The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  “I don’t see why one should be denied whatever trifling comforts that chance to come to hand, whatever the circumstances,” replied Mrs. Fripp, who along with her husband had pointedly ignored the table talk, preferring instead a direct assault upon the massive redoubts of food heaped before them. She had already begun reloading her plate for a fresh offensive.

  “But such gratifications,” observed WalIace, “become available only because people like me are willing to risk life and limb to go out and seize them.”

  “Bunkum,” snorted Maury derisively. “You have the effrontery to present your shameless buccaneering as heroic and self-sacrificing when, in fact, you are merely acting for your own gain. I can’t imagine a freckled opportunist such as yourself exhibiting even a passing interest in the Cause if putting coin in your purse weren’t involved.”

  “At least I’m committed to going down with my ship.”

  “If you mean to imply, sir, that I am some sort of coward…”

  “No, not at all. I’m simply suggesting that perhaps your own devotion to our beloved Stars and Bars might be constructed of thinner stuff than you imagine, thinner than greed, for example.”

  “At present, Captain Wallace, I am engaged in important research pertaining to southern ideals that must not be interrupted. Besides, I fear I am so constituted as to be wholly incapable of abiding any possible Yankee future.”

  “What?” questioned Wallace. “Are we all going to be required to wear shoes and eat with utensils?’

  “Should Lincoln’s clerks and shopkeepers prevail, Captain Wallace, we shall find ourselves beguiled into a time of tin soldiers, living in tin houses, rearing tin families. We shall be crucified upon the arms of the clock and then resurrected as machines. The world will be a passionless place devoid of honor, glory and, most of all, romance. And we will be bondsmen of the state, the church and the mill for all the numberless, anonymous days of our played-out lives.”

  “The whole country as a kind of exaggerated plantation?” remarked Wallace, who had been studying this vexatious passenger with enlarged interest. “But without the love, eh?”

  “Bait me if you must, Captain Wallace, but heed this: the dollar is forged of a substance more indestructible than any iron. Shackles can come in many guises. And that is why we fight, sir—for freedom, only for freedom.”

  Wallace leaned back into his chair with a nautical squint, as if trying to read landmarks from a great distance. “You astonish me, Mr. Maury. That you have managed to live so long yet learned so little. Let’s put the issue to our young friend here. The honest clarity of the eye uncorrupted. Tell me, Mr. Fish, what precisely do you understand to be the meaning of this nightmare your country is presently dreaming?”

  “I’d prefer to keep my opinions on such matters private, if you don’t mind.”

  “He’s a Yankee,” blurted Maury. “What do you expect him to think? They all champ on the ends of the same thoughts over and over again. Their views are manufactured on demand by a den of blind jews in a clandestine, windowless basement in the gnarled heart of New York City.”

  “Enchanting,” pronounced Wallace. “I see your own thoughts incline to the partial and the apocryphal.”

  “But I heard the exact story myself,” chimed in Mr. Fripp, laying aside the ham bone he happened to be gnawing on. “Only in my version the jews were also black.”

  “Same people who owned the companies which ran the slave ships,” confirmed Mrs. Fripp. “They don’t care what services they provide, or to whom, as long as their palms are properly crossed.”

  “And now,” Maury continued, “they are scheming for the future I have already alluded to.”

  “Well,” announced Liberty, in an unexpectedly commanding tone, wiping his lips with a napkin which, although apparently freshly laundered, tasted strangely of salt, “such enthusiastic speculation upon the affairs of the day tends to produce a benumbing effect on my brain, and, frankly, it has been a particularly long, arduous day. So, Captain Wallace, thank you for your generous hospitality. Mr. Fripp, Mrs. Fripp.”

  “If the boy is retiring, then so shall I,” asserted Maury. “He’s had difficulty sleeping alone since he was a baby.”

  “But we’ve had no coffee,” protested Captain Wallace. “Or dessert.”

  “I shall look forward to indulging myself thoroughly at breakfast,” replied Maury, rising from his chair.

  “But apple pie,” Wallace called to his departing guests. “Lemon pie, peach pie, cranberry tart, nuts, dates, figs, raisins, oranges, bananas…”

  The morning arrived in a flood of intemperate heat and rude, all-encompassing light that rendered the prolonged visual study of any object, even one nearby and shaded, a task too tiresome to contemplate. The day seemed reduced to a succession of hours that nothing and no one on board could ever adequately fill. As if still crapulous from the sparkling conviviality and strong spirits of the evening previous, an uncharacteristic Captain Wallace spent his watch draped in a largely unapproachable melancholia from which he was occasionally aroused by the sighting on the far horizon of a topmast or a plume of black smoke, none of which, to the relief of the passengers, ever materialized into a closing cruiser or an angry frigate. Mr. G. D. Fripp announced sadly that Mrs. Fripp sent her regrets but would, due to the motion of the boat and her reanimated dyspepsia, remain confined to quarters until further notice. Monday, who had become convinced against all argument that the true destination of the Cavalier was the slave trading posts of Africa, denounced the ship as a wicked craft on a wicked errand and vowed never to speak again for the duration of the crossing, responding to orders or queries with mere grunts or impatient gestures. And Tempie would be neither touched nor addressed without breaking into dramatic fits of convulsive sobbing, unless, of course, she was sobbing already.

  “Appears, my boy, only you and I among our little group retain the last vestiges of physical poise and civility,” Maury observed to his brooding grandson as the two continued their morning promenade around the deck, winding their way between burlapped walls of baled cotton. “You know, Mr. Fripp informs me that most of this crop is his, the final harvest, as he and the missus plan to settle permanently on the island of New Providence in an astonishingly pink bungalow already bought and paid for. He paints quite a congenial scene, what with the sand, the palms, the Atlantic at your window, the immutable weather.” He paused to lean against the rail, ponder the nervous swell and tumble of the sea.

  “Then imagine how great his surprise,” replied Liberty, “when, at the finish to our pleasant excursion, he claps his eyes upon the familiar harbor of Rio de Janeiro.”

  Seizing his grandson roughly by the arm, Maury pulled him close. “Now you hush up about that,” he hissed wetly. “I swear, every time you open your mouth I find my hand moving instinctively for the revolver.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “So you’ve asserted. Monotonously. And if such is rightly the case, then you are not so wise as you sometimes appear. I know you regard yourself as unassailable because of your supposed indispensability to my work, but let me hasten to assure you that I shall permit nothing—nothing, do you hear me?—to hinder the final completion of this project. And if some unforeseeable event transpires which requires me to make some adjustments in the plan, why, so be it.”

  Their meanderings had led them unconsciously to a closet-sized space at the center of the cotton maze that Captain Wallace had ordered prepared as shelter for Mrs. Fripp should the Cavalier come under heavy fire and where they now faced each other no more than three feet apart. “Well,” Liberty commented, “I believe the Confederacy might have made a grievous error when it did not immediately snatch you up for a general. I can see you even now, astride your mount, binoculars in hand, sending in wave after wave of brave boys up Seminary Ridge with about as much compunction as throwing another log on the fire.”

  “One feels an allegiance to one’s duty, that is, if one has ever even deigned to ru
b elbows with such a quaint notion.”

  “Of course, I would expect that someone so entombed within their own mortal idiosyncracies would be absolutely blind to any virtue whatsoever in another. And I refuse to be backed into the position of defending my character before an individual whose own sense of morality is practically nonexistent.”

  “I raised six children in the ways of the Lord from seedlings to flowering tops.”

  “And a fine job you made of it, too.”

  “All were taught their duty and all ventured forth to fulfill it.”

  “Even Mother?”

  “A quick pupil. She mastered the lesson and then learned how to turn it inside out. If I said ‘white,’ she would invariably respond with ‘black.’”

  “Do you know the circumstances of her death?”

  “A carriage accident.”

  So Liberty proceeded to serve up the details: the letter, the tears, the loss of composure, the reckless gallop, the bridge, the fall, the wheel spinning eternally through the affrighted air.

  “So you hold me responsible for her release.”

  “You and Grandmother.”

  “But we weren’t even present.”

  “Yes, you were. You’ve always been at her side, no matter where she journeyed, no matter how she was engaged.”

  “She was a headstrong girl, you know. There was no containing her.”

  “She was already in chains long before she left you.”

  “She did a fair job of breaking them.”

  “But not all of them, Grandfather, not all.”

  Maury permitted himself a long, audible sigh, as if a bellowsful of fresh air were flushing out the cavities in his head. Slowly his gaze traveled upward, inspecting with apparent interest the bulging walls of the chimneylike space in which they were enclosed, and on up to the framed rectangle of immaculate blue sky overhead, where his attention lingered as if awaiting the appearance of some object, any object, a cloud, a gull, a passing cannonball, to disturb the still perfection of all that incalculable emptiness. “I cannot confess to you,” he said at last, “how often I so desperately missed her during the sad span of those lost years. What a precious, spirited lass she was.”

  “Why did you never come visit?”

  “I was angry. She had betrayed me.”

  “But perhaps she was simply holding fast to the deeper meaning of virtues you had inculcated in her. Perhaps she was simply obeying her heart.”

  Maury responded with a skeptical grunt. “The heart can but lead you into calamity among the sharp pieces of this broken world. She was a child who possessed no proper conception of the prevailing winds of this life.”

  “Yet perhaps a fairer conception than any you could possibly entertain.”

  “Enough,” asserted Maury, extending an upright palm. “I’ll not dispute this issue with you again. You’re but a child yourself.”

  “Ah,” boomed out a genial Mr. G. D. Fripp, rounding the corner, and seemingly recovered from any slights and affronts he might have endured at dinner, “so this is where you two have managed to stow yourselves. When I didn’t find you in your stateroom, I knew all I had to do was follow the sound of contentious voices. The Great Debate rattles on, I see.”

  “In a manner,” replied Maury dryly.

  “A soupçon of advice, then, from an antiquated cracker-barrel rhetorician such as myself: I enjoy, every now and again, a good metaphysical rip as much as the next blockhead, but why keep driving your plow over the same exhausted ground, risking figurative sunstroke and blisters for naught? Concerning the dialogue of the day, it would appear that, like it or not—and no one abhors the outcome more than I—Messrs. Grant and Sherman have delivered their premises to a rather convincing conclusion.”

  “They’ve concluded nothing,” snapped Maury.

  “Oh how I wish it were so, Mr. Maury, I honestly do. But what a fine situation to have arrived at, in the full richness of one’s years, when merely to lay a head upon a pillow is to risk an infinite night of sweats and fidgets and horrid dreams that come thronging in like vultures to feed upon memories I would prefer remain unexhumed.”

  “Charming,” pronounced Maury, looking for a courteous way around the man’s extended girth. “But my grandson and I must get back to our stateroom. The servants have been alone much too long.”

  “No, please, don’t go. I’ve been cooped up for hours with a sick woman who can no longer bear the sound of my voice. And last night I was visited again by”—he leaned forward to whisper confidentially—“one of those dreams.”

  “We’d be delighted to hear it,” offered Liberty, avoiding his grandfather’s caustic eye.

  “Thank you, Mr. Fish. I have found that unless the excess is periodically drawn off the brain, certain distressing symptoms of a decidedly undomesticated variety tend to proliferate like weevils in the boll. Here, then, is my dream, a habitual bedside companion for many more years than I care to reckon. The scene is always the same. I am a child back at Arcadia some forty, even fifty summers ago, where it is always morning and the day has not yet begun to wilt and Father and Lomax are saddling up to go to a horse auction and Mother is in the sitting room reading Robinson Crusoe to little Lucy and I am upstairs in bed not daring to budge for fear of dislodging a moment of transport absolutely faultless in its construction and in all its particulars when I become progressively aware of an eerie halt in the order of things. Birds still chirp in the cypress, a fat fly buzzes against the ceiling, hounds bay from the hills, but the loudest sounds of all are those I am not hearing: no clink of chains past my window, no chant from the fields, no shouts from the quarters, no screeching in the kitchen, no whip cracking in the yard, and a chill lances through me like a shard of ice and I know for certain that I am going to die and then I awaken in the present in a disorganized state of great perplexity and fear, my mind for the moment not quite mine but a curious object on temporary loan from another. And the sensation, I assure you, gentlemen, is not one with which you would hanker to greet the coming day or hold any acquaintance whatsoever, no matter how brief. As you can probably judge, my bean’s been feeling a bit slantindicular of late.”

  “Well, whose hasn’t?” asked Maury. “I calculate, though, those sweet Bahamian breezes should sweep the marsh fog from all our heads.”

  “It is my fervent hope.”

  Liberty stared speechlessly at his grandfather, utterly unable to mask a rather complicated expression of sour incredulity.

  “Hard to believe,” mused Mr. Fripp, idly plucking a protruding tuft of cotton from a nearby bale, “that such an airy vegetative nothing could incite so much anguish and devastation. This is all that remains of Arcadia,” he added, rolling the tuft between his fingers. “The Yankees, I suppose, will raze the place to the foundation, and once I sell this shipment to a factor in port, all material connections to the family estate will be severed forever.” His suddenly brimming eyes threatened to overflow. “And, frankly, gentlemen, I honestly do not know if the dear missus can endure a single hour more confined to this rocking metal tub. I’ve questioned the captain persistently for even a fair estimate of our arrival, but on each occasion he has responded with a different date and time.”

  “Trouble yourself no further with the insufferable Wallace,” advised Maury. “If he’s not careful he might soon find himself piloting a barge on the River Styx. I can personally pledge to you that we shall reach our promised destination sooner than expected and that it shall be a happy astonishment for all.”

  “Thank you, sir,” exclaimed Mr. Fripp, vigorously pumping Maury’s hand. “Your words have lightened an oppressive and ever-shifting load. And, may I add, your mere presence on board lends strength to us all.”

  “Fate, Mr. Fripp, need not always be untoward. The Deity, in his veiled munificence, directed me to this ship, and I hold no doubt that He will guide each of our blessed souls safely into port.”

  “I’m certain you are correct, Mr. Maury. Please excuse my sil
ly complaints and anxieties. It isn’t often one stumbles upon a Christian brother whose conviction is quite so granite ribbed. Such an example makes infidels of us all.”

  “I am merely a pawn in the benevolent fingers of a greater Hand.”

  “I may as well confess to you, Mr. Maury, that upon first encounter Mrs. Fripp recognized at once the glare of piety radiating from your countenance, and Mrs. Fripp is an extremely devout woman whose ability to detect the divine in another is downright nonpareil.”

  “A talented lady in numerous departments,” commented Maury.

  “Quite so. And she will be gladdened to hear your reassuring assessment of our current position and probable future. In fact, it would surprise me not at all if she does not immediately abandon her bed and bucket to join us for supper in the salon.”

  “I wouldn’t prod the poor woman into a state of health she has not yet authentically attained.”

  “No fear of that,” replied Fripp, obviously eager to be off and relay the good news. “Phoebe does what Phoebe wants. No violating that commandment. And now, gentlemen, if you’ll please excuse me, I must check in on our patient.” He hastened away like a gambler intent on placing a last-minute bet.