Accordion Crimes (11 page)

“I guess I give up the hyphen, Hans. I don’t care if they drop a thousand bombs on the Kaiser’s head. I don’t feel so German now. My children, they’re born here, this is their country. I should keep hanging on to the old place that never did anything but drive me away? I just want America to stay out of it, this war, I want to work my farm and sit down to a good dinner and sleep good at night.” And it was true that Loats’s daughter Daisy had borrowed a copy of Walt Whitman’s
I Hear America Singing
from the teacher and read it aloud after supper.

Beutle hawked and spit at this perfidy, ordered four new gramophone records from Columbia’s Patriotic German
Music selection:
“Hipp, Hipp, Hurrah,” “Die Wacht am Rhein,” “Wir Müssen Siegen
” and “
Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,
” sung by a rich-toned male quartet. But this was not enough. He joined the German-American Alliance and his buggy showed up at every rally. He wrote, in his rusty German, a repetitive four-page pamphlet titled “The German Hog in America,” listing the names of outstanding noble German white hogs, many of them his own. Two evenings a week, after supper, he took his accordion down to the saloons in Prank and tried to explain reasonably to the men he knew that as a person of German extraction he was loyal both to his motherland, Germany, and to his bride, America. He tried to persuade them with German music.

“And this is terrible beer. Jesus Christ! You come out my farm and try
my
beer, German beer, one time.”

The bartender rolled his cold American eyes away from Beutle, turned his shoulder. He spoke to a customer at the end of the bar.

“They come right up to you and tell you they’re better.”

“Hang the Irish and shoot the hyphenates,” said the customer, sniggering. The next day a sign without a single flyspeck hung over the bar:
GERMANS NOT WELCOME. GET THE HELL BACK TO DUTCHLAND
. The bartender pointed to it. Beutle read it, made a face as if while swallowing a cup of vinegar he’d witnessed a flying cow, farted and walked out. He went to the new movie palace down the street to see long-faced William S. Hart and Louise Glaum in a shoot-’em-up,
The Aryan.
The intertitle flashed on the screen while the Irish piano player rattled out a march. “
Oft written in letters of blood, deep carved in the face of destiny, that all men may read, runs the code of the Aryan race: our women shall be guarded.
” He thought of guarding Gerti from harm and snorted.

Anti-German fever flared. In April 1918 they heard that in Illinois some miners, like fifty cats with a single mouse, played with German immigrant Robert Prager for two days, a young man, naive and confused, who knew little English. They stripped him raw, prodded him up and down the muddy streets forcing him to kiss the American flag again and again, to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which he could not do, to sing “We’ll Fight for the Red, White and Blue,” which he managed, stumbling over the words, letting him go, losing him, capturing him again from the grinning police, grilling and questioning, more flag-kissing and singing, calling for tar and feathers but finding rope and, drunk and inept and deadly, hauling the wretched man up into the air by his neck until at last he strangled. A rain of black moths fluttered from the tree, agitated by the dying man’s commotion.

In May, Karl, Messermacher’s son who was the telegraph operator, fell panting into the kitchen at broad noon, his clothes torn and his face bloody, his celluloid collar hanging in a jagged arc, left arm hanging useless, wrenched so badly he was never able to raise it above his shoulder again.

“They come right in the telegraph office and pulled me out, said I was a German spy sending messages to the kaiser. Gonna string me up,” he gasped. “Like Prager. They had the rope, they was going to do it. I seen Jack Cary in the crowd, my god, he was in school with me! I got away, I don’t know how, just fell down and crawled between their legs and got up and run so hard as I could. I come up over the horse path through Uncle Hans’s corn.”

He would not stay, let his mother arrange a white linen sling
for his arm, then hid under a pile of sacks in the back of Loats’s cart, nothing to hear but the clap and thump of hooves as the horses trotted and the sound of his heart. At the railroad station in Kringel he telegraphed the front office. They told him to take the next train to Chicago and ride in the baggage car.

Beutle persisted in going into Prank, said nothing about Karl or Prager or the Kaiser or American news reports, but joked at the feed store that maybe he would hire Farmerettes to help him with the corn harvest, earnest young girls in bloomers and smocks to help the farm labor shortage. He had seen a dozen of the pretty things marching around the square in Prank. There was a sullen silence. O’Grain spit on the floor and Beutle spit near O’Grain’s foot.

In the evening, while they sat forking up the potatoes, a rock smashed through the window and hit the enamel kettle on the stove.

“Chipped it good,” swore Beutle. The rock was wrapped in a page torn from the Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis’s lubricious and pornographic tales of German atrocities in Belgium. A sentence was underlined in heavy pencil: “
German
blood
is
poisoned
blood.
”

“Don’t that look like O’Grain’s underlining? Don’t it? Jesus Christ, that paddy son-of-a-bitch. You know why an Irish is like a fart? Both is noisy, both you can’t put back where they come from, and both stinks.”

They set his fields on fire. A hundred acres of smoking wheat. Beutle walked into the blackened field, the fine char flying up with each step, and he was coal black and coughing before he’d gone a hundred feet. He went defiantly into town on Saturday and was stoned by a gang of boys and young men who shouted “heinie!” and “fucken dirty Dutchman!” and “baby raper!” at him.

“I bought Liberty Bonds!” he shouted back at them. “We got a boy Over There. My boy Wid Beutle, born here, right here in Prank.” The horse, hit by stones, shied and reared, and set off for home at a gallop. Beutle’s hat flew away and he was struck in the mouth by a rock that cracked a good German tooth, which Loats had to extract later in the week with his villainous dental pliers, wrecking a kitchen chair in the doing. Beutle sat spitting blood and sweating, occasionally hissing “
rauch ich in der Pfeife!
” But that evening Gerti relented and let him mount her again, even though the smell of blood from his mouth reminded her of the day she found him in the hen’s nest, even though she had embroidered over the motto
God Bless Our Home
with a motto of her own choosing:
God Damn Our Adulterer.
Beutle had never noticed it.

A run of evil events occurred. Messermacher’s youngest son was killed when he fell from the top of a haystack, a distance of sixteen feet; a broken neck, but at least he didn’t suffer, didn’t die an ironic death, as did Wid Beutle, far off in the old country, in Germany, dead in Germany, shot in the groin, his roaring blood freezing in a black pool below his buttocks in the bitter December of 1917. (Sixty years later an anonymous photograph of the dead son’s mud-caked boots and stiff, putteed legs appeared on the dust jacket of an Australian history of the Great War.) Loats befriended an itinerant violinist who stayed with them for a week, eating like an ogre, then stole all the ready money in the household and crept away before dawn.

“Must of been a gypsy,” said Beutle.

Then Loats collapsed one forenoon because his ill-fitting spring truss pressed on his femoral artery so severely he was dizzy all the time. Without the truss, his groin rupture bulged halfway down his thigh and showed obscenely in his pants. He went,
groaning, to Kringle to consult the druggist in his back room and purchased another mechanical device which was painful in a different way and for a while gave the illusion of relief. The new pain he blamed on the druggist, a Greek marblehead.

The summer after the war ended, a mysterious event harmed Beutle’s twin granddaughters, Florella and Zena, eleven years old. In the afternoon, the mother saw them playing with three of the Messermacher girls under the cherry trees where the hens scratched for insects and kept secret nests. At suppertime Gerti called from the back steps, “
Essen! Kommt!
” For Percy Claude and his family and whatever hired men—there were no more hired girls—ate with Gerti and Beutle. But the children did not come to the table, even when Beutle himself shouted impatiently.

“Let them do without, then. They’re over at Messermacher’s stuffing their faces.” After dinner Percy Claude and his wife went to Messermacher’s with the wagon, found Messermacher’s family still at table eating bread with molasses, but no twins.

They had played Bachelor’s Kitchen in the orchard, said Thomalina, the oldest of the three girls, then they had played Rivers, twisting through the orchard and colliding on the way to the hog pen that was the ocean. At last they played Black Spider, and Florella was a horsefly, Zena a dragonfly and Thomalina a mayfly. Greenie was both mother and nurse because there weren’t enough of them to play the game properly, and Ribbons was the black spider. Now Ribbons spoke, the adults scowling at her.

“I caught the horsefly, that’s Florella, and I put her in the
grass, and then I went back and got Zena and put her in the grass with the horsefly, and I went back and caught Thomalina and got her and took her to the grass, but the flies were gone, they were gone. We thought they changed the game to Hide-and-Seek, and we looked, but after a while we couldn’t find them and then we got mad and went home.”

“So you didn’t see nobody?”

“No.”

“You did! I can tell by the way you bite on your finger. Who did you see?”

Greenie started to cry.

“In the lane. Two big bears were running away.”

“There isn’t no bears here!”

“Or like dogs. With short tails, and they looked at me and went in a hole in the ground!” There was terrific shouting from Messermacher and they all walked to the lane in the twilight and searched for tracks (none), the hole (none), and made the girls reenact the scene. Messermacher whipped his daughters to make them reveal everything they had seen, to force them to recant the story of the bear-dogs, but Gerti shuddered, remembered an evening, ten years ago at least, when she came up the lane in the same thick twilight after searching for a broody hen’s nest in the grass and saw sitting on the wheel of the hay rake an immense black man who shot plumes of smoke out of both nostrils before vanishing into the air with a sound like the burst swim bladder of a fish.

The three Germans combed the property into the night, their lanterns bobbing in the dark fields like boats on the swelling sea. There was nothing, no sign. But before dawn Beutle heard a wagon rattling on the road, heard it stop, then rattle away. He went out and there in the sallow morning the two girls limped up the lane, their hair matted with leaves,
their dresses torn and stained. They were barefoot, their knickers gone, blood on their thighs, and not a word of what happened could be pried from them. They swore, crying hysterically, that they did not know what had happened. One moment they were playing in the orchard, the next they were shivering on the dark road. Among themselves Beutle and Loats and Messermacher believed the worst, that the Americans had come from town, chloroformed and raped the girls in revenge for Belgium.

It was too much for Pernilla who, six months after marrying Loats, went down with some internal gripping pains that no elixir subdued (Loats was unlucky in wives). She shouted that Beutle, the grandfather, had harmed the children himself, everyone knew in what manner. Then she fell silent. After weeks of not speaking, her mind took a turn. She went outside to the fields with a potato fork and dug wild holes, hurling stalks and earth, moving farther away across the field until she was a tiny dot against the dark soil. No one saw her return and go into the barn where she went straight to Beutle and began to choke him with steely fingers.

“Jesus Christ, the woman’s a maniac! And the fools give women the vote.”

The doctor at the state hospital wrote down the particulars, had her photographed in her apathetic state. “It is unlikely there will be an improvement,” he said carelessly, a little bored with female insanity. Half the women in the state seemed out of their minds.

“I wish
I
could go crazy,” said Gerti, visiting Pernilla and looking around at the beige-painted walls. “To be mental, in a nice room like this with all the time in the world and no worries of life, just a warm bed and all your dinner brought to you—why, it sounds good to me. You are getting a rest from
it all. They say you see movies here. The only other way to get a rest in this life is to die.”

But after a month Pernilla was home again, though convinced that the Americans came out from town at night and poisoned the well. These thoughts followed a parade she had seen in Prank, as she sat and waited for Loats in the worn buckboard, conscious of her dusty bunned-up hair, her dowdy dress and cracked shoes, her aged and crazy face. The parade featured W.C.T.U. women marching around the courthouse, well-dressed American women, many with bobbed hair, in their pale linen dresses and white shoes with straps across the instep, holding placards:
DRINK IS THE CURSE OF THE IMMIGRANT
and
TRUE BLUE AMERICANS FOR PROHIBITION
and
SPIRITS WILL KILL THE AMERICAN SPIRIT
. Loats would hear her get up at night, making her haptic way through the dark rooms, peering through the windows into the night for the telltale lanterns of the Americans. She left notes on the table:
don’t drink the Wasser.
In the daytime she said, “I’d like to sleep but sleep don’t come” and “what’s the use to work so hard on a farm? Mr. Loats buys more land so’s he can raise more hogs to buy more land. Pretty soon he owns the whole world.” There were times she enjoyed eating paper, a shred or thin page of the bible rolled in a pancake with sour cream, liked it because it made a kind of resistance in the mouth, a pleasant and lasting chewiness under the teeth. Even the bitter taste of the ink she liked. One evening as she stood at the stove cooking potato cakes she became very stiff and still, the spatula clenched in her unmoving hand. The smell of scorch rose from the griddle. Loats pulled his face out of his farm paper.