An hour later, seated on a moss-padded boulder shaped remarkably like a monarch’s throne, Liberty pondered his destiny, much, so he imagined, like an ancient troubled king, before him an almost perfect circle of dead earth in which no living thing grew or trespassed, and apparently never had, this tranquil glade neatly scooped out of the traceless depths of the forest always for him a supremely magical place where it was said witches once capered and primeval tribes performed elaborate rituals of a thrillingly hideous nature, and whatever presences had been invoked by those pagan mystics must linger still else why did the soil remain so indelibly poisoned? Once he thought he had even glimpsed the spade-tipped tail of some green leathery creature slipping deftly behind a large stump at his approach. And once he had heard voices conversing in a guttural foreign tongue right out of the unbodied air before him and, as he attended to their intriguing confabulation, he discovered, after a mysterious auditory adjustment, he could actually comprehend their gibberish, his mind translating the nonsensical sounds into recognizable English that instructed him where to find a birthday coin given him by Aunt Aroline that he, careless boy, had promptly lost. The coin glittered in the exact center of the contaminated circle. Euclid was right. Solutions to the important riddles of this rough-and-tumble world could only be discovered through an appeal to the sphere unseen. But now, though, as he debated the question of the hour, taking up both sides in equal turn, the woods and stones remained frustratingly mute. Eventually, the words in his head trailed away and, entering a region where, language and logic spent, he simply surrendered the struggle and in that very instant it was not a voice but the silence that spoke clearly to him, and at once he stood and went down out of the forest to a road on the edge of town and a sad, saddle-backed cottage of cracked boards and crazed windows where a one-wheeled buggy stood tilted on its axle in the dried mud before the door. Loud, persistent knocking finally summoned a female voice from within. “Who’s there?” it cried.
“Liberty,” he announced softly, and in reply the bolt was instantly drawn and the heavy oaken door opened on a tiny woman no larger than a ten-year-old child. She was wearing a peruke and a soiled and torn ruby gown.
“Liberty!” she exclaimed, hugging him warmly about the waist. “I’ve just been thinking about you. Come in, come in,” she commanded, pulling him roughly into a dim cluttered space fragrant with pine smoke, stale grease and the distinctive effluvium of human bodies, numerous and unwashed, at close quarters.
“I knew,” declared Mrs. Fowler with a twittering enthusiasm one hinge removed from outright mania, “the moment I woke this morning that the sun would not set without an appearance of your face at my door, so I immediately decided that today’s pie, in your honor, would be rhubarb. And so it is, my special rhubarb pie for Liberty.” And she produced from a sideboard in a shadowy corner he could barely perceive a heavy platter whose circular cap of crust he did recognize once it had been shoved up under his flaring nostrils.
“Excellent!” he pronounced, frankly unable to distinguish the singular scent of that tart vegetable from the sundry robust odors clamoring for olfactory attention.
“It has a secret ingredient,” Mrs. Fowler confided in a coquettish aside, “I cannot divulge to the others but which I can reveal to you, Liberty.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping into stage whisper. “Gunpowder,” she murmured confidentially.
“Gunpowder?”
“It adds a certain tonic charm to any dish.”
“In which case I may require an extra slice,” he submitted politely.
“Gobble up what you will, Liberty. My family mislikes plant pie.”
In the gloom to which his eyes had gradually become accustomed, Liberty discovered baby Lucius teetering stark naked in the middle of the floor, sucking industriously on his thumb and clutching in his other chubby fist what appeared to be a dead mouse. From obscure corners came the rustlings of other creeping things, bestial or mortal or both. Despite having known the family since the advent of memory, Liberty had never been able to ascertain with any surety the precise number of Fowler children nor had he ever been informed of Mrs. Fowler’s Christian name.
“I had to send Phineas to town,” she explained, “simply to clear some space around me. You know what he can be like once something momentous settles over his brain, up and down, in and out, it’s enough to put a parson into a pucker. I do hope you’re not vexing your own mother unnecessarily.”
“No, ma’am, she’s taken to her room.”
Mrs. Fowler gave him a curt nod of approval. “Exactly where I would be if I had a room to take to. But what are we doing standing about in the dark and jawing like a couple of damn fools? Lucius!” she called out sharply as she began leading Liberty back into the well-lit kitchen, “what the devil do you have in your mouth? Drop the thingum on the floor, baby, that’s right, on the floor. That child,” she uttered, shaking her head in exasperated wonder.
Settled before a relatively clean table in a relatively filthy kitchen, Liberty stared almost uncomprehendingly at the mammoth slice of pie Mrs. Fowler had set out for him. The filling oozing threateningly from between the crusts was of a suspicious tinge and consistency. When he finally dared a bite, employing one of Mrs. Fowler’s prize possessions, a recent gift from a dotty Boston aunt, a pronged silver utensil she called a “forp,” he encountered a taste best described as sweetened saddle soap. In fact, he was so absorbed in exploring the bracing novelty of this flavor that he failed to notice at first that Mrs. Fowler had quit her anxious puttering about and was now leaning precariously upon the back of a chair and emitting a stuttering series of distressing noises.
“Mrs. Fowler?” he inquired tentatively.
She turned around to reveal to him her flooded eyes, her hot red cheeks. “Don’t think I am ignorant of what you boys are secretly planning. I have been dreading this day ever since that awful man was elected president. I’ve been young, I know what youth is like, an occasion for folly and artlessness unbounded, deaf ears to elders all around, I understand, but I will not permit my oldest boy to throw himself convulsively upon the pyre, and, if Mr. Fowler had not gone to Canada to seek his fortune in pelts, he would be here at my side blocking the door against the both of you. Mr. Fowler, as do I, abhors violence. He believes all disputes can be readily settled with a shot of old orchard and a deck of cards. If Mr. Fowler were here he would deal out a hand of faro and nobody would be going anywhere. Mr. Fowler understands the proper conduct in life and Mr. Fowler is never wrong.”
“Yes, ma’am” was all Liberty could offer in reply to such fervent reasoning, though he had never seen a Mr. Fowler or any other man about the place and lately had begun to wonder where all the fresh babies kept coming from.
“I always knew you possessed more than a single grain of sense, which is more than I can say of my Phineas. You’ve always been death on a speech, Liberty, ever your parents’ child, I suppose, and Phineas listens to you with far greater attentiveness than he does his own mother, so I ask you, please, try to talk some reason into that cast-iron noggin of his, would you?”
“I’m not so sure, Mrs. Fowler, that he really listens all that well to anybody,” replied Liberty, recollecting the time young Phinny, eager to sample the rumored delights of erotic bliss, dropped his pants and despite repeated warnings stuck his erect penis into the presumably honey-slick knothole of a dead tree containing what he swore was an abandoned beehive only to painfully learn that numerous angry tenants remained in residence, and as he ran howling across an open field, his unmentionables aflame, toward the relief of Wilson’s Creek, onlookers in a passing coach, namely his sweetheart Elmina Carlisle and her stuffy mother, were treated to an unobstructed view of his predicament, their combined shrieks adding to the general effect of wanton mayhem and causing the horses to bolt.
“I have faith in you, Liberty,” she said, patting him affectionately on the head. “You could coax snakes out of the ground with the music of your voice.”
> “Mrs. Fowler, I really must object—”
“Ssssh,” she cautioned hastily, finger to her lips, “hush now, here he comes.”
A door slapped shut, clumsy footsteps approached and into the kitchen stumbled a tall, freckled, cream-faced boy about Liberty’s age bearing upon his shoulder a sack of ground flour which he unceremoniously dumped to the floor, causing a puff of white powder to explode gently upward.
“Phineas!” exclaimed Mrs. Fowler. “Burst that bag and you’ll work it off shoveling shit in the barn for a month.”
“But I already shovel shit nearly every day,” her son quickly replied, rolling an eye for Liberty’s benefit.
“Don’t you dare direct such profane language my way. I’ll not tolerate such disrespect under my roof.”
“Why should you when you can go to town and get freely insulted any damn time you please.”
The slap she attempted to administer across his cheek was easily dodged and as Phineas headed out the door, he grabbed Liberty by the shoulder, saying, “Meet me by the woodpile.”
“I’ll meet you by the woodpile,” promised Mrs. Fowler heatedly, “birch rod in hand.”
Phineas raised a threatening fist, turned his back and departed.
“It’s a disjointed world, Liberty,” remarked a melancholic Mrs. Fowler, touching her hair as if it had just been mussed. “No snug fit to the parts anymore. We are tumbling and tumbling into a great abyss, I fear, perhaps one with no bottom. Go out and speak with him, Liberty. Tell him there’s rhubarb pie.”
He found Phineas seated on a fence post, studying his fingernails with grim intensity. “I’ve been to the rally,” he announced flatly. “The whole town’s in a positive jimjam.” The mayor had orated in his usual florid manner for more than an hour and then read a telegram from the governor promising that the state would chaw up all other states in the contest for duty and honor and glory. The band played, miserably, not a tune anyone in the crowd could recognize. Dogs scampered wildly about. Girls granted boys knowing smiles never revealed before. Then Wilbur Jenkins, rigged up in a fancy captain’s uniform, displayed the regimental flag his wife had stayed up all night sewing and asked for volunteers to step forward and take the oath. “And every man in the square but for me, Pegleg Tom and Ben Brown, that thieving coward, dashed cheering up to the table as if someone had just shouted ‘Free beer!’ I felt so bad I had to come right home. I don’t know what to do. She don’t want me to go.”
“Neither do mine.”
“Well, we could just desert the old homestead, march off like brave Greeks and let the old folks know by mail once we’re there.”
“Where? The battlefield?”
“No,” Phineas replied, eyes alight at the prospect of the stirring drama before them. “Richmond.”
“Got this dust-up won already, have you?”
“Do you think it’ll be over before we get our chance?”
“No, I reckon there’ll be more than enough killing and dying to go around. My father’s always said that breaking up chains requires a bigger, hotter fire than the one to forge them in the first place.”
“Perhaps there’s time then to lay seige to the mothers.”
“As a rehearsal for the rebs?”
“We’ll dazzle ’em with elocutionary rockets, Liberty, we’ll invest ’em with inductions, divert ’em with apostrophes, we’ll bombard ’em with a prioris, and if all else fails, we’ll simply outflank ’em and head smartly on out.”
Unlike most military campaigns, which rarely proceed as intended, Liberty’s crucial scene with his mother turned out to be not at all the lachrymose ordeal he had feared. She received him cordially in her bedroom, costumed in no mask of pale grief but appearing as herself, in the role he had largely known her by, eyes unringed, the whites startlingly pure and bloodless, complexion fair as a country milkmaid’s, her silvery black hair freshly washed and brushed. To her son she looked like a perfectly healthy adult woman who had decided, for understandable reasons, to simply remain beneath the shelter of the covers for a few days. He hesitated just inside the door.
“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, carefully closing the well-thumbed copy of the Bible she had been idly leafing through, a book to which she maintained a long, difficult, ambiguous relationship but one she could not, at least as yet, entirely abandon.
“It took a certain amount of time to accumulate the required courage.”
“I was expecting that, too. Come, sit beside me,” she urged, patting the blanket. “I want to feel your weight on the bed.”
As he settled into the soft knolls and hollows of the feather mattress, he noticed now, up close, a disturbing vagueness to his mother’s presence, a slight truancy around which attention skirted.
“Have you been eating properly?” she asked, then, feeling his forehead, “Do you have a fever?”
“No greater than the country’s.”
She sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I could say which would matter at this point. I couldn’t keep you from wandering as a child, I certainly cannot lock you up in your room now.”
“And there’s always the window.”
“I’ve known all these turbulent years that one day the turbulence would certainly invade our home, but I think I willfully refused to admit just how frightfully personal it might be.”
“But I’ll be back before summer,” he argued, the promise sounding ridiculously hollow even to him.
“Don’t, Liberty. Please stop. I have found that the unpleasant episodes of a life are more fruitfully endured when regarded through the strong lens of truth. All I ask is that you write regularly and that you try to refrain from imprudence. Don’t play the hero for anyone. There will be more than enough fools scrambling for that position and you will, no doubt, witness what becomes of them. The satisfactory fulfillment of one’s duty is heroism enough for anybody. Remember: the successful transit of even a single day is heroic beyond measure.”
“You understand this is an obligation I cannot shirk.”
“Yes. And you understand that I am a mother.”
“A grade that outranks the highest general.”
“Good, now give me a kiss.”
She smelled of soap and hyacinth and her own particular Roxana scent, somewhat vanillalike, ever allied in his mind with sentiments of safety and love, and as he paused in the doorway to say good-bye (for the last time as it turned out; he would never see her again) he was presented with a privileged glimpse into the nature of nature when for one eternal aching instant he beheld his mother as a complete discrete being, entirely isolate from himself, with a history his knowledge of which would remain forever spotty and elusive, and a present he could never fully inhabit, and he figured his own uncertain passage into muddling maturity had already begun.
The army was settling into uneasy bivouac when sometime after dusk it began to rain, an omen some claimed, though whether for good or ill was not altogether clear. In the dark, men tripped over objects that weren’t there, dogs barked for no discernible cause. Even the battle-tested horses seemed spooked, whinnying without provocation, snapping occasionally at passing humans. “There’s a higher officer than Little Mac or Bobby Lee directing the course of this campaign,” claimed Sergeant Wickersham, attempting to calm the “strawfeet.” “On this field we’re all outranked, private and general alike. And that commander ain’t going to let the Union go down. He ain’t going to let you boys go down.” Corporal Albion Franks, a veteran of Bull Run and the Peninsula who’d been listening nearby, averted his face and spat carefully into the dirt.
And all through that long rainy night the remaining regiments came straggling into camp, spectral beings from realms underground gathered out of the fog, the silence of their grand procession broken only by the jingle of metal and the steady monotonous hissing sound of their feet upon the road.
Liberty and Phineas Fowler sat huddled cold, wet and miserable inside their tent, munching on handfuls of dry coffee mi
xed with the last of their sugar. No fires, the general had ordered, no talking either. The opposing armies now lay as close to one another as weary travelers sharing a narrow bed, their restless shifting throughout the night setting off periodic flurries of picket fire, the muzzle flashes darting like bright reptilian tongues through the drizzle and thickening fog, attempting to sense within this tense obscurity the adversary’s precise location. Sleep would be a rare commodity tonight on either side—especially for Liberty, who the previous day had discovered gunpowder in his canteen and, this morning, that his ramrod had gone missing. “Once the ball’s in motion,” Sergeant Wickersham had assured him, “you’ll be able to fetch another easy enough. The field’ll be scattered with them.”
“I didn’t like the sound of that,” complained Fowler, wiping the grime from the metalwork of his Enfield. “How many of us do you reckon are going to end the day no longer in need of muskets or anything else for that matter?”
“Ill reflections, Phinny. Lieutenant Quincy says it’s such thoughts that help draw the minies.”
“But how do you know I’m not having thoughts like this because I’m already sensing the balls coming toward me?”
“They’re coming for all of us, Phinny, and I would suggest the best remedy is whatever rest we can pinch from this grudging night.” He rolled over onto his dry side, which became immediately wet.
“I’m scared, Liberty. I don’t know if my soul is adequately prepared.”
“Go talk to the chaplain.” He could feel the leading edge of a cold taking up residence in the back of his throat.
“Chaplain Poague doesn’t like me. He believes redheads are all bound for perdition.”
“Yes,” said Liberty, trying to determine if that was a rock or a root pressing so insistently against his hip, “and all southpaws are thieves. I’ve heard the speech.”
“You’d think they would provide us with spiritual counsel of a loftier quality, especially on the eve of battle.”
The Amalgamation Polka Page 18