The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  They were frozen in a stilled moment of maximum tension, and Liberty didn’t know how much longer he could fend off this man’s determined desire to murder him when he heard a loud, commanding voice and looked up into the grim countenance of Arthur McGee. “Turn your head!” he ordered, and when Liberty obeyed he placed the end of his musket barrel against the back of the reb’s head and coolly pulled the trigger. A warm stew of wet organic matter went spraying across Liberty’s squinched face. McGee kicked the heavy body off of Liberty and graciously helped him to his feet. “Hate to see some damn secesh finish a job I aimed to complete.” He flashed Liberty a tight, significant smile and then vanished into the fray.

  Heart audibly racing, emotions as diverse and confused as the battle itself, Liberty instinctively understood that in his present, desperate situation the one thing he must not do is think. Thought tended to dice a moment, particularly a crucial one, into too many puzzling and disconnected fragments. He wiped his face on a trembling sleeve, retrieved his weapon and hastened on.

  Bodies were piled up along the base of the cornfield fence like rejected sacks of spoiled potatoes. Astraddle the top rail was perched a dead man, hands still locked around the wood, feet twisted about the bottom bar. He appeared to be studying the far horizon with intent interest as if hopeful of assistance from that quarter. Liberty had lifted himself over the fence, careful not to dislodge this silent sentinel, when a major with a blood-soaked bandanna wrapped around his head dashed up and demanded, “What unit, boy?”

  “Eighty-ninth New York, sir.”

  “Well, where the hell are they?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty. What a way to conduct a war. Move on up there, then. Close up that gap.” And he slapped Liberty across the back with the flat of his sword.

  Liberty took half a dozen steps before being accosted by the hideous shrieks of a wounded soldier who looked to be no more than twelve years old. He was missing both legs at the hips. Liberty paused to offer him a sip of water from his canteen, but the boy couldn’t seem to keep the liquid down and his incessant screams prompted the thought that if the very walls of hell were cracked open with a chisel this was the noise the fiery rock itself would emit. He moved on.

  In addition to the perpetual storm of nasty minies, shell and canister were repeatedly plowing the teeming field, filling the humid air with cobs, leaves, stalks and a goodly portion of mangled arms and legs.

  “Devilish hot work, eh?” cried a Federal Liberty did not recognize, and who insisted on giving him a curiously demented wink. He was loading and firing his weapon without even bothering to take aim. “I’ve been back and forth over this same ground three times already!”

  “Well,” replied Liberty, “looks like you’re about to do it again.”

  Despite the energetic efforts of a capless colonel to stem the retreat, the Union line suddenly broke in the face of yet another Confederate charge. Men simply dropped their rifles and ran for their lives. Before Liberty could even react he was clobbered in the left temple by a scrawny, toothless johnny whose only weapon was the rock he wielded in his filthy fist. The sky turned black, the stars jiggled in their courses and when full vision was finally restored, Liberty found himself prone amid the multitude of fallen soldiers in varying states of consciousness and, of course, most numerous, the ones possessing no consciousness whatsoever. The battle, apparently, had pressed on without him. His head, throbbing like the inside of a bell upon which the midnight had just been struck, felt huge and red, and before he could even struggle gamely to his feet he was surrounded by a raggedy-looking pack of unwashed johnnies whose rifles, he couldn’t help noting, were all directed straight at him.

  “That’s one angry knot you got there, son,” observed a tall man with eyes so arrestingly blue they seemed like clear pieces of summer sky.

  Everyone ducked for a moment as a shell went sputtering a bit too low overhead.

  “Rufus!” called the tall man.

  “Yes, sir.” Rufus was hardly more than a small freckled boy with thatch hair and bare feet and outfitted in what appeared to be a random sampling of soiled rags. The rifle he clutched in such ungainly fashion was twice as tall as he.

  “Conduct this prisoner to the rear immediately.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so, that’s why.”

  “Sir,” observed one soldier, anxiously scanning the far tree line. “Looks like they might be fixing to attack again.”

  “I thought we didn’t take any prisoners,” Rufus persisted.

  “We’re taking this one. Now go on, skedaddle.”

  “Fucking hell,” the boy muttered, nudging Liberty in the back with his barrel. “Step lively, Yank. Ain’t killed one of you birds yet and my finger’s gettin’ awful itchy.”

  “I’m in a poor way,” Liberty complained. “How far do we have to go?”

  “Shut your mouth, you stinking bluebelly. Now move your shanks.” The barrel poked Liberty in the ribs.

  “Aren’t you a mite young for soldiering?”

  “I’m older than I look.”

  “And what age is that, exactly?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  “Quite a mouth on such an innocent tyke.”

  “It’s all you Yankees’ fault. Before this war a curse word never passed my lips. Now I swear like a Spanish trooper without even knowing I’m doing it. Seems to rile some folks sometimes.”

  “Why don’t you stop?”

  “Can’t. Got the habit.” A stray bullet lifted the cap right off Rufus’s head without touching a hair.

  “Holy shit!” cried Rufus. “Let’s hoof it, Yank, ’fore you get killed by your own side.”

  In a half crouch they dashed through the dense choking smoke, stopped, turned, ran on again. All around them, now visible, now obscured, masses of howling men—from which army who knew?—shifted to and fro in clamorous confusion.

  “Do you even know where the rear is in this mess?” yelled Liberty.

  “No Yankee’s gonna tell me I’m lost. You just head away from the noise.”

  “But the noise is all around us.”

  “I told you once to shut your pan.” He raised his rifle threateningly. “Want a taste of the stock?”

  Suddenly the air around them began to sing rather persistently and they found modest cover huddling together in a disappointingly shallow depression in the ground.

  “This is the goddamndest thing I’ve ever seen,” announced Rufus, “and I’m missing out on all the fun.”

  “We seem to be experiencing our fair share.” Liberty could actually hear the bullets hitting the earth around them like one shovelful after another of tossed pebbles.

  “Know why the old man ordered me back with you? He’s sweet on my ma and don’t want nothing to happen to me. I can’t seem to ever get into the scrap. There’s always some excuse for sending poor Rufus to the rear.”

  “What if I just up and bolted?”

  A slow smile spread across Rufus’s babyish features. “Well then, I reckon I’d have to pop you.”

  “Maybe you’d miss.”

  “I come from Alabamy, Yank, and you ain’t ever seen any real deadeyes if you’ve never been to our county’s turkey shoot.”

  “I’m not a turkey.”

  “No,” agreed Rufus, “but you’ll do.”

  At a momentary lull in the metal storm overhead, they rose up cautiously from their hiding place and had barely taken a step when they were engulfed in a sea of blue uniforms.

  “Well, lookee here,” declared a big, bearded sergeant. “Drop the piece, reb.”

  Rufus’s musket clattered to the ground as he obediently raised his hands.

  “Glad to see you boys,” said Liberty.

  “Our pleasure,” replied the sergeant. “Looks like you’ve been officially emancipated.”

  “What regiment?” asked a lieutenant.

  “Eighty-ninth New York, sir.”
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  “Don’t believe there’s many of them left. Heard they’re out of it for the day. But as you can see, we need every body we can get. Sergeant Trask, find this man a musket and get the prisoner to the rear.”

  “I hope,” Liberty couldn’t help saying, “he has better luck finding it than Rufus here did.”

  The boy glared savagely back at him. “You best hope we never meet again, Yank. I owe you one.”

  “Yes, I know,” answered Liberty. “Gobble, gobble, bang, bang.”

  Rufus, cursing furiously, was led roughly away.

  “What was that all about?” asked the lieutenant.

  “I think he was eying to put me on his dinner table.”

  “Them rebs,” offered the sergeant. “They’ll eat anything.”

  A rifle was abruptly thrust into Liberty’s unwilling hands and he was placed in line between one private visibly trembling from “the cold” and another flushed and sweat-soaked from the heat.

  “I wish,” said the first, “that darn sun would get down out of the sky.”

  “Hell,” replied the other. “It ain’t even noon yet. You still got plenty of time to get killed in, don’t you worry.”

  They both ignored Liberty, who was frankly somewhat stunned by the growing enormity of his situation, that fate had apparently decided, for whatever cryptic reasons, to send him waltzing through the hail yet one more time.

  “Why are you always so blamed nice to me?”

  The sweating private spat a stream of tobacco juice on the grass. “’Cause I love you so much, Huntzinger, can’t you tell?”

  Huntzinger, refusing to respond, turned away in disgust.

  Orders were barked out and the line stepped bravely off, bodies slightly stiffened, heads bent, as if advancing into a bracing wind. Not twenty yards had been crossed when men began to topple like bowling pins. The balls whistled all around, the cannons continued to thunder, the combination as deafening as if a universe of boulders had gone rolling eternally down a great mountain. Before Liberty’s astonished eyes Huntzinger’s entire right shoulder and arm were torn away, and as the man fell Liberty could clearly see the exposed heart still throbbing in Huntzinger’s crimsoning chest. Men emitted strange, harrowing cries one wouldn’t have thought even a tortured animal capable of producing. Liberty felt one round pierce the sleeve of his jacket, another drill a hole in his canteen, sending a stream of water pouring down his leg. Regimental flags of both sides, all in a tangle, swayed wildly above the smoke as if these tattered pieces of gayly colored cloth themselves were principals in a contest to which humans were merely incidental. A man came crawling on all fours over the broken cornstalks, dragging his entrails behind him. “It’s all right,” he kept chanting, “it’s all right.”

  The Confederate army loomed out of the haze ahead, and the line was halted. “Make leather out of ’em, boys!” shouted the lieutenant, and everyone bent to the repetitive task of loading and firing. The measured hysteria of their actions was accompanied by a mystical sense that the faster one worked, the more shots one fired, the safer one would be. They seemed now to be no longer men but transformed by the forge of battle into mechanical parts, identical cogs whirring inside some infernal engine whose demonic maker had not only fabricated but also personally selected each and every individual to serve his frankly evil needs.

  Then, in the midst of this enveloping hell, Liberty spied a Confederate not thirty yards away leveling his rifle and taking dead aim at him, and he thought, I cannot believe this is happening to me, as all noise and fury fell away, faded into a nebulous cloud at the center of which vision concentrated solely on the enormous barrel and the hot-beaded squint behind it and time stopped as if the eye of a great tornado of iron were passing overhead and in that eerie interval of calm and silence he heard himself say, Now I am dead. He saw the muzzle flash and then nothing.

  When he awoke he found himself seated on a hard, rather uncomfortable chair in a pleasantly furnished but foreign parlor. Across from him in a periwinkle blue rocking chair sat his mother or a woman who resembled Roxana in every significant detail from the creases on her face to the scattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, but his sense of her, of her inner being, seemed of an order he had never experienced before. She had changed or perhaps he had changed, for she was now radiating a certain candlelike mellowness that had eluded her all her life.

  “You look tired,” she said in that instantly familiar, soothing, softly accented voice. “Have you been ill?”

  “No,” he answered, smiling slightly. He had never felt so happy. “It’s been a long journey.”

  She nodded. “I know now the answer to your question.”

  “What question is that?”

  “The one that so perplexed your boyhood. ‘What color is the soul?’ you kept asking. Well, I now know that it is the color of no-color.”

  “White?”

  Her faint, wistful smile spoke of the traversal of vast distances, the abridgment of organic time. “There is no word adequate to describe the properties of the human soul. Its peculiar tincture can only be apprehended through the visionary optic.” Her own magnetic eyes seemed to have grown larger, brighter. “Now, come here,” she said, holding out her arms.

  He went to her, and in her warm embrace, enfolded in the natural fragrance of her hair and skin, he rested in the peace that was the rock-solid core of a frantic world, and in the dozing tranquillity of that enchanted space he knew with absolute certainty that his mother was dead.

  “Hey, pard,” came the voice, at first faint and distant, but increasing rapidly in nearness and volume. “Are you all right?”

  Liberty blinked and discovered himself staring up into the not unkindly face of a portly, blue-coated, tawny-bearded angel whose eyes possessed whites so pure, so amazingly uncontaminated, they seemed the cleanest spots on his essentially grimy person. “We thought you had pegged out for sure.”

  “Yeah,” added the shorter man beside him, “we was about to dump you in the hole.”

  “Creased you good, didn’t it?”

  Liberty reached up to trace gingerly the extent of the burning furrow opened, interestingly enough, on the side of his head opposite to his previous wound. When he looked at his fingers they were coated in blood, as was, he now realized, the entire right half of his face.

  “Guess it wasn’t your turn yet. Reckon you can stand?”

  Light was draining steadily from the sky and the dissonant decibels of war had been replaced by the subdued complaints of the injured and the melancholy scrape and clink of shovel and pick. Liberty studied the beaming countenances of his saviors, members obviously of a burial party, and asked, “Who won?”

  The shorter man let out a contemptuous snort. “The Reaper,” he replied.

  Somehow, with the gentle assistance of his new friends Sergeant Weeks and Private Klinefelter, Liberty managed to stand erect and, between their arms, hobble painfully off the field.

  In a barn filled from stalls to loft with the wounded, their laments, their effluvia, Liberty’s head was cleaned and dressed. Laid out on a makeshift operating table—a door placed between a pair of sawhorses—one unfortunate casualty was undergoing the unanesthetized ordeal of having his left leg amputated. Ignoring the man’s anguished but inventive oaths, the surgeon worked quickly, slicing away the meat in one continuous cut, then sawing through the bone, the entire procedure completed in less than a minute. “Hey, Fish!” cried the man as his stump was being sewn and bandaged. Amazingly, it was Private McGee. “Searched for you the rest of the day and look what happens to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Liberty.

  “Don’t think for a second this little setback changes anything between us. No matter where you go, no matter what you do, ol’ Pegleg McGee’ll be right behind you. Watch your back.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. McGee,” said Liberty. “I wish you well.”

  He went outside and sat on a bench in a kind of whirring stupor that was interrupted w
hen the man beside him opened his mouth and, staring straight ahead, began to speak aloud to no one in particular. “I’ve not only seen the elephant, I’ve fed it, I’ve watered it, polished its tusks, swept up its droppings, and still, despite all my sweet attentions, the moment my back is turned, the damn beast tries to step on me, squash me flat.” He raised the short wing that was all that remained of his left arm.

  “Maybe now, after all this bloodletting,” said Liberty hopefully, “it will finally end.”

  “And maybe I’ll grow a new limb.”

  Then a passing doctor, noting Liberty’s relatively functional condition, brusquely ordered him back to his regiment.

  “Where is it?” Liberty asked.

  “How the hell should I know? That’s your lookout.”

  Reluctantly, he got to his feet and, carrying his pounding head as if it were a basket of rare delicacies, his vision still somewhat blurred, he wandered through the night until the futility of attempting to locate his unit in this utterly disorganized darkness overcame him entirely and he slumped to earth beneath a ragged apple tree, its crop picked clean by iron hands.

  At daybreak he roamed, for as long as he could bear it, across the desolated field. In hours this once pastoral landscape had been translated into the interior of a butcher shop after the fall slaughter. Bodies were already beginning to bloat and blacken in the rising sun. A hatless major sat on the ground weeping, “My boys, my beautiful boys.” Liberty thought of the thousands of souls, most of them probably still undeveloped, who had departed the planet forever from this now haunted and sacred place, and then wondered if God were actually as deaf and dumb as He often seemed. In a corner of the field a spotted pig was energetically rooting beneath the exposed rib cage of a fallen soldier, the bloody remains shaking like a husk in the animal’s stained jaws.