The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  “Does that cussed pan of yours ever stop flapping?” demanded Captain Wallace. “I believe you could talk a preacher into a bawdy house,” then addressing the stocky, bearded mate to Maury’s port, brusquely ordered, “Get the shackles!” The instant the grip was loosened on him, Maury wrenched readily free, bolted for the hatchway with youthful alacrity and was gone. “Awfully damn spry for one of his years and infirmities,” Wallace noted as all went scrambling in ragged pursuit.

  They soon found the unregenerate secessionist precariously perched athwart the starboard rail, a mystic hiatus having descended over him, settling his haggard features—even the extensive patterning of wrinkles miraculously erased—into an earlier, milder version of his pitiless, eroded face. His hair and beard, flowing biblically in the high salt wind, appeared whiter than usual, spookily illuminated from within, as if the long-smoldering fervor by which every spite, every indignity, every canker of his obtuse life was tenderly fed had at last leapt the grate.

  “Mr. Maury, sir, I implore you,” urged Captain Wallace. “Please consult your senses. Is this the manner in which you choose to make a die of it? Is this the sorry end by which you wish to be remembered?”

  “I’ll not be placed in chains by any breathing soul on this miserable ball of mud.”

  “Grandfather,” began Liberty, his voice remarkably steady, “even if you’ve no regard for yourself, consider the sentiments of your family.”

  “What family? I’ve lost three sons to this unpleasantness and haven’t heard from the other in six months. Both daughters are gone, and Ida, poor woman, is gone in mind if not yet in body. All I have left, regrettably, is you. Why did I have to live so long only to witness a proud, noble line sputter feebly out into yankee-doodleism, negrophilia and cowardice?”

  “But what about your country? The South’s going to have to be rebuilt. Able-bodied hands will be scarce.”

  “My country is a fugitive exhibition of dwarves and changelings.”

  “Mr. Maury, sir,” interjected Captain Wallace, “I must again request that you step away promptly from the rail.”

  “Free I was born and free I shall die,” Maury announced defiantly. Then, shooting one final, extended, quixotic glance deep into the place of perpetual soreness Liberty had come to think of, more or less, as his soul, Maury lifted his beseeching hands to the unsullied sky and abruptly cast himself backward into the clemency of the waves. Immediately boats were lowered and the ground searched until dusk, but without result.

  “Formidable chap, your grandbub,” mused Captain Wallace, studying the contents of a generous tumbler of aged bourbon poured from his rarely shared private stock, which he’d gladly broken out as “the most effective known treatment for loss, grief and general miasma.” He and Liberty were closeted in his stateroom, attempting to achieve as elevated a state of inebriation as possible in the shortest amount of time. “Trifle deluded, perhaps, but then Dixie seems to breed these characters like rabbits. Always reminded me somewhat of home, you know, the cultivation of eccentricities being practically a national pastime back in Merry Olde.” Then, noting Liberty’s distracted gaze, he added hurriedly, “But listen to me rattling on like an old fishwife. Is your drink acceptable?”

  “What? What’s that?” asked Liberty, slightly startled, conscious only that at this moment the entire contents of his head totaled naught. “Oh yes, of course, best I’ve ever tasted.” His own glass was largely untouched.

  “This particular bottle was given to me in a sealed box by a rather high-toned member of the Wilmington gentry in exchange for a few delicate favors I granted his wife. Heard he died later in a jack epidemic, sweated for three full days at the end.” Receiving no response to these enlightening comments, Wallace occupied himself by running his thumbnail along the grooves of a giant capital T floridly carved into the defaced surface of the table at which they uncomfortably sat. Neither could have gauged with any accuracy the duration of the silence. “Bum go to lose family,” Wallace finally observed, “even if you’ve only been acquainted for a few days.”

  “He looked so strangely composed out there on the rail,” said Liberty in quiet wonder, “so unearthly, as if he’d just awakened from a long nap.”

  “Am I wrong, or is this entire ill-advised catastrophe the result of one foolish old man’s apprehension he was about to be transfigured into some sort of New England coffee grinder?”

  “Well, Grandfather did ride a number of hobbyhorses simultaneously, but, yes, that was one pertinent fear.”

  “Wage slavery versus chattel slavery. I’ve heard the issue knocked about from bow to stern on every run. Guess which side of the argument prevails?”

  “The question, it seems to me, involves the type and amount of coercion applied to guarantee a finished task.”

  “Then it’s lucre or the lash, eh?” Wallace’s eyebrows seemed risen halfway up his forehead.

  “No, I happen to believe there is another, more compelling impulse of much greater potency.”

  “Yes,” inquired the skeptical captain, “and exactly what carrot would that be?”

  “Love.”

  “Love?” he asked blandly, the fixings of a smile failing to coalesce completely about his pale lips. He took another sip of bourbon. “In spite of your naïve sentimentality, you cannot possibly be serious.”

  “But I am.”

  “Do you mean to imply that common laborers could be persuaded to spend twelve hours a day stooped over in the fields under a boiling sun picking cotton out of love?”

  “If they own the land, yes.”

  “Well.” Wallace looked about the room as if searching for assistance. “I am dismasted, keeled, run aground. I need another drink. You Americans. What a perennial marvel. Scratch a mechanic and discover a dreamer within. What a tantalizing, impossible combination. Is it the climate, some quickening agent in the air, sends you all mooning helplessly through the woods, scavenging for God in every tree, paradise behind every rock? I am humbled by such inimitable enterprise. So then”—raising his tumbler—“here’s to you, Mr. Fish; here’s to your America. I suppose if there’s even a fool’s glimmer of a feasible utopia lying about unnoticed in the shadowy corners of this world, you are indeed the people to find it.”

  They clinked glasses and drank. And drank again.

  An hour later, a flushed Liberty, now shirtless, was expostulating in a high, emphatic voice on the nagging dramatic question: was Othello brown or black? He strenuously championed the latter view, also insisting through lines cited from memory that it is Iago who is the true slave. Sometime later, when he heard himself accompanying Wallace in fractured refrain to the popular tune “Just Before the Battle, Mother,” he figured it was time to discreetly retire and so, clutching an unopened bottle of rum—a gift to Monday from the good captain—and leaning periodically against the swaying bulkheads, stumbled cautiously back to his cabin. Monday remained where he’d been left, fretting over a porthole-sized portion of sea and sky, now ominously dark, in which he momentarily expected, despite numerous exasperated assurances to the contrary, the dreaded materialization of what he persisted in calling “Nasty Saw,” surely the most treacherous slaving post in the entire history of treachery. The death of his master of forty years seemed to have affected him as little as the passing off of an afternoon shower because, as he patiently explained, indicating his scarred, misshapen head, “The man’s still alive in here. He got to die inside, too.”

  Monday examined the bottle of rum closely, then returned to his vigil.

  “You know, don’t you,” asked Liberty, in as sober a tone as he could summon, “that you are now free.”

  “So you say,” replied Monday, face still pressed to the glass, his vow of silence never strictly enforced against Liberty.

  “But I am not merely mouthing empty words. I am trying to inform you, if perhaps not too successfully, of a cataclysmic fact that should alter your existence forever and restore your life back to you.”

&
nbsp; After a significant pause during which this particular morsel was scrutinized from every possible angle, Monday turned gravely about and said, “I been hearing about this freedom business as long as rabbits got ears, and I have one question for you, Mister Liberty: which kind of freedom is this, anyhow?”

  “What do you mean, which kind?”

  “I mean, is this mockingbird freedom or mule freedom?”

  “Which kind do you want it to be?”

  Then, slowly breaking across Monday’s face, the first genuine smile he had allowed himself since boarding the Cavalier. “I been dreaming I could fly since I was knee high to a splinter.”

  “Puts me in mind of Charleston,” remarked Mrs. Fripp, absolutely entranced by the gradual thickening and spread of the southern horizon into a much-anticipated revelation of hills, of solid earth and an uncommon amount of green. Though improved sufficiently to allow her to take the air topside, Mrs. Fripp’s condition remained tentative, G.D. hovering in solicitous proximity, trusty bucket in hand.

  “New Providence,” Captain Wallace announced, with a proprietorial sweep of his arm. “Though, Mrs. Fripp, as you may have marked, pictures up close do not always resemble their impression at a distance. While harbors are harbors the world round, the Bahamas, madame, are decidedly not the Carolinas. Nassau is a port with, shall we say, a colorful history, a reputation for revelry durable as the centuries, and while perhaps not quite so libertine as in the heyday of Edward Teach and company, whenever sailors cross courses with grand sums of specie, there’s bound to be a debauch springing up somewhere in the vicinity. And, of course, the characters who feed upon the fringes of commerce are, inevitably, a genial and diverting lot: blacklegs, buggers, deserters, runaway slaves, cutthroats, knucks and mad sectarians. Hospitable fellows, one and all. Just beware of exhibiting your purse in public.”

  “Dare we step off the boat?” inquired Mr. Fripp, the captain’s verbal sketch of the town already inducing certain fantasies he preferred not to indulge consciously.

  “I neglected to mention the courtesans,” added Wallace, running a cool appraiser’s gaze over Mrs. Fripp from hair to toes. “Saucy women with big, bold eyes and slim, nimble fingers. A horn of plenty for any lady unfortunate enough to be caught in pecuniary embarrassment.”

  “What in the name of Satan and his gibbering hordes are you suggesting, Captain Wallace?” demanded Mr. Fripp, hastily searching his person for either his wallet or a weapon.

  “Sheathe your sword, Mr. Fripp. Just another joke, that’s all, a petty quip.”

  “Who is that remarkable man?” asked Liberty, his attention captured by the aerial acrobatics of a mate clambering about the rigging of the forward mast with an agility and grace astounding in one whose left arm ended at the elbow in a puckered stump.

  “Quite the monkey, isn’t he?” asserted Wallace. “Brother to a female acquaintance of mine in Savannah.” His eyebrow lifted a notch. “Lost the wing at Antietam or some such hideous place. Couldn’t bear sitting around home like a rusty hoe while the great boil continued on all around him. So, as a kindness to Fanny, I took the fellow on. Worked out rather well, as you can see.”

  “I must speak with him,” said Liberty.

  The renovated sailor, one Zachariah Dobbins, was immediately summoned and introduced to Liberty by the beaming captain, who obviously relished reuniting two old adversaries once met upon the selfsame field of battle and now, fortuitously, facing each other yet again upon the plates of his very ship.

  “Was you in the corn?” Dobbins asked. He was a small, skittery type with no eyebrows and a tic in his right cheek.

  “More like the threshing floor,” answered Liberty. “Might be there still but for my own clumsiness. Tripped over my rifle just as one of your shells passed through. Took the head clean off the man next to me.”

  “Orn’ry doings.”

  “It was like you people rose right up out of the earth.”

  “Our colonel got the jimjams, you know. Stripped off his butternut, punched Lieutenant Berry in the nose, stole his horse and galloped off into the smoke. Often ponder whatever became of that damn fool.”

  “Sorry about your arm.”

  Dobbins shrugged. “Like you say, I might be there still. Left a mess of good boys on that ground. Seems like the whole country’s a graveyard now.”

  “We can only hope the soil has now been sanctified.”

  “Sure woke snakes, though, didn’t we? I thought we was going to walk off from this scrape with the ribbon, but you blue devils just kept coming and coming like all nature dogging us. How many of them are there of you, anyhow?”

  “They turn them out daily by the batch up in those durn mills of theirs,” joked the captain.

  Dobbins shook his closely cropped head for a spasmodic beat or two, then paused with a vague, distracted air, as if listening for something rattling around inside. “We made a fist of it, by joe, but tell you true, I’m right content to be out of it. No hankering to see that particular elephant again, no sir.”

  “Nor I,” agreed Liberty, and into the awkward interval that followed he impulsively thrust forward an arm, and after solemnly clasping hands the two veterans embraced.

  “Sure glad I didn’t kill you back there in Sharpsburg,” said Dobbins, patting him affectionately on the back.

  “Or I, you.”

  “My prayers are already so full, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have room for even a quality Yankee.”

  “Don’t sleep much?”

  “About a hooter’s worth.”

  “Same here.”

  “I figure that when the Good Lord tires of showing me them pictures every night He’ll put them away in an iron box and bury it in a hole inside a hole at the deepest bottom of the ocean.”

  “It’s been a slow freight, but peace is coming,” Liberty said. “For all of us.”

  “I wonder what that will be like.”

  “Gentle, I suspect, very gentle. Mr. Lincoln will see to that.”

  “A half-breed in want of a goose’s brains,” declared Mr. Fripp, a moment after Dobbins had saluted his captain and returned to duty. “Come, come, Mr. Fish, don’t you think the wisest policy to pursue regarding our insufferable public embarrassment is to run that boorish backwoods ape out of Washington on the same shit-greased rail he rode in on?”

  “Gabriel!” cried Mrs. Fripp, in a rush of feigned indignation. “Your language.”

  “Though we may have lost the war, dear peach, the right to speak one’s mind remains, I believe, blessedly at large.”

  “Not if you insist upon employing profanity.”

  “I’ll employ whatever goddamn words I choose to express myself, woman.”

  “Now, now,” cautioned the captain. “Don’t force me to intervene. You’ve seen how skilled I am at negotiating settlements.”

  “Captain Wallace,” exclaimed Mr. Fripp. “The wife and I have managed to handle our own affairs quite competently for some twenty-five years now, and I expect we’re certainly more than capable of managing them for another quarter century without your nosy hindrance.”

  “Then please accept my apologies. I intended no offense. I cannot help noting, though, that you are about as touchy as a polecat in a washtub.”

  “I trust, then,” interjected Mrs. Fripp rather acerbically, “that your beady-eyed attentiveness has also marked the state of my own nerves, which, I suggest, can be charitably described as ‘tender.’ And is it any wonder? The ghastly events of this voyage alone will follow me in nightmares to the grave, not to mention that vile war and its ruthless consumption of my land, my home, my family, my son….” And she broke down in a fit of polite, muffled sobbing.

  “Phoebe, please, gather yourself,” urged Mr. Fripp. “Your condition.” He held up the bucket.

  “I’m a woman without a country,” she wailed.

  “But not without a husband,” Mr. Fripp hastened to assure her, administering a succession of awkward caresses to her trembling back to no ap
parent consequence.

  “‘Weeping sad and lonely, Hopes and fears how vain,’” recited Captain Wallace in a soft, singsong voice, “‘When this cruel war is over, Praying that we meet again.’ Of all the memorable tunes, both spirited and melancholy, which you ingenious people have retrieved from conflict’s wreckage, that’s the one I require a couple healthy pulls of baldface afterward to help moderate the effect.”

  “But a sophisticated man of the world such as yourself,” Liberty offered, “must realize that even when the guns are eventually stilled, the struggle will continue on.”

  “Indeed,” proclaimed Mr. Fripp, momentarily diverted from his wife’s subsiding crisis. “And what particular struggle is that?”

  “The work to which my family has been devoted since long before my birth.”

  “Madness and piracy?”

  “No, sir. Freedom and equality.”

  “What? Among the races? How preposterous!”

  “He’s one of them crackpot enthusiasts,” explained an affable Captain Wallace.

  “Well, it’s certainly no enthusiasm of mine.”

  “That’s why we’ve gone into exile,” confirmed Mrs. Fripp, dabbing at her cheeks with a mess napkin.

  “And well out of it, too, if the future is to resemble in any way Mr. Fish’s vision. Imagine being forced to dine with a savage like Monday slurping from a bowl at your elbow. Want to spend an evening watching Sambo gnaw on a bone as you endure his ethiop views on the urgent affairs of the hour? The body shudders.”

  “How do you know you have not done so already,” questioned Liberty.

  “How’s that?”

  “Taken a meal with a member of the race, suffered his bad table manners, his outlandish tongue?”

  “You’re not suggesting—”