Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  Your mama’s got change coming

  The Diamond Grocery Store stood out on the edge of the highway in the scalding sun, a quarter of a mile from two rows of shacks bisected by a mud-holed track. The store, fifteen by twenty, sported a sloping concrete step and a three-tier false front of warped and paintless clapboard, a cracked plate-glass window mended with lightning-bolt adhesive tape. A hand-lettered sign at the top read GROCERIS, and over the door another sign announced HOME MAD SUSAGE & HOT BOODIN. The window was pasted up with ancient advertisements for JAX Best Beer in Town, NEHI, Quality Ice Cream, Dental Snuff, Brown’s Mule, root beer, and Show Down, Welcome, TOP, Regal, Royal, King, Prince and Duke’s Choice chewing tobaccos. There was a single gas pump, 85 octane.

  At the back of the store was a three-room ell under a corrugated metal roof where Addie, the middle-aged daughter of Clarence Stranger (dead since 1987 when the seat chain of a carnival swing broke and hurled him onto a baby stroller), took care of her senile husband, thirty years older than she, kept the store accounts, cooked heavy dinners and painted the scenes of her childhood on square pieces of plywood, printing in the margins explanatory text of the events depicted. (A tiny black girl in a pink dress with a white cape spangled with stars ran over a plowed-earth landscape, pursued by huge men in masks, their legs spread like scissors, sinister bulges in their crotches. ALMOST GOT ME. SIX YR OLD MY MOTHER TOLD ME STAY AWAY FROM FLAT TOWN RD. I WENT THERE. MEN CHASED ME. YELLED GET OUT OF HERE YOUR FATHER IS A B——.) She was short and thin, her face diamond-shaped, with deep cheek dimples and eyebrows arched high like croquet hoops.

  To the left of the door was a second window, smaller than the plate glass and with a sliding pane that let her serve customers standing outside—beer buyers. Below the sliding pane was a shelf displaying a jumble of dusty objects: two red paper rolls of caps and a toy pistol, a box of wood screws, Smith Brothers, Vicks, and Luden’s cough drops, a torn packet of cut plug leaking brown dust, four empty glass jars, covers askew, everything browned by sunlight, fly-specked and dusty.

  Inside the store two big coolers roared, one filled with beer, the other with soft drinks and sodas, and against the back wall stood a refrigerator with milk, bacon, eggs, a few tired heads of lettuce; from front to back ran green painted shelves of canned goods, yams, hominy grits, peanut butter, store bread, soap and sugar.

  She leaned against the frame of the sliding window watching the traffic pass on the highway. A white truck with Arkansas plates pulled in, a skinny dude with three days’ worth of five o’clock shadow asking for 35-millimeter color print film; she had it. Mr. Tek walked in with Mrs., looking for condensed milk for their chicory, looking for margarine and matches; she had it all. The FedEx man, wisps of acid jazz and digital loops seeping from his earphones, swerved in, bid for a cold Co’-Cola; she had it. Cigarettes, gas, candy bars, aspirin, cold cuts, ballpoint pens, she had it, she had it.

  Down by the double row of houses her glance fell on three children playing, couldn’t be more than four or five years old, Tiny Faulk’s twins and their baby brother, must be. One was trying to tap-dance in the dirt, copying that dancer on Sesame Street. Now they were jumping off the sagging step of the shack where Tiny Faulk lived, hardly more than a kid herself, thin and bad-tempered, screaming at those babies to shut up when she was home. At least she kept them, taking care of them, not like the woman in the papers up in New York, walked out of the hospital the day after she had twins, false name, no way to find her. She saw Tiny every morning walking up the road to catch the bus to World, glaring down at the road, shifting from foot to foot impatiently, had some kind of job in World, in the meat-packing plant or the laundry, maybe both. Old Mrs. Simms supposed to look after the babies for ten dollars a week, but she was half blind and three-fourths deaf and lame-legged on both sides so she sat on the porch, turned up her hearing aid and fell asleep. Couldn’t hear them most of the time and Addie knew that sooner or later there’d be brakes screaming and somebody would run into the store saying, oh god, I run over a little chile.

  Sure enough, the bigger ones were running up to the edge of the highway, daring each other to stand on the last safe inch, and when a car or truck came blaring by, they’d jump back, laughing. Now look at them, squatting in the dirt and raising a dust cloud. Half drowsing, she watched them wander down the row of shacks and disappear behind the outhouses. She could see them getting run over so clear it was like a painting. She might make that painting someday if it happened. She painted only after the fact for fear of making something bad come true.

  It was late in the morning and she was reading the World Journal when the door squeaked open and the twins and baby brother came in and headed toward the beer cooler.

  “What you doin?”

  “We wants sodas.”

  “Sodas costs money. You got money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you won’t find no soda there, that’s beer for mens. Other cooler got the soda.” She watched them climb on the box provided for shorter customers and heave up the cover. They talked together in murmuring voices, lifting the bottles high enough from the icy water to see the contents, settled finally on a Yoo-Hoo and an Orange Crush and a Lime. The twin in the striped shirt—filthy beyond belief—handed her the money.

  “What’s this you given me?” She had to look and look again.

  “Dollar.”

  “A dollar! I guess it’s a dollar! Where you get it?” Her hand was almost steady.

  “Found it.”

  “Found it! I guess you found it! Whereabouts?”

  “By the road.”

  “Yeah. By the road.” Don’t that beat it, she thought. All the need in the world for money and who finds it? Three kids who want to spend it on sweet sodas, who don’t even know what they got. She could keep it, let them have their sodas, and who the hell would know? Not them. Not nobody. Must of been some bank robbers or drug lords going down the road, the windas wide open and a thousand-dollar bill flyin out like a green bird. Or else a counterfeit. Probably what it was, fake money, and she was going to be out three sodas.

  “You all drink your sodas,” she said. She put the thousand-dollar bill in the cash register under the pullout where she put twenties when she got them. There’d never been anything bigger than a twenty in that cash drawer. She watched them stand under the ceiling fan’s cool whisper, swallowing, turning their bottles around and around, tracing lines on the beaded glass.

  “Right now I’m goin a take a walk by the road, see there’s any more a these dollars. You all come sit out on the steps.”

  She walked along the road in both directions, scrutinizing the faded beer cans and cigarette packets, the muddy potato chip bags and scraps of plastic in the weeds. The sun was cruelly hot.

  “There’s nothin there. Must a been the onliest one.” She strode back to the store, thinking she’d close up at two, go to the bank and find out was it real.

  The children were sitting on the steps, down to the last inch of soda and taking tiny sips, sloshing the liquid around in the bottles for the rich wet sound.

  “When your mother git home?”

  “After supper. Late.”

  “I guess late! You all tell her come up here and see me. Tell her come to the store, she got change comin. Hear me? It’s on you. You forget to tell her and it be a shame and a misery for her, she work so hard. And you all stay away from that road, you hear me?”

  They put the empty bottles on the counter and straggled off toward the shack where old Mrs. Simms stood on the porch yelling, you come on here now. They kicked stones, jumped, the one in overalls saying, heyo, heyo, how you do. The smallest one’s pants hung low and wet. They came abreast of the crumpled instrument in the weeds and the twin in the dirty striped shirt jumped on it again. Waaaah, the thing sounded, and they screamed with laughter. The one in overalls picked it up and heaved it onto the highway. A distant black dot on the shimmering road grew larger, rushed toward them.

  “You all
come on now,” yelled Mrs. Simms.

  The eighteen-wheeler moaned, slammed past them with a blast of hot air, and in its gritty wash fluttered thousand-dollar bills. Droopy-drawers bawled with an eyeful of grit.

  “All right,” called Mrs. Simms. “I’m gonna eat all this nice butterscotch puddin by myself. Gonna count to five and start eatin. One. Two. Three. Four.” She held up a dish, gyrated a spoon above it.

  “FIVE.”

  Acknowledgements

  I wrote Accordion Crimes during two years of disruption and uprooting that included the deaths of my mother and several relatives and friends, a move in stages from Vermont to Wyoming with books incarcerated in boxes for eight months, constant travel, a broken wrist, a publisher takeover. I never would have finished this book without the help of many interested and kindhearted people who aided with accordion source material, lore, lists of books, clippings, photographs, postcards, tapes and CDs, introductions to accordion-music scholars and accordion musicians. To all listed below my truly grateful thanks, but especially to Liz Darhansoff, coolheaded, who many times calmed my anxiety that the book could not stand another interruption, to Barbara Grossman who helped get it under way, and to Nan Graham who gave me lunch, time and a long leash.

  Thanks for a 1992 Guggenheim Fellowship which helped with research for The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes, and is still helping another, now in progress. The Ucross Foundation of Wyoming provided a quiet island (literally, thanks to a spring flood) where sections of this book were written. Special thanks to Elizabeth Guheen and Raymond Plank for a hundred kindnesses.

  Thanks to Patricia A. Jasper, director of Texas Folklife Resources, for permission to listen to the Resource Center’s collection of taped interviews with Texas accordion musicians and for introducing me to the southeast Texas music scene from Antoine’s in Austin to the Continental in Houston, and thanks to Rick Hernandez, Texas Commission on the Arts, who put me in touch with her. Thanks to Jane Beck of the Vermont Folklife Center for several useful suggestions. Huge thanks to musician- scholars Lisa Ornstein and Nick Hawes of the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine in Fort Kent. Lisa’s deep knowledge of Québec music, her kind introductions to Marcel Messervier and Raynald Ouellette, accordion virtuosi of Montmagny, and her translation help were invaluable. To Raynald Ouellette, not only an internationally renowned musician but a maker of fine accordions and organizer of the Carrefour mondiale, thanks for his remarks on the history of the accordion and its manufacture. To Marcel Messervier, whose fine accordions and extraordinary musicianship are legendary, thanks for an hour in his workshop and for his comments on his life as an accordion musician. Thanks to Jerry Minar of New Prague, Minnesota, for his help with the elusive Chemnitzer concertina, better known locally as the German-style concertina. Thanks to Joel Cowan, witty and peripatetic editor of Concertina and Squeezebox. Thanks to Bob Snope, accordion repairman at the Button Box in Amherst, Massachusetts, for his patient and thorough explanations of all facets of accordion lore, for his suggestions, and for reading the manuscript for accordion errors. Thanks to Rhea Coté Robbins of the Centre Franco-Américain, University of Maine at Orono, and to Vermonter Martha Pellerin of the trio Jeter le Pont, for their comments on Franco-Americans and Franco-American music. Thanks to Bart Schneider, musician and editor of Hungry Mind Review, for winging the odd accordion book my way. Thanks to Pat Fisken of the Paddock Music Library, Dartmouth College; to Judith Gray, folklife specialist, Edwin Mathias of the Recorded Sound Reference Center, and Robin Sheets, reference librarian of the Music Division, all at the Library of Congress. Thanks to Laura Hohnhold of Outside magazine for the occasional Chicago accordion tidbit. Thanks for the gimlet eye of Christopher Potter at Fourth Estate who picked up errors in fact and nuance. Thanks to Jim Cady of Cady and Hoar for clarifying a detail of a character’s business dealings. Thanks to my German editor Gerald J. Trageiser at Luchterhand Literaturverlag, who caught errors both subtle and gross. Thanks to Barry Ancelet at the University of Southwestern Louisiana for his invaluable suggestions.

  Thanks to long-playing help from my son Jonathan Lang, sound engineer, and my daughter-in-law, blues singer Gail Lang, for instruction books, esoteric articles on current innovations in the accordion world, tapes of wizard accordion musicians, and advice on ancient speakers. To my son Morgan Lang, student of ethnomusicology, who first told me about the Chinese sheng, ancestor of the free-reed instruments, and widened my musical experience in every dimension, thanks. Thanks to my son Gillis Lang for San Diego accordion clips and witty puns, and to my daughter, Muffy Clarkson, who eased my heart and provided English muffins in extraordinary variety. Thanks to my father, George N. Proulx, for his true story of a punishing teacher who put male students under her desk.

  To Joel Conarroe, thanks for the photograph of Uncle Dick in knickers with an accordion on his knee; thanks to Claire Van Vliet for the personalized paper accordion toaster by Cece Bell; thanks to Jon Fox for the miniature accordion (and case) that does everything but play. To Dan Williams, thanks for hard-to-find records, tapes and CDs, and dittodittoditto to Robert Warner for extraordinary accordion ephemera. Thanks to Bobby Doberstein for advice and help with everything from ski routes to stuck garage doors. Thanks to Kimble Mead for the Hawaiian Cowboy (and many other) tapes, and to the Breakfast Club who showed me real-life collectors in full frenzy. Thanks to Laurent and Pascale Gaudin who brought me back hard-to-find musette recordings from France, and thanks to Tom Watkin, fellow enthusiast and companion tripper to Montmagny’s annual weekend de l’accordéon. Thanks to the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, especially Dotty Ambler, for books, help and quick service beyond all normal expectations. Finally, thanks to strong Gillian Blake in New York who carried bags of books from the Museum of Television and Radio back to my hotel for me.

  Praise

  Praise for Accordion Crimes:

  ‘Even readers with minimal interest in accordions or mutilation will find themselves bowled along by the sheer virtuoso energy of Proulx’s depiction of her violently seething, idiosyncratic Great American Nightmare. Her range and scope are tremendous, shuttling through the warp of multiple cultures and spanning, by the end, 100 years. And it is the range of detail that grips, richly concrete’

  Spectator

  ‘An exceptional novel, as black and as clever as they come’

  Maxim

  ‘Proulx’s research is awe-inspiring, mixing detailed knowledge of each immigrant group with everything you didn’t know you wanted to know about one particular musical instrument and the central part it has played in folk music from all over the world. Each character rings true; there’s not a dud sentence in these pages’

  Birmingham Post

  ‘The glorious richness of the language continually makes you pause in wonder, the details pile up and surround you’

  Scotsman

  ‘A huge, noisy and good-hearted book’

  Marie Claire

  ‘Just as one hears the blues in Toni Morrison’s writing, the “sonorous plangent” music of the accordion seems transmuted into Proulx’s haunting language and her powerful, compassionate tale’

  New Statesman

  ‘The detail is breathtaking, her ear for dialogue matchless, her observation unsentimental, her pace infectious. She tackles death, sex and the gruesome with black hilarity and the skills of a born storyteller. Rich and dense, Accordian Crimes is a splendid novel’

  The Times

  ‘The power and presence of this book cannot be overstated. For Proulx, the accordion is the symbolic instrument of unsuccessful men, of poor immigrants and failures. Lives are depicted in all their beautiful sadness but, as in all the best tragi-comic writing, you are uplifted, inspired – in the case of Proulx, by her intense passion for life and an inexhaustible optimism in the face of tragedy’

  Sunday Express

  ‘I cannot think of any other writer writing in English today, who can take your breath away and surprise you again and again … as
Annie Proulx does’

  Yorkshire Post

  ‘It is impossible not to be overawed by the continuous invention, the panoramic range and achievement. For long it was thought The Great American Novel would be realised in a character who exemplifies his or her life and times. If it exists and is to be found in any one thing, then it may have arrived in a small, green accordion’

  Glasgow Herald

  ‘This is a wonderful book. Proulx’s combination of humanity, imagination and perception, coupled with her complete lack of any conventional or second-hand point of view, mean she’s one of the very few authors successful in capturing a little of the essence of America’

  New Woman

  Also by Annie Proulx

  Fine Just the Way It Is

  Wyoming Stories

  Annie Proulx returns to the Wyoming of Brokeback Mountain and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories roam over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn country has known: from the native Indian tribes to the modern-day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears.

  Bold, elegant and memorable, these stories of a brutal and magnificent landscape one again confirm Annie Proulx as one of the most talented short story writers.

  ‘Heartbreakingly beautiful’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘If more people could write short stories like this, the novel would indeed be in serious trouble’