Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx
After the Second World War, Hieronim thought of Sunday as a day created for him, the day he could enjoy himself after the week in the steel mill. There were two parts to his pleasure, and sometimes three.
In the early morning, before it was full light, he went into the yard with his electric worm probe, the extension cord trailing from the toaster outlet and over the windowsill. He drove the night crawlers from the ground with jolts of electrical current, “AMAZING RESULTS!” He tossed the night crawlers into a rusted coffee can with a little dirt, took his Zirco rod and drove to one of three neighborhood bridges over the sluggish river. He let the line dangle in the water for hours, the rod propped against the railing, the worm down below among the silt-covered tires. He smoked cigarettes and talked to other men along the rail, men who called him Harry—he knew most of them from grade school, they were the same men he saw at work and at the Polish Club—watched the young girls ride past on bicycles, the podlotki, the little wild ducks, the hiss of passing cars and trucks a relaxing background music.
Once in a rare while someone caught a small grey fish with black nodules on its decaying fins. The one who caught it would hold it up for the others to see, accept their jeers and wisecracks, then drop it back in the water where it floated away under the bridge, twitching a little, or he’d drop it on the roadway where the next car along crushed it.
“What a way,” he said to Vic Lemaski next to him, “what a way for a fish to go, eh? Run over by a car! Something to tell the other fish. If he could! ‘Watch out when you cross the street!’”
Vic, who was a dullard, a dog’s bone of an elephant, answered, “get among goats, you jump like them.”
“How can that apply to a fish being run over?”
Vic shrugged, dipped into his tackle box for his pint.
Around three o’clock, half drunk, he would wind up his line, dump the remaining worms into the river, watch their ribbony forms disappear among the ghostly plastic bags and broken sticks drifting in the current.
Now came his second pleasure, the Polish Club, where he drank and ate and smoked and read and talked and watched television until ten, then wobbled home to sleep until the four A.M. alarm.
The Polish Club was for men only—his miserable father, old Józef Przybysz (what an insane name, from the old country), had been one of the founders—and in it was a smoking lounge with newspapers, Naród Polski, Dziennik Chicagoski, Dziennik Związkowy, Dziennik Zjednoczenia, the Zagoda, others in five or six languages, hanging on the rack, the biblioteka with paneled walls and Polish books (nothing published since 1922), a woodcut by Adam Bunsch, a 1920 oil painting of a ruined Polish village, Russian soldiers on horses drinking from bottles and smoking cigarettes, geese running frantically, dead Poles strewn like stones over the ground; in the basement of the club the café had its veined-marble tables and bentwood chairs (though now the beer was served, not in proper glasses, but in the new aluminum cans which crackled so loudly and irresistibly when squeezed), the walls covered with yellowed posters of past Polish events, singers, art exhibits, recitals, amusements and awards ceremonies celebrating dead Polish heroes, a mysterious coconut head with staring shell eyes and a fierce expression, and in the entryway an immense bulletin board with contemporary notices of a hundred little things—imported sausage casings for sale, a notice about the Cuban cigar embargo, for sale two tickets for the upcoming Sonny Liston–Floyd Patterson match.
The men who started the club back in the 1930s, many of them socialists, had been men of some education in the old country, forced in America to work as butchers and heavy-industry laborers, painters and garbagemen. A wry comment on human ambition. Hieronim had heard the story again and again from his mother of how his father had landed at Castle Garden and a month later was in Chicago working in the Armour meat-packing plant, living as a boarder with a Polish family in Armour’s Patch, this trained pharmacist, but he could neither read English nor speak American and the immigration inspectors marked him down as illiterate. In this way Hieronim learned that to be foreign, to be Polish, not to be American, was a terrible thing and all that could be done about it was to change one’s name and talk about baseball.
The old days
Hieronim’s youngest son, Joey, begged his grandmother for the shuddering stories of the grandfather, Józef, for whom he was named.
“Him, eh? His family was well-off in Poland but he quarreled with his parents, his father, over something—I don’t know what as he never spoke of it. Something very bad, I’m sure. So he left in anger and with empty pockets for America where he would make a big success. He was a pharmacist, a drugstore man who fixed medicine for sick people, although he wanted to be a photographer. He drank to quench this unattainable ambition. He told me once that his mother’s family was related to that of Kasimierz Pulaski, one of the greatest warriors mankind has ever produced, who fought powerfully in the American Revolution. And Tadeusz Kosciuszko also fought for American liberty. And the Revolution, it was paid for by a Pole, yes, a rich Polish Jew. You don’t hear this in school, but without the Poles there would be no America. But to Americans all Poles are peasants, peasants who dance.” Also, she said, someone in that family had crossed the Vistula on a leopard-spotted horse in the army of General Czarniecki in the dead of winter, had frozen his feet up to the knees. “And now they make everything, so aren’t they the muscles of this place? Yes.”
“What else?” said the child. “Tell about eating the roast dogs.”
“They called your grandfather illiterate! He who had read a thousand books, could recite from memory for one hour from Pan Tadeusz, who played three instruments, a pharmacist who wrote poetry, a man who thanked God for the day every morning he rose except after a night of drink, yet there was no way he could make them understand that he was not a peasant. It is not easy to remain yourself, to keep your dignity and place, in a foreign country. He could not talk American and later he was too proud to learn it. So it was that he found himself in the Chicago stockyards for his first job, seventeen cents an hour, what they called a ‘hunky job.’ How he hated it! How he hated the other Poles, peasants and fools he called them, Galacians and Lithuanians, the ones from Russia, stupid as boot heels, but he felt sorry for them too, so ignorant and naive they were always in trouble, timid people blamed for the crimes of others because they could not understand American ways and language. They could not even speak Polish well, nothing, not Russian or German. The poor things had no place, no language, of their own. The Americans called everybody a hunky—Lithuanians, Magyars, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Russians, Poles, Slovenes, Croatians, Herzegovinians, Bosnians, Dalmatians, Montenegrins, Serbians, Bulgarians, Moravians, Bohemians—it didn’t matter, all were hunkies. The Americans said hunkies roasted dogs and ate them, the women had ten husbands, that the children were lousy, the men were drunks and all were dirty, too stupid to learn ABC, too dull to feel pain or tiredness, too animal to be sick.
“You can’t believe the hardship of those days for Poles—to work all week sometimes and then be robbed on the way home. The Germans would spit on us, ‘Polish scum.’ I didn’t know your grandfather then but he spoke bitterly of those years, and especially of the dirty landlady who slept with the boarders for extra money. I’ll tell you, the Poles lived like rats when they came to America, to Chicago. And everywhere was rats, eating the rotten meat scraps. In the meat warehouses at night these rats would eat and eat until they almost burst. In the early morning, your father, walking to work, would see them so gorged their bellies dragged the ground going to their lairs of rags and torn paper. Someone found such a nest and in it were tiny shreds of paper money. And the worst jobs. A young man, a boy, just off the boat, healthy and strong, eager to be a success in America, was sent to shovel powdered lead for his first job and got sick and sicker, wasted away and died coughing blood.
“In that boardinghouse the windows were nailed shut, another terrible house was close beside. There was a big room, the landlord divided it in half, pu
“Finally it got so he couldn’t stand the blood and the stink no more. He quit Armour and he went to the cigar shop. You know, it was not all terrible. Sometimes funny things happened. A cow got loose and ran around in the streets, everybody chasing and screaming. And one poor man, he came home from work so tired and went to the outhouse—that’s all they had in them days—and he fell asleep while he was in there—they tipped up to get emptied—they had a hinge in the front—and the outhouse cleaners came around and pushed it over with him inside.
“My family he disliked, he disliked them. Because of where they came from. They came here from the Polish mountains, the Tatra Mountains. Górale, he called them, in American he said jumping Jesus hillbillies. He despised them. If my sister or my mother entered our house and he was there, he left, left without saying a word, just a look on his face of tasting something unpleasant.
“Why did he quit the meat plant job? Because he hated it. It was beneath him. It was filthy work. From the first day he worked there he became a vegetarian, he lived on cabbage and potatoes and onions. To him meat had a brutal appearance, as if it had been flayed from some wretched, kneeling animal. Borscht he loved, and I made it the real way, not like the stuff your mother makes, that’s no good. Cucumbers he loved. He hated the stink of the yards. He was a very clean man. His luxuries were two, the bathhouse and the Polish Club he helped to start after Paderewski came to Chicago and played Chopin in 1932 in the opera house—oh, the Poles then loved classical music very much—one of the greatest musicians mankind has ever produced, and you know, he came out on the stage, your grandfather said (he went to the concert with his friends from the Polish Club), strode out very manfully, and the entire audience stood up in homage and stayed standing up for three hours of concert and two more hours of encores. Their legs ached ferociously but they were in fifth heaven. Think of it. There were thousands who tried to buy tickets but could not. On that trip to America Paderewski earned $248,000.
“Your grandfather said the Americans were dirty, he couldn’t live like them, so every day on his way home he stopped at the baths. It cost five cents. ‘That’s my pleasure,’ he said. But really it was not. His pleasure was drinking. From Friday night to Sunday night he was drunk. At first he became very lighthearted and laughing and that was when he played his accordion—Spanish airs, then ragtime American, then polkas and obereks. Later he became depressed and moody and then he played the violin. And when he was very drunk he was terrible, a dark, silent anger filling him up like boiling water in a kettle. Then everybody had to get out of his way, he was merciless. Still, he carved little wooden toys for his children, for your father a tiny wooden accordion—yes, your daddy was my little boy. You could put this little instrument on a coin, and Hieronim pretended to play it by the hour, pinching it between his fingers and humming zim zim. I don’t know what happened to it, dear child.
“Oh, poor little Zofia? That sad story again? Well, the first years were cruel. I had two little children, your father and your Aunt Wanda, and was expecting a third, poor little Zofia, poor little girl. When she was just learning to walk she fell into Bubbly Creek they called it, oh, a terrible stream, not of water but of evil that was like little puffs of cream on the poison stream. They pulled her from it, but it had gone into her lungs and she died of pneumonia.
“After your grandfather left Armour, he started out rolling seed cigars and he was slow and made very little money, then he began to get good and fast and really make some money. He had a Cuban friend, an old man in that shop, like a skeleton, his legs were all twisted—a lot of cripples worked in the cigar shops—who showed him how to use the Cuban blade instead of a knife or cutter. Well, you take a binder leaf and smooth it out on the board like this, and then you take some filler leaves, could be two or three kinds of tobacco, sweet, bitter, and you build them up in your hand until it feels right, not too thick, not too loose, and if you was doing open head work, all the tips of the filler leaves had to be at the tuck end, the end the customers lights up. The tips are very sweet. This is the most difficult part, you can’t twist a leaf or make it too tight or loose. Then it can’t draw good. Then you break the filler leaves—chh!—to the right length of the cigar and put this bunch on a corner of the binder leaf and roll it up. Then comes the hard part, the wrapper leaf, very, very thin and fine, you have to start rolling it at the tuck, roll it a spiral way with a little overlap, and at the head you put a little bit of gum stuff on a flag and smooth it over the head, it has to be perfect. No, the flag is not that kind; it is a little piece of leaf. Then you make another one. Some of the claro makers were artists, real artists, but I only learned this when I began to roll cigars myself. Those claros had to fit through a ring gauge. But at first, when your grandfather started this occupation, it was hard. We could not live on what he made. And he had to dress well too; cigar makers wore fine suits, you know. And so we too had boarders, two boarders, bed, food and laundry, and I charged them three dollars a week. No, I did not sleep with them. What an idea! They never stayed long. He would find fault with them on their first evening, then pick at those faults and magnify them—garlic breath, big feet, this one lacks the fifth stave, a stupid face—he always knew how to find fault, to criticize. And they would go, many times owing us rent and always hating us. In those days he played his accordion at the Polish Club on Wednesday evenings, they had something like a concert—there was a string quartet, a pianist, and your grandfather knew some very fine Spanish airs—it was all for culture, you see, but then he stopped and began to play, not polkas at first, but American music, just Alexander’s Ragtime Band,’ in saloons for money. And you should have heard him go on about it. ‘Oh, that I ever could have dreamed that what I once did for careless amusement I would do in grim earnest for money—how could I have imagined it?’
“But he enjoyed playing the instrument, not so much for the sound it made, not for his devotion to music, not like you, my dear child, but because when he played he was the master of the situation, he was the boss. He said, ‘I work all week, the foreman tells me “do this, do that, hurry it up,” he calls me dumb hunky, he calls me stupid polack, I take it because I have six mouths to feed. I want to pull his intestines out of him with an iron hook but I do the work. In silence, because if I don’t like it there’s a hundred more waiting to take my job. But I pick up the accordion and if the foreman is there in the place, maybe with his disgusting fellow bosses and repulsive wife, he gets up and dances to my tunes and I make them hot to watch him sweat and twirl.’ So he said, the devil. He always played for money and command, never for pleasure in the kitchen or the neighbors’ enjoyment on the stoop. That’s what they did, you know, in the old days, people just made music with each other for a good time, not for money, but always there was a family that was good, they all played the instruments. On Sundays we’d have a picnic in Glowacka Park, start at noon, and you could buy a hot dog or good Polish things; I sold pierozki at these picnics and made a nice bit of money. There’d always be somebody’s polka band—two violins, you know, the bass fiddle and the clarinet, no accordion at all, they’d just play all afternoon and we’d dance. No music pages, they play from their heads, they were geniuses. You know, the dancers used to sing out a line of a song, or not even sing it, just shout it like, and the musicians they had to catch it, know it and play it back in the same key. Oh, they were so good. Well, your grandfather, he sees after a while there is some money starting to come to the polka band players and there was all kinds of places that wanted polka bands—Polish Homes, the Polish Club, not the culture evening but the Saturday night dance, little dance halls all over the place, the union halls, bars and Polka Dot restaurant, the Polish League of War Ve
Grandfather’s nightmares
“Grandfather’s nightmares! Holy Mary, your grandfather’s nightmares were terrible—his screams woke everyone. And the last time I told you about them, what happened, you woke up yelling in the night. So I better not tell them. Well, then. Remember, you asked for it. He said, ‘I dreamed of a severed head garlanded with decayed weeds and roots. The mouth was torn, the eyelids ripped away and yet the eyes rolled and looked. The face was that of my mother.’ Or he would tell of a head with the top sawed off so he could look inside, and in there he saw his father’s old pharmacy in Poland and behind the counter was a young man and just as the young man started to look up at your grandfather—as if he felt someone watching him—he would wake up. Or he would tell of eating in his dream a horrible soup of living toads and white snakes, of crushing each with the back of his spoon but feeling it revive and struggle in his mouth. He told of a dream in which he received a wooden box from Poland, of prying off the cover to find inside his young sister covered with a thick growth of red fur, arms and legs broken to fit her into the too small box, but living and staring at him. In his dreams were horses with pigs’ faces, pieces of paper that became bloody knives, accordions that disintegrated as he played them, the buttons leaping into the air, the bellows rending and hissing, the hinges melting. Then he became interested in these nightmares and no longer feared them but awaited them eagerly, and entered his own nightmares with a dream camera, photographing these strange events.