A Concertina Story

I posted this on Christmas Eve on the squeezebox newsgroup. It's all fiction except about the box coming from Alabama...

I was just about to give up hope when Aunt Polly arrived. Aunt Polly had always been our favorite aunt, though she'd had a dreadful singing voice, thin and screechy, loud and off time.

Anyway, she came to the house and opened the third drawer of the dresser that Bill had kept me in for so long. I'd seen less and less of Bill in the last three years, and nothing of light in the last one. Aunt Polly was a pretty sharp old girl; she reached into the box and picked me up, cradling my underside under her small hands.

With hardly a fumble she pressed my air valve and worked me open, then closed, open then closed again.

Gods! That air felt good after so long.

There had been a nasty looking mold working his way over to me on the inside of the box, admiring my blue leather and wanting me for lunch. Another couple months and he would have made it too.

Polly threw away the old box, placed me in a cloth sack and out into the world we went.

World. I've seen a lot of this old world, first with Sean and then Bill. Bill had bought me from a dealer in Liverpool in the 20's; Sean had had me from a pawnshop in 1862 when as a young man he went to sea.

I had woken in that pawnshop, being only a few years old. I had memories of being played, worked on, worked over, but I didn't stop being a thing and become a person till the old man that owned the shop started to talk to me while he played old folk ballads and slow airs on the long quiet afternoons. I never knew his name and he must be gone these long years. I owe him a lot, for it was he who cleaned and buffed me till I was shiny, refused to sell me to the rough music hall trade. When Sean came in, made him learn a tune on me before he'd sell me to him.

A lot of people think my kind never went to sea. Not true, though many more of the fewer-buttoned rectangular cousins went than us round men.

I sailed with Sean on seven ships, along the coast of Europe, around the horn of Africa and into the wide Pacific before we were through.

Sean was a wild boy in his youth, but he never took me ashore with him unless there was a girl already waiting, then he'd play the long slow sad ballads of the times and the quiet Irish airs for her till her heart'd melt. We melted hearts all over the right hand side of the world.

Time passed as time will do and Sean became First Mate on the old clipper we'd started out on so long ago. The 'Bereaved' had gotten shot up pretty well in the American civil wars, but Liverpool soon put her right and the out to sea again. Sean might as well have been captain of that pug, for the Captain himself was only a tool of the Insurance Company and the absentee owners. Sean had the conn any day the lardass didn't have to appear on deck, sober enough to go into a port and sign a few papers.

Some nights Sean and I'd go on deck and we'd play the 'Barbara Allen' or 'Lorena' or one of those heartbreaking airs he was so well known for. Most of my Life at sea with him was spent in a slung net above his bunk. He damn near killed a sailor in the early years for taking me out of that net without asking.

Finally Sean got a Captains Berth on a small packet ship that no one else wanted as Steam came in and blew the real sailor business all to hell. The packet made the trip from Norway to London as often as weather and cargo'd permit, and sometimes more often than weather'd permit.

I was in that dealers shop in Liverpool for pads, tuning and a good looking at, when the North Sea pulled Sean from this life. I stayed there three years on that shelf.

Bill was oiler in a steamship, part Scottish, all asshole, self-taught engineer. He worked below decks most of his life. He had hands the size of hams and a real talent for saying the right wrong thing to feisty types ashore. There was the night we were in Boston working out of a luxury liner that had gotten run in by the advent of what was to end up being called the Second World War. The knife missed both of us by less than an inch.

As a player Bill wasn't much, but he had a love for a rollicking tune and could play almost anything he had heard a couple times.

My reeds aren't really suited to a lot of things that he played but between doing the bellowing that he called singing and beating me faster than the air'd go thru; the drunks he played for didn't seem to mind.

Bill retired to Boston, though lord knows how, he never did own a passport, or a visa, and never paid a tax in his life. Things were strange after the war though, and Bill got by working on small boats and engines, we played in the bars and restaurants along the wharf for supper but never came to busking, as it would have offended him.

In the Sixties some family that did have passports and visas moved to Boston to retire as well, and one of them was Aunt Polly.

She tried, lord knows she tried to learn to play me for she dearly loved her ner'do'well nephew and loved to hear us play. I have found though that there comes a point when playing that I'm not doing it and the player isn't doing it, but we are working together. Polly, gawd love her never got there.

Eventually Polly went on too, and it was back in a dark box.

It fell to Betty, Polly's youngest to get rid of the flotsam of a long and careful life.

On a good day with the wind out of the south Betty could just about find her ass with both hands and a set of instructions across her knees.

The Estate sale was a farce. The Boston antique dealers schooled around like sharks and ripped Polly's carefully kept house to shreds for a tenth of what it was worth.

I got lucky though.

A small lady with an accent I hadn't heard in years picked up the new old box where I sat in the dark and asked Betty what she thought I was worth.

"That old thing? Mom never did learn to play it. How about twennny dollars?"

Sarah paid her.

We drove south out of Boston, South to the sunny climes of Alabama, Sarah gave me to her Dad who had always wanted a round man to work with.

Jim lived just long enough to squeeze out a few simple tunes. He then died of smokers cough after the doctors shot him so full of what they called 'radiation' that the meat of his lungs came up in gobs the size of the cigarette packs he'd used to put the stuff in there that was killing him.

One bright shiny day just before Christmas Sarah's mother called her at work to tell her that she needed to come home and hurry.

It was too late Jim was gone.

The process started all over again, back in that dark box.

Sarah took her childhood memories out of Jim's estate and let her Mother check for anything she hadn't gotten in the divorce, and sold the rest to a junk/antique dealer in Mobile for a tidy sum. Jim hadn't left much but an old pickup and a set of carpenter's tools, so every little bit helped. When last seen Sarah was headed for Washington state and a new life.

Back in another dark box, sitting day in day out in a huge shed behind Burhans Antiques in Mobile.

I was lonely.

Fourteen years passed. Burhans son now owned the business and was moving with the times. Item after Item was pulled from the shed, tagged, inspected and brought into the light. They set me up on a piece of black velvet and flashed lights at me though I was past caring, and it was back in that damned dark box again.

For a week.

Pulled from my box, rolled in some kind of squishy stuff that padded me all around I was shoved into another box and sent bouncing around the countryside. Then I stopped.

I stopped and I sat in that tight stuffy little dark box for two days. After fourteen years in a shed it wasn't much of a wait but I was tired, and had begun to think it might be time to go looking for friends long gone.

But the Putz appeared. Putz was a word I'd learned from Bill, he'd used it to describe anyone who wanted to play with me in the bars. This guy had a gray beard, and hair down the middle of his back, hands like rubber and the timing of a walrus in heat.

He saved me.

Back in a box. Gawd I hate boxes. BACK to Alabama to Bob Tedrow's shop and up on the bench. In a week I'd been tuned to a funny taste in my mouth, and had, miracle of miracles had a new bellows built around me. It was like a new set of lungs, and life.

Back in the hated box, and bounced back to the Putz.

He has yet to learn a decent tune. There are round men scattered all over the house in various states of repair and a close cousin of mine in a nice breathing case that sits half open most of the time and lets the light get in.

I live on his desk, next to what he calls a 'computer' and when he gets tired he picks me up and squeezes a few 'phrases' out. I haven't a clue what he is doing, but I've begun to just suspect that if he lives long enough we may, I say may, get to that point where we both know what we are doing.

And I haven't been in a dark box in a long time.

Happy Christmas to all from the Putz and one of the round men.

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1999 Lloyd McDaniel,
all rights reserved