Accordion Crimes (53 page)

“What is it made out of, bones?”

“Eagle. Meadowlark. Goose. Hawk. Sage grouse. Bird bones. Ten feet away you can’t even hear it.”

“You better keep it hid under your bunk. They’ll put you away for ten years for that eagle bone music.”

But Javier was looking at the tongue of cloud moving in from the west, curved veils of rain and hail falling on some distant place, sick of company and longing to be alone in the
pearl hour of twilight, the time between dogs and wolves.

Fay shrugged and started down the track. He had a five-hour drive ahead of him before he got to Padraic’s place, old Padraic, who was all his family now. The Bascos weren’t the only ones who could have a party.

On a night of full moon in January 1863, sixteen-year-old Riley McGettigan, tightly made, with doll’s feet, had left the family croft, teeming with his half-wild sibs, and made his way to Galway where, in five nights, he was able to rob enough drunks to buy steerage passage to New York. The last sight for his sore, peat-smoked eyes was of a penitent leaning on a short stick and inching along the cobbled shore on bloody knees.

In the fabled city, penniless and famished, he tried the same robber’s work with some success for a month or two, then was caught and beaten but, through his captor’s gin-soaked inattention, escaped back into the streets where he joined in with a gang calling themselves Lads of Ireland, playing hot and heavy in the draft riots, joyously beating any blacks they caught, busy at three hangings and in the mob that set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. In late summer he accepted a sum of money to serve in the army in place of a Yankee hardware merchant’s son (how the Americans loved the cannon-fodder Irish during that war) and found himself with three dozen other paddies in Sherman’s army slogging through the south, a few of the half million who had come to get rich, not to die, and who ended their lives marching behind a drummer whose sticks might have been thighbones, following a banner that should have showed a death’s-head.

He marched from the defeat at Kennesaw Mountain down
Georgia to the sea, singing a catchy rebel song, “The Rock Island Line,” and laughing at Sherman’s witty dispatch to President Lincoln, “
I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah,
” learned to play a pennywhistle and liked the rough life well enough to reenlist after the war to fight Indians.

He married Mary Blunky, a poverty-hardened girl with red ears, drifting along in the wake of the Union Army, dreaming of husband and home, no matter how lousy. The husband she got, but, pregnant and terrified of Red Indians, she stayed east of the Missouri when Riley marched to Fort Phil Kearny on the Bozeman Trail in the autumn of 1866.

In December he was in the column that rode out under the bragging command of Captain Willy Fetterman to protect a wagon train of lumber coming from the pine groves eight miles away. Fetterman, steeped in the myth of white invincibility, rode willfully into a trap. A thin Indian boy fled just ahead of them, seemed scared to death, dodging and evading, but never opening the gap. This clumsy youth, this easy kill, led the galloping column off the trail and onto a ridge where the grass and boulders and gullies and brush suddenly vomited arrows, and a horde of ululating warriors, the decoy Crazy Horse now with them, dashed chopping forward with razory axes and hardwood cudgels, loosing hissing swarms of darts, and annihilated the column in twenty minutes. Riley McGettigan, nineteen, wondering at the brevity of life, swooned with an arrow in his neck.

(He was not dead. Hauled back to the fort by the nervous collectors of bodies, he was sent down the line to recover but, satiated with the Indian experience, escaped from the field hospital one moony night and made his way to Texas where he scrounged a poor living stealing cattle and in 1870 was
caught red-handed by a rancher with a sense of humor. The rancher’s hands killed and skinned the cow, shot out Riley’s elbows and knees and sewed him up inside the animal’s skin, his head and feet protruding from each end of the stitchery, and left the arrangement in the sun, promising to come back in a month and buy him a drink. The hide shrank and dried in the heat of the day, tighter and tighter, while the nearby deliquescing carcass stank and attracted coyotes, their slavering and gnawing his night music, while in the beating day buzzards peppered the sky.)

Mary McGettigan did not marry again for four years though she bore three sons with the handy surname McGettigan in the period—Riley junior, then one who in the toddling age fell against the hot stove and died of the burns, and the youngest, who succumbed to cholera. Finally she moved to Dynamite, Montana, where she married Francis Dermot, a railway laborer who broke her heart singing “Beautiful Dreamer” in his delirious Irish tenor. On her in the next decades he begot four more sons and three daughters, all of whom survived and scattered across the continent, becoming wives and mothers, an assayer, a cardsharp who expired in a punitive barbwire corset, a muleteer, a railway laborer who wrote exquisite poetry on Sundays.

Riley junior, Fay McGettigan’s old man, was a hard-luck feller, the natural luck of a McGettigan, he said. He worked as a ranch hand and stayed single until he was forty when he had saved up enough to buy a dry, scabby ranch and lure a mail-order bride to him from Ireland, the seventeen-year-old orphan Margie, silent, hardworking, quick-tempered and a singer,
especially of “The Snowy-Breasted Pearl,” accompanying herself on a tiny fingering diatonic she called a come-to-me-go-from-me. The gift she gave to her children was a taste for song, the human voice pitched against waving grass, four walls, a sky lowering on invisible chains. Whatever befell her or them the woman had a song coiled in her lung for it, knew hundreds of verses and hundreds of tunes, remembered every sung fragment she ever had heard, and had a quick knack for imitating birdcall. She could tell the name of an unseen horse by nicker, whinny or neigh, heard a windstorm approaching the day before it struck, harbored true pitch somewhere inside her like a lodestone, and wept in the street the first time she heard a phonograph, in 1921, playing a recording of tenor Tom Burke’s “If You’ll Remember Me.”

Her husband, Riley junior, was hard-willed, sought relief in drink, burned impatient with men, women, children and animals; barely literate, he got seven children on Margie and one day in 1919 walked out of the house, mounted his good horse and rode into the sunset, leaving her with the foreclosure, a sucking baby, and a hundred twelve gaunt mortgaged cattle.

(He got as far as San Francisco where he was struck down by a touring Cadillac with an electric self-starter.)

Fay was eleven when the old man pulled out; the next child down the ladder was ten-year-old Padraic—the desperate boy, their mother called him. (He got the name when he was five years old and they took him to town for the first time. He was with his mother in the general store, he goggling at the objects hanging, standing, leaning, shelved, at the glassed myriad candies, when someone opened the door a little and a dog entered. Margie was examining a paper of needles, looking for one large-eyed enough to carry wool yarn, and a few feet away
Padraic studied the candy jars in agonies of choice, a nickel heavy in his hand. The dog, unnoticed at first, staggered down the brown aisle, rolling its dry hard eyes, an edging of foam on its black lip. It slammed into a display, jostling oil-lamp chimneys, and at the glassy rattle the clerk looked up. “Oh godamighty, mad dog,” he cried and climbed onto the counter, his shoes slipping on some piled-up paper fans, hauling up the lady customer at hand. Padraic saw the dog as it marched past him but his mother did not turn until the dog, growling, seized her skirt in its champing jaws. She shrieked and stretched her hands to Padraic to lift him to safety. He thought she cried for his help and there was nothing for it, he wrestled the heavy octagonal jar of cinnamon red hots into his arms, came forward and crashed the candy jar onto the mad dog’s head. The dog fell to its side, dazed, its legs scrabbling until the clerk leaped down and bludgeoned it dead with a cane. The desperate boy was celebrated the length of the street and puked sugar all the way home, a pair of bloody dog’s ears in his pocket.)

“You’re the men of the house now,” their mother said. “You’ll have to work. We’ve got to work to live.” She believed she had no choice but the classic occupation—taking in laundry. Fay’s memories of his mother were of pulpy hands and the slosh of water, sweet-sung lines of “The Snowy-Breasted Pearl.”

As a child Fay recognized himself to be a poor, graceless, homely and uneducated mick, out of the running for family life. This painful condition was compounded by his helpless private crashing headlong fall into love with every fine-looking
woman and girl he saw—photographs as well. He blushed and burned, looked at the charmers only from under his lashes or by way of window reflections.

In the midst of the Depression, when he was twenty-four, there had been a woman ranch hand at the R Bar, Eunice Brown, skin and bone and a mad preacher’s face—two intense, glaring eyes and a mouth misshapen by the scar of a burn put on her by a slit-eyed cousin with a branding iron. She took a liking to Fay and embarrassed him by casting sheep’s eyes whenever he had business at the R Bar. Old man Rubble said she was as strong as a man, worked cheaper, and was a better cowboy because she didn’t drink, but Fay thought he must be blind and deaf in the nose, because she kept a pint in her bosom and he’d had a swallow or two of that. But he only loved the beauties and that was the way of it.

Like his old man he did ranch work, moving from one ranch to another in the basin, taking offense and quitting over imagined slights, getting tired of the food or bunkhouse company, only to shift a few miles to another marginal operation with a desperate rancher and quixotic weather, for a few months bunked with a man named Ballagh who played a concertina with buttons fashioned from a mermaid’s finger bones, or so he said, and taught him how to play the instrument.

It was the Drowsy Ranch but they called it the All Checked Out because Old Man Drowsy always said that—“I want it
all checked out.
” There was a deep canyon on the ranch and, at the bottom, a well. To catch the wind, the windmill sat at the top of a one-hundred-ten-foot tower. The most hated, god-awful job on the place was the weekly climb up the tower to grease the bearings, the whole rickety thing groaning and swaying. The first public music Fay played on the unknown
cowpoke’s concertina was at a celebration of the canyon fire that burned down the windmill.

He came to work for Kenneth in 1957 when he was forty-nine years old because he fell in love with Bette at the first sight of her and the Irish face on her, the lovely auburn hair like twisted copper thread, her belly swollen with child and dressed in an old-fashioned cream linen smock with coffee-dyed lace at the neck and cuffs, a maternity dress designed to make the wearer resemble a little girl, and before that fire burned out in favor of the black-haired mail carrier with eyes the blue of a Steller’s jay wing, he’d been working there too long to stop. Ever since, he’d had a partiality for the pregnant ones. But for himself asked only the saddest whores, the ones with drug habits and scabs, gnawed red fingernails and no interest in anything.

The long weekend with the desperate boy once a year was a rite for both of them, two ugly, drunken, aging brothers with no gifts or grace beyond whiskey and music, for Padraic, with his quiff of white hair, his crooked eyes, his slanted mouth, played the uilleann pipes, and when Fay put a bottle of whiskey on the table in front of each of them and took up his concertina and Padraic drew the first breath to squeeze into the plaid lung under his arm, they had a precious hour.

Their music was the songs they’d learned from their mother, songs built in rhythm and interval from an old language neither of them had ever spoken and rarely heard. Padraic wrote down the names of these songs on a list and each year one or the other would have recollected a fragment of “The Barefoot Bachelor,” or “The Coulin,” or “Jenny’s
Chickens.” The desperate boy knew all the songs of love for he had been married during World War II for four days, but Fay didn’t know what had happened, no one did beyond Padraic and the female, wherever she was.

Now the two brothers stood in the desperate boy’s hallway and gripped each other by the elbows, each laid his head upon his brother’s shoulder, taking in the familiar smell of the other, despite tobacco and whiskey overtones, connected with the warmth and safety of the brown blanket they had shared seventy years gone.

“’Tis the Irish Hour,” said one, tossing off the first glass from the bottle the other had brought, in a mimicking brogue that was their own joke. “Never think of getting yourself an accordion in a nice flat key, say E flat?”

“Yeah, but I thought about a B/C sooner. You can do it all on them. Yeah, if I had the money and the time to learn, maybe. Anyway, I’m OK with this. Good enough for old waddy Jeffries singing to the longhorns, good enough for me.” The fingers of his right hand twisted and sprang into “The Dogs Among the Bushes,” and from the concertina issued rolls of triplets, a bouquet of ornamentation so floral and richly colored that Padraic could smell the music’s perfume, sweet and a little oily.

He had a stack of Irish papers for Fay to take home, and for him Fay had a story or two and some tapes for the player in his truck. And he thought of the poor Basco up on his lonely slope with the sheep and the pathetic instrument of bird bones, never a brother to keep him company and sing the childhood songs.

“Here’s what I think,” said Fay. “Mesas and buttes and rough country is the breaks, ain’t it? Broken land? Well, ain’t it the same thing with music—you make a sound, it breaks the air up? It’s the breaks again, invisible but there.”