The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  “Whose abundant rewards we reap today,” interrupted Grandmother.

  “Too many folks lost in spiritual error,” Maury continued. “We would not find ourselves in the midst of war and desolation had we not strayed so far from the teachings of the Testament, where the prescriptions for the good life are laid out clearly and precisely. This confusion over the issue of bondage is absolutely baseless. Servitude exists as the foundation for every great civilization from the ancients on. It’s the axis of the divine plan. Read Genesis 9:25–27, Genesis 24:35–36, Leviticus 25:44–46, among others.”

  “What about Hebrews 13:3?” interjected Liberty. “‘Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.’”

  “I’ll admit Satan can be found here and there peeking through the bars of sacred verse, but we should bear in mind that he is indeed caged.”

  Grandmother responded with another dismissive snort. “Why I ever even agreed to marry you and settle down on this exhausted patch of nothing is a mystery known only to the angels. Or perhaps the demons,” she added. Her small round head with its wispy halo of thinning gray hair swiveled about to address Liberty. “I’ve wasted my life shackled to an idiot, and I pray to God you should possess better sense. Your mother was the smartest of the brood, and you can only hope you’ve inherited a portion of her brains, which, of course, she must have gotten from me since, well, you’ve just heard a sanitized version of the lunacy that resides on the other side. And to think I could have eloped with that young Franklin boy and run off to Europe and spent my declining years in a Roman villa well out of all this consternation.” She looked to Liberty for signs of sympathy and, when none were forthcoming, quickly averted her head with a theatrical sigh.

  “Ditey!” bellowed Grandfather with genuine heat. “Bring the fucking potatoes! Now!”

  “Your mother,” Mrs. Maury went obliviously on. “Such a beauty, too.”

  “Not as beautiful as Aurore,” commented Grandfather.

  “No, not as beautiful, but she could have had any man in the state. We were so sorry when we heard about the accident. We even gave the niggers the day off to mourn. Honestly, I don’t believe Redemption Hall has ever been the same since.”

  “No,” Maury agreed, gazing somberly down at his own reflection in his empty plate, “none of us have.”

  “Even though, of course, we had always regarded her as dead long before the actual event, the news of its terrible reality came as quite a shock.”

  “We made a mistake with her,” interposed Maury in an uncharacteristically chastened tone.

  “We made a mistake with all of ’em,” she snapped back. “That’s what happens. What are we supposed to do about it now? Five of ’em gone already, and the other might as well be for all we know. Chasing after glory and a storybook life that never could be, never was for anybody. Just a silly, destructive dream, that’s all. A dream that’s failed, as we have failed as a family. And now it’s our turn to go, and frankly I’m looking forward to it. The fire and ice of hell couldn’t be much worse than what I’ve been privileged to endure as a dragooned member of this dissolute clan.”

  “Stop this nonsense at once,” ordered Maury angrily. “You’re tired and hungry and don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “The boy knows. He understands. I can see it in his eyes.” She reached over to pat the back of Liberty’s hand. “I’m so glad you were able to make this visit. You can tell the others what became of us. The world blew up and took Ida and Asa with it. Tell them that. That’s what I want them to hear.”

  At the sound of approaching footsteps, as arrhythmic and heavy as bricks being dropped singly onto the floorboards, the dinner party turned as one to observe an ancient woman dressed in a parti-colored frock bearing a huge chipped bowl of steaming vegetables. Her crooked nose had obviously been broken sometime in the distant past and never correctly reset, and her left ear reduced to a twisted knot of cartilege stuck to the side of her balding gray head.

  “What in the name of weeping Jesus is this?” demanded Mrs. Maury, indignantly examining the dish placed on the table before her. “These aren’t potatoes, they’re goddamn turnips!”

  “There ain’t any more potatoes,” replied Ditey, wringing her hands, wiping them on her dress. “This here is all we got.”

  “There were potatoes yesterday,” insisted Mrs. Maury, stabbing a turnip with her fork. “What happened to ’em?”

  “All et up, I expect.”

  “Yes, and I’m sure all you thieving ingrates made a fine meal of it too, leaving us to dine on this miserable hog food. And they aren’t even properly cooked. These things are as hard as stones.”

  “I did the best I could, Missus.”

  “Well it wasn’t good enough, and it’s never been good enough, you worthless bitch.” Grandmother lifted her knife as if preparing to carve some fowl. “Hold out your hand.” And with a single swift movement she opened the cringing woman’s palm to the bone. In an instant, with a savage cry, Ditey was upon her, the chair overturning, both women toppling to the carpet, Ditey’s hands, blood spilling from the one in shocking amounts, locked tight as iron collars about her mistress’s scrawny neck, a stunned Liberty only half-risen from his seat as Grandfather, with astonishing celerity, charged around the table, seized a chair and brought it crashing down upon Ditey’s head in a dreadful splintering of wood and skull. Then, yanking the unconscious cook from atop his wife’s body, Maury knelt down beside her, wiping the blood off her neck and face with the napkin Liberty, at a loss to do anything else, had handed him. “Get some water,” he ordered.

  Out in the kitchen, the other servants having briskly fled, Liberty found only a distraught young girl crouching under a table. “What’s going to happen?” she cried frantically. “What’s going to happen now?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied calmly, grabbing a half bucket of water from the counter. “You’d best get out of here.”

  Back in the dining room Maury had managed to prop his semiconscious wife into a sitting position against the wall where he now knelt, dabbing tenderly at her ashen cheeks.

  The moan issuing from her tiny, fishlike mouth was of such an unusually low pitch and impossibly long duration that it seemed to be emanating from beneath the floor.

  “You’re all right,” Maury kept repeating. “You’re going to be all right.”

  Grandmother’s eyes fluttered open. “No,” she whispered in a faint, diminished voice, “I’m not all right.”

  “There’s not even a bruise,” Maury observed, carefully inspecting her neck.

  “Is she dead?” came the voice, ever more feeble.

  Maury glanced over at where Ditey lay facedown in a widening puddle of her own blood. She appeared to be still breathing. “I believe so.”

  “Good.” The eyes closed again. “Isn’t anyone going to give me a drink of water?”

  At a nod from his grandfather, Liberty dipped a cup into the bucket and held it to his grandmother’s trembling lips.

  “Are you able to walk?” Maury inquired.

  Impatiently, she pushed away Liberty’s hand. “No, I’m not able to walk. How can you ask such a ridiculous question? I’ve just been almost murdered.”

  “I think you’ll feel better upstairs in your bed.”

  “Apparently I have no choice in the matter.”

  “We’ll help you.” Then he and Liberty lifted her unsteadily to her feet and, without much more grace or skill than the servants who had originally brought her down, half carried and half dragged the querulous old woman back into the hallway, up the rackety stairs, down the musty corridor and into her bed where, her little girl’s body decorously arranged beneath the covers, her exposed head rested on the pillow like a sculpted bust of rare worth, eyes as black and resolute as stones.

  “This is the end,” she muttered. “The absolute end.”

  “Goodnight, Ida.”

  “Goodnight,” seconded Liberty, the unspoken “Grandma” practically audible
in his ears.

  “Goodnight?” she sneered. “It’s two in the afternoon.”

  “Once your lids are shut,” noted Maury, “what difference does it make?”

  “Get out,” she commanded wearily, “the both of you.”

  As they descended the stairs, Maury’s face assuming an additional stratum of petrification at each step, Liberty found himself increasingly distracted by the alarmingly high proportion of familiar features—his own, largely—he could detect in the ancestors’ likenesses arrayed so symmetrically down the wall. As if the unholy mess of one family’s problematical past could be subverted or even ignored by a simple touch of ornamental harmony.

  At the foot of the stairs Maury paused. “As you might have reckoned,” he informed Liberty, “I have some further business with the dependents which requires my immediate attention. The library’s in there. Help yourself. I’ll be back for you later this evening. I have a special treat prepared.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “No, you needn’t trouble yourself. I’ve been handling such matters since before you were born, and I expect I can make a fist of this one just fine. In the meantime, read a book, take a nap.” And he departed through the back door, leaving Liberty alone in the hallway to absorb the private sounds of the house. It was so quiet he could discern even the faint metallic cadences of the clock in Grandfather’s office, each separate, steady tick as sharp and harsh as the scraping of a cold chisel on marble.

  The library was a modest room with one chair, one hopelessly abraded red velvet sofa and one bookcase, most of the shelves half-empty, most of the remaining volumes mildewed and insect-ridden, and, except for a forlorn cultural outpost of about a dozen novels by Scott and Dickens, all the titles chanted the same dreary singsong he’d already heard down in the “office,” of skulls and saxons, genesis and genealogy. He grabbed a copy of Great Expectations, its first twenty pages mysteriously missing, and retired to his room.

  Stretched out on the bed, unable to read or think, he allowed himself to subside gratefully into the all-enveloping cloudiness of a deep feather mattress, into nothingness.

  He came awake to disorienting darkness and a knocking so forcefully insistent—the door rattling in the jamb at each blow—it seemed like something begun in a dream and then willed into existence by its own brute necessity. Liberty managed to pull himself up in bed and croak out a feeble “Yes?”

  “It’s Asa.”

  “Come in.” He realized he was still lying atop the sheets in all his clothes and muddy boots. “If you would, sir, please excuse me. In my fatigue I seem to have inadvertently soiled the linen.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself with such trash,” Maury responded. “Earlier today I promised you a surprise, and now I’ve come to make good.”

  Liberty swung his legs out onto the floor. “How’s Ditey?”

  “Neither more, nor less, than she should be. Now hush, and follow me.”

  He led Liberty to a plain, unmarked door at the far end of the hallway from Grandmother’s, a door bolted on the outside. “Valuable contents within,” he revealed in an alcohol-scented stage whisper, genuine excitement infecting his manner for the first time since his infatuated lectures on the human brain pan. Pushing back the door, he presented Liberty with a theatrical bow, insisting, “After you.”

  The entire chamber had been dramatically transformed into a dazzling cube of pure white, every exposed surface, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, liberally coated in several layers of untinted wash, the startling effect heightened by the dozens of candles scattered haphazardly about the floor but for the orderly double row at Liberty’s feet that formed an illuminated path to the bed, the sole article of furniture in the room, freshly sheeted and from its mahogany posts draped in endless yards of billowing muslin. Posed before this monstrous object—despite appearances, a ship whose dream weather would no doubt always be inclement—was a young girl, younger even than Liberty, and also wrapped in immaculate muslin, though of insufficient quantity to obscure wholly the naked body beneath. On her head she wore a makeshift crown of cotton bolls and in her right hand she gripped a rusty hoe. Her smooth, glowing face was a perfect blank, her eyes inaccessible voids.

  “Liberty,” Grandfather announced with a certain degree of apprehensive ceremony, addressing his grandson by name for the first time, “I would like to introduce you to Slavery.” He made a petulant gesture with his hand, to which the girl responded immediately with a slight curtsy, the hoe, however, in the process, tumbling to the floor and knocking over several candles.

  “Christ on a stick!” shouted Maury, springing forward to correct the damage. “Have you any wits about you at all, you stupid cunt. Burning down the house, screwing on the parlor rug, crapping down the well, it’s all the same to you, isn’t it? Why, I ought to—” The girl cowered before him, anticipating the blow. “You’d like me to hit you, wouldn’t you? Show the stranger here just what a terrible ogre your master truly is. Well, the stranger already knows, and he certainly doesn’t require any instruction from—”

  “Please,” Liberty interrupted. “Would you please stop badgering this girl?”

  “She’s my daughter,” Maury proclaimed blandly. “I’ll do with her as I see fit. There, the secret of the evening revealed, and not exactly the stirring climax I had so tantalizingly envisioned.”

  “Would you please tell me,” Liberty asked, exasperated, “what all this tedious grotesquery is about?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I want you to plant a sucker in her.”

  “So you can examine the result?”

  “Yes, so I can examine the result. I’ve already been granted a glimpse, you know, in my mind’s eye, of the fruit of such a noble union. I foresee a favored issue, impeccable in proportion, sound of judgment, exemplary in character and, need I add, unblemished in complexion—the inheritor of our future, the final yield of my dreams, the glory of a nation.”

  “Your lunacy exceeds the bounds of definition.”

  “But I have freely, even cheerfully confessed to you my own spectacular derangement. And, on the cosmic scale, what is the eternal value of such a bold admission? I’ll tell you. A bungtown copper, that’s what. Because it may very well be that the universe itself is what we call crazed and the appearance of such a condition in an ordinary human implies that the individual has only adjusted himself as he would to a suit of ill-fitting clothes, for the commendable purpose of attaining a more accurate alignment with the stars.”

  “Well, that beats my flush.”

  “Good. Now, enjoy yourself. I shall see you again at breakfast.” He headed toward the door.

  “Hold on. I feel obliged to point out the curious irony that you, an unapologetic, antiabolitionist soul stealer, working alone in secret, have surpassed every other member of this tormented family, including us northern agitators, in the pursuit of amalgamation. You not only promote intimate relations between the races, you actively practice it.”

  “Prophetic vision is a merciless gift.”

  “And mercy itself a greater dispensation.”

  “I shan’t bandy words with you on this topic any longer. You have a pressing duty to perform, and I would suggest you not waste time. Remember, I have a parson’s faith in you and despite the evident distastefulness of the deed, you’re a Maury, you’ll find a way through.” The door closed behind him, the bolt slammed pointedly shut.

  By the time Liberty turned around, the girl had somehow freed herself from her muslin cocoon and now stood revealed before him in all her youthful nubility, any seductive appeal altogether dampened by an expression of such abject submissiveness on her face that he could only look away.

  “Have you any real clothing?” Liberty asked, noting the pile of gauzy material at her feet.

  “No, sir,” she replied. “Most of the time Master keeps me penned up in here with nothing but a handful of frill to cover my quim.”

  “Well, here,” he said, yanking a sheet from the bed
. “Wrap this around you. I’m not the master.”

  “Aren’t you going to make a baby with me?” she asked, obviously quite surprised.

  “No,” returned Liberty promptly, “there’ll be no baby making tonight. Given the genealogical anarchy that prevails in this house, by my calculations I do believe, and I think correctly, that you are my aunt.” He tried the door with his shoulder; it refused to budge. “What’s your name?” he asked, stepping between the candles to the open window.

  “Slavery,” she insisted.

  “I mean your real name, your Christian name.” Outside the window were no conveniently located trees to shimmy down. The drop was straight to the ground.

  “Slavery is my real name.”

  “You’ve never been called anything else since your birth?” he asked, incredulous.

  “You mean my buckra name or my nigger name?”

  “Please, don’t use that word. It makes my ears twitch. Tell me, what did your mother call you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes you do. What did she call you?”

  The innocent question plunging the girl into a quandary of no minor scale, the internal contest writ plain across her countenance, she must have finally concluded that this was one white boy for whom the rules of the place were mere signs, erected to be transgressed. “Tempie,” she answered shyly.

  “Tempie? Good. Now was that so hard?”

  “Master spoke about you all the time,” she dared to go on, “ever since I was a wee babe. He always said you’d show up here one day.”

  “He did, eh?” The bleached, featureless claustrophobia of the room was starting to oppress him. He felt as if he were trapped inside a snowbank.

  “Master said there was a powerful calling on you that you’d try to throw off, but it stuck to you like tar.”