Donât Let a Dead Man Shake You by the Hand
A PlANO ACCORDDION
A new owner
There was a truck parked on the lawn, with a hand-lettered sign in the windshield: FOR SALE $400. In the driveway a sedan panted, crowded with dim people, the back seat writhing with children, and lashed to the roof a long metal cow-feed trough. The wifeâs posture in the front seat marked her as pregnant. The driverâs door stood open admitting a torrent of small black mosquitoes while the driver, Buddy Malefoot, a muscular man in white jeans and white rubber boots, a pearlized raccoon foot heâd found in an oyster hung on a chain around his neck, leaned under the truck hood jiggling wires, hooking his finger under belts to gauge their stretch, reading the bone-dry oil dipstick, then coming out from under to kick the flaccid tires with his good foot. He had a bony, rectangular face like a box, the jaw as wide as the brow, the top of his head squared off, and two jug ears that had resisted the adhesive tape of his infancy. His greasy cap sat high on black curls. He was right-sided, from a mole on his right ear, to his dexter eye, larger than the other, five long hairs near his right nipple, fingernails that grew faster on his right hand, a longer right leg and a foot a full size beyond the left. In the house a shape hovered behind the screen door, cracked it open, but Buddy held up his hand and shook his head, got in his sedan and backed out.
âIdnât it no good?â The voice came from his father, Onesiphore, in the back seat smoking a cigarette, a man with the same square jaw as his son but stubbled with white, his yellowed hair crested, eyeglass lenses reflecting the rice fields and watery sky.
âNo damn good at all. Look like hell struck with a club.â He had a smudge of grease like a caste mark on his forehead.
âYeah, well, hate to see you spend that compensation money ennaway. Seem like yâall got a TV and an accordeen. You ought a save some of it.â He flipped the cigarette out the window.
âWhat I think, too,â said the daughter-in-law up front, half turning and presenting Onesiphore with her buttery profile. She wore a striped maternity minismock, and her bare thighs were stippled with mosquito bites.
âSeem like it was me got hurt. Seem like you forget donât nobody tell me what to do. Va brasser dans tes chaudieres.â
The sedan slouched over the road on its bad shocks, squatting on the corners.
âIâll tell you what to do,â said the back seat. âYâall drive straighter or Iâll put a chair leg to you. You ainât so big I couldnât make you dance. I want to get home and see that accordeen good.â
âThatâs right, Papa, make your poor hurt-footed son dance.â
âYour footâs as good as mine. I hope itâs a D chuned.â Onesiphore Malefoot craned over the front seat to look at the black case resting between his daughter-in-lawâs feet.
âYeah? Like to sec you walk on it for moreân a minute. Told you, itâs aC.â
âMe, oh yeah, Iâm gonna like to have a D. That beauty Ambrose Thibodeaux got, that old Major?â
âDream along.â
âOne time a son wouldnât speak to his father like you, when I was young we lived at home, ate the good homegrown food, oh yeah, none of the supermarket food, but sacamitĂ©, the good okra gumbo, boudin like you canât get no more, yes, oh yeah, then the kids were goodâtrouble started, and this is true, when they made the kids go to school, talk only amĂ©ricain. You, you and Belle used to talk French, perfect French, when you was little, now I donât hear a word, and the grandkids, they donât know a cheeseburger from a tortue ventre jaune. â He lit another cigarette.
âYeah? See how far you get out on the rig talkin French. These oil guys come here from Texas, Oklahoma, they got the money, they hand out the jobs, everything, bidness strictly American and you got to make your reports, all that the same way. What good is French to me? Itâs like this secret language donât work. Itâs like kids doing pig Latin, lay ovelay ouyay. Itâs OK for home, talk with the family, sing songs in.â His right eye fluttered, a tic brought on by the strain of conversing with his father. One of the children was lying on the back window shelf; the other, Bissel, crouched on the floor arranging stray pieces of gravel on his grandfatherâs boot toe. (Sixteen years later Bissel, who was playing drums in a disco band in Baton Rouge, came back for a visit, saw ten thousand screaming people give the old man a standing ovation at the Cajun Music Tribute. âThatâs my fucking grandfather,â he said furiously to his girlfriend as though it had been a secret kept from him all his life. When the old man died of trichinosis Bissel switched to accordion, imitated his grandfatherâs singing style with eerie accuracy for a year, then slid over into swamp pop.)
âGrandpa, did you see a turtle when you were little?â
âSee him! We ate him! Catch him in the summer when the swamp dried up, dig him out. Sometimes we find it after the thunderstorm. Keep him in a pen until we ready to eat him. You get the woman turtle full of eggs you got something good. We use to feel, feel that turtle with our little fingers, see can we feel eggs. Maman fricassee the meat, and the best treat is the yolk of the egg right there on your plate, taste just like chicken. You kids never ate no turtle yet? Itâs good! You know, you cook them eggs all day and all night and all the next day and the white never get hard. You got to suck it out of the shell, they got a shell like leather. I donât see one of them turtles for a long time, couple of years. Smell that cafĂ©! Always down this road a good smell of cafe, oh yeah. Me, I can use some of that. Letâs hurry up and get home. Ă la maison, mon fils! That petit noir is already jumping in my mouth.âLe cafĂ© noir dans unpaquet bleu, leplusje bois, le plus je veuxâ âhe sang in his celebrated voice, vibrant and keening, the wailing style anciently linked to the music of the vanished Chitimachas and Houmas. âMe, I say we gonna get more rain. See out there?â A mass of blue-black cloud was moving in from the Gulf. Only his daughter-in-law glanced to the southwest and nodded to foster the illusion that they were conspirators, allied against Buddy and Mme Malefoot. Onesiphore patted her shoulder and sang on, smoking, as the sedan rolled through the hot, flat country.
The Malefoot familyâtheir enemies said the name derived from malfraty, or gangsterâwas a tangled clan of nodes and connecting rhizomes that spread over the continent like the fila of a great fungus. Anciently they came from France in the seventeenth century, crossed the North Atlantic to Acadie in the New World, ignored the British when France ceded the land to England who renamed it Nova Scotia and demanded oaths of allegiance. The Malefoots and thousands of others along the littoral of the Baie Frangaise ignored the preposterous request, a lack of enthusiasm the British interpreted as treason. Thousands of the Acadians were shipped away to the American colonies, some made their own way to refuge. The Malefoots went first to St. Pierre, then to Miquelon, scraps of rock off the coast of Newfound-land, then were shipped back to France where they languished for months, crossed the ocean again to Halifax, and from Halifax took ship to New Orleans in French Louisiana, an ill-timed choice, for a few years after they arrived the territory was ceded to Spain. The refugees traveled north and west into the hot, dripping, watery country of the Opelousas, Attakapas, Chitimachas, Houmas, to the Acadian coasts, the bayous TĂȘche and Courtableau, learning to pole fragile bateaux and live in the humid damp. They mixed and mingled, blended and combined their blood with that of local tribes, Haitians, West Indians, slaves, Germans, Spanish, Free People of Color (many with the name Senegal, for their homeland river), nĂ©gres libres and Anglo settlers, even amĂ©ricains, shaping a mĂ©li-mĂ©lo culture steeped in French, and the accordion, borrowed from the Germans, livelied the kitchen music of the prairie parishes, the fiddle had its way in the watery parishes.
Along the great bayous stretched alluvial deposits of marvelously fertile loam. In the Attakapas country the Malefoots planted cane and corn and worked the plantations alongside imported Chinese laborers, driving big sugar mules, though no Malefoots lived in fine mansions; in the Opelousas, their crops were small-farm cotton and corn, sometimes worked on shares. They kept a yam patch, rows of Irish potatoes.
They built their houses on islands and back up the bayous in the Creole style, the houses standing above the ground on cypress pillers, the broken-pitched roofs borrowed from the West Indies that covered built-in porches and outside stairs with a fausse galerie roof extension to keep the slanted rain from striking in. They smoothed the inside walls with calcimined mud and moss, grew Blue Rose rice, and in the Atchafalaya Basin, the great freshwater swamp, they gathered moss, shot alligators, poling through the marsh where snowy egrets took flight before them like tablecloths shaking, threading the briny maze of quaking earth, oyster grass, wire grass to the edge of the Gulf. In the Gulf the Malefoots, once cod fishers and whale killers of the North Atlantic, dragged for shrimp, tonged oysters, fished, and, since 1953 when the government authorized offshore drilling, worked on the oil rigs, but had not forgotten the slow glide of the pirogue through black channels, the hiss of the boat as it parted the grass, the nutria in the trap, la belle cocodrie, snout brilliant with wet duckweed. Malefoots enveloped in whining clouds of mosquitoes, slapping at blood-mad deerflies, still poled through shimmering water, sky and marsh grass, but they complained that it was all changing, with alien water hyacinth choking the waterways and the shrimp nurseries dying since the Army Corps of Engineers had blocked the natural flow of the delta-building Mississippi with their levee system, cutting off the rich silt deposits that had traveled all the way from the heartland of the continent and that had fed the great marshes forever, now spilling the silt wastefully into the ocean. The swamps and marshes were dissolving, sinking, shrinking away. (A generation later, five hundred square miles of land had melted into water. Men closed off the saline marshes, flushed them with fresh water for a crop of rice, pumped them dry for cattle pasture and the quick money that Texas feedlot entrepreneurs would pay for scrub calves.)
There were square-jawed Malefoot relatives in New Brunswick and in Maine, they were all over Texas, Beaumont on the Gulf, up in the Big Thicket country through Basile Malefoot who had married into the Plemon Barko rednecks with their cur dogs and whooping coon hunts on a dirt-yard frontier, Basile who on horseback could round up unmarked pigs with his dogs, rope a young porker and haul it squealing up on the saddle, clip its ears and release it. A twirl of his rope, a cry, and he had another.
Basileâs older brother, Elmore Malefoot, herded cattle and raised hogs, fought Texas fever, ticks and flies on the north edge of the Calcasieu prairie near the pine flats where spits and points of woodland projected into the grassy flat plains like headlands and capes into the sea, where groves of hickories and oak and the small indentations of prairie, reminding the homesick of the irregularities of the lost coastline, were named coves and bays and islands. In the woods to the north of the prairies lived a strew of Scots Irish and Americans on their lonely square tracts, insulated from the pleasure of company and the comfort of good neighbors; the Germans down from the midwest to raise rice instead of wheat had been swallowed up, had gone French after a taste of bayou water.
The third brother, Onesiphore, had stayed in the small settlement of Goujon. Long, narrow strips of farmland ran out behind the houses as on the distant St. Lawrence centuries earlier. Onesiphore raised hogs and cane and grazed a few scrubby cattle on gazon, grass that grew lush and thick but failed to nourish and died and rotted when winter frost was followed by the inevitable rain. The state paved the old gumbo roads in the thirties and now, in 1959, people built along the macadam, no longer a mire of mud or choking dustland, as they had built once on the river, arranging the land in novel patterns.
Onesiphore Malefoot could remember his father, Andre, a man who always looked as though he were leaning back in a chair even when he was standing up, hauling their new-built house (constructed in Mermantau, near the sawmill), with teams of oxen and the help of his brothers, Elmore and Basile, over the open prairie.
âIt took three days to get to Goujon. Oh yeah, they couldnât get more than ten mile a day. That poor lovely man, he has the luck of a skinny calf. He get it move and what a trouble, he forget sheâs jacked up and in the nightâand he goes fall off the side of the house and break his leg.â The house was buried in four immense cape jasmines, the drugging, drowsing perfume of home for every Malefoot who ever lived within its walls, a missing sweetness that made Buddy uneasy when he was out on the rig doing his fourteen days, making good money and dying of homesickness.
âTell me again about this accordeen thing and how you found it and whatâs so good about it. Why you buy this? We got accordeens plenty, the Napoleon Gagne, the blue one, we got the Spanish three-row, and you, you got that pretty little Soprani, and we could get fixed up the funny oneâI forget all them name, but the one I wish we got is that old black and gold Monarch. Oh yeah. We got now un mystere accordeen, is it?â
The daughter-in-law opened her mouth for the second time.
âPete Lucienâs Marie got her niece Emma down from Maine, her husband Emil plays some music up there, the accordionââ
âCountry, he plays country and western music. You know, âSaddle my yodelin bronco and ride through the campfire at nightâââBuddy gargled an imitation yodel. âWhat the hell theyâre doin with that kind of music in Maine? You got a cigarette, Papa?â
âHow about right here? Happy Fats, oh yeah, he ainât influence by country-western? The Rayne-Bo Ramblers, Hackberrys? Diable, they was playin it when I was a bĂ©bĂ©. How about Frank Deadline, after the war? I play it myself, oh yeah, western swing, you play it, what you play sounds pure country sometimes. Hell, country all you hear on the radio. You told me yourself country is all you get out on the rig. So this poor Emil, he plays country-western accordeen, come down here, listen some Louisiana music, he decide, oh yeah, give up his accordeen because he canât never play so good as Cajuns?â
The daughter-in-law, wreathed in grey smoke, snickered. âNothing like that.â
Buddy said, ânothing like that. He donât like our music, too sad, not smooth. No, he keeps his own accordeen, just a big piano accordeen, white, weighs three or four tons, donât make so much sound as a little ten-button. This one here is the accordeen of some other guy, married to the nieceâs sister. The niece is Emma, her sister Marie, call Mitzi. The guy up in Maine, married to Marie, I forget his name, heâs the one that had the accordeenââand he gestured at the case between his wifeâs feetââand he was crippled up bad, I donât know it had ennathing to do with that accident Emmaâs first husband died from, remember we heard about that?â
âTruckdriver-accident man the only one I heard about, oh yeah.â
âThatâs him. Emmaâs husband, first husband, before this Emil-with-the-accordion-to-sell that belongs to the friend of Emmaâs truck-accident husband, the friend that marries Emmaâs sister Marie call Mitzi and got bad hurt legs, I donât know his name. Thatâs the songs they supposed to play up there, French songs about chain saws and log trucks. But no, they got to get cowboy hats. So this bad-leg friend of Emmaâs truck-accident husbandâheâs a friend of Emil tooâitâs his accordeen, heâs in a wheelchair, he makes a promise to god, if he gets his legs better heâs gonna give up the accordeen. Thatâs what happen. He gets better. And then! He kills himself. Married two or three months and kill himself. So Emil and Emma is already on the road for down here to sell the accordeen for him, somebody down here will like to buy it. Now Marie, sheâs the wife calls herself Mitzi, sheâs Emmaâs sister, of the bad-leg-wheelchair-friend-of-Emil-and-the-truck-accident-husband, she need every dollar.
âEnnaway, nobody up there like the button accordeen no more. Bad as here. They say itâs Frenchie stuff, so everybody going for the guitar, play rock and roll and all that. So I squeeze it a little bit, I can hear sheâs special, Papa, you gonna like the sound of this instrument, and sheâs got a big long bellows, plenty of squeeze in her, a crying voice. Oh sheâs a nice little girl accordeen, lonesome for the pine trees in the north, for that poor dead man, she cries on her pillow all night.â
âVite! Ăla maison!I am on flames to hear this accordeen.â
âHe scratch his name on the end, but I guess we sand it down right away. Leather bellows, tres bon kidskin, pliable. He put something on it, what they used to put on the harness of the log horses, this Emil says, so it donât dry out.â
âItâs not stiff, it donât fight you? Leather bellows fight back, oh yeah, they do. I remember one that Iry Lejeune had before he got run overâlike squeezing a corpse.â He blew out a rod of smoke through pursed lips.
âNo, itâs easy. Sheâs in pretty good shape, I think. Youâll look at it, Papa.â
Trois jours aprés ma mort
They were nearing the village now, past the gas station at the cross-roads.
âWait, wait, wait, wait. What is this?â Onesiphore pointed at a building going up, the Marais brothers nailing up exterior sheathing, gaping rectangles in the facade for plate-glass windows.
âGonna be a restaurant. Somebody from Houston behind it. Call it Boudouâs Cajun CafĂ©, jambalaya, crawfish boil and live music every night. For the tourists.â
âWho is this Boudou?â
âNobody. They just make up a name it sounds like Cajun, French ennaway. Building up the tourist industry, employ local people, thatâs the Marais brothers.â
âYâknow,â Onesiphore said, squinting up his eyes malevolently, âmy generation we just live. We donât think who we are, or anything, we just get born, live, fish and farm, eat home cooking, dance, play some music, grow old and die, nobody come here and bother us. Your generatio...