Accordion Crimes (29 page)

She leaned closer to him, cut Emma off. “You from around here?”

“Well, I was born here, but I grew up somewhere else. Old Rattle Falls.”

“Uh-huh. How come you’re in a wheelchair? You always been like that?”

“They don’t know. Just something wrong with my legs. It just started this year.”

“Delphine! Come on, we’re going! Come on, it’s nine hours’ driving. I ain’t waitin.” It was Tootie, the fat man, the front of his shirt marked with a triangle of sweat, his matted hair straggled over his brow.

“OK, here I am.” To Dolor she said “glad to met you,” got up and cut through the dancers to the fat man.

Then Emil was back, pulling Emma out onto the floor, and he was alone, looking at the litter of crumpled napkins and rinds of ham fat on the mustard-smeared plates around him.

“Hello, Frank. I’ve been looking for you.” It was Emma’s
sister, Anne-Marie, who called herself Mitzi, with her charming little stutter, her scent of lily-of-the-valley, a silver cross lying against her bridesmaid breast, a fluffy skirt of tulle, yellow satin slippers with Cuban heels. She was not pretty, did not have Emma’s robust vigor, but there was a delicacy about her, a tenderness that flattered him, a private and restrained tone in her voice when she spoke. Each time he had seen her she seemed deeply interested in how he felt, what he thought. Wilf had told her about the name Frank back at Birdnest and she always used it.

“Having fun?”

She looked at him. “Dead on my feet. These shoes are pretty but they hurt. They didn’t send my size, five and a half, so I had to wear these fives.” She sighed, drank a little from her glass of wine. “Frank, can I ask you a personal question?”

He knew what it was going to be. “Sure.”

“What happened to your legs?”

Christ, maybe he should make up a printed pamphlet. “Nothing
happened.
Just something went wrong. They don’t know what. I was OK until a couple of months after Wilf—Emma’s—after it happened, then I just woke up one morning and boom! There I was. They don’t have no idea of what it is.”

She nodded as if he had explained cause and effect. “I brought you something,” and she handed him a tiny metal figure.

“What is it?” He turned it over. It was a silver leg, less than an inch long, with a hole pierced at the hip.

“It’s an ex-voto, a votive offering? You offer it to Christ or to a saint and pray that your legs will be cured. See, you can put a pin through the hole? To pin on the saint. You know something, you ought to go to the shrine over at Lake Picklecake, the shrine of St. Jude. He’s the most American
saint, he’s the one who looks out for the impossible cases, the ones that baffle the doctors. Before that we went once to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré up in Québec, but there was gypsies there, hundreds of them. I got a girlfriend, she had terrible headaches, a spike being pounded into her head with a hammer, they didn’t know what caused it, but she went to this shrine of St. Jude and she did the stations of the cross and prayed for deliverance from her suffering and gave St. Jude a little silver head and after that she—she never had another headache. This was two years ago. I went with her.”

“Is it Catholic?” he said in a low voice.

She looked at him pityingly.

“Do you remember last year when Mother and Dad”—Emma said “
Mamam et Père
”—“were trying to sell their house and nobody even came to look at it?”

“A little,” he lied.

“Well, they had it on the market for a year and nothing happened so they went up to the shrine and prayed and asked St. Jude for help and left like a little house Dad made out of a bottle cap, he flattened it out and cut it with the edge of a chisel, it’s all straight lines. They drove home and walked in the house and the phone was ringing. It was a woman from New York who saw the
FOR SALE
sign last summer when she was driving through, wrote it down. She said she had been looking in her purse that afternoon and found the address and remembered the house and was it still for sale, and of course Dad says yes, and you know the rest. It was St. Jude that interceded for them and made it happen.”

Dolor vaguely remembered Emma saying that her parents had sold their old log house on Honk Lake to someone from out of state and built a new ranch next to the high school baseball field.

It was two hundred miles and more to the shrine, all the way across the state, then over a bridge and onto the island. She drove him there in her little Volkswagen, a good driver, steady and not too fast so they could see everything. The land was flat and swampy, then it rose a little. All along the lakeshore were empty summer camps painted cherry, chocolate, lemon, vanilla. The wind riffed and slapped up whitecaps; he squinted at massing clouds like twisted wet sheets.

“It’s going to rain.”

“What difference does that make? It’s to test you.”

They crossed a pistachio green bridge to the island, turned onto a mud road. A sign pointing vaguely toward the water said only “St. Jude.” The rain started, fine drops needling the windshield. She pulled into the gravel turnaround. There were no other cars. The rain came in gusts and the wind tore at their hair and snapped the nylon fabric of her pink jacket. She wrestled his wheelchair out of the back seat and helped him into it, began pushing it toward the lake, toward a small corrugated-metal shed. The wheels gnawed through the gravel.

The shed faced the lake and the front was open to the westward weather. On a wooden bench at the back stood a carved figure, a lumpy wooden St. Jude with a face like a beagle, black with rain. Once it had been brightly painted, but years of lake squalls and driving sleet, reflected sunlight and seasonal roasting and freezing had scoured away the pigment, and mildew mottled the figure. Mitzi pointed at the dozens of ex-votos pinned and nailed to the wall behind the saint: the miniature house her father had made from a St. Pauli Girl bottle cap, arms, legs, lungs, kidneys, trucks, a tiny chain saw painted on a scrap of plywood,
an eye, part of a report card, a fishhook. A second, weatherproof plastic representation of the saint, only a foot high, stood in a hollowed-out television set. The knobs were gone and there was no maker’s mark, but Dolor thought it was a Philco sixteen-inch. The mahogany veneer had buckled.

The rain slammed sidewise into the shed, and through his wet eyelashes Dolor saw the drops bouncing up from his wheelchair arms. His jacket and pants were sodden. The water was pouring from his hair, running down his neck and into his clothes, runneling St. Jude’s ruined visage. He could not see Mitzi behind him but heard her voice, serious, intense, believing. The lake was hammered white by rain. The world seemed compressed in a bare sumac branch. He leaned forward, pressed the pin into the wet wood. The tiny silver leg glinted. Some unknown sensation—was it faith?—stirred in him and he thought, no, he was
sure
he heard a holy voice.

All the way to the motel, as she drove through the belting rain and the car windows steamed over from the moisture in their wet clothes and hair, he felt his legs growing strong. Their rooms were side by side and she pulled the car up in front of his door.

“Don’t get the wheelchair,” he said in a low voice. “Just come around to my side.” As she walked around the car he opened the door, shifted over, swiveled his legs out and, grasping the top of the door, stood up. She stared at him, her face clenched. He stepped forward on trembling legs, and when he had to let go of the car door, he put his arm over her shoulder and shuffled eight steps to the motel door. Inside the room he kissed her, the salty tears in their swollen mouths, his shaking legs moving them to the stiff white bed.

“No,” she said. “After we get married. I made a promise to God,” she said.

He recovered very quickly, such is the power of miracles. They were married a month later, the bridegroom eager for connubial bliss, but they spent the honeymoon in Providence for the funeral of the bride’s aunt Delphine Barbeau, who had been a death’s-head at the wedding, at the reception choking and gagging from her cancerous throat but still demanding cigarettes and still swallowing brandy and asking those around her if they watched that chimp on TV. She croaked demands to fat Tootie who carried her in and wrapped a blanket around her.

He came over to Dolor, lighting a cigarette, his oily forelock dangling.

“She wants to see you,” he said, pulling at his sleeve. Dolor bent over the waxy face, trying not to shrink from the fetor issuing from the black hole of the mouth. The woman crooked her finger.

“Tell you. Now you married your cousin. You fool.”

“What do you mean? I don’t have any cousins.”

“Wife,” she said accusingly, “you married your wife,” and coughed and coughed, racked with coughing until the fat man carried her out.

“Frank,” she whispered, rolled fast in his arms, looking at him from the distance of a few inches, the waxy curve of his eyelashes, the dark stubbled chin and jaw, his red mouth and the wet teeth disclosed when he smiled at the sound of her voice. “I dreamed we went on a boat and the boat sank and everybody drowned but us and we just floated on the water like soap and we couldn’t
sink because we were saying Hail Marys and that’s what kept us up. Frank, I dreamed that you promised to give up playing the accordion for God and St. Jude who restored your legs, I dreamed that we moved away from here to Portland or Boston and our lives were so different, so beautiful and happy and successful.”

She told him what was wrong with the place. Random was a twilight place that made people moody, tripped the switch for tears, boiled up a sense of loss and the feeling that the good things were out of reach. Men rushed into hopeless situations. Women threw themselves away on roughnecks who beat them and made them suffer, men with faces pitted and blackened like aluminum pots, who humiliated them and showed them the worst of everything. It was a place that pulled you down, that made it so you could never get ahead, just trapped in some halfway life that nobody but those ensnared recognized. It was because everybody in Random was French but nobody was French—they weren’t anything; they were caught between being French and being American. Those who went away had a chance; they became true Americans, changed their names and escaped the woods. She asked him what he thought of the name Gaines to replace Gagnon.

“ ‘Frank Gaines,’” she said. “It sounds good. A good name for a child, easier, more American than Gagnon. What did that French name ever do for you? Kids made fun of it, right?”

“Yeah. But French kids made fun of it too, so I think it was me, not the name.” He didn’t care about these things the way she did. He was limp with happiness, unable to think of anything past or future, alive only in the moment.

“Frank,” she said, weeks later. They lay close in the bed, from the other room the sound of the new color console Zenith her parents had given them for a wedding present.
Mitzi had turned it on before she went to the bathroom, then to the kitchen to put on the kettle. He was weak with pleasure lying in the warm bed while the television voices bubbled like a porridge pot on the burner, listening to the sound of her voice for its buzzing timbre rather than its content.

“You know Emma and Emil been planning to go on their honeymoon when the weather got good. They’re going to Louisiana, we got some relatives there, and Emma, she got to go down there, got to have her way, see what it’s like, just for once. She said if you want him to, Emil could maybe take your accordion down, get a good price for it. Better than around here. She said Emil said he could maybe get a hundred dollars for it because it’s kind of unusual. It’s not like you play it anymore. I think you owe something to God, Frank, to St. Jude who healed your legs. And it’s, you know, sort of a instrument they make fun of, a Frenchie thing, you know what I mean.” There was a long quiet minute, with only the television voices and their breathing. He wanted her to understand what he was thinking, to know how happy he was and how little he cared about the accordion, about anything, if only he could lie there with her and drift on the buzzing of her voice.

“Frank,” she burst out, “I want a chance too. I want a chance to do something, do something with you. I want our kids to have a chance at the world, not stuck in the boondocks here. Frank, I cry when somebody, when a Yankee, is nice to me in a store. The rest of them give you that attitude, that here’s-another-Frenchie look, they make you feel like dirt. Frank, there’s no sense in being French, in staying here. You don’t talk French, you don’t know who your parents were or where they come from, nobody here remembers them, they were just passing through for sure.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not. Why not sell the accordion. Somehow I lost the urge for it. I don’t care. Whatever he can get. Yeah,” he said. “Whatever you want, we’ll do it. It’s a good idea, maybe, to get out of here. I used to think about getting into TV repairs.”

“Frank,” she said, “you can go to college, you can be anything you want.”

“I’ll tell you something though. I don’t change my name to Gaines. Frank, OK, but Gagnon stays. The only thing I got of my people is that name.”

And she slid out from under the covers, went to the kitchen to make his coffee and a plate of milk-soaked toast with maple syrup which he ate in bed under the silver crucifix while she brushed his trousers and rubbed his work shoes with neat’s-foot oil. He thought he would cry with the joy of it. But already the red idea was simmering that such intoxicating sweetness of life couldn’t last. He thought of what the man in Montmagny had called it,
douceur de vivre.
Yes, his bones were marinating in that bowl of wine, but how long would it be before he was impaled on the spit again and roasting over the flames?