The Master Butcher's Singing Club Read Online Free PDF

in the corner, packed in with three other couples, and were immediately served hard liquor. Up until then, Delphine had never witnessed Cyprian drinking, though at times she detected a whiff on his breath. Presented with a shot glass and a beer, hetried to slug the first back, and choked. Delphine said nothing, just nursed her beer and quietly tipped the shot onto the floor. She was almost ashamed of her fierce contempt for alcohol.
    After the first round, two of the other couples got up and danced. That left Delphine and Cyprian, and another two. The men were involved in some deep topic, though, and since Delphine and the other girl were at their men’s left elbows they could not really make an impact on the conversation or start talking to each other. Delphine pretended to watch the other dancers for a while. Bored, she went to visit the powder room, which was anything but a place to powder your nose, then she stepped outside to marvel at the sunset. The sky was roiling, the edges of the clouds were a startling green, and the light behind them an appalling threatful yellow. A man who passed by in the road said that it looked like a goddamn storm.
    “What’s it to you?” said Delphine, smiling just because she always smiled at a man, and because she was happy to see a sky that reminded her of home.
    “I’m a farmer, that’s what.”
    “Well you should come and see our show,” said Delphine. “You should bring your whole family.”
    “Does anybody take their clothes off in it?”
    “Sure!” said Delphine. “We all do!”
    “Oh mama,” said the man.
    When Delphine stepped back into the saloon, the other girl was smoking grumpily in the booth and the men were gone.
    “Where are they?” said Delphine.
    “How the hell should I know?” said the girl. Her lips moved nervously, drinking and smoking, like two limp ropes. Painted with a glossy purple red, those lips gave Delphine a shiver up her back. The girl was ugly, Delphine decided, and that made her mean. Plus, she’d ordered two more drinks and Delphine thought at first she’d ordered one for her. But the girl drank both, one after the other, right in front of her.
    “What’s wrong with you?” Delphine asked.
    “How the hell should I know?” said the girl.
    Delphine left the saloon and walked back out into the road, where the sky was changing as fast as Delphine herself used to when she was an actress. Not for the first time since she’d left her father, she felt lonely and out of sorts. Perhaps all that space was making her homesick. Maybe it was the beer, but the absence of Cyprian was certainly part of it as well. He was very attentive to her moods, and when she felt blue, she told him. He usually came up with some way to cheer her. For instance, the last time she’d entered one of these slumps he’d picked her pocket, for she always kept some money in an easily unbuttoned side vent of her jacket, and he’d bought her a spray of red hothouse roses. That was a thing she’d never had before, roses. She had dried them and kept the petals in a handkerchief just to remember. Then there was another time he’d bought her a little jar of peanut butter to eat with a spoon. That was a treat. He’d bought her an ice cream on a stick, and he’d also done little things for her that did not require money. He’d picked up pretty stones by the lake, and once a tiny black arrowhead that he said an old-time Ojibwe probably used to shoot a bird. She had tied it on a tiny cord, and still wore it around her neck. Now, Delphine decided that he probably had gone somewhere to buy her a gift. It cheered her to find two dollars missing from the stash.
    They were staying in a tent this time. She went back to the camp cot, rolled herself in her blanket, and woke before morning because the storm had indeed come and blown through the tent’s unwaxed canvas walls and gotten her soaking wet. Luckily, the stuff in the middle was hardly damp, and she was able to string up