The Master Butcher's Singing Club Read Free

quality of the hat. His family, who were emphatically not Bavarian, in fact distrusted people from the south and believed them of a coarser quality than their woolens.
    Although they were tradesmen and master butchers, his family also prided themselves on acquiring a degree of learning and on a talent for producing male voices of special beauty that skipped from son to son. His older brother hadn’t much voice at all, for instance, but Fidelis had a singing tenor of such natural clarity and freshness that his last name, Waldvogel, might have been invented just for him. Waldvogel was such a common name in his town that he’d never thought of it, but in this new country, where Germans were Germans regardless of their regional origins, more than one person would remark upon it, and also note that Forestbird was an oddly gentle name for one whose profession was based in slaughter.
    That was not how his family viewed it, of course; there was an art to a proper killing. The profession, acquired only through painstaking study and examination from a young age, was one of extraordinary precision and timing. A Metzgermeister’s diploma required working knowledge of every spice known to humankind, the arcane preparation ofhundreds of varieties of wurst, and the ability to commit one’s knife edge to the animal’s created bulk and grain with a dreamlike intuition. His father, having practiced all his life, hardly seemed to move his hands as the animal fell into increasingly civilized circles and predictable shapes. On a block set before him, its creatureliness disappeared and it entered, as Fidelis saw it, a higher and more satisfactory form of being.
    Fidelis thought of his father’s working grace as he stood for hours in lines, endured inspections, stamps, paperwork, the crush of impatient humans, and his own hunger. That he also managed, with that internal discipline of quiet he had learned at the rifle’s sights. For the smoked sausages in his suitcase were not for him to eat; they were his ticket west.
    Walking toward the train station through milling throngs of people, those who had acquired a foothold in this place, Fidelis gave in to an extravagant loneliness. Those who passed him saw an erect and powerfully carved man, high-cheekboned, fair, with a straight and jutting nose and a mouth as perfectly shaped, though who around him knew, as the voice that could pour from it. 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. He tapped his heart, which from time to time beat too anxiously behind the lapels of his suitcoat. The locket that Eva had given to Johannes, and which Fidelis had secretly kept, was lodged there, for Fidelis was both thrilled and terrified to find that, although he’d married Eva on the strength of a promise to his dying friend, he’d fallen through a trapdoor into blackness—a midnight of love that had grown like a bower of inky twigs over the baby’s defenseless beauty, over Eva’s prickly loveliness, her trim fortitude, her bullheaded, forthright, stubborn grace.
    The train station’s massive brass-trimmed doors swallowed Fidelis with all the others. Easily, the current of people pulled him to the windows of the ticket counter. He waited again in line until he stood before a sharp-mouthed girl whose jaws moved in a rhythm peculiar to people in this city. Fidelis was unfamiliar with chewing gum and the motion ofso many jaws made him uneasy. Her eyes brightened with an automatic greed, though, and the chewing stopped when he came before her.
    “I wish to Seattle,” he said, gathering the words in his mouth, “to go.”
    She told him the price of the ticket. He did not understand the click of numbers on her tongue, and mimed writing down her answer. She did so, and then, with a glance to one side, added her name and the words Come see me if you’re ever in town . Her lacquer-nailed fingertips presented the slip