Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  “What do you think we go up to Québec and get some records and learn that music? I got to have records to figure it out. Let Emma come to translate. We could go up to that town, they say there’s a lot of accordion players.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Montmagny. I was up there once, pick up this special saw blade.” But Wilfred wasn’t crazy about the idea, wasn’t crazy about the music, either, and kept putting the trip off. Dolor wondered if he had figured out how he felt about Emma and was jealous. Emma called from the kitchen, “they don’t give green stamps up there,” and that seemed to end it.

  But he woke up on a rainy Saturday morning with the idea of driving to Montmagny himself even though he did not understand the language. If he brought the green accordion he wouldn’t need to talk.

  The logging road bucked and twisted under him as he drove through the slashed woodlots toward the border checkpoint. He had expected it to look the same on the Québec side, but the country flattened out into clustered villages with long, narrow farm fields stretching out behind them. It was all farming, cows and crops, and this surprised him. As he drove over the flat roads he sensed a demonic energy coiled inside the houses and barns. Yards bristled with whittled objects and moving parts, robots constructed from tractor parts, bizarre flowers constructed from plastic bleach bottles, windmills, flying ducks, miniature houses set among the stones and emitting clouds of resident wasps, pinwheels, donkeys made of bottle caps, a canoe balanced on a stump and manned by carved paddlers, bouquets of tin cans, lath figures in scarecrow clothing with Halloween-masked faces. The rain faded and he drove toward a clearing horizon and sunlight.

  The trip became a journey, through St.-Georges, St.-Joseph-de-Beauce, St.-Odilon, St.-Luc, St.-Philémon, St.-Paul-de-Montminy, Nôtre-Dame-du-Rosaire. A heady feeling rose in him that he was returning home. Somewhere up here was his source. He wept when he saw the great river, the deep bolt of water shot into the heart of the continent.

  It was late afternoon when he reached Montmagny. The sun was low. The old stone houses with graceful pavilion roofs along the river glowed yellow and the water seemed made of sheets of torn gold. He drove around until dusk. There was no traffic on the street, only a woman walking a small black dog. He felt he had come into another century. He was hungry, he was afraid, excited. He found a place to park a few blocks away from a building that looked like an inn; dozens of cars were parked on the streets nearby. The swinging sign picturing the musicians read LES JOYEUX TROUBADOURS. He carried his accordion case. Before he opened the door he heard the music.

  A young woman with red lips and black hair curled under at the ends sat at a desk, the panel of a green door behind her painted with two dancing rabbits, looked up from a handful of papers, saw the accordion case and smiled.

  “Bon! Un autre accordéoniste pour la veillée.” She consulted her papers. “Quel est ton nom—?” Her voice was husky and hesitant, as though she had suffered a throat injury in the past and it was still painful to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” he said slowly, “I cannot talk French. I come up here looking to hear some accordion music.” She looked at him gravely. He smiled and lifted the case a little. “I do not speak French, I’m sorry,” he said, wishing there were a language of thoughts.

  She pursed her lips, raised her right forefinger and gave it a little shake as if to say wait one extremely brief minute, and disappeared behind the green door, leaving it ajar. There was an accordion on a chair near the door. He could make out the name Ludwig Sapin and see the image of a little spruce tree on it. Was it hers? He imagined himself married to the young woman, in love with her, combing her black hair, waking in the morning to her ragged voice. He could hear the music plainly now—a fiddle, an accordion and spoons; no, it had to be two accordions; the thump of the musicians’ heels. The woman came back, followed by a red-haired man in a suit that was too tight for his robust frame, adhesive tape across the bridge of his nose.

  “What can I do for you?” he said in American.

  “I drove up from Maine,” said Dolor. “This sounds dumb but I’m trying to find accordion players, I mean, the traditional music, you know. I’m French but I can’t talk it. Name is Dolor Gagnon. I’m trying to find out about the old music. I play the accordion a little, but not the traditional. I can’t find any records. I can’t seem to find anybody who still plays it. Not in Maine, anyway.”

  The man laughed. “Buddy boy,” he said, “did you hit the jackpot! In that room are some of the best. Anywhere. In the world! If I tell you Philippe Bruneau is in there and Joe Messervier’s boy Marcel, and a kid named Raynald Ouellet, Marcel Lemay and one or two more—maybe it doesn’t mean anything to you, but take my word for it, it’s the best. Tonight is the night of the Veillée du bon vieux temps in honor of the late Monsieur Duguay, accordéoniste extraordinaire. You’re welcome to sit at our table if we can find you a chair.” He spoke American without the trace of an accent, moved fluidly in and out of French, introduced himself as Fintan O’Brien, an overseer at the Thetford Mines and a fiddler of Celtic airs, born in Ireland, raised in Philadelphia and Halfmoon, Idaho, now marooned in Québec, he said, a man without a country, ha-ha.

  The dim golden room was packed with people at round tables illumined by candles. Along one wall he saw a long buffet covered with platters and dishes and dozens of bottles of wine. The red-haired man led him to a crowded table and found a chair for him, introduced his wife, Marie, in a scarlet dress, announced to the table that here was a lover of the old music, a traveler from Maine who could not find what he craved in the States.

  To Dolor he said, “it’s a special night. They’re losing the traditional music in Québec too—big band, folk music, pop songs from the States, that’s what people want to hear. But not here, maybe the last place where this music is alive and well.”

  An elderly man sang a line and every face turned to the front of the room where he stood on a dais. The accordions and the spoons glittered in the rich light, the knees of the musicians rose and fell in metronomic vigor. All over the room people were nodding their heads, prancing their fingers on the table, swaying and clicking their teeth in rhythm with the cuillères, the os, the pieds of the accordéonistes, until the tables were cleared away and dancing began.

  He was in a room of French people. There were similarities in bone structure, in the fine hands, the dark hair and eyes. He told himself these were the people from whom he had come, he was genetically linked to those around him. He felt a curious thrill. It became the great night in his life, the one he later pulled up from submerged dreams, though the memory was flawed by a phantasm assumption. He believed that on that evening he had understood and spoken French.

  The music was stunningly brilliant, joyous with life and vigor. The dancers sprang over the floor and now and then they would draw back and give room to a step dancer whose rigid back, erect head and straight-hanging arms accentuated the clattering, tapping, rapping, knocking, flinging feet whose steps stuttered in and out of the music. He wished Wilf could hear the fiddler, the sound like a flock of birds, a flight of arrows striking all around him, from a growling, clenched-teeth mutter on the G and D strings to harmonic shrieks and stair-tumbling runs—Jean something, a taxicab driver from Montréal. He stared, he listened so intently that what he heard was fixed forever. He remembered everything. His attention fell particularly on a brawny, square-jawed young accordionist with a pompadour of gleaming black hair. When the man played he seemed in a trance, his face fixed and expressionless, his eyes glaring into a distance beyond the room, his leg springing up and down like a piece of machinery, a fine accord de pieds. His music was muscular, with a full, ringing tone, very rapid and technically flawless. On and on he played, the music surging, circling, twining in and out of itself like a nest of snakes. It created a blue ozone mist around the player. No one was better than he and when he stopped, the throats of the people in the room roared. Dolor clapped until he thought his fingernails would fly off.

  “Wh
o is he?” he shouted to Fintan O’Brien in the din of applause. The man answered but Dolor could not hear him.

  A hollow-voiced man with a black, twenty-past-eight mustache announced a quadrille and played a curious “Français” accordion, very small, with only seven folds in the bellows. A bicycle bell attached to it signaled the change for each new figure of the intricate dance. The sound was too small for the room. Not far into the tune, the dancers stopped and looked accusingly at the accordionist who shook his head in apology and began again from the beginning.

  (The hollow-voiced man went to London the next spring to play this instrument in a program that included Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand Grand Overture” for three vacuum cleaners and solo floor polisher.)

  Toward the end of the evening the black-haired young woman from the front desk stepped forward with her little spruce tree accordion. She sang a complainte, a deep, slow drone from the accordion, and her voice issuing from a closed throat seemed unearthly and strained to him, the voice of someone in the grip of an invisible power.

  When the musicians put their instruments away at eleven o’clock he left, a scrap of paper in his pocket with Fintan O’Brien’s address, a promise to stay in touch. His head rang with wine. Outside the dark village he pulled the truck over and slept cramped up on the seat, dreaming something unutterably sad that he could not recall when he woke up in violet river fog to the flapping of ravens’ wings and remembered that in the bed of the truck were three bags of garbage he had forgotten to bring to the dump.

  What’s the use?

  On the return journey he could feel the familiar depression lowering onto him like the premature darkness that foreshadows a coming storm: a chronic, tearing misery that never completely retreated. He drove, yawning, the truck swaying over the line and touching gravel from time to time. He could not have Emma, nor the black-haired young woman at the green door. He wanted to play that music, music that belonged to him by blood inheritance, but could not learn it because he didn’t speak French, because he lived in a place where the music was no longer admired or played, because he could never be as good as the tranced man with the piston leg. Random had revealed nothing, meant nothing and held no meaning for him. The journey to Québec had only compounded his sense of alienation and inadequacy. He could never be those accordionists. And of himself he knew what he had known when he was two—nothing, rien, nothing. He threw the scrap of paper scratched with Fintan O’Brien’s name out the window and went on.

  Une douleur

  In June, two months after Wilf’s death, something went wrong with his legs. He woke in the morning, didn’t realize it at first, looked out the smeary window at white fog, white shirts and socks on Mrs. Pelky’s clothesline hanging limp, thinking it would burn off by ten. The black flies had been bad the day before; his scalp and neck were lumpy with their bites. He was ready to quit for good, fed up with the woods and the dirty work, and whatever he thought, his mind kept slewing around, arrowing back to Wilf.

  The days were warmer but the roads were still icy in the higher elevations where Wilf steered loads of pulp through the New Hampshire mountains to the paper mill in Berlin. They worked it out later that he must have whipped the truck around the sloped hairpins, taking them a little fast, then hit a section where a spring in the cliffs had frozen down the rock face, overflowed the ditch and crawled onto the road, a fan of blue ice two inches thick, slanting toward the precipice. The truck soared off the road at speed, fell through the icy air upright and into the trees, old black spruce, dense and brittle. As the trailer broke away and tumbled into the ravine spilling four-foot logs, a long broken stub speared up through the cab, pierced Wilf’s back so the bloody jag exited at the lower sternum, tearing away the xiphoid process and stabbing into the roof of the cab. Wilf, impaled, lived on. The ambulance came keening through the trees, and to his rescuers his moans were no louder than the wind in the rocks but far more memorable.

  Mr. Pelky brought the news to him, his voice low, shaking his head, adding the bloody details and spinning out the telling.

  “They had to cut off the stub, see, top and bottom, with a chain saw and bring him to the hospital with that stub still in him. They couldn’t lie him down in the ambulance, see, with that wood in him so they had him strapped on boards along his sides, under his arms, see, and they held him up. It didn’t do no good. He died on the way.”

  Dolor could not go near Emma, did not go to the funeral. He went to his distant slope the third morning after the funeral, the back of his truck in grimy order, the scarred Stihl, toolbox and dented gas cans, red paint chipped and marred, the tools becrusted with oil and leaf dust, sawdust, road dust. A light rain smeared the windshield, the sky dull along the east rim of mountains, the houses he passed, inmates in the deepest sleep, his headlights gouging a way through the trees. He yawned, still warm from the bed, a row of stale doughnuts sliding with the candy wrappers on the dash, a cup of coffee sloshing in the homemade wooden holder he’d lashed in place with wire, one by one eating the white sugared cakes, jelly spurting, until his mouth clogged with disgust of the sweet half-raw dough and he had had more than enough. His legs ached.

  By noon he could barely keep from fainting when he straightened up because of the pain in his legs. He told the foreman he was sick, staggered to the truck.

  As the day wore on, his vision blurred, he hyperventilated, he fought to keep from strangling. The next morning his legs did not hurt so badly but he could barely move them. The Pelkys did not knock on his door until the end of the week, and by then he was feeling better, he was moving around the apartment at least, thought it might have been arthritis, everybody who worked in the cold damp woods ended up with it. Mrs. Pelky came and said Emma was with the kid at her parents’ house in Honk Lake, she was probably going to move back in with her mother and father, she sent her love to Dolor.

  “I’ll go up and see her in a few weeks,” he said but didn’t do it.

  In the months after the accident he became preoccupied with his body. Strange sensations overtook him. Enormous sensitivities prickled: loud colors, bright light, the beeping of dump trucks in reverse, slamming doors and the conversations around him scraped his nerves raw. He developed allergies to dust, mold, apples and tomatoes. He was constipated, bought packets of laxatives at the Cut Rate drugstore in Millinocket, but nothing worked. He heard of a health food store that had just opened in Portland and made the long drive to forage through the jars of blackstrap and honey, the coarse bran and dark apricot ears. He bought packets of ginseng tea and nerve tisanes but developed abdominal pain, sore throat, shooting pains in his joints. One night pain spread through his face, a dull, severe ache that was unbearable at night. It hurt to rest his cheek on the pillow but if he turned on his back the pain flowed in waves from ear to ear. His mouth was burning up, his tongue swelled until he could barely speak. He woke at two in the morning with groin pains shooting up one leg and into his abdomen, across and down the other leg, circumscribing an endless circle of pain. It hurt to urinate, to defecate. He wrote out a list of pain and suffering in a shaking, paralyzed hand and brought it to the doctors at the V.A. Hospital. Diverticulitis, they thought, or a spastic colon, a back problem or a kidney problem. Kidney stones or nephritis—

  The aches coiled and uncoiled. He was cold, yet there was internal heat as though a ferocious furnace was stoked in his depths. It was too much; one morning he tried to get out of bed, managed a few steps, then fell on the floor where he stayed until the Pelkys heard him pounding with the heel of his hand.

  The Pelkys helped him into the back seat of their old sedan, Mrs. Pelky stuffing a bed pillow that still smelled of her night hair under his shoulder. Mr. Pelky, his driving confused by a sense of emergency, squealed onto the highway and sped for the hospital. The trees were in heavy bud, the wet road under the maples covered with their fallen blossom, as dark red as coagulated pools of blood. The car whirred past sloping maple, soft buff and genital-flesh blur, and below this
purpled arc a line of popple flashed, then past veins of birch, then the curving line of the ridge and through the branches the puzzled sky, and they were past the roaring arms of the pines and the swamp filled with stalks, coming to the first fields and scratchy lines of red osier, bramble hoops, and all of it strung together with birdcalls and apprehension.

  Nothing wrong

  They didn’t know what was wrong with him. He had them arguing, diagnosing unseen injuries, germ warfare, malingering, childhood polio, psychosomatic paralysis, a slipped disk, chronic fatigue, central nervous disorder, psychogenic pain, loss of pep, muscle spasms, an unknown virus, bacterial infection, a hereditary disorder, posthypnotic suggestion, infectious mononucleosis, depressive hysteria, hypochondriacal delusions, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, brucellosis, or encephalitis. But after three weeks, there was no change and they sent him back to Random in a wheelchair. If he could manage to stand up he could totter a few steps, but that was all, and the pain in his legs and back was relentless.

  The social worker at the V.A. helped him get a small government disability pension, but it wasn’t enough to live on because he had to pay Mrs. Pelky to cook for him and help him get to the toilet and in and out of bed. Mr. Pelky built a plywood ramp down the entry stairs.