Accordion Crimes (25 page)

Dolor looked at him, at the bony face, ears like urn handles and a nose wedged between wide-staring dilute blue eyes and an upper lip that arched tightly, gave his mouth the shape of a croquet hoop. His coarse hair was thicker than grass. There was a scar like a sickle on his right cheek where a fragment of metal broke from the edge of his axe on a cold morning splitting wood for his kitchen stove.

“I got that last winter; my foreman seen it, he says ‘two things you never wanna do, and one you
do
wanna do—never grin’ down your blade fine, and never leave her out all night so she gets brittle. And the best thing you can do for a cut is let a dog lick it.’ Suppose he thought I was gonna let a dog slobber all over my face.”

Dolor didn’t remember him. He shook his head, shrugged and smiled.

“Yeah, you remember
me.
Wilfred Ballou. Watch this.” He crossed and uncrossed his legs and his arms rapidly, writhed his face through maniac expressions, his feet tapped and shot out, knees bent, a rubbery burr from his flabbering tongue, his ears went up and down.

Dolor laughed. “Winky. Winks. Jesus. Yeah, course I remember. You used to get in trouble with Mrs. Breath. We’d go past the office and see you in there like headed to the electric chair.”

“Wilf, not Winks. Hated that damn name
Winks.
Hey, I met a guy once was
really
going to the electric chair. I got in some trouble after I left damn old Birdnest, they give me a choice, join the marines or go to jail, this was ’52, the choice
wasn’t too great because if I joined up I’d probably be on my way to Korea. Anyway, they told me to think about it overnight in the county jail, and there was this guy in there that had just killed his brother over a woman. They both wanted the same woman. Later on he got it, he got the chair.”

“Which did you pick?”

“Oh, I joined the marines. I went to Korea. See this?” He unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants, presented his left buttock where Dolor saw a fist-sized depression, a mass of fibrous scar. “That’s my souvenir. Man, that was my ticket home. When I got rehabbed and got so I could walk good again, went to Old Rattle Falls, got a job in construction, met Emma, my wife. She comes from up around here, comes from Honk Lake originally. She got family all around here, so we moved up. So what are you doing here?”

“Born here. My people left a long time ago. And I was in the army. In Germany.” Dolor didn’t know what else to say.

“They say you play the ’cordion.”

“Get out! Where’d you hear that?”

“My wife’s aunt and uncle. The Pelkys. You rent from them. They hear you. They say you got a long way to go. They say you’re pretty bad.”

He blushed furiously. “I don’t know nothing about it. I just fool with it. I found it in a taxi when I got out of the army. My father used to play the accordion—not this one, another one, with like piano keys. It got burnt up in a fire when I was a baby. He saved us kids but his accordion was ruined and he lost his life. That’s how come I was at Birdnest. I just, you know, fool with the accordion. I don’t know how to play it.”

“Bullshit! I had a dollar every time I heard that story I’d be drivin a Cadillac. Every kid in Birdnest used to say the same thing—dad got killed saving them from drowning or from a
fire or a car wreck. Dad run off, that’s what. Ain’t that right?”

“I don’t know. I was too little to know anything. Anyway, his accordion was burned up pretty bad, so there was a fire.”

“Well, my old man died because he was so drunk he couldn’t stay on the road and he killed my mother with him and if he was alive instead of dead I’d kill him myself for what he done. I wish you did play that ’cordion. This’ll knock you on your can—I play the fiddle. You believe that? I’m not much to listen to yet, but we got no mice in our house. Emma’s dad plays the fiddle. He’s pretty good if you like cowboy songs, that Grand Ol’ Opry stuff. Say what, you ought to practice up with that ’cordion. Anyway, come over to my place we’ll drink a few beers. One thing about livin around here, they love two things—music and likker. God, how they love them things. And dancin. There’s a dance every Friday at the Yvette Sparks Center.”

He put it off for a month. When he did get around to driving over, it was without the accordion. The kitchen was very small and clean, with curtains at the window, a wedding photo of Emma and Wilf in a round frame, salt and pepper shakers in the form of windmills. The calendar was fixed to the wall with a green-headed thumbtack and a chromo of Jesus with his raw heart like something from a meat counter hung over the refrigerator. He leaned on Emma’s table and listened to Wilfred saw the fiddle.

“Jesus, Wilf, I can’t even play, but I can make a better noise than that,” he said. “I never heard nothing so rotten.”

The next time he went to Millinocket he got an instruction book for the button accordion at Yip-I-O Music and, after ten days of sweat and fumbling and cursing, learned to play “You Are My Sunshine” and sing it at the same time, which was like patting his head and rubbing his stomach. He put some
money down for a record player that took the new long-playing records, thinner than a coin, made of some jawbreaker plastic, polyvinyl chloride.

Wilf and Emma watched him open the accordion case. “OK,” he said, “you asked for it, and here it is.” By the time he got to the refrain, Wilfred sawed in, playing his rosiny fiddle by ear. They were rescued from their own ineptitude by the astonishing sound the instruments made together, a rich and wonderful sound. “Fuckin greasily bears,” said Wilf. “It would sound
good
if we knew how to play the damn things. That’s a nice little ’cordion you got there.”

That winter on Saturday nights he drove over to their place; his suffering truck broke down often enough so that half the time he hoofed it, snow or sleet in the face, or deep cold icing the hairs inside his nostrils, making his teeth ache and his hand go numb where the strap of the case bit in, and over his shoulder a feed sack with six quart bottles of beer that would be half frozen by the time he got there. The accordion had to warm up for an hour on a chair in their kitchen before he could play it. Emma was always a little dressed up, her hair curled and rouge on her cheeks, like she was going out on a date. She wore a dress with a big circle skirt; her brown and white spectator pumps and those high heels did make a kind of festive feeling for all of them. He and Wilf drank beer and talked about the days at Birdnest as if they had been good times, while Emma fixed supper, some kind of special dish, had a glass or two of beer in an old amber glass dimpled with dots that had come to her after her grandmother died. Dolor left a five-dollar bill under his plate, his kick-in for the
casserole or the Pork ’n Pineapple or Curried Tuna Surprise she fixed from the
Betty Crocker Cookbook.

“I don’t cook that old French stuff my mother cooks,
ployes,
and baked beans take three days, them old
tourtières.
”

If he got too drunk he slept on their ratty couch, covered with a Frenchie quilt.

When she went to the woodbox in the entry, Dolor said, you’re lucky, Wilf, got yourself a good wife, a kid.

“It ain’t that hard, Dolor. First you find a girl, then you get married, you get the kids with three box tops and puttin it to the old lady regular—” and shut up when Emma came back in, kicking the door shut with her foot and stuffing the chunks into the firebox, pounding a big one with the lid-lifter until it dropped down. She’d heard what he said. “You watch your big dirty mouth,” she said. “Or you might start missin it regular.” Dolor didn’t know whether to laugh or keep quiet. Emma sat down at the table. “You know what your name means?” she said to him.

“No, what?”

“Irregular,” said Wilf.

“You won’t get none now,” said Emma, but to Dolor she added, “
Douleur
—pain.
J’ai une douleur dans les jambes
—my legs hurt.”

“That’s the truth,” he said. “They do hurt.”

“More like
j’ai une douleur
in the ass,” said Wilfred.

Around nine o’clock they got going with the music, the kid asleep, Emma putting the last dish away, getting her tambourine out of the closet, the head blackened by striking fingers. Wilf tuned his fiddle, the familiar bending notes as the tightening strings sought E and A and D and G, the accordion took in warm breath and at last expelled such a sonorous chord that the kitchen shook with it, the beer trembled in
their glasses. They warmed up with “Smiles,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Little Brown Jug” and Dolor’s standby, “You Are My Sunshine,” then tried whatever Wilfred had worked out from listening to the radio, “Get Out of Here,” “Kansas City,” and “Dance with Me, Henry,” similar but not the same, twisted around to what he could play, and Dolor followed along, sometimes guessing wrong, but it sounded pretty good and it was getting better.

By summer, when the long evenings kept them out on the porch playing and slapping mosquitoes and drinking, they had two dozen songs, hillbilly, popular, a hymn for Sunday morning. Once in a while they didn’t play but hit the dance down at the motel lounge in Random where a local band, The Saw Gang, played “Purple People Eater” five or six times, loud and fast, the dancers crowding around a tub of ice and beer between sets.

“Hell, we sound as good as them,” said Wilf. “That’s just crap they’re playing.”

“We’re better.” Though Dolor saw what dancers needed, a forceful steady rhythm that made them hop and kick when they were half dead.

In 1957 Wilfred quit Parfait Logging and started driving a St. Cloud pulp truck from Maine over to New York State, sometimes down to Massachusetts. When he got a chance he’d hit the music stores in different towns, pick up new records. He got a ten-inch record in a sleeve showing three men in weird masks wrestling an alligator—
Mardi Gras with Cajun Bill and His Honeybears.
They listened a couple of times. Wilf took up his bow and tried to follow the music but it was too much, and Emma, in capri pants and ballerina shoes, hands clasped before her on the oilcloth-covered table, caught French shreds of the songs and repeated them, “…
acheter du coton jaune … à bal
chez Joe … ’coute toi-même
…” but shut up when cries and gasps of sorrow came from under the needle. When the record ended, Dolor went at what he’d heard, threw himself at the double time, but he got only a little of it. They did better with popular songs and once in a while some country-western.

Emma, short and rumpy, dark circles under her eyes, said, seems funny, you being French but can’t talk it.

“Yeah.” He knew all about how funny it was, his name taken from him, the language lost, his religion changed, the past unknown, the person he had been for the first two years of life erased. He saw how a family held its members’ identities as a cup holds water. The person he had been as a child, a French-speaking boy with a mother and father, brothers and sisters, had been dissolved by the acid of circumstance and accident. He was still that person. He would return someday, like an insect cracking out of its winter case, he would wake speaking, thinking in French, a joyous man with many friends, his lost family would come back. And he always saw this transformation occurring in a warm room dominated by a wood-burning stove. There was a blue door and someone coughed. In French.

“Hey, you know, Wilf, the songs we’re tryin to play—I don’t know what it is, but that ain’t what I want. There’s a kind of music I want to play but I don’t know what it is. What are we messing around with? Stuff off the radio, ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore,’ ‘Tom Dooley.’ Folk music. It’s like it isn’t real music. It’s somebody else’s, you know what I mean?”

“I thought you liked the Kingston Trio. We spent two months trying to work out ‘Scotch and Soda.’ What do you
want to do, ‘Surfin’? How about a little rock ’n’ roll, a little ‘Blue Suede Shoes’? You like that Pelvis Presley? ‘
Ah-ha wah-ha-hant yew-hoo!
’ Hey, did you see that movie
Blue Hawaii?
What a load of shit that was. Or how about some blues? Or them Lawrence Welk bubbles?
Bluh bluh bluh bluh.
Hope to Jesus not. I don’t want to play that stuff.”

“No, no, no. Look, is there such a thing as French music? I mean, is there a kind of music that’s like, French? I mean, the Frenchies around here?”

“I don’t know. Emma! There such a thing as Frenchie music?”

“Yeah.
Ouai.
” Her voice came from the kid’s room. “It’s all a bunch of old-time
gigues
and reels for dancing. There’s nobody around here that does it no more. You got to go up to Québec probably. If they still do it up there. Fiddle music, piano, accordion. You ought to ask my dad. That’s the kind of music he used to play. He’s got all them old seventy-eights, Starr records—I remember that ‘
Reel du pendu,
’ the hanged man. He must have fifty, sixty them old things. Sometimes when he feels like it he plays a little. But not so much now.”

“And there’s that Cajun stuff,” Wilfred said. “That’s French. But Jesus, I can’t sing like that, sounds like your guts are being pulled out with the pliers. You want to try workin up one of those? ‘
Jole Blon,
’ maybe? There’s a new Jimmy Newman album out,
Folksongs of the Bayou,
I heard a cut on the radio the other day, some New Hampshire station, but I couldn’t play that fiddlin style if you put a blowtorch on me. It’s mournful stuff, but real tricky at the same time. You know what we ought to do is get out of here, get out of the kitchen and go listen to what they’re playin around here, you know, around Random, Millinocket, there’s roadhouses on Route
Thirty. Hit a few bars maybe, where they got live music. We need to get out of the kitchen.” He was flipping through the new
Playboy,
half listening for Emma coming down the hall, Emma who would say, get out of here? You been out all week. Try staying home for a change.