Master Butchers Singing Club

  As Delphine walked her packages out to the tent, she saw that Cyprian had made a little fireplace out of rocks. He was proving remarkably handy, she thought, in ways odd and wonderful. For instance, the fireplace was not a lazy round circle of rocks, it was carefully fit stone on mortared stone. There was a chimney, a little shelf. A hook set into the mortar. He was fixing up the chicken coop. And, too, there was his beauty.

  As Cyprian turned toward her with a gentle sideways glance his profile caught her breath. His eyes were deeply set, a resinous coal, and his nose was a classical line with perfect teardrops of nostrils. There was a slight curve to his lips, and an eerie perfection to his teeth when he smiled. It was that last, the even whiteness of his teeth, she decided now, that might possibly make his face too handsome to be handsome. Yes, she imagined, regarding him more critically, there was something to that. Some imperfection makes a face much stronger looking, gives it points of interest. Or am I just jealous? Protecting my own heart?

  She held out the packages. He took them from her and added them to his juggling routine, happily catching and tossing them before him and behind him, in the air, under a leg lifted straight out and pointy-toed like a ballerina’s, and then crooked to the side like a pissing dog’s.

  How could one not love a man who juggled so cleverly? How not love a man who stuck by you while the sheriff and deputies and morticians hauled three bodies out of the cellar of your father’s house? She forgot her moment of critical thinking and merely decided to appreciate Cyprian. There was no question, he had done his best to make her comfortable. He had not only erected their own private tent, but rigged up another, a neatly constructed house of tarpaulin and blanket, for her father, and it was near the river. Near Roy Watzka’s inevitable root-bound stash. Far away so that they wouldn’t hear him snore.

  After the three dead bodies were taken away, a traumatized exhaustion descended on Delphine and Cyprian. They sat long, staring in a numb trance, at the fire until it burned down to coals. A gentle snow of darkness fell upon them. There was no moon. Long into the night, they sipped fresh water and ate summer sausage, bread and lard, oranges for dessert, for Cyprian had caught no fish after all. The moonless night brought out the beams of stars. There was a gentle extravagance of light in the heavens. The air was so quiet they could hear the river flowing, and within its low sound Delphine at last shed a little of the horror and experienced a rare comfort.

  An urgency to speak gripped her. The darkness covered her face; her father was drinking down in the bushes; Cyprian was sitting beside her. She decided to ask.

  “That man by the river. You know what I’m saying.”

  Cyprian’s heart thunked, a jolt of adrenaline buzzed his brain. He had been waiting for this moment, hoping it wouldn’t come. Long before, he had decided what his answer would be.

  “You’re all I want out of life,” he said.

  Delphine pondered this. In a way, this was exactly what she’d prayed for when much younger, trapped in her room while drunks roared in the yard and kitchen. Here was a good-looking man, very strong and with an odd, but surprisingly proven, source of income that consisted of balancing. A talented man. A man who professed that she was all he wanted out of life—that is, presumably he wanted to marry her. And yet, this man had what she now understood she’d heard referred to as an affliction. That was the polite way she’d heard it. Other than such references, this whole thing was sheer enigma.

  “Why do you do it?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have to know.”

  As usual, and Cyprian could have predicted this, she would not accept an easy answer or even one that allowed him to keep his dignity. Even an evasion that might ensure their happiness was unacceptable. Nothing he’d heard about his desire matched the feelings that he had when he was experiencing this form of love. Then, at those times, it was simply the most basic joy he’d ever felt. He’d always hoped that he would never, ever, have to explain it, especially to a woman. But, he thought, looking at the ruby firelight on Delphine’s face, if he had to tell a woman he was glad it was she. The way he felt about Delphine Watzka was an utter surprise to him, something he’d never expected in his life. He loved the things she said, her amusing directness, the strength she had dismissed until he taught her to develop it, and now, the kindness she showed toward this scroungy old bastard of a father. Even her insistence that he tell her the truth about this hidden side of himself was a part of her true charm.

  Still, he didn’t know how to put it, and she was determined to obtain the whole truth and nothing less.

  “You’re not a Pole with a name like Lazarre,” she sidetracked.

  “I am not,” he admitted.

  “So then what are you?”

  “I’m French.”

  “Plus what else?”

  Cyprian paused. “Well,” he said at last. “I’m Chippewa. Ojibwe. The word my grandpa used was Anishinaabeg—the humans. Same thing.”

  “That makes you an Indian.”

  It was no small thing to admit this in the town where the two now lived openly together as though married, but he did at last.

  “You have light skin.”

  “My dad was half French and my mom was part French, too. Have you ever heard of michifs or métis?” Cyprian peered at her, then shrugged and looked away. “I guess not, but if you had, you’d have heard of my famous ancestor, Louis Riel, who died a martyr to the great vision of a mixed-blood nation—not a loose band or bunch of hunters. A place with boundaries and an actual government taking up a big chunk of Manitoba. There’s lots of us who still do dream about it! I’m descended of a famous man, Delphine, for your information. Riel. You can find him in the books of history.”

  “Was he a good balancer?”

  Cyprian cocked his head to the side and smiled. “He was an excellent balancer, but they hung him anyway. I guess the light side of my relatives came out in me, if not their heroics, though I did fight a decent war. All my cousins, two of my brothers, they’re brown.”

  “But now I see it,” said Delphine, softening toward him and his fantasy of lost glory and a hero’s inheritance, “in your eyes and all, or maybe in your hair.” Still, she was not to be diverted by Cyprian’s sudden burst of information. “Tell me about the man beside the river.”

  Her voice was patient, and Cyprain lost any hope of diverting her. His breath came short and he attempted to find the right words to describe what came over him when he knew it was going to happen with another man. He couldn’t, and was relieved when she finally asked him a question.

  “Did it start in the war?”

  “It started in the war!’

  He said this with a surge of hope, for it was an explanation that he hadn’t thought of yet. Yes, his thoughts knit quickly. This could be another freak effect of wartime life, a consequence of living so closely with other men, a side effect of getting gassed, or of the other things, septic wounds, a trench disease, a fear-borne germ. As he scrambled about with these explanations in his mind, he knew that they were not enough. During the war he had, in fact, fallen devoutly in love with another man, whose death he still grieved. And the love itself had not been a surprise. For he’d always known. It was perfectly apparent to him that he had the feelings for men that men usually expressed for girls, then women. What could be more obvious? No, the war had done far worse things than deciding whom he could or couldn’t love.

  Even thinking of it exhausted him.

  “Look,” he finally said, wearily, “ask yourself the same question. Why you like to do it with men? Your answer is the same as my answer.”

  Delphine nibbled some bread, poked the fire into a stronger blaze, and considered. After thinking of it for some time, she decided that she now felt a kinship with him that was more female than male. It seemed as though she could tell him anything that went on in her woman’s heart, and he would understand it, he would know the truth of it, having felt it in his own. So she was satisfied
with his answer although it meant that truly, for good and all, they would not be lovers. She did not know if they would even travel anymore, putting on their show. After all, they were stuck for a time, right here, according to their pledge to Sheriff Hock. What they needed to think about, especially in the face of the money they’d been forced to spend on the hotel, schnapps for Roy, cleaning supplies and new blankets, was work. They had to think just how they would acquire work.

  THIS TIME, Delphine walked over to the meat shop, a distance of about four miles. She and Cyprian had decided not to waste gasoline. Also, she needed to exercise her leg muscles in case they did resume their show—perhaps they should put it on here for a weekend or two just to raise enough to purchase a new mattress for Roy, not to mention buy a concoction that would remove the still raging stink from the floor and walls of the house. When Delphine walked into Waldvogel’s she noted the jangle of a cheerful shop bell and thought how pleasant it would be to hear it from deep in the house.

  Delphine made known the purchases she sought, as before, and as before, Eva asked her to come sit down for a coffee. There was not a product on Eva’s household cleaning shelf that would serve as a strong enough cleanser for the job Delphine required, and Eva wanted to concoct something of her own.

  “Believe me, I have the experience,” she said. “This type of stink is a hell of a problem. Most difficult to destroy.

  “First off, a good vinegar and water wash down. Then I should order the industrial strength ammonia for you—only be careful with the fumes of it. Maybe, if that doesn’t work good enough yet, raw lye. From the first, Delphine, I suggest to fill that cellar in, not just sprinkling with lime, but packing her up with a good mixture of wood ash and dirt. You will not be going to use it?”

  Delphine vigorously shook her head.

  “Then good. Fill it up.” Eva sipped her coffee. Today, her hair was bound back in a singular knot, the sides rolled in smooth twists, the knot itself in the shape of the figure eight, which Delphine knew was the ancient sign for eternity. Eva rose and turned away, walked across the green squares of linoleum to punch some risen dough and cover it with towels. As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol blazed out, those particular moments were eternal. Those moments actually went somewhere. Into a file of moments that existed out of time’s range and could not be pilfered by God.

  Well, it was God, wasn’t it, Delphine’s thoughts went on stubbornly, who made time and created the end of everything? Tell me this, Delphine wanted to say to her new friend, why are we given the curse of imagining eternity when we know we can’t experience it, when we ourselves are so finite? She wanted to say it, but suddenly grew shy, and it was in that state of concentrated inattention that she met Eva’s husband, Fidelis Waldvogel, master butcher.

  Before she met him, she sensed him, like a surge of electric power in the air when the clouds are low and lightning bounds across the earth. Then she felt a heaviness. A field of gravity moved through her body. She tried to rise, to shake the feeling, when he suddenly filled the doorway. Then entered, and filled the room.

  It was not his size. He was not extraordinarily tall, not broad. But he shed power, as though there was a bigger man crammed into him. Or could it have been that he was stuffed with the cries of animals? Maybe it was his muscled shoulders, or his watchful quiet. One thick red and punished hand hung down at his side like a hook; the other balanced on his shoulder a slab of meat. That cow’s haunch weighed a hundred pounds or double that. He held it lightly, although the veins in his neck throbbed, heavy-blooded as a bull’s. He looked at Delphine and his eyes were white blue. Their stares locked. Delphine’s cheeks went fever hot and she looked down first. Clouds flew across the sun. Light shuddered in and out of the room, and the red mouths of the geraniums on the windowsill yawned. The shock of his gaze caused her to pick up one of Eva’s cigarettes. To light it. He looked away from her and conversed with his wife.

  Then he left without asking to be introduced.

  That abruptness, though rude, was more than fine with Delphine. Already, she didn’t want to know him. She hoped she could avoid him. It didn’t matter, as long as she could still be friends with Eva, or even hold the job that she soon was offered, waiting trade.

  “When?”

  Delphine was immediately happy with the thought of working in the shop and sitting for her breaks in Eva’s kitchen every day.

  “Starting tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be right here when you open,” said Delphine.

  “At six.”

  From the next day on Delphine used the back door that led past the furnace and washtubs, the shelves of tools, the bleached aprons slowly drying on racks and hooks. Leaving the utility room, she walked down the hallway cluttered with papers and equipment. Lifted from a hook by the shop door Eva’s own apron, blue with tiny white flowers. From now on, she would hear the customer bell ring from the other side of the counter. She would know the slaughterhouse, the scalding tub, the tracks and hooks that held unbroken quarters of beef and half hogs. There was a cooler. Open the steel lever and the air lock broke, the thick door sighed open. She gulped the scent of spice and cheese. The deep freeze had a grimmer odor. Both were fitted with tracks, hooks, bins, and shelves. Between the slaughtering room and the store was a small smoking room, and piled beside it logs of hickory or apple wood and buckets of brine. Set to the side of the little smoking room was the busy processing room fitted out with butcher blocks, stubby tables where the quarters were broken. There were steel-sheeted tabletops around the saw where steaks and roasts were cut. The floor of that room was spread with fresh sawdust every morning to soak up blood and absorb the dust of bones that the meat saws spewed and the bits and pieces of gristle and suet that were flung off the blocks when they were cleaned with heavy, rectangular steel brushes. Aprons smeared with blood hung by the doors. It was Delphine’s job to assist in the shop laundry. Every day, she collected the stained aprons and rags and brought them back to the concrete-floored laundry room. Eva let her bring her own laundry, too. Not that Eva ever said so, but no matter how hard Delphine washed, it felt to her as though the smell of Roy’s house lingered—maybe in the seams of her dress, in the green and gray checks, the vines of the print, the stitched hem. Only gradually would that scent be replaced by the smell of the shop. Raw blood, congealed fat, sharp pepper, and sawdust. Delphine put on a fresh clean dress nearly every day. She washed her hair in the river at night. Still, the smell of meat clung to her, and bothered her until she finally grew used to it and didn’t smell it anymore.

  ON HER SECOND DAY of work, Delphine was arranging loops of wieners in the cooler when she heard the bell jangle, then jangle again, then jangle with a truly furious commotion. Who was this who could not wait a few seconds? Who was it who entered in a stormy tantrum? Irritated, Delphine stepped out of the cool locker into the presence of a woman known in town as Step-and-a-Half. She was a rangy stray dog of a woman who was probably still young—she looked between thirty and forty—and yet moved with an air of ancient bitterness. Step-and-a-Half lived alone, when she lived in Argus at all, and made her living trading in rags. Roy spoke to her sometimes, and Delphine remembered times as a child when Step-and-a-Half had thrust a stick of candy or a coin into her hands. Times when the woman had appeared, from nowhere, and drunks in the house had melted off as though into the earth. She was intimidating. The name Step-and-a-Half was hers because the length of her stride was phenomenal. She loved the night and could be seen, her beanpole figure in a trance of forward movement, walking the town streets and checking back porches to see whether anyone had left out a worn skirt, a piecemeal assortment of shirts and blouses, or maybe even a coat. Now, since she ate the town’s leavings as well as gathered them, she’d come for tripe. Or snouts, though Eva mainly used them in a salad that she believed was especially nutritious f
or boys. Today bones were also available for Step-and-a-Half. Delphine knew this because already Eva had set them aside.

  The bones, cut generously and hung with scraps of meat, lay collected in a pan underneath a towel. Delphine shook them into waxed, white paper, wrapped and secured them in string she pulled down from a roll suspended from the ceiling. She pushed the package impatiently across the counter, expecting Step-and-a-Half to snatch it. But the older woman threw back her racklike shoulders, stood tall, and glared down at the package in quizzical silence. She carefully unwrapped it. Wordless, she smoothed out the white paper between them, and displayed the dull, fat-smeared bones. Step-and-a-Half examined the bones as though they told the future.

  “This one’s for shit.” She pushed a knobbed legbone aside. “And I don’t take necks.”

  Step-and-a-Half inspected the rest, smiled approvingly at an oxtail, exercised over the scraps the meticulous discernment of a banker’s wife critically comparing the marbling on expensive steaks. When done, she waved the bones back. Delphine ceremoniously retied the package and gave them to the woman with a respectful flourish. She understood that this was the way Eva did things. Satisfied now with her treatment, Step-and-a-Half reached into an inner pocket of her voluminous man’s trench coat and pulled out a neatly cut pile of dust rags.

  “Give ’em to Eva,” she ordered, as though she thought that Delphine would keep the rags. Her eyes were a brilliant and searching black. Her gaze had at first seemed powered by a sharp, cryptic hatred, but now suddenly she shifted, looked at Delphine with an unreadable expression of melancholy.