The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  Vail and Strickling started immediately for the house while Liberty and Otis headed for the barn and outbuildings.

  “Are you currently married, Mrs. Popper?” Wills asked as Vail and Strickling pounded up the front steps, shouldering past the frightened slaves huddled in the doorway, Vail muttering, “Out of the way, you black bitch,” as he brushed by.

  “Yes, Lieutenant Wills, I am married,” admitted Mrs. Popper, hugging her teary-eyed daughter to her side.

  “Where is your husband?”

  “He’s away, proudly fighting for his country.”

  “Any other men about?”

  “Only the servants, those that are left, and right now I don’t know how many that could be. Hush now,” she said to her daughter, patting the child tenderly on the back. “I suppose you have accomplished your aim, Lieutenant Wills, of frightening defenseless women and making little children cry. We always knew this is what we could expect from you soulless Yankees.”

  “Oh now, don’t be so modest. I’m sure there’s much more you could expect from us, but let’s hope everybody stays good and chirky so you won’t have to witness it. Good day, ma’am,” he said, and touching his cap he moved past her into the house.

  Out in the barn Liberty and Otis discovered a sick cow with slatted ribs and a large festering sore on its belly.

  “I don’t know if I’d even want to eat that beef,” said Otis, “no matter how hungry I was.”

  “I’m sure we’ve chewed on worse,” said Liberty.

  “But I don’t suppose this is what the captain had in mind when he spoke of a ‘grand supper.’”

  “No, and it appears to be all these poor folks have left. Good excuse to just move on and leave ’em alone.”

  At the sound of rustling behind a pile of hay Otis swiveled about, his rifle raised. “All right now,” he called, “come on out of there now.” A pair of black children emerged blinking into the light, stems of hay stuck in their hair, grain sacks with holes cut out for the head and arms serving for clothing.

  “Well, well,” declared Otis, “what have we here? Rebel spies?”

  The children’s eyes grew larger.

  “What are your names?” asked Liberty.

  “Posey,” answered the taller of the two. “This is my baby sister, Bowzer.”

  “What kind of name is that for a little girl? Who gave your sister such a name?”

  “Why, Master did, sir. He gives out all the names.”

  “Where is Master now?”

  “Off killing them Yankees. He been killing ’em for near three years now.”

  Otis laughed. “Well, I guess he hasn’t got all of ’em yet.”

  “Are you all Yankees?”

  “We were when we woke up this morning. Who’d you think we were?”

  “You going to cook and eat us?”

  “No, certainly not,” said Liberty. “Who filled your head with such nonsense?”

  “Missus Sarah said you folks liked black meat ’cause it was nice and tender from being raised up so good.”

  “Sounds like the missus needs a hard lesson or two of Yankee schooling,” said Otis.

  “None of you is going to be harmed,” Liberty assured the children. “We’ve come to free you, not hurt you.”

  “Are we free?” asked Posey.

  “Yes.”

  The girls stared in disbelief at each other. “Let’s go tell Mama,” said Posey, and both went scampering barefoot out the barn door.

  When Liberty and Otis emerged they saw clouds of dark smoke boiling out of the rear windows of the house, Mrs. Popper and her children silently watching the destruction of their home at a distance, Vail and Strickling off in a grove of trees jabbing their bayonets repeatedly into the ground and Lieutenant Wills seated calmly in a chair in the yard, observing the flames and gnawing on a hock of ham. “Over here, boys,” he called. “Requisitioned some fresh rations from the larder.” On the ground at his feet were a dead turkey, a bag of dried peaches, a bunch of carrots, a couple onions, a jar of honey and a bottle of peach brandy from which he imbibed freely. “Ain’t much,” he confessed, “but Vail and Strickling are out prospecting for the rest of it. After a bit of coaxing, Mrs. Popper here kindly offered to share her bounty with us. Anything out in the barn?”

  “Nothing but a peaked cow,” said Otis.

  “That’s okay. I expect Vail and Strickling are about to strike the main lode any minute now.” He held out the bottle. “Care for a tasty slug of Georgia juice?”

  “No thanks, sir,” said Liberty.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Otis said, stepping forward.

  “Why has the house been fired?” Liberty asked. “I thought we were under orders to respect all civilian property.”

  “Well, Private Fish, ordinarily that would be the case, but this Mrs. Popper, you see, is something of an unregenerate secesh prone to a powerful lot of disrespect toward uniformed representatives of the government of the United States. In all the commotion someone accidently dropped a match. Wasn’t nothing of any value in that cracker-box, anyway. These dirt-eaters put on a fine show, but once you get inside you discover it’s all bluff and fudge and the whole damn operation’s made out of sand and hot air. We’ve been bamboozled, gentlemen, and nothing for it now but to sit down and enjoy the show.”

  “Lieutenant Wills,” called Mrs. Popper, clutching her frightened children about her, as if posing for a portrait of motherhood besieged, “where do you propose I and my family spend the night?”

  “Try the slave quarters,” cracked Wills. “Haven’t touched a single one of those cabins and don’t plan to. Don’t know how you feel about sharing a bed with Sambo and Dinah, but I reckon your husband was quite accustomed to it, so I believe you could make the necessary adjustments, too.” He laughed and pulled at the bottle of brandy.

  “I hope you, Lieutenant Wills,” said Mrs. Popper, “and your minions end up burning in hell where you belong.”

  “I don’t dispute you, Mrs. Popper, but wherever I may end up the fire’s going to be of a cooler temperature than the one you’ll eventually find yourself in.”

  The house, a mere skeletal frame within the shifting body of flame, seemed about to take a step forward when suddenly the entire structure simply collapsed in a great sigh and an eruption of sparks. All the Popper children were huddled protectively around their mother and all were in tears.

  A whoop went up from the grove of pecan trees and Vail called out that he had indeed struck paydirt: a brace of fat porkers, a turkey, a couple chickens, a case of whiskey, a barrel of molasses, a peck of potatoes, a sack of meal and, lordy be, a bag of gold coin.

  “Grand dining tonight, eh, gentlemen?”

  “I beg you, Lieutenant,” asked Mrs. Popper, “to please leave us something to eat. That’s the only food left on the plantation.”

  “Should have thought of that before you seceded,” said Wills.

  “Have you Yankees no heart at all?”

  “Hardened, ma’am, in the forge of war. And if you think this is bad, wait till you see what happens when we get to Carolina.”

  Liberty walked over to where Mrs. Popper stood trembling in rage and grief, leaned down, kissed her on the forehead and without looking back, kept on walking out to the road.

  “Private Fish,” called Wills, “where in holy damnation do you think you’re going?”

  There was no reply.

  “Dodds,” asked the lieutenant, “where is Private Fish going?”

  “I don’t know,” said Otis.

  “Well, don’t that beat all.”

  They watched Liberty moving steadily up the road until finally he was lost in the drifting clouds of smoke from the burning house.

  It was strange after years of tramping through the countryside in the company of a vast horde of armed and boisterous men for Liberty to find himself alone on an empty road rambling through a landscape from which all living presence had apparently fled. No cows in the pasture, no chicke
ns in the yard, no pigs at the trough, not even a single insect chirping in the grass. Ragged columns of black smoke stood at random intervals on the far horizon, and once he thought he saw a party of mounted riders racing across a distant meadow—or were they merely the shadows of passing clouds, movement of any kind in this time and place readily assuming the appearance of war? He possessed no food, no water, and clad in the blue uniform of his army he was solitarily adrift in the territory of what? The enemy? The adversary? The disowned cousin? There was no adequate language. Because deep down abided a preternatural conviction he could not be harmed on this ground. He was not an invader, he wasn’t even a trespasser, he was a son of the soil returning home on a singular odyssey that seemed to have been prepared for him long before his birth.

  He rested for a while in the shade of a dry creek bed beneath a decrepit wooden bridge, carefully unfolding and reexamining his tattered map. He was tending, as he knew, in the proper general direction, but had no idea how long the journey would take. He had no plan. He would allow what was going to happen to simply happen. In his mind he viewed this excursion—which he realized could be regarded as desertion, a capital offense—as only a temporary detour from military duty, though, of course, other deserters had their reasons, too.

  Back in the spring outside Chattanooga he and his brigade had been turned out in the rain to witness the execution of another such individual thinker, a boy even younger than himself who, discovering war not to his liking, had decided independently to give up his place in the ranks and head back up north where trees didn’t explode and no metal fell from the sky. He had kept so to himself that few even knew his name, much less that his father, without consulting the rest of the family, had summarily signed him up for a soldier despite the boy’s bad eyesight, clumsy hands and skin so pale that, refusing to tan, it turned painfully redder and redder throughout the long last summer. He was the lad who cried himself to sleep every night, his muffled sobs audible to those lying awake in their tents several company streets away. Under his first fire, a brief skirmish prior to the lead storm of Chickamauga, the boy dropped to the ground behind a fallen log, body curled tight as a doodlebug, and refused to budge—a position he immediately assumed whenever shots were fired, lightning cracked, or even at the sudden utterance of a loud oath during a heated faro game. And then one bright cold morning he was gone, having slipped away unnoticed during the night. A patrol of Kilpatrick’s cavalry discovered him later that same day, soaking his naked body in a secluded mill pond. Coming upon a hive of bees and hungry for honey, he had attempted to help himself over the swarm’s angry protests. When the troopers brought him back into camp, tied to a saddle, his face was swollen up big as a melon and he could see out of only one eye. They held a court-martial the following day and shot him the next.

  At the report of the executioners’ rifles, Liberty had closed his eyes. And he kept his gaze averted during a pensive meal around the fire with his glum comrades, this rather emphatic demonstration of military justice having blackened the mood for days to come. What Liberty’s fate would be for a similar transgression he could not even begin to guess. All he did know, and this with a granite certainty, was that this mad course which now placed his own life in positive jeopardy seemed a divine necessity because finally what choice did he have but to follow the trail of his mother’s tears.

  He came then to what could only be characterized as a shell of a town, grocery and groggery, church and cooper, all yet untouched by the vandal’s hand, standing mute and abandoned in the hazy Georgia sun, Liberty sat slumped in a chair before the saloon (F. T. Wade Son, Whiskey 5¢ A Glass) musing upon the sad desolation of the place. Devoid of their usual human traffic, the buildings seemed to have naturally lapsed back into their original being, as if they had been constructed for some other purposes entirely and were now patiently awaiting their rightful inhabitants. Even as a child Liberty had known—though he couldn’t begin to say how—that this world was not what it seemed, that closely hidden behind the mundane affairs of the day lurked layer upon unexamined layer of outright strangeness, of which what passed for ordinary was merely the protective outer covering, the skin, so to speak, of a beast so huge, so vital, it could never be discerned whole in all its proportions. This vacant town was permitting him a modest peek.

  As he brooded, a mangy, emaciated dog with patchwork fur slunk out from beneath the boards of the dry goods store opposite (T. Worth, Ladies Finery, Linen, Bijoux), gave Liberty a sidelong glance and tottered off on spindly drunken legs. Aroused by this first sign of life, Liberty heaved himself out of his chair, crossed the deserted street and entered the store. Inside, the shelves were stripped, rolls of cloth unfurled across the floor and the great brass cash register tipped upside down in a spreading pool of dark molasses. In the back office he discovered a forgotten half jug of peach brandy at whose mouth he sniffed cautiously—his nose after months of field experience having developed a fine sensitivity to questionable food and drink. Successfully passing the olfactory test, the sour liquid was poured without stop down Liberty’s parched, bobbing throat. When he was finished, he coughed once and spit on the floor. Outside the grimy window he noticed a dark figure scuttling across the back lot into the yawning doorway of a disheveled barn, and then came another loping close to the ground, but by the time Liberty went creeping out to the barn to investigate, rifle at the ready, the men, if such they were, had disappeared. Was he already, lonely castaway in this wide and lonesome country, beginning to lose his faculties, glimpse things that weren’t there, like Crenshaw had after gobbling down a tin of bad oysters?

  He wandered on to the edge of town, where on a well-tended plot of ground stood a large, pleasant-looking white frame house with a neatly painted sign affixed to the rail of the veranda: Mrs. Porter’s Rooming House, All Boarders Welcome. He climbed the worn wooden steps and discreetly approached the front door, which swung easily open at his touch. The interior was dim and lavishly appointed, and not a single vase, painting or fringed pillow seemed to have been disturbed. A vague smell of, oddly enough, gingerbread hung like a kind of aromatic bunting over the silent shadows of each room. On a polished mahogany table in the hallway rested an exotic potted plant of a species he had never encountered before, its thick, hairy stalk drooping over in a sad, upside-down U. Floorboards creaking softly beneath his heavy army brogans, he explored the house, expecting nothing, finding nothing, until upstairs, behind a half-open door, he discovered an elderly man stretched out upon a narrow unmade bed and wrapped in a bloodied Stars and Bars, his face gone from the white beard up, a shotgun lying carelessly across his stilled chest. A busy host of wasps and flies moved in and out of the dark cavity in his skull, greedily feeding upon the sweet treasures within.

  “Rest easy, Pop,” muttered Liberty, softly closing the door.

  The other chambers were empty, the beds, too, and somewhat apprehensive about lying down in a house where death was already taking a nap he spent the night on a pile of malodorous straw in an abandoned livery stable, the doors wide open at both ends. If it was sleep that visited him on that ammoniac nest it came in the shape of a ragged spirit with coals for eyes and a hot, foul breath that whispered into the snarled labyrinth of his soul the singsong lessons of an infernal primer he was failing repeatedly to memorize: A is for Abolition, Fiery tracks to perdition, B is for Black, Drowned white cats in a sack.

  At first light he rose up, muscles and joints stiff and weary, and staggered out into the morning mist in which no sun could be discerned, no bird heard to call, the country shrouded in fog and bleak silence, as if he had awakened upon a featureless plateau high up in the clouds. Around him the visible universe was reduced to a shifting circle no more than twenty feet in diameter. The road came toward him, magically materializing out of the gauze ahead, fading away into the gauze behind. He felt diminished in size, as though he were a simple weevil boring determinedly through the largest boll in all creation. Sounds periodically assailed him from off i
n the murky distance, the rattle of metal on metal, the leathery creak of tack and saddle, a muffled cough—noises without origin or consequence.

  When, several hours later, the enveloping obscurity burned away, Liberty found himself strolling between the sturdy columns of a vast pine forest, its scented shade shielding him momentarily from the augmenting heat of the day. Then, as if by chance, he happened to glimpse deep in the shadowy tangle of these woods the unmistakable man-made geometry of a human dwelling. Cautiously, rifle raised, he approached what appeared to be, beneath an awkwardly arranged camouflage of leaves and branches, a tiny cabin, its roof listing precariously to one side as if leaned upon by a giant hand.

  “Hold,” commanded a reedy voice at his back. “Throw down your arm and come about so I can take a gander at ye.”

  Liberty let his rifle clatter to the ground, raised his hands and slowly turned around. From behind a mossy boulder some twenty yards away stepped a red-whiskered man no bigger than a boy. He was wearing a crumpled cap, a flannel shirt and pants that stopped halfway down his hairless calves, his skin an unwholesome yellowy tinge and his eyes as pale as wood chips. The battered Enfield he held in his childish hands was aimed directly at Liberty’s chest.

  “Well, Lord skin a goat,” he declared, animated points of light suddenly rising in the moons of his eyes, “if you ain’t a genuine Yankee after all. Say something to me, I want to hear what a real one sounds like.”

  “Put down your piece,” replied Liberty in a voice so unexpectedly calm he hardly recognized it as his own. “There’s a whole army behind me, so you’ll hear soon enough what Yankees sound like.”

  “Is that Boston or New York?” asked the stranger, the barrel of his rifle still dead level.

  “It’s Fish,” answered Liberty. “Might you please put down your weapon?”

  “Never heard of no city called Fish. Where’s Fish at?”

  “It’s my name.”

  “That so? Knew a Fish over at Atkins Bend. Hung himself with a shackle chain when his wife run off with a pedlar’s son. You any kin to him?”