by Annie Proulx
But drought came as well, baking the crops to a total loss, and hellish grasshoppers in whirring clouds that clung so thickly to the barbwire fences that the strands appeared to be made of frayed hawser, hawser that writhed and moved. Black walls of cloud sucked themselves into the roaring tunnels of tornadoes, hurricane winds burst out of nowhere and blew down barns and houses, cast horses into gullies. Men were frozen as they staggered across the prairie in bitter ground blizzards, horses died in the traces, a woman bent against the screaming wind and gripping her husband’s hand as they struggled to the house fell and lost her hold. He could not find her until the next morning, her icy corpse blown up against the side of the barn, and would have rolled to the Missouri had the barn not caught her. Long savage droughts were broken by torrential downpours that gullied the powdery soil and washed out the dying crops. Hail as large as teacups, misshapen like baroque pearls, pounded cornfields into pulp and bruised the stock. Children drowned in the Little Runt, were lost in the forests of corn.
The long-awaited railroad line came in, the thirty-mile Rolla & Highrod, derisively called the Rawhide & Hog Lard for its improvisational operation—the company used rendered lard instead of expensive bearing oil for engine lubrication, dipped water by hand from the Little Runt River rather than put up water towers—but it was a connecting route to the Chicago markets and prosperity. So read the railroad’s posters and handbills. Beutle despised the Irish bogmen who laid the track with their “Irish spoons,” those pointed shovels, but their money spent as well as any, and for a year the Beutles boarded four of the dirty, praying whiskey drinkers.
“Oh the dirty Irish,” said Gerti who had brought a bowl of potato gruel to a shack where four children lay deathly sick with smallpox. The mother had offered her a cup of coffee and, when Gerti nodded reluctantly, went into a filthy kitchen alcove. After a minute Gerti glanced in and saw the wretched woman licking clean the inside rim of a cup while on the stove a pan of long-boiled coffee gave off the odor of a burning rag.
Beutle sold the black walnut grove for railroad ties and congratulated himself on making a good dollar. Some of the Irish stayed to mine the limestone discovered beneath the town, and some of them drifted out west, following the railroads, dropping out now and then to become ranch hands, land agents, clerks in the new government offices.
“Those dirty Catholics,” said Beutle. “They are all criminals, they commit any crime because they can go to confession, a few prayers and zack! all is wiped clean. There was an Irishman stole five chickens from his neighbor, he goes to confession and says, ‘Father, I stole some chickens.’ ‘How many?’ says the priest. ‘Five, Father, but let’s say ten and I’ll get the rest on the way home.’”
Gerti kneaded dough for twenty loaves of bread each week, her great enlarged hands like articulated hooks, the muscular arms so overdeveloped in the forearm they seemed deformed. After a restless cow she was milking in the yard shifted against the wash platform and sent the heavy tub of water onto her shoulder, the right one drew up permanently. Despite this crookedness and her sufferings from inflammatory rheumatism, she worked in the fields, cursing housework, and every morning she braided her hair and the hair of her daughters to form a coronet although the fashion in town was for a bun of hair the size of a young cabbage drawn up at the top of the head. She combed out the rippled hair with her fine comb, parted it into two long hanks which she braided swiftly and tautly, working in a strip of cloth near the end-of each braid. She wound the finished braids around the head, and where they met at the nape of the neck she tied the strips and hid them in the hair. The flat double braids made a glinting crown of hair on the young daughters; hers was dun, streaked with grey. At night the braids were undone—who could sleep on ropes of hair?—to cascade down in crimpy hot waves. And when several times each year the girls came home from school—never sit next to the Irish, she warned them—with head lice, she washed their hair in kerosene, combed the reeking strands with a fine-tooth nit comb, and when they itched and writhed with worms, she dosed them with Dr. Lug’s Vermifuge, a tarry substance with the reek of scorched cowhorn.
A second rail line came in, a double track laid by Chinese laborers who spoke an incomprehensible jabber, running south to Kansas City and north to Minneapolis. The railroad built a station, manned it with a stationmaster, a telegraph operator, a freight manager. The waiting room featured a ten-foot bench of perforated plywood that spelled out an immense motto, VISIT THE SICK. Buck Thorne, the stationmaster, had been an engineer until he lost one leg in a derailment. He made a joke of referring to himself as a steam locomotive. When he went home for lunch he put on his dome casing, limped along on his flat-wheel wooden leg, side rods working, headed into his roundhouse to fire up and take on coal and water. Saturday night he drank whiskey until he was in a roaring state and declared himself to be thoroughly oiled.
The Kansas City train made its first run on the Fourth of July. Prank celebrated success.
The three Germans stood in the front row on the raw plank platform. Each held a homemade American flag tied to a sapling pole. Behind them children held tiny paper flags the size of stamps on toothpicks between their thumbs and forefingers. On the other side of the tracks, in the hog holding pens, pigs stood on their hind legs, front feet hooked on the fence, watching the crowd.
“Vork hard and good fortune got to come,” Beutle orated, his accent thickening. “Ve got miles a corn shows vat good, hard vork does, and now ve got the railroads opening up the country”—sweating and stuttering with the honor of it, the Irish sniggering at his clumsy speech. The train from Kansas City hissed and groaned, the whistle screamed a raw, hoarse cry, the tone modified by a block of wood engineer Ozro Gare had jammed against the reed in the whistle to make a distinctive call, the three Germans leaned their flags against the station wall, and Beutle took up the green accordion from the baggage cart and crashed into the new Sousa piece, “The Westward March,” even though the new line ran north and south. Loats came in on his tarnished tuba with powerful blats and snarls, and Messermacher rang a bar of iron, a section of rail with a piercing clangor, in honor of the railroad. The children imitated the squealing pigs and all bellowed “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
With a breathy shriek the train pulled away, the crowd cheering, waving at the caboose until it was out of sight. Five or six boys laid their ears against the rail to hear the receding steely song. The men set up trestle tables on the platform and the women brought out the pans of chicken and dumplings, washtubs of rolls, bread pans of butter, pickled beets. The German women had brought the most food: an enormous pink ham and red sausages cooked in beer lying beside each other in dozens in the pan, smoked pork ribs with sauerkraut seasoned with pepper and wild juniper berries, radishes and sour cream, an onion pie fifteen inches across, pickled pork with apples and pears, head cheese. Twenty ripe watermelons cooled in tubs of ice had come up on the train, and there were prune pies, Gerti’s Apfelkiachle and twelve pound cakes with honey glaze. One of the Irish children bit into a second piece of cake and screamed with pain when a yellow jacket feeding on the sweet glaze stung his tongue. Girls stood at intervals along the table flapping away flies with willow branches and dishcloths.
“’Member how we cooked them melons the first year?” said Clarissa Loats, laughing her thin ha-ha. Loats twirled his Indian clubs and Beutle crept up to the station loft and threw handfuls of peppermint candies from the open window. Off to the side an Irishman played a mournful pipe and another did a clog dance on the platform until the planks sent up gouts of dust, but it was the Germans everyone watched. In the cooling evening the crowd moved to the new schoolhouse where the desks were all cleared away for a dance.
“Jesus Christ! Now dance!” shouted Beutle, starting off with comic German songs—“Die Ankunft der Grünhörner,” “Auf der Alm da steht ’ne Kuh,” and the great favorite, “Herr Loats, was ist mit deiner Tuba los?”—until the Irish had enough of it and shouted for jigs and reels that
the Germans could not play, and the Americans wanted “Old Uncle Ned” and “Arkansas Traveler.” The three Germans played until midnight, the tireless Beutle pumping out accordion polkas and the tuba honking and a fine spray of sweat, caught in the gaslight’s white rays, flying from couples spinning the tight corner turn. At midnight someone tolled a bell, an Irishman fired a shotgun into the sky and the three Germans performed their most astonishing feat.
They brought two anvils from Loats’s wagon and set one on the ground upside down. Beutle packed the hole with gunpowder and sprinkled a little around the margin and out to the edge to serve as a fuse, then placed the second anvil, top down, over the charged hole. Messermacher set off the gunpowder with a red-hot poker. A terrific barrage of explosions, the anvils banging, jolted the station, the pigs squealed in terror, and Prank shouted itself hoarse.
Sunday
The population of Prank passed six hundred. Farm roads from the hinterlands knotted beside the tracks. O’Rourke’s Comestibles and Merchandise installed a nickelodeon theater in the back room and Beutle, on a Saturday trip into town, cranked installments of The Great Train Robbery through the apparatus.
“It is something to see, all right, but nothing at all compared to a good German play.” A troupe of gypsies came by, selling willow chairs for porch sitting, and Beutle bought two, thinking of his Bierstube down beside the river, crabbing at the price. But when, at the end of the day, he carried the chairs down to the picnic spot, he found the willows hacked to the ground and fire circles where the Roma had camped. “Jesus Christ, I bought my own trees.” (And when the next year the same or another caravan camped down along the river, he drove them away at shotgun point, becoming impatient when one of their wagons mired in the wet earth, and laughing that he would get them going, aimed at the black-skirted behind of an old woman throwing her weight against the wheel. She fell shrieking, and Beutle’s children began to cry.
“Shut up! She ain’t hurt—foreigners is animals, they don’t feel no pain. She pretends, to make you sorry for them.” He spat and shouted “raus, raus!” until they pulled out onto the road, the woman hauled into one of the wagons.)
On Sundays the three Germans stayed home drinking beer, smoking homegrown tobacco, eating and playing music—in fine weather down by the river in the place Beutle had cleared, outfitted with a few benches and small plank tables and the gypsy chairs. (After all, the willows had grown up again.) It was very agreeable there in hot weather, with the sound of the river slipping along and the songs of meadowlarks thrown into the yellow afternoon light. They had no taste for the Yankee version, a day of gloom and bleak prayers.
“You know why the Puritans left England for America?” Beutle set the green accordion on a chair and reached for the beer pitcher. “Jesus Christ, like the feller says, it was so they could carry on their religion in freedom and in their own way and force others to do the same.” He made a tremendous fart and the children screamed with laughter.
A trip to Chicago
In town they began to say that the children of the three Germans looked remarkably similar—perhaps the families were closer than anyone suspected. Stories about Beutle had circulated for years, and if it hadn’t been for his accordion and his aggressive, half-laughing character, he might have been roughed up some dark night.
“Jesus Christ! Somebody wants to make trouble with me, den rauch ich in der Pfeife! I smoke him in my pipe!”
On one memorable trip to Chicago to sell the hogs—six cents a pound!—the noble German white hog—Beutle said he intended to give the beat-up little green accordion to Messermacher. He’d teach him how to play it. It was not a bad little instrument. Himself, he was buying a new one, a Hohner, a German instrument by a firm that made excellent harmonicas. It had a few helper buttons that gave him some sharps and flats. Then they’d get up an accordion band, a German accordion band if they had another instrument. Loats suffered from the motion of the train and went to stand on the platform in the cold rushing air, breathing in the sulfur stink of burning coal.
“Germans invented the accordion,” Beutle explained to Messermacher. “A thousand things they invented, but accordions most of all. Because Germans think, Germans have brains. There was this feller, a musician, a German violinist, he ends up playing in the court orchestra in Russia, not Catherine the Great but around that time, he plays the violin. But because he’s a German, Jesus Christ, he notices things, he notices when he hangs up his bow on a nail back in his room she makes a nice little tone. From this he invents the nail violin, very beautiful tones, I have heard it. A circle of wood with nails sticking out, you run the bow on the nails and ooo aaa ooo aaa, a beautiful tune. One day this feller gets a strange thing from China, somebody gives it to him because interested in things he is—naturally, he is a German—and he sees a round bowl with some bamboo pipes sticking out, and on the bowl a mouthpiece. He blows on it. It’s a fine sound. This thing the Jesus Christ Chinese put reeds inside the pipes, same as in the accordion, little reeds stuck on one end with wax, the other end can vibrate like this.” He trembled his hand at Messermacher. “The German violin player learns the playing of this instrument, die liebliche Chinesenorgel, and from this he passes to other Germans the idea of the accordion—the free reed. That’s how it begins. Later comes the bellows.”
In Chicago Beutle drank imported Bavarian beer and smoked a twisted Spanish cigar at a beer hall, ate plates of kraut and wurst, sang drinking songs until midnight, fornicated with prostitutes, and bought a new instrument with some of his hog money, and for his wife a perforated cardboard motto, God Bless Our Home, and a selection of colored threads for working it. Loats thought of yellow pencils and sheets of coarse paper for the children and chose a tape measure holder in the shape of a hen and a bottle of THANKS A MILLION tonic for his wife who was already somewhat broken in health. He ate a plate of Chicago sausages of a strange bronze color and a flavor like kerosene. Messermacher ordered a rocking chair and one of the new bedsprings for a total of six dollars, bought a box of oranges for his children and from time to time took the cover off to inhale the fragrance.
On the train back to Prank, the new accordion changing laps, teasing their fingers, they talked about the power of music over men. “Listen to the sound of this, how strong and clear.” For the new accordion had good steel reeds and a bright and aggressive German tone, though it was difficult to play because of the extra buttons. Beutle had looked at a washing machine, a copper Maytag with a handle for the woman to crank until the clothes were clean, and a wringer, but did not buy it, got instead a windup phonograph and several Edison discs, including one featuring an accordion player named Kimmel playing a selection of German waltzes and Irish jigs and reels. He burned to get home and hear it.
“You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive,” said Beutle. “You take a fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you find? Vocal cords like strings, where the sound comes from. Now, the accordion, we have here an instrument that breathes! It breathes, it lives. Jesus Christ! Even so without a neck. Lungs it’s got. And the piano? The keys are fingers, answering your fingers. The trumpet, the cornet, is a nose. That you blow. Here’s a good one I heard. See, a feller goes to Chicago to sell his hogs and he gets a high price. His pocketbook is full, he can’t hardly close it. He’s afraid of thieves. But he don’t want to go back to the farm without some fun. So he finds this place full of women, hard-looking women with arms like sailors. Still, that’s all he can find so he says to himself, ‘OK, I be careful.’ The woman asks him one dollar. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘I give you two dollars if—’”
“Look out!” said Loats in a strangled voice, lunging for the window to vomit Chicago sausage.
Beutle’s lust
At first Beutle denounced the playing of Kimmel as fakery. “It’s two accordions. No one can play this music.” Then he said of course it was one musician—a German—a genius of the accordion although too fond of Irish jigs.
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The three Germans made good loud farmers’ music and the way to dance to it was to stamp.
“If you play like those Germans play, when you grow up you’ll be fit for nothing at all but to blow a train whistle, like Quint Flint,” sneered an Irish pipe player to his son who had tried once to play with the Germans but had been drowned out. Quint Flint, a train engineer, blew “Polly Put the Kettle On” when he approached his home station.
When traveling bands came through Prank, Beutle trailed after the leader, introduced himself as a former traveling musician. “You have heard of Tonio’s Golden Touring Band? Ach, years ago, different towns. I used to play with them. Now I’m a farmer. Well, maybe you got some instruments you want to get rid of, they’re maybe a little broken. I could buy them if they’re not too much, fix them up. Something for us out here on the lone prairie for music.” And so the Germans gained saxophones and drums, harmonicas, glockenspiels, and Beutle taught the children to play them. Messermacher’s son, little Karl, learned several instruments quickly, could play “The Camptown Races” on the accordion, the penny whistle and the harmonica at seven years of age.
In town they said, “get the three Germans for the dance,” and then they’d laugh, and someone would say something about Beutle and Gerti. “The Three Germans” became the name of their band even when half a dozen of the kids were playing with them. They played music for dances with a beat thumped out by Beutle’s right foot, as steady and solid as the tick of a wound clock. They sat around the hard-coal heater, a great thing after burning twisted slough grass for so many winters, Lotte squeaking the violin, the accordions huffing, little Wid working a set of foot chimes, and Percy Claude ringing the banjo, so bright and clever in its sound that the old dog sat up and howled whenever he took it from the nail on the wall.