by Annie Proulx
“ ‘Frank Gaines,’” she said. “It sounds good. A good name for a child, easier, more American than Gagnon. What did that French name ever do for you? Kids made fun of it, right?”
“Yeah. But French kids made fun of it too, so I think it was me, not the name.” He didn’t care about these things the way she did. He was limp with happiness, unable to think of anything past or future, alive only in the moment.
“Frank,” she said, weeks later. They lay close in the bed, from the other room the sound of the new color console Zenith her parents had given them for a wedding present. Mitzi had turned it on before she went to the bathroom, then to the kitchen to put on the kettle. He was weak with pleasure lying in the warm bed while the television voices bubbled like a porridge pot on the burner, listening to the sound of her voice for its buzzing timbre rather than its content.
“You know Emma and Emil been planning to go on their honeymoon when the weather got good. They’re going to Louisiana, we got some relatives there, and Emma, she got to go down there, got to have her way, see what it’s like, just for once. She said if you want him to, Emil could maybe take your accordion down, get a good price for it. Better than around here. She said Emil said he could maybe get a hundred dollars for it because it’s kind of unusual. It’s not like you play it anymore. I think you owe something to God, Frank, to St. Jude who healed your legs. And it’s, you know, sort of a instrument they make fun of, a Frenchie thing, you know what I mean.” There was a long quiet minute, with only the television voices and their breathing. He wanted her to understand what he was thinking, to know how happy he was and how little he cared about the accordion, about anything, if only he could lie there with her and drift on the buzzing of her voice.
“Frank,” she burst out, “I want a chance too. I want a chance to do something, do something with you. I want our kids to have a chance at the world, not stuck in the boondocks here. Frank, I cry when somebody, when a Yankee, is nice to me in a store. The rest of them give you that attitude, that here’s-another-Frenchie look, they make you feel like dirt. Frank, there’s no sense in being French, in staying here. You don’t talk French, you don’t know who your parents were or where they come from, nobody here remembers them, they were just passing through for sure.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Why not. Why not sell the accordion. Somehow I lost the urge for it. I don’t care. Whatever he can get. Yeah,” he said. “Whatever you want, we’ll do it. It’s a good idea, maybe, to get out of here. I used to think about getting into TV repairs.”
“Frank,” she said, “you can go to college, you can be anything you want.”
“I’ll tell you something though. I don’t change my name to Gaines. Frank, OK, but Gagnon stays. The only thing I got of my people is that name.”
And she slid out from under the covers, went to the kitchen to make his coffee and a plate of milk-soaked toast with maple syrup which he ate in bed under the silver crucifix while she brushed his trousers and rubbed his work shoes with neat’s-foot oil. He thought he would cry with the joy of it. But already the red idea was simmering that such intoxicating sweetness of life couldn’t last. He thought of what the man in Montmagny had called it, douceur de vivre. Yes, his bones were marinating in that bowl of wine, but how long would it be before he was impaled on the spit again and roasting over the flames?
While she was in the bathroom he pressed a pin under his fingernails until the blood came as a reminder of the pain and loneliness from which God and St. Jude had released him. The traitorous observation that he suppressed lurched up from the pit—he could feel the pain and weakness waiting to seize him again; he was not cured.
Emil’s joke
Emil looked the accordion over. He thought it needed work, one of the buttons stuck a little, though the fine leather bellows were still tight and sound and when he blew smoke into the instrument to test the bellows for leaks none escaped. It had a special tone, sad and emotional. They would like it in Louisiana.
“They’ll buy it, somebody down there will. You know, I don’t want to say anything against the French people, but those coonasses, they’re, you know, impulsive, not too smart? You heard this joke: Thibodeaux goes to the barroom to have a drink with his friends, both ears is bandaged up. ‘What’s the matter with your ears?’ says his friend Boudreaux. ‘Oh,’ says Thibodeaux, ‘I’m sitting in my kitchen, next to the ironing board, Marie she’s gone out to use the little house, and the telephone rings. “Allo, allo, cher,” I say, but oh my god, I pick up the hot iron instead and burn my ear.’ ‘What about the other ear, Thibodeaux?’ ‘The other ear? That damn fool calls back.’”
He roared, blew his nose in one of Emma’s paper napkins stamped with silver bells, left over from their wedding. If he couldn’t get a good price, he told Dolor, he would buy it himself and keep it in the family. That way, if Dolor decided to take it up again it would be there.
“No, I’m not going to play no—anymore.” Mitzi was correcting his grammar.
Going to Louisiana
“My God, this interstate road system is something,” said Emil to Emma, “you can drive across the country in half the time.”
“‘Drive your Chev-ro-lay, through the U.S.A., America’s the greatest la-la-laaaa,’” sang Emma in a mocking baby-voice. They were in the new car, a thistle grey Chevrolet V-8 sedan, though Emil had wanted a station wagon. In Kansas City they heard Polish polkas at an all-night dance, the wild Kansas City style so crazy they couldn’t even dance to it, though there was a couple who did the fastest polka while working a single Hula Hoop around their mutual hips to great applause. “They could have started a campfire that way,” said Emil.
They had stopped in Des Plaines for the fifteen-cent hamburger at a drive-in called McDonald’s a gas station attendant told them to try, and turned south down Route 66, stopping every night to go to a drive-in movie, through Pontiac, Ocoya, Funks Grove where Emma bought a can of maple syrup, past grain elevators and truck stops and hot dog eateries, the Dixie Trucker’s Home, a thousand filling stations, Texaco, Shell, Mobil, Phillips 66, and Emma picked out the tourist cabin for the night by the signs, HEATED—QUIET—CHRISTIAN ATMOSPHERE, the car wheels thumping over the tar seams in the four-lane highway. Near Sand Owl they passed a bad wreck, oil and water and gasoline all over the road and three cars in the ditch, one upside down, a man bucking in the grass, his white shirt mottled with blood and the red lights of the police cars flickering.
“I’m not lookin,” said Emma and they rolled on to St. Louis and Rolla where they started noticing the increasing heat, turned south to Little Rock and a sign that spelled out
What Was
The Last Miracle
Jesus Performed
Just Before He
Was Crucified?
but the answer was missing, and on to Cuba, dodging possums, to Alton where an American flag flew in the middle of a cornfield, Searcy, Lonoke, Fordyce, Natchitoches, Bunkie, past roadhouses, a café with a giant milk bottle on it that reminded Emil of the phonograph record factory with a dog on the roof and Emma said that was nothing, they had a gift shop in Kennebunkport shaped like a whale, but all these were eclipsed by a drive-in ice cream place shaped like an enormous black bear and you drove between the bear’s legs and said what you wanted into a microphone and it was ready when you drove out under his tail, and finally they were in the flat, hot country almost on the Gulf of Mexico.
The last night on the road, Emma called her mother to say they were almost there, how was the kid doing, was he still up or in bed, hello honey, it’s Mama … pretty soon … next week we start back, I’ll bring you a surprise … bye-bye … hello Maman, he sounds good and—what? What? WHAT? She came back to the car, stone-faced and twisting the strap of her purse, threw herself into the seat with force.
“What’s the matter,” said Emil. She wouldn’t say for a long time, an hour. He drove carefully and slowly, looking over at her, patting her knee and saying tell me, tell me, is it the kid,
then what, when she shook her head, your mother, your father, then what? Eh? What’s wrong? Eh? Finally he pulled over. There was a gravel turnout beside a bayou under a mass of trees with festoons of Spanish moss. The air smelled rotten.
“Now tell me.”
“It’s Dolor. Dolor killed himself. Emil, he had everything to live for, they don’t know why he did it. He left her a note. All it said was ‘I am happy.’ My poor sister, they got her under sedatives.”
“Jesus Christ. When?”
“Saturday. The day before yesterday. We was driving along and laughing and having fun and his little green accordion in the back seat and he was—” Please, please, Emil, she thought, don’t ask how.
Don’t Let a Dead Man Shake You by the Hand
A new owner
There was a truck parked on the lawn, with a hand-lettered sign in the windshield: FOR SALE $400. In the driveway a sedan panted, crowded with dim people, the back seat writhing with children, and lashed to the roof a long metal cow-feed trough. The wife’s posture in the front seat marked her as pregnant. The driver’s door stood open admitting a torrent of small black mosquitoes while the driver, Buddy Malefoot, a muscular man in white jeans and white rubber boots, a pearlized raccoon foot he’d found in an oyster hung on a chain around his neck, leaned under the truck hood jiggling wires, hooking his finger under belts to gauge their stretch, reading the bone-dry oil dipstick, then coming out from under to kick the flaccid tires with his good foot. He had a bony, rectangular face like a box, the jaw as wide as the brow, the top of his head squared off, and two jug ears that had resisted the adhesive tape of his infancy. His greasy cap sat high on black curls. He was right-sided, from a mole on his right ear, to his dexter eye, larger than the other, five long hairs near his right nipple, fingernails that grew faster on his right hand, a longer right leg and a foot a full size beyond the left. In the house a shape hovered behind the screen door, cracked it open, but Buddy held up his hand and shook his head, got in his sedan and backed out.
“Idn’t it no good?” The voice came from his father, Onesiphore, in the back seat smoking a cigarette, a man with the same square jaw as his son but stubbled with white, his yellowed hair crested, eyeglass lenses reflecting the rice fields and watery sky.
“No damn good at all. Look like hell struck with a club.” He had a smudge of grease like a caste mark on his forehead.
“Yeah, well, hate to see you spend that compensation money ennaway. Seem like y’all got a TV and an accordeen. You ought a save some of it.” He flipped the cigarette out the window.
“What I think, too,” said the daughter-in-law up front, half turning and presenting Onesiphore with her buttery profile. She wore a striped maternity minismock, and her bare thighs were stippled with mosquito bites.
“Seem like it was me got hurt. Seem like you forget don’t nobody tell me what to do. Va brasser dans tes chaudières.”
The sedan slouched over the road on its bad shocks, squatting on the corners.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” said the back seat. “Y’all drive straighter or I’ll put a chair leg to you. You ain’t so big I couldn’t make you dance. I want to get home and see that accordeen good.”
“That’s right, Papa, make your poor hurt-footed son dance.”
“Your foot’s as good as mine. I hope it’s a D chuned.” Onesiphore Malefoot craned over the front seat to look at the black case resting between his daughter-in-law’s feet.
“Yeah? Like to see you walk on it for more’n a minute. Told you, it’s a C.”
“Me, oh yeah, I’m gonna like to have a D. That beauty Ambrose Thibodeaux got, that old Major?”
“Dream along.”
“One time a son wouldn’t speak to his father like you, when I was young we lived at home, ate the good homegrown food, oh yeah, none of the supermarket food, but sacamité, the good okra gumbo, boudin like you can’t get no more, yes, oh yeah, then the kids were good—trouble started, and this is true, when they made the kids go to school, talk only américain. You, you and Belle used to talk French, perfect French, when you was little, now I don’t hear a word, and the grandkids, they don’t know a cheeseburger from a tortue ventre jaune.” He lit another cigarette.
“Yeah? See how far you get out on the rig talkin French. These oil guys come here from Texas, Oklahoma, they got the money, they hand out the jobs, everything, bidness strictly American and you got to make your reports, all that the same way. What good is French to me? It’s like this secret language don’t work. It’s like kids doing pig Latin, Iay ovelay ouyay. It’s OK for home, talk with the family, sing songs in.” His right eye fluttered, a tic brought on by the strain of conversing with his father. One of the children was lying on the back window shelf; the other, Bissel, crouched on the floor arranging stray pieces of gravel on his grandfather’s boot toe. (Sixteen years later Bissel, who was playing drums in a disco band in Baton Rouge, came back for a visit, saw ten thousand screaming people give the old man a standing ovation at the Cajun Music Tribute. “That’s my fucking grandfather,” he said furiously to his girlfriend as though it had been a secret kept from him all his life. When the old man died of trichinosis Bissel switched to accordion, imitated his grandfather’s singing style with eerie accuracy for a year, then slid over into swamp pop.)
“Grandpa, did you see a turtle when you were little?”
“See him! We ate him! Catch him in the summer when the swamp dried up, dig him out. Sometimes we find it after the thunderstorm. Keep him in a pen until we ready to eat him. You get the woman turtle full of eggs you got something good. We use to feel, feel that turtle with our little fingers, see can we feel eggs. Maman fricassee the meat, and the best treat is the yolk of the egg right there on your plate, taste just like chicken. You kids never ate no turtle yet? It’s good! You know, you cook them eggs all day and all night and all the next day and the white never get hard. You got to suck it out of the shell, they got a shell like leather. I don’t see one of them turtles for a long time, couple of years. Smell that café! Always down this road a good smell of café, oh yeah. Me, I can use some of that. Let’s hurry up and get home. À la maison, mon fils! That petit noir is already jumping in my mouth. ‘Le café noir dans un paquet bleu, leplusje bois, le plus je veux,’” he sang in his celebrated voice, vibrant and keening, the wailing style anciently linked to the music of the vanished Chitimachas and Houmas. “Me, I say we gonna get more rain. See out there?” A mass of blue-black cloud was moving in from the Gulf. Only his daughter-in-law glanced to the southwest and nodded to foster the illusion that they were conspirators, allied against Buddy and Mme Malefoot. Onesiphore patted her shoulder and sang on, smoking, as the sedan rolled through the hot, flat country.
The Malefoot family—their enemies said the name derived from malfrat, or gangster—was a tangled clan of nodes and connecting rhizomes that spread over the continent like the fila of a great fungus. Anciently they came from France in the seventeenth century, crossed the north Atlantic to Acadie in the New World, ignored the British when France ceded the land to England who renamed it Nova Scotia and demanded oaths of allegiance. The Malefoots and thousands of others along the littoral of the Baie Française ignored the preposterous request, a lack of enthusiasm the British interpreted as treason. Thousands of the Acadians were shipped away to the American colonies, some made their own way to refuge. The Malefoots went first to St. Pierre, then to Miquelon, scraps of rock off the coast of Newfoundland, then were shipped back to France where they languished for months, crossed the ocean again to Halifax, and from Halifax took ship to New Orleans in French Louisiana, an ill-timed choice, for a few years after they arrived the territory was ceded to Spain. The refugees traveled north and west into the hot, dripping, watery country of the Opelousas, Attakapas, Chitimachas, Houmas, to the Acadian coasts, the bayous Têche and Courtableau, learning to pole fragile bateaux and live in the humid damp. They mixed and mingled, blended and combined their blood with that of local tribes, Haitians,
West Indians, slaves, Germans, Spanish, Free People of Color (many with the name Senegal, for their homeland river), nègres libres and Anglo settlers, even américains, shaping a méli-mélo culture steeped in French, and the accordion, borrowed from the Germans, livelied the kitchen music of the prairie parishes, the fiddle had its way in the watery parishes.
Along the great bayous stretched alluvial deposits of marvelously fertile loam. In the Attakapas country the Malefoots planted cane and corn and worked the plantations alongside imported Chinese laborers, driving big sugar mules, though no Malefoots lived in fine mansions; in the Opelousas, their crops were small-farm cotton and corn, sometimes worked on shares. They kept a yam patch, rows of Irish potatoes.
They built their houses on islands and back up the bayous in the Creole style, the houses standing above the ground on cypress piliers, the broken-pitched roofs borrowed from the West Indies that covered built-in porches and outside stairs with a fausse galerie roof extension to keep the slanted rain from striking in. They smoothed the inside walls with calcimined mud and moss, grew Blue Rose rice, and in the Atchafalaya Basin, the great freshwater swamp, they gathered moss, shot alligators, poling through the marsh where snowy egrets took flight before them like tablecloths shaking, threading the briny maze of quaking earth, oyster grass, wire grass to the edge of the Gulf. In the Gulf the Malefoots, once cod fishers and whale killers of the North Atlantic, dragged for shrimp, tonged oysters, fished, and, since 1953 when the government authorized offshore drilling, worked on the oil rigs, but had not forgotten the slow glide of the pirogue through black channels, the hiss of the boat as it parted the grass, the nutria in the trap, la belle cocodrie, snout brilliant with wet duckweed. Malefoots enveloped in whining clouds of mosquitoes, slapping at bloodmad deerflies, still poled through shimmering water, sky and marsh grass, but they complained that it was all changing, with alien water hyacinth choking the waterways and the shrimp nurseries dying since the Army Corps of Engineers had blocked the natural flow of the delta-building Mississippi with their levee system, cutting off the rich silt deposits that had traveled all the way from the heartland of the continent and that had fed the great marshes forever, now spilling the silt wastefully into the ocean. The swamps and marshes were dissolving, sinking, shrinking away. (A generation later, five hundred square miles of land had melted into water. Men closed off the saline marshes, flushed them with fresh water for a crop of rice, pumped them dry for cattle pasture and the quick money that Texas feedlot entrepreneurs would pay for scrub calves.)
