The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  It never occurred to Liberty to speak to anyone about such topics. He believed, in the blind innocence of his years, that everyone knew these things.

  Ahead, a pair of white beams rose up out of the dark water and the steersman lifted his horn and sounded two long thrilling notes. They were approaching a lock! From out of a modest limestone house squatting on a knoll in the shade of a towering chestnut tree strolled the humped, gray-bearded locktender and his idiot son, arms thick and hairless and as long as his legs.

  “Erastus, you old honey-fuggler,” cried the tender, securing a line to the snubbing post and tossing the end to where Whelkington stood ready in the bow. “Looks like you’ve hooked another fine catch of pike for the blacklegs on Canal Street.” The son stood there grinning.

  “You know me, Luther, can’t let a good one get away.”

  “Appears to me you should’ve thrown more than a couple back. Nothing but babies.”

  “I’m surprised at your ignorance, Luther. Don’t you know them wee ones makes the best eating?”

  Their loud laughter was taken up by the son, who continued on after both men had stopped.

  Whelkington stepped off the slowing boat and onto the berm and, as Luther and son leaned into the balance beams to open the lock, he stood looking up at the house, where framed in the window, leaning carelessly upon the sill, sat a representative of that illustrious creature of fable and song, the locktender’s daughter, this particular specimen perhaps not so well-favored as her mythical sisters, exhibiting poxy cheeks, a squinty eye and no more than four visible teeth in her head. She smiled and waved coquettishly to the captain and called out, “My pretty popkin.” Someone laughed, then another, and Whelkington swung swiftly about, glaring at the offending passengers. Then he turned and mounted the narrow path to the door of the house, which he opened without knocking and went inside.

  The Croesus was eased into the lock, bumping against the stone walls with sufficient force to cause several of the ladies to gasp and clutch at their companions. The lower gates were closed, the paddle-valve levers manned, and as the water rushed in the boat rose slowly, majestically, into the summer air. And when the lock was filled and the upper gates opened, the Croesus reemerged into the canal at a newer, more exalted altitude just as Captain Whelkington exited the tender’s house, the customary stiffness of his face made somewhat more elastic. He conferred briefly with the old locktender, clapping him on the back as he handed over a palmful of coins. He presented a cherry sucket to the son, then stepped nimbly back onto the boat, and to Red’s cries of “God Almighty!” “Jesus Christ!” and “Judas Priest!”—the whip cracking, the trace chains clinking—the harnessed mules moved off at a thoroughly healthy trot.

  Utterly preoccupied by Liberty’s obvious delight in the ongoing pageant that was life on the Grand Western, speculating on the nature of the memories taking shape in his young son’s mind, Thatcher failed to mark the low burbling sound emanating from the quaint figure at his side. He didn’t even realize he was being addressed until, at a rise in volume, he recognized in the faint incoherent noise various particles of speech and, bending politely forward, he inquired, “Excuse me?”

  “Of course you understand, sir,” his interlocutor replied promptly, as if Thatcher had been patiently heeding all along, “Providence has granted us an extraordinary privilege on this occasion.”

  His long white hair and beard were arctic bright, and he leaned upon an ivory cane, gazing out on the passing scene with the attitude of one who’d seen it all before, would see it all again and wasn’t much impressed with the sight. In costume and demeanor he conveyed as prominently as possible his membership in that class known as gentlemen.

  “Certes,” Thatcher agreed. “We are alive, and it is a splendid day.”

  “I refer, of course, to the privilege of bearing witness to the end.”

  Thatcher allowed himself a modest smile. “The end? The end of what, precisely?”

  “Why the country, sir, the whole living, breathing, scrapping country, at least such as we have known it heretofore.”

  “You are not the first to harbor fears for the future of our union. Parlous days we have entered on.”

  “I am not adverting to the tedious machinations of government, sir. Government is a touch and go affair. I neither take part in nor do I enjoy the least regard for its various storms and squalls. Those furies have ever accompanied us in the past and will continue to harry us unto the shores of whatever trackless futurity we eventually find ourselves marooned upon. And I suspect that that sandy spot will not be a kindly one for folks such as us.”

  “Us?”

  “Why, of course. Those of mature years who came to manhood in a now distant, now lost, age. We are superannuated, sir. We prefer that the dust cling to our heels, that the mule shall not be whipped. We were not built for haste. You recall the time when these packet boats were first introduced? The consternation in certain circles, some of them quite powerful, over the crews’ improvident methods, their untrammeled velocity? The damage caused to the banks by their turbulent wakes? The bow-mounted scythes to cut the lines of slow-moving barges? But to what avail? Haughty packet masters paid and continue to pay their fines without complaint, proceeding with impunity upon their reckless ways. And why? To ensure their ill-turned profit. What is a modest forfeit compared to the monstrous sums accrued by squeezing out two trips in the time it used to take to complete one? Simple economics, sir. Speed equals specie. And there you have it, the equation of the modern age.” He thumped the tip of his cane against the boards. “Might I inquire as to why you did not choose to travel by rail?”

  “Well, yes. Frankly, we are in no great hurry and—”

  “Then I can assume you are not in business.”

  Thatcher smiled. “This makes the second instance this morning I have been found out. The truth of the matter is that I wanted my boy to experience the pleasure of a packet journey.”

  The gentleman nodded approvingly. “Before it is no more.”

  “Why yes, I guess you have me there.”

  The gentleman, still nodding, offered every appearance of a considered wisdom. “The rails are coming, sir. Indeed, the rails are here. Running full chisel across the stones of every hearth, straight down the center of every heart. We want proportion. The human ratio. A life scaled to our organic needs. Where now is leisure? Where contemplation? Where exists even a minikin measure of peace? We are become slaves, sir, slaves to an extravagant precipitancy ruinous to body and soul.” He paused and held up a finger. “Nevertheless, a remedy is at hand.”

  From the capacious pocket of his buff-colored coat he withdrew a small brown bottle, which he ceremoniously presented to Thatcher. The label, in florid capitals, read “COL. FOGGBOTTOM’S FLASH COM

  POUNDS” and underneath, in smaller type: “Cures nettlerash, belly-bloat, vertigo and the Decline, and other subsidiary maladies induced by the Gallop of Modern Times.”

  “And you are?” commented Thatcher, remarking the prominent similarity between the engraved portrait on the label and the living gentleman standing before him.

  The colonel rendered a slight bow. “Not my original moniker, but what’s in a name? You appear to me, sir, to be a citizen of high intellect and penetrating probity. Would you be interested, perhaps, in purchasing a bottle of said stimulant?”

  “What’s in it?”

  “A common, perfectly sensible request. However, I regret I am not at liberty to divulge the abundant array of beneficial herbs contained in this tincture other than to assure you and other sharp patrons that the wholesome derivatives of the poppy plant play a significant role and have been proven, scientifically, I remind you, to soothe the fractious symptoms of the go-ahead life. So, would you care to join the growing tribe of happy Foggbottom consumers? More than five thousand sold to date. A mere one dollar and twenty-five cents per bottle.”

  “I’m sure your nostrum is of a highly agreeable order, but as a matter of person
al principle I refuse to ingest patent medicines of any stripe whatsoever.”

  “Perhaps your son, then. He seems rather an excitable lad.”

  Before Thatcher could summon up a remark withering enough to rebut this ridiculous characterization, a bell sounded and the colonel’s polite formality evaporated like the morning mist. Snatching the bottle of compound from his hand, he lurched past Thatcher to join the stampeding throng racing for the stairs into the main cabin.

  “What’s happening?” Thatcher called, startled by this hasty abandonment of decorum among a listless group of loungers who, until now, had seemed to value little except breeding and good manners.

  “Dinner, you damn fool!” the colonel shot back. “Last one there gets to lick out the bowls!”

  Father and son watched in twinned amazement as the old gentleman, deploying his cane like a jousting lance, rudely wedged his way past several offended ladies and their irate escorts.

  “Who was that man?” asked Liberty.

  “A professional notion-higgler,” replied Thatcher, quite unable to keep the trace of amused admiration out of his voice, “with as original and persuasive a line of palaver as I’ve ever heard.”

  By the time Thatcher and Liberty had made their prudent descent into what was optimistically termed “the dining salon,” several male gourmands, having already downed their edibles, were vacating the room, faces flushed, lips greased, bellies amplified.

  “Fourteen different dishes,” declared one glutted diner, popping the top button on his breeches. “Two more than we were served on Cleopatra’s Barge.”

  “Four more than on the Try and Beat It,” added another.

  “What’d I tell you gents about ol’ Captain Whelkington. Don’t he treat his ruck right square?”

  “Wonder if they’ll feed us the same at supper,” conjectured a third, picking at his nubby teeth with an unused lucifer.

  The sated trio brushed past with barely a glance, stubby fingers extracting long nines from waistcoat pockets for a postprandial smoke and stroll about the deck.

  Inside, where the ceiling was so low that even with his hat removed Thatcher had to stoop, reigned a bizarre but rigorous silence. Instead of conversation, the ceaseless scrape of cutlery upon crockery and enthusiastic chewing noises, as if the meal itself were a mammoth block of stone being chipped away at by a dedicated corps of inspired artisans. All bent upon the plate in the solemn task of consuming as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

  Presiding over this enterprise was a large, testy woman with a wide, mustachioed face who claimed to be the captain’s wife yet insisted on being addressed as Mrs. Callahan. She rushed to and from the galley, bearing great platters of steaming meats which were emptied the instant she set them down.

  Captain Whelkington sat holding court at the head of a table, regaling a fawning mob of the “boys” with colorful tales of the canawling life: the great cholera epidemic of ’32, tar smudges smoldering in every town square, chunks of skewered beef set out on poles to draw the toxins from the air; the drunken locktender who one night, deep into the corn, tried to light his pipe with a live coal and caught his beard on fire, and the next morning there was nothing left but a heap of char they sold to a local baker to burn in his kiln; the pathmaster’s wife with the temptational eye who would lie down in the timothy with you for a mere pistareen; the terrible breaches that sometimes left the Croesus helplessly “mudlarked” for a whole day or more; and, of course, the rovers and the roughs who haunted the waterway like unappeased spirits, the soaplocks and the runagate apprentices, the gyppos and the swingkettles, the road men and the redemptioners, and the mighty brawls that ensued when this pot was stirred a bit too smartly.

  “Then one night,” Whelkington told his spellbound audience, “about an hour out of Rome, a norther blew down, shook the squirrels right out of the trees. The canal was boiling, you couldn’t see to the end of the boat. Then an electron come down, knocked ol’ Red senseless to the ground and I run out and—” He stopped, staring at the bewildered Fishes in the doorway as if he’d never seen them before and wouldn’t want to ever again.

  “Set yourselves down,” snapped Mrs. Callahan, bustling by with an armload of dirty dishes, “or there’ll be nothing to set down to.”

  As she spoke, the last slab of ham was speared away by a hard character in buckskin whose grizzled face seemed to pose the eternal question: What are you gonna do about it?

  “That’s quite all right,” asserted a young woman sitting nearby with eyes so strikingly blue the pupils resembled black suns. She and the other members of her sex, all exhibiting the same grim countenance normally associated with cigar-store indians, were arranged in a row at a long table opposite the men, who, either too busy shoveling grub into their pieholes or too embarrassed by their perilous proximity to the better half, neither conversed with nor barely glanced at the ladies. “The boy is welcome to finish the remainder of my whatever-it-is,” she said, pushing the plate distastefully away. “I’m thoroughly sated.” Her smile, toothsome as it was, gave the appearance of a surface phenomenon only, suggesting that beneath the skin such smiles were rare, furtive things and much preyed upon.

  Thatcher politely declined, adding, “We had a more than ample breakfast before setting out this morning.”

  “But I insist.” She patted the empty seat beside her. “Breakfast must have been many long hours ago and, frankly, this boy looks as if he could lick the enamel off the plate.”

  Liberty looked at his father, then slid shyly into the chair as the young woman extended a slim, pale hand toward Thatcher. “Augusta Thorne,” she announced boldly, and, indicating the older, portly woman to her immediate right, “my mother, Edith Thorne,” who nodded sweetly, “and the naughty imp on the end is my baby sister, Rose, to whom no attention should be paid whatsoever or she’ll be up on the table reciting, ‘She walks in beauty like one so bright,’ or however it goes, I have such a poor head for all that dreamy claptrap.”

  “‘She walks in beauty like the night,’” corrected Rose, the blood rising in her downy cheeks to produce a tint that mimicked her name.

  “Really,” declared the elder Mrs. Thorne, aiming her lorgnette in Thatcher’s direction, “I fail to see why these preposterous meals must be conducted like horse races. Are prizes awarded to the swiftest, or is it that everyone is concerned the fare will be depleted before all have had their fill?”

  “A very real concern, I should think,” remarked Rose, noting in wonder upon a sideboard the staggering pile of plundered serving platters.

  The touchy Mrs. Callahan, passing within auditory range of these unpardonable criticisms, selected a particularly virulent sneer from her vast armamentarium of expressive hexes devised over the years to deal with just such ungrateful trash as these, though unfortunately no one noticed but the boy, whose strange colorless eyes seemed, for a brief, frightening instant, to penetrate directly into the deep private knowledge of exactly who she was.

  “Do I detect a note of the old country in your speech?” asked Thatcher, after introducing himself and his son and settling into a chair across from the beaming Thornes.

  “Yes, you do, Mr. Fish,” replied Augusta. “Hampshire, to be exact. We’re on holiday.”

  “We’ve come to see the Falls,” Rose blurted out, almost lisping with excitement.

  “Yes,” declared Mrs. Thorne. “We’ve heard so much about the great Niagara our curiosity could no longer be politely restrained. We wish to experience sublimity and terror.”

  “Well,” drawled Thatcher, “I’m sure you’ll find America abounding in both qualities.”

  “Oh, we already have.” Augusta took a sip of tea, looked into the cup and set it back down again. “We attended the most stimulating sermon by the Reverend Beecher in Brooklyn.”

  “Oh my,” interrupted her mother. “I cannot recall precisely what the good man said, but I still get goosebumps just thinking about the sound of his voice.”

  �
�Then we witnessed a boiler explosion on a steamboat in New York harbor. More than twenty killed, I understand.”

  “But a gentleman we met at the hotel in Albany,” Mrs. Thorne added breathlessly, “assured us that the consequence of the Falls would be to combine the effects of the two.”

  “Just what is it,” mused Augusta, “about the sight of filthy water tumbling over a precipice that we find so positively thrilling?”

  “Perhaps,” conjectured Thatcher, “there is something in us that is eternally, noisily falling and we respond as magnets to the outward emblem of an inner descent.”

  Augusta’s eyes narrowed, went rapidly in and out of focus, as if she were attempting to maintain a close watch on Thatcher while simultaneously concentrating furiously on something else. Then she blinked and said, “How absolutely transcendental.”

  “Your son,” noted Mrs. Thorne, “does not appear to be so hungry as we thought.”

  Liberty had been silently studying the half-eaten contents of his plate as if contemplating a collection of dead oddities arranged under museum glass.

  “Go ahead,” Augusta urged. “You should understand that I’ll not withdraw my attentions until you begin eating. And I must warn you, I can be a very stubborn woman. Ask my mother.”

  “The most willful child in the family,” confirmed Mrs. Thorne, “perhaps in several generations. Even her dear brother Austin—admittedly, a boy of near pathological sensitivity, God protect his soul—would have nothing further to do with her after the age of eight, wouldn’t even acknowledge her in public as his sister. Why, if she so much as lost at a game of croquet, she’d sit sulking under a mulberry tree until two in the morning, when Father would have to go out and carry her in to bed, the mallet still clenched in her hot little fist.”