by Annie Proulx
Emma, short and rumpy, dark circles under her eyes, said, seems funny, you being French but can’t talk it.
“Yeah.” He knew all about how funny it was, his name taken from him, the language lost, his religion changed, the past unknown, the person he had been for the first two years of life erased. He saw how a family held its members’ identities as a cup holds water. The person he had been as a child, a French-speaking boy with a mother and father, brothers and sisters, had been dissolved by the acid of circumstance and accident. He was still that person. He would return someday, like an insect cracking out of its winter case, he would wake speaking, thinking in French, a joyous man with many friends, his lost family would come back. And he always saw this transformation occurring in a warm room dominated by a wood-burning stove. There was a blue door and someone coughed. In French.
French music is hard to find
“Hey, you know, Wilf, the songs we’re tryin to play—I don’t know what it is, but that ain’t what I want. There’s a kind of music I want to play but I don’t know what it is. What are we messing around with? Stuff off the radio, ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore,’ ‘Tom Dooley.’ Folk music. It’s like it isn’t real music. It’s somebody else’s, you know what I mean?”
“I thought you liked the Kingston Trio. We spent two months trying to work out ‘Scotch and Soda.’ What do you want to do, ‘Surfin’? How about a little rock ’n’ roll, a little ‘Blue Suede Shoes’? You like that Pelvis Presley? ‘Ah-ha wah-ha-hant yew-hoo!’ Hey, did you see that movie Blue Hawaii? What a load of shit that was. Or how about some blues? Or them Lawrence Welk bubbles? Bluh bluh bluh bluh. Hope to Jesus not. I don’t want to play that stuff.”
“No, no, no. Look, is there such a thing as French music? I mean, is there a kind of music that’s like, French? I mean, the Frenchies around here?”
“I don’t know. Emma! There such a thing as Frenchie music?”
“Yeah. Ouai.” Her voice came from the kid’s room. “It’s all a bunch of old-time gigues and reels for dancing. There’s nobody around here that does it no more. You got to go up to Québec probably. If they still do it up there. Fiddle music, piano, accordion. You ought to ask my dad. That’s the kind of music he used to play. He’s got all them old seventy-eights, Starr records—I remember that ‘Reel du pendu,’ the hanged man. He must have fifty, sixty them old things. Sometimes when he feels like it he plays a little. But not so much now.”
“And there’s that Cajun stuff,” Wilfred said. “That’s French. But Jesus, I can’t sing like that, sounds like your guts are being pulled out with the pliers. You want to try workin up one of those? ‘Jole Blon,’ maybe? There’s a new Jimmy Newman album out, Folksongs of the Bayou, I heard a cut on the radio the other day, some New Hampshire station, but I couldn’t play that fiddlin style if you put a blowtorch on me. It’s mournful stuff, but real tricky at the same time. You know what we ought to do is get out of here, get out of the kitchen and go listen to what they’re playin around here, you know, around Random, Millinocket, there’s roadhouses on Route Thirty. Hit a few bars maybe, where they got live music. We need to get out of the kitchen.” He was flipping through the new Playboy, half listening for Emma coming down the hall, Emma who would say, get out of here? You been out all week. Try staying home for a change.
“We could do that.”
The bedroom door hinge groaned and he shoved the magazine in Dolor’s accordion case.
Getting out
Emma’s father, who was a weekend gunsmith and held his fiddle to his shoulder like a rifle, turned down the volume on Maverick, said he’d taken all the old Starrs to the dump four or five years before. They had hurled them into the air and shot them with the bird gun.
“Oh, it was a lot of fun. Those old things, they was wore out. But some great music. I use to know it all, how I learned. LaMadelaine, everybody had his records—boy, he could hypnotize you. He come out of the woods, learned fiddle from his father—that old-fashioned sound. Traditional, hein? But Soucy, he was a genius. Nobody ever played like him, not even this guy they got playing now, Jean Carignan? Why I switch to hillbilly. There’s too many good ones up there. Then the accordion come in strong, so I got interested in that, learned to play a little. In the old days we use to have kitchen parties, everybody come, dance, but the new new houses, the ranch houses? The rooms are too small. So you got to hire a hall, go out to a hall or something got enough room.”
Dolor tried to imagine the old music.
The next Saturday night they got dressed up, big jackets, Wilf in a pink shirt half unbuttoned, Dolor in black, and tried the bars in Bertrandville. Emma couldn’t get a baby-sitter and had to stay home. At the North Star, there was a guitar player moaning over “The Tennessee Waltz.” They ordered Bud.
“How about country music? Remember that night we tried to get ‘Abilene’ goin? It sounded pretty good.”
“Yeah, maybe.” The guitar player was mauling “Which One Is to Blame?”
“Christ, the guitar’s a stupid fuckin thing.”
They went down the street to a neon sign that first winked COCKTAILS, then became a stemmed glass with a green and red olive. Inside they ordered whiskey sours which sounded sophisticated and went with the music, a tenor sax, an organ and a bald black man from somewhere else stroking brushes on his drumheads and shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe he was in Maine. When they left, the street was empty but the signs flickered, and they kept hitting the bars. The sleeve of Dolor’s new duffel coat caught on a protruding nail and the fabric tore.
Dolor overheard bits and pieces of French fly past him.
“Je m’en crisse!”
“Mange de la marde!” After a while he had the feeling he could speak French and tried French-sounding words, but it was like talking to the chickens: the tone was there but without meaning. Wilf’s submerged side slowly came up under the influence of whiskey until he was in a homicidal mood. Dolor remembered the crazy-eyed Winks with his lunch tray.
“I hate drivin that goddamn truck,” he screamed and started to punch faces, tore at coats on the backs of strangers and chopped at their necks with the edge of his hand, tried to gouge and bite. Dolor got him back to Random, the truck veering over the road and swaying toward trees and other headlights, wrestled him into the house. Emma gave him a cold eye and said, I hope you’re satisfied.
“It wasn’t much of an idea, I guess.” He wanted to jump her.
Maybe the wildest time they had was on a snowy March night when the Penobnocket radio station announced it had stuffed five thousand dollars in a Coke bottle and hidden it somewhere in town. Men, women and children came from a hundred miles around, spent two days shoveling snow and searching motel rooms, tearing booths out of taverns, invading the courthouse, the post office, garages and the Extension Service office, ganging into the radio station itself, until the state police called everything off and sent them all home. Wilf heard later that the bottle had been hidden in the locked trunk of the station owner’s car. Who could find that? He refused to listen to the station again even though they’d donated the money to a new playground.
Bad thoughts
At twilight in the deepening wood, the pale sawdust spurting from under the teeth of the cutting chain, he felt the pain in his legs again, blamed it on the whole day, the weeks, the cold months leaning down, holding the saw at awkward angles so his back seized up. And rolling and heaving on the trunk to get at the branches pinned underneath, breath gushing from his chapped and cracked lips, chin stubble picked with beads of frost, the smell of oil and two-cycle engine exhaust, of resin and raw wood and crushed needles, the smell of snow and his own reeking armpits and cigarette smoke, thought, was he going to do this the rest of his life? Was he crazy for Emma? He thought he wanted Wilf’s life. He knew he wanted Emma, most deeply because she was French, because she had made a kid for Wilf and because of her dozens of relatives, the Comeau and the Pelky clans, the complex interconnections of blood extending up
over the border and to the St. Lawrence south shore and down through New England and into the south, Louisiana, uncles, cousins, second cousins, aunts’ sisters-in-law, brothers and sisters and their husbands and wives and children. The wealth of blood. He dreamed sentimental family thoughts through tunes as he cut along the bole, trying to limb with certain rhythms, though awkward branches constantly ruined the songs, thinking of those lost records, the blue and gold labels powdering over the dump, the music of dead fiddlers, something Irish-sounding but swingier, a slipping, reeling line of music, wildly ornamented but broken and lost among the wet mattresses and rinds. There was something about the green accordion that repelled him. He could feel how the buttons had been worn by the earlier owner’s fingers, the strap twisted to fit another’s thumb. Ancient dirt packed the joints and cracks—dust from dance hall floorboards, human grease, motes of decayed matter, lint, crumbs. A ghostly player moved into the circle of his arms whenever he took up the accordion. He wanted Emma, yes, but he wanted her to stay with Wilf as well. What did that leave? A marriage with two husbands and awful intimacies. Or maybe Wilf would die and he’d get her. This desire became a template for distorted thoughts and for no reason he began to check if he was pissing blood, worried that the urine would be pink-brown when it hit the snow, although there was no reason for this fear. Then, for weeks, he got in the habit of counting how long it took to empty his bladder. One morning he got to forty-two seconds and expected death from internal rupture in the near future.
The first gig
He was sewing a barbwire tear in the leg of a pair of work pants when he heard the hiss of air brakes, an idling motor, then footsteps as loud as a horse on the Pelkys’ flagstone path. The outside door slammed and Wilf galloped down the hall and into the apartment. He jerked open the refrigerator and took out two beers, opened them, handed one to Dolor, clinked the foaming lips.
“What’s it all about?” said Dolor. “You get elected Driver of the Year?”
“We got a job. A gig. A guy I know, trucker, drives a truck, is havin a surprise party, it’s his wife’s birthday. We supply the music. You and me. We get paid. Twenty bucks. Saturday night. Listen, we got to practice. This gotta go well. After this we’ll play a lot, I know it, if it goes good. Come on, let’s practice. This is the best thing ever happened to us. We’re on our way now. Come look in the truck, see what I got—a amp and a couple of speaker horns at the army surplus. Come on, what the hell are you doing, sewing at a time like this? Goddamn, just like a stupid Frenchman.”
He was calm when the night came. He could remember every note; the fast runs fell off his fingers, the beat was punchy, strong for dancing. But for the first hour it was no good because Wilf shook with stage fright. He shook so hard he could not tune his violin, he overtightened the bow and stripped the screw, had to use the old bow missing half its hair, and when he started to play his hand trembled ferociously, the notes skittered and squalled and he forgot tunes.
Dolor cursed himself for not noticing while they were setting up. The speaker horns were round, made of pot metal and painted khaki green. The Bogen amplifier, under its coat of dust, bristled with glass tubes. They couldn’t find a place to put any of the equipment in the crowded kitchen, finally put one horn on top of the refrigerator, the other on a chair near the back door and the amp on the back burner of the electric range. It warmed up into a steady hum. Wilf was wound tight.
“Christ, that sucker’s heavy.”
“Why do we need this stuff?” said Dolor. “It’s only the kitchen, they can hear the music good.”
“They can’t! Once they get dancin and scratchin their feet around and laughin and slammin the door they won’t hear us. You got to have a amp, that’s what bein a professional is all about.” He kept shaking his hands as though they were wet, changed the placement of the horns five or six times until Big Bubbie, already drunk, yelled, come on, let’s have some music. His wife was white with rage, had been truly and unpleasantly surprised, for her birthday had come and gone unnoticed two weeks before; now, gripped by savage menstrual cramps, both kids hacking with bronchial coughs, she had been slopping around in a torn housecoat, the place a mess of strewn socks, dirty dishes and dust kitties, when cars and trucks began to pull up and disgorge strangers who wished her happy birthday, lit cigarettes and started to drink.
Dolor and Wilf, dressed in matching red Airtex shirts and crepe-soled shoes, squeezed themselves into a tight corner of the kitchen. People going out the back door kept tripping over the speaker wire. Big Bubbie kept shouting “Awright!” The refrigerator door opened every ten seconds, jarring the horn on top. The sound from the speakers was screechy, Dolor thought, all the bass strained out, Wilf’s fiddle notes straight from hell in piercing power.
“Break,” yelled Dolor to Big Bubbie when Wilf’s fingers skidded off the fingerboard like a hockey puck on new ice. He pulled Wilf out into the backyard, through a crowd of drinkers to the quiet of the garage, gave him a beer. His eyes were white with panic.
“Jesus, drink that and settle down. You’re nervous.”
“I know it. It’s all them faces looking at us. There’s this couple keeps trying to dance and I think, ‘oh no, I’m gonna fuck up and they’ll stop and give me a dirty look’—and then I do and they do and I feel like I want to get the hell out of there. Look, am I crazy? Did Bubbie’s wife give us the finger? I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”
“It’s OK,” said Dolor. “She’ll get into it. It’s kind of fun. Just don’t look at nobody. Look at me, just pretend like we’re at your place with Emma, havin a few beers and playing for the hell of it. Anyway, they like it, except her, even when it falls apart. They like the instruments there in the kitchen, it makes everybody feel good. It makes me feel good. It makes your pal there, Big Bubbie, feel real good. I heard somebody tell him it was the best party they ever been to. Everybody’s happy except Mrs. Bubbie and she’ll get with it when we play ‘Happy Birthday.’ Come on. We’re not doin bad. Except for those goddamn speakers—them things sound like somethin out of a train station.”
Wilf calmed himself down by looking rigidly at Dolor. Now he hit hard and clean on the notes, the double-stops true, a kind of goatish leap in his playing that had never been there before, that cooked out as a raw and slangy sound. Dolor was getting good music out of the box, rich and competent, despite the bad speakers, a yard ahead of his usual cut. The dancers were pulling the music out of them. People were dancing, bumping into the stove, the table, the kitchen floor was undulating, Mrs. Bubbie was washing dishes and slapping the clean plates into the drain rack, they were dancing through the door and into the backyard, when somebody slammed the refrigerator door and the speaker rolled off, bouncing from Mrs. Bubbie’s shoulder into the dish-water where it simultaneously broke, exploded and loosed a savage current that raised the birthday girl’s hair in a crest and threw her, staggering, into the crowd of dancers.
Minutes of chaos passed before Dolor yanked the speaker wires loose, jerked the amp plug out of the outlet. Mrs. Bubbie, white and shaking, sat in a chair, Big Bubbie wept on her knees and begged forgiveness, someone brought a glass of whiskey, another a can of beer, another a towel to dry her wet hands, another a blanket covered with dog hairs, and in half an hour, after three glasses of whiskey and abject apologies from her husband, she had recovered enough to command the music—without amplification—to begin again.
“I told you,” said Dolor, feeling this was the right moment to play “Happy Birthday” in waltz time and then move into some good hard dancing stuff. A little later one of the kids sidled through the dancers and said, Mama, there’s smoke comin out of the wall.
At two in the morning, after the fire truck had left, they pulled away, the wreckage of the sound system rattling in the back of the truck, their hot breath misting the windshield so that Dolor kept wiping it with his hand to clear the glass, Wilf passing him the pint of bourbon. They were exhilarated, groaning, laughing, still hearing the music, still
seeing the way a roomful of people sprang and shuffled and swayed and pressed against each other because they had played the twenty songs they knew, still seeing the sparking voltage in the sink and feeling relief when Mrs. Bubbie, not dead, looked at her husband and said through stiff white lips, you pinhead.
“What a night,” said Dolor. “Without them goddamn speakers it would have been good.”
“Yeah, except at the beginning when I couldn’t get it together. I don’t know what happened, I just started shaking.”
“If you leave that out and leave out almost electructing his wife and almost burning the house down, it was good.”
“That fire was Bubbie’s fault, putting foil in the fuse box.”
“Somethin else. Before the trouble started, this lady come up and asked for a song, something French, la danse du something or other. I told her we didn’t know it, she said, shame on you not to play the music of your people.”
“Fuck her,” said Wilf.
“Yeah. All right. But I happen to think she’s right. All I want to know is where the hell is this so-called French music? It sure ain’t around here.”
Virtuosi
The closest he came was once or twice on the way home from the woods he tuned in Le Réveil Rural, on Radio Canada, heard a fiddle reel with tiddly-pom-pom piano accompaniment and the twangy buzz of la guimbarde, the Jew’s harp, then something that sounded untamed and feral, demonic flying runs, a harsh, exultant music that imitated waterfalls, locomotives, a band saw, an accordion huffing, the strike of ice spicules on a tin pan, a screeching, rambling, shrill, mad cascade of music that made him pull over to the side of the road. “Wah!” said the announcer. “Soucy l’incomparable!” Another time he caught a program featuring les accordéons diatoniques, musiciens du Québec; the brilliant and vigorous playing seeped through the static, overrode the scratches and scars of old wax discs; Joseph-Marie Tremblay, Henri Bisson, Dolor Lafleur, Théodore Duguay, murmured the announcer. At least he knew what it was called now: traditional music, la musique traditionnelle. It must have been this that his father played on the old burned accordion. He couldn’t get past the idea that his father had died saving his children from an inferno.