The Master Butchers Singing Club

“Fidelis walked home from the great war in twelve days and slept thirty-eight hours once he crawled into his childhood bed.”

So begins The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich, my absolute favourite novel with my absolute favourite first line. In my copy, I’ve stuck an exuberant note to the first page: “SO MUCH HAPPENS in the first two pages, but really he’s just lying in bed and getting ready.” As soon as I was asked to write about a book that I revisit, I knew this one was the only option. I love this book with every single piece of my heart. I used to buy any second-hand copies that I saw, so I could give them to people, the way evangelists carry Psalms and New Testaments, ready to share the good news. I always remember how books made me feel, but I usually forget the details of reading a book for the first time. My first Erdrich book, Love Medicine, is one rare exception: I was waiting in the airport as my partner drove across Iowa in a snowstorm to pick me up because flights into Des Moines were cheaper than Cedar Rapids. But I don’t remember where or when I read The Master Butchers Singing Club, probably because I fell into it so completely that all else disappeared. I know it was four or five years ago and that I’ve reread it every year since, though the season hasn’t been consistent. That being said, I think I’ll make it my October book from now on. Fall is a tucking-in time. People slow down, light candles, wrap themselves in layers—blankets, sweaters. The earth, in shaking off its summer finery, seems to come alive in a different way. We can sit on our couches with hot tea and watch leaves turn fiery before our weary eyes as the temperature drops. We are Fidelis, tired after the run-around of summer, ready to crawl back into the nests we’ve made year after year. From his childhood bed, Fidelis finds his way to Ellis Island, where his stillness is a sort of costume: “Those who passed him saw an erect and powerfully carved man […]. That he was afflicted by the riptide of a recent and unexpected love was, of course, not apparent to those who noticed him in the crowd.” The American Dream that he’s chasing is itself an act, a nation’s costume; he has come to the United States “because he saw, from that place, a slice of bread” so perfectly crafted that it promised a wondrous, well-ordered place. Fidelis sells wild-boar sausages to pay his way from New York to Argus, North Dakota, but he never finds that perfect slice of bread. Instead, as he waits at the train station, he notices another American oddity—chewing gum; “the motion of so many jaws made him uneasy.” Imagine crossing the ocean alone, with nothing but a suitcase of knives and boar-meat sausage, and finding yourself in a sea of people all moving their jaws in an unfamiliar, constant rhythm: that’s the stuff of Halloween, if you ask me.In Argus, the story of Fidelis and his wife, Eva, intersects with the life of Delphine Watzka, daughter of the town’s hopeless-romantic-turned-alcoholic. Delphine is in a travelling act with Cyprian Lazarre; her job is to lie perfectly still and provide the plank-solid abs on which he performs feats of balance, perched atop stacks of chairs. Delphine is a performer; she and her best friend, a beauty who also happens to embalm corpses, grew up together in the Argus community theatre. As such, themes of performance and offbeat professional prowess are woven through the book. Characters balance seemingly conflicting identities; after all, this is a book in which “butchers sing like angels.” But one aspect of life in Argus is exactly as it seems: when Delphine and Cyprian enter her father’s home, they’re pummeled by an overwhelming stench. Their search for the source leads them into the cellar, where they find what looks like three dead bodies standing upright in suits, one in a porkpie hat.This is not a ghost story, not horror, but it is the perfect kind of spooky for me, a theatre-kid-turned-writer who loves October but has always been uncomfortable with Halloween; I was that kid who would tear my candy into little pieces and take tiny bites just in case someone had slipped in a razor blade or broken glass. Erdrich owns Birchbark Books, which champions Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. I have not yet visited, but I hope one day to step inside the confessional booth whose interior Erdrich has collaged with “images of her sins.” Who better to provide your fall reading than an author and bookstore owner who invites you into a small, dark space to unveil your hidden vices? This fall, I will slip back into these well-worn pages like a child falling into a pile of raked leaves—a joy, a comfort, a shiver of wind, a shudder when a centipede crawls across your ankle.

Kate Finegan has a short story chapbook currently available for preorder with Penrose Press. Her work has won contests with Thresholds, Phoebe Journal, Midwestern Gothic, and The Fiddlehead, and been runner-up for The Puritan's Thomas Morton Memorial Prize, shortlisted for the Cambridge Short Story Prize and Synaesthesia Flash Fiction Prize, and longlisted by Room. You can find her at katefinegan.ink.