The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  Hesitantly, Liberty turned a two-tined fork sideways as a sort of miniature trowel, then shoved onto the blade of his knife a slice of cold fowl which he lifted gravely to his mouth and gravely chewed and swallowed.

  “Good,” announced Augusta, patting his head approvingly.

  Thatcher watched the tips of his son’s ears grade into deep scarlet. “He won’t complain or utter a sound,” he said quietly, “but if you don’t withdraw your hand, he just might try to take off a finger or two, as a warning.”

  Augusta’s arm flew back in horror. “Why, how astonishing.” She turned to study the docile lad at her side. “He doesn’t appear to be that manner of boy.”

  Thatcher smiled blandly. “What boy does?”

  Hunched now over his plate, Liberty consumed morsel after overdone morsel of various meats and sauce, boiled per Mrs. Callahan’s strict instructions for a measured hour or more, effectively relieving flesh and plant of any taste, consistency or nutrition, the bony wings of his thin shoulders commencing to quake in gentle convulsions of secret glee.

  “What’s wrong with him now?” asked Augusta.

  “He’s happy,” Thatcher explained. “He likes to eat.”

  Formally addressing the boy, she inquired softly, “What is your favorite food?”

  Shaking and chewing, Liberty gave no response.

  “He can’t hear you,” said Thatcher. “He’s deaf.”

  “Oh my goodness!” Augusta covered her mouth with a dainty hand.

  “What did he say?” asked Mrs. Thorne.

  “He said the boy’s deaf.”

  “Oh.”

  The Thorne family now shifted in their seats to contemplate the unfortunate child.

  “He’s adjusted to his condition marvelously well,” said Thatcher. “Quite a quick study in the lipreading department.”

  “Can he hear music?” asked Rose, disturbed that the person at the table nearest to her in age should be so afflicted.

  “No, but he can feel it.”

  Augusta bent down, positioning her face on a level with Liberty’s, and spoke loudly, deliberately, spacing out the words like stones plummeting at uniform intervals into a dark pool. “What…is…your…favorite…food?”

  Liberty regarded the woman with a look of complete vacancy, then abruptly dropped his jaw to reveal on his tongue a semimasticated mass of unidentifiable beige chunks to which he adverted with extended forefinger.

  Augusta reeled back, gasping. “Why, that’s the most disgusting sight I’ve seen since we left New York. I believe he certainly is capable of biting me, or worse. I beg your pardon, Mr. Fish, but your son’s behavior doesn’t appear much more advanced than that of an untamed beast.” Unable, though, to turn herself entirely away, she continued to stare at the offending child as if expecting an apology or, at the least, an adequate excuse.

  “I know you did not mean to insult my son,” said Thatcher mildly, “nor he you, but I fear I must further inform you that, like certain creatures of the forest, he is also mute.”

  All the women exclaimed at once.

  “Oh, Mr. Fish,” declared Augusta, “I’m so terribly sorry. I had no idea.”

  “Doesn’t seem to bother him much. He can satisfy most of his needs with a series of meaningful gestures.”

  Mrs. Thorne, settled on the edge of her chair like a nesting bird, absorbed this information with avid interest, then leaned giddily forward, jowls aquiver, to announce, “When I was a tender lass, younger than my own Rose here, our stableboy Edgar—you remember Old Budgie, don’t you girls?—was kicked in the head by a rabid horse. Or, wait—perhaps it was that sick cow drove us mad always lowing down there by the gate, wouldn’t come in, wouldn’t go out, until one day Randolph simply walked up, shot it square between the ears with that antique musket Father used to kill Frenchmen with—well, it was all so long ago anyway, and afterward there was nothing they could do for the affected youth but prop him up in a corner and make sure his nappie got changed regularly. Poor dear couldn’t speak, could barely lift a finger. Utterly unseated he was. And, curiously enough, as the years passed, he came to bear a remarkable likeness to the author Thomas Carlyle, although never having met the great man myself, I could not say for certain.”

  “Well,” replied Thatcher, “I believe my son still retains enough sense than to lose himself in the writing line. He has, however, on a number of occasions, expressed an intense fascination with the role of riverboat captain.”

  Augusta’s well-ministered facade had lapsed into an open gawk, thoughts, mostly dark, blowing cleanly as clouds across her powdery, unguarded face.

  Having devoured every scrap of food on his plate, Liberty was diligently sopping up the last of the gravy with a ragged heel of wheat bread. When he was done, he pushed back his chair, stood and delivered a deep bow.

  “You’re welcome,” replied Augusta, nodding courteously.

  Thatcher, who had eaten almost nothing, also rose and excused himself, a tall man with large hands and a persistent light in his countenance whom Augusta found supremely intriguing because so fundamentally unreadable. “Pleasant meeting you ladies,” he said, touching his hat. “My son and I both appreciated the enchantment of your company and the compass of your generosity.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fish,” responded Mrs. Thorne. “You’ve aided in transforming this horrid boat trip into a—how shall I say?—more elevating experience.”

  “At least he isn’t blind, too,” blurted Rose, quickly shushed by mother and sister.

  Mounting the stairs, Liberty in front, Thatcher kept nudging sharply with a knee the back of his giggling son’s leg until finally, Liberty, in some irritation, tried to look back to voice a complaint and his father simply seized the top of his head and turned it firmly forward again, as if the head were merely a finial atop a post, a wooden ball requiring minor adjustment.

  Up on deck, Thatcher was immediately waylaid by yet another itinerant of disputable character who sought to engage him in a rambling “philosophical colloquy” on the subjects of table-rapping, animal husbandry and the verifiable demonstrations of the Devil in this, our fallen world—“cunningly constructed, sir, in such a style as to provide numerous nooks and crannies for the Great Tempter to dwell comfortably within.”

  His father thus diverted, Liberty took the opportunity to explore the limited deck space of the Croesus. Two circumambulations between bow and stern proving more than adequate to satisfy even a cat’s curiosity, he settled once again upon the forward edge of the roof. Nearby, the party of young fashionables struck poses, flirted shamelessly and partook of the blessings of Nature with much bright chatter concerning ancient Phoebus, brindled kine, genial rustics, etc. A bored, pale woman, meditatively revolving a silk parasol above her lofty arrangement of coiled blond hair, turned to bestow on the boy a vague smile much as one deposits a coin into a beggar’s cup—behavior Liberty had already endured enough times to understand that it might, and should, be safely ignored.

  A stand of pine crowded the banks, draping the passing boat in a cool, medicinal shade, and a man laughed when a low branch almost reached out and plucked away his hat. A black cloud of gnats set passengers to coughing, windmilling their arms. Big green bullfrogs plopped into the water at the vessel’s approach. A pair of dark, glittering eyes appeared at the roof’s edge, peering intensely right at Liberty, no sooner noticed than their owner, in one dramatic bound, leaped high into the air and landed nimbly at his side.

  “I’m the hoggee,” announced the acrobat, thrusting out a soiled, well-callused hand. This was the fidgety, unattached boy Liberty had already observed skulking mysteriously about the boat or lying sprawled atop one of the mules whenever Red took one of his frequent breaks, retiring to the salon to share a tumbler of antifogmatic with the convivial Mrs. Callahan. He looked to be roughly Liberty’s age and height, with skinny, bruised arms and bare, splayed feet missing nails on several toes, and he was dressed in a baggy, liberally patched man’s shirt and
a seedy pair of purple pantaloons. Every visible inch of skin was incrusted with dirt of sundry hues and layers. It was the hair, however, that was particularly noteworthy, each mousy strand cut to an identical length and then, apparently, dipped in molasses and brushed straight out from his scalp, giving him the appearance of a dandelion about to blow.

  Liberty accepted the proffered hand, sticky though it was—the telltale star in this imp’s pupil a beacon he would never be able to resist, vestige of the aurora that resided in all but was too often occluded by bad weather in the soul’s outer provinces.

  “I’m Stumpy, the hoggee,” he declared proudly, emphasizing again the latter word as one would a title of no small distinction. “Take a gander at the tile,” indicating the high hat atop the man seated cross-legged on the foredeck below them reading a newspaper, Stumpy leaned over and from his puckered mouth let fall a juicy gob smack onto the center of the glossy crown. The man looked up, held out his hand as the boys scuttled back out of sight. “One of them fat Dutchmen,” gurgled Stumpy, trying to check his giggles manually by pressing all ten smutty fingers against his lips. “I’d whang him in the eye with a fending pole if he so much as laid a single hand on me. See ol’ Genesee Red over there?” He gestured toward the lanky somnam-bulent stumbling along behind the hayburners. “We’re the ones make this boat go. I spell him in about another hour. Pretty whangdang, doncha think? Watch out for Captain Whelkington, though. Don’t get in front of him. He’ll knock you down quicker than billy-be-damned. Times he and Red get into it so bad they got to stop the boat and take it out on the towpath. Passengers always seem to enjoy it, though. Everyone loves a good knockabout. But like I say, you don’t want to be in one yourself, so steer clear of the cap’n. He’s notional, that one. Listen, want to see something bunkum?”

  With a conspiratorial leer, he led Liberty down into the dining salon where, the tables cleared, the mop run once across the floor, Mrs. Callahan sat at the bar, sodden rag in one hand, cup of forty rod in the other. “What mischief you up to now?” she muttered.

  “Cap’n business,” mumbled Stumpy, moving on past the marathon whist game in the corner, serious men devoutly occupied, who hadn’t stepped outside or glanced up at a window since boarding at Troy, and forward into the cuddy, where he carefully pushed the door open and, grinning wickedly, pointed upward. Liberty had no idea where he was or what he was supposed to be looking at. This cramped, murky space contained four bunks, one stool, and smelled of mold and sweat and mule dung. Overhead a betty lamp hung on a chain, and in the rough planks of the low ceiling he could see crudely carved initials and untutored words and symbols of enigmatic significance. Then he noticed, bored into the peeling and splintered wood, a configuration of auger holes, some bright as noon, some dark as a well bottom, others winking mystically on and off or hovering suspended in a dim twilight state in between.

  Stumpy positioned the stool and motioned for Liberty to climb up and take a peek. His eyeball jammed up against the hole, gamely squinting into a grayish obscurity impossible to puzzle out, he was about to step down when the shadows shifted, the textured light, though still dampened, seeped in from another angle and into view materialized a comprehensible form, long and pale and shapely, a human leg, a woman’s “limb” to be precise, revealed now in all its secret splendor beneath the protective tenting of ruffled silk.

  Stumpy, tugging impatiently on Liberty’s pants, informed him in a confidential whisper, “They don’t wear no drawers under them petticoats,” teeth gleaming even in this uncertain light.

  Liberty’s eye, traveling inquisitively up that turned column of tender muscle and opalescent skin, illumination steadily dwindling, endeavored to penetrate the beckoning mystery where leg met torso and it was very dark indeed. He was still seeking when the door crashed open, admitting Captain Whelkington and a couple of bachelors dressed like twins in matching cream linen suits and hats and brandishing identical segars of considerable heft and pungency.

  “Piss in a bucket!” bellowed the captain. “What in the high holy hell are you two scrawns doing in here!”

  Without awaiting a reply, he seized Stumpy by the ear and hauled him squealing through the door.

  “And you, you little dawplucker!” he cried, advancing upon Liberty, who, having hastily jumped down from the stool, was feinting left, now right, striving to turn this lunatic’s flank, but the room was too small, the captain’s girth too wide. “I knew it were a monstrous misjudgement on my part to allow you and your nigger-loving father on my boat. Didn’t know you were a damn pervert, too. Now get the fuck out of here”—cuffing Liberty hard enough on the head to send stars and bells reeling through space—“afore I tell your pa just what article of boy you truly are.”

  “Now hold on, Erastus,” declaimed one of the creamy gentlemen in a hearty baritone. “Don’t be too precipitate with your screed. Next thing you know, the old man’ll be down here applying for a position.”

  “At which juncture,” replied the quick-witted captain, “I’ll be applying something firm of mine to something soft of his.”

  And the door slammed shut upon their coarse laughter.

  His father still entangled in the coils of the same monotonous conversation as when he’d left, Liberty ignored Thatcher’s concerned look and quietly reassumed his seat on the deck. Though it seemed to him as if he’d just been translated to another realm and back by means not yet officially recognized, scattered parts of him over there still trying to catch up, here topside, everything seemed exactly as before, the sky the same bleeding blue, the neighboring faces well padded and smug, all achingly familiar, the recurring vistas drab and undistinguished. He had the odd sensation he’d already been on board for several days. He was surreptitiously studying the women clustered unknowingly, like elegant and begowned dolls in the general vicinity of the tampered boards, attempting to determine which one it might have been whose veiled anatomy had been indiscreetly exposed to his aspiring gaze, and he’d just about decided on the pretty girl in the green dress with the high forehead and dimpled chin when abruptly she turned to look him full in the face, and all the skin from his neck up swelled with blood.

  Mrs. Callahan came trudging up from the galley to toss a bucket of orts over the rail, cheese parings, potato skins, egg shells, animal bones, apple cores, congealed fat and the unidentifiable runoffs and leavings from the unsparing dinner meal to mingle with the other diverse ingredients of the canal this August day was industriously brewing into a memorably aromatic, rainbow-hued soup: traffic garbage and body waste, castoff clothes and discarded boots, missing traps and lost books, whiskey bottles and sheets of newspaper, hats and children’s tops and a wooden leg or two, rusted pistols and lensless eyeglasses and untold gallons of tobacco juice, and playing cards and lamp oil, and all the dead: the mules, the horses, the cows, the dogs and cats, the muskrats and the snakes, the frogs, the fish and, of course, the humans. Liberty had overheard the affable bowman amusing a couple of Jonathans from the North Country with gruesome yarns of the stiffs he’d personally seen dragged from the water just this year—one, near Little Falls, a hairless giant who’d looked more like a bleached pig; the other, west of Ganajoharie, a faceless greenish thing half-nibbled by the carp and the turtles, its bones protruding from the spongy flesh like the ribs of a scuttled ship.

  Stumpy had replaced Red out on the towpath and somehow gathered behind him a taunting gang of local children who mimicked his swaggering gait and chanted loudly in unison:

  Hoggee on the towpath

  Five cents a day

  Picking up horseballs

  To eat along the way!

  Flashing Liberty a knowing grin, he cracked his whip with great authority.

  Sometime in the blazing heart of the endless afternoon the Croesus arrived at the village of Sparta, and while the packet was being passed through the lock its bored and overheated passengers, having spied on the bank an animated crowd collected in the shade of an impressively developed chestn
ut tree and desperate for novelty of any stripe, rushed from the boat en masse in hopes of even a few brief minutes of entertainment.

  Nailed to the ragged bole of the tree was a gaily executed sign proclaiming: “Dr. Wilbur Fitzgibbon, Esq. Extractions 50¢.” And in the clearing at the center of the three-and-four-folk-deep throng of craning, clamorous spectators lined up like curiosities in a sideshow exhibit were the doctor, a lively, stout figure in a swallowtail coat and pipe hat; his assistant, short, bald and black and rigged out in a threadbare jester’s costume and clutching in his left hand a hard-used banjo; and, seated between them rather tentatively on a bare wooden chair, an anxious white gentleman who responded to the shouted encouragements and drolleries of the crowd with a mirthless grin and the frequent mopping of his brow with a voluminous checkered kerchief.

  “Quiet! Quiet, please!” called Dr. Fitzgibbon, removing his coat and stepping confidently forward. “Before we begin I would like to remind the assembly that what you are about to witness today is neither an idle stunt nor a theatrical performance, but an authentic dental procedure of paramount consequence, particularly to our suffering friend here.”

  “Bring on the fortifier, doc!” yelled a voice. “Calvin don’t look so good.”

  Clapping a powerful hand upon the patient’s shoulder and lifting a cautionary finger to his lips, Fitzgibbon went on, “I would therefore entreat each and every one of you attending this afternoon’s operation to display an appropriate respect and consideration. Now, before we may properly proceed, we must verify the diseased tooth.” Slipping from his waistcoat pocket a long, slim, glittering instrument that tapered down to a fiendishly fine point, he leaned over the seated gentleman, tilted his chin, and, requesting politely, “Open, please,” began to probe the pink interior of the exposed mouth with an artistic delicacy.