The Amalgamation Polka (35 page)

“I see you’ve not been too terribly damaged,” remarked Maury after a quick glance at his grandson. He wiggled one of the barrels. “Take your place over there with your fellow apostates.”

“Put down the guns,” ordered Liberty in a tone normally employed to address rabid dogs. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Don’t patronize me, boy. I have never acted with such clarity.”

“Your grandfather,” began Wallace in a sardonic drawl even more pronounced than usual, “is a man of many parts, not all of them, unfortunately, equally sound. He has been attempting to persuade us with, I must report, a limited degree of effectiveness, to alter our present course to one bearing on the exotic destination of,” he peered politely in Maury’s direction, “I believe it was Rio de Janeiro you mentioned, was it not? And frankly, I’ve been compelled to regretfully advise him that such a deviation is out of the question despite the Latin charms of said port, which I can assure you are quite considerable.”

“If you prefer,” warned Maury, “I can, with a twitch of my forefinger, expel you on the instant to a much warmer, livelier locale.”

“By all means,” responded the genial captain, “and once there I shall be sure to secure you a seat at the table. Now then,” he went on, his mirth evaporating as swiftly as it had arrived, “hand over those preposterous weapons before someone, most likely yourself, suffers a grievous injury.” He advanced a step.

“Hold!” warned Maury, waving the barrels recklessly about. “You wouldn’t want an ugly hole in that fancy coat of yours, now would you?”

“Grandfather,” pleaded Liberty, “turn yourself over. What possible chance have you? You’re one against all.”

“Tale of my life, boy. But one learns to carve a path through the ruck with the means at hand.”

“Please. There’s been enough distress inflicted upon this company.”

“Yes,” confirmed the captain. “Allow reason to prevail.”

“Captain Wallace, I abandoned the constraints of reason back in my salad days, observing even then the utter impotence of logic before the actual workings of this fatuous world, and I will not be lectured at by a dewy-eared bantling nor dictated to by a fen-dwelling, gin-guzzling mutt such as yourself. Monday,” he demanded harshly, “fetch that rope,” indicating a tangle of line lying bunched in a corner, “and begin trussing up these fowl for the spit. I am now in command of this vessel, and I intend that all my orders be executed promptly and efficiently.”

“As if a sole member of my crew,” asserted Wallace, “would obey a single request of yours.”

“That so, you black British bastard? Perhaps the spectacle of their beloved master bound and gagged with a pistol at his temple will provoke a salutary shift in their allegiances. Monday, you damn fool,” he cried at the old man’s ineffectual struggle to gather up all the cord from the deck, “don’t dare tell me you don’t know how to work a rope.”

“But, sir, look here at all this devilment,” complained Monday, displaying aloft a hopeless intricacy of knotted hemp.

“Liberty, go help that brainless jackass. Mary, Mother of God, the day I meet the man who knows his job and how to discharge it faultlessly is the day I fall to my knees and pray for immediate deliverance, because there’ll be nothing wondrous left to behold on this benighted planet.”

“If you weren’t so preoccupied with abusing everyone around you,” suggested Wallace, “perhaps the poor fellow might be able to satisfy your annoying demands. Perhaps that comely girl might still be with us rather than now being numbered among the majority.”

“Liberty, tend at once to this limey son of a bitch. You may start by stuffing his hat into his mouth and tying it in tight.”

Accompanying himself with a complete idler’s repertoire of facial tics, vocal strains and hand pantomime designed to convey as wide a range as possible of truculence, resentment and undue imposition, Liberty finally managed to unravel the tarry cord and arrange it in a fistful of neat, dangling loops. “I’m going to need a knife.”

“Can someone, anyone, please simply do as they are told,” exclaimed a vexed Maury. “Just bind him up like the fallen despot he is, and I’ll cut off the excess when you’re through. I know I probably should have provided both you and Monday with written instructions, but he can’t read and you can’t think, which is why this mindlessly elementary affair is requiring twice as much time as it should. Light a fire under it, Liberty. We do happen to be conducting a mutiny here.”

“Yassuh, Cap’n.” Obediently, he shuffled a few steps, then turned and, without warning, swung out his arm, whipping the hank of rope straight across Maury’s stunned face. One of the guns discharged, the ball whizzing perilously close to Liberty’s ear as he, Wallace and the two crewmen lunged forward in concert, toppling Maury to the floor with a sickening crack, the captain sprawled atop the old plantation owner, pummeling his undefended head with startling savagery. “Don’t hurt him!” begged Liberty, attempting to pry the flailing bodies off his grandfather. Retrieving the revolvers, Wallace clambered to his feet crying, “How dare he presume to seize my ship?
My
ship!” The crewmen hauled Maury roughly upright and held him in custody, so to speak, one on either side. Monday, who had wisely refrained from taking any role in this white folks’ ruckus, now surveyed the aftermath from his secure vantage behind the helm, his jaundiced eyes, in a rare unmasking, sharply lit with exactly what he thought of these lurid, hollow creatures he had been forced to spend his existence among.

“Until a few moments ago,” declared Maury, still wheezing from his exertions, “I continued to harbor great hopes for you, Liberty, but when Maurys begin striking out at Maurys, whatever the cause, nature herself is broached and our finer properties all but scuttled. It’s that infernal willfulness in you, boy, puts the sand into every pie, and that is a dish I will not abide.”

“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.”

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?”