The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  Then there was the bed, the one dominating article of furniture. He walked around it a few times, actually contemplated curling up on the hardwood floor, but finally plain weariness of bone and heart nudged him mattressward where he lay like a painted figure atop a sarcophagus, pondering the imponderable mysteries of time and family. The smoldering fantasies of revenge, the grand schemes for personally administering a sublime brand of exquisitely calibrated justice usually found only in the wishful pages of airy romance or in visions of afterlife proceedings before the bar of God, now seemed hopelessly childish and futile. These ghastly people who had, over years of reiterated tales of their fabulous exploits, assumed in youthful reverie ogreish proporions of utter invincibility appeared in their furrowed flesh to be little more than puny, imprisoned creatures, old, deranged, lost. And what could one do about that?

  If he slept at all during his first fervid night on ancestral ground, it was a slumber hardly worthy of the name, an anxious roll between the sheets, endeavoring in vain to elude unwelcome visitations from the ever-present past, memories of his mother mostly, but her memories, not his, yet somehow through a kind of occult agency transmitted clearly and abundantly, scenes from a young girl’s passage through the privileged world of the southern landed gentry and, strangely enough, the heart’s most piercing intensities fully refracted through the implacably commonplace: the emblazoned side of the gin house at dawn; the spooky intelligence in her spaniel’s wet brown eyes; Mother Maury at the piano at candle lighting, each distinct note as pure, as melancholy, as transient as the fading western sky; the thrill of Baylor’s lips behind a peeling oak tree at the Charleston cotillion; a rusted shackle lying untouched for months in the shade of the big house—a shifting cargo of perilous remembrances sufficient at times to scuttle even the sturdiest ship of being, often resulting in such convulsive episodes as “the month of tears,” so termed by a sardonic Thatcher, when Mother (his mother) rarely left her New York room, seemingly unable to keep from bawling for hours at a time, and Liberty, a frightened and helpless son, resolving then with all the fierce determination of a half-formed eight-year-old mind that once grown up he would find and punish terribly the fiends responsible, whoever they were.

  Now, as he thrashed about in the lair of the beast, so to speak, mulling obsessively over the unforeseen intricacies of his visit, ruefully concluding that he, too, was as trapped as his forebears in the venomous nettles of the overarching family tree, he became aware of a disturbance in the atmosphere, faintly at first, then swelling swiftly in volume, the sound of querulous voices raised in contention and though muffled by the intervening walls, still capable of conveying to his attentive ears an audible quality of daggers slashing at the air. It’s me they’re arguing about, he understood at once, a visible embodiment of their once beloved daughter’s unforgivable treachery, the insidious canker in the genealogy, a corruption to be coldly felled, sectioned and kindled into fine powder. It is Grandmother, Liberty surmised, who wishes him gone, returned to a banishment too good for him and his kind. But perhaps Grandfather, amused by his youthful audacity, had begun warming to him and might, after a probationary day or two, take Liberty aside for a private palaver on the hypocritical paradoxes of life above the Mason-Dixon line, then attempt to satisfy what must be a natural parental curiosity about the fate of his daughter, a woman he last glimpsed in the flesh more than two decades ago. And, if Grandfather asked, how would Liberty reply? She is dead, sir, he might explain, first driven to distraction, then harried to her grave by Furies you and Grandmother incubated and nourished to exact petty vengeance for a courageous assumption of moral duty you people, in your mutual blindness, could not perceive as anything other than willful disobedience, Furies I recognize even now leering from the wallpaper, decorating the trees, perching atop each and every fence post, Furies gathering themselves, I fear, for the final hunt, and this time, Grandfather, the quarry will be you and your invalid wife. Could he actually dare utter such damning language to a man who was still as much a stranger as he was kin? Well, Liberty was a pirate, remember; he knew how to bide his time until the moment was ripe for running up the black flag.

  Maury came for him at dawn with a steaming cup of what passed for coffee in those straitened parts, a groggy Liberty startled at his window by the postdiluvian spectacle of flattened grass, dripping leaves and countless metallic-bright puddles of water standing about in the yard, as if the land itself had broken out into weepy eruptions.

  “Rheumatoid’s acting up in all this dampness,” complained Maury, clutching his grandson’s shoulder as they laboriously descended the gallery steps. “Sleep well?”

  “Apparently so,” admitted Liberty, not having heard a single drop.

  “Rain on the roof, a soothing elixir vitae to the weary wayfarer. How many times, frazzled and sore, have I found myself, even in woefully inadequate foreign quarters, nodding plumb off to the gentle lullaby of an evening drizzle in my ear? Suppose it reminds us of the womb or some such truck.”

  “How’s Grandmother today?”

  “Wouldn’t know. Elsie does a bang-up job of tending to her. I haven’t slept in the same room with the woman since Nullification. Watch your step there”—brusquely yanking him around an impressive pile of dog manure. “A good soaking turns this place into one big crap farm. All varieties and shapes, too. There’s a cash crop for you.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Probably make a better job of it than with this cussed cotton. Got bad rust in that field there,” he noted, pointing through the trees. “And a plague of caterpillars in the one yonder. And I’ve just received word another of the gins has seized up, so we’re only working two today. If I weren’t already crazy the futile attempt to coax a marginal profit out of these shiftless people and this played-out land would’ve brought the asylum cart to our door years ago. See those banks?” He indicated several distant acres of cleared ground laid out in ridged rows of soil and straw. “Those are my eating potatoes. Finest leatherjackets in the state. As you shall soon discover later at table. Ah, here we are.” He had led Liberty through the mud and the mist to a long, narrow, weatherbeaten shack from whose malodorous interior seemingly emanated every unbearable sound of which human beings in distress are capable. “The sickhouse,” he announced, in grand butlerian tones.

  “What’s all this commotion in here?” demanded Maury, stepping through a filthy curtain of frayed linen.

  An overwrought woman with a milky eye and the letters A M branded on her cheek rushed forward. “It’s Goldie, Master, she got a griping in the bowels and it pains her terrible.”

  “Well, what do you expect me to do about it? Brew up some of that cross root or fence grass and pour it down her whining throat.”

  “Already did, Master, and she’s worse than ever.”

  “Well, we shall see about that. Goldie, where are you? Goldie!” Out of the clustering mob of howling, wailing, women, children and babies, all uniformly plastered from sole to crown in such a baked-on crust of matter biological and mineral it was obvious no bar of soap had approached anywhere near skin in weeks, if not months, came a timid young woman in a stained calico gown split up the back.

  “Now then,” asked Maury not unkindly, “where do you hurt?”

  She pointed shyly to her belly.

  “Lift up your dress.”

  Removing the ring from his belt, Maury chose one of the longer keys and began insistently pressing the business end into various spots on her stomach and abdomen while inquiring, “Does this hurt? Or that?” and the girl repeatedly shook her head no.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” he declared. “Have her back in the fields by noon.”

  “But Master,” pleaded the ward mistress, “she can barely walk.”

  “Are you deaf? Did you hear what I said? Maybe what I should do is send for Doctor Cooper, eh? Get ol’ Doc Coop over to examine all of you malingerers. How’d you like that?”

  “Now, now, Master, we don’t need that old fool mucking abou
t in here. My medicine’s as good as his. Maybe I’ll make up one of my turpentine and chestnut seed poultices for Goldie. Haven’t tried that yet.”

  “Oh, really? Thought that peanut brain of yours might be able to come up with something. I’m sure, Goldie, that shortly all this nonsense will pass away and you’ll be out there in the bottom pulling bolls like a machine.”

  Several small children who had attached themselves to Liberty almost immediately remained fast at his side, clutching tenaciously at his trouser legs. He felt immobilized in body and mind.

  “How’s Bridget?” asked Maury. “She’s the one I’ve come to see.”

  Glancing away, the ward mistress pointed mutely to a lump under a ratty blanket. Nearby, two naked women struggled together on the dirt floor, apparently in the final stages of childbirth.

  “Dead, eh?”

  “She tried, Master, she tried awful hard not to fail you, but them galls was just too much for her little body.”

  “Well, get her buried then, and I don’t want you to be carrying on all day about it either, understand? Plant her and get back to work. And by tomorrow I want at least half these shamming wretches cleared out of here. I got more people in this sickhouse than I do in the damn quarters. Come,” he said to Liberty, who was daintily prying each child’s hand, a grimy finger at a time, from his pants. “If I have to swallow one more breath of this deplorable air, I’ll need one of Aunty’s bark concoctions myself.”

  They trudged up the muddy lane toward the Big House in thoughtful silence. The clouds had broken up into ragged pieces a mild west wind was tidily dispersing. Sky’s the same wherever you go, mused Liberty. Comforting notion to carry with you on your transit through life.

  On the front gallery, awaiting their return, stood the overseer, Clement C. Malone, a transplanted northerner who had wandered into Dixie before the war in search of a job suitable to his talents and temperament. Apparently he had found it.

  “My grandson,” asserted Maury, admitting, to Liberty’s astonishment, the blood relation for the first time. “Come all the way from New York state.”

  Malone cocked an interested eye, examining Liberty as if he’d never before beheld a living human of this particular age or sex. “That so? I hail from Brattleboro, Vermont, myself. Used to teach school up there.” His grip felt like a clutchful of twigs wrapped in an old glove.

  “Passed through the place once,” Liberty remarked.

  “Business? Pleasure?”

  “Believe I was running away from home at the time.”

  The overseer glanced at Maury and chuckled dryly. “Itchy feet seem to run in the family. Contagious too—most of the servants being likewise affected.”

  “Easy now,” cautioned Maury. “I don’t pay you to strew insults upon my name.”

  “Or to do anything else, for that matter,” Malone replied, avoiding eye contact by fumbling around in his pockets for something he couldn’t find.

  “Now, Clement, I don’t notice you wanting for food, shelter or clothing.”

  “There are other wants.”

  “Yes, but none you really need filled. As I have previously explained, with great forbearance I might add, this plantation is a joint-stock enterprise. We rise and we fall as one. When I have money, you shall have money. If everyone had grasped this simple principle from the start, had pulled together as a team, perhaps we wouldn’t find ourselves in our present predicament.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I would venture to suggest that with the unforeseen, catastrophic events now ruling us it wouldn’t have mattered how hard we pulled, we would not have been able to outpace the bluebellied tide. In fact,” he added, with a sly gaze in Liberty’s direction, “looks like the advance guard has already arrived.”

  “Mr. Malone, the entire country can go down for all I care, but here at Redemption Hall we are staying up, do you understand? We are not going down.”

  “Tell that to the hands. Two more bolted this morning.”

  “Who?”

  “Moses and Ella.”

  “Perfidious bastards. Well, let them go. I want only the faithful around me. In the pattyroller times we would have treed ’em and hung ’em from same. I should have whipped the pair of them more often when they were younger. That’s where you take your durable lessons in love and devotion—at the tip of the lash.”

  “Horace quit hoeing again today after about an hour and says tomorrow he might not do any hoeing at all.”

  “Well, then, lay into him, man, lay into him good.”

  “Be happy to, Mr. Maury, but I wanted to check with you because, as you know, the administration of discipline in our current circumstance can provoke some additional, rather inexpedient problems.”

  “You provide the correction and I’ll worry about the consequences.”

  “Very well, sir.” And, with a tip of his hat, he abruptly departed.

  “The bottom’s dropped out of that imbecile’s gut,” Maury muttered, and then, as if struck by some untoward occurrence, invisible to Liberty, sullying the immutable perfection of the clear horizon, he froze completely for a spell, studying the empty distance as if positively entranced, his expressionless face dominated by what Liberty remembered his mother describing as “faraway eyes,” that invariable precursor to a day spent brooding in his office or, worse, striding around the property in full possession of what the intimidated family termed his “manwrath,” harassing dependencies and kinfolk alike. But the mood seemed to pass off quickly enough, and a minute later he was civilly, even cordially inviting Liberty to wash up for the noon dinner, an occasion of occasions, since on this very special day Grandmother had decided, against Maury’s better judgement, to venture forth from her sick room in order to take her meal with her only surviving grandchild.

  Aided by two wheezing, hopelessly inept servants, one on each frail arm, the old white lady was clumsily maneuvered out of her bed, down the creaking staircase and across the barren hall to the dining room, all the while as if wrestling with a sack of dry sticks, where the infirm, impossible woman was unceremoniously deposited in her bespoken padded wheel chair. Once seated, she waved her skeletal fingers in a gesture of impatient dismissal and addressed the waiting room. “I swear, I’ll never become accustomed to those unscrupulous black hands touching me where no proper lady should ever be touched.” She glared accusingly at the slaves now arranged in a respectful rank against the wall, arms decorously folded in attitudes of patient attendance.

  “Now, now,” soothed her husband.

  “Are you daring to imply, Mr. Maury, that I am imagining such improprieties?”

  “I didn’t say that, Ida.”

  “I know you tend to regard me as hardly more than an antiquated fool, so bereft of her senses she cannot distinguish between assistance and assault.”

  “When you’re crazy, Mrs. Maury, I shall be the first to inform you.”

  “Yes, and how would you know, dawdling about in that precious hideaway of yours like a feeble-minded recluse, and what, I’d like to know, has all this blasphemous projecting gotten us but fresh graves in the yard and a mess of crippled niggers?”

  Ignoring the question, Maury leaned back in his chair and called out sharply through the open doorway, “Ditey! We’re ready for the potatoes now!”

  “Jonah,” said Mrs. Maury to one of the ministering domestics as she continued to fuss ceaselessly with her silverware, “you and the others wait outside until requested. I can’t bear to eat with all those devil eyes boring into me.”

  “Nerves bad today?” asked her husband. “We could increase the drops this evening.”

  “At this point, Asa, what does it matter? Awake or asleep, it’s the same accursed life I’m passing through, the same death. And you, boy.” She rotated her chair in Liberty’s direction. “Excuse me for not addressing you by your Christian name, but I find my tongue simply refuses to pronounce the word. You bring a green perspective to all this moth and mildew. What is your opinion of our Red
emption Hall?”

  “With due respect,” replied Liberty, “it’s a bit more than I can adequately absorb in a single day.”

  Her nose made a horrid snorting noise that could almost have been the beginning of a laugh, but wasn’t. “I’ve been here half a century, and I haven’t absorbed a single thing.”

  “Ditey!” Maury shouted again. “Where are those potatoes? I promised the lad potatoes!”

  “I do have a question,” submitted Liberty, somewhat hesitantly. “Redemption Hall. What is it exactly you seek to be redeemed from?”

  “Ourselves,” cracked Grandmother.

  “There may be more truth in that remark than you intend,” Maury observed with a grimly indulgent smile. “My own grandfather, Samuel Maury, cleared the land and named the plantation. An enthusiast of the most dangerous stripe, a bit too enchanted by moonbeams, if you know what I mean, he envisioned the Hall as a sort of school for the natural man where souls were to be educated in the ways of God and, through a magical metamorphosis I’ve never been able to fully comprehend, attain to a paradise, not only spiritual but material as well. You sit at the very heart of what was designed to be a new Eden on earth.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think happened? He went bankrupt. If it weren’t for Whitney and his gin—and who’s to say the Lord was not working mightily through the inspirations of the inventor—the entire estate might have passed out of family hands. As it was, once seeds could be separated from fiber quickly and efficiently, rational Maurys could reestablish the enterprise on a healthy cash basis.”