The Master Butcher's Singing Club (13 page)

“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.

“Can I help you with something else?” Delphine asked, uncertain. But Step-and-a-Half only continued to stare, taking Delphine in carefully. For her part, Delphine stared right back. That was when she noticed something new about Step-and-a-Half. Although her face was planed rough, her features, almost noble in their raw strength, could have been beautiful if suspicion had not pulled the corners of her mouth down so tightly that deep lines tied beneath her chin. Her eyes, that surprising color, were constantly narrowed. Suddenly, the older woman slapped the counter sharply with one hand. She grabbed the package with the other and without a word of thanks or gesture of common courtesy, she turned on her heel and swept out. The door jangled shut in that same fury with which she had entered.

That was one of the customers, and there were others. Some paid money and some, like Step-and-a-Half, lived off the scraps. For the shop and the dead animals fed a complex range of beings—from the banker, his steak cooked perfectly and set before him every night, to those who bought the sausages, then the cheapest cuts; from the family of Dakota Sioux who were darker than Cyprian and dressed in old-fashioned calicos, wore strings of rose, blue, coral, and yellow beads, and traded wild meat or berries for flour and tea, to the ones who did not pay at all like Step-and-a-Half, Simpy Benson, the Shimeks, and the out-of-work fathers who had taken to Depression roads; and still on down to the dogs who gnawed the bones that Step-and-a-Half rejected and even further, to the plants that flourished on the crushed bones even the dogs could not chew to bits.

There were also a number of customers who didn’t always buy but regularly came in to talk or to plan the meetings of the singing club—the fat bootlegger, Gus Newhall, and the courtly, stone-broke, but immaculate Tensid Bien, who always wore a tie and coat, who took forever to browse through the Sunshine Baking Company rack of cookies, from which he meekly sampled, and who bought one or two slices at a time of minced ham, occasionally an orange, a few cookies, a meager cut of
the toughest beef, a turnip, a sparse rind of cheese. There was Pouty Mannheim of the Mannheim brothers, chubby and with rich-boy airs, and his confused perpetual girlfriend, Myrna. There was Chester Zumbrugge, who tried to put the moves on her. There were Scat Wilcomb and Mercedes Fox, Old Doctor Heech and his son, Young Doctor Heech, who was not a doctor at all but a dentist, and was that shocking thing, a vegetarian, and thus suspected to be a Communist. The only one of them all whom Delphine truly dreaded seeing, however, was Eva’s spoiled sister-in-law. Everyone just called her Tante because she otherwise insisted on her baptismal name, Maria Theresa, and no one wanted to add to her swellheadedness by using such a queenly title.

Delphine did not call her Tante, she did not call her anything. She carefully did not address the woman who swept in with one clang of the bell, as though the bell itself were subdued by the woman’s sense of her own elegance and importance. On Delphine’s first day of work, Tante went right around to the sliding panel on the case that held the sausage, opening it with a clatter. She fished out a ring of baloney and put it in her purse. Delphine stood back and watched Maria Theresa—actually, she stood back and envied the woman’s shoes. Those shoes were made of a thin, flexible Italian leather, and cleverly buttoned. They fit her long, narrow foot with a winsome precision. Tante might not have a captivating face, for in that she resembled Fidelis, she replicated his most aggressive features—the powerful neck and icy bold demeanor, a too stern chin, thinner lips and eyes of a ghostly blue that gave Delphine the shivers. Still, Tante’s feet were slim and pretty. She was vain of them,
and all her shoes were of the most expensive leather and make.

“Who are you?” Tante asked, rearing her head back and then swirling off without deigning to accept an answer. The question, insulting in the first place, since Delphine had already been introduced to the butcher’s sister, hung in the air.
Who are you
is a question with a long answer or a short answer. When Tante dropped it between them, bounced but did not retrieve it, Delphine was left to consider the larger meaning as she scrubbed down the meat counters and prepared to mop the floor.

Who are you
, Delphine Watzka,
you drunkard’s child and fairy’s
whore, you vagabond, you motherless creature with a belly of steel and a lusting heart? Who are you, what are you, born a dirty Pole in a Polack’s dirt? You with a household cellar full of human rot and a man in your tent who has done the unimaginable to other men? Who are you, with a father seen sucking his bottle like a baby in its own shit? Who are you and what makes you think you belong anywhere near this house, this shop, and especially my brother, Fidelis, who is the master of all he does?

DELPHINE WAS NOT CAPABLE
of indulging in that sort of self-doubt without resenting the one who had introduced it into her heart. She hated Tante from the first and she imagined the woman’s overthrow. She would be ruthless in attaining at least one small eventual victory from which Tante never recovered. Tante even tried to lord it over Eva, for which, in her complicated, loyal heart, Delphine detested her. When Tante swept back out with a loaf of her sister-in-law’s fresh bread under her arm, and grabbed a bottle of milk besides without a by-your-leave, Delphine wrote it down on a slip.
Tante took a bottle of milk, a ring of baloney, and a loaf of bread.
And she left it at that. She did not know there would be repercussions for even so slight an accounting, but there were, for Tante didn’t take things. By her reckoning, she was owed things. Out of money left by her grandmother, whose favorite she was, Tante once gave her brother five hundred dollars to purchase equipment. Although he had paid her back, she continued to take her interest out in ways that would remind them all of her dutiful generosity.

The boys, in particular Markus and Franz, did not like Tante. Delphine could see that. Not that she knew all that much about children. They were foreign to her. She had not been around them often. Now, things were different. As these boys were children belonging to Eva, she was interested in who they were. She took note of them beginning with the oldest boy, Franz.

At fifteen years he was extremely strong and athletic with a proud, easygoing American temperament perfectly transparent and opaque at the same time. His inner thoughts and moods were either nonexistent or hidden, she couldn’t tell. He always smiled at her. He always said
hello with only the faintest German accent. He was always cheerful and he was unfailingly polite. As time went on, she would see that he was the product of Fidelis’s insuperable patience and also his controlled rage. Franz’s strength coupled with his mother’s wire-frame tenacity made him a formidable athlete. He played football, basketball, and baseball, all with powerful grace, and was, in fact, something of a town hero.

The next boy was more reclusive. Markus was barely nine but already it was clear that he had a philosophical bent and a monkish nature, though he’d play with tough abandon when he could. His grades were perfect for one year, and abysmal the next, according to his own interests. He had inherited his mother’s long hands, her floss of red-gold hair, her thin cheeks and eyes that looked out sometimes with a sad curiosity and amusement, as though to say,
What an idiotic spectacle.
Markus was also polite, though more restrained. He anxiously accomplished errands for his father, but he clearly doted to the last degree upon his mother. He was named after her beloved father. His mother often stroked his hair, so like her own, the curls clipped. She often pulled him close and kissed him. He pulled away, as boys had to, but in a gentle way that showed he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

The two youngest boys, Erich and Emil, were five-year-old twins, bull strong, morose when hungry, perfectly happy once they ate their fill, simple of heart and devoted to their stick guns and homemade sets of clay and twig armies that eternally strove in combat across the floor of their back room. Those armies, which included those that once had belonged to Fidelis, and a few more modern soldiers bought with precious pennies, were just about the only toys in evidence around the house. Once, when Delphine wondered what boys played with, Eva told her that they played with everything around them, inventing it into something else.

“A stick, it becomes a gun. Our meat trays they slide down the hills. Once in a while a bat, a ball. You never know. Delphine, I just leave them out of my interest to see what they build.”

Delphine watched and indeed they made surprising things. Out of abandoned springs, wheels, crates, they put together a buggy that the
dogs pulled. They rigged up a near lethal tree swing, which flung them from a branch near the road in an arc over the dirt where they could be hit by a passing car. Down near the river, they made rafts out of old lumber scraps. Swords from lathes, forts from packing-crate wood, guns that shot gravel, bombs of cow’s bladders filled with water. Yet, in spite of their rowdy play out in the world, they were quiet and subdued in the shop and around their father, especially. They worked hard on slaughtering days. When every hand was needed, even the two youngest pulled gizzards inside out and cleaned them of gravel. Once old enough, the boys learned to use knives without slicing off their hands. Fidelis had determined to train them all in his profession.

There was that—the profession. Delphine didn’t mind selling groceries, or even cutting headcheese, but butchering wasn’t her kind of work. Not only did she hate the brutish excitement of the killing, but its long and meticulous aftermath. The casings must be washed and rewashed, for sausage, and the gizzards turned inside out and carefully smoothed back together. Each product had an endless procedure and she thought some of the steps unnecessary, though Eva insisted they were not. Maybe, Delphine thought, she wouldn’t mind actually mixing the spices up into the ground meat and making the sausages, but that was Fidelis’s work and he was jealous of each step he took. Some steps were secret. He brooded over each batch like an alchemist.

Delphine would rather have spent her time on the stage, or even backstage, designing costumes and sewing them. She liked to build sets. She was good at everything that had to do with drama and most of all she liked dressing up in whatever composed a costume: feathers, wreaths, gowns, Victorian shirtwaists. Delphine had always loved making up shows. It was, in fact, their mutual passion for disguise that had first brought Clarisse and Delphine together while they were still in grade school. They had staged complicated shows in Clarisse’s backyard, using a sheet draped over a clothesline for a curtain, and playing all parts with complicated costume changes and stage directions, even lighting from an old captain’s lamp, the glow of which could be directed onto the grass as a kind of spotlight after dark. Their inventions, and the
mingled derision and awe in which other children held them, had made them close as only children can be who are set apart. Their loyalty to each other had saved them. Over time,
they had become invulnerable to teasing and gained a complex form of respect. When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished. So it began to happen with “those two girls”—an acceptance of their peculiar getups and an appreciation of their entertainment value.

Still, in their shared daydreams, Clarisse and Delphine had always seen themselves taking leave of Argus, moving off into the vague wilderness of cities and other people and even bona fide theaters. Although Delphine had, for a short time, pursued some form of their fantasy, she was disappointed that it had only been as a human table, a prop, the base of Cyprian’s flamboyant balancing. As for Clarisse, she’d never left at all, since her father and uncle required her in the business directly after high school. It was her fate to stay and to assist the town’s dead on their short journey into the earth. She didn’t mind, she told Delphine, she had accepted it. She had always known that she would step into her parents’ spot, but once she lost them the luxury of going to school or playing at drama was at an end. Besides, her aunt Benta said she had a natural aptitude for embalming, which was an art that went back to the Egyptians but was only now catching on in the Dakotas. Aurelius Strub had taken the course and earned his diploma from one of the first itinerant embalmers to enter the state. Since then, he had made steady technical improvements. Strub’s was getting first calls from people in towns at quite a distance, from people who had seen and found comfort in the serenity of the bodies that Strub’s prepared and displayed.

Clarisse moved her own grocery trade from Kozka’s market to Waldvogel’s, as soon as Delphine began to work there. She had inherited her parents’ house and often unwound from her day by cooking elaborate meals for herself in her mother’s kitchen. She was very finicky about her diet, and Delphine now saved the leanest cuts of meat for her. They were alone in the shop one afternoon, regarding a lavender-pink pork chop that Delphine had just laid on a piece of waxed paper.

“Trim off the fat, will you?” said Clarisse.