Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  “He entered yet another world of strong odors with the cigar shop. The smell of tobacco was so strong that it made him run out and vomit in the street the first day. There’s tobacco dust in the air. The windows were nailed shut. It’s humid inside because the tobacco cannot be allowed to get dry. If someone who didn’t know came in and opened a window, all the workers would walk out and threaten to quit. But anyway, the windows were all nailed shut so that couldn’t happen. He was good at his work, his fingers were agile from playing the accordion and he had a good eye, he had the feeling in the fingertips. In a few years he was making more money than anyone in the neighborhood rolling those Havana claros. We found this house and began to make payments. But he was not satisfied. He swaggered about, finely dressed, worked when he pleased and smoked his three free cigars and continued to drink. He shunned our little house. A worm gnawed his brain.

  “He quit working at the American Cigar Company and went to United Tobacco. He began to do what many of the best cigar rollers did: travel about the country, going to different towns, and when he found one he liked that had a cigar shop—in those days every town in America had one or two—he would show the boss what he could do, stay for six or seven months or weeks and then move on. By the hundreds, these cigar makers, Italians, Germans, Poles, on every train, back and forth and up and down, looking for the golden America they had imagined, a place they believed existed somewhere.

  “He would send money home, regularly at first, but then nothing came. For months. I was crazy. I thought to myself, this dog’s blood of a man, this psiakrew, let him die alone among strangers. I had a little money put aside and it all went for food and the house payments. I had five children. I had to take in a boarder or two. The best was Uncle Juljusz. How kind that man was! You know, he was named after his ancestor Juljusz Olszewicz, who became French under the name Jules Verne. He helped me write a plea to your grandfather—I think he must have inherited some of the gift for writing—an advertisement that I mailed to the paper; they had a paper every cigar maker read. I’ll never forget it. It would make an angel cry. It said: ‘The children of cigar maker Józef Przybysz need to know the whereabouts of their father as they are in need.’ They ran this advertisement for one year but we never had an answer. I never heard from him again. And what did he leave his children, what did we find when we opened his precious trunk he brought all the way from Kraków and never let anyone peep into? A metal tool no one understood, a model of an iceboat, a tiny little tin globe with a drop of red paint on the place where Chicago might be, two wax records, ‘Zielony Mosteczek’ and ‘Pod Krakowem Czarna Rola.’ What did these things mean? Nothing! Oh, the songs? Oh, in American you say ‘The Green Bridge’ and ‘The Black Soil near Kraków.’ Old-country songs, sad old songs, I don’t know why he had them. Not his kind of music. He preferred classical music or humorous smut; you know: ‘Zyd sie smiał, w portki srał, zyd sie smiał, w portki srał’—‘the Jew was laughing, he shit in his pants’—that nasty stuff he liked.

  “It was good Uncle Juljusz who persuaded me I could take up cigar work myself. He told me they were hiring many women in the cigar trade. At first I only did dirty work, stripping. You know you got to get the midrib out of the leaf. Then a woman showed me how to roll cigars. The work was mostly the five-centers—the good-paying Havana claro work was then and always only for men—but I could earn enough, like Uncle Juljusz said, to support my children. My oldest girl, Bubya, your Auntie Bubya, was twelve, old enough to look after the others.

  “And so it happened. I worked for American Cigar. They started me off stripping, but I pestered one of the other women who had been there a long time to show me how to do it—I knew something about it, of course, from listening to him, the critical affair of gauging the bunch, and I progressed very rapidly. We used cigar mold presses for the five-centers. Your grandfather never touched a mold, he was an aristocrat of the cigar. You got this two-piece wood mold with hollows in it, little beds for the cigars, and you put the filler leaves, the bunch, in these little beds and put on the top of the mold and it goes in the press for twenty minutes. It shapes the filler. I enjoyed it—you can’t imagine. We were all very friendly, we had little names for each other. I was Zippy Zosia because I was very fast; Eagle Eyes was a woman who saw everything. The rest of them I don’t remember. We could talk anything, conversation, jokes, somebody always playing jokes, somebody put a snake in my filler leaf box once. What a scream I made! We had a reader in the afternoon, somebody would read the paper out loud or a book—we heard Black Beauty, I never forgot it, we all cried and it was very bad for cigar making. We would sing—one cigar place had a piano. We would bring in cakes. All my friends were these cigar-making women. My happiest years.

  “I say now those were the happiest years of my life. I was making money enough to pay the mortgage, set aside a little to gain certain advantages for my children. Bubya married Uncle Juljusz, as you know. True, she was only thirteen, but it worked out well enough. Uncle Juljusz bought her a beautiful doll for a wedding present, something she always wanted but there was never the money.

  “Joey, I paid a suit for your father so he could play the accordion looking nice, I paid shorthand school for Marta, I paid chiropractor school for your father, I paid nurse school for Rosie, for my children I paid a good education, all my children went to the Tatra dance classes, they should do well and remember they are of Polish heritage and not have to roll cigars. But Hieronim disappointed me, he stopped chiropractor school and went to work for the Polonia Sewing Machine Company and got married. Of course he played the accordion too, ‘The National Defense Polka,’ ‘Dive Bomber Polka,’ ‘Hilly-Billy Polka’—ask him, I can’t remember. After I started the cigar job I got very active in the church, I joined pleasant societies, very good discussion and happy occasions, I became reunited with my family and my people from the mountains, and Uncle Tic-Tac who tried to teach your father the old mountain songs, urged him to write them down in a book, to gather these songs from the old generation, what they remembered from their villages, from their youths. But your father was more interested in the new kind of polka, ‘The Killer Diller Polka,’ and one I did not like very much but I’ve forgotten the name, something about ‘the little man in the corner,’ especially when he came back from the war and so much was lost. Perhaps you, little grandson, with your love for music, will find a way to save the old Polish music.”

  What Hieronim (a.k.a. Harry) said to Joey

  “My old man? Hey, I don’t want to talk about the bastard. The old lady fills you with lies. He was a lousy musician, interested only in the dollar. His music was coarse—‘the cow shit, the bull farted, everything went into the same hole, I came along and looked and we all shit some more.’ That was what he liked. Crude stuff. The lowest common denominator. Then he’d blubber all over the place when he heard the Angelus or something. He claimed to be a pharmacist in the old country, but I did some checking up and he wasn’t nothing but a peasant. Tried to make out he was better over here. Once he left, it was good. I played a lot of weddings the week he left—three or four a week. I was happy. It was good times, not just because people was getting married but because he was gone.

  “Hey, when I came back to Chicago after the war it was all changed. Everything! Before the war we used to have a lot of fun at dances—there’s one thing you gotta say for polacks, we really know how to have fun—there was this guy, big heavy guy with a red nose like a cherry tomato, worked at the steel mill, you’d see him at every dance the sweat just pouring off him, and he’d shout ‘ale sie bawicie?’ Are you having fun? and the whole dance floor would roar ‘yah, yah, yah.’ Weddings? They used to go on for three days. But then after the war everybody is serious, no time for fun, the wedding dance is three hours instead of three days, all the Polish halls and societies are closed down and there’s niggers everywhere, entire streets, whole Polish neighborhoods wiped out. And the people are different too, I mean white people, Polish people. They do
n’t have such exuberant fun, even though the music, and I mean the polka music, was terrific, better than in the old days, punchy and fast and loud. Hey, I think of the music—Li’l Wally Jagiello, he’s the one started the business about singing the Polish lyrics, he’s got a good voice, before him hardly ever anything but instrumental polkas. But hey, are we having fun? Are people warm and friendly like they used to be, a big arm around your shoulder, buy you a drink, have some more food? No, no, everybody’s cool, everybody’s casual, stand back a little, don’t make a big thing, don’t act so Polish. This cool stuff, I say they got that from the niggers who will stand there like statues, very still, never move but watch everything going on and not move a muscle, act unconcerned, cool, where a old-fashioned polack would be tearing his hair out and praying to the saints. See, polacks are more like wops in the emotions. And that’s when the Polish dance halls and community dances started to close down, so now the only time you hear polka music is at somebody’s wedding and at special Polish days, festivals and like that. Records too, records spoiled it—hey, everybody can have a polka band in their living room on the phonograph, they don’t need to go out to a place where live musicians are playing. So we’re losing it. I heard my first rock number with a polka beat last week, some jerk band of kids, call themselves the Warsaw Pack. Ha-ha. I predict that in ten years the polka will be dead. And don’t ask me anything again about my father. He was a lousy shit.”

  The third pleasure

  The occasional third pleasure of Hieronim came when someone—always someone else, never him—got some whore in the back room to do for all of them, whoever was drunk enough.

  In winter, there was no fishing and he spent all day at the Polish Club. But there was another reason he liked to come there. The bartender, Feliks, because of a birthmark, had an uncanny resemblance to a man who boarded in their house when he was eleven, twelve, Mr. Brudnicki.

  The house seemed full of boarders after the old man left, some working at the mill, some traveling through with things to sell, sometimes musicians and actors. Mr. Brudnicki was youngish, with swollen hands and tight pursed lips, a birthmark from the inner corner of his left eye to his ear like half a mask, a series of dots and dashes, purple writing in some strange alphabet. He was part of something the men knew about, a show or some event that happened elsewhere. Sometimes he would come into the kitchen and, if no one was around, crook his finger at Hieronim, a good-looking big kid then with snow-blond hair and wolf-green eyes, already thinking of himself as “Harry,” to come up to his room where his bed was curtained off from the others, and if the house was empty he would lean against the bed and Hieronim would stand in front of him. Mr. Brudnicki would open first his pants, letting the “Red Devil” (as he called it) leap out, then Hieronim’s, to release the “Little Devil” which he stroked, pushing back the foreskin and pressing the head against that of the circumcised Red Devil, and then it was time for the two devils to spar, rubbing, bumping, shoving at each other until Mr. Brudnicki turned him around and pushed him onto the bed and then Hieronim would feel the Red Devil, dressed in a cold layer of lard from the can under Mr. Brudnicki’s bed, enter the “secret cave” with snorting and writhing. Afterward Mr. Brudnicki would swear him to silence and give him a quarter, a magnificent sum, worth any amount of devil sparring, though the secret-cave entry gave him pain and diarrhea.

  Once, restless for that odd excitement, he took his cousin Casimir up to Mr. Brudnicki’s room to teach him the trick, but when he knelt to get the lard can under the bed he saw a small red trunk. It was locked. He looked then in the scabby green cupboard where Mr. Brudnicki kept his clothes and saw an extraordinary garment suspended from a wire hanger, a glittering thing, a dress of ice. He lifted the hem, heavy and cold with tiny glass beads.

  “Casimir, see this.” His cousin came up beside him and touched the dress. The gloom of the cupboard, a musky, spicy smell, enveloped them. He heard his cousin breathing, could feel his warm breath on his neck. They pressed into the cupboard, the beady fringe of the ice dress clicking as they rubbed each other’s swelling pricks.

  “I do this all the time,” gasped Casimir.

  “So do I,” lied Hieronim, the clotty sperm hitting the ice dress, deciding not to tell Casimir about Mr. Brudnicki and the quarters, which was different from this, sinister yet thrilling and enriching. When Casimir had finished too they started to laugh, and forevermore Casimir had only to say “the beaded dress …” and they would both smirk and blow their lips out in half-laughter at the memory.

  After a few months Mr. Brudnicki started a series of brief absences, often falling behind in his rent, and then a long absence of weeks although his trunk and his can of lard were still under the bed, the mysterious dress in the cupboard. Sixteen days passed.

  “That’s it!” cried his mother to Uncle Juljusz. “He’s more than two weeks behind. I got good men, working men, want this room. If he don’t come by Saturday it all goes out. I rent to somebody else.”

  Saturday passed. On Sunday afternoon his mother went into the room, pulled the blanket divider aside and began throwing out trousers and shoes, the ice dress, the can of lard and the red trunk which crashed down the stairs, unlocking itself on the way, tumbling out wigs, cosmetics, unguents, glittering masks, and a curious elastic-backed garment with a rubber front sporting a pair of large breasts with maroon nipples.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” shouted his mother and Uncle Juljusz came out of the kitchen and looked, picked it up. He took it to the mirror over the sink, held it up in front of himself, but it looked laughable until he took off his shirt and pulled on the breast garment over his bare skin. The effect was extraordinary. It was Uncle Juljusz, the seamed, flattened face and the straggling mustache, and the red arms with tufts of stinking hair, but then he became—not a woman, but part of a woman. Uncle Juljusz minced around the kitchen shouting “oh, you bad man” in falsetto and slapping at the air.

  “Now you know how he could pay the rent!”

  At that moment when they were all screaming with outraged laughter, Mr. Brudnicki opened the door. He was thin and white, a soiled bandage like a helmet wrapped around his head. He stared at them with tragic eyes, saw his glittering dress on the floor in a heap like melting ice, turned and ran down the steps, back into the street. “What was I supposed to do, wait until doomsday?” shouted his mother after the flying man.

  Hieronim’s worm probe

  In 1967, the week before Joey and Sonia—a beauty with a flat, still face, the full, rich mouth seeming to pull the cheeks toward it, great-lidded eyes of china blue provocatively slanted—married, it rained steadily, every morning beginning with fog that thickened and turned to drizzle that turned to steady rain that turned to downpour as night fell, so that under the drumming roof they slept well. Sometime between four and five the rain stopped and for a few hours there was the hope of dry weather, but then it started again.

  On that Sunday morning Hieronim believed it was going to clear. The mist was blowing off, the ragged clouds showed sky. There was a lovely freshness to the day, the smell of the country. He passed the extension cord out the window, went outside and connected the worm probe. Barefooted, pale feet with knobby bunions, a cup of coffee in one hand, the probe in the other, he walked across the spongy lawn looking for a good spot. A slight depression in front of his wife’s rain-beaded ornamental cabbages, pearly violet and mauve-frilled leaves, what beauties. He plunged in the probe and turned on the current. For a moment, as he leaped into the air, he had the galvanizing sensation that he was being turned inside out as a skin is stripped off a rabbit in one sharp jerk, but by the time he landed facedown in the sopping grass he was almost dead, and he was thoroughly dead, surrounded by a halo of electrocuted worms and robins, when his wife noticed him from the kitchen window four hours later.

  She had given him the worm probe for a name day gift two years before.

  A dog’s voice does not reach heaven

  Hieronim’s wake
was something, the last of its kind in the neighborhood, in the old, old Polish style, and nobody would have known how to do it except Old Man Bulas from the Polish Club, who carried a blind man’s watch, a curious horologe knobbed with chimes and rings that sounded the hour and minute when buttons were pressed. The two of them had drunk and talked away the years together, both of them filled with a deep and mystical regard for Mikołaj Kopernik, the father of astronomy. Nobody would know how to conduct such a funeral in future, as Old Man Bulas himself died two weeks after the funeral-wedding weekend, and was buried with a scanty American ceremony. There’s irony for you, said Mrs. Józef Przybysz, slamming her cane on the floor and weeping.