by Annie Proulx
He had come as a child from the old country to his uncle’s farm on the north shore of Lake Huron where, from the highest field, one could see the smoke of steamers churning west. The language of the uncle’s house was English.
Loats was clever and thrifty, as thin as a hoe handle, had a stone-shaped head with a frizz of dark crimpy hair, puffed cheeks and small cross-eyes. He was easygoing, the kind of man who would never shout at a horse. The uncle’s twelve sons denied the possibility that a portion of the farm could ever come to him, and finally he had struck out for himself, fired up by the advertisement in his uncle’s farm paper for free homestead land. He took passage on the Vigorous, a passenger-freight steamer bound down the Great Lakes for Chicago. The steamer was loaded with barrels of sugar and three hundred passengers—a family of Courte d’Oreilles Indians, a gang of young Polish laborers in high spirits heading for the meatpacking plants, two Norwegian clergymen, Irish railworkers and three families of white-blond Russians on their way to the Dakotas. They stopped at St. Ignace to take on more passengers. The wind was coming up. White petals from a nearby orchard in flower drifted onto the dark water and the deck. Dutch immigrants clumped on board in their wooden shoes, headed for utopia in Indiana; they found places on the overcrowded deck—more of them were left on the dock, calling out messages to be passed on to their relatives.
An hour and a half after midnight, under a full, cold moon, the Vigorous struck an uncharted reef and broke apart. The bow sank quickly, but the stern floated on, filled with fire that set the sugar barrels ablaze. The moonlight shone on the rolling waves and the wet faces of the drowning passengers, who cried out in six languages. Loats kicked to shore in the company of a young Dutch woman, both clinging to the headboard of the captain’s pine bed. As the headboard dipped and plunged, Loats imagined a life-saving machine, a right-angled wooden frame with an inflated rubber cushion for buoyancy, a rear propeller driven by a hand crank, another under the feet driven by pedals; and there would be a mast with a little sail, a whistle hanging from a lanyard, a signal flag, and even a lantern. But how could one light the lantern? He puzzled at it until the waves swept them into the sandy surf. He helped the woman, reeling and choking, toward a green house with smoke streaming from the chimney. All along the wet sand lay the wooden shoes of drowned Dutchmen and from the woods a bear emerged, head up into the wind, lured by the smell of burning sugar.
A coincidence
Messermacher and Beutle beckoned Loats to them. Now the three stood on the warped boardwalk speaking a mixture of German and American, sizing each other up, discovering similarities, exclaiming over the strange coincidence that had brought them to this tall grass on the same day. They were all of an age, twenty-eight, their birthdays within weeks of each other.
“Like brothers!”
“The Indivisible Three!”
“Alle guten Dinge sind drei!”
Beutle’s laugh came from a chest like a stuffed mattress. “Not like those fellers was going up in the mountains to look for gold, two prospectors, friends and comrades forever. Before they go they get provisions and everything they need at the trading post. There’s no women in the mountains so at the store they buy these love boards. It’s a pine board with a knothole, a piece of fur nailed on.” He winked. “So a year later, down from the mountains comes only one prospector. ‘Where’s the other feller?’ the trader asks him. He says—” When he finished the story Messermacher laughed but Loats drew the side of his mouth down.
They built a camp near the river in a clump of bur oak, and after the sunset blaze burned down into coals they smoked the Western Bee cigars Loats passed around, talking until the leaves of the trees disappeared in the darkness, until one by one sleep stifled their voices.
In the morning they waded through grasses, bluestem and Indian grass, needle grass and foxtail barley studded with bird-foot violets, wild strawberry blossom and multiflora rosebuds, prairie clover, whitetop and larkspur, until they were soaked to the thighs with dew, their pants legs caked with yolk-colored pollen and their strides releasing the green perfume of crushed stems. They veered around a huge swale of slough grass, for the saw-toothed blades cut like knives.
“But it’s good feed,” said Loats. “Twist it up, you can burn it.” Messermacher was anxious to find clay—a good clay pit, he said, and he would show them how to make the best house in the world. They stumbled over bison bones, cast their eyes across the prairie, over the iridescent, undulating sea. They pointed to islands and archipelagos of bur oaks, a stand of black walnut, to the cottonwoods, elm and green ash on the riverbank. Loats pulled up a spindly plant with a cluster of creamy flowers. “Not this! Poisons your stock. Death camas. My uncle had this plant.” He looked for others but did not find one.
“This here is Tiefland,” said Messermacher.
Fate had dropped them in a wreath of birdsong to hear the meadowlark’s gurgling double notes, the prairie blackbird’s rusty cries, kiss-he, kiss-he, the dickcissel’s jup jup jup clip clip, husky trillings and clear pensive notes, quavers and sliding whistles, sweet warbles, rattles, purrs and buzzes and the fragrant air shot through with lazuli buntings as a length of silk may show metallic threads. When they found a bank of slick blue clay along the Little Runt, Messermacher said some higher power had directed the event, and he took off his broken hat. He dropped his beard on his chest and said a prayer.
Loats suggested they name the settlement Trio.
“Nein, nein, no,” said Beutle, holding up his hands, sinewy and callused. “It’s these Pranken, these paws, that will build our farms and the town. Let the name show the work of our hands.” He was the most emotional of the three, the most volatile, the most sensual. A minor chord could make him weep. He was self-educated, owned a number of books, was never without facts and explanations.
“So call it Pranken, then,” Messermacher said, his dark face twitching at the idea, but when they filed the papers at the county seat, the word was written down as Prank.
“If we called it Hände,” said Loats, “it would of turned into Hand, a not bad name. But Prank? A joke. Your life place becomes a joke because language mixes up!” And every year thereafter he petitioned to change the name of the town, suggesting in turn Snowball, Corn, Paradise, Red Pear, Dew, Buggywhip and Brighteye. (Later his suggestions were bitter: Forget It, Roughtown, Hell, Wrong, Stink.)
A polka in the lumber office
They had no time. Ground had to be broken; it was late in the season. The three Germans drove themselves without mercy, sleeping in their clothes, eating in their sleep, crawling out in the darkness before dawn when the only sign of the approaching day was the fresh odor of moist earth. They staggered in dirt-stiffened overalls to hitch the horses, plow and harrow and plant corn and wheat and drive the birds from the swollen, germinating kernels. Messermacher used one of his grain-sack traveling bags to make a seeder, filling it a quarter full with winter wheat seed, then folding and strapping it across his breast so the bag gaped, and steadily he cast the seed in an even fan. A little wheat, yes, said Beutle, who had read somewhere that corn was the destiny of the place, civilization was built on corn. Loats nodded. Then came a rush to throw up temporary sod hovels.
“I don’t get my woman here pretty soon, you fellers better sleep with the axe handy by,” said Beutle, rubbing his groin and moaning in mock agony. Their faces were sundark, with startling white foreheads marking hat lines, their bodies supple and strong in the crusted overalls, their eyesight keen and expectations brilliant. They worked with demoniac energy. Everything seemed possible.
They made trip after trip to Keokuk, first to fetch their women and children, then a milk cow and seven pounds of coffee for Messermacher, then lumber for the houses and barns, southern pine shipped up from Louisiana on the Kansas City Southern. Back and forth they went in Beutle’s wagon hauling the resiny yellow boards to Prank and going for more.
“You want your nails to stay clinched, yellow pine’ll never let go,” s
aid Messermacher who had knowledge of wood and joinery.
Loats ordered a dozen bald-cypress boards but wouldn’t say why until they pried it from him that it was for a casket.
“It don’t ever rot, stays sweet and solid a hundred years. Believe in looking ahead.”
“That’s right! No telling what the price of coffin wood will be next year,” said Beutle. “And you already twenty-eight years of age.”
In the lumberyard office Beutle counted out the money. His eye went around the familiar room, taking in the stained deal boards, the dusty clock, the counter polished black by the action of coat sleeves, the finger-marked safe with its painted gilt flourishes. On the safe stood a green button accordion, furred in dust.
“You play that instrument?” he asked the clerk. An American.
“Nah. Something Mr. Bailey got off a nigger last year come through here off the boats and hungry. He couldn’t play it neither with a broken arm. I reckon Mr. Bailey felt sorry for him, give him something for it, two bits and goodbye, keep moving along.”
Beutle picked it up, gave it a tentative squeeze, then filled the office with a loud and pumping polka. The dust flew from it as he worked the bellows. The other two Germans stood with their faces ajar.
“Hans,” said Messermacher. “This is marvelous. That you can do this. This music gives me happiness.”
“Not bad,” said Beutle. “Nice tone, quick buttons. How much wants Mr. Bailey for this thing?”
“I dunno. He’s not here now.” The clerk made up his mind to try the instrument as soon as the Germans had gone. It couldn’t be difficult if Germans could play it.
“You ask him. I got to come back in September, get more lumber. You tell him he want to sell it, I buy it. If it ain’t too much money, like the old feller with a nickel in his pocket said to the whore.”
New houses and women
They spent the summer cultivating and hammering, raising frames and fencing, pacing off new fields for corn and oats and hay. All three of them were as hard and corded as hickory rails. The sown fields grew maniacally. In one plot Gerti planted some black seeds, the size and shape of squash seeds, given out by the land office, a new thing to try, watermelon, they called it.
“Raus! Raus!” shouted Beutle to his children in the black morning of each shortening day, pulling them from the rustling tick stuffed with wild grass and setting them to chores and labor. The women—except Gerti—sweated and strained, pressed bricks of clay, grass and manure from wooden molds, fed the stock and worked in the fields, keeping track of the little children by the bells pinned to their clothes, while the men hammered until they were striking by feel, blind in the darkness, packing the clay bricks, batser, between the vertical studs as Messermacher said, “like this, like so.” Gerti worked with the men, brandishing a hammer and singing.
When the watermelons were as large as a child’s head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow. In mid-August the second cutting of hay was stacked and Loats sowed rye seed between his corn rows to plow under in the spring. The others laughed; with such rich loam it was a waste of time.
By the end of September they were out of the sod huts and into the small, good houses with their smooth exteriors of clay, thick walls, and central chimneys of the same hard bricks. Over the winter Messermacher’s wife stenciled a design of red flowers with pointed petals along the walls near the ceiling, very much admired by a finger-cut Indian woman who appeared one morning with a basket of snakeroot for barter. The earthen huts were renamed barns, and next year, said Messermacher, they’d enlarge the houses, build better barns. Gerti and the children walked through the long grass feeling for bison bones with their bare feet (a man came in a wagon at the end of the summer and paid cash for the bones which were shipped east and ground into fertilizer), ate wild rose hips for the fleeting taste of sweetness. Beutle’s oldest son, Wid, had a gift for finding grassy meadowlark nests.
The green accordion
“Look now. Four months since we walked on the naked land. Now is three farms started.”
Before they started harvesting the corn Beutle went back to the Keokuk lumberyard for henhouse studding. The accordion was still on the safe.
“Well, how much does Mr. Bailey want for it?”
The clerk pulled a sour face. “Mr. Bailey don’t want nothing for it. Mr. Bailey is gathered to his maker. See that lumber you got on your wagon? That fell on him. That and more. Bad stacking. That’s his brains and blood on it. You look at the ends. It stove his head in, crushed him like a bug. His own fault. He’d get anybody to stack them boards; bums, eyties, polacks, krauts, hunkies. He goes out there, pulls at a board on the top to start loading up some gink’s wagon, the whole thing come down on him. He give one scream you could sharpen your axe on. Took me over a hour to get the pile off’n him. So I guess it’s up to me to name a price on that damn squeezebox. I don’t know what you Germans see in it. Sounds like Mr. Bailey when the boards come at him. One dollar. In cash.”
A memorial photograph
Beutle played the accordion in the new house still smelling of the southern pinewoods, the resinous odor evoking the hissing sound of wind in the needles, the buzz of cicadas.
“Look at it. It’s a pretty color.” He stretched the green accordion out on his knee, pulled long chords from it. “A good voice.” His saccharine tenor soared, the old German songs flowered in the kitchen, the children played under the table slipping straws beneath Beutle’s tapping toe and the women wiped tears away.
“Yes, it’s a nice little accordion,” Beutle said loftily, firing up his curved pipe. “But I would rather have a good German Hohner. It would be stronger.” Messermacher thumped the laundry tub and Loats buzzed at a paper and comb until his lips numbed.
“Now we got everything,” said Loats.
“No,” said Beutle, treading on the finger beneath his toe. “A tuba we need. And a Bierstube. I miss that place, the chairs and little tables with the red-check cloths under the trees, the little birds hopping around for crumbs, everyone peaceful with a stein of fine lager—oh how I miss Herr Gründig’s lager, he made it like a fine wine—a little music sometimes, an accordion playing this”—and he drew out a few bars of “Schöne Mähderin”—“the children sitting quiet, and how I remember the old ladies knitting with their little glass in front of them. There is nothing like this in America, there is no place to go. Everybody stays home and works. Americans understand nothing of how to live, only to get and get and get. Now we make our own Bierstube, eh? I make a place down by the river under the willow trees, and on Sunday afternoon when it’s nice we go there and pretend to ourselves we are in a place of warmth and convivial feelings. The children can play at waiters.”
“Um,” said fiddle-faced Clarissa Loats. “And shall I be one of the old ladies knitting with the little glass before her, or like a demented one, carrying cakes and cheese and sausage from the house back and forth?”
“A woman’s work is a woman’s work,” said Beutle. “First carry, then knit and drink.”
Loats’s uncle had belonged to a Turnverein, and the nephew, impressed with the old man’s wiry strength, persuaded the others to do exercises. Every morning at daybreak the three Germans arose in their separate houses, emptied their bladders, then performed three knee bends, toe touchings, and finally they flung their arms outward, forward, and to one side. Messermacher was exceptional with his homemade Indian clubs; Loats could walk on his hands. Then each went to table and drank a quart of home-brewed beer—Beutle smoked a cigar as well—while the woman of the house clattered the cover off the milk crock and salt pork crackled in the frying pan.
“We got it good,” said Beutle.
But in November one of Loats’s children fell sick with second summer complaint and convulsions that worsened into brain fever, and Beutle’s vaunted doctor book, Praktischer Führer zur Gesundheit, was useless; after a week the boy died. Loat
s and Messermacher dug a grave a little way out on the prairie, and Beutle, tears streaming down his face, swore to fence the plot in the spring. He played “The Dead March” twice through on the accordion and the women sobbed. It was only the beginning of the unending illnesses and accidents that seemed to afflict the Germans. Over the years the children sickened of diphtheria, spinal fever, typhoid, cholera, malaria, measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis and pneumonia as well as lightning strikes, injuries, snakebites and frostbite. When Beutle’s youngest son died of complications following measles, Gerti sent Beutle riding after the itinerant photographer who had passed by a few days earlier so they might have a memorial photograph. She quickly dressed the dead child in his older brother’s trousers and a black winter coat and, while he was still pliable, arranged the small body on a chair in a sitting position and in his hands placed the wooden horse Beutle had carved. Because the corpse would not stay upright, Beutle had to tie him in place with a rope blackened in soot that it might not show. The photographer arrived, they carried chair and child into the brilliant sunlight. There was still no fence around the plot and this time Beutle played “The Dead March” once. That was enough. The lives of children were in precarious balance; it was better not to love them too much.
The Rawhide & Hog Lard
In 1900 there were thirty farms around Prank, new families impelled west by private failures, drifting in from drought-ruined Kansas and Nebraska, some stragglers from the east who had failed to get decent land in the Oklahoma land run the year before, a few ruined by the Depression and looking for a new start, some ex-cattlemen brought to their knees by the terrible blizzards of ‘86 and ‘87, still hoping to get back to where they had been, and most of them flying high on the idea of the new century, sensing a chance at momentous things. Some seasons the corn grew like nothing any of them had ever seen or dreamed, jerking up out of the purple-black loam as they watched, and in the hot silence of a windless summer day, standing among the rows they could hear the screak of stalk growth, the force of life.