Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

There I will be all right.

Ah! my child, I would love your heart if I knew

how to be loved.

Ah! friends, let’s drink and lift our bottles.

No. No one can predict love.

After the men left, Fidelis sat alone in the yard. As the dark came down he finished off the beer and sang to himself, practicing old tunes that no one else knew, all in German. The moon came up, a brilliant gold disk that slowly tarnished to silver and brightened again as it moved upward. His voice melted to a growling croon. The garden, Eva’s overgrown garden half tended by Delphine, whispered and rustled all around him. Grasshopper music surged on and off in waves. Somewhere a frog croaked, hoarse with longing. Pigs mumbled in the killing pen. He thought of Franz, Markus, Erich, Emil, recalled the moments he had held each boy for the first time in his arms. He was going soft on himself. Sobs tightened his lungs and his eyes burned. His voice trembled as he sang the reproachful song of the enemy, “Lili Marlene,” and he grew angry. They were his enemies and his sons would fight them and rescue their brothers. “Lili Marlene.” Even the tune of the sentimental old piece of tripe filled him with shame. A disastrous need to see the faces of his parents took hold of him and he carefully quashed the feelings with a deep gulp of beer.

D ELPHINE HAD always known that her body would not be inclined to grant her children, not after what she’d seen in the cellar of her father’s house. She felt the lack less than other women might, perhaps, because she’d helped raise Eva’s boys. Markus especially bore the force of her maternal attention. Delphine had observed that after his resurrection from the earth, Markus was a very different boy from the one who had dug the tunnels and fought ecstatic boy wars and smashed himself into trees in go-carts and tumbled off sleds. Lying in the grip of earth had quieted his mind and cooled his blood. He became a reader, developed a studious quiz-bowl intelligence, bought himself a record player. Squeaking horns, the human moans of saxophones, smooth backwards scrolls of music spurted from his room. Some of his teachers sent home glowing reports and others said that he was arrogant, lipped off, and was a troublemaker in the classroom with all of his criticisms and his questions.

When he was younger, Delphine scolded Markus for losing mittens, and then knit him new pairs. Developed strategies of feeding to combat his thinness, which did not work. As he grew older, she helped him study and celebrated the awards that he won in school. Consoled him when he was forced into eyeglasses and made him wear them, hoping secretly that they would keep him from acceptance into the army. By cheating on the vision tests (she was sure) he schemed his way in anyhow.

The day he told her, she was prepared.

“Markus, sit down with me.”

He sat down eagerly at the kitchen table, confident and excited, indulging her. Delphine knew already that he wasn’t going to listen to her or believe her, but she was determined to make some impression.

“Markus, it’s not like in the movies where they shoot you in the shoulder or even if you die it is neat. Drilled through the heart. Men get ripped limb from limb. Torn up like so many pieces of paper. And half the time it’s out of some mistake and our own side kills its men by accident. Whatever you do, Markus, I am begging you, for Eva’s sake and your father’s sake and even though I’m not your blood mother, my own sake, too. Don’t get yourself put in the thick of it. Nobody says what it’s really like, Markus, to the young men. No one says boys get mangled.”

“Mangled!” Markus looked at her in patronizing surprise. “Where did you learn all this?”

“Reading, and common sense.” She could feel herself becoming desperate with irritation at his superior attitude. “What do you think bombs do? Pick out the Germans and Japanese? Make distinctions when they fall close to our lines? And then neatly and invisibly do away with you? They’re meat grinders.”

“Mom,” said Markus, “calm down.” As if he were dealing with a crazy person.

“Are we all a bunch of stupid suckers?” Delphine burst out passionately. It wasn’t even the war that made her so angry, it was the hypocrisy, the cheerful façade, the lies. She grabbed a magazine and leafed to an ad for toothpaste that exhorted the reader to send a tube to their boys in the front lines. “As if the worst you’ll suffer is a toothache! And this!” An ad for gum implying that a stick in every letter would counter loneliness and even sharpen the troops’ observational skills.

“That’s how we are in this country,” she cried. “Destruction is a way to sell gum!” She put the magazine down, nearly weeping.

“I know, Mom.” Markus put his hands on her shoulders now and patted gingerly. He spoke quietly, dropping the cocksure tone. “I’ll be careful. I won’t let anybody shoot me or mangle me. I’m not like Franz, you know. He was a trained pilot when he went in. Me… they probably won’t even ship me overseas.” He said this kindly, to comfort her, but although she was grateful she could tell he both thought and hoped otherwise.

She put her face in her hands as Markus continued to pat her, awkwardly. She knew he wished that he were somewhere else. She felt her heart splitting right in her chest. “Go, get out of here. It’s your last night home,” she finally said, wiping her face with her apron. “Go tear up the town.”

“There’s nobody here to tear it up with anymore,” he said. “I’m gonna take a walk, buy a newspaper. Then I’m reading myself to sleep.”

HIS BROTHERS’ ARMIES still ranged across the room, along the top of the dresser, on the windowsill. Markus had long outgrown the set, but he didn’t take down the display. In fact, after he’d taken his walk, unable to sleep, he spent his last evening at home perfecting the battle. Even though it was stupid, sentimental, Markus righted the tiny horses and toppled lieutenants, rearranged a charge and fortified a stand. As he fiddled around, he grew absorbed by the boy’s play. He surrounded a motley reconnaissance group with the wooden rocks and trees the twins had sawed of lumberyard scraps and painted in crude woodland colors years ago. He arranged the armored vehicles, with real rubber treads and tin flags. The soldiers had tiny helmets that could be blown right off their heads. And the horses, and the cavalry, they were obviously no match and easily reared over backward, hit, when, in a moment of fascination, Markus ranged their homemade machine-gun nests before them and made a sweep, and then sent in the tanks. Anyone could see that it was romantically insane to send mounted horsemen against armored divisions, as the Poles did when Blaskowitz’s Eighth Army drove eastward against Lodz, but Markus meticulously arranged the seated horsemen with the rearing officer at their head.

When Delphine and his father first married, Markus had hidden behind the door of the office listening to his father on the telephone. From thinly disguised talk between Fidelis and Delphine, he understood the truth that his brothers weren’t coming home. That was when he decided that he wouldn’t put the toy soldiers away. He would never put them away. He would have to keep their toys prepared. And so, as though the passionate games they’d played for hours, lost in their careful arrangements, would of their own force and incompletion draw his brothers back home, Markus had wiped the dust off the infantry and set them into a new and stricter formation. He’d kept them looking sharp ever since. Now, he took a step backward, frowned, then swept some down with a finger to lie with their rifles pointing at the ceiling. His action suddenly frightened him. Superstitious, he set the soldiers up again.