Accordion Crimes (8 page)

“Hans,” said Messermacher. “This is marvelous. That you can do this. This music gives me happiness.”

“Not bad,” said Beutle. “Nice tone, quick buttons. How much wants Mr. Bailey for this thing?”

“I dunno. He’s not here now.” The clerk made up his mind to try the instrument as soon as the Germans had gone. It couldn’t be difficult if Germans could play it.

“You ask him. I got to come back in September, get more lumber. You tell him he want to sell it, I buy it. If it ain’t too much money, like the old feller with a nickel in his pocket said to the whore.”

They spent the summer cultivating and hammering, raising frames and fencing, pacing off new fields for corn and oats and hay. All three of them were as hard and corded as hickory rails. The sown fields grew maniacally. In one plot Gerti planted some black seeds, the size and shape of squash seeds, given out by the land office, a new thing to try, watermelon, they called it.

“
Raus! Raus!
” shouted Beutle to his children in the black morning of each shortening day, pulling them from the rustling tick stuffed with wild grass and setting them to chores and labor. The women—except Gerti—sweated and strained, pressed bricks of clay, grass and manure from wooden molds, fed the stock and worked in the fields, keeping track of the little children by the bells pinned to their clothes, while the
men hammered until they were striking by feel, blind in the darkness, packing the clay bricks,
batser,
between the vertical studs as Messermacher said, “like this, like so.” Gerti worked with the men, brandishing a hammer and singing.

When the watermelons were as large as a child’s head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow. In mid-August the second cutting of hay was stacked and Loats sowed rye seed between his corn rows to plow under in the spring. The others laughed; with such rich loam it was a waste of time.

By the end of September they were out of the sod huts and into the small, good houses with their smooth exteriors of clay, thick walls, and central chimneys of the same hard bricks. Over the winter Messermacher’s wife stenciled a design of red flowers with pointed petals along the walls near the ceiling, very much admired by a finger-cut Indian woman who appeared one morning with a basket of snakeroot for barter. The earthen huts were renamed barns, and next year, said Messermacher, they’d enlarge the houses, build better barns. Gerti and the children walked through the long grass feeling for bison bones with their bare feet (a man came in a wagon at the end of the summer and paid cash for the bones which were shipped east and ground into fertilizer), ate wild rose hips for the fleeting taste of sweetness. Beutle’s oldest son, Wid, had a gift for finding grassy meadowlark nests.

“Look now. Four months since we walked on the naked land. Now is three farms started.”

Before they started harvesting the corn Beutle went back to
the Keokuk lumberyard for henhouse studding. The accordion was still on the safe.

“Well, how much does Mr. Bailey want for it?”

The clerk pulled a sour face. “Mr. Bailey don’t want nothing for it. Mr. Bailey is gathered to his maker. See that lumber you got on your wagon? That fell on him. That and more. Bad stacking. That’s his brains and blood on it. You look at the ends. It stove his head in, crushed him like a bug. His own fault. He’d get anybody to stack them boards; bums, eyties, polacks, krauts, hunkies. He goes out there, pulls at a board on the top to start loading up some gink’s wagon, the whole thing come down on him. He give one scream you could sharpen your axe on. Took me over a hour to get the pile off’n him. So I guess it’s up to me to name a price on that damn squeezebox. I don’t know what you Germans see in it. Sounds like Mr. Bailey when the boards come at him. One dollar. In cash.”

Beutle played the accordion in the new house still smelling of the southern pinewoods, the resinous odor evoking the hissing sound of wind in the needles, the buzz of cicadas.

“Look at it. It’s a pretty color.” He stretched the green accordion out on his knee, pulled long chords from it. “A good voice.” His saccharine tenor soared, the old German songs flowered in the kitchen, the children played under the table slipping straws beneath Beutle’s tapping toe and the women wiped tears away.

“Yes, it’s a nice little accordion,” Beutle said loftily, firing up his curved pipe. “But I would rather have a good German Hohner. It would be stronger.” Messermacher thumped the
laundry tub and Loats buzzed at a paper and comb until his lips numbed.

“Now we got everything,” said Loats.

“No,” said Beutle, treading on the finger beneath his toe. “A tuba we need. And a
Bierstube.
I miss that place, the chairs and little tables with the red-check cloths under the trees, the little birds hopping around for crumbs, everyone peaceful with a stein of fine lager—oh how I miss Herr Gründig’s lager, he made it like a fine wine—a little music sometimes, an accordion playing this”—and he drew out a few bars of “
Schöne Mähderin
”—“the children sitting quiet, and how I remember the old ladies knitting with their little glass in front of them. There is nothing like this in America, there is no place to go. Everybody stays home and works. Americans understand nothing of how to live, only to get and get and get. Now we make our own
Bierstube,
eh? I make a place down by the river under the willow trees, and on Sunday afternoon when it’s nice we go there and pretend to ourselves we are in a place of warmth and convivial feelings. The children can play at waiters.”

“Um,” said fiddle-faced Clarissa Loats. “And shall I be one of the old ladies knitting with the little glass before her, or like a demented one, carrying cakes and cheese and sausage from the house back and forth?”

“A woman’s work is a woman’s work,” said Beutle. “First carry, then knit and drink.”

Loats’s uncle had belonged to a
Turnverein,
and the nephew, impressed with the old man’s wiry strength, persuaded the others to do exercises. Every morning at daybreak the three Germans arose in their separate houses, emptied their bladders, then performed three knee bends, toe touchings, and finally they flung their arms outward, forward, and to one side.
Messermacher was exceptional with his homemade Indian clubs; Loats could walk on his hands. Then each went to table and drank a quart of home-brewed beer—Beutle smoked a cigar as well—while the woman of the house clattered the cover off the milk crock and salt pork crackled in the frying pan.

“We got it good,” said Beutle.

But in November one of Loats’s children fell sick with second summer complaint and convulsions that worsened into brain fever, and Beutle’s vaunted doctor book,
Praktischer Führer zur Gesundheit,
was useless; after a week the boy died. Loats and Messermacher dug a grave a little way out on the prairie, and Beutle, tears streaming down his face, swore to fence the plot in the spring. He played “The Dead March” twice through on the accordion and the women sobbed. It was only the beginning of the unending illnesses and accidents that seemed to afflict the Germans. Over the years the children sickened of diphtheria, spinal fever, typhoid, cholera, malaria, measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis and pneumonia as well as lightning strikes, injuries, snakebites and frostbite. When Beutle’s youngest son died of complications following measles, Gerti sent Beutle riding after the itinerant photographer who had passed by a few days earlier so they might have a memorial photograph. She quickly dressed the dead child in his older brother’s trousers and a black winter coat and, while he was still pliable, arranged the small body on a chair in a sitting position and in his hands placed the wooden horse Beutle had carved. Because the corpse would not stay upright, Beutle had to tie him in place with a rope blackened in soot that it might not show. The photographer arrived, they carried chair and child into the brilliant sunlight. There was still no fence around the plot and this time Beutle
played “The Dead March” once. That was enough. The lives of children were in precarious balance; it was better not to love them too much.

In 1900 there were thirty farms around Prank, new families impelled west by private failures, drifting in from drought-ruined Kansas and Nebraska, some stragglers from the east who had failed to get decent land in the Oklahoma land run the year before, a few ruined by the Depression and looking for a new start, some ex-cattlemen brought to their knees by the terrible blizzards of ‘86 and ‘87, still hoping to get back to where they had been, and most of them flying high on the idea of the new century, sensing a chance at momentous things. Some seasons the corn grew like nothing any of them had ever seen or dreamed, jerking up out of the purple-black loam as they watched, and in the hot silence of a windless summer day, standing among the rows they could hear the screak of stalk growth, the force of life.

But drought came as well, baking the crops to a total loss, and hellish grasshoppers in whirring clouds that clung so thickly to the barbwire fences that the strands appeared to be made of frayed hawser, hawser that writhed and moved. Black walls of cloud sucked themselves into the roaring tunnels of tornadoes, hurricane winds burst out of nowhere and blew down barns and houses, cast horses into gullies. Men were frozen as they staggered across the prairie in bitter ground blizzards, horses died in the traces, a woman bent against the screaming wind and gripping her husband’s hand as they struggled to the house fell and lost her hold. He could not find her until the next morning, her icy corpse blown up against
the side of the barn, and would have rolled to the Missouri had the barn not caught her. Long savage droughts were broken by torrential downpours that gullied the powdery soil and washed out the dying crops. Hail as large as teacups, misshapen like baroque pearls, pounded cornfields into pulp and bruised the stock. Children drowned in the Little Runt, were lost in the forests of corn.

The long-awaited railroad line came in, the thirty-mile Rolla & Highrod, derisively called the Rawhide & Hog Lard for its improvisational operation—the company used rendered lard instead of expensive bearing oil for engine lubrication, dipped water by hand from the Little Runt River rather than put up water towers—but it was a connecting route to the Chicago markets and prosperity. So read the railroad’s posters and handbills. Beutle despised the Irish bogmen who laid the track with their “Irish spoons,” those pointed shovels, but their money spent as well as any, and for a year the Beutles boarded four of the dirty, praying whiskey drinkers.

“Oh the dirty Irish,” said Gerti who had brought a bowl of potato gruel to a shack where four children lay deathly sick with smallpox. The mother had offered her a cup of coffee and, when Gerti nodded reluctantly, went into a filthy kitchen alcove. After a minute Gerti glanced in and saw the wretched woman licking clean the inside rim of a cup while on the stove a pan of long-boiled coffee gave off the odor of a burning rag.

Beutle sold the black walnut grove for railroad ties and congratulated himself on making a good dollar. Some of the Irish stayed to mine the limestone discovered beneath the town, and some of them drifted out west, following the railroads, dropping out now and then to become ranch hands, land agents, clerks in the new government offices.

“Those dirty Catholics,” said Beutle. “They are all criminals, they commit any crime because they can go to confession, a few prayers and
zack!
all is wiped clean. There was an Irishman stole five chickens from his neighbor, he goes to confession and says, ‘Father, I stole some chickens.’ ‘How many?’ says the priest. ‘Five, Father, but let’s say ten and I’ll get the rest on the way home.’”

Gerti kneaded dough for twenty loaves of bread each week, her great enlarged hands like articulated hooks, the muscular arms so overdeveloped in the forearm they seemed deformed. After a restless cow she was milking in the yard shifted against the wash platform and sent the heavy tub of water onto her shoulder, the right one drew up permanently. Despite this crookedness and her sufferings from inflammatory rheumatism, she worked in the fields, cursing housework, and every morning she braided her hair and the hair of her daughters to form a coronet although the fashion in town was for a bun of hair the size of a young cabbage drawn up at the top of the head. She combed out the rippled hair with her fine comb, parted it into two long hanks which she braided swiftly and tautly, working in a strip of cloth near the end-of each braid. She wound the finished braids around the head, and where they met at the nape of the neck she tied the strips and hid them in the hair. The flat double braids made a glinting crown of hair on the young daughters; hers was dun, streaked with grey. At night the braids were undone—who could sleep on ropes of hair?—to cascade down in crimpy hot waves. And when several times each year the girls came home from school—never sit next to the Irish, she warned them—with head lice, she washed their hair in kerosene, combed the reeking strands with a fine-tooth nit comb, and when they itched and writhed with worms, she dosed them with Dr. Lug’s Vermifuge, a tarry substance with the reek of scorched cowhorn.

A second rail line came in, a double track laid by Chinese laborers who spoke an incomprehensible jabber, running south to Kansas City and north to Minneapolis. The railroad built a station, manned it with a stationmaster, a telegraph operator, a freight manager. The waiting room featured a ten-foot bench of perforated plywood that spelled out an immense motto,
VISIT THE SICK
. Buck Thorne, the stationmaster, had been an engineer until he lost one leg in a derailment. He made a joke of referring to himself as a steam locomotive. When he went home for lunch he put on his dome casing, limped along on his flat-wheel wooden leg, side rods working, headed into his roundhouse to fire up and take on coal and water. Saturday night he drank whiskey until he was in a roaring state and declared himself to be thoroughly oiled.