The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  After his death Sarah Fenn changed her name and opened her school. The front parlor was readily converted into a pleasant classroom with several militarily precise rows of miniature desks facing Ma’am L’Orange’s imposing escritoire, which stretched half the width of the room, and a mammoth slateboard with fist-sized chunks of chalk. Under the windows were shelves impressively stocked with books, and only a close perusal of the titles would disclose an odd and often decidedly unchildlike mix of volumes: Murray’s English Grammar, The Bride of Lammermoor, Botanical Receipts for Cure and Custom, The Unknown Friend, Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, The American Frugal Housewife and Tom Jones. Hung around the walls in haphazard fashion at a height of about three feet (“for the children’s edification”) was a series of illustrations to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress that Ma’am L’Orange had drawn in a rudimentary but earnest style, each stick figure painstakingly labeled in an elegant hand: Faithful, Ignorance, Mr. Pickthank, Mr. Money-love, etc., Vanity Fair depicted as a sort of Brueghelesque Fourth of July picnic celebration, the City of Desolation indistinguishable from the Celestial City and both resembling Delphi itself. Her masterpiece, Christian’s climactic combat with Apollyon, rendered the beast as a fanged snail with ludicrous curlicued bat wings.

  But, in the end, this fine educational setting was rarely used. Most instruction took place upstairs in the mistress’s bedroom with Ma’am L’Orange perched at the foot of her bed, the children arrayed before her on a motley collection of trunks, boxes, a carpenter’s bench and a single rather unsteady stool once the property of her only son and heir, Winslow, upon whom manhood and gold-madness seemed to descend simultaneously, igniting an inner combustion that hurled him through the door all the way out to Californy and a disquieting silence unbroken by mail or hearsay for more than a year now. Strewn indifferently across the sills, the dressing table and the bare floor of this plain, undecorated room were—the sole touch of the personal—jars, cups, tankards and tumblers stuffed with garden violets, some sprigs fresh and startlingly purple, others wilted and tobacco brown.

  A typical daily lesson consisted of Ma’am L’Orange reading aloud from the Bible for hours at a time in a chirpy soprano whose aspirations to the thrillingly theatrical tended to lapse promptly into the drearily vexatious. The children fidgeting on their hard benches, struggled, not always successfully, against the temptations of sleep and poking one another in the ribs. Then, in the midst of a passage, Ma’am L’Orange, having apparently attained a state of perfect exhaustion, would swoon back into her linen sighing, “Oh, children, children, children. It is a hard lot we have been assigned, devilishly hard. But do our duty we must and not a single tear will have been shed in vain.” A second, greater sigh thoroughly deflating her body, she would lie there in absolute stillness, not a single pupil daring to stir, their innocent eyes intent upon this strange, mad woman laid out before them like a corpse awaiting resurrection—the frightening moment when Ma’am L’Orange would sit up with a start, as if catching herself in the midst of a great fall and, searching frantically about the bedclothes for her willow switch, seize in her bony grip the nearest hapless youth (never the agile, feisty Liberty whom she’d soon enough discovered wasn’t worth the trouble) and commence whaling away on the unfortunate scholar’s exposed backside as even untouched onlookers shrieked and howled in sympathetic pain. Suddenly the switch would cease in midair and Ma’am L’Orange would climb wearily back into bed muttering, “I’m so tired, children, so very tired.” For days after such a vigorous demonstration of the disciplinary arts, a model of sullen docility reigned over the school.

  Sometimes, setting her Bible aside, Ma’am L’Orange would entertain her charges with colorful tales from her past, whatever vague recollection, daydream, ill-lit fantasy or scrap of old gossip happened to be blowing through her mind at the moment. These recitations she called History.

  “When I was a girl about your age the whole of this valley from Mount Hook to the Kiawanna was still infested with raving hordes of wild savages. Half-naked and reeking of odors you couldn’t squeeze out of a wet pup. They didn’t care one jot what anybody thought of ’em. Their wolfish fingers perpetually curled about the neck of a whiskey bottle. A worse lot of lying, thieving, cheating demons you wouldn’t want to meet—and those were the friendly ones. There seemed to be a dropped stitch or two in the knit of their souls long past right remedy. And their bodies, even in the ice-bound fury of a desperate winter, always a portion of tawny flesh peeking through the greasy rags. Agents of Satan’s empire, yes…”

  And her voice would trail off, and in the pause the children would begin to squirm in their seats, nervously studying one another until the voice would return from its hiding place, circling back cometlike, magically replenished, though settled decisively into another orbit altogether.

  “Now up on a hill outside of town back in the faraway time there lived an old woman in a tumbledown thatch hut. If she had a name, it was not known to me. Old Skitteryclaws we called her, my friends and I. I couldn’t even tell you for certain what she looked like because of the long white hair that obscured the features of her face and streamed down her back like a horse’s mane. Winter or summer she always wore a long black dress and from the road at the bottom of the hill you could see her every morning sweeping the dirt from her door with a straw broom. At night her eyes glowed like a hell beast’s and her horrible laughter scared the bark from the trees. And if you happened to be caught in that part of the country as the sun was going down you raced home as if your feet were aflame. Do you know why? That’s right, children, because Old Skitteryclaws was a witch. Ellis Butts once stole some cherries from her orchard and she changed him into a snake. Many were the carefree boys and girls, much like yourselves, who, lost forever to their grieving families, came to live as hideously transformed pets under a rock beneath her wretched hut. And whenever she wished, Old Skitteryclaws had but to emit a single whistle between her two remaining teeth for this ball of poisonous serpents to uncoil and all come rushing out in an angry hiss, eager to do her infernal bidding.

  “Last night, my dears, as often occurs in someone of my advanced years, I experienced some difficulty sleeping. The mind, you should understand, possesses a will of its own that not even prayer can always correct. So, as is my custom on such occasions, I sat for many an hour in my rocker in the parlor window, watching the dead wandering like fireflies among the stones of the cemetery across the valley. They can’t sleep either, poor things. They’re here with us, you know, every minute of every hour. No, no, don’t bother twisting your necks about. You cannot see them from where you are sitting. If you could step outside of yourselves even for a moment and view the world through your spiritual eye, then all would be instantly apprehensible. This is heaven, children. We have, each blessed one of us, already been translated. Our earthly senses are like blinders beguiling us from the truth.

  “Allow me, then, to pour into your porchlike ears an elixir of practical benefit. If ever you find yourselves preparing a batch of pumpkin cookies, I would advise you to omit the yeast and substitute instead a tablespoon of pearl ash. The baked result will be so much lighter—tastier, too—and your table will be adorned in a delightful spray of compliments.”

  One idle afternoon, several months after Liberty’s passing under the tutelage of Ma’am L’Orange, Thatcher—curious as to the health of his son’s academic life—inquired casually, “Who is the president of the United States?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Liberty promptly answered.

  Father looked at Mother. Mother looked at Father. Liberty never saw Ma’am L’Orange again.

  Instruction resumed at home under the watchful guidance of his parents and, in their long and frequent absences, Aunt Aroline, who was charged with an explicit list of prohibited topics, prominent among them her own string of modish hobbyhorses now temporarily banished to the barn. Society was diseased toe to crown, near and far leaking poisons perilous to the unfo
rmed mind. The general theory was clear to Aroline at least in principle—her own quest for physical and moral perfection yet another essay at warding off the fatal contamination—but the details baffled her. Alone in the big house with her impressionable young nephew often for weeks at a time, her overtaxed will further assailed by loneliness, responsibility and a host of other anxieties too dimly perceived to be even named, she couldn’t help but seek to mend the empty air with certain navigational aids she deemed invaluable in negotiating the rapids of existence from genesis to revelations: don’t ever eat anything red; kiss your elbow and your wish will come true; the Deity cannot commit a mistake; let the wind be your guide in times of trouble; the juice of one huckleberry will make you drunker than any wine; a cat is privy to secrets you and I will not be permitted to know until we are dead; the heart is a cesspool of verminous lusts; drink a gallon of water a day and you’ll never be sick; God speaks directly through Senator Webster; the road to hell is paved with the skulls of infants; the seat of government is a Castle Misrule; dirt is the Devil’s dandruff; your shadow is the robe of the angel watching over you.

  As he had with Ma’am L’Orange, Liberty simply digested with serene impartiality whatever tidbits happened to drop onto his plate, from the valid to the fallacious, the modest to the exorbitant. Much of what he learned would be forever coupled in his mind with the memory of a specific setting: Latin and Greek at the kitchen table with his mother, geometry and philosophy in the study with his father, and of course the dizzying miscellany of Aunt Aroline’s as she shooed the boy from room to room one step ahead of her chores. And then the countless books consumed in solitude out under the old walnut tree overlooking the east meadow or, with the dogs for pillows, prone on the floor before the hearth, munching meditatively upon a piece of fruit. For as long as Liberty lived, the god-haunted hills of Mycenae would always resemble the pine-capped round tops surrounding Delphi, just as the American Revolution would always be steeped in the humid flowery scent of ripe pears.

  From the moment baby Liberty, alarmingly precocious in matters both physical and mental, achieved the capacity for locomotion of any sort whatsoever, it fell to supervising adults the tiresome necessity of assuming the posts of watchtower guards. An instant’s inattention—a brief turning away to crimp that pie, search the cubbyhole of the desk for that recent letter from L. Tappan, toss a bundle of soiled linen out the window to Aroline boiling clothes in the backyard—and the boy would be gone, vanished beneath one’s very nose. He seemed to enjoy an unerring instinct for doors left forgetfully ajar and would crawl, at a surprisingly energetic rate, through one beckoning portal after another, his progress usually checked at the routinely bolted front entrance, where he could be sometimes found gently bumping, bumping, bumping the soft crown of his finely haired head against the stubborn oak.

  And, once the giddy pleasures of upright ambulation had been mastered, even a closed door presented a mere temporary obstacle, the cunning rascal having also speedily solved the slippery puzzle of knobs and locks. Liberty’s endless waking hours required a vigilance nearly impossible to maintain. One exceptionally distracting morning, Roxana, in a gust of teary panic, rushed from the empty house to spy her wayward son some twenty yards down the pike, toddling briskly along on plump bowed legs, his arms in the air, and buck-naked. Racing forward, she snatched him up just steps ahead of the clattering wheels of the Albany–Schenectady coach.

  “It’s all your fault,” Thatcher commented slyly, from behind the pages of the Delphi Argosy. “The boy’s simply living up to the imperative of the name you christened him with.”

  “And if I had chosen to call him Patches,” countered Roxana, eyebrow raised, “he’d have been obliged to scamper about on all fours and bark at strangers?”

  Thatcher shrugged. “Who can say? In this world there is little of import we truly comprehend.”

  Such was the nature of their domestic exchanges at the time. Thatcher, ever prone to humors of diverse hues and strengths, was often brushed by the wings of melancholy, great batlike creatures who hung in shadowy suspension from the pocked and darkly gleaming walls of his caverned self, liable at the least provocation to spring into agitated flights of random duration. Despairing of the country, the crusade, his own meager abilities, he would indulge his innate propensity for frivolous speculation, drawing Roxana into extravagant colloquy over premises she doubted even he believed. When this mood was upon him, as she had learned over the years, the prudent course lay in quiet disengagement, a graceful retreat from the field. Still, she loved the man dearly, helplessly, having readily granted to him those portions of her heart untouched until their first meeting by human commerce, and if the thorns might occasionally obscure the blessings of the rose, she commanded the patience, the green thumb of a lover, and the wisdom to appreciate that in this mundane garden all was rankness and maze, an elaboration into ordained forms, outer and inner, to which we affix the name Destiny.

  But what, finally, were they to do about their wandering boy? Nothing, apparently, nothing but watch over, fret about, hope for and endeavor to keep from as much harm as possible.

  “Tether him to a rope,” suggested Aunt Aroline, tactfully avoiding mention of her own experiments with this method of restraint when the parents were away.

  “Like a dog?” queried Roxana, her shock at hearing such advice, from a close relative yet, largely suppressed.

  “The boy needs to be taught obedience. There are rules in this world that must be respected, laws that must be mastered, without and within.”

  Roxana gazed out the window. The nearby hills, in their seasonal metamorphosis from white to brown, were beginning to exhibit the green fuzz of spring and appeared, strangely enough, closer than usual. A lone hawk, like some dark, defective piece chipped off the vault of perfect sky, descended in long, slow circles toward the valley floor. “There are no rules,” she said softly.

  “What? What did you say?” Aroline could barely contain her outrage. “I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. Why, it’s almost blasphemous, child—and I address you as ‘child’ because, evidently, your moral development has failed to progress much beyond the stage of your own untutored son. Is this what they teach you down in that horrid South? Is it?”

  The wistful line of a smile materialized on Roxana’s face, hardly cracking the glaze of her expression. “There is no place on earth more concerned with laws and precepts and maxims and regulations.”

  “The Devil’s maxims.”

  “Yes.”

  The operation of memory, when Roxana came to regard it at all, seemed to her to be rather like the idle shuffling of an ever-thickening deck of haunted cards, some of course quite new regardless of age, figures and symbols still retaining a high gloss across years of hard usage, some gone missing entirely (thereby reducing one’s chances in the crucial game?), while others, the bulk of the pack, simply gathered over time stains and smudges, layers of puzzling obscurities, edges slowly softening, detail fading, hands dealt and redealt in whatever grand, capricious, unknowable cycle it was that made up the contest of a life. But when she was visited by her distant past—which meant whenever she entertained thoughts of Carolina—the same unremarkable scene would be placed before her vision with curious and unchancelike regularity.

  She must have been thirteen, fourteen perhaps, certainly somewhere in that charmed interval between the gift of her first horse and her dreadful introduction to the smirking, doltish Cooper Beacham, her Intended, her parents’ Intended actually, dubious product of one of the “finest families” of one of the “finest plantations” of one of the “finest etceteras” in a land plentifully stocked with etceteras. It was one of those long, hot, lazy, molasses afternoons in late spring just prior to the annual decampment to Charleston in advance of the heat, the bugs, the “summer sickness.” Father and Mr. Dray, the overseer, were up at the Point inspecting a dike that had collapsed overnight, Mother secluded in her chamber “resting her eyes,” the boy
s off on a romp to the Pritchards “to see a man about a horse,” cracked young Saxby, and the house, for a number of rare hours, was thankfully quiet.

  Roxana was upstairs alone in her room, having curtly dismissed, over the usual childish protestations, her body servant, Ditey, who now lay curled up like an animal on the heart-pine boards outside the door, rustling and sighing in as obnoxious a manner as she gauged her little missus could safely tolerate. Ditey had also been sternly admonished not to go whining to Mother about this latest banishment from Missy Roxana’s presence. “What in heaven’s name are you doing in there?” Mother would demand, knuckles rapping sharply on the door. “Ditey thinks you don’t like her.” And Roxana: “Can’t I steal a moment’s privacy in this nosy house? Must I always be spied on by meddlesome eyes? We’re watching them, they’re watching us, and no one relaxes for an instant. It’s making us all ill.” Mother: “I’ll send for Dr. Groton.” Roxana: “If you do, I’m going to start screaming and I’m not going to stop until I pass out.” And so on. A conversation, of course, without any definitive end, variants of which had already been played out so frequently that Roxana simply could not bear another exhausting performance. She had promised Ditey a shiny new dime if she kept her mouth shut.