The Master Butcher's Singing Club

SIXTEEN. Step-and-a-Half

WHEN STEP-AND-A-HALF was a very old woman she at last became beautiful, in the way a wind-shaped rock or the whitened bones of deer are beautiful. The starkness of age revealed the underlying symmetry of the planes of her face, the antique but sturdy ivory of her teeth, her graceful hands and straight legs and arms. Even her hair turned to a whiteness of unusual purity and formed two majestic waves that vaulted off her smooth forehead. Age, the ownership of her junk store, and the insomnia that still plagued Step-and-a-Half forced her often into a state of reflection that she had been able to avoid when in motion. Before she came to Argus, she had wandered the long North Dakota roads. She had slept in the ditches and the fringes of trees along the rivers, in the occasional barn or porch. She’d walked. Nobody knew how far she walked — she didn’t know herself. Her long stride ate up twenty, thirty miles a day, and the distances were easy, the space a soothing mesmerization. Once she’d arrived at a place she often couldn’t remember getting there. Arrival was its own enigma — how did she know she’d arrived when she had nowhere to go? Yet Argus had long ago become an arrival. And because she began to arrive there more and more often, and then to stay in that town, she began to collect its truth.

Now, when she looked at the streets around her and all the people, she saw them from a junker’s point of view. She saw them from the alleys where they burned their garbage and from the back porches of their houses, where they left rags — not the front steps, kept so tidy. She knew them not from what they wore or the façade they showed to the world, but from what they tossed out, discarded, thought worthless. She knew them by their scraps, and their scraps told their stories.

The bottles in Gus Newhall’s trash bin told the common secret of his income back in the bootleg days. The Bouchards had a habit of throwing plates when they fought, and were a source of shards that often could be fitted back together with more success, as it happened, than their marriage, which fell apart. Pouty Mannheim threw out both socks when one toe frayed — he never darned them, being a bachelor, and he didn’t keep the widowed sock, for which he earned her respect. Yet his proud and profligate sock habit also told her that he would one day fail in business. As for his mother, candy wrappers told her secret vice. Though she remained slim enough, her teeth dropped out. Step-and-a-Half was not surprised. She found awful things — pet carcasses, ripped-up love letters, bedding soaked with death, blood, illness, waste. She found good things — books and sheet music, which she kept though she did not read, toys that children had accidentally lost, which she cleaned and set on windowsills. She found a prosthetic wooden hand and an eyeball made of glass. A tin filled with weird blue seeds, all of which she planted in a coffee can of dirt, one of which sprouted a fat white flower shaped like a comical soldier’s helmet and smelling of sex and cinnamon. Razors to sharpen, tires that could be mended, engine parts as well as the stacks of clothing the resale of which as rags bought the flour that made her bread, and sometimes grease to butter it. She’d found a gold pocket watch, a radio, a music box that played a few bars of an elusive tune that Eva once told her was composed by Mozart. She’d found a perfectly good pot roast, a box of foil-wrapped chocolates, six bars of brand-new fragrant pink soap. She’d found peppermints and crackers and fancy stuffed pillows that suffered only from a bit of mildew. She found these things in trash heaps and burning barrels and along the river, down the sides of ditches, in the street and here and there. There was no question, however, that her most spectacular find was fished from the hole of Mrs. Shimek’s outhouse.

It was a find that had defined her life, a discovery that had circumscribed her wanderings, given shape to her thoughts, and provided her with an emotion that she never quite recognized but upon which she acted, again and again. Although it had happened more than forty years ago, the drama of it was still with her, and the consequences, which she’d seen played out before her as on a mystery stage.

THAT NIGHT, long ago, was still and deeply cold. The moon was a brilliant and distant polished disk. That October, there had been an early bitterness in the air, but deadly temperatures had never bothered Step-and-a-Half. The walking solved that. She generated her own warmth and knew how to wrap her limbs to conserve heat and repel the wind. She had stayed in Argus long enough then to know its routine. After all the taverns closed, after the doors in the town had banged shut, the fires in the stoves were damped, the curtains drawn, the dogs silenced, she walked. In time, she passed behind the Shimeks’, a place she rarely stopped, as it was merely the source of boiled-out bones and hairballs and stained newspapers. She would have passed by as usual on that night, had she not heard from the shut and weathered outhouse, a single groan. The sound arrested her. It was somehow familiar. She waited. The sound made her terribly uneasy, yet she could not leave. Four more times it sounded, and with an increased and animal intensity that made her certain that the person needed help. She had just made up her mind to violate the shack’s privacy when Mrs. Shimek, at the time a large young bride of a vacant innocence, a harmless bovine type of woman, red-cheeked and incurious, burst from the outhouse door and staggered away like a drunk farmer.

In the shadows of scrub box elders, Step-and-a-Half watched the woman pass into her darkened house, and Step-and-a-Half would have moved on herself, relieved, had she not heard from within the outhouse one more sound — a single, scratchy, outraged squawl. Enough moonlight fell through the door when she opened it for her to see that the seat and floor of the outhouse were slippery with a darkness of blood. That Mrs. Shimek’s husband was a lazy man, and hadn’t dug a deep new winter’s outhouse hole and moved the outhouse according to the autumn custom, was on that night a fortunate thing. For Step-and-a-Half’s arm was just long enough so that by reaching down and straining against the wood of the toilet hole, groping through the unfrozen filth, she was able to grasp the heel of the infant. The baby had dragged its own afterbirth up with it by the umbilical cord, and Step-and-a-Half severed the cord with nothing other than her own sharp teeth. With a finger, she cleaned out the baby’s mouth. She puffed a little air into its face, then opened her coat and pulled up the knitted vest underneath and unbuttoned the three dresses she wore one over the other. She pressed the convulsed thing hard against her flesh and inside her clothing, then she covered it with the dresses and the knitted vest and held it tightly. She had heard its one cry before it sank the incremental inch that covered up its mouth. And it was always, she thought, watching Delphine grow up, exactly the margin by which the girl escaped one dirty fate after the next.

Those thoughts came later, though, and after Step-and-a-Half had time to regret and wonder at the choice of where she left the child. She took the baby with her, of course, to the place she considered her den the way a roaming wolf will put itself up temporarily. For a few weeks only, she’d come to the barn and then the door itself of a bachelor farmer on the edge of Argus. Roy Watzka was shorter than she was by nearly half a foot, but he had fallen in love with Step-and-a-Half anyway. He declared that he would marry her. He made all sorts of plans. He’d buy her a milk cow and a golden ring. A wagon would be hers, and a strong gray horse to draw it. A chicken coop, which he would build, with fine piles of straw for the chicks and hens. He would learn to play the hand organ, to amuse her on winter nights. But she would have to stop wandering, he said. She would have to settle down with him.

Those settling qualities, which he claimed at the time, had fooled her. She had known she would take the baby back there right from the first. As she started to walk, she felt it move, clenched silently at first, and then, dragging somehow a bit of air into its miniature lungs, it gave a shorter, deeper, ragged cry so sad that it seemed to know, as Step-and-a-Half herself knew, it was now doomed to life.

By the time Step-and-a-Half came to the house — boards and tarpaper, but of a solid and thorough construction — the baby was most definitely alive and rooting desperately for a nipple. Roy had a goat, whose mild milk she thought would do. She banged on the door and when he let her in she told him to stoke up the fire and go milk the goat. She’d wakened him, of course, and he stood mystified in his baggy cream-white long johns as she unbuttoned her coat and lifted the vest and rummaged in her three bodices. Her finds interested and sometimes embarrassed him. This one frightened him.

“Holy Jesus!” he cried out, flapping his hands in the air and then wringing them together, “you’ve got a baby there, Minnie.”

Both the baby and the woman who held it eyed him fiercely. The baby was covered with patches of dried and reeking stuff, and it began to tremble and bleat in the cold of the room. The woman Roy had nicknamed Minnie, in a romantic fit, quickly returned the baby to her chest and covered it.

“Quick, it’s in tough shape.”

He threw two logs in the barrel of the stove and jumped into his overalls, shot out the door with the small pail. Surprised the goat, who sleepily butted him at first and then gave up and tiredly let him milk her. When he came back into the house he saw that Minnie was boiling pots of water. In one, she was sterilizing a rag. The other water she was warming to wash the baby. After it was fed with the rag twisted into a teat and dipped in the milk over and over, a tedious process, Minnie wiped the tiny girl clean, pinched a clothespin onto the stub of her navel cord, and swaddled her tightly in a ripped flannel pillowcase.

“Let me hold her,” said Roy. Although he felt a little stupid at first, trying to arrange himself into the proper angles to support the baby against him, it all worked out. He even had a rocking chair, although its joints needed to be reset with glue. As he sat there going back and forth, the rocker creaking high and the floorboards beneath creaking in a lower register, he watched Minnie in the kerosene lamp light as she shed her knitted vest and peeled off two layers of her dresses, and then began to wash within the folds of the dress closest to her skin.

She made a businesslike job of it, soaping and scrubbing and then rinsing. She washed her face, the sides and back of her neck, then she twisted up the rag and washed her ears. She washed the slope of her throat and underneath the collar of the dress. Then she wrung the rag out and resoaped it and pulled the dress off her shoulders a bit, turned to unbutton it and washed each of her breasts, which he’d never seen yet, and never would see, as it turned out. She buttoned up and then, still turned away from him, set one leg on a chair and peeled off her sock. She washed up the inside of that leg and then washed between, lifted the other leg, pulled off its sock and washed along that leg as well. She added the last of the hot water to the basin on the floor and sat in the chair across from him, set her feet inside to soak. She sat there steadily, watching him rock the baby. Her eyes were intent and slanted, unblinking, steady as a hawk’s. He wondered what she was thinking, but he didn’t dare to ask because he was afraid that she was thinking that she had to walk.

And it was true. He didn’t understand — none of them did. She looked on most other people as upon a species different from herself. For certain, she knew, they couldn’t experience what she did inside and live one day, the next and the next, without needing to outwalk their thoughts. If she stopped for very long she might see the trust of the baby, eyes shut, nursing faithfully at the breast of its killed mother. She might see the little boy throw his arms to his face, a toddler who thought the gesture would make him invisible. The gunfire cut him in half. Later on she’d heard that there was one baby who had lived three days, lived through a blizzard, and been rescued although frozen in a sheet of its mother’s blood. It wore a tiny cap beaded with a bright American flag. Who wouldn’t try, for a whole life, to walk off such memories? For that was what it came to and why she did it — walking was the only way to outdistance all that she remembered and did not remember, and the space into which she walked was comfortingly empty of human cruelty. An unfeeling sky, brutal wind, cold, and the indifferent broil of the sun she could accept. The rush of wind in her ears drowned out the sounds of that fizzling and sifting Lakota language, and the other language, her first language, which she spoke with her father. Into her old age she still saw his surprising smile, as they looked into each other’s eyes, where they lay on that snow-hard ground, beneath a roof of bullets. She heard his words, “Go home, gewehn, n’dawnis. Tell them it is over.” The roar of clouds drowned out his silence after that as well as the silence of unspirited bodies sprawling in the slippery gullies, where the wind boomed for days until its voice, too, was gradually choked with snow.

Who wouldn’t walk? Who could ever stay in one place?

Ever since, she had paced the earth. Roy couldn’t expect her not to walk. She knew that eventually she’d leave him with the baby, but she didn’t know that she’d feel compelled to return, again and again, that she’d give him her money to keep the child secure and that, at times, she’d attempt to tend the growing girl in small and clumsy ways. She didn’t yet know that Roy had taken her own picture. She hardly knew what a photograph was. Nor did she understand that she was beautiful, at that time, as she would be again when old and remembering.

NOW, IN THE LITTLE ROOM behind her small shop on an Argus side street, she could seldom muster more than the strength to travel in and out onto the ground before the windows. Only occasionally did she walk the roads, and then the miles that melted away her flesh still temporarily soothed her old torment and put off her reflections. More and more, she rested. Every afternoon she crept upstairs to nap in a bed with blankets quilted out of her best finds of fabrics — thick and figured velvets, heavy satins and fragile silk. Before she fell asleep underneath that crazy quilt of all her pickings and wanderings, scenes assembled. Her brain bothered her back into startling and vivid moments that she’d already lived through and thought she’d finished with in memory.

Again she passed the butcher, Fidelis, whose suitcase she’d imagined entirely empty from the way he tossed it hand to hand as he walked into town, way back then, looking for work. She found out later it held his fancy knives. The suitcase would be filled again, though not with knives or sausages either. The suitcase would go back to Germany. She saw the tender arrangement of boys belonging to Eva, and lived again the surprise and the sorrow of her friend’s death. She saw the boy unsealed from the hill of dirt. The boy who climbed into the clouds, then fell in love with Delphine’s little sister. She saw Roy, and was glad he’d taken those pictures of her to the grave with him, so that there would be nothing left of her to walk upon this earth. She remembered how he’d claimed, early on, that he drank to show her that he couldn’t live without her. To which she answered, “That’s a load of bull crap,” and stepped out the door.

Step-and-a-Half remembered Delphine playing in the dirt that day, swirling it into piles as she passed her, and then the girl, too small to recall this, toddling after her and calling out, just that once, Mama? And Step-and-a-Half remembered breaking her stride at that and kneeling down so that she could look directly into the child’s face, the eyes too beautiful to meet, the cheeks fresh and open, blazing with purity. Step-and-a-Half’s heart squeezed in fear, and then she heard herself saying to the child, “Your mother is dead.” The little face, only beginning to know what dead was, had frozen shut suddenly, then recovered and looked straight at Step-and-a-Half with kindred, bold, shrewd, survivor’s eyes. Delphine then had reached out a swift small fist and rapped Step-and-a-Half on the forehead with her knuckles, as hard as she could. Step-and-a-Half rubbed her head and said, “Good. The tough ones live.”

“My mother will come back,” Delphine stated, as though dead were a place just like heaven or road and she had convinced herself that her mother would return.

Well, dead is a place right around the corner, but she didn’t have to convince herself of anything, thought Step-and-a-Half. Delphine’s mother had never left. She persisted right down the road from Delphine even now. She would live forever, messy as a haystack, her shack outlined against the huge and lowering clouds. But Delphine would live forever, too. Step-and-a-Half took pleasure from the picture of Delphine and her sister in the plant shop they had renovated. Two curly-headed old women surrounded by hothouse trees, refrigerated flowers, and bedding plants grown in the rich stockyard dirt. Sleep tugged Step-and-a-Half underneath the quilted scraps of Argus days and Argus years. She gave up and entered the wide pull of dreams. She could see one square of sky from her window. Step-and-a-Half slowly released her weight into the mattress and let herself be carried into that blueness. The blanket was comforting and familiar against her face. One of the pieces sewed into the quilt was a piece of ragged shirt the good Sioux lady had given her to wear beneath her coat, so long ago.

Step-and-a-Half had kept a scrap of the ghost shirt ever since, a bit of yellowed muslin and tattered fringe. She touched its faded painting of a crow, eyes bright, beak open, and pressed her cheek to the horned white moon. Some said the ghost dancers believed that those shirts would protect them against bullets, but Step-and-a-Half knew the dancers were neither stupid nor deluded. They just knew something that is, from time to time, forgotten except by the wind. How close the dead are. One song away from the living. She had heard the soldiers bawl their drinking songs the night before the great guns sounded. Sometimes rough, sometimes smooth as whiskey, the harmonies of male voices had seemed mellow and oval in the freezing December air. “Aura Lee.” “Auld Lang Syne.” “Calpurnia, the Faithful.” From across the tent, she had heard the mournful sweetness of the lullaby that the mother crooned into her baby’s soft swirl of black hair. No, the dancers understood just what was happening. They were told. The cloth of the shirt allowed the wearer to visit the dead and to draw comfort from their singing.

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.