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

to be and still live in Argus. This mark of consideration also did a great deal to ameliorate any potential hard feelings, at first. Of course, Fidelis could not have anticipated that, when the main highway was rerouted to take the pressure of traffic off the town’s clogged main street, it would pass directly by the new storefront that he tacked on to the sturdy farmhouse. Yet it wasn’t even the jealousy over business gained, however inadvertently, that made things go bad. It was a different sort of jealousy entirely, and one more primary even than money.
    A dog’s love is something more or less complicated, according to the owner of the dog. Fidelis, for example, was faintly contemptuous of canine adoration, believing that it was based mostly on the dog’s stomach rather than the dog’s heart. Pete Kozka, on the other hand, held to the conviction that dogs, his own especially, were creatures of an unsurpassed fealty and that their loyalty was based on a personal love. Pete and his wife, Fritzie, raised purebred chow dogs with coal-black tongues and bitter temperaments. The progenitor of their line, the father of them all, was a snuff brown champion named Hottentot. He bred alternately with his first dog wife, Nancy, and his second mate, Zig, short for Ziguenerin, named for her passion for music—she slept near Fritzie’s piano, and had a musical howl any child could prompt by singing nursery rhymes in a minor key.
    After Fidelis moved, what should have been an insignificant difference of opinion became another thing entirely when Hottentot began turning up at the back loading plank of Waldvogel’s Meats, where there were sometimes scraps. In addition to their differences over such things as the motivations of dogs, Pete and Fidelis also had a fundamental difference over the disposal of the waste, the odd bits, the offal and guts that are an important part of the butchering trade. While Pete kept every tiniest bit down to the tail’s tips in a barrel that he locked in the freezer and sold to a guts dealer each month, Fidelis’s way was todistribute the wastage, and he had, therefore, a commodious following of those who lived lightly on the earth—from dogs to itinerants and the hard-hit poor of Argus. The visitors at the back of his shop, as mentioned, included Hottentot.
    The dog was a greedy, suspicious, evil-minded stud whose character amused Fidelis, as it proved his point about the heartless opportunism of dogs. Hottentot would fawn over anyone who held a bone or the hope of a tidbit, and he regarded the rest of humanity, those who didn’t feed him, with an ancient contempt. He had the tendency to snap, and even bite, and those who’d felt the splendor of his teeth detested him. He would have been poisoned, as happened often to offensive dogs in Argus, except that Pete and Fritzie were themselves so friendly. In spite of the fact that they gave no credit and charged money for their soup bones, they were well-liked people and had no enemies.
    Fidelis took satisfaction in the fact that the dog, doted on by the Kozkas, made his way across the town to visit him. One day he showed up at the Waldvogels’ killing chute, his black eyes clever in a ball of bristling rust brown fur, a sneer on his velvet muzzle. Hottentot was granted all the scraps he could gulp, and then Fidelis gave him a huge cow bone and sent him back to Pete. That would have been all right if that was as far as Fidelis had taken it, but Fidelis had a teasing streak and did not know when to quit. Day after day the dog showed up, and Fidelis amused himself by providing it ever more gruesome skeletal remains—skulls, femurs, ribs. The spinal column of a heifer, trimmed out meticulously to allow the ligaments to maintain articulation, was the pièce de résistance that overthrew the Kozkas’ patience. When Hottentot dragged it proudly through the Argus streets, pausing here and there to gnaw a bit or improve his grip on the thing, everybody in