Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx

the dirty Irish in Prank, there’s not one can read a signpost or sign his name.”
    Messermacher was the richest of the three, although he had trouble with his eyes, sensitive to the windblown dust he lived in, and he dosed them with Dr. Jackson’s Eye Water. Two of his sons worked with him on his farm, the other three farmed adjacent or nearby sections, and one son, Karl, lived in town and worked for the railroad as a telegraph operator. Messermacher bought one of the new wireless check-row corn planters but it fouled and skipped when it passed over dead furrows. He modified it, wrote a letter to the manufacturer, and when the representative came out, gave him such an impressive demonstration that the company paid him one hundred dollars and an annual royalty for the invention for years. Until the war they used his photograph in their advertisements: Farmer L. Messermacher says “ This planter won’t go wrong. Simple enough so a boy can run it. ”
    Loats’s hogs were famous in Chicago; a few were fattened for the table of the governor and for the Century Club in Chicago. He had skill with wheat and hogs but thought the best thing on his farm was a twenty-acre orchard of sour cherry trees, each tree a phosphorescent globe of white netting as the fruit ripened.
    Yet there was something strange. Although they were all successful farmers, the farms showplaces of thrift and good management, although they played music for every dance, the Germans were disliked in Prank. The children (called cabbageheads in school) and women were friendless except for each other’s company. Part of it was because Clarissa was a fanatic housekeeper who scrubbed the exteriors of house and barn and whose snow-white floors dazzled, and few women wanted such a perfectionist for a friend; part because the three Germans werefreethinkers, self-confessed agnostics who bragged that there was not a bible among them. And part of it was because in spite of locust, drought, hail, flood, tornado, summer frost and untimely thaw, the three always made a decent crop while men around them lost everything. In the flood the Little Runt rose over Beutle’s low field, but when the water receded, dozens of fine fish were stranded in the wet, enriched furrows. He had only to gather them. The gossip flourished, juicy tales of German lubricity and incest. Most of the whispers routed back to Beutle and his insatiable appetites.
    “Nah. The reason we don’t play them dances so much now,” said Beutle, “is the people hereabouts wants coon songs. Ragtime. The saxophone. They wants the piana accordion; the button accordion ain’t good enough for them anymore. You see?”
    By the time there were grandchildren around—the oldest son, Percy Claude, and his wife had built near the main house and the other boys had houses on the section—Gerti didn’t want to be caught accommodating Beutle. At their age, she told him. Grey hair and all. Her big belly and his hairy hams like a bear. She pushed him away more frequently. Behavior that had been exciting when he was young was repellent in a slack-skinned man with grey hair. The situation got more complicated when she walked into the henhouse and there he was with the hired girl, he sitting in a hen’s nest and the girl straddling him, her knickers on a nail. He winked at his wife as if to say, you won’t and she will. There were straws in his hair.
    She dodged away as though she had been sluiced with a bucket of icy water, a freezing despair running over her. She ran for her kitchen, moaning, heavy breasts swinging, the great haunches pumping her along. In the kitchen she leanedagainst the cold stove, put her forehead to the chrome edge of the warming oven and sobbed with grief and insult until her nose swelled. She stumbled to the knife drawer in the dresser and took out the black-handled carving knife, IXL stamped on the blade, and without reflection drew it across her throat. The heat of her own blood soaking her