The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  Silence.

  “Well?”

  The woman rustled about in the straw. “Don’t expect I have an answer,” she said at last.

  “Are you hungry? Did you get your edibles this noon?”

  Silence.

  “Where’s that damn plate? I tell you, if Luther forgot again today…”

  “There,” said Liberty, pointing to a metal bowl on the dirt floor in which a heel of uneaten bread sat amidst a puddle of uneaten beans.

  “Bridget, Bridget honey,” lamented the old man, “this will not do, this will not do at all. What have I told you, over and over again? You have to eat, have to stay healthy, produce good milk for that new suckling of yours.” He turned to Liberty. “You see firsthand what we’re up against here. Even the adults are little more than overgrown children. Bridget, step on over for a moment so that our visitor may see what a fine specimen you are.”

  After a protracted pause, the woman roused herself from her squalid bedding and shuffled toward them, chains clanking between her bare feet. The old man gripped her by the chin and forcibly twisted her head into a knothole-sized beam of light. “Look,” he exclaimed, “at this remarkable ivory skin. Delicious, isn’t it?”

  “Albino?” To Liberty, from the dimmed presence in her fragile brown eyes, it appeared this woman had long ago vacated the moment, probably permanently, to reside in a separate place private and remote.

  “No, not at all. Examine the features closely, observe the virtual absence of negroid characteristics.” He was stroking her trembling cheek with his knuckles. “No, what you see standing before you is no freak of nature but a different type of mulatto altogether. And the color, isn’t it extraordinary? Fresh cream with a splash of coffee. But wait till you see the baby. Bridget, where’s Wellington?”

  Stooping down, the woman retrieved from her foul nest a bundle of rags which she passed without comment to her master.

  “Now, prepare to gaze upon absolute astonishment,” he boasted, carefully unwrapping the wad of soiled linen to reveal a weak, dwarfish face, chalky in hue, purplish eyelids glued firmly shut, minute fingers curled into translucent balls like grotesque fetuses prematurely hatched from a shell. “Wait, what’s this?” Pinching each of the infant’s pallid, sunken jowls in rapid succession. “This child is no longer breathing.” He glared furiously at the woman who was attentively studying her fidgety feet. “Don’t give me any of your down looks, you insolent wretch. What have you done to your baby?” He flung the swaddled thing against the wall, where it made a plopping sound and then dropped like a spent ball to the earthen floor. “Answer me! Now!”

  She looked up at him, a latticework of tears already streaming down her stricken face. “Nothing, Master,” she stammered hastily, “didn’t do nothing. That babe was poorly from the start.”

  His hand lashed out quick as a moccasin’s strike, the sudden slap catching her full across the left side of her head and pitching her backward to the hard ground, the crack of the blow echoing in the close air like a lingering odor.

  “Are you a doctor?” he cried, looming over her cowering body. “Are you qualified to make such a diagnosis? Why didn’t you seek help? You must have known the infant was ill.” He stared coldly down upon her helplessly heaving back. “Yes, yes, go on, water the soil with your sobs. Maybe what I should do during the next drought is line you people up at field’s edge and drive you all boo-hooing between the rows. Probably double my yield. Nothing the land appreciates more than a good penitential rain.”

  Then a relative calm descended over him as abruptly as his temper had flared. “Sorry you had to witness such an unpleasant scene,” he apologized to Liberty, “but perhaps you have gained a clearer understanding of my chronic dilemma. The obstacles in my path have been nearly insurmountable. How I have managed to achieve even a few modest successes is a miracle only Divinity comprehends.”

  “You are mad.”

  He responded with laughter of unembarrassed abandon. “Of course I’m mad. Everyone’s mad, the country is mad. What is war but public madness, the outward manifestation of an unplumbed and tenacious disturbance? And now the disease of racial differentiation, which has infected us all for generations unnumbered is running its inexorable course. Time is short. I fear for the outcome because it is very likely, in my estimation, that even all this dreadful bloodletting will ultimately do little to drain the insidious pus from our core. That in the aftermath this illness will persist, under newfangled labels of course, cunningly rigged out in fancy masquerade, but beneath the surface persisting nonetheless. No, our social ailment will not be cured by iron and gunpowder. What we require are physics of a boldly imaginative bent. As I have been trying so patiently to explain—have you been attending to my words at all, dear boy?—we can end the curse of color by eliminating color entirely. This unfortunate babe was the most triumphant realization of that happy goal to date. Speaking of which, I really hesitate to ask, Mr. Fish, but would you mind terribly fetching Wellington for me. My lumbago, you know. I can barely lean down of a morning to pull my own boots on. Not too squeamish, are you? I’m sure you’ve handled worse articles on the field of battle. That is the bloody arena from which you have lately retired, is it not?”

  “Yes,” Liberty replied coolly, “and may I remind you that those ‘articles’ were once human beings.”

  “‘Were,’ my boy, ‘were’—the operative word here. Once you’ve been physically and permanently entered into the past tense, does it really matter what is said of you?”

  “Most folks would say yes.”

  “Most folks are fools. Thank you,” he said, accepting the diminutive corpse into his arms. “I’ll dissect the little chap up in my office. See what went wrong. And you,” he added, shifting his attention and his mood onto the weeping mother writhing about in the dirt, “I want you to contemplate the enormity of your crime and how you could’ve been so bad, and I want you to decide on your own just what your punishment should be. I’ll be back later to administer whatever judgment you have chosen. Come, lad, this stifling place oppresses me.”

  Back in his own disheveled den he dropped the dead baby on the desk and began rooting about in the encompassing mess. “There’s a splendid article on the diversity of origin by the great Louis Agassiz you absolutely must acquaint yourself with. Professor of zoology at Harvard, no less. I had the honor, many years ago, of attending his lecture series at the Charleston Literary Club. What a stir in the audience as one hot nugget of wisdom after another was tossed into our laps. A revelatory experience during which one’s intellectual firmament was altered forever. Did you know, for example, that the brain of the grown Negro is equal to that of a seven-month-old fetus in the womb of a white? Or that each of the species, animal and human alike, is the manifestation of a specific thought in the mind of the Creator? Imagine the melancholy state He must have been languishing in the day the Negro race popped into being.” A precarious stack of papers went sliding to the floor and he threw up his hands in defeat. “Well, it’ll turn up eventually and I shall immediately pass it along. Anyway, you must be burning with questions after our eventful call on the charming Miss Bridget. Please, indulge yourself, I shall be delighted to entertain all inquiries.”

  “Where’s Grandmother?”

  “I suppose,” he pretended to go on, pointedly ignoring that particular query, “you must find yourself in a perfect perplexity as to who the father might be. Well, I’ll tell you. It was I. And a frightful chore it was, lying down with that cold woman. She lacked—how shall I put it?—the appropriate scientific spirit for the job. But I knew what had to be done, and I did it.

  “Now, you might further wonder, who exactly is Bridget’s sire? And I would be forced to reply in precisely the same manner. What say you to that?” The gleam in his eye had become so alarmingly pronounced it threatened to escape the gravitational field of the ocular globe altogether.

  “I say your soul is in extravagant peril. Probably the mortal coil along
with it.”

  “On what basis?”

  “Surely you joke. I’m no theologian, but numerous sins appear to be involved here, incest being the most prominent among them, not to mention whatever civil and criminal statutes have also been transgressed.”

  The old man grunted contemptuously. “I leap over laws as if they were broomsticks.”

  “Obviously.”

  “The work is much too important to be fettered by the trifling orthodoxies of small-minded authority. I’m not certain you have fully grasped the historic, nay, epic significance of what you have witnessed today. Had this pathetic suckling survived and grown to a suitable breeding age, I would have been the author of her offspring also. Can you even dare to contemplate the tone, the texture, of those children’s skin?” His voice drifted off into a seductive reverie only he was privy to, posed in statesmanlike attitude atop a bracing mountain peak, the lucent sapphire sky behind him streaming dramatically with clouds of a blazing, uncontested purity. “The iniquities of the world,” he mused softly, “washed away in the blood of my flesh. Can you conceive of such a welcome boon?”

  “But the infant died.”

  “Regrettably, yes. A minor setback that will not deter me from my ordained course.”

  “But isn’t Wellington a boy’s name? How could you proceed with your plan if the child was male?”

  “I’ll baptize the bastards however I damn please. Now let us adjourn to the house and rest in the shade of the gallery. It’s been a trying day.”

  The long trudge up the hill in company was no less dismaying to Liberty than the earlier solitary descent. The old man kept rattling on in his excitable, scattered way about how the rate of insanity among the Negro increased progressively from Pennsylvania to Maine but dropped by half in Delaware and continued declining steadily on down into Florida—the Mason-Dixon line itself drawing a virtual boundary between dementia and reason. An extraordinary statistic! Did you know that seventeen sacred cubic centimeters of cranial volume constitute a permanent intellectual Grand Canyon impossible for our prognathic inferiors ever to bridge? Blessed be the name of the Lord! Or that it was not a snake but Nachash, a Negro gardener dwelling in the Land of Nod with his sooty brethren, who tempted Eve with the apple? His wonders to behold!

  This vicious farrago of humbug, deluded fancy and crackpot ethnology was delivered in a rather genial humor, as if sharing only the most innocuous of local gossip. Liberty, depressed, depleted, the works of his brain ensnared in a kind of all-enveloping mucilaginous fog, kept mum—what possible rejoinder to such raving conviction?—his widening amazement directed not at his mother’s daring rebellion and eventual flight but at how she’d endured life under this lunatic’s roof for as long as she had. And he couldn’t help but loiter for a pensive moment or two about the plausible conjecture of precisely what size portion of ancestral madness, so far as he knew still untasted, had been fated for his plate.

  Still jabbering away like a distracted parrot, the old man led him through the back door of the house, down the main hallway he had already explored, up an imposing staircase of polished mahogany beneath the accusing gazes of a remarkably stolid-looking portrait gallery of male Maurys to a closed door at the far end of a long, unornamented corridor. All was dark, all eerily silent. He tapped tentatively with his knuckle, then cocked his head as if listening for sounds from the bottom of a mine. Then tapped and listened again. “Stay here,” he commanded, cautiously opening the door and slipping inside. Presently Liberty became aware of a rapid exchange of silibants, then a muffled cry, then nothing. The door creaked open. “You may enter,” the old man declared.

  The room had been essentially sealed, windows shuttered and thoroughly obscured by several layers of thick green drapes, the fetid air exceedingly warm. On a nearby nightstand stood a solitary candle, its sputtering flame gasping for oxygen, the uncertain light still sufficient, however, to reveal a mammoth four-poster bed curtained on all sides but one, in which, under an impressive mound of heavy blankets, lay a tiny old woman, her tiny gray head propped upon a pile of feather pillows. She might have been dead but for her eyes, hard, blue, strikingly alert and animated, so radiant they appeared preternaturally lit from within. “Is this he?” she inquired in an equally incongruous voice of surprising clarity and vigor. “Come closer, that I might see.” Warily, Liberty approached the bed. “You do look young,” she pronounced, “quite young,” and, addressing the older man, “You see, he’s got the Maury brow and the cleft chin. Lord, I never thought I’d live long enough to see one of ours come home a Yankee. Of course never thought I’d live to see my own daughter…” The singular voice trailed off into a tremendous stillness.

  “Favors Langdon a mite, don’t you think?” offered the old man, hastening to mend the pause.

  “Touch around the eyes, maybe the nose,” she replied, scrutinizing Liberty’s features as if he were a commissioned portrait. “You don’t suppose he has any nigger blood in him? Something suspicious about the mouth, don’t you agree?”

  “She wrote that the husband was a New Yorker.”

  “Well,” declared the woman, as if that fact were explanation enough. “But never mind. All my life I’ve struggled to embrace white and black alike. Come here, boy, let Grandma give you a kiss.”

  Liberty edged closer.

  “Well, bend down, for Christ’s sake,” she commanded sharply. “You expect an old shriveled-up woman like me to lift herself up out of her deathbed for you?”

  Liberty leaned over, inclining his face to within what he hoped was respectful range, and was abruptly startled by the unexpected sensation of her thin, papery lips pressing somewhat indecorously against his. There was no suitable comparison. It was like sparking with your own granny.

  “He smells,” she announced decisively.

  “Oh, oh,” stammered Liberty, still slightly distracted by the intimate matriarchal touch. “Terribly sorry, I’ve been traveling through open country for some weeks now, occasions for refreshing oneself being understandably rare.”

  “I didn’t say I minded. God knows the promiscuous bouquet of man and beast I’ve had to endure on this forsaken farm. Yours is rather pleasant, actually, puts me in mind of black pepper.” Turning to her husband: “Remember Aunty Dell’s rabbit stew? How it smelled after sitting overnight in the pot?”

  “Because once we were done, you spit in it to keep her and her brood from sampling any.”

  The woman snorted contemptuously. “They were all such unregenerate thieves. What could I do?”

  “Now, now,” he soothed, “those times are long past.”

  “Yes,” she snapped, “to be replaced by worse ones.”

  “Now don’t go riling yourself up again. You know what can happen.”

  Her pale, bony fingers had begun plucking restlessly at the covers. “Goodness,” she exclaimed, noticing Liberty still standing politely before her, “this boy must be famished. Take him down to the kitchen and have Nicey fix him some supper. “

  The old man sighed. “You know Nicey’s been missing for two days now.”

  “I know no such thing.”

  “We discussed the matter only this morning.”

  “I have no recollection of any fugitive being reported to me since Horace run off for the swamp with a side of bacon.”

  “Horace?” repeated Maury patiently. “That was over twenty-five years ago.”

  “What ridiculous nonsense. You were always no-account on dates, anyway. If Nicey’s gone, who’s been cooking my food?”

  “Old Portia.”

  “Old Portia?” she shrieked in alarm. “You permit a crazy woman to prepare our meals? What careless stupidity! It’s a wonder we’re not all poisoned. Remove her from the kitchen immediately, and I want her replacement to be personally witnessed by you tasting each portion on my plate before it is served to me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “And I should think you would do well to have your own dishes ta
sted, also. I’ve never been able to fathom why I wasn’t laid out in my grave decades ago, brought low by the cruel burden of managing this absurd jamboree all by myself.”

  “Now, Ida, I believe there you are exaggerating again.”

  “How dare you? I never exaggerate. If you hadn’t wasted your life puttering about in that damn shack teaching a monkey how to hold a pencil or whatever profitless folly you’re engaged in out there, you’d know I speak the truth. Conditions on this property have been so monstrous, even from the moment I said ‘I do,’ that a simple recitation of the plain facts sounds like a ten-cent melodrama.”

  “I will not have you blackening the value of my work.”

  “Show me a result and I won’t.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Ida.”

  “Then don’t.” She settled back regally into the immaculate plumpness of her pillows and, through emphatically shut eyes, instructed, “Now go. Get that boy fed. When everything else has gone up the flue, we can yet demonstrate to the world that southern hospitality still prevails through the smoke and the dust.”

  “Nicely put.”

  “Write it down for me so I can read it later.”

  As they hastily withdrew, Liberty thought his ears must be mistaken on hearing Grandmother mumble drowsily, as if already adrift in sleep, a single indelible word—and that word was “Shit.”

  Out in the hallway, as his grandfather fiddled with the latch, a flimsy contrivance of bent nails and string, Liberty was finding himself somewhat disconcerted by the wild fantasy of bringing both fists crashing down onto the back of this stooped old man’s white, white head when Maury shot him an amused glance and said, “She’ll outlive all of us.”

  That night, after a distinctly satisfying platter of dodgers and chicken fixin’s concocted seemingly out of thin air by the moody monkey woman, who apparently was not the dreaded Old Portia, and a julep-fueled rehash of Maury’s rigidly selective views on history, nature, politics and religion—an arrogant amalgam of fact, fancy and folly that would have been outright laughable if it weren’t so potentially lethal—Liberty was shown by his grandfather without comment to a second-floor room he guessed at once must have been that of his mother. He felt as if he’d been conducted into the private sanctum of a great museum where were stored priceless rarities the public was never permitted to see. But after a long, deliberate, respectful exploration of the room he could find little that was demonstrably hers. The bureau, the trunk at the foot of the bed were both disappointingly empty, as was the closet, though he did manage to locate there the loose floorboard under which she had secreted her precious diary. All that remained now were some dried mouse droppings. It was a chamber from which all evidence of previous occupation had been thoroughly expunged.