Free Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx

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 keenand 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.
    “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.”
New houses and women
    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 themen 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