Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Along with the spiders, Cyprian also donned a swallowtail suit coat and polished black leather boots. His legs were still comically bare. He was Adolf Hitler, with intestinal gas. Every time an offstage tuba sounded, Cyprian’s muscular ass end popped between the tails of his formal jacket, danced, jigged, reacted with a life apart from the absurdly stern and hypnotic features of the Fuehrer, whose attempt to inspire the howling crowd was undone. Every time he called for the Nazi salute, the tuba squawked and his rear end explosively twitched. The spiders stayed attached to Cyprian’s head somehow. The audience discovered that they could make the Fuehrer fart by giving the salute themselves. They straight-armed, uproariously, until the tuba was one long groan and Hitler went zinging all around the stage like a flea on a hot griddle. The curtains shut to roars and howls. The first act was finished.

Laughter hadn’t even died down when the curtains were flung wide again. An eight- or nine-foot leather valise with several handles was displayed upon four sawhorses. Cyprian and Vilhus Gast appeared, wearing jeweled turbans and dressed in strange and delicate transparent veils of fabric that ballooned around their legs, floated in the air beneath their arms, and drifted behind them as they walked. A tinny phonograph record played exotic whining music as the two men unlatched the valise and displayed something live, mottled, and very quiet, but with a vibrating energy that made people catch their breaths. The men coaxed the enormous snake from the case into their arms and announced the Dance of Death. They wound and unwound with the snake as it became more alert, tried to curl them into its coils and draw them close. Their dance was impromptu, graceful, and sensuously peaceful. Every member of the audience, believing that the python meant to devour the two men, was mesmerized with interest. Cyprian and Vilhus Gast danced the python down the center aisle. The crowd was allowed to touch the dry, charged skin. All saw the incongruously small head, an evil wedge of muscle. Its brilliant, cold, criminal’s eyes made them shudder so they were glad when Cyprian and Vilhus returned the snake to its leather case, resnapped the locks, and produced two sharp-toothed, gleaming handsaws, with which they proposed to reduce the python into stove lengths.

“Is there a butcher in the house?” called Cyprian. Pete Kozka was given the saws to test. He pronounced them keen and effective. The men sawed up the python. It writhed horribly in the valise, its tail whipping through the unlatched end. Then they burned a fragrant substance and began to chant portentous syllables, made some signs over a pot of school glue, and stuck the python back together. The show continued. They put away the python and juggled lizards. Displayed a huge iguana still and blinkless as a stone carving. Once again introduced the talented arachnid, Mighty Tom, who played the part of Vilhus Gast’s toupee. They brought him down the aisle in a great round candy jar so that people could look aghast at him and marvel. They balanced cups, plates, and their curly-toed shoes on pates and noses. They did a few more acrobatic tricks and then bounced off, to wild applause and shrieks of encore! They came back out as twin Hitlers on unicycles that they rode while breaking wind and saluting and from which they nearly toppled when their farts grew boisterous. They juggled swastikas set on fire. They juggled hatchets, cleavers, knives. They juggled apples and snatched great bites from them until they juggled only cores. They were an enormous hit.

For weeks after Cyprian and the Snake Man had vanished, Markus talked of nothing but the show, and people stopped Delphine in the street. They treated her with shy admiration. She received the deference of one who knows, or has access to, a great artist. They addressed her with respect. They wanted details, secrets.

“The python, has it eaten anyone?”

“Has the spider underneath Cyprian’s nose ever caused him to sneeze? If he did, what would happen?”

“Where did he learn to juggle? To ride a unicycle?”

“Will he return? Ever again?”

Delphine couldn’t answer any of the questions except the last one. And she only answered it on instinct, though she was proved right.

“No,” she said, “he won’t come back here.” And he never did.

ROY SEEMED CONTENT to stay in bed next to the stove most of the day, courting sleep, soaked in sleep, washed in the pleasant duty of it. Because Doctor Heech had prescribed a prolonged rest in order to relieve his liver and keep his cough from turning to pneumonia, at first both Roy and Delphine counted each hour of his loss of consciousness as a healing virtue. However, after a time, she understood that it was something more. She could tell this sleep was different for Roy, not restorative, but some final preparation. He slept so earnestly. It was as though he was practicing. She began to fear he would die when she was out at work, and she put her hand on his face first thing when she returned every day, and first thing when she rose in the morning. Along with the overpowering sleep, he hardly ate. He swallowed a few mouthfuls of soup, then lay back and let sleep take him once again. She had to watch him. He was shrinking. Growing weaker and quieter. He’d asked for the pictures of her mother, Minnie, and set them on a shelf of the spice and flour counter, where he could see them from his bed.

Delphine had asked Roy to tell her about Minnie, but he had surprisingly little information for one who so flamboyantly existed in a state of destructive long-term grief. She didn’t even have a gravestone to visit, and Roy would not say why that was or where she was buried. All Roy would say was that Minnie was the only one left to tell the tale.

“What tale?” Delphine had always asked, but Roy had kept his mouth shut.

Now that his tongue was somewhat loosened by the codeine, and he was bored, Delphine thought she might have better luck with her questions. One night she sat with him, speechlessly tending a little fire in the stove, lost in her own brooding. She slowly became aware that she was waiting for something, she was not even sure of what. Perhaps Roy was going to die this night. Her thoughts had become dispassionate, and she regarded him with detached affection. Poor Roy. He looked weary and his skin had gone fragile, soft, almost translucent. Blue blotches came up on his forearms, bruises that seemed to have surfaced from deep, invisible, interior blows. It was as though he was finally showing all the knocks life had dealt him. Delphine suddenly decided not to let him die with all of the secrets that she had a perfect right to know.

“All right. I want answers. Where was she from?” Delphine asked, pointing to Minnie’s picture.

“She was from down there.” He waved vaguely south. “Then she came up here.”

As usual, thought Delphine, he would give her nothing. But when she stared at him and said, “More. I want to know it all,” he seemed to reconsider, and spoke more alertly. “Actually, she was originally from way, way up there.” Roy rolled his eyes northward until the whites showed, then stared at Delphine in concentration, frowning. Perhaps he understood that in Delphine right now he had the perfect audience. The vagueness of sleep in his face cleared. As if an electrical wire was spliced, the old Roy came on, the one who told stories in bars and eased Eva Waldvogel into death by talking the secret language of wolves. Delphine hunched close to hear it all, and held her breath until he started speaking with such an eager intensity that she knew she was finally getting the story.

“You want to know? Of course you want to know. I’ll tell you, too. So go on, take notes. Put these things down for posterity or posteriority, what have you. Minnie. She wasn’t no ordinary, everyday, woman. She wasn’t just a person you would walk past. She wasn’t forgettable. Not Minnie. She had something else in her — the blood of her forefathers, and foremothers, too, and that blood was not just any blood either, but I’m telling you she was of the great nation of the Indians up north called the Crees and Ojibways who mixed with the French, of whom she was descended of kings. That’s right. Her great grandpa was the bastard of the Sun King himself, or so he said, and had escaped across the ocean to lead a clean life skinning pelts. While from the south, she was an adopted second cousin to old Crazy Horse or could have been, though she was almost tragically destroyed. I set this up so you’ll realize that from all sides and all directions there was royal lines simmering and boiling and knocking up against one another in the blood of this woman, your mother. And don’t, no, don’t start diverting me with other questions. Let me go on. Let me speak. For what you now will hear I’ve told no other, and for good reason. It is a story so sad and incredible I don’t like to think of it myself. It is better forgot. It is the story of who your mother became at the age of eight years and why thereafter she grew into someone who could never be tamed by the likes of old Roy Watzka, not me!”