Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  (He did time himself for a few years and in the clink managed to get through junior college, thought about becoming a Black Muslim and changing his name to something new, start a fresh life, start over again. He thought about money and how to get it. At first it didn’t seem there was anything but music and crime, those were his job categories, what the circumstances pegged him for. Well, he wasn’t going back fishing and couldn’t make it with zydeco or jazz or rock or any other fuckin music thing.

  He started reading like a crazed bastard, read his eyes crossed, not mysteries and crap like the rest of them did, but the Wall Street Journal and financial magazines, small-business start-up analysis, and after a year or two of studying what the world needed, he settled on sludge. On his release in 1978, after he was turned down for loans by sixteen banks, he held up a supermarket and with this investment money went back to Louisiana, bought eighty acres and invited several metropolises to bring him their solid waste for a fee. By 1990 he owned a five-hundred-acre model landfill and was a major conduit for New York City sludge which went from him to fields in Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas and California. He tracked down Wilma, twice divorced, gave her some play, got her heated up and dropped her. He never picked up an accordion again, didn’t even like to hear it. “Only way out for me if I’d stayed up there was be a street musician, play in the cold, the subway, have a little tuna can settin on the sidewalk for dimes and quarters. Fuck that.” But he was very careful and didn’t drive at night.)

  Hit Hard and Gone Down

  Back of the yards

  Old Mrs. Józef Przybysz had worked until she was sixty-six—“No work, no pork, no money, no baloney”—but in 1950, the same year she caught her grandson Joey smoking a cigarette from a shoplifted pack and broke his nose with her ivory darning egg from the old country, she retired, concentrated her time on church, cooking, social meetings and telling stories of the hard times they had survived.

  “Tragic. We are a tragic, tragic family. All dead now but me. Yes, nothing lasts forever, my dear child. Let me change the cold cloth—ah, you will not steal coffin nails again and smoke them, will you?”

  Two decades later, at eighty-six, she had outlived her oldest son, Hieronim. She was a massive woman, her furrowed and liver-spotted skin like a slipcover over a rump-sprung sofa, yet her muscled forearms and strong fingers suggested she could climb a sheer rock face without chalk. Her face was heavy, indented eyes and mouth like fingernail marks in dough, her yellow-white hair pulled up in a soufflé crown bun. Her rimless bifocals were extraordinarily reflective, flashing with the blue flame of the gas burner.

  Over her rayon dresses, printed in diagonal checks, flowers, polka dots, feathers and flying birds on dark backgrounds, she wore aprons trimmed with bands of blue or Mamie Eisenhower pink, but she was so lame and bent that she could no longer search for mushrooms.

  For years her son, Hieronim, and daughter-in-law, Dorothy (a real cholera of a woman), and their two sons, Rajmund and Joey, had lived with her in the tiny house on the South Side’s Karlov Avenue, a solid Polish neighborhood; the house she had purchased herself with her wages as a cigar maker after her husband ran away, for, she said several times a day, “the person without land is like a man without legs: he crawls around but gets nowhere.” The Chez family from Pinsk lived across the street; later they changed their name to Chess, the two boys grew up to work in businesses, a junkyard, bars and nightclubs, finally making phonograph records featuring black singers moaning the blues, and by 1960 the good Polish neighborhood had also turned black on all sides. She couldn’t blame the Chess brothers, but somehow it made a connection in her thoughts—the black ones, the blues, the Chess brothers, the changing neighborhood. The Poles moved out fast when the black ones started coming in after the war and efforts to defend the neighborhood with fire and stone failed.

  At first Hieronim had been a great stone thrower and urged Rajmund and Joey to throw as well.

  He shouted at the black ones, “go on, get out of here, this is good hardworking Polish people here, get the hell out, nigger, you spoil our homes, go on you dog’s blood, cunts will grow on pineapple trees before you live here,” as boys had once thrown stones at him, calling him a dirty polack, a dumb hunky, get the hell back where you come from. The Irish, the Germans, the Americans.

  Hieronim, with his small oval face and tiny blue eyes buried deep in their socket caves, a pinched mouth like his father but long-armed and with ropy shoulders made for hurling, went with other men to protest at the huge housing projects when they tried to open them up, Fernwood Park Homes, a few years later, the sly government putting black ones in a white neighborhood. There was a huge crowd, thousands. Hieronim kept his eyes open later, watching where they built others, and he’d go at night with men to get building materials, not to steal but to sabotage, to slow down the work. (On one of his expeditions he fell into an empty stairwell and hurt his back. After that he limped and complained of an aching liver.) He filled Coke bottles with gasoline for Park Manor. He started an improvement association for their block, although it did no good. He saw to it that the Polish Club had a buzzer on the door, and he went back night after night to Trumbull Park Homes in 1953 when they tried to sneak in the light-skinned nigger family, until they gave up and moved out, back to the dirty slums.

  A few years later the real estate man came to her door saying, “you guys better move out while you can, get a price for your house. It ain’t gonna be worth nothing pretty soon. I can get you something for it right now.” But she did not sell though the daughter-in-law complained constantly because it wasn’t safe, Hieronim not so much. He’d given up by that time, watched The $64,000 Question on television, shouting out wrong answers and finding fault with the ballroom accordion players in their sequined suits.

  Next door in those days was the house of Zbigniew and Janina Jaworski; she remembered the day they moved in, 1941, both of them working, “…him in the steel mill, her in the ammunition factory. Oh, us women loved the war; the only time a Polish woman could get a job was when they had that World War Two.” Before the war there were thirty women for every job and the foremen wouldn’t hire them, blustered that women were demanding and troublesome. How clean were the Jaworskis’ kids, and the yard spotless, nice flowers, she went to mass, good friends, yes, he liked to drink but what man doesn’t, and many happy hours she spent with Janina, sipping coffee and swallowing that tender ginger cake. Look at the house now, inhabited by a washboard black woman in a pilled sweater and grimy slacks, shoe soles flapping and half a dozen ragged children darting mischievously around, kicking garbage cans, prying at mailboxes, punching each other, a detritus of bottle caps, paper scraps, broken sticks, dented hubcaps, flattened tin cans spreading out in their wake, the house itself shabby and peeling, the broken windowpanes blocked with warped cardboard, anything at all. And at night the men who slouched through the loose door, shouting and singing and fighting inside, the din filling the street. Who knew what would happen next? But often, when her daughter-in-law was at work, she brought the woman cabbage rolls covered with foil, gave her ragged children cookies and the tiny tin globe from old Józef’s chest.

  A few years before she grew so lame, on good days she had knotted her babushka under her chins, taken up her collecting basket and set out for Glowacka Park to search for fungi. “So many!” she whispered to herself, her basket crammed with heavy flesh, its weight pulling her left shoulder down. She routed the return journey so she would pass the Stretch-Yor-Bucks grocery, past the sidewalk displays of McIntosh and Delicious apples, baskets fitted with commercial mushrooms from the chemical cellars of Pennsylvania. She despised these smooth beige heads, the flavor of nothing, all poison sprays. Let the stupid Americans eat them! What terrible grocery stores, she muttered, thinking of the old Quality Pork & Provisions store, long ago torn down, thinking of the huge sausages in striped bags, flitches of bacon with the square brown rind like a notebook cover, a stiff, pale leg suspended by a
wire loop around the hoof, the ribs slanting down the rectangular rack looking like a ravine in a landscape photographed from the air, and the terrible heads of the pigs, brows furrowed with the anguish of the last realization, the clouded burst eyes starting or sunken, the ears tattered, the stiff snouts tilted as if releasing the last exhalation. At home she spilled her basket of mushrooms onto the white tablecloth, these delicious mushrooms that she stroked as though they were kittens: fifteen pounds of pheasantbacks, the speckled tawny fans an inch thick giving off a smell of watermelon; sacks of morels, their mazed surfaces leading the eye around and around, the hollow insides studded with glistening bumps like the plaster ceiling in church; creamy waves of oyster pleurotus with a fragrance of leaves and nutmeats, to dry, to stuff, to pickle in vinegar. And all this for nothing but the effort of the exciting search. How her heart beat the summer she discovered twenty-seven great parasol mushrooms in a clearing. But now the park was so beaten and trampled it resembled the earthy dust of an African village.

  In her day she had cooked with passion and experience, a craftworker who needed no measuring cup or recipe, who held everything in her mind. She kept a garden in the handkerchief yard, tomatoes tied to old crutches she took from the Dumpster at the hospital, she made her own good sausage and sauerkraut, extra for her married son, Hieronim, when he was still alive, even after he changed his surname to Newcomer—the Americans called him Harry Newcomer—a little snack of pierozki and the filling soup zurek with mushrooms and potatoes and fermented oatmeal and good sour bread, kneading bread dough until her hands fainted, and once when someone Hieronim knew went hunting in Michigan and brought back a deer shared out among friends she had made again bigos (venison but not boar ham or the sweet dark meat of the Lithuanian bison which few ever tasted), crying into the pot with joy it had been so many years, and for Sunday dinner gołąbki, the little cabbage rolls in a sweet-sour sauce, and always a fresh-baked round babka or two. Józef had always recited when she made bigos of American beef, smoked sausages, sauerkraut and vegetables and, of course, her wild mushrooms, he had put his hand on his breast and declaimed, “all the air is fragrant with the smell.” No wonder when her children came home they ate ravenously, said no one can cook like you. It was true. And did she bring good things to the Nuns’ Day Luncheon? Yes. She despised the American supermarkets full of bright-colored square packages and heavy cans, the terrible cookbooks Dorothy bought by made-up women with American names, Betty Crocker, Mary Lee Taylor, Virginia Roberts, Anne Marshall, Mary Lynn Woods, Martha Logan, Jane Ashley, all of them thin-lipped Protestants who served up gassy baking-mix biscuits, tasteless canned vegetables and salty canned Spam without shame, the worst food in the world. Look at her stupid daughter-in-law, Hieronim’s wife, Dorothy, that cholera, who hardly knew how to cross herself, see her open a can of soup, fry some hot dogs, buy a stale cake slicked over with evil green icing, potatoes in a cardboard box, powdered drinks and trays of nasty crackers and dips and spreads and dunks, Dorothy, who made borscht with jars of baby food, beets and carrots, had once served her mother-in-law a glass of milk with an enormous spider struggling in it. Yet the deluded woman thought she was a notable cook because she had taken part in something called The Grand American National Bake-Off, had won a set of aluminum pots with her imitation of a T-bone steak made out of hamburger and Wheaties, a carved carrot for the bone. Smacznego.

  But all that was ended. The old woman sat in the back room now, her husband long disappeared, her son dead, her daughter-in-law lording it over the kitchen and her grandsons Rajmund and Joey grown men, Joey married to Sonia, parents themselves of her two great-grandchildren, Florry and Artie. Dorothy often knotted up her hard face and complained that Joey and Sonia never visited. She said they wouldn’t come because of the dirty blacks all around them; she couldn’t guess it was her terrible cooking.

  Yes, Dorothy, her flame-shaped blue eyes winking, asked them every week, said come over Sunday, come over Saturday, come over Friday, any day, I make a nice dinner (she made also, besides the baby-food borscht and the false steak, a fish shape from cottage cheese, canned tuna and Jell-O, with a black olive eye), bring the kids over, come over and watch the television, but they never did, and now they had their own television, a portable Philco, and paying more than three dollars on it every week, Dorothy’s invitations making no more impression than if she’d been throwing peas at the wall, except on Christmas Eve they came for the Opłatek Wigilijny and the dinner which the old woman commanded though she could do very little of the work herself now, but last year they refused to go to midnight mass, and the old woman knew they had not fasted because the little girl left so much food on her plate and whined for pizza, bunching the hay under the tablecloth and demanding to open presents, and not Sonia, not Joey, never said nothing to her. The child had the same ash-blond hair and broad cheekbones and little ski-jump nose as Dorothy. The boy she couldn’t blame, he was only a baby and anyway a boy, but the girl needed correction. She was not too young to be enrolled in the dance class and learn the old dances. She was not too young for a little dustpan and broom.

  Buried alive

  When Joey was a boy old Mrs. Józef Przybysz had told him horrific tales of the old days. The other boy, Rajmund, would not listen, clapped his hands over his ears and rushed out to play in the streets. Oh yes, she said, she had been there—a young girl at the time—during that terrible mass when, in the middle of the service, Maria Reks, who worked for the Irish priest, came staggering through the door crusted with dirt and blood and great red scrapes, clods of soil dropping from her torn clothes onto the wine-colored carpet. Father Delahanty shook, his mouth hung open, then he turned and fled out the back of the church. Maria staggered toward the altar, then swayed and collapsed, but as Ludwik Simac and Emil Pliska held her up and the women moaned, she told them a tale of horror in a last-act voice, the congregation standing on the pew seats to get a better view. She said that for three years she had been forced into the bed of Father Delahanty, the miserable Irisher the church had rammed down their throats, and that when, last night, she told him she was pregnant with his bastard, he tried to kill her with a kitchen knife, thought he had succeeded and buried her in a shallow grave behind his kitchen garden, behind the Egyptian onions with their heavy garlic-looking heads, but she had come to, half smothered, and clawed her way out and was here now to accuse. What an uproar! The men shouted for blood and the castration of the lying Irish priest. And within a week the hair of the entire congregation present had turned white, so that when they came together the following Sunday it was like an old folks’ home. The poor girl, though bathed and cleaned and cosseted, had delivered a malformed baby with a head shaped like a carrot and then had died of influenza when the baby was a month old. At the wake the accordion was played, though some said this was wrong, for it was through the accordion she had been seduced, as Father Delahanty was an adept player of jigs and reels.

  Father Delahanty—let thunder strike him—was never found, and lucky for him, too. Slipped away like water. Perhaps had become a cook or a librarian in a distant place, for he’d had a taste for both the kitchen and the book. More likely a corset salesman, hands reaching to squeeze and feel women’s breasts. This was in the time when the Polish Americans rebelled against the Irish priests and separated off into their own Polish Catholicism. If the girls were going to be damaged by priests, let it at least be Polish priests. That’s to look on the bright side, she said. Nowadays, and on the dark side, it wasn’t only the girls.

  “And what have they got for a president now, only an Irish. And a painter artist who thinks soup cans a fine subject.” She looked in the boy’s eyes and told him the true subject for a painter was the horse.

  Hieronim Przybysz a.k.a. Harry Newcomer

  Before old Józef Przybysz ran off he had taken his son, Hieronim, to a ball game once. The day was sweltering and men in paper hats dragged buckets filled with ice and clinking beer bottles, climbed up and down the tiers crying �
��coldie-cold, cold beer, get it here, coldie-cold.” He was allowed to drink the foaming bitter beer from his father’s bottle, could not understand the passion of men for this stuff, and soon he had to pee.

  “Dad,” he said, but his father was talking about cigars with a florid-faced man. He waited, sniveling a little, whispering “Dad” now and then, his bladder aching, the contents of his head sliding around like soapsuds in a bowl. At last his father turned to him, a huge yellow cigar, freshly lit, clenched in his teeth, and said “what!”

  “I have to go.”

  “Jumping Jesus Christ. I’m going to drag you half a mile? Here, use this”—and handed him the bottle which still had an inch of beer in it. “You’ll have to pee in this, go ahead, it’s all men here, nobody cares about this.”

  In an agony of embarrassment he tried, but his frozen bladder would not unclench and he gave up, buttoned his blue jeans. As soon as his naked flesh was hidden in the dark warmth of the jeans, the treacherous bladder relaxed and the day was ruined. The cuff on the ear, the sopping jeans, the crack of the bat on the ball and the great shout from the crowd, all around them men jumping to their feet and leaning tensely forward, shouting awright, awright, atta baby, the smell of the yellow cigar, all combined in a deadly way that made him choose fishing over watching baseball as a suitable pleasure. He grew to manhood, married Dorothy, worked and died without ever seeing another ball game, yet smoked cigars with moderate pleasure.