The Master Butcher's Singing Club (14 page)

“There’s no fat on it,” said Delphine.

“Just that corner,” said Clarisse, pointing.

Delphine removed a bit of translucent flesh no bigger than a fingernail.

Clarisse nodded for her friend to wrap the rest. Her pinch-waisted brown suit of summer-weight wool and her crisp white blouse and white piped leather pumps looked good enough for city wear. Her philosophy, she’d informed Delphine, was not only to prepare the deceased as the guest of honor at a party, but to dress herself with an elegance that befit the grand going-away occasion. She had just come from the funeral of a thirty-four-year-old drowning victim, a man, and was pleased, though she merely hinted of this and only whispered the disagreeable term “floater,” that she had managed to nearly eliminate the awful red and purple blotches from his face and halt its typical rapid degradation.

“I would never have let him go out in front of people looking like that drowned boy who purged, right in the church, up in Fargo,” she said. “Sloppy work. Those poor parents. The wife of mine—you don’t know them, they’re new in town—anyway, his wife told me that she couldn’t believe the work we’d done. She thanked me. The family tried to give Benta extra money. We wouldn’t take it. How do you like this jacket?”

The two were the same size and Clarisse was generous with her clothing, so Delphine always took a possessive interest in her friend’s wardrobe. Even now, Clarise said pleasantly, “This would look swell on you.”

“I can’t think where I would actually wear it,” said Delphine.

“You and Cyprian go out, don’t you?”

“We’re living in a
tent
, Clarisse,” said Delphine, and then she laughed. So did Clarisse. Her sweet, fresh voice bubbled over the rumble of generators and the clash of meat grinders out in back. While they were laughing, Eva walked into the shop with a new roll of string for the spool that hung above the cash register. She gave Clarisse the smile Delphine knew as her formal smile, the one she used with customers she did not
particularly know or like. Delphine wasn’t sure which category her friend fell into, and she experienced a sudden anxiety, a confusion of loyalties in which she wanted to please them both. But Eva swept immediately out and Clarisse, who hadn’t picked up on Eva’s formality and probably thought that she was merely busy, was frowning at her fingernails in a serious way that Delphine knew meant she was thinking of imparting some questionable piece of information.

“Come on,” Delphine said to her friend, though she felt guilty now, talking on the job, “business is slow. I’ve got a minute. Let’s hear it.”

“In a way, it’s nothing that you haven’t heard before,” said Clarisse, pouting with vexation.

“Give it over,” said Delphine firmly.

Clarisse tipped her head down and eyed her friend almost angrily from beneath her brows.

“Hock came to my house last night, late. He stood on the porch, talking of this and that, trying to pretend like we shared some secret until I wanted to scream. I shut the door in his face and stood behind it. He must have stepped up to the door because I heard him whisper like it was right in my ear,
then I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down
.”

Clarisse had a talent for looking truly miserable. Her face fell into the slack lines of a much older woman, and she bit the lipstick off her lips, nervously, so that it smeared onto her teeth. She lifted the gloved hand that held the wrapped pork chop, squinted her eyes shut, pressed the pork chop to her forehead.

“Nothing I say or do makes a goddamn bit of difference,” she said vehemently. “He turns it around to hear what he wants.”

“What are you supposed to be, his tender little pig?”

“Ha!” Clarisse held the pork chop out at arm’s length, and spoke to it.

“I suppose you’re fed up with me always pitching a moan over Hock. Well, I’m sick of me, too. I’d move away if I could, that’s how tired I am of it. But I have a duty here, and more than that. I’m good at my
profession. Heech says I know as much as he does about anatomy, and I have been experimenting with a new pump that . . . oh, I’ll spare you the details. I’ve got pride in my work, and he can’t ruin things for me.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Delphine. “We’ll get together and knock off the big boy. We’ll murther’m.”

“Oh,” said Clarisse, wistful. “That would be so nice!”

NORTH DAKOTA WILTED
in a brutal heat. For Delphine, the summer weather, hot, hotter, unbearably hot the second week of her new job, meant that this was the summer of ongoing terrible odors. The slaughterhouse of course began to smell like slaughter. The scrap pile went green and the rank smell of flesh was everywhere. Of course, she couldn’t escape the bad smells after work. No sooner was the cellar of her house filled in and the floor scrubbed down, new mattresses, clean blankets and sheets put out, the walls sprayed with vinegar and then vigorously wiped, no sooner was the house fit to live in than the heat crushed the air. She and Cyprian decided to stay in the tent for other reasons, as they attempted to catch some sleep in the night’s wet furnace.

A slight breeze flowed off the dwindling water of the river just around three a.m., and Cyprian positioned the tent flaps just so in order to take advantage of it. But that breeze also turned the mud sour and came laden with whining fronds of mosquitoes. The insects batted the canvas of the tent with a tiny insane lust. All night, the whining built and diminished, sometimes so loud it sounded like air raid sirens, sometimes low and insistent, but always constant and without letup.

Cyprian bought mosquito netting for the two of them. Draped around their army cots, it allowed them enough rest to see straight the next day. At first they thought they would go mad listening to the bugs clustered an inch deep at the tiny holes through which their warm-blooded scent must have exuded, tantalizing. The next week they bought cotton wax from the pharmacist and pressed it into their ears. No sooner had they solved the problem of the mosquitoes than they were infested with a plague of armyworms. If you looked at just one, it wasn’t bad . . . olive brown with an intricate racing band of blue dots. It was their
numbers that made them horrible. The worms crept up and down the trees in such thick droves that the bark seemed to be moving. They inched across the tent roof by the thousands and it was impossible to keep them off the ground cloth or even out of their blankets, no matter how tightly Delphine and Cyprian pegged down the tent’s bottom. She got used to walking on them, an awful carpet, and leaving footprints of slime when she stepped into the shop. As for Roy, he slept half in the river some nights or on the starry banks, in grass, and all bugs left him alone, perhaps because his blood was eighty proof, said Delphine.

“You’d think the mosquitoes would bite him, at least, I mean, to get drunk themselves. Roy’s a walking party bar,” she complained one night, irritated that her father could sleep peacefully in that infested heat. She and Cyprian were sweating safely underneath their nets. Lying side by side, before they agreed to lose consciousness, they rolled the cotton wax between their fingers and argued over whether Cyprian should use the DeSoto to run some liquor out of Canada. Avoiding the slap of sales tax was not only a very common thing to do, it was patriotic if you were German, or supplied the liquor to them. No one had hated Prohibition like the Germans, who were convinced it was a law passed as a direct comment on their tradition of Zechkunst, the art of friendly drinking. Since Prohibition was over, heavy taxes on liquor were the new source of resentment and no one took such pleasure as Germans in thwarting the government. On a recent visit up north, even Tante had filled hot water bottles with whiskey and worn them as a bosom in her dress, smiling regally at the customs man as she sailed across the border.

“I’d rather stay legal,” said Cyprian, “but the offer’s good.”

“That means I walk to work one whole week.”

“That’s not what gets you.”

“Damn right.”

“I will not, and I mean this,” Cyprian said, propping himself up on one arm and staring at her intently, “get caught.”

“Scares the hell out of me to think you would,” Delphine offered.

“Does?”

“For what it’s worth.”

Even then, Cyprian just didn’t feel like kissing her, but he loved her so much at that moment he nearly overcame his reluctance. It seemed to him that since the end of their traveling show, and since the house was cleaned and fumigated, things were slowing down to normal. He missed balancing, and the travel, but not the insecurity of where to perform and how to set up shows. He wanted things predictable but he also wanted something else. It was a problem with men who had come back from the war, he’d heard, normal wasn’t good enough. They had to jack up every situation. Make it dangerous. Maybe he was like that. Or it could be that Delphine’s job made him jealous. Not only because she was so tight with Clarisse and then Eva, but because she now bought everything, their food, their clothes, Roy’s whiskey. He did feel as though the man should make the money.

“I’m gonna do it.”

“Oh God,” said Delphine.

“I’m not bad with a engine.” Cyprian tried to placate her. “I learned a lot in the war. When I finish this, tell you what, I’ll get a job. Maybe set myself up to fix automobiles.”

“What do I tell the sheriff?”

“I’ll get back here before he even knows. . . .”

His reassurance was cut off by Roy’s wild hollering, and the two of them pushed aside their nets and jumped out of bed. Gingerly slipping along a rutted path, they made their way toward Roy’s drinking camp down along the river. Delphine carried a small kerosene lamp that cast a pool of light just before them, so she was the first to see, when she reached the source of the panicked howls, why Roy was in hysterics. He had finally been discovered. The armyworms had come across him during a long drunken sleep, and they’d settled in, perhaps to feed on his clothing, or maybe just to rest on their way toward a banquet of leaves. His hair was packed. They dripped from his ears. Not a fraction of an inch of a wormless Roy was visible and he was, indeed, a supremely horrifying sight. So it was a surprise when at Delphine’s voice he calmed down pathetically.

“I need a hair of the dog if you please,” he said, blinking through a
veil of strings of dripping worms. “I got the shakes, little daughter, got the deliriums. Need the whiskey. I know it’s not real, but I could swear that worms are covering me.”

“You’ll be all right, Dad, just stand still,” said Delphine, knocking pads of worms from his arms, his shoulders, and then tugging him forward. Cyprian clawed handfuls away, tried to comb the hordes from Roy’s head, to shake them off his trousers and gently pluck them from his ears.

“Just stand still and you’ll get your whiskey,” he echoed Delphine.

“They’re in your head,” she told him, “stay still. They’re all in your mind.”

IT WAS TRUE
that Cyprian was good with engines. By now, Delphine had totally revised her view of him and touted him to Eva as outstanding for his practical abilities. Repairing cars wasn’t as satisfying to him as balancing, but still he had a knack for mechanical work. He babied the DeSoto, and it ran so clean it purred, as he said, like a kitten in a butter dish. Before he left the next day, to reassure Delphine, he did a free once-over on the shiny brown delivery car Eva was so proud of—
Waldvogel’s Meats
, it said on the side.
The Freshest. The Finest. Old World Quality.

Old World Quality. Eva was most proud of that, for it was true that in this country you could simply not get sausages prepared with the simplicity and perfection common in the German street. And she missed that. Other things, too, were impossible to find, she said, and when she said so she sounded a bit like Tante. Marzipan. Herring. Pickles with the right degree of spice. Rolls as soft. Down beds as deep. Fur as lustrous. Cream as thick.

Well, she often admitted, they couldn’t do everything. They could only make the sausages. Pity about the bread, she often teased Fidelis. He had come to this country on the evidence of bread, machine bread, a slice of it sent in a package as an example of an everyday American marvel. He’d never tasted that preserved slice, of course. She despised the stuff—it was thin and salty. It crumbled. You could not get it fresh and it turned
hard by noon if by chance you did. It wasn’t real bread. The crusts were soft and the interior tough. Everything about the bread was backward, said Eva, so she made her bread herself. She sold loaves when she made extra, and sometimes pastries too, from a tall glass case that she rubbed transparent with a sheet of newsprint wetted with vinegar.

Eva prided herself on triumphing over anything that circumstance brought her way, yet she could not keep the butcher shop functioning in the heat with the efficiency she usually demanded. As the heat wave and the drought wore on, the glass collected steam and the counters and floors were slippery with melted grease. Everything was more difficult, for Delphine, too. Nights alone in the tent without Cyprian were unpleasant. It was harder to watch Roy destroy himself down by the river with two buddies who now slept with him in sour comfort. Delphine felt vulnerable in the open, and was afraid to plug her ears for fear one of the drunks might sneak up on her. So she endured the mad whining of the bugs until sleep took her and still, within sleep, she woke restlessly from time to time. It occurred to her that Cyprian had left in order to make her miss him. If so, enough. She did. They were like an old married couple, except that the romance of their youth had lasted about six hours. To get some sleep herself, and help out in the crisis, Delphine started sleeping on Eva’s couch every two or three nights. Waking early, Delphine could put in a couple of hours cleaning before the crush of heat.

Now that she was around her friend from early morning on, Delphine could see how Eva suffered. Eva’s face was pale with daily effort, and sometimes she declared she had to lie down, just for a minute, and rest. When Delphine checked on her, she found Eva in such a sunken dead shock of slumber that she hadn’t the heart to wake her.