Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“Nah,” said the officer, but not with much conviction. German prisoners of war did not escape in this country, they found cousins. Former village neighbors. They worked on farms and were paid good money for it. Nobody was supposed to talk with them, take their pictures, give them food, or even notice they were there, but plenty of people did.

The line of prisoners kept moving, clanking and jerking, but the men were speechless until they reached an enclosure deep in the woods. Pine logs were stuck all around the camp, anchored deeply into the earth, and several different thicknesses of wire were nailed onto the logs. Barbed-wire rolls were set on the ground to either side. Yet because of the surrounding trees and the blue light of the sky, the place was not all that forbidding. They’d live in simple barracks cabins. In spite of his confusion and the burden of his memories, Erich entered with a lightness of feeling that nearly choked him. They lined up for blue work outfits emblazoned with PW. They were given overcoats, shoes, four pairs of socks, undershirts, drawers, even a wool shirt and a raincoat. They were given two blankets, toothbrushes, soap, one tiny towel each. Erich accepted each item and frowned at the involuntary satisfaction that he felt. Maybe it was the fresh air, he thought, working on his brain. Or the fact they were going to do forestry work — good hard mindless work, a thing his body craved. And then the food, served at once and ladled hot into their tin pans from great cauldrons in the central log house, was sweetly familiar. There were baked beans — he hadn’t tasted the tang of molasses, the heat of the powdered mustard, the smoked fat of pork, in this particular combination since he was a child. He suddenly thought of Delphine. Although famished, he ate slowly, with a combination of reverence and shame, wiping the plate with white bread sliced into a soft, square page.

There was no meat but the fatback, but there was for each man a mound of creamed corn and a huge baked potato. Onto each plate, a slug of lard was tapped. There was a two-inch square of white cornbread with Karo syrup poured over it. Each man received the food, staring at it as though it would vanish. Some pocketed their potatoes, inhaled the sweet cornbread, or cleaned their whole plates before they even got to the tables. Inside the great hall there was utter silence from the men. Only the scrape of tin spoons. The animal wetness of their chewing. They were silent not only because they were famished but because, from the quality of the food, the amount, and that it was somehow carried to this remarkably remote place and actually fed to them — dregs, prisoners — they knew that Germany had lost the war.

THEY USED crosscut saws for the big trees, Swedish saws to trim the branches on the trails. They used chain drags, a couple of heavy trucks, and for the remote trees they had two mules they named Max and Moritz. One of the supervising soldiers spoke passable German and had the job of censoring the little newspaper that the men put together on a handset printing press. Although years before it was thought that none of the Waldvogel boys had inherited their father’s voice, Erich’s had developed once he hit adolescence. He’d opened his mouth one day to hum tunelessly, then snapped his jaws shut in surprise when a rich sound boomed forth. To kill time now, in that beautiful place, he began to sing and soon others sang with him, swapped the words to songs, made of the singing a nightly event to cut the tedium.

The songs acted on their emotions, entered their dreams. At night in the bunkhouses, men cried out in their sleep, coughed, farted, snored, snuffled, and sometimes moaned tunelessly into the darkness. Erich heard them every night, since he was wakeful, as he listened to the sounds from the outside. The smooth mutter of pines, the owls calling back and forth, curious and hollow. He longed to go back to Ludwigsruhe, wondered if he’d ever see his grandfather, whom he adored, or eat the sausages he’d stolen at night to share with Emil in their bed. He thought of his brother, but with dispassion. He’d made his heart numb. He avoided and then shut out all thoughts of his family here. It might have cost him his life to make the specifics of his identity known, or take advantage of his American upbringing. There were rumors of German POWs sawed to bits and burned and scattered through the woods by the Heiligen Geist. They disappeared if they got too friendly with the Americans, it was said. No one had actually known, or seen, or spoken with anyone who knew this for certain. But some of the older prisoners put dread into the hearts of those who weren’t loyal enough to Germany. As for Erich, in a fierce crush of training and in the years of his formation, he had become in his deepest person thoroughly German. Or what he thought of as German. That is, he’d replaced his childhood with a new wash of purity. Belief, death loyalty, hatred of the weak. He lived simply, by one great consuming oath.

MAZARINE WENT OUT behind the house and emptied her mother’s night bucket, then walked slowly back and set the galvanized pail on the broken back stairway. The unpainted wood of the little house still sagged, and great clumps of thistle and burdock had thrust up around the outhouse. That didn’t matter. The weeds were full of twittering birds — tiny golden throated warblers, green finches, drab sparrows. Let it just cave in, thought Mazarine. Who cared? Certainly not her mother, who now called weakly from her bed for a cup of water. Mazarine ignored her. Growing against the side of the teetering steps a lilac bush, one she’d planted herself from a tiny sprig long ago, lifted a fat cone of fragrance. Mazarine pulled the branch against her face, breathed the sweetness that always filled her with a sweeping nostalgia. Lilac dew crawled down her neck. The sun was already warm in the grass. Mazarine wasn’t much good with a hammer and nails, but the day before she’d found both and now she turned and fit the snow-warped boards into place and attempted, as best she could, to repair the winter’s damage. She hammered over her mother’s repetitive cries, over the creak of protest as her mother rose and began to move about in the kitchen, drawing her own water from the indoor pump, perhaps even stirring up a little fire to cook herself some oatmeal.

Mazarine had gone to teacher’s training college in Moorhead, and now she had a grade school certification. She had returned when Roman was wounded in the war and got his medals. Her mother took to bed and did not rise, so Mazarine stayed. The Argus school needed her to fill a temporary position anyway, so she’d taken over a fourth-grade class. It had been six months now and Mazarine thought that her mother would probably stay in bed until the house collapsed all around her. She could see it happening — the mice chewing down the flimsy walls, the lilacs growing up to her bedside, painted swallows and woodpeckers nesting just over her mother’s head and learning instead of their own bird calls to imitate her mother’s faint cries, Mazarine? Mazarine? as the light sifted through the tattered shingles.

She steadied the lowest step with a rock lugged from against the side of the house, and then sat down again on the weathered wood. The smell of sun on the wood reminded her of the salty, dusty, summer boy smell of her brother’s hair. She pulled down a bunch of flowers and breathed deep. The lilac had benefited from her mother’s laziness — she tossed her wash water out the window instead of walking to the door. As the spring sun rose the fragrance intensified. Mazarine touched the side of her skirt and stirred the crackle of the letter in her pocket.

Delphine told me that you are back in town and didn’t get married yet out in the wide world, which is good. I didn’t either. I’m coming home pretty soon and you’re going to see me whether you like it or not because I have never forgotten one single moment and I still love you.