The Master Butcher's Singing Club (57 page)

From underneath the crazy quilt now, Step-and-a-Half heard them, outside. Wild keening of women. Men exercising their voices. Up and
down the scales. La-la-la. Foghorns of chords.
Adeline est morte
.
Elle est morte et enterrée
. Ina’he’kuwo’ Ina’he’kuwo’.
Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten.
The air scoured the fields, then hit the telephone wires and trees. It entered and was funneled through the streets and around the sides of buildings in Argus. The singing flowed over rooftops and rammed down chimneys, trapped itself in alleys or bent the tree branches in a muted off-key roar. Sometimes it was all joy and bluster! Foolish ballads, strict anthems, German sailor’s songs and the paddling songs of voyageurs, patriotic American songs. Other times, Cree lullabies, sweat lodge summons, lost ghost dance songs, counting rhymes, and hymns to the snow. Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled. Step-and-a-Half hummed in her sleep and sank deeper into her own tune, a junker’s pile of tattered courting verse and hunter’s wisdom and the utterances of itinerants or words that sprang from a bit of grass or a scrap of cloud or a prophetic pig’s knuckle, in a world where butchers sing like angels.

THANK YOU
Diane Reverand, Andrew Wylie, Trent Duffy, Terry Karten, Lisa Record, Jen Mundt—and most of all, Ralph Erdrich, my dad.

In the oral history of the massacre at Wounded Knee it is said two people from the north, Cree or Ojibwe, died with Bigfoot’s people. I have always wondered about them.

The picture of the young butcher on the cover of this book is of my grandfather Ludwig Erdrich. He fought in the trenches on the German side in World War I. His sons served on the American side in World War II. This book is fiction except for snout salad, the bull’s pizzle, and my grandmother’s short stint as a human table in a vaudeville act.

L
OUISE
E
RDRICH
grew up in North Dakota and is a mixed blood enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is the author of eight novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning
Love Medicine
and the National Book Award finalist
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
, as well as poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood,
The Blue Jay’s Dance
. Her short fiction has won the National Magazine Award and is included in the
O. Henry
and
Best American
short-story collections. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore, The Birchbark.

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N
OVELS

Love Medicine
The Beet Queen
Tracks
The Bingo Palace
Tales of Burning Love
The Antelope Wife
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

W
ITH
M
ICHAEL
D
ORRIS

The Crown of Columbus

P
OETRY

Jacklight
Baptism of Desire

F
OR
C
HILDREN

Grandmother’s Pigeon
The Birchbark House
The Range Eternal

N
ONFICTION

The Blue Jay’s Dance

Jacket photograph of Louis Erdrich, June 8, 1912
Pforzheim, Germany, photographer unknown

Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

Nothing in this book is true of anyone alive or dead.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of The New Yorker, where portions of chapters 5 and 6 appeared in slightly different form as “The Butcher’s Wife.”

THE MASTER BUTCHERS SINGING CLUB.
Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub © Edition JANUARY 2003 ISBN: 9780061747380

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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