Accordion Crimes (54 page)

Late at night, the two of them drunk back to limber youth, the desperate boy got up and to the tickle and bounce of “The Broken Plate” did a step dance that took the breath out of Fay watching, and he, not to be outdone, laid his instrument aside and danced out the silent tune on the dirty linoleum of the kitchen floor.

For a long time after Fay left the mountain Javier played, he played and sang into the thickening dark, drinking and singing, his voice and the green accordion’s warped and ruined chords and lunatic notes—he didn’t care—echoing off the boulders, while he imagined tracers of notes making trapezoidal and triangular figures as they bounced from boulder to stone, and it was beautiful, beautiful to hear it, alone.

But the next day he opened it up to see what could be repaired. The reeds were rusty, that was sure, and the axle, the pivot point for the keys, was probably corroded, grabbing and making the buttons stick. He could think of better places to draw out an axle than in a sheep wagon rocked by wind, something of a delicate operation, but he couldn’t make the instrument any worse. He wasn’t worried about replacing the valves—there was a roll of leather and skin and whang under the bunk.

He scrambled through the tools looking for a pliers to grip the end of the axle, but for some reason there wasn’t one. At the back of the drawer he turned up two pairs of rusty old sheep shears and an ancient pair of castrating forceps.

“Them’ll work,” he said to the accordion, “maybe,” but used the fencing tool instead to get a grip on the end of the axle and pull it out straight. It was bad enough.

The silent reed suffered from a grain of rust jammed between the reed tongue and its vent, and this he eased out with a silk thread from his fly-tying box. The steel reeds were coated with islands of rust and he scraped at them with the blade of his knife but was afraid of lodging more fragments under the reed tongues. He cleaned the reeds with his toothbrush, blowing out the dust until he was dizzy.

He could see it needed everything—new bellows, new reed, new springs, reed plates reset, grille replaced, and more. But it had a wonderful voice, sonorous, plangent, shouting in grief to the mountain slope.

Late that summer, at another camp farther west, he laid the accordion on the earth and went with the dog to discover the source of a far-off sheep’s nervous blat, nothing to be seen but some disturbed earth that made him wonder if there was a cat around, but there were no clear tracks, no dead sheep or signs of a killing. The dog took little interest in the roughened place.

He was gone for two hours, three, and when he came back he leaned down to pick up the accordion, still thinking about the cat he now believed was up on the slope with him, scraping the bellows over the rattlesnake resting beneath the instrument and receiving the fangs in the great vein in the crook of the elbow.

The camp tender found him ten days later, his skin blackened by the high-altitude sun. He thought, heart attack, poor old bastard, loaded him into the back of the pickup with his belongings. Javier was buried at the back of the cemetery without a stone, and his goods stored in the Basque hotel where he had spent the winters and the morose times between work.

Two summers later the owner sold the hotel to a young Vietnamese couple and returned to his ancestral fishing
village, Elanchove, where he had been born sixty-seven years earlier, hoping for a bride and a few years of home comfort. The new owners cleared out the back room packed with boxes of old clothing, bibles and catechisms, spurs and boots and worn saddles, yellowed calendars with day after day crossed out in crooked slashes and Xs, shepherds’ crooks, rifles, ancient trunks, and a green accordion. All that seemed salable went to the Little Boy Blue pawnshop on commission.

Ivar Gasmann, the youngest son of Nils and Elise Gasmann, grandson of immigrants Gunnar and Margaret Gasmann, was a familiar figure in Old Glory, Minnesota, in the late 1970s, pushing his grocery cart with the groaning wheel along the streets, picking up cans, bottles, a pair of muddy, tread-printed underpants, nor did he ignore odd-colored rocks, slouching along, his hands on the handlebar, blond hair lying in dusty ropes over his shoulders, hair that he would knot and tie under his bony chin when the wind blew at his back, blinking eyes the color of sky-reflecting glass, a fine-faced man but slow in mind and dirty in person. People saw him as soft, yet potentially violent, some said he ate lost dogs, and anyone could see he lived like a swine.

Yet he was useful in the community. For him women set out things they no longer wanted: three-legged side tables, leopardskin-print cushions, a soap-flake-premium cookie jar in the shape of a bulldog head, sections of toy train track, wall plaques of three flying geese
moderne,
dusty eucalyptus leaves, papier-mâché bananas and artichokes, a pink crib whose occupant had died in the night. These objects he hauled to his shack in the lilac trees, near something that had been a livery stable at the turn of the century, a gaunt building slumped at one end like a rising camel, the roof patched with flattened baking powder cans.

He had never had sexual intercourse with a woman. His feeling for men, after a peculiar encounter with a short-order cook at Chippewa Willy’s Grill, was ambivalent.

When Ivar was born, a year before World War II ended, his parents farmed north of town on land once black with the dense shadow of giant pines. (The forests went down long before old Gasmann bought the farm, cut by axemen and sawyers from Prince Edward Island, Maine, Québec, New Brunswick, Finland, Norway, Sweden; as the loggers moved west, into the raw stumpland came Germans, Czechs, Scandinavians, Slovaks, Croatians, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and a few Irish and French with farming on their minds.)

Gunnar Gasmann had come over from Norway in 1902 (during the passage the ship steamed through waters where, ninety-three years later, the world’s largest concrete drilling platform stood in the Troll offshore gas field), dragged around Wisconsin and Michigan for ten years working in the lead mines, the lumber mills, as a laborer, a hired farmhand, before the family bought the stumpland farm for fifty cents an acre. Stubborn and easily injured, Gunnar took offense if anyone had the bad manners to call him by his first name, felt patronized by a warm greeting. He thought book learning an affectation of the snotty middle class and discouraged his children from school. He had a single joke, an acid retort for those who crossed him: why don’t you go back where I come from?

Under the authority of this thin-skinned man the boy Nils grew up barely literate but good with an axe, a natural for the lumber camps where he started working at fifteen. By the time he was twenty he was a tie hack in the Idaho mountains.

(His twin sister, Floretta, left the farm a month after he did. She tied up with Jack Brady’s All-Girl Wild West Show for a
while, switched to rodeo and became a champion trick rider and bronc rider. In 1927, at Tucumcari, New Mexico, she was thrown, landed on the back of her head, dead instantly of a broken neck.)

Nils disliked farming and returned to it reluctantly after each season’s work, drinking and cursing in the polyglot camp talk of Swedish, Norwegian and English. Every summer after the river drive, suffering from squeak heel, an audible ailment of the Achilles tendon that afflicted many who drove the ties down the tumbled water of snowmelt rivers, he hitchhiked back to Old Glory where his wife, Elise, kept old Gunnar’s farm going with her half-wit cousin, Freddy, a good worker who needed no pay.

But as soon as the last cutting of hay was in the barn and the corn shocked, Nils was off again for the woods camp with his chopping axe, broadaxe and peeler, hungry for tobacco, whiskey and the stink and rough company of men—the place where all of his teeth except two uppers and two lowers dead center had been pulled by Oleson, the tie pin, with a pair of oily pliers in the winter of 1936. (Oleson joined the navy in 1943, stayed in until 1947 when he was one of six hundred killed in the Texas City, Texas, explosion of a hold full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer.) Nils’s mail-order dental plate was patterned from a wax impression he made with a plug of chew in his cheek. The teeth did not fit well, and because he frequently lost them during drinking bouts, he burned his initials in them with the heated tip of his knife, N.G.

“Know what that means?” said Oleson. “N.G.—No Good.”

In the woods he felt at home, a fluid and tireless chopper of perfect ties seven inches by eight feet, ears cocked for the ring of the gut hammer, his imagination playing with the
pleasures of the whorehouse and saloon, of fiddle and accordion tunes by moonlight with the tie hack musicians sitting on stumps in the cutover and the rest of them lurching over rough ground, treading hemlock cones into powder dancing with one another’s shadows.

In 1938 Nils cut a pine; its fall sent tremors through the snow on the steep slope above, and a small avalanche, a hissing white turmoil of powder and loose boulders, raced down. He threw away his axe and ran, got far enough to escape living burial but was wedged to his knees when a small dislodged boulder, leaping and plunging, hit the side of his head so hard it laid him out senseless. When he came to in the dark, with the lantern of Oleson shining in his eyes, he did not know his name or where he was. He said, “hello, Oldsmobile,” instead of “Oleson,” and the men cheered. At least he was alive, and they all thought of young Som Axel snowshoeing along the railroad cut in new powder snow two years earlier, caught by an avalanche, bent and frozen in a hoop, his snowshoed feet pressed against his shoulder blades.

Nils recovered, but his memory was erratic and he came up in screaming rages over nothing, for a savage, volatile personality had been released by the erratic boulder. The logging company gave him his walking papers and there was nowhere to go but back to Old Glory and the farm.

So he was there when Ivar, his second son, was born—a farmer against his will, his brain addled, while men with undented heads went off to fight the Axis powers. He came home drunk in the dawn; after bringing Elise to the hospital the night before and listening to her moans for twenty
minutes, he went to a loggers’ bar and drank boilermakers. As for Elise, it was a painful labor that made her shriek against her will. She sank gratefully into what the fat, cross-eyed doctor called Twilight Sleep and delivered the child, but she remembered enough to swear that Nils would never come near her again, the crazy hog.

“Ah, you’ll forget. I’ll see you in here next year,” said the nurse.

Nils, yawning home, drunk, desperate for an hour of sleep before starting the milking, longing for sleep in the sweet unaccustomed silence—the other child, Conrad, was at Elise’s sister’s house, the half-wit cousin burrowed in his greasy blanket still—fell into the bed and slept for seven minutes until a hairy woodpecker roused him with a tremendous rapping on the shingled roof. He got the shotgun and ran outside naked but the bird flew off with a coy feminine squeak. He cursed woodpeckers. He tumbled back into bed, the shotgun in Elise’s place, and pulled the quilt over his shoulders when the woodpecker began again. The shattering noise was right above him. He sobbed in fury, fired through the ceiling, deafening himself and splintering shingles, then ran outside to see the proof of his fallen enemy. The bird was in an apple tree, working on a hole the size of a grapefruit. He dashed inside, snatched up the gun, then back out, jumping down the porch stairs, but again the woodpecker flew. The cows were lowing with discomfort in the barn. Back into the house he went, shaking with temper, but when he was two up the stairs the malicious hammering started once more, and he sprang into the kitchen, incoherent, shouting maledictions, yanked open the red-painted drawer in the dresser where Elise kept the matches, crumpled a ball of newspaper, ran up to the attic and set the roof on fire directly under the rapping. His
rage dropped away in a few minutes but by then the flames had the roof. The fire department saved the lower story, and the family spent the rest of the winter in cramped, char-stinking rooms. In the spring he rebuilt the upstairs, but after he sawed the stringer for the staircase he found he had measured wrong, and too furious to buy more lumber and start again, he tore the work out. From that time on, in order to use the upper rooms, they climbed a ladder.

Ivar grew up in fear of his father’s insensate rages, ricocheted from slaps and screams in the barn to gingersnaps and cream in the kitchen.

Nils, when he was rational, gave Elise detailed commands on how to raise children properly. His own parents had been obsessed with the prescriptions of a book,
The Emigrant’s Guide to Preserving Norwegian Culture,
written by a homesick settler in Texas, a book that dwelt on the merits of the Norwegian language, twice-daily prayers, Norwegian hymns, clothes, food and, after the fortune was made, return to the “
elskede Nord
” country. Daily they had sung “
En Udvandrers Sang,
” “
O Norges Son
” and others. His mother wished to live in a Norwegian community where land was owned in common by all. But Gunnar shouted for independence and his own land, purchased a mighty, star-spangled flag. Years later, drunk, Nils could still remember one of those old songs, “The Skeleton at the Party,” with its verses about liberty and peace across the sea: “
Bliver os Skatter, Afgifter for svær, reise vi Vest over Sø, til Missisippis Breder, o der, ja, o der i Frihed vi blegne og døe
…,” but forbade his own children to learn a word of the purse-mouth tongue. Concentrate on American, he told them—Oleana, that Norwegian utopia dreamed up by Ole Bull, was a joke and Norwegians were a joke and their accent was a joke and they made themselves into jokes with
stupid behavior and low comedy acts and songs, heavy with simulated farts and swollen red noses and checkered highwater pants. Norwegians were figures of fun like no others, bawling “who threw the halibut on the poop deck?” in exaggerated comic accents, playing the squeezebox through their legs, behind their ears, until you wanted to howl. And what stubborn people, unable to let go of an idea and look at another. So the birth language of old Gunnar and Margaret perished in the Gasmann family.

As an illustration of stubbornness and single-track minds, Nils told the story of how old Gunnar and the uncles began to dig a well on the farm. Seven feet down, they struck a vein of shining red-colored flakes and nuggets. Could it be copper? Perhaps. Samples of the mystery ore were wrapped up in a brown paper parcel to send off to the assay office. But in the meantime water was needed and the men dug on. For one reason or another the interesting package was never sent and in time it was lost.

“A copper mine ignored for the sake of water. We could have been millionaires,” said Nils, “except for those old Norwegian fools.” But he never made a motion himself to dig in the vicinity of the old well, unused for many years. There was pleasure in the thought that while stumbling about the farm chores they might be walking over a great fortune.

In 1951 Ivar was seven, and a traveling preacher drove into the farmhouse yard towing a plywood trailer behind a two-tone car with Tennessee plates, packed full of women, children and boxes. He knocked on the farmhouse door, said his name was Howard Poplin and asked Nils if he could set up for a few days
in the lower field near the road, be glad to pay a dollar or two. Nils, frowning with his colorless eyebrows, said yes, they could stay there, no need to pay, we were all brothers in this hard world and any god-fearing Christian was welcome on his land. He didn’t smile; he never smiled. After noon dinner he went down to see what they were doing—ruining something, perhaps—and called Ivar to accompany him, told Conrad to slop the hogs.

Poplin’s women were off to one side going through boxes, the wife and an older woman that must be the wife’s mother, Nils decided, looking at their narrow heads and long hanks of hair, the old lady’s grey, the younger one’s a yellowish brown, but the same heads, both with a great vein bisecting their foreheads and drowsy, stunned eyes. Neither one was much to look at.

The preacher unhitched his trailer. He and two rangy, paste-faced girls unfolded long hinged roof sections. With a squalling scrape of raw edge on wood they opened out side walls; the minister ducked into the hollow structure and released the hooks that held up the floor sections which dropped in place and rested on cinder blocks the girls had put down.

“Son-of-a-baby, I’ll be god-damn,” said Nils.

“Take not the name of the Lord in vain, brother. Yep! There she is, a traveling house, sleeps six people comfortable when she’s set up. Look inside and you’ll see a good-sized living room. Got a good old kitchen, two bedrooms. She’s designed to travel, to be set down in this system of traveling house parks right across the country, a national system, all alike, neat as a pin, let you go off in any direction with your good little old traveling house, with all these people traveling out to California and New York and Florida. Hello, Sonny,” he said to Ivar. “I bet you like to cut up some, don’t you? Well, I’m bad to cut up myself.”

“What park system is that,” said Nils. “Haven’t heard a thing about it here.”

“Well, the parks ain’t built yet, but they will be after Eisenhower’s road system gits finished. It come to me after prayer. The traveling houses are going good. I got a franchise, preach the word of God, interest people in these fine little houses. There’s a million need them.”