The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  “But that’s not to say I am not highly curious in a purely personal way as to the nature of your mission in our beautiful state.”

  “Ma’am, my mission, at the moment, is to depart your beautiful state at the earliest opportunity. Am I headed, I wonder, in the proper direction?”

  “Any road traveled far enough will lead you successfully out of Georgia.”

  “I should have known better than to even try to be coy with a woman such as yourself.”

  “One who sits all by herself, daring to summon up a brazen thought or two?”

  “You know how to fasten onto a wooden mind quick as a woodchuck.”

  “Don’t the ladies up north have any thoughts?”

  Liberty smiled. “Oh yes, plenty of ’em. Many, many thoughts by many, many women.”

  “And I’ll bet you know more than a few of ’em.”

  “Not so many,” he replied, feeling the blood rushing to his cheeks, thinking yet again that it was his mother foremost in his mind; then he dangled for a moment on the precipice of confessing all to this relative stranger, but something kept him from falling headlong into the arms of her sympathy.

  “Why so eager to get on into Carolina ahead of the rest of the boys? Planning on liberating the whole state by yourself?”

  And so, following a nervous bout of preparatory throat-clearing—his being seemingly wholly transparent before her keen gaze—he recounted the pertinent facts of the picturesque Fish family history, providing examples enough of the tangled skein of misfortune and accident that had led him from bucolic upstate New York to the threshold of her hospitable door, yet withholding from her the one crucial event that had set him on his odyssey toward the ancient maternal homestead in the Carolina marshes, saying no more than that he wished to meet the grandparents he had never known.

  “I hope you find them well,” said Olivia, obviously thinking of something else.

  “Yes” was all he could summon up in response.

  There then ensued an awkward and protracted silence, broken eventually by Liberty. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  Olivia rubbed her hands across her weary face. “I am, too. But what’s a body to do, particularly a worn-out female one like mine.” She seemed then to leave herself for a minute. When she spoke again, it was in a voice so soft he had to lean forward to hear. “I’m going to miss him,” she said.

  “He appeared to be quite a remarkable man,” Liberty observed, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

  “He loved cake,” Olivia said through a small, sad smile. “Peaches, too. He loved to eat and he loved to argue. Sometimes we couldn’t help but wonder if much of his contrariness was but a mummer’s role designed to entertain—himself most of all. Sun’s sinking,” she noted, the trace of a dark stain spreading over the eastern sky. “You’re welcome to stay the night if you wish.”

  “Well—”

  “Better than a mud wallow by the side of the road.”

  “Quite true, ma’am—I mean Olivia.”

  “You need some clothes, too. You can’t go traipsing about the country in that damn Yankee suit.”

  “But traveling in civilian clothes, I could be shot as a spy.”

  “As you are, you’ll be shot for certain as an enemy soldier.”

  She found him some old clothes of her husband’s, a patched shirt several sizes too large and a pair of pantaloons he would need a length of twine to hold up, and then told him about how her dear Peter had run off at the first bugle call and his letters had stopped arriving months ago, whether due to understandable disruptions in wartime mail service or something worse she did not know. The vast and relentless uncertainty of the age had whittled her heart to a mere nubbin. The last time she actually laid eyes on the man had been more than two years ago, and now she feared the details of his features were fading from memory. They were standing in an upstairs bedroom, the cries and laughter of the children pouring through the open windows and rising up through the floorboards. It was apparent Olivia wished to ask him something but momentarily lacked the nerve or the proper words, and Liberty waited expectantly until she spoke. “Mr. Fish,” she began, “I propose this request to you with great hesitancy, but I find, nevertheless, that I am compelled to do so: might I be permitted a glimpse, however brief, of your naked maleness?” Ignoring the sudden look of modest astonishment upon his face, she went on. “I say this not out of any pressing desire to actually touch it, I believe I’m done with all that”—she swept her arm toward the window, the screams, the shouts, the squabbling—“but simply because it has been so very long since I have gazed upon such an organ and I find to my embarassment I am troubled by a need to do so once again.” She regarded Liberty with a perfectly sober, almost clinical expression, its severity abridged slightly by the faint tint coloring her expectant face.

  “Is that all?” asked Liberty. “I thought you were about to ask me to kill somebody. I might have minded before joining this crazy campaign, but, frankly, everywhere we’ve gone, north and south, whenever we halted to bathe in a river or pond the banks would fill up mighty quick with crowds of young ladies for pretty much the same reason as yours. No different from what the boys would do if it was an army of girls taking a dip. I guess we like to look at each other. Now, where is it exactly you want to do this looking?”

  She crossed the room and quietly shut the door. “Right here would be fine,” she said, a nervous haste and tremor in her voice.

  “This is as strange a request as has ever been put to me,” said Liberty, fumbling with the buttons on his drawers. The pants fell to his ankles and he stood there fully exposed from the waist down. Olivia said not a word, she simply looked, and Liberty felt that never before in his life had he been so thoroughly looked at by anyone, imagining himself visibly shrinking beneath her stringent scrutiny.

  When she finished, she nodded curtly, her countenance as blank and unreadable as a masque at a ball. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s not everyone who would provide such a service for a lonely plantation wife.”

  “Well I thank you, ma’am, for being so appreciative.”

  “You may as well put on my husband’s things now,” she said. “You’re already half-undressed.” And she turned and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  That night, alone in the room she insisted he occupy while she slept with one of the older daughters, tossing fretfully in the very bed lately shared by Olivia and her departed husband, Liberty was visited by unbidden fantasies of a decidedly salacious nature until hours into the struggle, he heard, filtering through the thin walls, the distinct sounds of a woman sobbing and, as long as he was awake, the sound did not stop.

  In the morning she thanked Liberty for his kindness, saying she expected she would ask Jasper and his son to bring around the wagon and help her go retrieve the body of her father, firmly rebuffing Liberty’s offers of assistance, saying he had cares enough to attend to and she wished him well. She kissed him once on the cheek, they exchanged good-byes, and Liberty marched off down the road. When he paused to look back, she had vanished.

  Child and adolescent, Liberty had so often visited the old homestead in his mind—inspecting the spacious grounds, greeting the hands, drifting down the long carpeted corridors, caressing furniture worn into intimate family contours, sampling the distinct atmosphere of each individual room—he was sometimes surprised by the stark realization he had yet to set foot in the actual house, having perhaps forgotten that the entire grand edifice had been fabricated for him solely out of words, the bright lumber of a mother’s recollections.

  Now, hiking up the sandy road along a river winding sluggishly through this exotic low country, swollen feet blistered and sore in ill-fitting boots, numerous bug bites of an exceeding itchiness appearing mysteriously on skin exposed or not, he was struck by the unimaginable (at least to him) quality of the place. He could never have foreseen the brooding impenetrability of the encompassing forest, the alligator dozing here and there in the
pungent mud, the gaudy eye of a blue heron fixed resolutely upon him from the clattering reeds or the bony old white man in a lopsided wagon some miles back who was proud to inform Liberty he’d lost his right blinker in an eye-gouging contest back in Old Hickory times when this country’d still amounted to something. Deep inside the cratered socket, the collapsed skin was all puckered up like a little shrunken mouth. Trotting along behind the wagon on a length of frayed rope fastened around his neck was a black boy of about ten.

  “Ever hear tell of the Emancipation Proclamation?” inquired Liberty.

  No, the driver allowed, he had not.

  Liberty explained.

  “Don’t recognize Black Republicans in this state,” muttered the driver. “Jeff Davis is president of this here country and he ain’t freed any niggers I ever heard of. And he ain’t about to, neither.”

  “Federals might have a say in that.”

  “Let ’em come. I’m too nigh the grave to be afeared of any Yankees.”

  The driver then went on to declare that though he’d been born and bred in the county, never passing the line more than once or twice throughout his mortal existence, he thought he might have heard of that Redemption Hall but couldn’t rightly say if Liberty was headed in the proper direction or not or even what the proper direction might be. Liberty left him scolding the boy for having dared to wet, as he stood there in the dust, “his one good pair of breeches”—a ridiculously outsized meal sack clumsily cinched about the boy’s skinny waist.

  An hour later, rounding a graceful bend in the river (he’d been on the right road after all), Liberty was abruptly presented with an initial revelatory view of the ancestral homestead as it appeared not in fancy but in harsh, implacable fact. First he spied the landing, or what remained of it, a sad asymmetry of tilted piles, precarious roosts for adventurous gulls, one of which was topped by a carved wooden pineapple, symbol of hospitality, and then, in a rapid series of irrevocable glimpses, between thick columns of peeling live oak, the Big House itself—in size physically imposing, though the bleak, unpainted façade certainly offered no intimidating vision of unspeakable opulence and romantic ease. Perched on four sturdy corner posts in order to encourage air circulation and inhibit insect traffic, the “mansion” also provided sheltering shade for a family of dozing hogs and a brace of scraggly chickens pecking furiously away at several small heaps of unidentifiable trash. There was a shabby, secondhand tone to the place, as if the entire hall had been hastily hammered together out of discarded boards and logs. Even the surrounding vegetation seemed utterly used up, the leaves of the myrtle bushes hanging dull and listless, the brittle branches of the nearby oak, magnolia and cypress trimmed in ill-fitting wigs of crinkly Spanish moss, nature itself a haphazard construct of cast-off material.

  A dilapidated fence, fallen altogether away in some sections, enclosed the grounds, and out front, lounging against the top rail in attitudes of studied insouciance, were two black men of medium build and indeterminate age, one of whom was outfitted in a suit of striking design, shirt and pants fashioned entirely of mismatched patches of diverse cloth, patches sewn atop patches. His companion, bearded, with bright brown eyes, was dressed in ordinary homespun, and both men displayed upon their hands and faces a mottled network of strange, open sores Liberty had never encountered before.

  “How dee-dee, Master,” called the patched man in a genial, insinuating tone.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” responded Liberty, which greeting occasioned an outburst of raucous laughter from the two men. Amused himself, Liberty stepped forward to formally shake each man’s roughly callused hand. “How goes it?” he asked.

  “Well, sir,” Patches replied, “take it all around, could be better, could be worse, but, tell you true, that there sun’s”—squinting meaningfully skyward—“growing brighter by the day.”

  “Lighting up the country like God’s own lantern,” seconded the bearded one. “I’m seeing things now ain’t never been seen before.”

  “Glad to hear it. Guess, on this farm, the jubilee has already arrived?”

  “Not quite, Master,” said Patches, “but it sure is drawing mighty close.”

  “Please,” requested Liberty, “if you would, please refrain from addressing me as ‘master.’ I am master of no one. I am hardly even master of myself.”

  The two black men exchanged a significant look. “Sir,” questioned Patches, now boldly eying Liberty up and down, “you ain’t a Carolinies man, are you?”

  “Surely not,” agreed the bearded one.

  “Fact, you must be from somewheres so far off they ain’t never even heard the word ‘slavery.’”

  “No doubt,” seconded the bearded one.

  “Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know where that mythical land could possibly be, but yes,” Liberty admitted, “I have dared a treacherous distance to arrive finally at the fallen gates of the fabled Redemption Hall, if that is indeed where I now find myself.”

  “Oh,” declared Patches, “this is Redemption Hall all right, but like the rest of us, it ain’t what it used to be.”

  “‘Grass in the cotton,’” crooned the bearded one, “‘weeds in the corn.’”

  “Is Mr. Maury about?” inquired Liberty.

  “Oh yes, he’s about,” Patches replied, “but about what we surely do not know.” A second round of outrageous laughter.

  “What, may I ask, are those terrible sores on your bodies?”

  “These?” asked Patches, indicating the raw, weeping ulcers on his forearm. “Well now, these here are not sores, they’re speculating spots.”

  “Speculating spots?”

  “Yes,” explained the bearded man, “some more of Master Asa’s demon witchery. Always bragging he could raise up the dead, bring down the moon, change the leopard’s hide, but nothing come of it I could see but this here pox.”

  “Do they hurt?” Liberty asked, appalled by the angry toxic appearance of their many and variously sized blemishes.

  “Not so much,” answered Patches. “Itches like hell sometimes just before a big blow, but never bothered me much except when the master first put that damn medicine on. Bad as bee stings then.”

  “And what, pray tell, was the purpose of applying this so-called medicine?”

  “Why, to make us white, of course. Master been trying to turn everything white around here since back around the time Mistis Roxy run off.”

  “Where’s Mr. Maury now?”

  “Reckon he’s where he always is, up in the speculating shed back of the big house.”

  “Will you show me?”

  “Reckon not. Master don’t like to be disturbed when he’s in there conjuring.”

  “I guess I can manage to find it by myself.”

  “Then good luck to you, sir,” cautioned Patches. “Just don’t let him spill nothing on you. Under all that dirt and sunburn you already look whiter than a pot of boiled milk.”

  Boot soles slipping and squeaking, Liberty followed the long sloping path of crushed oyster shells up to the waiting house, where he recognized immediately the scrawny orange tree from whose upper branches his mother, leaning out her bedroom window, had often plucked her morning fruit. Her warped sill, her very hand. Was it possible, he wondered, to be visited for even a mercifully brief instant by a piercing nostalgia for a past one had never personally experienced? In some form or another he had passed this way before. Of that he was quite certain.

  The gallery was deserted but for a sleeping dog, a sea green broken-backed rocking chair, its loosened sticks held precariously upright with crudely knotted twine, and on the boards nearby a heavy earthenware mug which, when raised to Liberty’s alert nostrils, revealed itself as having been the recent container of an intoxicating spirit of some considerable force. Cautiously, he approached the strangely inert animal. Detecting a slight but rhythmic heaving of the ribs, he touched the toe of his boot to the red-furred hound’s bony back. “Hey,” he called softly. “Hey, pooch.” The dog lifted h
is head, granted Liberty one extended doleful stare before nuzzling its gray-whiskered snout back between balding paws.

  An open window offered a conveniently framed view of the front parlor, a spartan room spartanly furnished, the centerpiece a sprung horsehair couch propped up on one end by a stack of yellowing law books, on the floor a faded rug, on one of the otherwise bare walls a series of six curiously murky paintings, each no more than six inches square, each progressively darker than the last, all devoid of even the faintest outline of a discernible image. Stepping to the door, which was also open, he rapped softly on the jamb and when there was no reply, called out a few tentative hellos. He entered the house, passing through the deserted rooms like a bewildered apparition abruptly returned to a world forgotten yet oddly familiar. These the walls upon which were once projected the pure dreams of youth, this the favorite chair in whose unyielding embrace resided the comforting notion of home, that the very cup of buttermilk pleasures, its rim memorized by corporeal lips. Cherish the past, no matter how bitter, he remembered hearing his mother declaim, therein lies the gate to future freedom.

  From the back door he could see a tattered strand of gray smoke lazily unwinding from the chimney of the kitchen outbuilding, and within a sense of shadowy movement that drew Liberty to investigate. There he found an elderly woman with no teeth and big bony hands who seemed not at all surprised by the sudden appearance of a strange man in her kitchen. She was standing at a table and shaving a monkey in a bowl.

  “Who are you?” she asked, barely glancing in Liberty’s direction.

  “A friend.”

  Up went a skeptical eyebrow. “We don’t have any friends here,” she replied tartly, lifting this amazingly docile monkey’s right arm and expertly drawing a straight razor down across his lathered armpit.

  “I’m not from here.”

  “Didn’t think you were.” She had now begun shaving the belly, and Liberty was intrigued to note how white the animal’s skin actually was.

  “Is Mr. Maury in?”

  “Well, that depends which Mr. Maury you’re asking about.”