The Master Butcher's Singing Club by Louise Erdrich

all powerful. All right, maybe. But if so, then clearly not all good, since He let her mother die. All merciful? Lie. Just? Lie. All seeing? Had He really the time to watch what her hands did beneath the covers at night? Did God really invade her brain and weep at her impure thoughts? And if so, why had He concentrated on such trivia rather than curing her mother of her illness? What sort of choice was that? Delphine counted and even wrote the lies down in the margins of her textbooks and library books. Lies! More lies! She wrote so fiercely that for the next five years the nuns would admonish their students both to disregard and tobring to their attention any books bearing handwritten annotations.
    Her father was pleased enough. As soon as he learned she’d quit school, he quit life and proceeded to pursue his own serious drinking, while Delphine went to work. Well, maybe she shouldn’t have been so smart, she admitted. Maybe better to endure the tyranny of lies than the series of jobs she had then, briefly, held. She had wrapped butter in the Ogg Dairy. She had worked cracking eggs, gasping at the sulfur whiplash of the rotten ones. For a while she had sorted cookies into metal troughs, survived on the crumbs. Ran a buttonholer in a dress shop. She ironed. Blistered her hands in bleach laundering sheets. All these jobs were tedious and low-paying. Besides, since she lived at home, her father tried to appropriate half her money.
    The first time she split her pay cash, he quietly used it to drink somewhere else. The next time, he brought his buddies home. She arrived home—lame, dusty, exhausted, from sorting bricks at the brickworks—to find them drinking a case of skin tonic. Although she tried her best to ignore them, they made a ruckus, ate every morsel, even the last bit of the ham, and in a half stupor blundered into her bedroom, which was her only haven. She took a broom to them, cracking the handle against their legs. When they guffawed and refused to leave, a storm of white dots fell across her vision. At long last, she decided to clear them out. She walked out to the woodpile, yanked the ax from its block, strode back into the kitchen.
    Hey, Roy’s baby . . . , one of them mocked her.
    She lifted the ax high overhead and brought it down, split the just dealt ace of diamonds, then tugged the ax from the wood and lifted it again. Her father yelped. She shook the ax and screeched back at him, which caused him to jump backward in boozy dismay, scattering the poker deck, and to declare that she had gone haywire. Mightily affected, he raced out the door, gasping for breath, flanked by his companions. Somewhere in the night he fell through thin ice and from his dousing got pneumonia, almost died, so that Delphine had to quit the brickworks and nurse him. The ax was the first time she had turned on him,and he couldn’t get over it. All of his bluster had collapsed at the sight of her, striding through the door in her white rag of a nightgown, hollering bloody murder , as he put it, weak and feverish. That had been the gist of Delphine’s life, that and more of the same. Still, she could not burn the house. It was the house where she’d grown up and where, according to at least one version of Roy’s story, her mother had given birth to her. He said it happened right in the kitchen, by the stove, where it was warm.
    “I suppose we should clean out the cellar,” she sighed.
    “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” said Cyprian, but his voice was cheerful. He stubbed out his cigarette, slapped his pants, and laughed at the puffs of dust that swallowed his hands. Delphine wanted to tell him that she admired his capacity for brute labor. It was a thing people in the town valued, and she herself was proud of her own endurance. If she said as much, though, would she be admitting she’d once thought of him as a useless lug who couldn’t so much as grow a plant? Maybe, she revised in her mind as they walked toward