Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

He told her nothing else. When she asked him why he’d loved Minnie so much, what made her so wonderful that he still looked at her fuzzy pictures after all these years, or even what her personality was like, his answers were so general as to give her nothing. Or maybe he was selfish, maybe those private memories were all he had, and he couldn’t give them up, not even to her.

Still, there were things he needed to say.

Day by day, as he weakened, his voice softened to a fragile whisper. To hear him, Delphine always had to lean close, into the circle of his breath, which was not the sour alcohol rankness she had been familiar with all of her life, but a childish scent, milky and pure. His gaze was owlish, bewildered. He wanted to talk all the time, and his speech was often garbled — tenses collided, main facts were missing, characters loomed large but with no reference. He seemed to have lost the ability to sustain narrative, as though his lifetime of booze had eaten into every other cell of his brain and made his mind skip like a scratched record. There were occasional times, too, when he spoke with great clarity out of some protected corner of his thoughts. Delphine was never sure which it would be from one sentence to the next.

“Stop looking at me,” he frowned at her one afternoon.

She’d had her back turned, and now she did look at him.

“Or I mean,” he sighed, “stop looking like you’re looking at me. I don’t know which. I never sang your part, you know, Chavers. Shut your damn trap.” He sighed calmly and then seemed to recognize Delphine. “I’ve had enough of him knocking on the floor. He’s never quit, you know. Banging, banging. I suppose he’s waiting for me on the other side. Him with his whole damn family — and I never knew they were there!”

Roy’s voice was the frightened whine of a four-year-old.

“I know you didn’t, Dad, you were looped out of your mind,” said Delphine in some annoyance. She didn’t want him to slide onto this mental track of self-pity and comfortable blame. She’d heard his lament many times. But then he said something different. His face grew solemn, then both crafty and confiding. “I could have justified Porky, though it took me a lifetime.”

“What?” Delphine peered into the vague, watery, washed-out blue of his eyes. “Justified?”

Roy grabbed her hand and spoke urgently. “I told him to get the ginger beer out of the cellar. And while he was at it, hunt around for the good stuff. And take a candle or two so you can read the French labels! Maybe old Chavers was looking for the king’s wine.”

Roy twisted uncomfortably, winced, shut his eyes and continued then to speak with his eyes shut, perhaps to keep from seeing the effect of his words on Delphine. “Who knew the wife and kid went down there with him?”

Delphine bent over and shook him lightly, but his body flopped like an old dog’s and she released him and he groaned on.

“The kid, Ruthie. I don’t remember what happened, but it could be I shut the hatch! Maybe I shut the hatch. I remember what I yelled down at him. ‘Hey, Chavers, you can come up again after you quit singing over me in practice!’ You know, he was always puffing his chest and inching forward, singing over me.”

Roy was silent, raptly watching the air between them.

“You went away for three weeks. A long drunk,” said Delphine, her face stiff. A wave of sick unbelief dragged over her.

“Longer,” Roy said in the faintest whisper. He went silent for several moments in which the wind boomed in the box elders and the windows shook lightly in their frames. Then he coughed a deep hacking cough, spoke clearly. “I came back to get the liquor in the cellar, went to find it. Saw them. After that, I stayed drunk until you showed up. You and Cyprian.” He looked up at her, his eyes glazed in hopeless appeal, then shut them when he saw her face and turned away. Drew the blanket over his head.

Delphine got up and walked from the house, out onto the small front porch. She sat down on the top step and folded her arms around herself. From time to time, she slapped away mosquitoes or shook from her hair the seeds falling from the trees in a gentle snow. They were delicate, tiny beads sealed in a papery, brown, transparent case. She brushed the seeds off her skirt. Occasionally, she felt the zing of a mosquito bite, but she didn’t want to go back indoors. As soon as Roy died, she would sell the house, she decided. She would leave the butcher shop and Fidelis and move away to the city. Chicago. Get a job in the theater even if it was only selling tickets. I won’t think about Markus. Ruthie! She touched her fingers to her temples, then clenched her fists and kneaded her forehead with her knuckles. She pictured the apartment she would live in, small and efficient. Near a park where she could take short walks, a library, maybe an art museum. She’d learn everything, stuff her brain, become a teacher. Write for a newspaper. She pictured herself at a typewriter, a cigarette burning at one elbow. She was wearing a crisp white blouse and a tight gray skirt, heels. Or no, one shoe was off. She was thinking.

She pictured herself thinking.

I’ll never do it, she thought. I’ll never really think. I’m not thinking now, I’m just fantasizing. That’s a much different thing than to play in the free openness of your own mind. She felt the keen sense of something escaping, bright as silver. Then she couldn’t remember the last thing she’d held in her mind, just the sharpness of it. Who gives a damn anyway, she went on. What’s done is finished, and Roy’s his own punishment. I should not hold myself responsible for his drunk sins. And oh yes, I’m a married woman. I’m good at doing business, at holding up my end of the bargain. I’m good at taking care of kids that aren’t even mine. She felt her mind stuttering, searching a way out of guilt and horror. She closed her eyes and saw the hulks in the cellar. One resolved and became an immaculately dressed little girl with a shrewd mouth and snapping eyes. She wore a small, round hat and stood with her fists on her hips, frowning. Her eyes opened slightly, as though she’d noticed Delphine watching her. Tossing her chin up, the little girl laughed in a mocking, unpleasant way. Her laugh was acid with sarcasm and when she turned away Delphine saw snakes twirling off her shoulders and down her arms and the backs of her legs.

“Leave me alone,” Delphine whispered.

You are alone, the snake child mocked, more alone than you know. Your husband’s from a foreign country and you haven’t got a child. Your father’s dying and you don’t know the face of your mother. You are different from everyone else living in the town. You think you’re smarter, that you read more. The truth is you just feel sorrier for yourself. Poor Delphine. Poor girl Polack. Poor butcher’s wife!

Poor me, poor me , Delphine started to laugh and it felt so good that she didn’t stop even when Roy called out in a hopeful voice for his teaspoon of whiskey.

THE COUNTY VISITING NURSE found Roy Watzka, wide-awake dead sitting up and staring at the obscure and illegible pictures of Minnie placed just before him on the counter edge of the flour cupboard. She set down her bag on the kitchen floor, opened it, put on her stethoscope, and listened for a heartbeat. There was none so she took off the instrument, folded it back into the bag. She uncapped a pen, next, wrote down the exact time of day, and a sentence or two about the condition of the body and her own conjecture on the reason for his death. She recorded the eerie, composed death stare that compounded the legendary nature of his love. The nurse composed his limbs, shut his eyes, lay him down, and contacted Delphine. While waiting, she used the telephone and broadcast the news of Roy’s stare all around the town.