Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  The first order

  By early October the cotton crop poured onto the docks and the levees swarmed with workers loading night and day. The accordion maker was making and saving money—despite his excursions with Cannamele. One morning when he and Silvano came out of the boardinghouse Pollo was in the street waiting for him. He said something, a question the accordion maker did not get. Silvano understood, could already mangle his way along in American.

  “He wants to buy your accordion. He will give you ten dollars!”

  The accordion maker smiled pityingly. “Tell him it is not for sale. It is my showing accordion. But tell him I can make one similar in every way. Tell him the cost is thirty dollars, not ten. Tell him it will take four months’ time.” He had figured out what he must charge.

  Pollo spoke, ticking off items on his long, pale-fronted fingers. He was describing or listing. Silvano translated.

  “He wants it red—this green is not good for him. He wants his name, Apollo, on it, here. And on the folding part paint a picture, the Alice Adams with a head of steam up.”

  “Tell him nothing could be simpler. But on Saturday he must give me five dollars as surety and for the materials.” He was excited. His success was beginning.

  That night he set up a tiny worktable in the corner of their room, sat on a box which he kept under the bed when he was not working on the instrument, rose before daylight to glue and fit, saw and sand; he worked a few minutes at night as long as he could afford the candle, could stay awake, and worked all day Sunday—for he did not go to mass in this godless new country—was drawn into the spell of precise craftsmanship as another might be charmed by words or incantations. He was fortunate to have the room—many slept on the streets and docks and every morning lifeless forms were carried away, throats slit and pockets turned inside out, even young children. All around him were men who had to piss in the nettles.

  For weeks he stopped going to the saloons except on Saturday night, despite the allure of the music and the black women, but reduced his life to work, the accordion, a little sleep. He was getting the Italian look—thin and ragged, eyes very hard and watchful.

  A shooting

  On a November night Cannamele came up to his room and said, “listen, you work like a fool. You will develop a brain fever.”

  “I am making a success.”

  Cannamele shook his head. “A Sicilian cannot make a success here,” he said. “It is not possible unless you know certain men and do certain things. This is the truth. If you come out you will ease your mind. Look at you, half crazy. Besides, I will buy the beer.”

  “One hour only. To look for new customers.”

  The landlord leaned on the bar in the Golden Dagger, listening to the crying music. The accordion maker had his instrument and sat in a corner trying to fit minor chords like long moans to a scraping fiddle and a rattling tambourine, when the doors burst open and police beat into the room, kicking and striking with their batons.

  “All Italians, hands up, over there, get up you dirty dago bastards, move, MOVE!”

  The accordion maker stared uncomprehendingly like a fool until he was dragged from his chair, the accordion falling to the floor. He cursed and reached for it and was jerked back, hands closed on him. His frightened eye fell on the black man, Pollo, crouched in the back near the hall door. Their eyes caught. The black man nodded and looked away, slid into the darkness of the hall.

  Silvano, in the street outside, was taken when he ran toward his father. Pressing the prisoners against the wall of the building, the Americans battered them with a volley of incomprehensible questions. The accordion maker’s silence and shrugging infuriated them, and when they found his pistol and Silvano’s knife they herded them into a line of men tied ankle and wrist with a long connecting rope, slapped and kicked them along the streets and away to the pound, to the Parish Prison, to cells packed with Sicilians and Italians.

  The crime was serious. Someone had shot the chief of police. The American Patriotic League screamed Italians! Catholics!—another vicious example of ceaseless warfare on the docks between Italian gangs, between the Irish and the Italians and the blacks, a mix of languages and colors, hatreds and competition of such ferocity that the spray of blood and interruption of labor stained the name of New Orleans. The Americans, who usually held themselves above the dirty business of foreigners and black men fighting for mean jobs, flared with outrage, ordered the police into the streets.

  “Tell them,” the accordion maker begged a man in the cell who spoke American, “tell them they have made a mistake. I have done nothing.” His jacket was crusted with some white substance.

  “Do you suggest that I did?”

  “No, no, but—”

  Many were released in the next weeks, including Cannamele, but not the accordion maker, whom they accused of deliberate conspiratorial silence, of suspicious skulking, of murder with the confiscated pistol, nor Silvano, because he also was silent, and silence meant complicity. Dozens of Sicilians and Italians wept and prayed in the cells as the month ground through December. They were in a zone of uncertainty. The accordion maker was in an agony of frustration.

  “Ah,” he cried, “how I regret coming to this place.” And when he sent a message to Cannamele to get his accordion from Pollo and keep it, word came back that Pollo was upriver working on the wood boats, that he had been thrown off the Alice Adams, that he had taken the accordion with him.

  On Christmas Eve an elderly black woman, sent by someone unknown, brought the prisoners oranges and an “old lady’s face,” faccia da vecchia, the baked crust spread with sardines and cheese and onion. Someone whispered, Archivi.

  “This is the land of justice,” said the accordion maker, confident again, swallowing his sliver of the delicacy. “They will soon realize their mistake and release us.”

  But another prisoner, a short muscular man built like a crate, sneered.

  “The Americans treat us like cheap shoes. They buy cheap, they walk long and hard, when the shoes are worn out they throw them aside and get others. Shiploads of these shoes come every day. You speak of justice and your stupid accordion, but you are a shoe. A cheap shoe. Sfortunato. An unlucky man.”

  Yes, thought Silvano.

  An evil dream

  One night there was an uproar as the guards brought in another, dragged him down the corridor to a cell at the end.

  “Oh Gesù, Gesù,” whispered Polizzi.

  “What? Who is it?” They had seen the prisoner, his smeared face, his torn clothes, for only a few seconds.

  “Oh Gesù, Gesù.”

  A whisper started, grew to a murmur. “Archivi. Archivi.”

  Flies clustered in the corner of the ceiling, like nailheads.

  “Look,” said someone. “Even the flies are afraid and dare not fly for fear they will be accused.”

  Archivi shouted from his cell. “This filthy America is fraud and deceit. My fortune is lost. America is a place of lies and bitter disappointment. It promises everything but eats you alive. I shook the hand of John D. Rockefeller, yet it means nothing.” He spoke in American.

  A sarcastic voice added, “chi non ci vuole stare, se ne vada”—if you don’t like it here, go somewhere else.

  A few nights later the accordion maker had a waking dream of raw meat, of the wet kid carcasses he remembered from village butcherings, of basins of red flesh marbled with fat, of glistening bones with maroon shreds of tissue clinging to the joints, of dark gobbets dropped randomly on a great flight of stairs.

  The rat king

  Just as Pinse’s left foot touched the garnet runner of the top stair, the ching of the breakfast room bell sounded. He had come in very late, hours past midnight, after a week away at the Robinsonville levee break. He had no doubt; it had been dynamited by the malcontents he had fired from the timber contract; foreigners, all of them, observed creeping and slinking for the better part of a week. And as soon as the levee breached they’d disappeared. The dama
ge was local, hard on the Yazoo Valley, but in the long run the silt deposit would improve the bottomland. He knew one thing; he’d rather have niggers than dago socialist rabble screaming for weekly paydays and threatening strikes and blowing up levees in revenge when they did not get what they wanted. His eyes burned. The staircase wound as did a chambered nautilus, and he walked down quickly, one hand on the banister—taking pleasure in the mild centrifugal force of the descent, the flash of his passage in silvered mirrors—stepped into the foyer, glancing at the seascape, a study of icebergs in some northern sea, hanging against the brown paper, looked through the archway at the hall stand with its coats like headless bodies, taking satisfaction in the carved chair, the electroplated card receiver with the head of Hadrian staring at the beaded doorknob. He noted the sweep of herled feathers in a jardiniere—that was new—felt the usual irritation at his squabby reflection in the hall-stand mirror. He yawned.

  A Boston fern on an octagonal plant table colored the breakfast room with a greenish light reflected by the mirrored sideboard; he glanced at his wife’s orchids in the fogged Wardian case, sighed and stretched and yawned. There was the faint bitter smell of damp tea leaves from an early sweeping. A cloth embroidered with trumpet vine covered the table, on the walnut sideboard, carved with dead hares and pheasants, waited a silver cover, the coffeepot over a pale flame, his grandmother’s cut-glass decanter. More than any other room this one expressed his wife’s vivid pleasure, pitched fever high as the tuberculosis advanced, in exotic blooms, marble and mirrors, crystal, silver and green, velvet. More than that—she had been ill for months with nervous prostration after a terrifying incident as they walked out of the house at dusk, she leaning on his arm, and an owl swooped on the decorative bird adorning her hat, the striking talons laying open her scalp to the bone, blood everywhere, and he smelling the hot, louse-ridden feathers as the bird beat upward, carrying away the hat. The children’s Astley-Cooper chairs, for straight posture, stood against the wall; the boys and the girl all slumped.

  He tipped the coffeepot, releasing the aroma of chicory and dark-roasted Martinique, blew on the black liquid. Too hot. He set the cup down, took his glass of anisette between thumb and forefinger, swallowed a drop or two. In the oval wall glass his reflection swallowed as well. The smell of levee mud and brackish water lingered. He drank the coffee. His temples were pounding. Again the anisette and the coffee. His Times-Picayune was not on the table. No telling how much of the trial he’d missed. He’d followed it avidly until he was called away to the damaged levee. He rang the bell.

  “Where is the paper?” He said it even though he saw it on the tray she carried.

  “Just come, sah. They late this morning.”

  He shook it open—nothing on the front page but the trial: ah, gone to the jury yesterday—jabbed appreciatively at his stuffed oxtail, disliked by the rest of the household, and began to eat, the tines of the fork seeking out truffle moons.

  The fork stopped in midair, sank again to the gold-rimmed plate. He brought the paper’s details closer to his eyes. He had thought the headline read “Nine Guilty,” but, unbelievably, it was “None Guilty”!

  Unspeakable.

  They had tampered with the jury. Yes, New Orleans was drenched in blood these years, the loathsome Italians murdering each other, that was all right, they could kill each other until the last one dropped, but they were assassinating the innocent and upright as well, and all out of a depraved greed for the banana trade, the banana trade!, he thought of a ridiculous music hall song he had heard in London, “I Sella da Banan’”—a festering foreign corruption was rotting Louisiana’s heart. The Black Hand had killed Captain Hennessy. It was known, known. All of these Mafias and Camorras. The endless labor problems of the docks, strikes and the threats of screwmen. All of it tied to the city’s eternal problem of letting white men and niggers work together—nowhere but in New Orleans—half and half, snarling trade in knots with their insane rules, encouraging miscegenation and rebellion. White men? Foreigners. Irish and Italians. Socialists. They were dirty, diseased and dangerous incendiaries who did not know their place. Why in the name of God had the businessmen ever encouraged the Italians to come, what had made them think they could replace the shiftless blacks? Oh, the Italians worked well enough at first, but they were greedy and cagey, their first thought to push to the forefront. At least niggers knew their place, knew what could happen. Now look at that greasy dago Archivi, who had leeched his way to the throat of the city’s commerce, who had been received in Pinse’s own house, who had looked at his wife’s orchids, had praised them and simpered over them. Treat the Italians well and see what happens. They were dangerous. They went too far. Give an inch and they would seize the city.

  And barely any action taken until private citizens forced the authorities to arrest and bring the Italians to trial—naive belief in justice. Now that trust in the law had been cynically betrayed. None Guilty! This slippery call of acquittal and mistrial was the final mocking proof of corruption in high places, proof of Italian fixing and fiddling, of crooked foreigner-loving lawyers and perverted law. It was vomiting cowardice, unendurable to men of honor.

  His racing eyes devoured the page, the sketches of the courtroom, the faces of the Italian assassins—especially that whinging, bucktoothed, chinless and craven poltroon Politz, Polizzi, whatever his name was, he who had been carried bodily, weeping and fainting, from the courtroom during trial, he with the lying, hard-faced mistress, he who had confessed, Polizzi, declared a mistrial? And in the right-hand columns, there were the portraits of that other set of criminals, the jurors, headed by the Jew jeweler, Jacob M. Seligman, smirking as he told the reporter, “we had a reasonable doubt.” The home address and place of business of each juryman was given. Good! They would know where to find them. And here was the bearing question; the reporter asked juror William Yochum, a weak-faced little rat: “Did you hear of any of the persons having been approached before the trial?” No, he had heard of no such thing, the lying, slithering vole.

  Approached? Of course the jurors were approached, approached and embraced, their palms clasped in golden Italian handshakes, their shoulders enwrapped by the oily arms of the moneymen of the Black Hand and, he didn’t doubt, of Hebrew Jewish bankers behind the whole scheme.

  He tore the pages as he turned to the editorials. “AT THE FEET OF CLAY. Elsewhere we print an advertisement … a mass meeting at the foot of the Clay statue … expressed object of the meeting … what it is intended to do … doubtless murdered by Italians, but not by the Italians as a race … Let us have no race prejudice …” Rubbish, rubbish. He searched for the advertisement, missed it, went back and found it at the bottom of the editorial page itself where his hand had obscured it.

  MASS MEETING! All good

  citizens are invited to attend

  a mass meeting on Saturday,

  March 14, at 10 o’clock a.m.,

  at Clay statue, to take steps

  to remedy the failure of

  justice in the Hennessy case.

  Come prepared for action.

  Come prepared for action. It could be no clearer. And below were the alphabetically ordered names of prominent men, though not, of course, his own. He had no wish to see the name Pinse on the same roster as certain men. His eyes lingered on, returned to the place where the inky show of his name would have fallen. The clock chimed the quarter hour. The streets would be jammed. He stood up, thrusting the chair back. The air would clear his headache. The half-eaten oxtail lay on his plate.

  In the hall he put on his derby, glancing at himself in the mirror, and fumbled through the sticks in the umbrella stand until he found the staff he had bought in England years before on a walking tour of the Lake District. Why had he not purchased the ebony walking stick with the lead-weighted head he’d seen in London? Come prepared for action. He shook the staff, knocking askew a box of stereopticon photographs, sending to the floor the novel scene of two black men hanging an
alligator from a limb, a rope knotted around its neck, the men grinning and straining against the weight. He had his revolver.

  Halfway down the drive, stubbing the staff so vigorously that the ferrule dug at the crushed oyster shell, he heard Joppo running behind him. The stableman hauled up, panting and jerking his head.

  “What is it? I can’t delay now.”

  “Sah, sah, we got a king back of the stable, big rat king, sah, swear to Jesus real big.”

  “Ah!” He had seen only one in his life, years before, down in the family’s cotton warehouse on the docks, a horror of a thing. “How big?” He loathed rats and vermin; had been a child in the years of the yellow fever plague, when thousands of people died, when his mother died, and they fired the cannons day and night until his head ached from the sound, they burned barrels of tar in the streets to drive out the pestilence spread by fetid vapors, scuttling creatures and foreigners, the invisible seeds of disease spraying out from their loose mouths. Even now the memory of the relentless booming induced a hopeless mood and migraine headache that sent him to the sofa in his darkened study for days. He remembered the corpses stacked on the wharf, from a distance resembling goods ready for shipment. Yes, a shipment to hell, his grandfather had called it, and the rain streaming down the window glass while in the yellow streets the dead carts rolled.

  Joppo held up both hands twice—twenty.

  “Some a them dead, some a them rotten meat.”

  He strode quickly across the grass toward the stable, Joppo lumbering after him and describing the rat king, who had discovered it, how they jabbed and dragged it out from under the floor with a yam fork, the supposed weight and mass.