The Master Butcher's Singing Club Read online

  Fidelis thought of his father’s working grace as he stood for hours in lines, endured inspections, stamps, paperwork, the crush of impatient humans, and his own hunger. That he also managed, with that internal discipline of quiet he had learned at the rifle’s sights. For the smoked sausages in his suitcase were not for him to eat; they were his ticket west.

  Walking toward the train station through milling throngs of people, those who had acquired a foothold in this place, Fidelis gave in to an extravagant loneliness. Those who passed him saw an erect and powerfully carved man, high-cheekboned, fair, with a straight and jutting nose and a mouth as perfectly shaped, though who around him knew, as the voice that could pour from it. That he was afflicted by the riptide of a recent and unexpected love was, of course, not apparent to those who noticed him in the crowd. He tapped his heart, which from time to time beat too anxiously behind the lapels of his suitcoat. The locket that Eva had given to Johannes, and which Fidelis had secretly kept, was lodged there, for Fidelis was both thrilled and terrified to find that, although he’d married Eva on the strength of a promise to his dying friend, he’d fallen through a trapdoor into blackness—a midnight of love that had grown like a bower of inky twigs over the baby’s defenseless beauty, over Eva’s prickly loveliness, her trim fortitude, her bullheaded, forthright, stubborn grace.

  The train station’s massive brass-trimmed doors swallowed Fidelis with all the others. Easily, the current of people pulled him to the windows of the ticket counter. He waited again in line until he stood before a sharp-mouthed girl whose jaws moved in a rhythm peculiar to people in this city. Fidelis was unfamiliar with chewing gum and the motion of so many jaws made him uneasy. Her eyes brightened with an automatic greed, though, and the chewing stopped when he came before her.

  “I wish to Seattle,” he said, gathering the words in his mouth, “to go.”

  She told him the price of the ticket. He did not understand the click of numbers on her tongue, and mimed writing down her answer. She did so, and then, with a glance to one side, added her name and the words Come see me if you’re ever in town. Her lacquer-nailed fingertips presented the slip of paper to him. She made him tug just a little to get it. He thanked her, in German, and she replied with a manufactured tragic pout that he was too weary to notice. The amount was legible, anyway. He understood it, knew how much money he would have to add to the meager amount he still possessed. He put the paper in his pocket and then found a pillar against which to stand.

  He took up this position, the back brim of his father’s hat just touching the grooved stone behind, and then he lifted the suitcase in his arms, unlatched the lid, and lowered it enough so that he could see just over the opened top. For the remaining hours of the day and then on into the dusk, during which the smoky radiance through the high windows intensified and then diminished to a feeble gray, he stood. Motionless, he seemed not so much rooted as suspended, as though he’d been lowered by strings that still held him poised. That was perhaps the visual effect of his hunger. For it crawled in him to lighten him, opened him from the inside. His gut yawned. Yet he remained impassive and somehow buoyant in the dark. He had rehearsed on the boat across the price he would ask for the sausages, and at once he sold seven, not perhaps because they were so irresistible but because, even in that city of every possible sight the image of the man holding open in his tireless arms the sausage-filled suitcase, which looked heavy by the way, arrested quite a few. From time to time, a shaft of the fading light plucked his calm and idealized features from the gloom. So he sold, just as he’d known he would, out of his depth of silence as much as the quality of what he carried, though he believed most certainly, and with a firm drama, that his father’s were, no argument, the best sausages upon the earth.

  Maybe they were. The next morning some who bought one the day before came back for two. And more people that same afternoon. Other than sleeping on a platform bench with the closed suitcase in his lap, visiting the washroom, or drinking the surprisingly cold, sweet city water, Fidelis had remained at his post. Those who noticed, and there were a few among the swirling crowd, wondered at his endurance. How did his arms support that open suitcase hour after hour? The suitcase, which also contained his treasured knives, was heavier than it looked, yet he held it lightly. As the day went on, his stillness seemed an unquestionable form of self-torture. But it wasn’t, for Fidelis, the way it seemed to an observer. Standing there was not so difficult. It was almost a relief, after the constant motion of the sea. And the strength required to hold the suitcase in one position all that time was nothing to him, even though he was weakened by not eating.

  Hunger had been with him forever, it seemed, and hunger was with him now. He’d learned its routine and knew, on the second day, not having eaten since the scrap of a last meal on the boat, that he must have food. No matter how reluctant he was to spend his money, the time had come. Fidelis shut the suitcase, from which sausages had noticeably disappeared, and he walked straight across the station, the familiar, famished buzz in his ears, to a small diner set into the side of a wall. There, at a stool, the suitcase clasped between his feet, he chose three bowls of the cheapest stew—tough beef, potatoes, carrots, gravy—and ate with the intent patience he’d developed when relieving a period of starvation. The waitress brought him extra bread, and when he indicated that he couldn’t pay for it and she insisted that he keep the bread, he thanked her with a gulp of surprise. The goodwill of most of the people here amazed him, but then, he reminded himself, they were neither starving in the main nor recently and thoroughly defeated and detested outside their diminished borders. So they could afford, he decided, the ordinary kindnesses, the gift of bread.

  He paid, recalculating the slight diminishment toward his goal, and he went to the public washroom for his morning shave. He unwrapped a scrap of stolen soap that had grown almost transparent, and had a surreptitious wash using one of his two pocket handkerchiefs. If he’d had the chance, he would have rinsed out his other pair of undershorts, tucked into the back pocket of his pants, but there were other men in the room and he was embarrassed. From a breast pocket he removed a carved ivory toothbrush, the boar’s bristles softened and mashed with use. He’d had this with him all through the war. And the razor, too, thinned with years of stropping, the tiny comb, and the clever silver ear cleaner. All fit neatly back upon his person when he was finished. He lifted his suitcase and went back to his post.

  By the time dusk began to throb in the windows again, he’d made more than half of what he needed. Now, as he counted his money, an idea occurred to him. Why not board the train with what he had, ride as far as he could get, and sell the sausages to the other passengers captured in the train cars? He went back to the ticket booth, encountered this time an impatient and elderly gentleman, and bought a ticket that would take him somewhere into the beginning of the Middle West. Then he went back to his post, sold one more sausage, closed his suitcase, and walked to the numbered platform with his ticket in his inside breast pocket. Among the boarding passengers wallowing in long good-byes or traveling with others, he entered the coach, settled himself, and waited patiently until the train began to rock, away from the hateful ocean, away from New York.

  THE SAUSAGES TOOK HIM through Minneapolis and rolling prairie country into the sudden sweep of plains, vast sky, into North Dakota, where he sold the last link. He left the train and walked along the edge of a small town railroad platform. The town was a huddle of cheerful squat buildings, some framed with false half-story fronts on top of awnings and display windows, one or two of limestone and at least three of sturdy brick. Against the appalling flatness, the whole place looked defenseless and foolish, he thought, completely open to attack and, with its back against a river, nowhere to flee. It looked to him like a temporary place, almost a camp, that one great storm or war could level. He read the sign Argus aloud and memorized the sound. He turned in a circle to get his bearings, brushed off his father’s suit, assessed the fact that he’
d arrived with thirty-five cents and a suitcase, now empty of sausages, that contained six knives, a sharpening steel, and graduated whetstones. There was horizon to the west and horizon to the south. There were streets of half-grown trees and solid-looking houses to the north. A new limestone bank building and a block of ornately bricked stores on the principal street stretched down to the east. The wind boomed around Fidelis with a vast indifference he found both unbearable and comforting.

  He didn’t know that he would never leave. Fidelis simply thought that he would have to stay here, and work here, using the tools of his trade, until he made enough money to travel on to the destination he’d picked out for the severity of its bread. Now he wondered where the bread was made in this town, where the beer might come from, where the milk and the butter were kept cold, where the sausages were stuffed and the pork chops sliced and cleaved and the meat killed. Nothing gave him a clue. All directions looked the same. So he adjusted his father’s hat, shrugged down his pants cuffs, picked up the suitcase.

  TWO

  The Balancing Expert

  IN A SMALL TOWN on the headwaters of the Mississippi River and in a room rented solely for the purpose of making love, a man and woman, unclothed and in bed, paused in apprehension. For several months before this hour, they had been comfortably well acquainted, even friends. They had met doing town theater in Argus, North Dakota. Inevitably, they both became curious whether there was more and they set off together. Could they make a living with a traveling act? Were they in love? The man reached out and the woman, Delphine Watzka, raised her penciled eyebrows as though to judge. His hand swerved. “You have,” he said, “very strong stomach muscles.” He swept her torso lightly with his knuckles, then the tips of his fingers. With a thump, Delphine turned over onto her back, threw the covers off, and pounded herself on the stomach. “My arms are strong, my legs are strong. My stomach’s tough. Why not? I am not ashamed I grew up on a goddamn farm. I’m strong all over. Not that I know what to do with it …”

  “I have an idea,” said the man.

  She thought for a moment that the man, whose name was Cyprian Lazarre, and who was of a tremendous tensile strength, would put his idea into immediate action. She hoped that his purpose would overcome lack of nerve. That did not exactly happen. Enthusiasm for the plan in his brain gripped him, but instead of leaping passionately upon Delphine, he knelt, upright, on the sagging mattress and regarded her thoughtfully. Welts of soldered skin fanned across his shoulders. He was thirty-two years old, and his body was flint hard, perfectly muscled because of his gymnastic practice. She thought that he looked just like one of those statues dug out of the wrecked ancient city of Troy, even to the damage of war and time.

  Along with a cousin and a buddy, Cyprian had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, survived his training and perhaps the most dangerous part of the war, exposure to Spanish flu, to find himself plunging ahead in the fourth wave at Belleau Wood, where he was burned in the wheat. During that last year of the Great War, chlorine gas blinded him, the split barrel of a machine gun nearly took his hand off, dysentery unmanned him, his sense of humor failed, and he very much regretted his zeal. He came home before it even occurred to him that, as an Ojibwe, he was not yet a U.S. citizen. During his slow recuperation, he couldn’t vote.

  With a slight bounce, he went from his knees to standing and then hopped off the bed. There was a chair in the tiny room. Eyes flashing with performance fire, he gripped the bowed back, twisted the balls of his feet for purchase on the wooden boards, and then kicked up into a handstand. The chair wobbled just a bit, then steadied. “Bravo!” he breathed to himself. With his back to her, head down, sculptured buttocks and pointed toes, he was an ideal picture of manliness. Delphine was glad she couldn’t see around to the front of him. She was also hoping that no one outside in the street opposite this rooming house happened to glance up into the curtainless second-floor window, when she heard a scream from outside. Cyprian ignored it.

  “This will be the finale,” he said, “I’ll be ten feet in the air, and you’ll be holding me up here with your stomach muscles!”

  Another scream outside was followed by a shudder of voices in the street below.

  “Oh, will I?”

  Delphine’s voice was muffled by the neck of her blouse. One of Delphine’s talents was to dress very quickly. She had learned it changing costumes in the repertory theater, where they’d all played two or three roles at once. She was dressed, even to her stockings and shoes, and the covers were pulled up on the bed before Cyprian even grasped what was happening in the street below. He was, in fact, still talking and planning as he practiced the handstand, when she slipped out the door and hurried down the stairs. She stopped at the very bottom, cooled her thoughts. With a composed air she stepped out the door and went straight up to the landlady, who was already purple.

  “Mrs. Watzka!”

  “I know,” Delphine sighed, her face a mask of resigned calm. “Back in the war, you know, he was gassed.” She tapped her temple as the landlady’s mouth made an O. Delphine then walked straight into the cluster of people on the street. “Please! Please! Don’t you have any respect for a man who fought the Hun?” She dispersed people with sharp waves and claps, the way she used to scare her chickens. The people staring upward suddenly were staring downward, pretending to examine their purchases. One of the ladies, cheeks delicately wrinkled, her eyes very round and her mouth a little beak of flesh, bent close to Delphine’s ear. “You had really best persuade him to rest, dear! He is in a state of male indiscretion!”

  That Delphine did not turn to look up at the window proved her both quick thinking and self-disciplined, although she did decide to hurry back into the room. “Oh dear,” she said in the tone of a resigned wife, “and to think, standing on his hands is the only way he can maintain his readiness. And we’ve managed to have two darling children!”

  Turning away she spoke to the crowd sweetly, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred at all, as though she hadn’t just thrown them into a state of startled conjecture. “Don’t forget, the show is at five o’clock this evening! Second stage at the fairgrounds!”

  From the quality of the silence behind her, she knew it would be packed.

  THAT NIGHT, Cyprian spun plates on the top of poles balanced two on each arm, one on each shoulder, one on his forehead, and one between his teeth. He set up a long line of poles and plates that he twirled as he ran back and forth, while Delphine took bets from the crowd on how long he could keep the plates going. That was where they made most of their money. He stacked things on his head, whatever the audience came up with—crates of chickens, more dishes. He declined the washing machine. While the stack mounted up, he jigged. He rode a bicycle over wires strung across the fairgrounds. For the finale, as the night was windless, he climbed the flagpole and balanced, did a handstand gripping the ball on top. The sight of him—tiny, perfect, a human pin against the wild black Minnesota sky—made Delphine start with a thrill of sympathy. At that moment, she forgave him for his lack of sexual heat, and decided that his desperate need for her was enough.

  A STOCKY POLISH girl from off a scrap of farm is not supposed to attract men so easily, but Delphine was compelling. Her mind was very quick—too quick, maybe. Things came out of her mouth that often surprised her, but then, she’d had to deal with a lot of unpredictable drunks in her life and this had sharpened her reflexes. She had small, even, very white teeth, a clever dimple on one side of her mouth. Extremely light brown eyes, honey gold in direct sunlight, narrow and bold in a tan face. Her nose was strong, straight, but her ears were rakishly lopsided. She often wore her hair in what she imagined was the style of a Spanish contessa—one spit curl midforehead, two before either off-center ear, the rest in an elaborate bun. If she stared sharply into a man’s eyes, he was immediately filled with unrest, looked away, could not help looking back. Just because she was magnetic, though, it did not make life easy.

  At the age of
three or four months, she had lost her mother. Her extreme affection for her dipsomaniacal father was unappreciated, even misplaced, and yet she was helpless before the onslaught of his self-pity. They would have lost even their tiny wedge of land and homestead many years ago, but for the fact that the farmer to whom her father leased his land refused to buy it outright and sewed that up in a contract. Therefore, they had a tiny income month to month, which went to hooch unless she swiped it. To escape a miserable home life, Delphine had sewed bright outfits, practiced the fabulous speeches of tragic heroines, and thrown herself into local dramatic productions. She’d met Cyprian when he was honing his act with the congenial town troupe. She left North Dakota with him, headed back into the hills and trees of Minnesota, where the towns were closer together and less dependent on the brutally strapped farmers. He’d said that there would be excitement, and that commenced with the all-revealing handstand before the window. He also said there would be money, which she hadn’t seen much of yet. Delphine had joined the show because she hoped she’d become infatuated with Cyprian, who was the only other person in the show and was, although this became quite incidental, handsome.

  Cyprian called himself a balancing expert. Delphine soon found that balancing was really the only thing he could do. Literally, the only thing he could do—he couldn’t wash his own socks, hold a regular job, sew a seam back together, roll a cigarette, sing, or even drink. He couldn’t sit still long enough to read an entire newspaper article. He couldn’t hold much of a conversation, tell a story beyond the lines of a joke. He seemed too lazy even to pick a fight. He couldn’t play long card games like cribbage or pinochle. Even if they ever stayed in one place long enough, he probably couldn’t grow a plant! She did begin to love him, though, for three reasons: first, he claimed he was crazy about her, secondly, although they had still not made love with decisive lust, he was very sweet and affectionate, and lastly, his feelings were easily hurt. Delphine could never bear to hurt a man’s feelings because she was so attached to her own father. In spite of his destructive idiocy when in his cups, she harbored an undying fondness for Roy Watzka that became, unfortunately, a kind of paradigm.