by Annie Proulx
In the office, the steam radiator hissing despite the leaves still on the trees, Mrs. Breath gave him her good wishes and a large, awkward parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with dark red cord. It was heavy.
“Yours,” she said. “Personal belongings from when you first came here. It was in the storeroom.” He blushed, did not want to open the package in front of her, believing in family letters and photographs never seen. She handed him a white envelope.
“Good luck, Frank.”
On the bus to Portland he got a seat to himself in the back, opened the envelope, though he knew what was in it—a twenty-dollar bill and the standard Birdnest letter of good character on a sheet of paper decorated with the image of a bird bearing a writhing worm in its beak. He put the money and the letter in his new vinyl wallet. In the front of the bus a natty man, hair touched with grey, fingering his sandy, pockmarked face, got up and moved down the aisle testing different seats. He settled across the aisle from Dolor, pulled at the sleeves of his brown jacket.
“Don’t want to sit with the sun in my eyes,” he said to the window and began a pleasant, modulated conversation with himself. He spoke in a rapid southern accent. “Now I’ll split it,” he said. “Thank you, Inspector.” A gold wristwatch with an expansion bracelet showed at his wrist. “I can offer you three hundred dollars. I’m taking this trip, this important trip and I don’t know how it’s going to come out. Hmmm, hired—hired?”
To keep from staring, Dolor got down the brown-paper parcel from the overhead rack and worried it open, carefully undoing the hard knot, its twists dark with dust, pulling the paper away gently, embarrassed by the way it crackled, made the southern man watch him.
He didn’t know what to make of it. Nothing but a wrecked accordion, the wood case charred on one corner, the bellows torn open. Rows and rows of little buttons on one side and on the other black and white keys. The name “GAGNON” on the end looked as though it had been scratched in with a jackknife blade. An odor rushed up from it, the smell of softwood smoke and damp. A lousy burned accordion. Suddenly he heard his mother’s cough, though he had not known she coughed until that minute. Now he was sure of it. Maybe she’d given him up because she was sick. He examined the instrument, the paper it was wrapped in, but there was no message, no note or photograph or letter, and his past remained unknown.
“I never smoke now,” said the man in the brown jacket. “Never. I no longer drink.”
In Portland Dolor got off the bus, walked to the army recruiting station. The back covers of Double Detective and Weird and Argosy all ran the same ad—HELP YOURSELF GET THE JOB YOU WANT IN THE ARMY. He carried the instrument, rewrapped in the brown paper, under his left arm. He gave his name as Dolor Gagnon, signed up for four years. It was 1954 and the job he wanted was television repair but the closest thing was electrician and they were full up. They put him in the quartermaster corps.
In some ways the army was like Birdnest: he did what he was told and kept out of the way. When they landed on him he never complained. He got through basic training by being quick and invisible, barely looking at the bigger men, the loudmouths and smart alecks who attracted the interest of sergeants as limping hesitation attracts predators. He was assigned to Germany.
“Be fuckin glad you got the Fräuleins instead of Frozen Chosen,” drawled the sergeant standing behind him. “Be goddamn glad you didn’t have to go to Korea. There was nothin worse than Korea. Guys froze solid standin up.”
All around him men talked of getting married when they got back home. Everyone had a photograph in a wallet, girls, girls, looking the same with their rolled-under shining hair and deep-colored lips, the pastel sweaters and the distant tender gazes. He found one of these photographs in the pages of a book from the base library and kept it in his wallet. The girl looked Swedish, with crayon-yellow hair and protruding blue eyes. He invented a name for her, “Francine,” he would say, “that’s Francine, we’re getting married when I get back, she’s a kindergarten teacher.”
In Germany he took the wrecked accordion to an elderly man in a cold, dark hole of a repair shop. The man was as thin as a sheet of cardboard, beside him slouched a young girl with a ferret face and lipstick although she was not more than ten or eleven. The girl watched the old man attentively as he examined Dolor’s accordion.
“Französisch. Sehen Sie hier?” Pointed to the metal crest. Maugein Frères—les accordéons de France. His nasal voice sounded as though he were close to weeping.
“How much to fix it?” muttered Dolor. “Wie viele?” The old man did not answer, shook his head, pointed at the burned wood, the scorched buttons, gently stretched the cracked and torn bellows. He touched the brittle folds.
“Diese Plisseefalten…” He leaned over and talked to the child in his sadness.
She looked at Dolor. “He says he cannot repair this, all the folding parts must be new, he cannot get the right kind of wood for the end, the keys are ruined, it is burned, you see, and even if it is new it is not good. French accordions are not good. You must buy a German accordion, these are the best ones. He will sell you one.”
“Naw,” he said, “I guess not. I don’t even know how to play it, I just wanted to know if it could be fixed.” It was the only thing he had. The old man didn’t wrap it up again and he left the shop with the paper loose around it, trailing string and the smell of burn. Back in the barracks he separated the end piece engraved “GAGNON” from the instrument and threw the rest away. He, too, had a passion for cutting his name or initials in everything he owned.
A few weeks later in the damp German spring he caught a cold which developed into pneumonia. The illness ebbed from his lungs, seemed to shift to his legs. He was in the base hospital for two months, wobbling around half paralyzed, a cane in each hand, sucking air through his teeth with the pain.
“Frankly, it may be paralytic poliomyelitis,” a doctor with a pointed mole on his right nostril said. “I see they gave you this new vaccine, this Salk vaccine, when you were inducted, but who really knows how efficacious it will prove to be?” Gradually he recovered, but the same doctor said he was unfit for active duty and after a year and a half in the army he limped out on a medical discharge in the summer of 1955.
The taxicab
He was supposed to get a plane to Boston, then catch a train to Portland where he would be processed out, but the plane landed in New York and seven hours later when they gave him his new ticket he tangled up with a parade of kids in red, white and blue costumes and moved into the second leg of the mistake, dodging a boy disguised with a paper Uncle Sam beard and a tall blue hat pasted over with stars, getting away from the acned girl with a sign on her breast, AMERICA FIRST, he somehow boarded a civilian flight heading, not for Boston, but for Minneapolis. He sat next to a woman in a polka-dot blouse that reeked of dye and underarm odor.
“You dumb shit,” said a sergeant at the recruiting booth in Minneapolis when Dolor turned up, nervously showing his travel orders and asking for help. “Didn’t you see at the gate it said Minneapolis? Can’t you read the word Minneapolis? Is that word too big for you to read? Did you think it said Marmalade or Mystery Booth?” He made telephone calls, letting Dolor stand there, shifting from one foot to the other.
“I thought they were going by way of Boston. I thought they’d stop at Boston. The girl didn’t say nothing when she took the ticket.”
“You thought so. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, don’t it, go to Minneapolis by way of Boston. Like Los Angeles by way of Singapore. What a moron. OK, here’s what you do. You’re gonna stay in a hotel, here’s a chit, the Hotel Page on Spivey, and I will personally see you get to Boston. Don’t expect no cushy civvy plane, soldier. You are going on the dirt-bag train at nine ayem mañana. You be right here where you’re standing right now at eight tomorrow morning. I’m afraid you might see the Boston sign and think it says Bingo.”
He walked around for a while, taking in the city. There was a black man on Prairie Avenue pl
aying an alto sax, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” the instrument case open, some quarters and halves lying on the blue crushed velvet. It sounded good. He threw in two dimes and a nickel. The guy didn’t even look at him.
He ate at Happy Joe’s Café, lured by the sign in the window, “It’s Air Conditioned COOLER Inside,” ordered the special and got some kind of strange food, little meat dumplings and steamed cabbage with white sauce and plenty of bread, the custard pie dessert, all for sixty cents. There wasn’t any point in going to the hotel until he had to, so he drank two beers in a place where they spoke a foreign language, he guessed Polish, but it was a good place and the beer was cheap, then he found a movie palace, gilt and marble inside, where Seven Samurai was playing. He sat in the dark eating licorice. He didn’t understand half the action because the subtitles were hard to read, and it was funny as hell to hear the actors spouting Japanese. He left halfway through the film and went across the street to see The Killer Shrews, decided it was the worst movie he’d ever seen, blamed it on Minneapolis.
When he came out of the movie into night, the neon blue and yellow of a café, a woman in a clear plastic raincoat, carrying a spray of ferns, her white shoes flashing over the sidewalk, the shine of trolley tracks and stoplights reflected in windshields dazzled him. He heard music crisscrossing in the street, slow piano like a dripping faucet, a snare drum. The hotel was twenty-seven blocks away. He was dog-tired after two days on planes and the mix-up and hauling his duffel bag around, but he started walking. The streets were swarming with people—midnight kids on junk bikes, a blind woman led by a dog, a man whose suitcase pulled his shoulder down, black people. After two blocks he saw the same saxophone player on the sidewalk ahead of him and somehow he didn’t want to pass him again. His legs hurt. The guy was still playing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Probably the only song he knew. He held up his arm for a taxi and, although he waited for a long time, caught one as it pulled away from a hotel back up the block.
There was something on the floor of the cab, a kind of case, an overnight case. Furtively he seized the handle. When he got out of the cab at the Hotel Page, a dump of a place, he carried his duffel bag and the case, telling himself if it had the owner’s name in it he would call the guy up and say, I found your overnight in the taxi, and the guy would maybe offer a reward. Or if it was a woman’s suitcase, he’d call her up and she’d say, why don’t you bring it to such and such an address, we’ll have a drink, you’re very nice to call, and she would live in a beautiful apartment with white rugs and he would miss the train. He couldn’t believe what he found. Another goddamn accordion, like it was a message from God, or something. For something to do, he spent an hour with a nail file picking out the glass rubies that formed the letters AR and scratching “GAGNON” in the wood while he watched The U.S. Steel Hour, some army show about sergeants, on the hotel’s dinky metal TV, a round seven-inch screen, like looking out of a porthole in a storm. The sound was bad and he couldn’t get the gist of the action, ended up watching the ads for Breast o’ Chicken tuna and Winston cigarettes.
Maine
In Maine again, he spent a few days in Augusta trying to get a copy of his birth certificate, bought a used Chevrolet truck, a secondhand RCA with a twelve-inch screen, though he really wanted one of the new portables, then headed up to Random. The birth certificate did not say much. The date. Both parents from Canada. His father, Charles Gagnon, had been twenty-nine, his mother, Delphine Lachance, twenty-eight. Five living children before him. His birth weight, six pounds, one ounce. That was all.
Through the rain-streeled windshield, Maine appeared as alternating plats of spruce, slash and clear-cut, withered acres of poplar and cherry, rolled-up leaves like charred scraps of paper on the defoliated trees, dark, too, with rain, and roadside moose the shade of old butternut husks, darkness unrelieved by whatever pale strip the sky unrolled, the crippled rivers and chains of lakes bordered by tattered horizons. He drove over a maze of roads that circled, looped, crossed and recrossed.
Back on the edge of the slash he saw tar-paper shacks and churches with hand-painted signs nailed to skinned poles—Church of Christ Coming Again, Church of Redeeming Grace, Church of New Faith, Temple of Christian Beliefs and Practices, Church of the Big Woods, Sanctuary of the Last Times—set among pale sand and gravel quarries, among the shattered trees, a stipple of mauve clouds like petechiae against a flesh-colored horizon. He would have to be careful.
The stranger in his birthplace
He did not expect to recognize anything. He knew only that Random was situated between woods and potato fields and that he had been born here. The light in this place was the first light he had seen after the blindness of the womb. His eyes kept filling with tears. He felt he might be slipping back into an archaic time when clans roved the forests and he was running along behind them, belonging with them, yet an outsider. He felt the somber light, the black softwood and the sound of rivers from the earth’s core rolling over rock. He passed a stumpy clearing where there were three or four old trucks with homemade plywood caps built into the back beds, a woman in a gypsy skirt placing a stick on the red fire.
Random was a small town with two general stores, a post office, a café, a garage, school. No one knew him, but he began to study their faces and learn their names. He liked the peculiar dullness of the buildings with their film of age, the evocative smell of spruce and potato dirt, the vague roads that petered out in the slash.
North of town another road branched off through the bog holes. At the junction he saw the Esso station and the Pelkys’ clapboard farmhouse, the ell divided into four apartments, two up, two down, in the distance a barn against a wall of black spruce.
“Mr. Pelky raised potatoes—we had one of the biggest potato farms in Random County—but you know how it is, you get older and your kids is all somewheres else. He fell off the tractor two years ago and the tractor runned right over his head, made him lose his mind for six months, but gradual he’s got it back and he’s as good as anybody now, but they say he can’t farm no more, so we fixed this up for apartments.” Mrs. Pelky wiped the checked plastic tablecloth as she talked to him, pushed the salt and pepper shakers into the central position. Her aquamarine eyes winked behind plastic harlequin glasses. Her green housedress was printed with yellow sombreros. “Home-cooked breakfast goes with it. I hope you got adventure in your heart. Like I tell Mr. Pelky, I can’t stand to cook the same old thing every day. Mr. Roddy rents a unit but he don’t take the breakfast, goes into town and eats a greasy mess at the diner.” The linoleum was a crazy pattern of many colors, the wallpaper a jungle of poppies and elephant ears. Mrs. Pelky sang her little song, “‘… des bottes noires pour le travail et des rouges pour la danse …’ now, if you want furniture and you don’t mind used, there’s secondhand in the barn up the road, that used to be our barn but we sold it to the Dentist. If you can stand the Dentist, the dirty old thing. He’s like some of those old men get, you know what I mean.” With a piece of cheese she coaxed her little dog to sit up and beg, told Dolor another dog, even more enchanting than this one, had been seized the year before as he stood near the fence, leg lifted, by an Arctic owl which carried him off in the moonlight.
His apartment was on the ground floor, two long rooms with sloping wooden floors, the flyspecked windows looking into a straggle of spruce. He stood in the kitchenette taking in his gas burners, the tiny refrigerator no higher than his knees, a white enamel table and mismatched chairs with chrome legs. There was a metal bed in one room and on certain evenings the sound of Liberace came through the walls.
Every morning Mrs. Pelky labored to his door on her bad ankles with a plate of curious cookery: Orange Buds, Pork Fruit Cake, Deviled Clams and Bean Mash, Lentil Loaf, or The Poor Man’s Omelet—bread sopped in hot milk. Her passion was experimentation. She clipped recipes from the papers, pasted them into her “cookbook,” a turn-of-the-century salesman’s catalog for soda-water apparatus; the recipes obscur
ed photographs of fabulous machines in onyx, red-veined Breccia Sanguinia and Alps Green marbles with gleaming spigots and ornate woodwork and German-silver labels for the sirops. From behind the luteous clips for “Appetizing Relish” and “Egyptian Stew” peeped the gas-lit Ambassador, the Autocrat with twelve spigots and double-stream soda-draught arms. He ate everything she brought him for it was better than his own strange combinations, a peach and kale sandwich, macaroni and vinegar, canned salmon and rat cheese.
He needed some shelves, a bookcase, an easy chair, a dish cupboard. He steered toward the secondhand furniture barn and saw hulking figures in the yard, immense naked women twelve feet high, carved of wood and with breasts like watermelons, pubic triangles the size of pennants, staring eyes and glistening hair, painted in exterior enamels. They stood among wooden cacti with nails for spines and plywood spruce trees. Inside he examined basins and two-gallon coffeepots, rusted calipers and axe heads with broken helves still filling the eyes, bucksaws and crosscuts, wedges, scratching awls, snatch blocks and snow knockers from old lumber-camp days.
The Dentist was bandy-legged and filthy-mouthed, his words drenched in brown tobacco spit. “How do you like them babes I got out front? That’s my hobby, carvin women. Don’t know who I am, do you?”
“The one they call the Dentist.”
“Call me the Dentist? Why, they call me everthing from a two-handled devil to a three-legged bastard to a four-eyed fool. Some call me Squint, short for Squint-Eye. When they don’t call me Dentist, ’cause I was the fuckin filer, filed the saw teeth. Ain’t a fuckin son of a bitsie left knows the difference between a goddamn tuttle tooth and a sterling tooth, goddamn scissorbills cannot find their eyes in the sockets.” He had worked in the woods in the old days, out to the Pacific and back, and the only people who mattered to him were dead men, men whose exploits and scars could never be equaled by the soft maggots of the contemporary woods.