Free Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx Page B

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 Beutleplayed “The Dead March” once. That was enough. The lives of children were in precarious balance; it was better not to love them too much.
The Rawhide & Hog Lard
    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