by Annie Proulx
“You know it makes me sick when you do that, spit your food out. Why do you do that?” said Nancy, breathing through her mouth, winding a curl around her index finger. “Listen at that wind. Supposed to gust to sixty, they said on the radio. Change the weather, sure enough.” She threw down the folded paper. “This’s the worst, a crossword puzzle that’s nothing but Asian rivers and golf players from the nineteen thirties.”
“Where’s Vela?”
“I don’t know, somewheres outside. I don’t know how she can stand that wind. Why?”
Conrad’s voice was as kittenish as it got. “Ah, I thought we might go up in the bedroom for a little while, lay down and take a nap.” His loose, soft stomach trembled beneath his knitted shirt.
“The day you want a nap. I know you, and you don’t want a nap any more than you want cancer.”
“Don’t get back on that subject again. I had about all the hearing about cancer I can stand. Come on, get in that bedroom.” He whacked her behind. She slapped back but followed him into the dim room (it was the room where his parents had slept, redecorated by Nancy with a sparkling textured ceiling and orange striped wallpaper), the sheets and covers still snarled from the night and smelling of their bodies, and the wind whistling shrilly at the window joints.
“Of course, right at the climax, that’s when our kid got her arms cut off,” Nancy whispered a year later to her sister.
The Home Away
With some of Vela’s insurance money they’d had insulation blown into the old house, a thousand dollars’ worth of the stuff, a two-thousand-dollar oil furnace installed, storm windows upstairs, and it was still so cold in the bedroom in winter he could see his breath. Nancy had wanted to fix over the kitchen, a cramped hole with drain problems and curling linoleum, but Conrad said, better wait.
He scraped at the back window, got a look at the white corrugated fields. On the other side of the room the sun had melted the frost enough to show the spraddle of buildings and grain elevators along the road, the billboard hand-painted by the Lutheran Women’s Circle showing a three-year-old child’s face, golden curls and a single black tear on the cheek like a beauty mark—ABORTION STILLS A BEATING HEART—the Conoco station in the distance, the river, and on the other side, Ivar’s warehouse and parking lot. There was a ruffling lump of something on the macadam, right on the yellow line. A dead raven, must of got hit picking at carrion. Dick Cude’s blue pickup went by, swerved to hit the carcass, sending up a few feathers. He watched the truck, saw it slow at the diner, the Home Away.
Out of the blue he wanted a slab of cherry pie and a mug of perked coffee, not granola and instant in Nancy’s arty glass cups. For years he’d had his coffee and pie at Chippewa Willy’s Grill, but he could see there was a good crowd at the Home Away morning after morning.
He got mad all over again looking at the old silo as he drove past, thought for the thousandth time that he would get up there this summer and paint the damn thing out, the big peeling picture of Jesus with a snake in each hand standing in front of a house trailer. For that matter, pull the silo down. Empty for years. Snow crystals on the clumps of roadside grass like crusted salt. Past the signs OLD GLORY BELIEVES IN GOD AND AMERICA, DO YOU? and THIS IS A CHILD WATCH COMMUNITY.
He sat next to Dick Cude in the last empty place. Cude’s clothes smelled of some noxious washday detergent perfume. The restaurant was full, half the farmers in town in for the breakfast they couldn’t get at home, for the pleasure of ordering and getting two meaty pork chops and home fries and two over easy instead of a load of crap and whiny complaints. What the hell was wrong with Nancy that she couldn’t put a decent breakfast together? She knew he loved Spanish omelets, but how often did he get one? Father’s Day, and no other time. Breakfast in bed, a Spanish omelet, and a few other things. The rest of the time it was “cook it yourself.” Was it just Nancy?
“Dick, what d’you get for breakfast when you eat at home?”
The man lifted his red face, the granulated complexion as though sprinkled with hot sugar.
“Frozen waffles. We got a freezer full of frozen waffles. I can have frozen waffles with margarine and corn syrup and some kind of artificial cream comes in a tub. Could be worse, could be Jell-O. How you, Mrs. Rudinger? Guess I’ll have the special.”
“You sure? You know there’s turnip mash this morning, and not everybody likes turnip.” She gave the U.P.S. man a hard look, dropped her glance to the mound of turnip on his plate.
“Sure as snow I love turnip. Gimme some fried onions too.” A photograph of Mrs. Rudinger hung behind the cash register, showed her standing in front of a venetian blind holding a burning paper—the mortgage—in a pair of spaghetti tongs. Over the door the head of a six-point buck she had shot in 1986 waggled when someone came in.
“Comes with it. Liver, onions, turnip mash, two corn muffins and coffee. You want coffee?”
“I rather have milk. If I can get it.” He turned to Conrad, used his sympathetic voice.
“How’s your kid doing?”
“She’s coming along pretty good, I guess. Goes in to the therapist twice a week, got all this equipment in the house. She spends a lot of time listening to tapes, we got her a Walkman when she was in the hospital. Seems like she wants a new tape ever other day and it gets expensive.”
Two Guatemalan agricultural laborers got up, paid for their eggs and walked out. Mrs. Rudinger’s new waitress came past, refilling coffee cups.
“What is she,” said Dick Cude when she was out of earshot, “Chinese or Vietnamese or what?”
“I think she’s Korean,” said Conrad. “That’s what’s the matter, the country’s sinking under these people—chinks and spicks, and pakis and those aye-rabs from the Middle of the East. It’s not the same thing as when our grandparents come over; they were white, they had guts, a good work ethic, didn’t go around blowing up buildings. These are not white people. They’re swarthy, they’re mongrels. It’s simple—the country’s filled up, there’s not enough room, not enough jobs to go around.”
“Well, anyway,” said Dick Cude, “we got a lot of tapes at home. You know, from my sister after Russell—I could bring some of them over. It’s time to let somebody else enjoy them. What kind of music she like? I hope she don’t go for this here Nigro rap shit with the dirty lyrics. I won’t let it in the house.”
“Nah. What she likes—look, it sounds funny, but what she’s going for is Lawrence Welk, all that old cornball stuff. A lot of it is on tapes now. I don’t know what she sees in it, but she listens to it by the hour. That stuff was stale before I was born. That bubbly-bubbly champagne music. It’s just a damn joke. Nursing home music. But that’s what she likes. It’s cheerful, that’s why, I think. Nancy’s planning to take her down to Disney World when she’s strong enough, hear that Disney World polka band, they got a terrific band, lot of accordions.”
“She’ll grow out of it. After what the kid’s been through, I guess she can listen to anything she wants. Tell you something about polka, this disc jockey in St. Paul a couple months ago said just offhand on the air that listeners could send in the names of their favorite polka bands, see? And in three days he got twenty-eight thousand postcards. Hey, we’re watching old movies the other night, Arsenic and Old Lace, it’s a special on Frank Capra movies. They said he used to play the squeezebox, showed a clip of him doing it. Jimmy Stewart, Joan Crawford, they all played. Hollywood’s favorite instrument. How about Myron Floren? I got some Myron Floren. He used to play with Lawrence Welk. How about Frankie Yankovic? ‘Roll out the barrel…’ How about Whoopee John Wilfahrt? That New Ulm stuff? There’s one of them old seventy-eights of that woman accordion, Violet, Viola Turpeinin? Finnish woman. Boy, could she play. Dead now, I suppose. Beautiful stuff, some of that old Scandahoovian music, but you don’t hear it much now except at them festivals, your good time there, but you don’t hear it in ordinary life like when I was a kid. My dad’s father could play it. He used to work with some Finns, there was
a song they sang, something about a mailman. God damn, it was funny. We still got the old Hardanger fiddle, all cracked, a course. A course, that old-time music now, seems a lot of people is interested in it, you know, the Finns, the Swedes, the Croatians, all them, but you ask me, it’s like pumping blood into a corpse.” He wanted to say he knew something about accordions, damage and grief, but Conrad wouldn’t want to hear that.
“Well, it’s that sound that gets her, not no particular bunch a people. She says it makes her feel in a good mood. She told the therapist that if she got any use back in her hands she wanted to learn to play the accordion.”
“Yeah? They think that’s gonna happen?”
“No.”
“Well. It’s a miracle she’s still alive. It’s a miracle they could sew them back on. I mean it. The paper said only the second one they done it on. Imagine sewing all them little blood vessels back together and joining the muscles? I don’t see how they done it. She’s a tough, tough little kid. Somebody up there’s looking out for her. I wish He could have looked out for Russell. I suppose she goes to one of them help groups, they got them for everything—Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, sexaholics, shoplifters. Seems like they got to have one for blind people and maimed people, don’t it?”
Conrad looked at the clock. He knew where the conversation was going, didn’t want to hear anything about blind Russell, dumped out of a bus in the desert. He had twelve minutes to get down to Old Glory Gas. He hoped Pitch was around to help load the tanks on the truck. Whatever, it beat listening to Dick Cude, the big red face bunching up as if he was going to cry any minute.
“What can I say,” he said. “It’s light in the day and dark at night. It’s cold in the winter and warm in the summer. I’ll see you,” he said.
Dick finished his turnip and asked for more, watching Conrad gun his truck out of the parking lot, noticing that his seat belt wasn’t fastened—what a fool to take the risk. He smoked too. Something heedless about that family. Whereas his sister had taken every care of Russell and again and again terrible things had happened to him. Dick finished his glass of milk, sorry that the toast had run out before the milk. He had a thought.
“Any rice puddin?”
“Not ‘til lunch, Dick. There’s very few eats rice puddin for breakfast.”
He left her a dime and went out, waded into the freezing wind, strung now with fine snow, toward his truck in front of the post office, eight blocks down. He always parked there. The wind in his face was unpleasant enough for him to turn his head every few steps and walk blind. It was awful cold, he thought, and his hands were freezing, even with good warm gloves. The bank’s digital thermometer read eight below but the wind had to be gusting to forty. He ducked into the store—Out West Antiques—to get warm, better there than the yarn shop or the health food store, walked around looking at the tools: beautiful old mahogany planes, a well-balanced little tack hammer, some wrought-iron hinges. He checked the junk table; usually it wasn’t worth looking at, but once he’d found a tiny brass spirit level with fancy engraving on it, a cabinetmaker’s level. Now he discovered a small green accordion and took joy in the find. He’d get it for Conrad’s girl even if she could never play. She could listen to tapes and look at it and pretend. He paid his dollar and carried the old thing out to the truck.
At home he thought he’d clean it up a little—in truth, it was a dirty piece of work—and he put it in the sink, turned on the vegetable sprayer, hit it with a good squirt of detergent. The damn thing took on water. It was heavy now, though clean, but when he squeezed it not a sound came out, even when he pushed all the buttons at once. He’d just dry it out a little. He put it on the hot air register under the window. Sure enough, it was dry by afternoon, and it was clean in a way that showed up how old and beat the thing was. The bellows was nearly as stiff as wood, you could only get a few inches of squeeze out of it and a weird, shrill chord. He sprayed it with WD-40 inside and out but it didn’t seem to make any difference. What the hell, it was only for her to look at.
Driving down to the diner the next morning, bumping over the railroad where a track gang was taking a break, wiping their mouths with paper napkins, dropping their empty soft drink cans and paper coffee cups into the trash bucket on the flatcar, he switched on the radio—it was NPR; his wife had used the truck after supper—and heard John Townley singing “Land’s End” to the accompaniment of his rare Dipper Shantyman concertina of West Indian cocobolo wood and goatskin, with handmade reeds, the ends fitted with nautical engravings of stout mermaids and cresting waves, the air button a tiny arm of polished bone which gleamed against the dark wood like the arm of a deus ex. machina. The rich, oboelike tones set off Townley’s voice, but in midsyllable, “and the great seas ro—,” Dick shut him off. Those sea songs ended only in drowning and forsakenness.
(His nephew, Russell, had been born blind, and the family considered it a mercy when he showed an aptitude for music. He learned to play the accordion from an Italian woman, and his first solo piece was a Swedish version of “Life in the Finnish Woods” before its transformation into “Mockingbird Hill.” She gave him good advice: “try to develop a sound all nationalities can identify with—that way you’ll never be out of work.” By age thirteen he was playing a big square Chemnitzer concertina, studded with six hundred rhinestones, in kiddie contests and winning them all with his version of “Cattle Call,” by way of Eddy Arnold out of a tune octogenarian Old Glorians knew as “The St. Paul Waltz.” His father, anxious to see the kid bring in a little money, started booking him for the Friday entertainment hour at the local summer resorts. The Lake Hideaway belonged to his friend Harvey Westhold [born Waerenskjold] who abused and ravished Russell twenty minutes before his first performance.
“Go ahead, kid, take a quick shower. You smell. Can’t play for a high-class crowd all sweaty like that. Here, I’ll help you get your clothes off. The shower’s right over here. Uh-uh-uh-uh. Don’t say nothing about this or I’ll kill you.”
By the time he was twenty-one Russell was a troublemaker. Blind or not, he’d sneak out of the house at night and stand by the road until somebody picked him up. In town he played the concertina for drink and drugs, invited tattoo artists to “do what you want.” These illustrations were banal, curious, some were obscene. He worked as a street musician in Minneapolis for a year or two, then, his mind frayed by chemistry, excesses, and the longing for something more, he bought a bus ticket for Las Vegas. Forty miles out from that destination and full of multicolored pills, he got to his feet, took a pistol from his concertina case and fired it into the roof. He was quickly overpowered by two women from the University of Ohio swim team. The bus driver pulled over and asked them to put him out. They prodded him forward and down the steps, lifted him, with his instrument, over a five-strand barbwire fence and left him in the desert. Nobody heard from him again.)
Boredom
It had happened because she was bored. She’d been in the yard, swinging a broom at the swallows. There were dozens of them under the eaves of the old barn and inside, tatty nests balanced on dusty beams or stuck up under the roof and for half the summer the birds tore in and out of openings, their beaks full of beetles, ants, wasps, spiders, flies, bees, moths and darning needles.
A thunderstorm to the north was approaching, a curled lofty plume with a dark wedge at the base, tongues of wind rushing violently out from it. The wind made her feel crazy and vigorous though she kept her back to it because of the dust it stirred up. But that’s all it was, wind, thunder; somewhere to the north, rain would fall. She was bored; there was nothing to do in Old Glory, nothing ever to do at home with her stupid mother and father, and Sunday was the worst, just nothing, nothing, nothing to do when the television wasn’t working and there was nowhere to go and nothing in the refrigerator to eat except a raw turkey breast that had been there a week and stank. So she marked the openings the swallows used and leaped up, swatting at them, pretending they were tennis balls and sh
e was a girl champion. The wind gusts flared, hissing and tearing at the leaves of the tree. She heard a truck coming, rattling like it was going to fly apart, and she spun around gracefully with the broom racket and saw Ed Kunky’s black whiskers in the smeary windshield and beside him his son Whitey, good-looking Whitey, a class ahead of her, who made her daydream of sitting in a kindergarten chair so that her skirt came down around her ankles like a bell and he came over to her with something in his hands, it was never clear what, a bunch of flowers or a rolled-up paper or a candy bar (a Freudian analyst clarified this years later), but he bent over her and leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, a kiss like a mosquito dapping across her lips, across her hair at night, and in the daydream she fainted. But now she held up the broom, wrestled it against the wind, and she was primed to smack a swallow into the middle of next week. No swallow came, the truck drew abreast and beyond, rattling and banging with a load of jagged-edged metal roofing and flashing from the old Knudsen barn to the north. Three swallows dived for high holes in the wall, a ferocious gust caught up a piece of roofing as she leaped, swinging the broom at the swallows. The sharp metal sailed across the yard like a silvery flying guillotine and sheared off both of her upstretched arms above the elbows, smashed into her face, cutting and breaking her nose.
