Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

It was a find that had defined her life, a discovery that had circumscribed her wanderings, given shape to her thoughts, and provided her with an emotion that she never quite recognized but upon which she acted, again and again. Although it had happened more than forty years ago, the drama of it was still with her, and the consequences, which she’d seen played out before her as on a mystery stage.

THAT NIGHT, long ago, was still and deeply cold. The moon was a brilliant and distant polished disk. That October, there had been an early bitterness in the air, but deadly temperatures had never bothered Step-and-a-Half. The walking solved that. She generated her own warmth and knew how to wrap her limbs to conserve heat and repel the wind. She had stayed in Argus long enough then to know its routine. After all the taverns closed, after the doors in the town had banged shut, the fires in the stoves were damped, the curtains drawn, the dogs silenced, she walked. In time, she passed behind the Shimeks’, a place she rarely stopped, as it was merely the source of boiled-out bones and hairballs and stained newspapers. She would have passed by as usual on that night, had she not heard from the shut and weathered outhouse, a single groan. The sound arrested her. It was somehow familiar. She waited. The sound made her terribly uneasy, yet she could not leave. Four more times it sounded, and with an increased and animal intensity that made her certain that the person needed help. She had just made up her mind to violate the shack’s privacy when Mrs. Shimek, at the time a large young bride of a vacant innocence, a harmless bovine type of woman, red-cheeked and incurious, burst from the outhouse door and staggered away like a drunk farmer.

In the shadows of scrub box elders, Step-and-a-Half watched the woman pass into her darkened house, and Step-and-a-Half would have moved on herself, relieved, had she not heard from within the outhouse one more sound — a single, scratchy, outraged squawl. Enough moonlight fell through the door when she opened it for her to see that the seat and floor of the outhouse were slippery with a darkness of blood. That Mrs. Shimek’s husband was a lazy man, and hadn’t dug a deep new winter’s outhouse hole and moved the outhouse according to the autumn custom, was on that night a fortunate thing. For Step-and-a-Half’s arm was just long enough so that by reaching down and straining against the wood of the toilet hole, groping through the unfrozen filth, she was able to grasp the heel of the infant. The baby had dragged its own afterbirth up with it by the umbilical cord, and Step-and-a-Half severed the cord with nothing other than her own sharp teeth. With a finger, she cleaned out the baby’s mouth. She puffed a little air into its face, then opened her coat and pulled up the knitted vest underneath and unbuttoned the three dresses she wore one over the other. She pressed the convulsed thing hard against her flesh and inside her clothing, then she covered it with the dresses and the knitted vest and held it tightly. She had heard its one cry before it sank the incremental inch that covered up its mouth. And it was always, she thought, watching Delphine grow up, exactly the margin by which the girl escaped one dirty fate after the next.

Those thoughts came later, though, and after Step-and-a-Half had time to regret and wonder at the choice of where she left the child. She took the baby with her, of course, to the place she considered her den the way a roaming wolf will put itself up temporarily. For a few weeks only, she’d come to the barn and then the door itself of a bachelor farmer on the edge of Argus. Roy Watzka was shorter than she was by nearly half a foot, but he had fallen in love with Step-and-a-Half anyway. He declared that he would marry her. He made all sorts of plans. He’d buy her a milk cow and a golden ring. A wagon would be hers, and a strong gray horse to draw it. A chicken coop, which he would build, with fine piles of straw for the chicks and hens. He would learn to play the hand organ, to amuse her on winter nights. But she would have to stop wandering, he said. She would have to settle down with him.

Those settling qualities, which he claimed at the time, had fooled her. She had known she would take the baby back there right from the first. As she started to walk, she felt it move, clenched silently at first, and then, dragging somehow a bit of air into its miniature lungs, it gave a shorter, deeper, ragged cry so sad that it seemed to know, as Step-and-a-Half herself knew, it was now doomed to life.

By the time Step-and-a-Half came to the house — boards and tarpaper, but of a solid and thorough construction — the baby was most definitely alive and rooting desperately for a nipple. Roy had a goat, whose mild milk she thought would do. She banged on the door and when he let her in she told him to stoke up the fire and go milk the goat. She’d wakened him, of course, and he stood mystified in his baggy cream-white long johns as she unbuttoned her coat and lifted the vest and rummaged in her three bodices. Her finds interested and sometimes embarrassed him. This one frightened him.

“Holy Jesus!” he cried out, flapping his hands in the air and then wringing them together, “you’ve got a baby there, Minnie.”

Both the baby and the woman who held it eyed him fiercely. The baby was covered with patches of dried and reeking stuff, and it began to tremble and bleat in the cold of the room. The woman Roy had nicknamed Minnie, in a romantic fit, quickly returned the baby to her chest and covered it.

“Quick, it’s in tough shape.”

He threw two logs in the barrel of the stove and jumped into his overalls, shot out the door with the small pail. Surprised the goat, who sleepily butted him at first and then gave up and tiredly let him milk her. When he came back into the house he saw that Minnie was boiling pots of water. In one, she was sterilizing a rag. The other water she was warming to wash the baby. After it was fed with the rag twisted into a teat and dipped in the milk over and over, a tedious process, Minnie wiped the tiny girl clean, pinched a clothespin onto the stub of her navel cord, and swaddled her tightly in a ripped flannel pillowcase.

“Let me hold her,” said Roy. Although he felt a little stupid at first, trying to arrange himself into the proper angles to support the baby against him, it all worked out. He even had a rocking chair, although its joints needed to be reset with glue. As he sat there going back and forth, the rocker creaking high and the floorboards beneath creaking in a lower register, he watched Minnie in the kerosene lamp light as she shed her knitted vest and peeled off two layers of her dresses, and then began to wash within the folds of the dress closest to her skin.

She made a businesslike job of it, soaping and scrubbing and then rinsing. She washed her face, the sides and back of her neck, then she twisted up the rag and washed her ears. She washed the slope of her throat and underneath the collar of the dress. Then she wrung the rag out and resoaped it and pulled the dress off her shoulders a bit, turned to unbutton it and washed each of her breasts, which he’d never seen yet, and never would see, as it turned out. She buttoned up and then, still turned away from him, set one leg on a chair and peeled off her sock. She washed up the inside of that leg and then washed between, lifted the other leg, pulled off its sock and washed along that leg as well. She added the last of the hot water to the basin on the floor and sat in the chair across from him, set her feet inside to soak. She sat there steadily, watching him rock the baby. Her eyes were intent and slanted, unblinking, steady as a hawk’s. He wondered what she was thinking, but he didn’t dare to ask because he was afraid that she was thinking that she had to walk.