Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  “You’re the men of the house now,” their mother said. “You’ll have to work. We’ve got to work to live.” She believed she had no choice but the classic occupation—taking in laundry. Fay’s memories of his mother were of pulpy hands and the slosh of water, sweet-sung lines of “The Snowy-Breasted Pearl.”

  Love denied

  As a child Fay recognized himself to be a poor, graceless, homely and uneducated mick, out of the running for family life. This painful condition was compounded by his helpless private crashing headlong fall into love with every fine-looking woman and girl he saw—photographs as well. He blushed and burned, looked at the charmers only from under his lashes or by way of window reflections.

  In the midst of the Depression, when he was twenty-four, there had been a woman ranch hand at the R Bar, Eunice Brown, skin and bone and a mad preacher’s face—two intense, glaring eyes and a mouth misshapen by the scar of a burn put on her by a slit-eyed cousin with a branding iron. She took a liking to Fay and embarrassed him by casting sheep’s eyes whenever he had business at the R Bar. Old man Rubble said she was as strong as a man, worked cheaper, and was a better cowboy because she didn’t drink, but Fay thought he must be blind and deaf in the nose, because she kept a pint in her bosom and he’d had a swallow or two of that. But he only loved the beauties and that was the way of it.

  Like his old man he did ranch work, moving from one ranch to another in the basin, taking offense and quitting over imagined slights, getting tired of the food or bunkhouse company, only to shift a few miles to another marginal operation with a desperate rancher and quixotic weather, for a few months bunked with a man named Ballagh who played a concertina with buttons fashioned from a mermaid’s finger bones, or so he said, and taught him how to play the instrument.

  It was the Drowsy Ranch but they called it the All Checked Out because Old Man Drowsy always said that—“I want it all checked out.” There was a deep canyon on the ranch and, at the bottom, a well. To catch the wind, the windmill sat at the top of a one-hundred-ten-foot tower. The most hated, god-awful job on the place was the weekly climb up the tower to grease the bearings, the whole rickety thing groaning and swaying. The first public music Fay played on the unknown cowpoke’s concertina was at a celebration of the canyon fire that burned down the windmill.

  He came to work for Kenneth in 1957 when he was forty-nine years old because he fell in love with Bette at the first sight of her and the Irish face on her, the lovely auburn hair like twisted copper thread, her belly swollen with child and dressed in an old-fashioned cream linen smock with coffee-dyed lace at the neck and cuffs, a maternity dress designed to make the wearer resemble a little girl, and before that fire burned out in favor of the black-haired mail carrier with eyes the blue of a Steller’s jay wing, he’d been working there too long to stop. Ever since, he’d had a partiality for the pregnant ones. But for himself asked only the saddest whores, the ones with drug habits and scabs, gnawed red fingernails and no interest in anything.

  Dancing on cold linoleum

  The long weekend with the desperate boy once a year was a rite for both of them, two ugly, drunken, aging brothers with no gifts or grace beyond whiskey and music, for Padraic, with his quiff of white hair, his crooked eyes, his slanted mouth, played the uilleann pipes, and when Fay put a bottle of whiskey on the table in front of each of them and took up his concertina and Padraic drew the first breath to squeeze into the plaid lung under his arm, they had a precious hour.

  Their music was the songs they’d learned from their mother, songs built in rhythm and interval from an old language neither of them had ever spoken and rarely heard. Padraic wrote down the names of these songs on a list and each year one or the other would have recollected a fragment of “The Barefoot Bachelor,” or “The Coulin,” or “Jenny’s Chickens.” The desperate boy knew all the songs of love for he had been married during World War II for four days, but Fay didn’t know what had happened, no one did beyond Padraic and the female, wherever she was.

  Now the two brothers stood in the desperate boy’s hallway and gripped each other by the elbows, each laid his head upon his brother’s shoulder, taking in the familiar smell of the other, despite tobacco and whiskey overtones, connected with the warmth and safety of the brown blanket they had shared seventy years gone.

  “’Tis the Irish Hour,” said one, tossing off the first glass from the bottle the other had brought, in a mimicking brogue that was their own joke. “Never think of getting yourself an accordion in a nice flat key, say E flat?”

  “Yeah, but I thought about a B/C sooner. You can do it all on them. Yeah, if I had the money and the time to learn, maybe. Anyway, I’m OK with this. Good enough for old waddy Jeffries singing to the longhorns, good enough for me.” The fingers of his right hand twisted and sprang into “The Dogs Among the Bushes,” and from the concertina issued rolls of triplets, a bouquet of ornamentation so floral and richly colored that Padraic could smell the music’s perfume, sweet and a little oily.

  He had a stack of Irish papers for Fay to take home, and for him Fay had a story or two and some tapes for the player in his truck. And he thought of the poor Basco up on his lonely slope with the sheep and the pathetic instrument of bird bones, never a brother to keep him company and sing the childhood songs.

  “Here’s what I think,” said Fay. “Mesas and buttes and rough country is the breaks, ain’t it? Broken land? Well, ain’t it the same thing with music—you make a sound, it breaks the air up? It’s the breaks again, invisible but there.”

  Late at night, the two of them drunk back to limber youth, the desperate boy got up and to the tickle and bounce of “The Broken Plate” did a step dance that took the breath out of Fay watching, and he, not to be outdone, laid his instrument aside and danced out the silent tune on the dirty linoleum of the kitchen floor.

  The Little Boy Blue Pawnshop

  For a long time after Fay left the mountain Javier played, he played and sang into the thickening dark, drinking and singing, his voice and the green accordion’s warped and ruined chords and lunatic notes—he didn’t care—echoing off the boulders, while he imagined tracers of notes making trapezoidal and triangular figures as they bounced from boulder to stone, and it was beautiful, beautiful to hear it, alone.

  But the next day he opened it up to see what could be repaired. The reeds were rusty, that was sure, and the axle, the pivot point for the keys, was probably corroded, grabbing and making the buttons stick. He could think of better places to draw out an axle than in a sheep wagon rocked by wind, something of a delicate operation, but he couldn’t make the instrument any worse. He wasn’t worried about replacing the valves—there was a roll of leather and skin and whang under the bunk.

  He scrambled through the tools looking for a pliers to grip the end of the axle, but for some reason there wasn’t one. At the back of the drawer he turned up two pairs of rusty old sheep shears and an ancient pair of castrating forceps.

  “Them’ll work,” he said to the accordion, “maybe,” but used the fencing tool instead to get a grip on the end of the axle and pull it out straight. It was bad enough.

  The silent reed suffered from a grain of rust jammed between the reed tongue and its vent, and this he eased out with a silk thread from his fly-tying box. The steel reeds were coated with islands of rust and he scraped at them with the blade of his knife but was afraid of lodging more fragments under the reed tongues. He cleaned the reeds with his toothbrush, blowing out the dust until he was dizzy.

  He could see it needed everything—new bellows, new reed, new springs, reed plates reset, grille replaced, and more. But it had a wonderful voice, sonorous, plangent, shouting in grief to the mountain slope.

  Late that summer, at another camp farther west, he laid the accordion on the earth and went with the dog to discover the source of a far-off sheep’s nervous blat, nothing to be seen but some disturbed earth that made him wonder if there was a cat around, but there were no clear tracks, no dead she
ep or signs of a killing. The dog took little interest in the roughened place.

  He was gone for two hours, three, and when he came back he leaned down to pick up the accordion, still thinking about the cat he now believed was up on the slope with him, scraping the bellows over the rattlesnake resting beneath the instrument and receiving the fangs in the great vein in the crook of the elbow.

  The camp tender found him ten days later, his skin blackened by the high-altitude sun. He thought, heart attack, poor old bastard, loaded him into the back of the pickup with his belongings. Javier was buried at the back of the cemetery without a stone, and his goods stored in the Basque hotel where he had spent the winters and the morose times between work.

  Two summers later the owner sold the hotel to a young Vietnamese couple and returned to his ancestral fishing village, Elanchove, where he had been born sixty-seven years earlier, hoping for a bride and a few years of home comfort. The new owners cleared out the back room packed with boxes of old clothing, bibles and catechisms, spurs and boots and worn saddles, yellowed calendars with day after day crossed out in crooked slashes and Xs, shepherds’ crooks, rifles, ancient trunks, and a green accordion. All that seemed salable went to the Little Boy Blue pawnshop on commission.

  Back Home with Reattached Arms

  Harmless

  Ivar Gasmann, the youngest son of Nils and Elise Gasmann, grandson of immigrants Gunnar and Margaret Gasmann, was a familiar figure in Old Glory, Minnesota, in the late 1970s, pushing his grocery cart with the groaning wheel along the streets, picking up cans, bottles, a pair of muddy, tread-printed underpants, nor did he ignore odd-colored rocks, slouching along, his hands on the handlebar, blond hair lying in dusty ropes over his shoulders, hair that he would knot and tie under his bony chin when the wind blew at his back, blinking eyes the color of sky-reflecting glass, a fine-faced man but slow in mind and dirty in person. People saw him as soft, yet potentially violent, some said he ate lost dogs, and anyone could see he lived like a swine.

  Yet he was useful in the community. For him women set out things they no longer wanted: three-legged side tables, leopardskin-print cushions, a soap-flake-premium cookie jar in the shape of a bulldog head, sections of toy train track, wall plaques of three flying geese moderne, dusty eucalyptus leaves, papier-mâché bananas and artichokes, a pink crib whose occupant had died in the night. These objects he hauled to his shack in the lilac trees, near something that had been a livery stable at the turn of the century, a gaunt building slumped at one end like a rising camel, the roof patched with flattened baking powder cans.

  He had never had sexual intercourse with a woman. His feeling for men, after a peculiar encounter with a short-order cook at Chippewa Willy’s Grill, was ambivalent.

  Nils and Elise

  When Ivar was born, a year before World War II ended, his parents farmed north of town on land once black with the dense shadow of giant pines. (The forests went down long before old Gasmann bought the farm, cut by axemen and sawyers from Prince Edward Island, Maine, Québec, New Brunswick, Finland, Norway, Sweden; as the loggers moved west, into the raw stumpland came Germans, Czechs, Scandinavians, Slovaks, Croatians, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and a few Irish and French with farming on their minds.)

  Gunnar Gasmann had come over from Norway in 1902 (during the passage the ship steamed through waters where, ninety-three years later, the world’s largest concrete drilling platform stood in the Troll offshore gas field), dragged around Wisconsin and Michigan for ten years working in the lead mines, the lumber mills, as a laborer, a hired farmhand, before the family bought the stumpland farm for fifty cents an acre. Stubborn and easily injured, Gunnar took offense if anyone had the bad manners to call him by his first name, felt patronized by a warm greeting. He thought book learning an affectation of the snotty middle class and discouraged his children from school. He had a single joke, an acid retort for those who crossed him: why don’t you go back where I come from?

  Under the authority of this thin-skinned man the boy Nils grew up barely literate but good with an axe, a natural for the lumber camps where he started working at fifteen. By the time he was twenty he was a tie hack in the Idaho mountains.

  (His twin sister, Floretta, left the farm a month after he did. She tied up with Jack Brady’s All-Girl Wild West Show for a while, switched to rodeo and became a champion trick rider and bronc rider. In 1927, at Tucumcari, New Mexico, she was thrown, landed on the back of her head, dead instantly of a broken neck.)

  Nils disliked farming and returned to it reluctantly after each season’s work, drinking and cursing in the polyglot camp talk of Swedish, Norwegian and English. Every summer after the river drive, suffering from squeak heel, an audible ailment of the Achilles tendon that afflicted many who drove the ties down the tumbled water of snowmelt rivers, he hitchhiked back to Old Glory where his wife, Elise, kept old Gunnar’s farm going with her half-wit cousin, Freddy, a good worker who needed no pay.

  But as soon as the last cutting of hay was in the barn and the corn shocked, Nils was off again for the woods camp with his chopping axe, broadaxe and peeler, hungry for tobacco, whiskey and the stink and rough company of men—the place where all of his teeth except two uppers and two lowers dead center had been pulled by Oleson, the tie pin, with a pair of oily pliers in the winter of 1936. (Oleson joined the navy in 1943, stayed in until 1947 when he was one of six hundred killed in the Texas City, Texas, explosion of a hold full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer.) Nils’s mail-order dental plate was patterned from a wax impression he made with a plug of chew in his cheek. The teeth did not fit well, and because he frequently lost them during drinking bouts, he burned his initials in them with the heated tip of his knife, N.G.

  “Know what that means?” said Oleson. “N.G.—No Good.”

  In the woods he felt at home, a fluid and tireless chopper of perfect ties seven inches by eight feet, ears cocked for the ring of the gut hammer, his imagination playing with the pleasures of the whorehouse and saloon, of fiddle and accordion tunes by moonlight with the tie hack musicians sitting on stumps in the cutover and the rest of them lurching over rough ground, treading hemlock cones into powder dancing with one another’s shadows.

  In 1938 Nils cut a pine; its fall sent tremors through the snow on the steep slope above, and a small avalanche, a hissing white turmoil of powder and loose boulders, raced down. He threw away his axe and ran, got far enough to escape living burial but was wedged to his knees when a small dislodged boulder, leaping and plunging, hit the side of his head so hard it laid him out senseless. When he came to in the dark, with the lantern of Oleson shining in his eyes, he did not know his name or where he was. He said, “hello, Oldsmobile,” instead of “Oleson,” and the men cheered. At least he was alive, and they all thought of young Som Axel snowshoeing along the railroad cut in new powder snow two years earlier, caught by an avalanche, bent and frozen in a hoop, his snowshoed feet pressed against his shoulder blades.

  Nils recovered, but his memory was erratic and he came up in screaming rages over nothing, for a savage, volatile personality had been released by the erratic boulder. The logging company gave him his walking papers and there was nowhere to go but back to Old Glory and the farm.

  Temper, temper

  So he was there when Ivar, his second son, was born—a farmer against his will, his brain addled, while men with undented heads went off to fight the Axis powers. He came home drunk in the dawn; after bringing Elise to the hospital the night before and listening to her moans for twenty minutes, he went to a loggers’ bar and drank boilermakers. As for Elise, it was a painful labor that made her shriek against her will. She sank gratefully into what the fat, cross-eyed doctor called Twilight Sleep and delivered the child, but she remembered enough to swear that Nils would never come near her again, the crazy hog.

  “Ah, you’ll forget. I’ll see you in here next year,” said the nurse.

  Nils, yawning home, drunk, desperate for an hour of sleep before starting
the milking, longing for sleep in the sweet unaccustomed silence—the other child, Conrad, was at Elise’s sister’s house, the half-wit cousin burrowed in his greasy blanket still—fell into the bed and slept for seven minutes until a hairy woodpecker roused him with a tremendous rapping on the shingled roof. He got the shotgun and ran outside naked but the bird flew off with a coy feminine squeak. He cursed woodpeckers. He tumbled back into bed, the shotgun in Elise’s place, and pulled the quilt over his shoulders when the woodpecker began again. The shattering noise was right above him. He sobbed in fury, fired through the ceiling, deafening himself and splintering shingles, then ran outside to see the proof of his fallen enemy. The bird was in an apple tree, working on a hole the size of a grapefruit. He dashed inside, snatched up the gun, then back out, jumping down the porch stairs, but again the woodpecker flew. The cows were lowing with discomfort in the barn. Back into the house he went, shaking with temper, but when he was two up the stairs the malicious hammering started once more, and he sprang into the kitchen, incoherent, shouting maledictions, yanked open the red-painted drawer in the dresser where Elise kept the matches, crumpled a ball of newspaper, ran up to the attic and set the roof on fire directly under the rapping. His rage dropped away in a few minutes but by then the flames had the roof. The fire department saved the lower story, and the family spent the rest of the winter in cramped, char-stinking rooms. In the spring he rebuilt the upstairs, but after he sawed the stringer for the staircase he found he had measured wrong, and too furious to buy more lumber and start again, he tore the work out. From that time on, in order to use the upper rooms, they climbed a ladder.