The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  But just as the sun must set and night come rushing in, there were periods of unfortunately longer duration when Liberty’s father, or the self he chose to think of as his father, was partially obscured by what the family referred to euphemistically as Thatcher’s “grumpers.” Something deep inside the man became eclipsed by something else and the whole household had to move like mourners within its captive shadow. Then Thatcher sank into a curdled silence which no one dared break, stretched out on the worn horsehair sofa in his study, a wet cloth folded across his eyes. Liberty never really comprehended what was going on inside his father during these alarming interludes, but he did know this: Father, in this prone position, was not, under any circumstances, to be disturbed. No laughter, no loud voices.

  But what Liberty would remember best was the feel of his own small hand gathered in the warm, comforting grip of the man, those times alone when all of Thatcher’s potent attention was concentrated on his son, as something inside Liberty always insisted, occasionally to contrary evidence that it should be, their trips together, their talks, the information about the sorry state of the world Thatcher shared reluctantly, almost sadly, with his son and heir out of a conviction that I do not enjoy having to tell you these things, but it is important you hear this news, no matter how distasteful, because, unfortunately, it is the truth, whereas it is lies and the promulgation of lies that will make you and the people in your life sick.

  From the front porch the lonely Liberty could often watch children passing along the road at the foot of the hill. Since his near accident with hooves and wheels he had been sternly and repeatedly warned by both parents and his aunt, under pain of a punishment so severe he could not possibly imagine it, to never, under any circumstances, dare to wander down onto that dangerous pike, no matter what the temptation.

  Of course temptations were many and Liberty’s years few, so eventually there came the day when, ignoring all adult authority, he yielded to his own. It was a warm, drowsy summer morning, banks of clouds sitting motionless off to the south like a succession of white reefs, Liberty on the porch rocking leisurely in his mother’s chair and quietly contemplating the grasshoppers sailing erratically across the long uncut yard when two boys, shirtless and barefoot, came meandering up the road, brandishing sharpened sticks which each deployed against the other as if engaged in the most furious sword fight. Startled by their whoops and cries, a cloud of sparrows erupted skyward from nearby trees as the boys, thrusting and lunging, gradually disappeared from view. Not a thought in his head, Liberty abruptly stood up out of the chair and let his willful legs carry him down across the yard and onto the road, following the junior cavaliers at a respectful distance. At the crest of the next hill the boys turned, looked back at Liberty for a moment and went on. Insects buzzed in the weeds. Butterflies chased one another into the shadows of the woods. Liberty paused to retrieve a fallen branch which he waved dramatically about in the air as he walked. The boys vanished around a bend, and when Liberty caught up he discovered them posed on the front porch of a weathered frame house, one on either side of a lean, red-faced woman who was regarding him with the severe look normally reserved for cheating husbands, disobedient children and bad dogs. Bravely, Liberty approached. The boys looked expectantly at their mother. A large yellow hound slunk out from beneath the boards of the house and began to bark. “Hush!” snapped the woman, and the animal instantly stopped, sat back on its haunches and assumed a canine version of the same suspicious gaze mother and sons were directing at Liberty.

  “What do you want?” the woman called harshly.

  Ever the mannerly youth, Liberty replied politely, “I’ve come to play.”

  “Well, you get along now and go play somewhere else. We don’t want your kind playing around here.”

  Each of the boys had taken hold of one of their mother’s hands.

  “Now go on from here before I sic Chester on you.”

  “Go back to your nigger hotel!” yelled the taller of the boys.

  The smaller boy stepped down off the porch, picked up a rock and threw it at Liberty, which missile he easily dodged. But never having encountered such puzzling hostility, Liberty remained temporarily paralyzed, unable to move, unable to think.

  The older boy was looking for a good-sized rock for himself when suddenly the woman shrieked, “Get him, Chester!” and in an instant the hound was up and bounding forward in a furry streak of fangs and claws, followed closely by the boys who, gathering stones as they ran, proceeded to let fly an erratic barrage at Liberty, now several hundred yards down the road, the maddened hound yelping, foaming, snapping at Liberty’s feet and hands until one of the boys’ rocks came sailing in directly on the pointed peak of its head and the animal dropped to the dirt like a bag of seed, horrified mother and howling sons gathered about the unmoving carcass as Liberty, with hardly a backward glance, flew over a hill and was gone.

  For all its enthusiastic ferocity the dog had failed to even penetrate Liberty’s skin. His wounds consisted of a couple bruises and a few angry-looking scratches which Thatcher washed and dutifully kissed, and then, sitting attentively in his study, with Liberty perched on a pillow in a chair opposite, listened to the sorry tale of his son’s morning adventure. When Liberty finished Thatcher said not word, simply watched the boy’s flushed face for a long minute. Then, sighing, he placed his hands on his knees, leaned forward and said:

  “Now, Liberty, I have something of grave importance to convey to you and I would urge you to pay close attention. Are you listening?”

  The boy nodded solemnly.

  “Good. Now first, as an experiment, I want you to say the word ‘nigger’ for me.”

  Liberty stared blankly at his father.

  “Go ahead, it’s all right. I want you to say it for me.”

  “Nigger,” Liberty said in a near whisper.

  “Louder. Say it the way the boy said it today.”

  “Nigger,” he repeated with a certain force and heat.

  “Listen,” Thatcher advised. “Listen to how you sound when you voice those syllables. See how the word seems to naturally lend itself to being pronounced with anger. Now say it again and notice how your lips, the muscles of your face, feel. To even mouth the word is to shape your countenance into a leering mask of ugliness and hatred. Now, most importantly, observe how you feel deep inside when speaking such a word, the ugly shape it makes of your insides, and imagine also what it is doing to the insides of the person so addressed. How did you feel when you heard your home called a ‘nigger hotel’?”

  “Bad.”

  “Yes, and though you didn’t even really know exactly what the word meant, yet still it produced its intended result. So, I would like for you to always bear in mind the pernicious effects of this insult. Will you do that?”

  “Yes.” His voice barely audible.

  “Because, as I hope you now understand, the word ‘nigger’ is the most foul sound that can be formed by human lips and tongue. There is no comparison with anything else. It is the verbal equivalent of a raised whip. Not all the blasphemies uttered by all the infidels of the world against God and all the churches and ministers and priests can equal the hatred embedded in that singular word. I don’t want you to ever employ that word in any manner whatsoever upon any other person, no matter what slight or crime you think they may have committed against you. People who do so are callous fools deformed by ignorance and fear and not worth associating with by day or night. I know you feel bad about what happened to you today, but believe me, those boys would not have made suitable playmates. Their souls are soiled, as are no doubt the souls of their parents, their relatives, their friends. All touched by the curse that has been laid against this land. I know it hurts, but sometimes, Liberty, all one can do before such malignant idiocy is be polite as possible and gracefully withdraw. There are certain terrains where the wise general seeks to avoid battle. Because there will come other days, other fields, where one will be presented with the opportunit
y to beat back the tide of hatred and work to lift the curse that weighs heavily as chains upon us all, free and bonded alike.”

  One early evening in the late spring of Liberty’s eleventh year, swallows playing tag over the peaks of the house, the limpid air marshaling objects near and far in sharply defined equidistance, cricket orchestra warming up in the dank pit under the front porch, Uncle Potter, who hadn’t been seen by family, friend or local constabulary in more than a year and whose last known whereabouts involved a lengthy stroll down the Drummond Pike, a left at the North Fork and on out about sixty miles past the border of Nowhere, came thundering into the dining parlor, per custom, unexpected, unannounced and in an inveterate state of personal and mental dishabille at the precise moment Aunt Aroline, with the fussy ceremony of an anxious chef, was depositing upon the loaded table a great pewter dish out of which rose a steaming citadel of beef and bone set amid a delightful enceinte of boiled “sauce”—potatoes, onions, beets and carrots chopped and sliced and compulsively aligned in an alternating pattern emphasizing their natural chromatic harmony.

  “As usual, Potter.” Roxana smiled. “I must applaud your theatrical sense of timing.”

  The color in Aunt Aroline’s round cheeks, already alarmingly high from an afternoon’s labor at the oven, rapidly underwent several further degrees of pinkening. Delivering a fusillade of withering contempt in Potter’s direction and muttering something obscure about “the improper domestication of beasts of the forest,” she vanished into the kitchen, from which she refused to emerge for the duration of Potter’s visit.

  Halfway through slurping up his first of many bowls of over-seasoned pumpkin soup, Potter abruptly announced to the less than dumbfounded company that he had just about made up his mind to mosey on out to the Kansas Territory and try to bag him a puke or two.

  “If the language weren’t brutal enough,” Roxana replied, “you must compound the crime with an act of ultimate violence.”

  “I would not have thought Mexico chafed so after all these years,” commented Thatcher.

  “What’s a puke?” asked Liberty, instantly envisioning some bad-tempered collusion between a yellow-fanged mountain lion and a rabid timber wolf.

  Potter’s spoon busy ferrying gobbets of thick soup through the hair-curtained portal of his mouth paused in midcourse, and darting a bloodshot glance at the inquisitive boy he replied, “A puke is a jaundiced-cheeked, snaggle-toothed, scum-licking saucebox with a massy head and a wizened brain whose preposterous upright endeavors to pass as a man are incontestably betrayed by the bestial bouquet of his musk.”

  “I see you’ve given the matter some consideration,” Thatcher said dryly.

  “Really, Potter.” Roxana’s attention, as ever, focused firmly upon her mesmerized son. “I enjoy backcountry vulgarity as well as the next, but must we be so entertained at the dinner table?”

  Potter, now hunched mere inches away from his bowl, was slurping up soup with renewed abandon. “A puke is a puke.” He shrugged. “You can’t pretty ’em up.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to. I only wonder whether we might not finish our meal before being served the full particulars.”

  “Now, Roxie, darling, don’t start reefing the sail just yet. I’ve got a savory yarn to spin.”

  Slicing off half the joint for himself, the rambling wanton then proceeded between noisy, spewing chews and long drafts of cold cider to relate news of the latest atrocity from the Kansas Territory: the shocking execution of an innocent Free Soiler name of R. P. Brown by a marauding gang of border ruffians pleased to dub themselves the Kickapoo Rangers. Seems the previous day a no-account puke called Cook had been found brutally murdered by a person or persons unknown. Inflamed with drink highly rectified and unquenchable fancies of revenge, the fun-loving Rangers waylaid the first misfortunate who happened along, in this case the hapless Brown, who was hauled into Dawson’s grocery in Leavenworth prior to his trial for Cook’s murder. Ticktock went the clock on the wall, ticktock. Nerves among the abductors, already strained, began in that drafty, oppressively cramped room to fray and part.

  “Don’t you leer at me with such an unfettered eye.”

  “Heap o’ grit, ordering me around like that. Who was it pressed that ol’ gray you now prance about upon in such princely style?”

  “Speak one word more and I’ll twist that bandanna around your pipe till the lamps pop out of your ugly mug,” etc., etc., until attention turned inevitably to the bound prisoner.

  “Gents, hold on now. Why try a guilty man? Was Cook tried? Has a single one of them eastern punkinheads ever come within hailing distance of the bar of justice?”

  “But we got to try him,” someone suggested, “so we can decide how to kill him.”

  “Arguing about how to kill a skunk?” replied another, running a filthy thumb along the bright bit of his hatchet. “You can’t please a bastard.” Rising almost reluctantly to his feet, he raised the hatchet and with one powerful swing planted the blade deep into Brown’s cowering head.

  The Rangers watched like spectators at a dance as the bleeding man writhed painfully about on the sawdust floor. After a while someone said, “Reckon we better take him home.” So the groaning body was roughly tossed into a wagon bed and the Rangers, warming themselves on a demijohn of Old Monongahela, set off across ten frozen miles of the worst winter on record, when men went about draped in buffalo robes, their boots wrapped in burlap, and wild turkeys were so numbed by the cold they could be shot like targets with a pistol.

  “I am very cold,” complained Brown.

  “Here’s some coffee for you,” one of the boys declared, leaning over to deposit a fresh gob of tobacco juice into the open wound in Brown’s skull. “Liniment for a damned amalgamator.”

  Yet drawing feeble breath, the body was rudely dumped at the door of the man’s cabin with the cry to the horrified wife: “Here’s Brown!”

  Potter’s dark dancing eyes had become as still as baked pebbles. He was staring not just at but directly into Liberty, searching the boy’s gaping soul for points of recognition. “Those,” he intoned gravely, “were pukes.”

  “Do what you will,” Thatcher conceded. “The Territory is not Veracruz.”

  Roxana remained apart, seated at the table though out of the conversation, even perhaps out of hearing, her abtracted gaze fixed on a nearby window whose polished sash now framed in its glass a pale, distorted reflection of the lamp-lit dining parlor and its inhabitants floating in ghostly splendor within a rectangle of utter obsidian.

  Over the years the westering impulse, as persistent and irresistible as sexual desire, had come to assume an almost physical presence, the neglected, unkempt urchin at Potter’s side loyal as a favorite revolver, an ill-smelling snot-nosed kid ever tugging at his sleeve, pleading with eyes too enormous for such a small child, disturbingly blank, curiously cold, as if out in the providential lands just over the next rise, beyond the keeps and customs of the day, in the murk of the forest or the wail of the prairie, might be found the heedless parents who somehow lost track of their winsome boy.

  So once again, heaving his not inconsiderable bulk into the saddle, Potter rode out over the mountains, down through the Pennsylvania woods and much of the same Ohio meadow country he had traversed nine years before, the beckoning sun declining each night between his piebald’s twitchy ears, taking his meals, his sleep, in reasonable proportions at reasonable intervals, the reckless haste of his earlier aborted journey supplanted by a magnetic resolution that drew him deliberately, unswervingly, onward—to the landing at Weston and ferry passage across the Big Muddy and the novel sensation of actually leaving the states behind, entering K T, where the sky was so irredeemably vast, so present, a piece of it always seemed to be stuck in the corner of your eye, outdoors or in. From every vantage the land slid drunkenly away on high gentle swells of rippling, red-tasseled grass. Eventually, directed by an inner compass whose infallibility had withstood every extravagant test a life of appa
rent aimless vagabondage had been able to inflict upon it, Potter ambled out along the California Road past the burgeoning town of Lawrence, that impudent outpost of stiff-necked Yankee rectitude, the grand three-story brick hotel, the mobbed groggeries dispensing ten-cent whiskey by the barrelful, the sod huts and cottonwood cabins down on the Kaw, imported steam engines chugging day and night, reducing trunks of black walnut and hickory to hand-smooth planks of invaluable lumber, the call of one clanking machine—Home of the Free! Home of the Free!—answered instantly by another: Never a Slave State! Never a Slave State! and on between rustling walls of ripe sunflowers taller than a man in a tall hat, their mellow heads nodding inquisitively down, to find himself one somber midnight posted upon a windy plain amidst a company of armed Regulators, observing with an interest beyond the merely professional a dull forgelike glow fluttering unchecked off at the black edge of the world, too remote to distinguish the actual flames seesawing over the charred site of the former Goodin place.

  “Wahl,” drawled Furry Ike in the tenured voice of one who’d been in a tight corner before and was likely to be again, “reckon we’re next.”

  “Never fear, lads,” promised Captain Gracie, whose habitual promises, a salient element of his command style, had become understood by his men long ago to be aspects of the hollowness of a language they need no longer obey or even respect. “They’re walking into a reception here warmer than any they ever bargained for.”

  “I’m not afraid, sir,” Little Johnny Phelps piped up, words he had been repeating in one form or another since sunset several long hours ago.

  Raising an unwashed finger to one nostril and bending slightly forward, Furry Ike abruptly expelled a projectile of heavy mucus that either hit or narrowly missed the upper of Potter’s boot. In the dark it was hard to tell, and Potter wasn’t about to reach down and feel with his hand.