Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

How stupid! He crashed his fists on his temples. At night, he thought of and rejected ways to make it up to her, ways to draw her to him. He would throw himself upon her mercy. Waylay her. Beg her. Buy her a hothouse rose and lay it on her bed at night. She needed him, didn’t she? Anyone could tell she was unhappy. Look how quiet she was, walking the school hallways, how serious. Look how her slender grace had become an alarming thinness. How she kept her hair, which had always swirled with her movements, stiffly locked into that one thick braid.

The only thing that really diverted him was the airfield. Sometimes, Franz looked at the other men who worked around him, and wondered if they’d ever had such feelings. He doubted it — none of them looked as if they could ever have been in love with anything but their machines. At first he scorned such limitations. Then they made sense to him. To actually fix a touchy engine was a relief. So whenever Fidelis let him out of the shop, Franz worked on airplanes. In payment, Pouty Mannheim began to teach him how to fly.

Each time they went up, Franz felt the same roaring physical release from the earth that had charmed him when he first watched, from the field behind the house, the plane take off and lift over the windbreak. Only it was better to be in the plane itself. Better now as he understood exactly how to control the flight, read the wind, the signs in the clouds small and large. On their eighth flight, Pouty let him have a chance at the controls. For weeks, they practiced taking off, touching down, and then gradually added a beginning barnstormer’s repertoire of stalls, spins, easy wingovers and gentle loops. When Pouty finally let him take the plane up solo, Franz experienced a startling lightness. The plane flew at a touchy and thrilling balance with just him in it. He focused on the town grain elevator, a thin mark on the horizon, kept his nose directed at it and did a slow point roll. Then a more complicated hesitation roll, a loop, a difficult spin. The earth tipped over him. Concentrate, or die. Things were simple upside down. By the time he landed, he was absolutely at peace. After that, he thought that maybe he would survive the loss of Mazarine if only he could spend his life up in the air.

NO GUESTS, no cake, no flowers. After she married Fidelis and Franz left to start his tests for the air corps, Delphine continued to divide her time between the butcher shop and her house, nursing Roy. She kept part of her filing job, kept reading her books, tried to keep as much of her old routine as she could. Still, the past with its horrors, complexities, and incompletions intruded. Although she was married, the background to her new life seemed unfinished, like a jumbled stage set. She wished that she could file her past the way she filed the papers at the courthouse. Then Cyprian returned.

He was sitting on the front steps of Delphine’s house one early evening, wearing a hat. He squinted out at the road and nodded, cool and self-contained, as Delphine drove the car into the yard. Then he took off the hat, and Delphine saw that he was utterly bald. He looked even more attractive, exotic, like someone from a prehistoric world jolted into pants and shirt and shoes. The head made you think of him naked. Her heart jolted when she saw him. She took a deep, ragged breath to calm herself as she stopped the car and took in his presence through the windshield. So here he was. She smiled, an involuntary reflex, before she thought of Clarisse, then realized that she could find out what happened to Clarisse. The smile altered but stayed on her face. In spite of everything, she was glad to see Cyprian.

As she opened the driver’s door, jumped out, and nearly ran toward him, Delphine was surprised to experience a sudden uncomfortable pang. Was Fidelis watching? Irrationally, she glanced to all sides. She tried to shrug the discomfort off her shoulders like a cape, but her uneasiness persisted. Her greeting was tentative, and she stood before Cyprian in the bent sun of early dusk, shifting her weight, hoping he’d not come into the house with her. Again, this sense that she was doing something wrong although there was no wrong in it, but there was the intimidating certainty of Fidelis. The realization that she was now susceptible to a man’s jealousy irritated her. From under the porch and the stillness of the grass, mosquitoes started to whine. Cyprian tipped his head to the side and fanned away the bugs with his hat. They sat down on the porch steps.

“Light up a cigarette, will you, to keep off the bloodsuckers?” She accepted a cigarette from Cyprian and allowed it to burn down between her fingers.

“I’m not even going to talk to you,” she said in a low voice, finally, “until you tell me what happened to Clarisse.”

“I didn’t know about Hock,” Cyprian offered.

“I know what the hell happened to Hock. I asked you what happened to her .”

“All she said to me was this: ‘I’ll go where my work is necessary, and appreciated.’”

“That actually sounds like her,” said Delphine. “I’ll bet she went south, New Orleans… no, farther. The Yucatan or maybe even farther down, Brazil. I can see it.” She sighed and shook herself. She couldn’t see it. Missing Clarisse was still a daily habit, like drinking coffee or turning on the radio. She didn’t stop to ache or wonder or brood over Clarisse anymore. She just missed her and then was done with it and went on to the next thing. And that is the kindness of time, she thought.

She looked at Cyprian. “So you didn’t know about Hock. Until when?”

“Until she told me.”

“Which was when ?”

“Right away, on the trip to Minneapolis.”

“Didn’t it occur to you, then, that somebody might connect the two of you? Think you were in on it?”

“Sure it did,” said Cyprian, “which is one reason why I parted ways with her.”

“Why did you come back here?”

Cyprian turned his hat around and around in his hands — it was a smooth clay brown fedora with a wide brown grosgrain band. Expensive looking. He pinched the brim, his fingers careful, choosing his words.

“I’m passing through,” he said finally. “But I just had to see if you love him.”

“Of course I do.”

“The hell you do!”

Suddenly they turned, their eyes locked in outrage, and they stared at each other. Their exasperation was so exactly matched that it struck them both, at the same time, as ludicrous. They turned away, each unwilling to let the other see any softening, or smile. Delphine fiddled with the cigarette, sharpening its ash on the wood of the steps, waving it slowly around her to make a smoke barrier.

“So you came back not knowing if you’d get picked up for murder, just to see if I love Fidelis.”

Cyprian didn’t answer for a moment, then he nicked his head. “Like I said, I have other reasons.” He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. His eyes were sharply lovely.

“Come in then,” she said at last. “Roy’s in bed. He needs a good laugh.”

Cyprian jammed his hat on his head, then took it off, and followed her across the bare porch and into the house. Inside, he took off his hat and held it over his stomach as he walked into the kitchen, where Roy slept. Cyprian sat down by the bed and waited for Roy to wake. For a long time, Roy lay still, hands on the quilt, eyes shut. Eventually, he opened one eye just a crack, took in Cyprian’s presence, and shut his eyes again with an elaborate fluttering of lids. Delphine was surprised to find that she was cheered to see this deception, this hint of the old Roy, and she pulled her chair up, too.

“Hey, Dad,” she said softly, “you have a visitor.”

Roy lay mum, deciding whether to retreat from consciousness or seek out communion with the living. His brows knit and he worked his jaws in little chewing motions. Finally, he gave a decisive jerk and let his eyelids flap up to display great, staring, milky-blue rounds of iris.