Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  There were square-jawed Malefoot relatives in New Brunswick and in Maine, they were all over Texas, Beaumont on the Gulf, up in the Big Thicket country through Basile Malefoot who had married into the Plemon Barko rednecks with their cur dogs and whooping coon hunts on a dirt-yard frontier, Basile who on horseback could round up unmarked pigs with his dogs, rope a young porker and haul it squealing up on the saddle, clip its ears and release it. A twirl of his rope, a cry, and he had another.

  Basile’s older brother, Elmore Malefoot, herded cattle and raised hogs, fought Texas fever, ticks and flies on the north edge of the Calcasieu prairie near the pine flats where spits and points of woodland projected into the grassy flat plains like headlands and capes into the sea, where groves of hickories and oak and the small indentations of prairie, reminding the homesick of the irregularities of the lost coastline, were named coves and bays and islands. In the woods to the north of the prairies lived a strew of Scots Irish and Americans on their lonely square tracts, insulated from the pleasure of company and the comfort of good neighbors; the Germans down from the midwest to raise rice instead of wheat had been swallowed up, had gone French after a taste of bayou water.

  The third brother, Onesiphore, had stayed in the small settlement of Goujon. Long, narrow strips of farmland ran out behind the houses as on the distant St. Lawrence centuries earlier. Onesiphore raised hogs and cane and grazed a few scrubby cattle on gazon, grass that grew lush and thick but failed to nourish and died and rotted when winter frost was followed by the inevitable rain. The state paved the old gumbo roads in the thirties and now, in 1959, people built along the macadam, no longer a mire of mud or choking dustland, as they had built once on the river, arranging the land in novel patterns.

  Onesiphore Malefoot could remember his father, André, a man who always looked as though he were leaning back in a chair even when he was standing up, hauling their new-built house (constructed in Mermantau, near the sawmill), with teams of oxen and the help of his brothers, Elmore and Basile, over the open prairie.

  “It took three days to get to Goujon. Oh yeah, they couldn’t get more than ten mile a day. That poor lovely man, he has the luck of a skinny calf. He get it move and what a trouble, he forget she’s jacked up and in the night—and he goes fall off the side of the house and break his leg.” The house was buried in four immense cape jasmines, the drugging, drowsing perfume of home for every Malefoot who ever lived within its walls, a missing sweetness that made Buddy uneasy when he was out on the rig doing his fourteen days, making good money and dying of homesickness.

  “Tell me again about this accordeen thing and how you found it and what’s so good about it. Why you buy this? We got accordeens plenty, the Napoleon Gágné, the blue one, we got the Spanish three-row, and you, you got that pretty little Soprani, and we could get fixed up the funny one—I forget all them name, but the one I wish we got is that old black and gold Monarch. Oh yeah. We got now un mystère accordeen, is it?”

  The daughter-in-law opened her mouth for the second time.

  “Pete Lucien’s Marie got her niece Emma down from Maine, her husband Emil plays some music up there, the accordion—”

  “Country, he plays country and western music. You know, ‘Saddle my yodelin bronco and ride through the campfire at night—’” Buddy gargled an imitation yodel. “What the hell they’re doin with that kind of music in Maine? You got a cigarette, Papa?”

  “How about right here? Happy Fats, oh yeah, he ain’t influence by country-western? The Rayne-Bo Ramblers, Hackberrys? Diable, they was playin it when I was a bébé. How about Frank Deadline, after the war? I play it myself, oh yeah, western swing, you play it, what you play sounds pure country sometimes. Hell, country all you hear on the radio. You told me yourself country is all you get out on the rig. So this poor Emil, he plays country-western accordeen, come down here, listen some Louisiana music, he decide, oh yeah, give up his accordeen because he can’t never play so good as Cajuns?”

  The daughter-in-law, wreathed in grey smoke, snickered. “Nothing like that.”

  Buddy said, “Nothing like that. He don’t like our music, too sad, not smooth. No, he keeps his own accordeen, just a big piano accordeen, white, weighs three or four tons, don’t make so much sound as a little ten-button. This one here is the accordeen of some other guy, married to the niece’s sister. The niece is Emma, her sister Marie, call Mitzi. The guy up in Maine, married to Marie, I forget his name, he’s the one that had the accordeen”—and he gestured at the case between his wife’s feet—“and he was crippled up bad, I don’t know it had ennathing to do with that accident Emma’s first husband died from, remember we heard about that?”

  “Truckdriver-accident man the only one I heard about, oh yeah.”

  “That’s him. Emma’s husband, first husband, before this Emil-with-the-accordion-to-sell that belongs to the friend of Emma’s truck-accident husband, the friend that marries Emma’s sister Marie call Mitzi and got bad hurt legs, I don’t know his name. That’s the songs they supposed to play up there, French songs about chain saws and log trucks. But no, they got to get cowboy hats. So this bad-leg friend of Emma’s truck-accident husband—he’s a friend of Emil too—it’s his accordeen, he’s in a wheelchair, he makes a promise to god, if he gets his legs better he’s gonna give up the accordeen. That’s what happen. He gets better. And then! He kills himself. Married two or three months and kill himself. So Emil and Emma is already on the road for down here to sell the accordeen for him, somebody down here will like to buy it. Now Marie, she’s the wife calls herself Mitzi, she’s Emma’s sister, of the bad-leg-wheelchair-friend-of-Emil-and-the-truck-accident-husband, she need every dollar.

  “Ennaway, nobody up there like the button accordeen no more. Bad as here. They say it’s Frenchie stuff, so everybody going for the guitar, play rock and roll and all that. So I squeeze it a little bit, I can hear she’s special, Papa, you gonna like the sound of this instrument, and she’s got a big long bellows, plenty of squeeze in her, a crying voice. Oh she’s a nice little girl accordeen, lonesome for the pine trees in the north, for that poor dead man, she cries on her pillow all night.”

  “Vite!À la maison! I am on flames to hear this accordeen.”

  “He scratch his name on the end, but I guess we sand it down right away. Leather bellows, très bon kidskin, pliable. He put something on it, what they used to put on the harness of the log horses, this Emil says, so it don’t dry out.”

  “It’s not stiff, it don’t fight you? Leather bellows fight back, oh yeah, they do. I remember one that Iry Lejeune had before he got run over—like squeezing a corpse.” He blew out a rod of smoke through pursed lips.

  “No, it’s easy. She’s in pretty good shape, I think. You’ll look at it, Papa.”

  Trois jours après ma mort

  They were nearing the village now, past the gas station at the crossroads.

  “Wait, wait, wait, wait. What is this?” Onesiphore pointed at a building going up, the Marais brothers nailing up exterior sheathing, gaping rectangles in the facade for plate-glass windows.

  “Gonna be a restaurant. Somebody from Houston behind it. Call it Boudou’s Cajun Café, jambalaya, crawfish boil and live music every night. For the tourists.”

  “Who is this Boudou?”

  “Nobody. They just make up a name it sounds like Cajun, French ennaway. Building up the tourist industry, employ local people, that’s the Marais brothers.”

  “Y’know,” Onesiphore said, squinting up his eyes malevolently, “my generation we just live. We don’t think who we are, or anything, we just get born, live, fish and farm, eat home cooking, dance, play some music, grow old and die, nobody come here and bother us. Your generation split up. All of you talk American, no French hardly at all. Some say ‘oh, I got to learn French, I got to be Cajun, quick, show me some words and give me a ’tit fer I can play Cajun music.’ So then these bébés here, they coming up in a time where strangers get in, make a restaurant, nobody’s gonn
a eat at home and go to the dance, but they go to a restaurant own by some guy from Texas, a place for tourists come to see the Cajuns, like monkeys. CAJUNLAND! Put up the sign.”

  Buddy rolled his eyes. They were past Dumont’s store, abreast of the woven wire fence topped with two rows of barbwire in front of Bo Arbour’s new ranch house, window trim painted sea blue, plaster ducks in the rank-growing grass and the first of the row of television aerials that marked the air with loops and curves resembling the old skillet-full-of-snakes cattle brands.

  “You never could tell, you look at that nice house, old man Arbour died from leprosy. Oh I remember, they said his leg was like cheese, his big toe fell off in the bedroom, then they took him away to Carville there with the lepers. Kept it secret for a long time so he can stay home.”

  “Oil rig work built that house,” said Buddy out of the right side of his mouth. They passed Onesiphore’s cow pond and turned into his driveway. Buddy and the daughter-in-law lived on the far edge of the village near the rice field, in the modular house Buddy was still paying off. They pulled up behind Onesiphore’s old truck, the paint completely gone, a dark red shell of a truck eaten out by the damp salt, dented all over from the old man’s accidents and dance hall parking lot bashes with fried drivers. There was a spatter of shot holes in the cab from the night Belle was killed.

  “Let’s get this cow trough down first,” said Onesiphore. “I wanna put him over by the fence where it’s that old wood one.” Cigarettes in the corners of their mouths to keep the smoke from their eyes, they carried it to the fence and pulled away the splintered, broken wooden trough that had been there forever, as long as Buddy could remember, and Onesiphore lashed the new one to the fence with wire. The galvanized metal gleamed.

  “Those cows don’t butt it away now, oh yeah, when he’s empty,” he said. “We try it out with a little hay, get them used to this good new trough,” and he broke a bale into it. There was a rumble of thunder.

  Belle

  The daughter-in-law made the children take off their shoes in the entry; Mme Malefoot kept a bitterly clean house, and it was one reason Buddy and his family did not often go there. The white gas range against one wall balanced the gleaming refrigerator on the other. The clean blue light from the window reflected from the surface of the white enamel table and from the polished glass ashtray. The floor was white linoleum, waxed to a watery glare. Mme Malefoot had ordered the flooring after the death of Belle, dead years ago in a parking lot in Empire. Three other people had been shot or stabbed in separate fights that night, two of them blasted by an enraged and drunk troublemaker named Earl, thrown out of the bar for pissing on customers’ legs (he later had a fatal coughing fit in the penitentiary). In the moiling darkness customers had rushed from wall to wall, into the parking lot and back, like ants trodden by horses. Belle, her silhouette mistaken by Earl for that of the bartender—both were slender and short, both had frizzy halos of hair—took a charge of buckshot in the chest and died at the hospital the next morning. The waiting room had smelled of guinea pigs.

  Always tidy and fine, Mme Malefoot began after Belle’s funeral to clean obsessively, spoke little, fell into silences. She left Onesiphore’s bed and slept in the room of her dead daughter. In the flow of the rising moon it seemed sometimes the girl was only away, visiting her cousins in Texas. A slow, holy music, pure voices arcing through the broken clouds, slid into the room with the moonlight. A net of light appeared on the wall, a delicate mesh in a curving form like a drawn bow, with a deep band at the end and a fringe of filaments, long threads of moonlight given motion by the warm air above the electric heater through which the light passed. She could not find the source of this odd and beautiful dispersion and in a few minutes it was gone, the wall an ordinary dull white. She took it as proof of her daughter’s ascension and presence. She secretly purchased a selection of tubes of paint and when Onesiphore was away from the house tried to re-create her dead daughter’s face, first on paper plates, then on squares of canvas, unstretchered, laid flat on the table, copying from old photographs. She painted her as an infant, as a child holding a snapping turtle above her head, on her knees saying her prayers, as a young woman sitting beside her father striking the ’tit fer that had caused her death, for had she not played music in the rowdy dens with Onesiphore and Buddy, had she not worn American blue jeans, had she had a fuller bosom—poor child, she was as flat as a wall—she would not have been mistaken for a man in that rough place and would still live. Had she not been a little slow, an innocent who was not wary of evil, all would have been different. Onesiphore himself had a great scar from eye to jaw from years before when he had played at a country dance hall (“Hit the floor and start dancin!”), a dangerous place where the musicians were not protected from flying bottles by a chicken-wire cage, all that smoke and so hot their eyes as red as Christmas the next day, and Buddy was always in a fight, partly because of his combative nature, his truculent anger, but so far had felled all attackers with right-left punches and a knee in the groin. The best painting of Belle, showing her as a child holding a calico cat, hung in that bedroom, framed in a black-enameled toilet seat with gilded margin, the lid hiding the portrait unless it was lifted.

  Onesiphore examines the green accordion

  White muslin curtains framed the incoming storm. A painting of three diaphanously clothed angels flying through a rainbow, also from Mme’s brush, one angel with the features of Belle, hung over the insurance company calendar. White china plates leaned against the rail of the sideboard, cups the white of peeled eggs, a white sink and a white porcelain drainboard. The daughter-in-law felt as awkward as a burned moth bumping against the enameled surfaces. In all this chill paleness only Mme Malefoot, dressed in her cream polyester pants suit, the smell of fresh-roasted coffee and the chairs seemed lively and warm. The chairs were homemade, with thick legs and plain ladderbacks, the wood scraped smooth with a piece of broken glass, the seats of red and white cowhide with the hair still on. Near the window was the cat’s chair, and out in the grass inspecting the new trough stood the cat himself, immense, squarish and orange, resembling a suitcase, his tail a broken strap. The storm cloud darkened the grass and he moved toward the back door.

  Mme was stout and proud, her grey hair fixed in a tight double bun at the top of her head. Her large face, like a china plate itself, floated above a lace collar. She embraced her daughter-in-law without feeling, kissed the children coldly, set out pecan cookies on a foil pie tin instead of good china which the daughter-in-law perceived as an insult, began to grind the coffee beans, halted in midgrind to admit the cat who was clawing at the door. He marched to his chair, sprang up and began smoothing his fur in short, displeased licks.

  Buddy opened the instrument case, lifted out the green accordion and handed it to his father. Onesiphore, on his chair, legs cocked open, examined it minutely, undid the clasps. He worked the buttons, nodding at the action, then lifted his arms, elbows down, and began to draw music from it, the vigorous double time seizing the kitchen, kicking up the rhythm with his octave jumps. He stopped after a few minutes, looked at Buddy and winked, then turned away and began to play again, lifting his voice over thunder so loud the china plates quivered against their dish rail, threw down a sobbing gulp at the end of the lines as though he had been punched.

  “Yie, chère ’tite fille,

  Ah, viens me rejoindre là-bas à la maison.

  Trois jours, trois jours après ma mort, yie,

  Tu vas venir à la maison te lamenter à moi.

  Yie, garde-donc ’tit monde …

  “Oh yeah, man that made this knew one or two somethings. Buzz on the E, probly a loose reed. She’s quick, got good action, but she’s noisy. You hear how she clacks?” He lit a cigarette, squinted into the nearly empty pack with sorrow.

  “Me, I like that sound. That’s part of the music. That’s Cajun, that clacking.”

  “Tell you what’s not Cajun is that valves—you hear her make that gurgle,
a kind of throat sound? Listen.” He played again:

  “Fais pas ça ou ta maman va pleurer.

  Viens avec moi, yie, là-bas,

  Non, non, ta maman fait pas rien.

  Yie, toi, ’tite fille,

  Moi je connais tu ferais mieux pas faire ça, yie, yie, yie”

  and they could hear the rough sound, could hear too the first strikes of rain as though called down by the music.