Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Roy’s funeral was well attended. The wives of the bankers and landowners came, those who perhaps longed for similar devotion to the very death. There were fragile rafts of flowers in the church, many flourishes of hankies, and a general clucking at the photographs laid facedown in the coffin, over his heart as he had instructed. There was a dinner afterward in the church hall, a gymnasium that had been the scene of a basketball game the night before.

Delphine walked over once Roy was buried, and stood in the corner of the gym. The place smelled faintly of stale excitement, old sweat, and salted popcorn. The tables set up for the funeral dinner were decorated with small pots of flowers — African violets, ferns, sweet potato sprouts, taken off the windowsills of the parish ladies’ homes. There was creamed chicken, creamed corn and spinach, mashed potatoes with butter and cream, and just plain cream for coffee. Pies and cookies were set out on doilies cut of white paper. The dinner was served by an interdenominational bunch who for the first time seemed to Delphine more kind than curious, more eager to please than to gawk, somehow of slightly more genuine feeling. Still, their solicitous care overwhelmed Delphine with a simple claustrophobia.

In the swirl of food and sympathy, Delphine abruptly stood with Mazarine Shimek.

“Come with me,” she said to the girl. And they left the church hall to stand in a little plot of blistered grass behind the church kitchen.

“If I smoked anymore, I’d smoke now,” said Delphine, pushing her hair away from her face. She’d had it trimmed and set, but the curls wouldn’t mind her brush and sprang out every which way. Another thing she had in common with Mazarine, whose hair possessed so much unruly life.

Mazarine told her that she was sorry.

“Me too,” Delphine muttered, but actually she was very tired, and hopelessly angry. She was mad at the long waste of his life and his waste of her affection. As soon as Roy died, she had experienced the stupid and desperate love she’d had for him as a child. Tears suddenly choked her and she tried to wave them off. She’d prepared herself for years to lose him and when he’d exasperated her, had even looked forward to the day. She couldn’t explain just why she felt such a deep, blind, stirring of emotion. This is not grief, she said to herself, this is not fear of loneliness, this is not even exhaustion or relief. It’s existential, she decided, and straightened her back, taking courage from the word. Mazarine was standing next to her, one hand on the brick wall, patient and humble.

“I want to tell you something,” said Delphine, recovering her voice. Without knowing exactly what it was she wanted to say, she realized that she had something urgent to impart to the young girl, something that her father’s death, embroidered though it was by wishful romance, made plain. “We all die,” she found herself saying to Mazarine. “Franz loves you. You love him. Why not write to him? Why not tell him?”

WHILE SHE WAS cleaning out the house a few days later, Delphine heard the familiar footsteps and opened the door. A shaft of light fell out on the grass and Fidelis walked into it, shuffling at the threshold, stamping his feet as he entered. Delphine brought beer and then sat with him. He took the wooden rocking chair across from her reading chair. “I’m going to keep my house,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll stay here.” Fidelis opened his fist and closed it, but said nothing. They sat in silence for a long while, listening to the wind sweep and groan in the eaves of the house. Tree branches scraped together and tapped the roof. All of a sudden, Fidelis rose and in one motion picked up Delphine from the chair and carried her into her bedroom.

He carefully pushed the door closed after them, with his heel, and then lowered her onto the cold, slippery, yellow-gold bedcover. He hadn’t known that he was going to bring her there and now she lay before him in the light of a bedside lamp, staring at him with a cat’s self-possession, her eyes the same color as the fabric behind her. The small glass clock on the dresser ticked with a simple insistence. Above her bed, there was a clumsily painted picture of waves bursting over rocks. Draped on the bedside table, an orange velvet scarf. His blood roared in his ears. The wood of the bed was recently polished with beeswax. He could smell sun on the bedsheets as he leaned down toward her. He breathed an earthen scent of her warm skin as she moved toward him, just a fraction, but then all of a sudden she rolled away. She sat on the edge of the bed.

“Listen,” she said, and then she felt her heart pumping too quickly, “I’ve got to tell you something.” Her mouth went dry and she tasted rust. She cast about for something else to say, nervous, wishing suddenly she hadn’t thought that she must tell him about Roy. She had thought this out, imagined it, written it out in her mind. She winced and made herself blurt it out, no matter that it sounded like a false reading of a line in a play. “I am the daughter of a murderer!”

Bewildered at the sudden change in direction, he sat up, a little stunned, thinking maybe he’d gotten trapped and snarled in the English language. Maybe she’d said something very different. He waited, listened as she went on with a dramatic explanation and re-creation of all Roy had admitted to before his death, and how she had reacted to his revelation. As she spoke, agonizing over what was or was not in her father’s mind, and taking on blame, then rejecting it, he could not help his own pictures from appearing.

One after the other, Fidelis saw the faces of the men he’d destroyed, as in an album or a keepsake book of death. He could no more stop his brain from paging through them, once it started, than he could stop the wind from blowing across the plains. As Delphine’s voice surged around him, he lay back on the bed, closed his eyes against their banal formality, but the pictures invaded his darkness and grew more detailed. He opened his eyes and focused on Delphine’s face, but now he couldn’t hear a word she spoke. He saw his fifth kill. A blond man who looked a lot like Pouty Mannheim reached across a sandbag for what… a cup of tea maybe… a tin cup in a friend’s hand. Then he’d opened his mouth and thrown back his head as if to belt out the beginning of a song. The bullet had smashed into his face and now Fidelis saw that face, as he did so often. Blond hair, a dark red hole, a nothing. Ears. He saw that no-face. It lived on. The no-face knew him and it never died. The others, too. He saw them all whenever the album opened.

Sometimes in his mind it worked for Fidelis to stand on the black cover and hold the book shut underneath the same hobnailed boots he had worn then. He tried closing the book, now, concentrating until he sweat. Muck oozed up around his boots. He smelled shit and death. He’d been cold-blooded, invincible, bringing down the enemy’s personal, vengeful fire upon himself and everyone around him. No wonder the other men had hated him and feared him, except Johannes.

“Are you all right?” Delphine was shaken. He knew she had told him something that she felt was terribly important, but he didn’t remember much of what she’d said. He must divert her. He took her face in his hands and concentrated fiercely upon her features.

“Es macht nichts,” he said, speaking German in the hope that Delphine would interpret what he said in the way most comforting to her. Then he stilled his heart, his breath, his thoughts, and leaned into her until his heart knocked hard and his breath tore through his lungs and thoughts turned into shifting colors that ripped softly into many pieces and rained down all around them as ordinary light.

WALKING AWAY FROM the little house much later, in the middle of the night, through the brilliant blue air, Fidelis knew that something had shifted. Up and down the center of his body he could feel the movement of his blood for the first time, as though agitated molecules boiled slowly top to bottom. Several times, as though drunk, he nearly lost his footing. The strange inclination took him at one point to shout aloud, and he did, in the booming dark wind, the cropped black wheat stubble stretching for miles around him. New wheat coming up. There was nothing to throw back his voice, no echo, only blurred horizon. He imagined that perhaps the sound traveled all the way around the world, the faded vowels bouncing back on his shoulders before he moved, and he laughed. It was the shout, the sound, that told him later as he entered the lights of the town’s outskirts and drew near to his own door, what had happened to him. He’d lost his stillness, his capacity for utter cessation, the talent he’d once possessed for slowing his heart and drawing only the slightest breath. That was disarranged. He couldn’t do it anymore. That was finished. And yet it didn’t matter, he thought, there was no need anymore for that sort of quiet, that stillness, that absence, to survive.