Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

When his feet were safely stuffed in woolen socks, he poured another highball, made with rum. He was trying to get used to it as whiskey from overseas was scarce. Delphine put away the foot bath, sat next to him. I’ve missed out on God, she thought. Still, I haven’t fooled myself. I still think God’s a drunken lout who hasn’t given the world a second thought since making it. Formerly a genius, yes, I’ll give God that, but a supremely careless artist who casts His most extraordinary paintings and sculptures and exquisite live works to hell and lets the devil shit on them.

“Just read between the lines,” she slapped the Fargo newspaper headlines. Guadalcanal. Stalingrad. “No divine presence would allow such evil mayhem. What kind of God is that?” she asked Fidelis.

Fidelis didn’t answer because he was used to her noisy newspaper reading, where she made anguished replies to the lists of the North Dakota fallen. He never minded her shooting wild ideas, funny stories, sorrows, and irritated opinions at him out of nowhere. Besides, when it came to God he agreed even though he prayed every night for his sons, just as he had prayed when under fire, knowing it was useless but having no other option but to apply to God for help. He bent across the space between himself and Delphine and kissed her forehead. It was a rare tenderness. His hands drifted down her neck. He tipped his face sideways and kissed her again, slowly, then drew away. She looked straight on at him and the knifepoint dimples on either side of her smile deepened. They got up. Ceremoniously, the dog trailing after them, they made the rounds of the house and shop testing door locks and dousing lights. Somewhere in the front of the shop Fidelis took her hand. Gouged, ripped, healed, their hands fit together like pieces of old pottery. They held hands as they walked down the hallway into their bedroom and closed the door behind them.

Left outside, the white dog moved up the hall with an old dog’s lumbering aches, and stood in the gloom of the shop, half blind, nose high, making certain that all was as it should be. When she was satisfied, she turned back down the hallway, nails clicking slowly on the linoleum tiles. At the bedroom door she paused a moment, and her ears, large points delicately furred inside, cocked forward with a concerned attention, and then relaxed. She turned around twice and lay down in a cool spot she cherished, shifted onto her side, her legs stretched in a running bound.

EMIL’S WAR WAS VERY SHORT. He didn’t have to lie about his age because the army became desperate for reinforcements and took the entire class from his Adolf Hitler Schule, including the teachers and platoon leaders. Both Emil and Erich were highly praised and singled out at the selection camp as officer material. They had planned to join the Hitler Jugend division of the Waffen SS and spend the whole war shoulder to shoulder. But Emil stepped on a mine planted in a sheep pasture, early on. His new uniform was blown apart before it was ever stained or dirtied. A swirl of green passed before his eyes, and he realized with wonder that he was upside-down in the air, looking down at the grass. He was dead before he landed on it. A picture of Tante soaked up blood in his pocket and a piece of honey candy cooled in his mouth. His grandmother made him bring the honey candy. Recalling that his father had survived the great war on honey, she’d hoped it would similarly protect the son.

Erich walked on though he was half gone, blown away from himself with his twin. He had vowed to fight to the death, and his expression never faltered, but he found that when the shelling was constant his bowels disobeyed him. His arms froze around a sandbag. His fingers numbed and locked into fists. The sacred oath he had sworn and the Kameradschaft he lived by were useless shelter from the rain of blood, guts, brains, and undifferentiated bits of meat or even, once, the marvel of a boy turned into a burst of red vapor. He hadn’t slept for four days and nights when he was captured, but he still, by some instinct, kept himself from croaking an answer in English when the GI who disarmed him said, “This one’s just a kid, probably doesn’t have fuzz on his balls yet.” What would he have said, anyway, he wondered, as the soldier was more or less right?

Later, he’d made a vague grab for the GI’s rifle and crumpled instantly when he was bashed over with a curse. “I hate these baby storm troopers. Bunch of little rattlesnakes.”

“They’re goddamn poison,” said another soldier. “We should kill ’em. Save the trouble. Where the hell, anyway, are we going to march them to?”

The first one stepped back, raised his M-1 and just as he might have fired Erich was horrified to hear himself scream, “Jesus Christ, sir, please don’t shoot me.”

“What the fuck?”

“I was born in North Dakota,” Erich choked out. “My dad still lives there.”

“I’ll be fucked. What are you doing here, you little pissant?”

“I got sent here before the war.”

“What the fuck are you then, a fucking Nazi or a fucking American?”

Erich was further shocked at his sudden yell. “I don’t know what the hell I am, sir, but I’ve got no hair on my balls!”

The Americans went crazy with laughing and his fellow Hitler Schule classmates, the two who were left, looked at Erich in mystified and sober wonder, deciding that he either possessed a hitherto unknown brilliance or had, under the pressure of battle, entirely lost his mind.

* * *

PERHAPS IT WORKED. Maybe the lead armies that Markus carefully arranged before he left drew Erich back. Of course, Erich couldn’t have known it. He did think of his toys, as he thought of every aspect of his childhood, when the stripped-down American train car within which he and two hundred other prisoners rode, went north, as well as he could make out, because it was nighttime, toward somewhere around the Great Lakes, maybe Wisconsin or Michigan. He couldn’t remember anything about the map — he’d forgotten all he could about the States. After the shocking ignominy of his surrender, Erich had hidden that he knew and understood English perfectly. There were fervent Nazis in his group who’d vowed to punish any of the prisoners who collaborated. So he continued to affect a suspicious, withdrawn silence. All the way across the country he’d been nearly struck dumb anyway just looking out the train windows. So were the others. They were all waiting to gloat over the miles and miles of bombed-out cities, the devastated countryside, blackened crops, dead farms they were promised by the radio reports back in Germany. And yet, they had penetrated farther and farther into a curious, cheerful, teeming, spectacularly untouched country. The prisoners were tragically awed, bewildered. Later, some would feel betrayed. Others would choose excuses of their own invention. Erich did neither, for his brain was too busy, too desperate, too crammed with excited memories and despair.

They kept traveling north, and north, into the pine forests. Here, those from the southwest of Germany felt at home and pointed and nodded at the great, dark, revolving stands of fir that shifted and bristled in the blue light of dawn. The train veered deeper into the trees and the forest seemed to close behind them. At a small station, their hands were linked to a chain and they filed out of the train cars and then walked a muddy road for miles. It was early summer and the blackflies were out. When one man reached for a stinging fly with his chain arm, the whole chain clanked and the others’ hands jerked, but the flies were so bad that the men couldn’t help swatting.

“Where the hell are they gonna go?” said an American soldier guarding them. There were six guards altogether. “Let them off the chain.”