Free Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx Page A

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.
The green accordion
    “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 tothe 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.”
A memorial photograph
    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 thelaundry 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