Accordion Crimes (40 page)

“Oh, poor little Zofia? That sad story again? Well, the first years were cruel. I had two little children, your father and your Aunt Wanda, and was expecting a third, poor little Zofia, poor little girl. When she was just learning to walk she fell into Bubbly Creek they called it, oh, a terrible stream, not of water but of evil that was like little puffs of cream on the poison stream. They pulled her from it, but it had gone into her lungs and she died of pneumonia.

“After your grandfather left Armour, he started out rolling seed cigars and he was slow and made very little money, then he began to get good and fast and really make some money. He had a Cuban friend, an old man in that shop, like a skeleton, his legs were all twisted—a lot of cripples worked in the cigar shops—who showed him how to use the Cuban blade instead of a knife or cutter. Well, you take a binder leaf and smooth it out on the board like this, and then you take some filler leaves, could be two or three kinds of tobacco, sweet, bitter, and you build them up in your hand until it feels right, not too thick, not too loose, and if you was doing open head work, all the tips of the filler leaves had to be at the tuck end, the end the customers lights up. The tips are very sweet. This is the most difficult part, you can’t twist a leaf or make it too tight or loose. Then it can’t draw good. Then you break the filler leaves—
chh!
—to the right length of the cigar and put this bunch on a corner of the binder leaf and roll it up. Then comes the hard part, the wrapper leaf, very, very thin and fine, you have to start rolling it at the tuck, roll it a spiral way with a little overlap, and
at the head you put a little bit of gum stuff on a flag and smooth it over the head, it has to be perfect. No, the flag is not that kind; it is a little piece of leaf. Then you make another one. Some of the
claro
makers were artists, real artists, but I only learned this when I began to roll cigars myself. Those
claros
had to fit through a ring gauge. But at first, when your grandfather started this occupation, it was hard. We could not live on what he made. And he had to dress well too; cigar makers wore fine suits, you know. And so we too had boarders, two boarders, bed, food and laundry, and I charged them three dollars a week.
No,
I did not sleep with them. What an idea! They never stayed long. He would find fault with them on their first evening, then pick at those faults and magnify them—garlic breath, big feet, this one lacks the fifth stave, a stupid face—he always knew how to find fault, to criticize. And they would go, many times owing us rent and always hating us. In those days he played his accordion at the Polish Club on Wednesday evenings, they had something like a concert—there was a string quartet, a pianist, and your grandfather knew some very fine Spanish airs—it was all for culture, you see, but then he stopped and began to play, not polkas at first, but American music, just Alexander’s Ragtime Band,’ in saloons for money. And you should have heard him go on about it. ‘Oh, that I ever could have dreamed that what I once did for careless amusement I would do in grim earnest for money—how could I have imagined it?’

“But he enjoyed playing the instrument, not so much for the sound it made, not for his devotion to music, not like you, my dear child, but because when he played he was the master of the situation, he was the boss. He said, ‘I work all week, the foreman tells me “do this, do that, hurry it up,” he calls me dumb hunky, he calls me stupid polack, I take it because I
have six mouths to feed. I want to pull his intestines out of him with an iron hook but I do the work. In silence, because if I don’t like it there’s a hundred more waiting to take my job. But I pick up the accordion and if the foreman is there in the place, maybe with his disgusting fellow bosses and repulsive wife, he gets up and dances to my tunes and I make them hot to watch him sweat and twirl.’ So he said, the devil. He always played for money and command, never for pleasure in the kitchen or the neighbors’ enjoyment on the stoop. That’s what they did, you know, in the old days, people just made music with each other for a good time, not for money, but always there was a family that was good, they all played the instruments. On Sundays we’d have a picnic in Glowacka Park, start at noon, and you could buy a hot dog or good Polish things; I sold
pierozki
at these picnics and made a nice bit of money. There’d always be somebody’s polka band—two violins, you know, the bass fiddle and the clarinet, no accordion at all, they’d just play all afternoon and we’d dance. No music pages, they play from their heads, they were geniuses. You know, the dancers used to sing out a line of a song, or not even sing it, just shout it like, and the musicians they had to catch it, know it and play it back in the same key. Oh, they were so good. Well, your grandfather, he sees after a while there is some money starting to come to the polka band players and there was all kinds of places that wanted polka bands—Polish Homes, the Polish Club, not the culture evening but the Saturday night dance, little dance halls all over the place, the union halls, bars and Polka Dot restaurant, the Polish League of War Veterans, a lot of restaurants, Polonia Hall—oh, there was plenty of polka dancing, and a lot of fun, and weddings, weddings, weddings, everybody was getting married and you got to have polkas. So your grandfather
decides, this is in 1926, he decides he’s going to have a polka band. So he gets a couple of fellows together, a fiddle, they don’t need the second one because they got the accordion, a clarinet, drums, and he’s very good. They picked an American name, the Polkalookas. The drum was good, pick up their feet, yes? He was a shrewdie, your grandfather. He’d take two engagements for the same night, hire some extra fellows and get both bands set up at different places, then he’d run back and forth between them and collect the money for both. It was not so old-fashioned, this music, as the polka bands in the park. No, a little faster and louder because of the accordion and the drums. And he got the idea for the Baby Polka Band, he got your father, Hieronim, only six years old, and five or six other little kids and got them all going with instruments, playing little baby polkas. A comb and paper, a triangle, they had a little girl singer, so cute. People loved this very much. But he was not happy and he drank all the money from the band playing. After a while he quit, just like that, but your father, Hieronim, he kept on, played with other bands, whoever would ask him, even though he was young, and he brought every cent he earned back to me.”

“Grandfather’s nightmares! Holy Mary, your grandfather’s nightmares were terrible—his screams woke everyone. And the last time I told you about them, what happened, you woke up yelling in the night. So I better not tell them. Well, then. Remember, you asked for it. He said, ‘I dreamed of a severed head garlanded with decayed weeds and roots. The mouth was torn, the eyelids ripped away and yet the eyes rolled and looked. The face was that of my mother.’ Or he would tell of
a head with the top sawed off so he could look inside, and in there he saw his father’s old pharmacy in Poland and behind the counter was a young man and just as the young man started to look up at your grandfather—as if he felt someone watching him—he would wake up. Or he would tell of eating in his dream a horrible soup of living toads and white snakes, of crushing each with the back of his spoon but feeling it revive and struggle in his mouth. He told of a dream in which he received a wooden box from Poland, of prying off the cover to find inside his young sister covered with a thick growth of red fur, arms and legs broken to fit her into the too small box, but living and staring at him. In his dreams were horses with pigs’ faces, pieces of paper that became bloody knives, accordions that disintegrated as he played them, the buttons leaping into the air, the bellows rending and hissing, the hinges melting. Then he became interested in these nightmares and no longer feared them but awaited them eagerly, and entered his own nightmares with a dream camera, photographing these strange events.

“He entered yet another world of strong odors with the cigar shop. The smell of tobacco was so strong that it made him run out and vomit in the street the first day. There’s tobacco dust in the air. The windows were nailed shut. It’s humid inside because the tobacco cannot be allowed to get dry. If someone who didn’t know came in and opened a window, all the workers would walk out and threaten to quit. But anyway, the windows were all nailed shut so that couldn’t happen. He was good at his work, his fingers were agile from playing the accordion and he had a good eye, he had the feeling in the fingertips. In a few years he was making more money than anyone in the neighborhood rolling those Havana
claros.
We found this house and began to make
payments. But he was not satisfied. He swaggered about, finely dressed, worked when he pleased and smoked his three free cigars and continued to drink. He shunned our little house. A worm gnawed his brain.

“He quit working at the American Cigar Company and went to United Tobacco. He began to do what many of the best cigar rollers did: travel about the country, going to different towns, and when he found one he liked that had a cigar shop—in those days every town in America had one or two—he would show the boss what he could do, stay for six or seven months or weeks and then move on. By the hundreds, these cigar makers, Italians, Germans, Poles, on every train, back and forth and up and down, looking for the golden America they had imagined, a place they believed existed somewhere.

“He would send money home, regularly at first, but then nothing came. For months. I was crazy. I thought to myself, this dog’s blood of a man, this
psiakrew,
let him die alone among strangers. I had a little money put aside and it all went for food and the house payments. I had five children. I had to take in a boarder or two. The best was Uncle Juljusz. How kind that man was! You know, he was named after his ancestor Juljusz Olszewicz, who became French under the name Jules Verne. He helped me write a plea to your grandfather—I think he must have inherited some of the gift for writing—an advertisement that I mailed to the paper; they had a paper every cigar maker read. I’ll never forget it. It would make an angel cry. It said: ‘The children of cigar maker Józef Przybysz need to know the whereabouts of their father as they are in need.’ They ran this advertisement for one year but we never had an answer. I never heard from him again. And what did he leave his children, what did we find when we opened his
precious trunk he brought all the way from Kraków and never let anyone peep into? A metal tool no one understood, a model of an iceboat, a tiny little tin globe with a drop of red paint on the place where Chicago might be, two wax records, ‘
Zielony Mosteczek
’ and ‘
Pod Krakowem Czarna Rola.
’ What did these things mean? Nothing! Oh, the songs? Oh, in American you say ‘The Green Bridge’ and ‘The Black Soil near Kraków.’ Old-country songs, sad old songs, I don’t know why he had them. Not his kind of music. He preferred classical music or humorous smut; you know: ‘
Zyd sie smiał, w portki srał, zyd sie smiał, w portki srał
’—‘the Jew was laughing, he shit in his pants’—that nasty stuff he liked.

“It was good Uncle Juljusz who persuaded me I could take up cigar work myself. He told me they were hiring many women in the cigar trade. At first I only did dirty work, stripping. You know you got to get the midrib out of the leaf. Then a woman showed me how to roll cigars. The work was mostly the five-centers—the good-paying Havana
claro
work was then and always only for men—but I could earn enough, like Uncle Juljusz said, to support my children. My oldest girl, Bubya, your Auntie Bubya, was twelve, old enough to look after the others.

“And so it happened.
I
worked for American Cigar. They started me off stripping, but I pestered one of the other women who had been there a long time to show me how to do it—I knew something about it, of course, from listening to
him,
the critical affair of gauging the bunch, and I progressed very rapidly. We used cigar mold presses for the five-centers. Your grandfather never touched a mold, he was an aristocrat of the cigar. You got this two-piece wood mold with hollows in it, little beds for the cigars, and you put the filler leaves, the bunch, in these little beds and put on the top of the mold and it goes in the press for twenty minutes. It shapes the filler. I
enjoyed it—you can’t imagine. We were all very friendly, we had little names for each other. I was Zippy Zosia because I was very fast; Eagle Eyes was a woman who saw everything. The rest of them I don’t remember. We could talk anything, conversation, jokes, somebody always playing jokes, somebody put a snake in my filler leaf box once. What a scream I made! We had a reader in the afternoon, somebody would read the paper out loud or a book—we heard
Black Beauty,
I never forgot it, we all cried and it was very bad for cigar making. We would sing—one cigar place had a piano. We would bring in cakes. All my friends were these cigar-making women. My happiest years.

“I say now those were the happiest years of my life. I was making money enough to pay the mortgage, set aside a little to gain certain advantages for my children. Bubya married Uncle Juljusz, as you know. True, she was only thirteen, but it worked out well enough. Uncle Juljusz bought her a beautiful doll for a wedding present, something she always wanted but there was never the money.

“Joey, I paid a suit for your father so he could play the accordion looking nice, I paid shorthand school for Marta, I paid chiropractor school for your father, I paid nurse school for Rosie, for my children I paid a good education, all my children went to the Tatra dance classes, they should do well and remember they are of Polish heritage and not have to roll cigars. But Hieronim disappointed me, he stopped chiropractor school and went to work for the Polonia Sewing Machine Company and got married. Of course he played the accordion too, ‘The National Defense Polka,’ ‘Dive Bomber Polka,’ ‘Hilly-Billy Polka’—ask him, I can’t remember. After I started the cigar job I got very active in the church, I joined pleasant societies, very good discussion and happy occasions,
I became reunited with my family and my people from the mountains, and Uncle Tic-Tac who tried to teach your father the old mountain songs, urged him to write them down in a book, to gather these songs from the old generation, what they remembered from their villages, from their youths. But your father was more interested in the new kind of polka, ‘The Killer Diller Polka,’ and one I did not like very much but I’ve forgotten the name, something about ‘the little man in the corner,’ especially when he came back from the war and so much was lost. Perhaps you, little grandson, with your love for music, will find a way to save the old Polish music.”