Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx
“They come right in the telegraph office and pulled me out, said I was a German spy sending messages to the kaiser. Gonna string me up,” he gasped. “Like Prager. They had the rope, they was going to do it. I seen Jack Cary in the crowd, my god, he was in school with me! I got away, I don’t know how, just fell down and crawled between their legs and got up and run so hard as I could. I come up over the horse path through Uncle Hans’s corn.”
He would not stay, let his mother arrange a white linen sling for his arm, then hid under a pile of sacks in the back of Loats’s cart, nothing to hear but the clap and thump of hooves as the horses trotted and the sound of his heart. At the railroad station in Kringel he telegraphed the front office. They told him to take the next train to Chicago and ride in the baggage car.
Beutle persisted in going into Prank, said nothing about Karl or Prager or the Kaiser or American news reports, but joked at the feed store that maybe he would hire Farmerettes to help him with the corn harvest, earnest young girls in bloomers and smocks to help the farm labor shortage. He had seen a dozen of the pretty things marching around the square in Prank. There was a sullen silence. O’Grain spit on the floor and Beutle spit near O’Grain’s foot.
In the evening, while they sat forking up the potatoes, a rock smashed through the window and hit the enamel kettle on the stove.
“Chipped it good,” swore Beutle. The rock was wrapped in a page torn from the Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis’s lubricious and pornographic tales of German atrocities in Belgium. A sentence was underlined in heavy pencil: “German blood is poisoned blood.”
“Don’t that look like O’Grain’s underlining? Don’t it? Jesus Christ, that paddy son-of-a-bitch. You know why an Irish is like a fart? Both is noisy, both you can’t put back where they come from, and both stinks.”
They set his fields on fire. A hundred acres of smoking wheat. Beutle walked into the blackened field, the fine char flying up with each step, and he was coal black and coughing before he’d gone a hundred feet. He went defiantly into town on Saturday and was stoned by a gang of boys and young men who shouted “heinie!” and “fucken dirty Dutchman!” and “baby raper!” at him.
“I bought Liberty Bonds!” he shouted back at them. “We got a boy Over There. My boy Wid Beutle, born here, right here in Prank.” The horse, hit by stones, shied and reared, and set off for home at a gallop. Beutle’s hat flew away and he was struck in the mouth by a rock that cracked a good German tooth, which Loats had to extract later in the week with his villainous dental pliers, wrecking a kitchen chair in the doing. Beutle sat spitting blood and sweating, occasionally hissing “rauch ich in der Pfeife!” But that evening Gerti relented and let him mount her again, even though the smell of blood from his mouth reminded her of the day she found him in the hen’s nest, even though she had embroidered over the motto God Bless Our Home with a motto of her own choosing: God Damn Our Adulterer. Beutle had never noticed it.
A run of evil events occurred. Messermacher’s youngest son was killed when he fell from the top of a haystack, a distance of sixteen feet; a broken neck, but at least he didn’t suffer, didn’t die an ironic death, as did Wid Beutle, far off in the old country, in Germany, dead in Germany, shot in the groin, his roaring blood freezing in a black pool below his buttocks in the bitter December of 1917. (Sixty years later an anonymous photograph of the dead son’s mud-caked boots and stiff, putteed legs appeared on the dust jacket of an Australian history of the Great War.) Loats befriended an itinerant violinist who stayed with them for a week, eating like an ogre, then stole all the ready money in the household and crept away before dawn.
“Must of been a gypsy,” said Beutle.
Then Loats collapsed one forenoon because his ill-fitting spring truss pressed on his femoral artery so severely he was dizzy all the time. Without the truss, his groin rupture bulged halfway down his thigh and showed obscenely in his pants. He went, groaning, to Kringle to consult the druggist in his back room and purchased another mechanical device which was painful in a different way and for a while gave the illusion of relief. The new pain he blamed on the druggist, a Greek marblehead.
Night cares
The summer after the war ended, a mysterious event harmed Beutle’s twin granddaughters, Florella and Zena, eleven years old. In the afternoon, the mother saw them playing with three of the Messermacher girls under the cherry trees where the hens scratched for insects and kept secret nests. At suppertime Gerti called from the back steps, “Essen! Kommt!” For Percy Claude and his family and whatever hired men—there were no more hired girls—ate with Gerti and Beutle. But the children did not come to the table, even when Beutle himself shouted impatiently.
“Let them do without, then. They’re over at Messermacher’s stuffing their faces.” After dinner Percy Claude and his wife went to Messermacher’s with the wagon, found Messermacher’s family still at table eating bread with molasses, but no twins.
They had played Bachelor’s Kitchen in the orchard, said Thomalina, the oldest of the three girls, then they had played Rivers, twisting through the orchard and colliding on the way to the hog pen that was the ocean. At last they played Black Spider, and Florella was a horsefly, Zena a dragonfly and Thomalina a mayfly. Greenie was both mother and nurse because there weren’t enough of them to play the game properly, and Ribbons was the black spider. Now Ribbons spoke, the adults scowling at her.
“I caught the horsefly, that’s Florella, and I put her in the grass, and then I went back and got Zena and put her in the grass with the horsefly, and I went back and caught Thomalina and got her and took her to the grass, but the flies were gone, they were gone. We thought they changed the game to Hide-and-Seek, and we looked, but after a while we couldn’t find them and then we got mad and went home.”
“So you didn’t see nobody?”
“No.”
“You did! I can tell by the way you bite on your finger. Who did you see?”
Greenie started to cry.
“In the lane. Two big bears were running away.”
“There isn’t no bears here!”
“Or like dogs. With short tails, and they looked at me and went in a hole in the ground!” There was terrific shouting from Messermacher and they all walked to the lane in the twilight and searched for tracks (none), the hole (none), and made the girls reenact the scene. Messermacher whipped his daughters to make them reveal everything they had seen, to force them to recant the story of the bear-dogs, but Gerti shuddered, remembered an evening, ten years ago at least, when she came up the lane in the same thick twilight after searching for a broody hen’s nest in the grass and saw sitting on the wheel of the hay rake an immense black man who shot plumes of smoke out of both nostrils before vanishing into the air with a sound like the burst swim bladder of a fish.
The three Germans combed the property into the night, their lanterns bobbing in the dark fields like boats on the swelling sea. There was nothing, no sign. But before dawn Beutle heard a wagon rattling on the road, heard it stop, then rattle away. He went out and there in the sallow morning the two girls limped up the lane, their hair matted with leaves, their dresses torn and stained. They were barefoot, their knickers gone, blood on their thighs, and not a word of what happened could be pried from them. They swore, crying hysterically, that they did not know what had happened. One moment they were playing in the orchard, the next they were shivering on the dark road. Among themselves Beutle and Loats and Messermacher believed the worst, that the Americans had come from town, chloroformed and raped the girls in revenge for Belgium.
It was too much for Pernilla who, six months after marrying Loats, went down with some internal gripping pains that no elixir subdued (Loats was unlucky in wives). She shouted that Beutle, the grandfather, had harmed the children himself, everyone knew in what manner. Then she fell silent. After weeks of not speaking, her mind took a turn. She went outside to the fields with a potato fork and dug wild holes, hurling stalks and earth, moving farther away across the
“Jesus Christ, the woman’s a maniac! And the fools give women the vote.”
The doctor at the state hospital wrote down the particulars, had her photographed in her apathetic state. “It is unlikely there will be an improvement,” he said carelessly, a little bored with female insanity. Half the women in the state seemed out of their minds.
“I wish I could go crazy,” said Gerti, visiting Pernilla and looking around at the beige-painted walls. “To be mental, in a nice room like this with all the time in the world and no worries of life, just a warm bed and all your dinner brought to you—why, it sounds good to me. You are getting a rest from it all. They say you see movies here. The only other way to get a rest in this life is to die.”
But after a month Pernilla was home again, though convinced that the Americans came out from town at night and poisoned the well. These thoughts followed a parade she had seen in Prank, as she sat and waited for Loats in the worn buckboard, conscious of her dusty bunned-up hair, her dowdy dress and cracked shoes, her aged and crazy face. The parade featured W.C.T.U. women marching around the courthouse, well-dressed American women, many with bobbed hair, in their pale linen dresses and white shoes with straps across the instep, holding placards: DRINK IS THE CURSE OF THE IMMIGRANT and TRUE BLUE AMERICANS FOR PROHIBITION and SPIRITS WILL KILL THE AMERICAN SPIRIT. Loats would hear her get up at night, making her haptic way through the dark rooms, peering through the windows into the night for the telltale lanterns of the Americans. She left notes on the table: don’t drink the Wasser. In the daytime she said, “I’d like to sleep but sleep don’t come” and “what’s the use to work so hard on a farm? Mr. Loats buys more land so’s he can raise more hogs to buy more land. Pretty soon he owns the whole world.” There were times she enjoyed eating paper, a shred or thin page of the bible rolled in a pancake with sour cream, liked it because it made a kind of resistance in the mouth, a pleasant and lasting chewiness under the teeth. Even the bitter taste of the ink she liked. One evening as she stood at the stove cooking potato cakes she became very stiff and still, the spatula clenched in her unmoving hand. The smell of scorch rose from the griddle. Loats pulled his face out of his farm paper.
“What are you doing, burning them up?” For a moment longer the woman did not move, and then she slapped her own face with the greasy spatula, seized the boiling kettle and poured it over the hot metal of the stove. A hissing cloud of steam enveloped her, she was tearing at the stove lid with one hand and pouring boiling water with the other. Clarissa’s daughter Jen shrieked, “Pernilla, you fool stepmother!” and Loats cursed and sprang at her, wrenching the kettle from her seared hand.
Gerti came over in the evening carrying a lemon extract cake. “I wouldn’t go crazy if I was you,” she whispered to the sweating woman, “not even for the nice room. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. What’s the point?”
Pernilla was all right the next day, her burned hands wrapped in greasy bandage.
After the Wall Street explosion in 1920 and the high feeling against immigrants, the three Germans and their families drew into themselves, never went into Prank, taking the long road instead to Kringel where Germans outnumbered Irish. On a Sunday Beutle sometimes got out the two-row Hohner and played a line or ‘two of some song or another, but the music of the three Germans was finished.
Karl makes good
Prank touched the borders of their farms. There was a feeling, in the dry years after the war, as after a summer storm that fails to cool or refresh the air, of continuing sullen humidity and irritating heat, of another, more powerful storm building below the horizon. The old world was dead and gone, replaced by a feverish anxiety for something, anything, new. New roads were going in everywhere, and an army expedition came through, driving coast to coast to show the country how bad the roads were, how something had to be done. John O’Cleary converted the old schoolhouse at the crossroads into a gasoline station, selling Fisk tires and Mobiloil and Standard Oil gasoline, “guaranteed to test the best—no kerosene oil or other injurious substance.”
Karl Messermacher came down from Chicago, wearing plus fours and driving an automobile. He brought magazines and papers: True Confessions, Reader’s Digest, the funny papers, with Tillie the Toiler and the Katzenjammer Kids, which Beutle stuffed into the stove as a mockery of Germans. Karl laughed about the way they’d pulled him out of the telegraph office five years earlier.
“By god, the company give me an office and a promotion and a telephone because of that. I’d probably still be down in Prank banging the key—or hanged—if not for Jack Cary. I hear he got a lungful of mustard gas and is down at his mother’s place coughing his guts out. I’ll stop by and thank the son-of-a-bitch before I go back.” Karl’s voice was mocking. He showed off his argyle sweater, talked about the color movie he’d seen, The Toll of the Sea, passed around a packet of the new invention, potato chips, invited his female cousins out behind the barn to smoke Murad cigarettes, showing them crazy dance steps, cavorting and twisting until he slipped on duck turd and stained the knee of his white flannel trousers.
Before he slipped, his cousin Lulu said, “Karl, you look like an American college man.”
“Call me Charlie,” he said. “I changed my name—Charlie Sharp. That’s me. Listen,” he said. “I’m no German. I was born right here in Ioway. Listen,” he said, “there was seven copycats sitting on a fence. One jumped off. How many was left?”
“Six?” said Lulu.
“Girlie,” said Karl, shaking his head and laughing, “you are a hick from the sticks, girlie. Come on, I’ll take you girlies to the show.”
They walked into the Palace after the movie had started, on the screen an automobile factory and in front of it an enormous black kettle. Into one side of the kettle danced clots of immigrants in old-country costumes, singing in foreign tongues and kicking their legs, and out the other side marched a row of Americans in suits, whistling “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“This movie stinks,” whispered Charlie Sharp. “Come on, we’ll get some hot dogs and something that will curl your hair.”
Beutle said he’d gone far beyond dropping the hyphen and Karl countered by laughing, saying that accordion music was old-country junk.
Messermacher was enraged by the cigarettes. “If God wanted humans to smoke them things he would of put a chimney in the top of your head. A man smokes a pipe or a cigar.” He pronounced the potato chips not fit to feed hogs.
The three old Germans and their wives stayed close to home, but the children and grandchildren went into Prank. The malevolent, sniffing nose of public hatred was scenting new dangers—Reds, Jews, Catholics, other foreigners, not just Germans. When a klezmer band arrived in town in a rackety De Soto, the sheriff told them to keep traveling, no Jew agitators wanted in Prank and he didn’t care what kind of music they played on their dirty accordions, Prank had had enough of accordions, get out, and the same for any goddamn gypsies with their swift and pilfering fingers, the only kind of music Prank wanted to hear was “The Old Rugged Cross” and “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” although his daughter sang “I’m in Love Again” and accompanied herself on the ukulele.
No one yelled “beer, brats and bellies” when Percy Claude and his second, obviously pregnant wife, Greenie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Messermacher, came into the drugstore. Two of Messermacher’s other girls married Americans from Minneapolis, both streetcar conductors, and moved to the city. Another daughter, Ribbons, got work as a hired girl for the limestone mine manager’s wife and quit after a year to marry the new express agent, became Mrs. Flanahan, bridging the Irish ditch. Loats’s sons Felix and Edgar bought a Ford model T truck and started a feed store business. Felix (children believed he had been named for the cartoon cat) was crazy for driving after years of walking along the side of the hot roads an
(Twenty years later, in 1944, hunting in a field that had once been part of his father’s farm, Felix saw a balloon drifting across the Little Runt and ran toward it. There was something suspended from the ropes. He reached up as it glided smoothly down and grasped the Japanese bomb. After the funeral—a complete right hand, a mangled leg and an ear—government men came to the family and swore them to silence to prevent panic and public fear.)
Beutle argued with Percy Claude and refused to get a tractor, still held out against the radio. Messermacher, who had the most money, ordered indoor plumbing from Kringel and burned his outhouse in a pillar of smoking stench, then surprised all of them in the autumn of 1924 by selling the farm and moving to Coma, Texas, to grow cotton. In Coma, one side of the town was German and the other populated with Czechs from Bohemia. Messermacher changed the family name to Sharp, following Karl’s example, for Charlie Sharp found life easier than had Karl Messermacher.
Packing up for the move to Texas, one of the daughters came upon the green accordion.
“What to do with this? It’s that old accordion Vati got from Uncle Beutle. It still plays OK.” She squeezed out chords, played the first line of “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”
“Oh, put it in the brown trunk. If Willy gives up the ukulele, maybe—or maybe one of the grandkids will take it up.” The mother dropped it into the bottom of the trunk and on top of it came a sewing basket, the coffee grinder, a worn buffalo robe, a set of wool carders.
Beutle cursed Messermacher for a traitor, leaving the good land they had found together and made into fine farms.