Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

THERE WAS A knocking in Delphine’s dream. Loud, whispery, rapid. Then more urgent, tapping knocks, as though from just beyond a wall. Impatient knocks. When she woke, still in Germany and fitted beside her husband upon a narrow mattress of soft sheep’s wool, Delphine knew these sounds. She understood that Eva was asking for Fidelis. Delphine would have to return him very soon. Delphine knew that the knocking was Eva because she had heard the exact sound before. Long ago, the same tapping knocks had occurred in Delphine’s dream, and when she had awakened, back then, in Argus, she had known that Eva was dying.

Now, as Delphine woke again to that rapid knocking, she knew that Fidelis was hiding his illness. Time was an army marching like the butchers onto the stage. Time was a singing club whose music was smoke and ash. Delphine moved close to Fidelis and held him in his sleep, felt the even sigh of breath, the humming blood, the troubled beating of his heart.

In her last letter from Europe to North Dakota, she wrote Markus:

He is not very well and I think we should get the doctor to give him a good once-over. Please watch our new help and take note of when they arrive at work. We are too well fed (sauerbraten everywhere we go, or forest venison, pastry like I never knew about) and I can’t wait to get home for good. Tell Mazarine to kiss Johannes, if he’ll stand still long enough, and to give her mother charcoal pills for the gas.

STEPPING FROM the USS Bremen into the milling New York crowd, Fidelis ached with the unfamiliar exhaustion he had battled all the way across the ocean, sleeping twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch, napping in the afternoons, too. The tiredness was bewildering — it had come upon him gradually and now it was beyond his control. He didn’t know it, but his heart had begun to fail ten years before. When his son had marched past him in the woods of Minnesota, choosing a gated prison house rather than his father, Fidelis had felt the first intimations of the weakening disease that would eventually clog and then destroy his heart. When he received the telegram telling of Franz’s injury and then the letter about Emil, he had felt his heart shredding. He tore up the papers, roaring. When Franz had come home only to fade from life in bewildered anger, part of Fidelis had gone out raging with him. But to one born in the phenomenon of strength, weakness is an alien lie. Fidelis would not accept the news that he was ill. He ignored his body, despised its needs, kept his old habits as though they would bring back his power.

Now, although his lungs were tight and aching, he lighted a Turkish cigarette, one of those he’d bought in Germany. As he breathed out the smoke and waited at the customs gate for their clearance, shuffling slowly behind Delphine, toward the officer’s booth, he remembered standing in the same line those many years before. He recalled how the memory of his father had come to him then — his father boiling the sausages in the great copper sausage kettle, his heavy red forearms lifting the links in and out of the steam. Again, Fidelis saw his father’s huge face above it all, calm and disciplined and sweating. He mopped his brow with a heavy cotton handkerchief and braced his feet so that he could continue to stand there unsteadily, feeling heavier, growing slightly dizzy. The tailored coat he had bought in Ludwigsruhe was too heavy for this weather. The now and then of things was colliding. The days between his first arrival and this one were like an innumerable pack of cards laid out upon a great table, each of a predictable suit and color. Suddenly they were swept up in a stern hand and tapped neatly into a suffocating deck. The days collapsed, one on the next.

The cigarette dropped from his numb fingers. He followed its curious trajectory as it bounced, still lit, off his shoe. And then, he did not know how, he smelled the rich smoke of it burning just under his nose, and he was looking at a floor of stained and smeared tan linoleum that reached to either side of him forever. As when he had first come home from the war, he experienced, once again, the strange singing of the light. It gleamed in fragments of a rich song off the floor’s farther reaches, where no one was allowed, and the tiles still bore their original morning polish. Fidelis wondered at the music, the familiar croon of voices. He was on his hands and knees, kneeling there on the floor like an animal. This was the way the animals suddenly collapsed, but, he thought, wearily, this is an arrival gate and not a killing chute. He felt himself rising and dusting off his coat, walking a few steps forward, and so he was surprised to find that he had not moved at all, and was still looking at the floor.

All his life, the day for slaughter had arrived every week, and Fidelis had always been there to carry out death’s chores. Now it was his time — he knew that when he looked into the swirl of the grimy floor. Who was there to do the same for him? His arms splayed out, his legs stiffened, he went down flat. Someone turned him on his side. Someone took his hand. Delphine’s face wavered into his line of vision and she bent over him, crouching, looking down at him and moving her mouth in a familiar pattern. He knew what she was saying and wanted to respond, but he couldn’t. To his surprise, his mouth wouldn’t open. His hands wouldn’t move. Nothing about him would do his bidding. His heart seized. A stunning rip of anguish widened his eyes in shock. Delphine’s face blurred. The light dimmed, the singing stopped.

W HEN STEP-AND-A-HALF was a very old woman she at last became beautiful, in the way a wind-shaped rock or the whitened bones of deer are beautiful. The starkness of age revealed the underlying symmetry of the planes of her face, the antique but sturdy ivory of her teeth, her graceful hands and straight legs and arms. Even her hair turned to a whiteness of unusual purity and formed two majestic waves that vaulted off her smooth forehead. Age, the ownership of her junk store, and the insomnia that still plagued Step-and-a-Half forced her often into a state of reflection that she had been able to avoid when in motion. Before she came to Argus, she had wandered the long North Dakota roads. She had slept in the ditches and the fringes of trees along the rivers, in the occasional barn or porch. She’d walked. Nobody knew how far she walked — she didn’t know herself. Her long stride ate up twenty, thirty miles a day, and the distances were easy, the space a soothing mesmerization. Once she’d arrived at a place she often couldn’t remember getting there. Arrival was its own enigma — how did she know she’d arrived when she had nowhere to go? Yet Argus had long ago become an arrival. And because she began to arrive there more and more often, and then to stay in that town, she began to collect its truth.

Now, when she looked at the streets around her and all the people, she saw them from a junker’s point of view. She saw them from the alleys where they burned their garbage and from the back porches of their houses, where they left rags — not the front steps, kept so tidy. She knew them not from what they wore or the façade they showed to the world, but from what they tossed out, discarded, thought worthless. She knew them by their scraps, and their scraps told their stories.

The bottles in Gus Newhall’s trash bin told the common secret of his income back in the bootleg days. The Bouchards had a habit of throwing plates when they fought, and were a source of shards that often could be fitted back together with more success, as it happened, than their marriage, which fell apart. Pouty Mannheim threw out both socks when one toe frayed — he never darned them, being a bachelor, and he didn’t keep the widowed sock, for which he earned her respect. Yet his proud and profligate sock habit also told her that he would one day fail in business. As for his mother, candy wrappers told her secret vice. Though she remained slim enough, her teeth dropped out. Step-and-a-Half was not surprised. She found awful things — pet carcasses, ripped-up love letters, bedding soaked with death, blood, illness, waste. She found good things — books and sheet music, which she kept though she did not read, toys that children had accidentally lost, which she cleaned and set on windowsills. She found a prosthetic wooden hand and an eyeball made of glass. A tin filled with weird blue seeds, all of which she planted in a coffee can of dirt, one of which sprouted a fat white flower shaped like a comical soldier’s helmet and smelling of sex and cinnamon. Razors to sharpen, tires that could be mended, engine parts as well as the stacks of clothing the resale of which as rags bought the flour that made her bread, and sometimes grease to butter it. She’d found a gold pocket watch, a radio, a music box that played a few bars of an elusive tune that Eva once told her was composed by Mozart. She’d found a perfectly good pot roast, a box of foil-wrapped chocolates, six bars of brand-new fragrant pink soap. She’d found peppermints and crackers and fancy stuffed pillows that suffered only from a bit of mildew. She found these things in trash heaps and burning barrels and along the river, down the sides of ditches, in the street and here and there. There was no question, however, that her most spectacular find was fished from the hole of Mrs. Shimek’s outhouse.