The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  She awoke with sweat on her brow and a trembling in her limbs, staring at the gray rectangle of her bedroom window until grayness dissolved in the slow, liquid light of dawn. She slept fitfully for weeks afterward, afraid of the places her dreams might carry her.

  Then, one perfectly ordinary day, without fanfare or gonfalon, the great thing simply commenced. She was alone in the house at the time—Thatcher off on another hazardous mission across the Ohio, Aroline gone to town shopping—and she had been feeling slightly “vague” (there was no more precise word for it) since arising, a sensation she habitually associated with just being alive, when abstraction resolved itself into a pang, then another, and another, and she knew the contest had begun. She went out onto the porch and sat in the rocker watching the solid, solid hills and the bright autumnal sky. She was still sitting there waiting for whatever was to happen when Aroline, nose mask tied firmly across her face (a practical precaution she indulged whenever a nip entered the air), returned in the trap with a basketful of morally sanctioned supplies from the Requited Labor Grocery and Dry Goods Store and breathless news of the Grand Rally for Polk that had transformed their drowsy town square into a reveler’s midway, the normal day’s routine being apparently suspended for the duration. A Brass Band! Military Procession! Oratory and Cannonades! Oysters and Ices! Roman Candles at Eight! Then Aroline noticed what was written on Roxana’s face and, recognizing the text at a glance, immediately hustled her protesting sister-in-law up to bed where she ordered her to remain while Aroline went off in search of a reliable physician.

  Two agonizing hours later, reliability presented itself in the disheveled person of Dr. Timothy Margrave, a small, narrow, agitated man with big, hairy ears and a disconcertingly blank gaze typically centered on a point several feet behind the head being addressed. He was wearing a frayed, ill-fitting coat speckled fore and aft with whitish stains of indeterminate origin. If his manner seemed lacking even its usual gruff charm, he hastened to inform the women, it was due to his having been called away from treating a considerable wound to Mayor Twiggs’s backside in order to observe a rather common labor. His Honor had just concluded a rousing stemwinder on behalf of the Democratic candidate for the presidency (“this loyal ‘Napoleon of the Stump,’ this fighting champion of independence, this patriotic foe of all foreign powers who would oppose our Union’s triumphant march toward its divine destiny”) and was basking in the cheers and applause, trying to collect his own breath, when a black-and-white mongrel no one in the crowd would claim ran up out of nowhere and planted a sharp set of little teeth into the invitingly ample seat of the mayoral pants. Town wags remarked that the animal must have been a Clay raccoon.

  The doctor called for a sheet which he carelessly draped over Roxana’s recoiling body and, studiously averting his eyes, proceeded, with cold, rough hands, to examine her “down there.” Roxana stared at the molded plaster scallops on the ceiling and imagined herself up on the auction block, proud features washed and greased, enduring inspection by strange male fingers whose right to probe the very orifices of your flesh was sanctioned by law and blessed by the church. Dr. Margrave removed his arms from beneath the covering, announced that the business was progressing nicely and, clapping beaver to head, unceremoniously took his leave. He feared complications in the delicate case of that executive posterior.

  The door had no sooner clicked shut than Roxana had sat bolt upright, torn the sheet from her body and flung the offending wad of linen into her sister-in-law’s stoical face. Then, leaning from her bolstered bed, she let fly a healthy gob of spittle onto the exact spot where the good doctor had stood, declaring that should another medical man dare set foot in this house ever again she would personally stick him in the ass with his own catlin. Without a word of rebuke, Aroline rushed over to wipe up the floor with a lavender-scented handkerchief, few surprises left for her in Roxana’s bag of tricks. My mother did this, Roxana declared fiercely to herself. She did it eight times. I can do it once. Trying not to dwell on such particulars as the roomful of family, neighbors, servants—women all—ministering to each of her mother’s deliveries, fetching water, massaging limbs, diverting her mind with gossip, while she (Roxana) would be forced to abide her maiden labor alone but for a scatterbrained spinster whose notion of nonpareil care was a cold compress and an electromagnetic machine.

  On the wall opposite the bed hung a framed lithograph of the Water Witch, a full-rigged, canvas-bellied clipper ship heeling majestically before the wind (another of Thatcher’s divers fancies that he might, upon awakening, gaze dreamily from his pillow for a jeweled moment or two upon a reminder of realms the mind could populate to suit its occasional need for motion, space, unfettered light). A beveled tower of rounded sail and triangular line, the ship bore down upon the viewer like a charging elephant. From atop successively elevated peaks of pain and fearing the ranges yet to come, Roxana concentrated on the deceptively clean proportions of this picture, the geometry of rope alone offering numerous focal points within which consciousness might vanish, as the entire room moved and the air bloomed and the halyards sang and the pennants popped and the timbers groaned from truck to keel, amidships the atmosphere a virtual soup of noxious vapors (of garbage, feces, tar and mold), the day-world present, when at all, in a slender pole of piercingly bright light that shifted about playfully from an opportune knothole in the planks overhead, as if wielded by some mischievous fellow up top attempting to torment further this wretched company of prostrate gentlemen, unkempt wives of the once and future variety, and a dozen or so weepy indentured servants with a random touch of his magic healing wand. Too late for sister Rosetta, already gone over, in Paradise ahead of the rest, the wasted body she’d left behind attractive bait for ship rats big as terriers that grew bolder by the hour. Her own strength failing, she didn’t know how much longer she could keep the vermin at bay. (Roxana realizing only now that this alien life she found herself occupying with such morbid intensity was, in fact, that of Great-grandmother May, braving Atlantic chop and the parlous unknown for one final turn of Fortune’s wheel.) Her lips were cracked, her throat swollen, her stomach unmoored, the water in the drinking casks having long since turned foul, strung now with intricate webs of a white sticky matter too horrid to contemplate, let alone swallow, while under her, now and forever, the lift and pull of the sea shuddering through the hull ancient as time, the force of God’s terrible hands moving mercilessly upon your body, and a voice cried out America! and, despite the captain’s injunctions against passengers above decks, all who were able rushed up to the rail to behold the dim horizon line slowly spread and thicken into a vernal ache of purest wonder.

  “It’s a boy,” Aroline declared flatly, thrusting into dramatic view a wailing, wriggling, shimmery thing of mottled red and blue that Roxana recognized instantly as a glistening piece of her own heart.

  Liberty was always afraid of the dark. Even as a young man he required the company of an attentive flame standing watch over his bedded self because the night, he had come to know, was populated by a host of ravening forms and the fear of being plucked, stolen away physically, even spiritually, from the familiar, from the family itself, remained a sentiment not easily outgrown.

  “Born with an anxious make,” pronounced Aunt Aroline, “like all the Fishes—and no, don’t for an instant suspect I am excluding myself from such a judgement.”

  It was a mother’s tender stratagem that first coaxed the reluctant boy from the trundle bed at the foot of his parents’ high poster and up the narrow complaining stairs to the snuggly roost prepared for him under the sloping rafters.

  “This is the tower,” Roxana explained, in her best maternal voice, “of a great castle. And this”—she gestured rather airily about the truncated space in which they stood like museum visitors side by side, mother and son—“is the hidden keep where the prince resides until the fateful day he is called upon to become king.”

  Liberty was skeptical; such a drab cubbyhole seemed, e
ven to his untutored eye, to exhibit more of the characteristics of a prison cell than those of a richly appointed chamber for nobility. Roxana pressed a hand gently into the feathered ticking until it sank from view, demonstrating the sumptuous nocturnal pleasures awaiting a royal heir. She flung open the window, admitting the clemency of spring, its sweet pastoral breath, and the nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof. Liberty wheeled abruptly about and marched disdainfully from the room.

  His inaugural night alone in the place, bound in a darkness so complete he might as well have been blind, he bawled inconsolably at such length and with such force he periodically lost his wind in prolonged fits of horrible gasping exaggerated only slightly for the benefit of any listening parental ears. Then, well past the death of all hope, the stairs awakened into their distinctive squeak, I’m coming, I’m coming, and the door suddenly swung open upon the forbidding specter of his father, splashed from the waist up in a wild fearful light that played eerily across his chest and cast the fond features of the paternal face into an inhuman mask of malign relief. Cupped in Thatcher’s enormous hands like a transparent chalice of fire was a half-filled tumbler of water topped by a layer of whale oil upon whose trembling surface floated a cork disk, its perforated center containing a lighted wick that dangled down into the clear liquid like an undulating worm. Placing this improvised night lamp on a deal table beyond the range of Liberty’s arm, Thatcher settled on the edge of the bed, took his son’s warm, damp hand in his own and waited patiently for the boy’s heaving body to subside. Then he asked, kindly, “Are you finished?” Liberty nodded. Unable to confront his father’s gaze, the boy studied the seemingly autonomous motions of his own fingers, writhing and rubbing endlessly one against the other.

  “I appreciate your position,” began Thatcher. “Solitude, night, bumps and cries and all that, but I think you should understand there will come a time, believe it or not, when you will wish to leave home, to embark on your own adventure without comfort of escort or entourage. Remember, your grandfather Azariah didn’t help Colonel Knox haul sixty tons of artillery three hundred miles over the Berkshires in the dead of winter for you to squander the precious nights of your earthly sojourn blubbering like an infant because your parents weren’t snoring contentedly away in the same room with you. So, to help conduct you safely to the portal of that ordained future, I have brought you this lamp.”

  He then proceeded to instruct his son on the manifold hazards of combustion, especially the trickiness involved in keeping it tamed within doors. Did Liberty know the tale of Brother Latimer out on the Old Cayuga Road? Well, one evening not so long ago, far past the midnight chimes, the good brother could be found hunched at his desk, desperately laboring over his accounts, endeavoring by a fantastic stroke of the pen to convert two dollars into three, when, the hour late, his vitality low, Brother Latimer fell dead asleep facedown in the wet ink, and sometime before dawn his unconscious hand, reaching out for an object in a dream, toppled the candle and up went the books, up went the house and up went Brother Latimer, his wife and three children. Do you want to go up? Do you want your mother and me to go up? Then don’t touch the taper.

  Liberty’s eyes were yet as big as boiled eggs when his mother joined them, enveloped in the restorative aroma of warm gingerbread emanating from the platterful of cookies she presented to her son, each cookie cut in the shape of a kneeling slave, shackled arms lifted beseechingly in prayer.

  Liberty rode out the night in the embrace of several large pillows, munching beaverlike through one gingery figure after another, ever alert to the least fluctuation of that dim yellowy bead wantonly adrift upon its isle of cork over immensities of dream tide, until morning light found him asleep at last, a half-eaten cookie clutched in one chubby fist, the abandoned plate lying slantwise beside him on the bed, empty now save for a dusting of crumbs and a scattered cairn of neatly nibbled little brown heads.

  Any wonder then that his earliest memory was baptized in the magic of fire? He was perched on his father’s bony knee, clasped in arms of majestic strength, wine-scented masculine breath beating softly about his ears, the surrounding room hot, smoky, clamorous with strangers who kept approaching to pat his head, chuck his chin, screw up their faces and otherwise bleat, coo, croon and declaim, all of which Liberty pointedly ignored in favor of the intoxicating scene spread wide before him, the eternal drama of wood burning on the hearth where the wee orange people lived and capered among the crackling logs. Here was a world more real, playful strife and perpetual metamorphosis holding lovely reign, and as he watched, Liberty wanted to live there, too.

  Framing this spirited show was a massive oaken mantelpiece darkened by time and heat and into whose scratched and dimpled surface had been incised a progression of geometric marks that years later, under his mother’s patient tutelage, would, with the abruptness of distant objects brought to a startling clarity by the mere imposition of the proper lens, spring into the marvel of written language, the rude letters of the first words he learned to read hung in memory as a verbal amulet to be admired, even fondled when necessary, in the dark days of his future: Freedom Hath Been Hunted Round The Globe. O! Receive The Fugitive, And Prepare In Time An Asylum For Mankind.

  The house he grew up in was an enchanted domain, a knotty warren of hidden passageways, secret stairwells, sliding panels, floor traps and peepholes bored into the wainscoting at assorted elevations from which disembodied eyeballs periodically gaped like living bosses of ornamentation.

  One lazy sun-shot morning, sprawled on the green and white Kidderminster carpet in the front parlor and thoroughly engrossed in the patient composition of a lecture on the sanctity of mousey life he planned on delivering later that afternoon to a polite congregation of backyard cats, Liberty happened to glance up as an entire section of papered wall swiveled silently open and out stepped a tall, looming gentleman with clenched jaw and fists who directed at the boy a mad piratical glare, crossed to the doorway opposite and vanished—never to be seen again. Already quite accustomed to the odd comings and goings of perfect strangers of every age, gender and hue, Liberty wasn’t particularly disturbed by this specimen. Furtive figures often came stealing in from the nearby woods to be admitted at the back door by Aunt Aroline and end swallowed up forever by the house. On occasion there’d be a whole family of novel faces seated around the supper table, solemnly chewing on warm Indian bread and barely uttering a word. Sometimes at breakfast Liberty half expected a fully clothed fugitive to come climbing out of the porridge pot, shake off his hat and demand a cup of fresh water.

  At night, tending to his humble bowl of illumination, ever apprehensive that without the necessary fuel of his vigilance the precious flame might falter and die, he was frequently distracted by unsettling noises from up on the roof and behind the lath, the pattering of feet large and small, sinister scratchings, muted cries, irregular thuds and thumps, inarticulate whisperings of the air—a chorus of gothic notes he struggled in vain to separate and identify.

  Endless hours on such watch left his nerves depleted, his sleep infected. Visiting dreams vivid as exotic sea creatures—scales intensely iridescent, eyes huge and lidless, gaping mouths lined with rows of sharp triangular teeth or, worse, cold ridges of slimy gum—gobbled him up into a labyrinth of entrails where raged vague conflicts of epic savagery and no clear resolution, desperate voyages over convulsive seas, frantic flight through narrow measureless spaces, as if just beneath the skin of the world a vast, ageless war contended and once asleep you were inducted into service in this great invisible clash. But on whose side? And for what cause? A duty permanent and timeless, broken only by the cry of a voice calling out your name, a mother’s fingers hooked about the hunched blade of your shoulder and hauling you up into the light.

  One long languid evening, either actually awake or mindlessly adrift down a dream of being awake, Liberty was roused by a volley of brittle noises approaching the house in the dark. What? What was it? Nothing but hooves
, and the rattle of wooden wheels mounting the stony path toward the barn. Stealthily, he rose up in bed on his knees, leaned his elbows upon the splintery sill and peered anxiously out the window. The sky was clear, the moon full, seemingly doubled in size, mantling the scene below in layers of living phosphorescence, a coating of pure dream paint. In the bed of the wagon halted just beneath Liberty’s window, his father and a bearded stranger were stooped over a long, narrow box, bright as a bar of silver, prying the nails from the lid with the flat blades of their axes. Unable to budge from his vantage or even turn away, Liberty waited helplessly for whatever was going to happen, his breath clamped in a vise of tensed muscle, his heart at that moment the loudest sound on the sleeping planet. And when the lid was lifted away to reveal, resting peacefully amid a pile of wood shavings, an actual dead body, a rush of mausoleum chill went goose pim-pling over Liberty’s own warm flesh, and when the body sat up in its coffin and opened its mouth and spoke living words that his father then answered, a sound escaped Liberty’s throat, an unrecognizable eruption from the darkest interior, and calmly the body turned its head and stared directly up into Liberty’s wide astonished eyes. Immediately he ducked down below the sill, buried his face in a pillow and listened for a long while to the wind whistling in, whistling out of his squashed nose. And when he dared to peek out the window again, the wagon and its contents, the coffin and the body in the coffin, his father and the bearded stranger, all were gone without a trace. Was what he had just witnessed truly real or merely a bit of insubstantial mummery staged by the old sleep phantoms? At what point exactly had he come truly awake? How to know? He filed the event away with other curious matters requiring further reflection such as, Where does the darkness go during the day? or, Why can’t people fly?