The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  “Yes, and before me, how many others whose tainted company you might have enjoyed completely unaware?”

  “Mr. Fish, I don’t know whether you are gumming me or not, but it is precisely such loose palaver that in my day earned a man a pistol, a ball and a walk of twenty paces. I’ll tolerate such chicanery not an instant longer. We are people of the first respectability. Come, Phoebe,” he said, offering his wife a protective arm. “I believe we shall be more comfortable waiting out the debarkation in the privacy of our own cabin. Good day, gentlemen.” And the couple departed without a backward glance, Mr. Fripp stiffly escorting his lady safely away from the hazard of civil contamination.

  “Was that true” asked Captain Wallace, highly entertained by the energetic polemics.

  “Was what true?”

  “You seemed to imply that you were actually a mulatto of some degree.”

  Liberty shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  The captain regarded his young, inscrutable passenger for a considerable moment, then broke out into his distinctive cackle.

  “How can anyone know for certain?” argued Liberty. “Blood flows across time like water, going where it wants, when it wants, without respect to boundaries geographical, physical or social. Tributaries converge, branch, reconverge in a pattern that may not be so random as it appears. Life, I suppose, and ultimately it makes mongrels of us all.”

  “Well, mongrels…” mused the captain, before suddenly brightening. “The best kind.”

  “Yes,” agreed Liberty, with a smile as wry and elliptical as his grandfather’s. “The best kind.”

  Snow in big fat flakes was falling softly as spilled down when the crippled Leopard, laboring tentatively under only one boiler, crept almost soundlessly up through the Narrows, past the ever-shuttling channel traffic, and on toward Governors Island and the Battery beyond. An unfortunate encounter with a late winter squall some eighty miles off the Carolina banks had nearly swamped the over-laden vessel, rendering the incongruous cargo of sugar and wooden matches largely ruined and the cursing, half-naked stokers up to their knees in cold seawater.

  Stationed in the bow, windburnt face lifted squarely into the thickening storm, stood a solitary, woefully underdressed figure in a resolute attitude that might even have appeared heroic to an observer too distant to mark the shivering limbs, the red, rheumy nose, the tearing sleepless eyes still teeming with collected imagery a reluctant mind refused, as yet, to process.

  The snow fell, dissolving silently into the gray swell, and the ship chugged doggedly on. Up ahead, in the blank sky, appeared the first faint pencil strokes of a city, forming briefly, then vanishing to reform again like something vaguely recognizable glimpsed behind shifting folds of muslin—the idea of a metropolis, hovering tantalizingly apart on the very edge of embodiment. Liberty (for it was indeed he) turned away from the blizzard for a moment to wipe with the back of his bare hand the accumulating flakes from his brows and eyelashes. Too restless to remain snugly warm below decks, he had wanted to experience this impending return to a favorite city with the unguarded fullness of his inner apparatus, to expose himself thoroughly to whatever snares and traps New York might have set for him in his unknowing heart. But now, as the Leopard drew near and the city began solidifying before him in all its thrusting magnitude, he realized, to his disconcerting surprise, that he felt nothing whatsoever, nothing but the bitter air.

  This voyage back from the Bahamas had been a particularly trying business, confined aboard a faltering ship with a ludicrously tyrannical captain and a desperate crew few of whom ever spoke to Liberty but to bark out colorful insults regarding his nationality, his patriotism, his ancestry. His berth on this unhappy vessel had been secured by Captain Wallace who, within an hour of the Cavalier’s arrival in Nassau harbor, had recognized the familiar lines of a British steamer coaling nearby, and, alluding mysteriously to an unpalatable favor once performed for the Leopard’s flinty master, persuaded his old shipmate to allow Liberty to ride deadhead back to America. Monday had already announced with a sorrowful but obstinate solemnity that he believed he had quite had his fill of all the American states, north and south alike, their deceits, their impieties, their incessant quarrels, and that he wished to give these fragrant English isles a go. The Fripps, of course, acknowledging none of their fellow creatures but the local cotton factor and the porters struggling with their abundant baggage, hopped into a waiting carriage and rushed off to Government House for a call on a former business partner, now conveniently serving as royal governor—a patently childish social snub upon their maritime companions which produced no effect at all on Liberty for whom big bugs or bed bugs, it was all the same to him.

  Now, as Liberty disembarked into the wintry alien wonder of his native country, he found himself rudely accosted by a mettlesome indigent dressed in pieces of clothing from at least three different suits and hobbling furiously at him across the icy cobblestones on a single primitive crutch. He seemed to have been posted in that specific spot in ordained anticipation of Liberty’s arrival.

  “Yes, yes, don’t play me false now,” bellowed the stranger, offering up a hand so begrimed he seemed to be wearing a glove. “We shared a canteen in the shade of Piney Branch Church back there at Spotsylvania. Remember those ruddy cheeks of yours as clear as my own dear mother’s picture.”

  “But I’ve never been anywhere near Spotsylvania,” protested Liberty with the mild caution typically employed in the presence of bedlamites, rogues and other freethinkers.

  “Sure you was,” insisted the stranger. “Why, ’twas you, me and Indian Bobby Stones the very ones carried Uncle John himself over to the ambulance. Never forget that queer little smile pasted to his lips, the neat black hole under his left eye.”

  “I never saw General Sedgwick in my life, alive or dead. Or, as I’ve already indicated, any parcel of Spotsylvania Court House and environs, for that matter.”

  “Sell my own sweet sister to strut about the world on a pair of pins sound as yours,” the stranger went obliviously on, frankly admiring the length and sturdiness of Liberty’s young limbs. “This one of mine ain’t fit to kick a dog. Here, grab my crutch for a wink.” He then formed the hard nugget of a fist and began pounding with dramatic severity upon the thin shank of his uselessly dangling right leg. “Damn loin’s dead as a tree stump from the hip down.” He looked Liberty hard in the eye and muttered flatly, “That was Spooner’s Mill.” He paused. “Ever hear tell of it?”

  Liberty allowed he had not.

  “No, no one has. Don’t suspect anyone ever will, either. Memorable enough for me, though, I can guarantee you that. How about you there? Appears you somehow managed to scamper through this shindy with nary a scratch.”

  The snow fell between them like a cheap, disintegrating curtain.

  “I was fortunate,” admitted Liberty, attempting to conceal his discomfort behind a wan smile.

  “No, you wasn’t, that’s for true. It’s how it was writ down in the book before you, me or anybody was ever born. It’s how you was writ from the beginning, the character you was dictated to impersonate through all the daylong turnings of the pages.”

  “Seems you’ve got more than a touch of the metaphysician in you.”

  “What else have I to do with my needless hours than abuse this battered old head?” he asked in a sudden pucker.

  “Perhaps in the next story you’ll be assigned a better part,” suggested Liberty delicately.

  “Flapdoodle. I’m done with stories. I hope to end in a place where stories are no more because human contention is no more.”

  “I believe I’ve dreamt of such a place myself.”

  “It’s a place outside the book.”

  “The best places always are.”

  “Yes,” replied the stranger, then abruptly distracted, began looking anxiously about as if he had momentarily forgotten just where he was. “Listen, lad,” he went on quickly, “I apologize for putting the bite on you, but if you sh
ould happen to have any excess specie secreted about your person and might be willing to offer a small donation to one Chester Cribbs for the purchase of a spanking new limb I would thank you most kindly—as would the Lord.”

  “Now, answer me plain, Mr. Cribbs, do I strike you as an individual who is likely to possess even a single unwanted copper?”

  “No,” Cribbs promptly replied, “frankly you do not, but it has been my experience observing the nefarious traffic along these docks that you can’t always be certain who’s juggling a pocketful of rocks and who is not. Besides, no hurt in the asking now, is there? Don’t know how else an ancient bereft veteran like myself could ever lay in all the Vs and Xs necessary to get my leg revivified.”

  “What do you propose to have done?” asked Liberty, mentally calculating the largest possible sum he could spare from the modest amount Captain Wallace had generously provided him for the long trip home.

  “Well, I hear about this fellow down Philadelphia way, crafty professor of some stripe or other, used to be a doll maker, busies himself now mending broken bodies. They say he’s invented this wiry style of contraption straps around your knee, got a damn hooter-sized engine fixed to it, makes your leg go up and down slicker than a well pump. Give me one of them, I’d go dashing up and down Broadway like a schoolboy on a freak.”

  “Now there’s a vision the city needs to behold,” agreed Liberty, handing over a quarter eagle he reckoned he could afford.

  “Bless you, sir!” exclaimed Cribbs, examining the coin in his creased palm as if it were a fragment of the True Cross. “May the angels guide you sure and steady to the last encampment.”

  “I’m already there,” answered Liberty, honoring Cribbs with a smart salute.

  The journey north (packet to Albany, rail to Rome, Concord coach to Delphi) passed in an oddly pleasant restorative mist. His head was empty. He spoke only when spoken to. People, villages, whole alabaster landscapes traversed his stare unregistered, and when finally he stepped down from the last carriage, he barely recognized the contours of his own hometown. In his absence the once intimate shops and offices and houses, absurdly untouched by shot and shell, seemed to have been subtly altered, the buildings perceptibly reduced in size, the streets narrowed.

  Cold, alone, feet so numb he might as well have been limping about on wooden pegs, the first feathery stages of a bad catarrh or ague or worse tickling lamentably at the back of his throat, Liberty turned up the near impassable road that led homeward. Keeping true to the wheel ruts, he presently entered the enchanted wood where, as a boy, he had played with an almost disturbed intensity, now the black trees and branches stood shorn and spidery upon a pale sky like an unintelligible message scribbled in a palsied hand. The storm had blown off, and already poking aggressively through the soft uniform mantling were the stained layers of granite outcroppings, fallen timbers, misshapen boulders, the essential hardness of the world beginning to reassert itself. Liberty trudged stolidly onward.

  As he hiked up the buried lane toward the magnetic gingerbread house in which he had been born and bred, he spied beside the barn a stooped, angular figure hewing wood with an organized fury, the sound of the ax bit like a measured succession of rifle reports echoing sharply through the thin air. Even at a distance his father appeared decidedly older, enveloped in a more grayish aura. He, too, seemed alarmingly diminished in size.

  At the sight of this tattered stranger plodding toward him unbidden and unannounced, Thatcher paused in his work. Then, flinging aside the ax, he rushed eagerly forward to embrace the son he had not seen in three interminable years.

  “You look thin,” he observed, holding Liberty back at a critical arm’s length.

  “As do you.”

  “Well.” Thatcher was peering steadily into his son’s face with a concentration so fierce Liberty had to avert his gaze. “Well,” he said again.

  “I guess I’m a deserter,” Liberty confessed.

  Thatcher smiled. “I’m certain the grand blue leviathan requires no further assistance from you.”

  “They might believe otherwise.”

  “I honestly doubt that. Seems incredible that the long-anticipated jubilee has come at last but so, apparently, it has. Yet enough,” he added, wrapping a firm arm about his son’s newly muscled shoulders. “We can discuss these momentous matters later. Let’s go inside. You must be fatigued beyond endurance.”

  Upon hearing her nephew’s distinctly elastic voice in the hallway, Aunt Aroline darted from the kitchen, shrieking out his name repeatedly, and then, seizing him by the ears, proceeded to fill every inch of Liberty’s startled face with wet kisses.

  “Aroline, please,” begged her younger brother, “let the boy catch his breath.”

  “A glorious day, Thatcher, an eruption of divinity into our lives. Our heavenly petitions have been answered.”

  And though she apparently could not help but continue to grin at him like an institutionalized fool, Liberty noticed that she had become, or perhaps always had been, a curiously birdlike creature of fine bones and plentifully wrinkled skin whose increasing transparency over time permitted to shine progressively forth a spiritual radiance of astonishing authority.

  “You look so dreadfully peaked,” she remarked. “What farm slop did they feed you in that wretched army? Tell you what, Liberty honey, the mess of pottage I’ve been preparing all day shall remain a mess of pottage because I’m going to fix you your favorite dinner—roast joint and a Marlborough pie. How does that sound?”

  “About as peart as rain on a rooftop in July,” he replied, quoting fondly from his aunt’s seemingly inexhaustible stock of quaint expressions that had served to season his childhood and the world beyond childhood with meaning and mystery.

  “Now you two get on into the parlor,” ordered Aroline, ushering her amused brother and nephew brusquely forward, tears beginning to collect in her nervous, faded eyes. “The fire’s fresh, and, Liberty, that old hairy chairy of yours,” referring to a juvenile favorite hair-bottomed rocker, “has practically gone to pasture waiting for a rider of your exuberance.” Her voice having grown discernibly breathless, she suddenly wheeled about and vanished, apparently requiring a quick infusion of air from an unoccupied room.

  “Same as ever,” Liberty noted affectionately.

  “After you’ve been here a while,” commented Thatcher, “I’m afraid you shall find the, uh, slippages becoming ever more common.”

  The legendary rocker proved to be much too noisy and vertiginous for Liberty’s adult nerves, so father and son settled comfortably into a pair of matching Windsor chairs before the crackling hearth. Above the mantel the ancient family clock continued, as it had always done, to sever off the minutes with dependably audible precision.

  “I’ve been to Redemption Hall,” Liberty announced quietly.

  “I expected as much,” replied his father. “The night you ran off with the Fowler boy I suffered a dream which was to trouble me for many nights to come. I saw you practically sauntering at a brisk constitutional pace not just oblivious to the surrounding hordes of vigilant snakes and reptiles but actually frolicking fearlessly among the venomous creatures. I saw you astride a grinning gator, piloting an entire fleet of the fanged amphibians toward some distant dubious conclusion. And when I belatedly recognized that you were grinning, too, I became quite agitated. You were the autocrat of the alligators.”

  “Well, you always claimed I possessed an unwholesome and decidedly un-Fishlike mesmerization with things sovereign and ecclesiastical.”

  “I knew this damn war would devise a way, no matter how labyrinthine, of depositing you in that accursed place.”

  “I had to go.”

  “I know.”

  Liberty then related, in as temperate and objective a tone as he could maintain, the whole sordid account of what he had found in Carolina, of the melodramatic events aboard the Cavalier, of the fate of Grandfather Maury. As he spoke, Thatcher seemed to slump visibly in his seat. “Wo
rse even than I could imagine,” he muttered.

  “His head bobbed to the surface once before the final descent, his infatuate will, I suppose, keeping him afloat to direct one last shot of malice straight to my heart.”

  “Such hatred is a near unquenchable force.”

  “In his case it required an entire ocean.”

  Thatcher sighed. The clock ticked tartly on. “Let’s go visit your mother.”

  She had been buried in the midst of her scrupulously tended flower garden beneath, so Thatcher explained, a summertime quilt of unendurable color; now the sole evidence of once-thriving life lingered only in the brown brittle weeds piercing winter’s dreary monochrome like a fusillade of fallen arrows. A well-trodden path had been worn in the snow between house and plot. The simple stone, topped by a thick white crust, read:

  ROXANA MAURY FISH

  1822–1862

  Beloved Wife and Mother

  Freedom’s Warrior

  “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here,” confessed Liberty.

  “There was nothing you could have done.”

  “Except, perhaps, the one thing…”

  “Yes, you and those damn envelopes. It was as if you were trying to protect her from enemy fire.”

  They stood together in joined solitude and pretended to study the barren ground as the sere branches around them rattled in the chill wind.

  “She would have been so proud of you,” declared Thatcher.

  “I didn’t do anything different from any man on either side.”

  “But you were her son.”

  Liberty said nothing.

  “Stay as long as you wish,” advised Thatcher gently. “I shall be inside.”

  Sometime later Liberty looked up with a start, wondering where his father had gone. He hardly noted the dripping woods, the churning sky, the solitary doe in the clearing on a distant hill picking its way daintily through the high drifts, but he could hear his mother’s voice, her firm podium voice, as clearly as the squirrels chattering at him from the nearby trees: “Like flowers listing toward the sun we ever incline, each separate one of us, black and white alike, despite the obstacles abounding, toward the virtues, the necessities, yes, the absolute pleasures of our own personal Fourth of July, physically, mentally and spiritually. This is the handprint of the Creator upon our natures.” Then Liberty knelt down in the snow, kissed the palm of his own hand and pressed it against the cold marble.