Accordion Crimes (7 page)

A few shrimp boats were tied up at the dock, others moored a hundred feet out in the river. Someone was whistling the same three notes over and over, a rough Sicilian voice said something about being sick, two drunk American voices cursed each other. One boat was silent except for the sound of snoring, a choking snort followed by a gurgle. The name on the stern was American:
Texas Star.
He dropped onto the deck of this boat and curled up behind the stacks of reeking baskets, pulled his shirt over his head against the mosquitoes. “Bob Joe,” he said quietly in American, burning with hatred for Sicilians. “My name are Bob Joe. I work for you, please.”

A hundred miles up the river, Pollo sat on the deck of a wood boat tied up for the night, half watching for a steamer and ready to call out “wood—ho, wood—ho” to any passing fireman running low on fuel, all the while squeezing the green accordion and singing,

I think I heared the
Alice
when she blowed,

I think I heared the
Alice
when she blowed,

She blow just like a trumpet when I git on board.

Fish Man slid the blade of his bowie knife against his guitar strings making silvery, underwater notes, slapping a little at mosquitoes, but thinking, yeah, why we on this wood scow instead a the
Alice Adams
is Pollo make trouble and I git it when he git it. The light of the flickering fire they had built on shore reflected in the red metal eyes of the accordion.

“You playin like a fool,” said Pollo. Fish Man said nothing and hummed.

But in the ashy light before dawn Fish Man crept to Pollo and slid five inches of string-honed steel between his ribs. He cut the charm bag with its gold coin from around his neck and eased the thrashing body over the side. Under a sky the tender violet of the oyster’s inner shell, he cast off and began to pole upstream against the sluggish current, taking the accordion along for the ride.

The town was settled and abandoned twice, burned out the first time, then emptied by cholera and a bad winter a few years before the three Germans arrived and planted corn along the Little Runt River. It was a fluke that this rich cut of prairie lay fallow, for the good land of the mid-west had been claimed and worked for a generation.

The day the three Germans—a Württemberger, a Saxon and a Königsberger who became Germans in America—arrived, they found four or five ramshackle deal buildings, fifty feet of boardwalk and a clogged public water pump downhill from the saloon’s outhouse. The withering heat of summer and the scouring prairie wind had popped the nails in the siding until the clapboards curled, bristling with rusty points.

They arrived, one by one, unknown to each other, on a late spring day in 1893. Ludwig Messermacher, the son of German-Russian emigrants who had shifted from the steppes to Kaliningrad to North Dakota, tied his spot-rumped horse to a flimsy rail—a horse traded, though he did not know it, first from a Nez Percé named Bill Roy up in the Palouse country to an itinerant dentist and elixir stumpman, to a Montana holdup artist, to an Indian agent for the Rosebud reservation, to a succession of ranchers and farmers, never staying with any of them long because of his crowhop habit which Messermacher calmed out of him. (The grandfather of Bill Roy had shot from the back of this horse’s great-grandsire and, using a bow of laminated mountain-sheep horn, had killed a female bison and her flank-running calf with a single arrow.)

Messermacher was the first to walk along the warped boardwalk, peering into buildings through the broken windows. Meager and hard of frame, he understood farming
and carpentry. His swarthy face was dished as though a cow had stepped on it when he was a child, and his lipless mouth, thatched by a mustard-colored mustache, was framed in curved ice-tong lines. A beard of darker color, like an unraveled braid, hung from his chin. He had traveled along the river, the banks choked with sandbar willows and, beyond, wild rye and switch grass. He slept under the cottonwoods, making a small fire with the deadwood that littered the ground, sometimes turning over arrowheads with his sturdy German shoe. Everything he owned he carried in two grain sacks.

An hour later Hans Beutle arrived, driving a springy buckboard, clicking his tongue and singing to his bay mare. The flesh of his face fell straight away from high cheekbones. A low sagittal crest suspended his eyebrows just above the pale irises giving an expression of peculiar intensity to his face. The blunt nose, the round ears, and stiff hair the color of ironstone were not memorable, but the mouth, with its twist, the lips pouting a little as though ready to begin kissing, and his skim milk-and-gravel voice, high-pitched and raw, drew attention. He was broad and very strong, with thick-wristed hands. He had been a miller’s apprentice in Bavaria with musical abilities, but after a quarrel with the miller that left the man choking and smothering inside a quarter-filled sack of flour, Beutle fled to America promising to send for his wife, Gerti, and baby Percy Claude. He was never sure later whether he had been fortunate or unfortunate to find a job playing the cornet with an Italian marching band for a salary of twenty dollars a month. In Chicago the bandleader broke a tooth on a fragment of butternut shell in a piece of divinity fudge given him by a country girl in a stained dress. The tooth throbbed. The bandleader tried to lance the swollen gum with his case knife and set a galloping septicemia in action. He died in a
dirty room owing the rent; the musicians were on their own. Beutle was sick of the jolting train rides and sweaty crowds, sick of Italian music and emotion. He saw a railroad advertisement for free land on the Little Runt River. As long as they were giving away quarter sections to anybody who proved up a claim, count him for one. The farm life was a good life, they said.

The third German, William Loats, arrived at sundown, pumping along on a shrieking bicycle and gnawing a heel of bread. The afternoon light streamed out of the west and lit the street like a stage. He slowed and stopped at the end of the grass-grown street, saw two men drawing lines in the dirt with sticks. The air quivered. Suddenly the other two straightened and looked at him.

He had come as a child from the old country to his uncle’s farm on the north shore of Lake Huron where, from the highest field, one could see the smoke of steamers churning west. The language of the uncle’s house was English.

Loats was clever and thrifty, as thin as a hoe handle, had a stone-shaped head with a frizz of dark crimpy hair, puffed cheeks and small cross-eyes. He was easygoing, the kind of man who would never shout at a horse. The uncle’s twelve sons denied the possibility that a portion of the farm could ever come to him, and finally he had struck out for himself, fired up by the advertisement in his uncle’s farm paper for free homestead land. He took passage on the
Vigorous,
a passenger-freight steamer bound down the Great Lakes for Chicago. The steamer was loaded with barrels of sugar and three hundred passengers—a family of Courte d’Oreilles Indians, a gang of young Polish laborers in high spirits heading for the meatpacking plants, two Norwegian clergymen, Irish railworkers and three families of white-blond Russians on their way to the
Dakotas. They stopped at St. Ignace to take on more passengers. The wind was coming up. White petals from a nearby orchard in flower drifted onto the dark water and the deck. Dutch immigrants clumped on board in their wooden shoes, headed for utopia in Indiana; they found places on the overcrowded deck—more of them were left on the dock, calling out messages to be passed on to their relatives.

An hour and a half after midnight, under a full, cold moon, the
Vigorous
struck an uncharted reef and broke apart. The bow sank quickly, but the stern floated on, filled with fire that set the sugar barrels ablaze. The moonlight shone on the rolling waves and the wet faces of the drowning passengers, who cried out in six languages. Loats kicked to shore in the company of a young Dutch woman, both clinging to the headboard of the captain’s pine bed. As the headboard dipped and plunged, Loats imagined a life-saving machine, a right-angled wooden frame with an inflated rubber cushion for buoyancy, a rear propeller driven by a hand crank, another under the feet driven by pedals; and there would be a mast with a little sail, a whistle hanging from a lanyard, a signal flag, and even a lantern. But how could one light the lantern? He puzzled at it until the waves swept them into the sandy surf. He helped the woman, reeling and choking, toward a green house with smoke streaming from the chimney. All along the wet sand lay the wooden shoes of drowned Dutchmen and from the woods a bear emerged, head up into the wind, lured by the smell of burning sugar.

Messermacher and Beutle beckoned Loats to them. Now the three stood on the warped boardwalk speaking a mixture of
German and American, sizing each other up, discovering similarities, exclaiming over the strange coincidence that had brought them to this tall grass on the same day. They were all of an age, twenty-eight, their birthdays within weeks of each other.

“Like brothers!”

“The Indivisible Three!”

“
Alle guten Dinge sind drei!
”

Beutle’s laugh came from a chest like a stuffed mattress. “Not like those fellers was going up in the mountains to look for gold, two prospectors, friends and comrades forever. Before they go they get provisions and everything they need at the trading post. There’s no women in the mountains so at the store they buy these love boards. It’s a pine board with a knothole, a piece of fur nailed on.” He winked. “So a year later, down from the mountains comes only one prospector. ‘Where’s the other feller?’ the trader asks him. He says—” When he finished the story Messermacher laughed but Loats drew the side of his mouth down.

They built a camp near the river in a clump of bur oak, and after the sunset blaze burned down into coals they smoked the Western Bee cigars Loats passed around, talking until the leaves of the trees disappeared in the darkness, until one by one sleep stifled their voices.

In the morning they waded through grasses, bluestem and Indian grass, needle grass and foxtail barley studded with bird-foot violets, wild strawberry blossom and multiflora rosebuds, prairie clover, whitetop and larkspur, until they were soaked to the thighs with dew, their pants legs caked with yolk-colored pollen and their strides releasing the green perfume of crushed stems. They veered around a huge swale of slough grass, for the saw-toothed blades cut like knives.

“But it’s good feed,” said Loats. “Twist it up, you can burn it.” Messermacher was anxious to find clay—a good clay pit, he said, and he would show them how to make the best house in the world. They stumbled over bison bones, cast their eyes across the prairie, over the iridescent, undulating sea. They pointed to islands and archipelagos of bur oaks, a stand of black walnut, to the cottonwoods, elm and green ash on the riverbank. Loats pulled up a spindly plant with a cluster of creamy flowers. “Not this! Poisons your stock. Death camas. My uncle had this plant.” He looked for others but did not find one.

“This here is
Tiefland,
” said Messermacher.

Fate had dropped them in a wreath of birdsong to hear the meadowlark’s gurgling double notes, the prairie blackbird’s rusty cries,
kiss-he, kiss-he,
the dickcissel’s
jup jup jup clip clip,
husky trillings and clear pensive notes, quavers and sliding whistles, sweet warbles, rattles, purrs and buzzes and the fragrant air shot through with lazuli buntings as a length of silk may show metallic threads. When they found a bank of slick blue clay along the Little Runt, Messermacher said some higher power had directed the event, and he took off his broken hat. He dropped his beard on his chest and said a prayer.

Loats suggested they name the settlement Trio.

“
Nein, nein,
no,” said Beutle, holding up his hands, sinewy and callused. “It’s these
Pranken,
these paws, that will build our farms and the town. Let the name show the work of our hands.” He was the most emotional of the three, the most volatile, the most sensual. A minor chord could make him weep. He was self-educated, owned a number of books, was never without facts and explanations.

“
So
call it
Pranken,
then,” Messermacher said, his dark face
twitching at the idea, but when they filed the papers at the county seat, the word was written down as Prank.

“If we called it
Hände,
” said Loats, “it would of turned into Hand, a not bad name. But Prank? A joke. Your life place becomes a joke because language mixes up!” And every year thereafter he petitioned to change the name of the town, suggesting in turn Snowball, Corn, Paradise, Red Pear, Dew, Buggywhip and Brighteye. (Later his suggestions were bitter: Forget It, Roughtown, Hell, Wrong, Stink.)

They had no time. Ground had to be broken; it was late in the season. The three Germans drove themselves without mercy, sleeping in their clothes, eating in their sleep, crawling out in the darkness before dawn when the only sign of the approaching day was the fresh odor of moist earth. They staggered in dirt-stiffened overalls to hitch the horses, plow and harrow and plant corn and wheat and drive the birds from the swollen, germinating kernels. Messermacher used one of his grain-sack traveling bags to make a seeder, filling it a quarter full with winter wheat seed, then folding and strapping it across his breast so the bag gaped, and steadily he cast the seed in an even fan. A little wheat, yes, said Beutle, who had read somewhere that corn was the destiny of the place, civilization was built on corn. Loats nodded. Then came a rush to throw up temporary sod hovels.

“I don’t get my woman here pretty soon, you fellers better sleep with the axe handy by,” said Beutle, rubbing his groin and moaning in mock agony. Their faces were sundark, with startling white foreheads marking hat lines, their bodies supple and strong in the crusted overalls, their eyesight keen
and expectations brilliant. They worked with demoniac energy. Everything seemed possible.

They made trip after trip to Keokuk, first to fetch their women and children, then a milk cow and seven pounds of coffee for Messermacher, then lumber for the houses and barns, southern pine shipped up from Louisiana on the Kansas City Southern. Back and forth they went in Beutle’s wagon hauling the resiny yellow boards to Prank and going for more.

“You want your nails to stay clinched, yellow pine’ll never let go,” said Messermacher who had knowledge of wood and joinery.

Loats ordered a dozen bald-cypress boards but wouldn’t say why until they pried it from him that it was for a casket.

“It don’t ever rot, stays sweet and solid a hundred years. Believe in looking ahead.”

“That’s right! No telling what the price of coffin wood will be next year,” said Beutle. “And you already twenty-eight years of age.”

In the lumberyard office Beutle counted out the money. His eye went around the familiar room, taking in the stained deal boards, the dusty clock, the counter polished black by the action of coat sleeves, the finger-marked safe with its painted gilt flourishes. On the safe stood a green button accordion, furred in dust.

“You play that instrument?” he asked the clerk. An American.

“Nah. Something Mr. Bailey got off a nigger last year come through here off the boats and hungry. He couldn’t play it neither with a broken arm. I reckon Mr. Bailey felt sorry for him, give him something for it, two bits and goodbye, keep moving along.”

Beutle picked it up, gave it a tentative squeeze, then filled the office with a loud and pumping polka. The dust flew from it as he worked the bellows. The other two Germans stood with their faces ajar.