Read Online The Master Butcher's Singing Club by Louise Erdrich - Free Book Online Page B

washed out in several spots, the dirt churned up and dried in pits and snarls. They drove up to the beaten little farmhouse—three dim rooms and a jutting porch—where Delphine had always lived with Roy.
    Just as they arrived, Delphine’s father happened to be walking out the door. He was a pallid little crooked man with the fat nose of a sinister clown. When he saw Delphine, he removed his slouch hat, jammed it over his face, and began to weep into the crown, his whole body shaking with sobs. Every so often he’d lower the hat to show them his contorted mouth, then smack the hat on his face again. It was a masterly performance. Cyprian had never seen a man weep like that, even in the war, and he was horrified. He offered his hankie, pressed it into Roy’s hands, sat down with the old man on the porch. Delphine squared her shoulders, took a deep fortifying breath, and walked into the house.
    She ran right out again, gulping air, but she didn’t say a word. The men were locked in a blubbering conversation. She ran back in and threw the windows open. Then went back out to the car. She removeda scarf from her suitcase, soaked it with Evening in Paris, and tied it over her mouth and nose. The depth of this horrible odor led her to believe, for the first time, that her father wasn’t just a common drunk—he was truly depraved. When she walked past the men she kicked at the leg of her father’s chair.
    “Don’t do that!” said Cyprian.
    “Oh shut your mouth,” said Delphine from behind her scarf, as she bravely reentered the house.
    Bad smells made her angry, they were a personal affront. She had dealt with her father’s messes before, but this was of a different order. He had created this one on purpose, she believed, to show her how helpless he was without her. On the floor, there was a layer of must, crumbly and black, for the clothing and food, the vomit and piss, had composted along with the knuckles of pig’s trotters and frail chicken bones. Perhaps a dog had crawled in there to die, too. There were layers of husks of insects, foul clumps of rat droppings, and a bushel of rotted, sprouting potatoes some kind neighbor had probably dropped off to keep Roy Watzka from starving. Over it all there had grown arcane scrawls of cheerful and reeking mold. Weak and sick, Delphine staggered out again onto the porch.
    “I need a shovel,” she said, and she put her face into her hands and began to cry. She wept even harder than her father. Cyprian was completely astonished, for up until that moment she had behaved with a steady cynical kindness and he hadn’t known that she was even capable of feeling such intense sorrow. Nothing that Cyprian had done, even getting caught with the hardware store owner in Gorefield, Manitoba, had caused her to so much as mist over. Now the sobs were wrecking her, tossing her like a storm. They built up and died down and then built up again. Her father sat listening to the waves, almost reverent, his head bowed as though he were attentive to a sermon. Cyprian couldn’t bear such a show of brutal emotion. He sat down on the porch steps right next to Delphine and carefully, with immense tenderness, put his arms around her shoulders. Until that moment he hadn’t realized what enormous respect he had for Delphine—her breaking up like this wasvery moving to him. He’d seen this in the war sometimes, the moment when the toughest ones go was always hardest. He began to rock Delphine back and forth, crooning to her.
    “Don’t cry, little sister,” he said, and Delphine wept harder because he called her by this sweet name, and although she knew it meant his feelings for her were brotherly, not romantic, she was suddenly as happy as she was nauseated.
    “I’ll be all right,” she heard herself blurt. She couldn’t help saying it, though she wasn’t all right and wanted to keep soaking up this delicious and unfamiliar male sympathy.
    “I know you’ll be okay,” Cyprian said. “But