The Amalgamation Polka (8 page)

Pukes were not pards or pigs or pumas. Pukes were people.

Even at a distance,
from the crest of the hill on Front Street, the packet boat lying moored down at the wharf between an inconspicuously dunnish pair of unlading bullheads resembled nothing so much as a circus wagon, its low roof, long hull and multiwindowed cabin and shutters all painted up in promiscuous shades of red, green, blue and yellow, a floating advertisement for the marvels of the watery way. Across the bow and stern, bold letters of flaking gilt announced the name
Croesus,
“the finest, fastest craft abroad in either direction upon the Grand Western, bar none, guaranteed,” boasted the owner and captain, one Erastus Whelkington, a stubby, sun-toasted man finified to packet master nonpareil in a brass-button broadcoat, flowered sarsenet waistcoat with matching neckcloth, yellow small-clothes, prunella-topped morocco boots and a high, silky, gray castor with a picture of the
Croesus
itself passing through Lock 49 painted on the front. In appearance, a small rabbity creature of no discernible strength, his grip was sufficient to steer the tolerant father and his accompanying son deftly leeward of the increasingly frantic exhortations of a rival captain declaiming in a belligerent, high-pitched voice the manifold virtues of his own particular boat from the moment Thatcher and Liberty alighted, somewhat stupefied by the rollicking experience, from the Delphi–Schenectady omnibus.

“Pay no heed to the false appeals of that mud-chunking malefactor,” advised Captain Whelkington, drawing Thatcher ever nearer the oriental fragrance of his breath. “His vessel leaks, his mules are lame, his old woman went mad—tossed her last two spratlings plunk into the canal the minute she was done with ’em. Told the sheriff their cries weren’t quite human, said they put her in mind of rutting tabbies.”

“Whelkington!” roared the man who had pursued the captain and his prospective passengers out into the middle of the bustling street where all were now engaged in dodging drays, runabouts, gigs, dog carts, coaches, carryalls and solitary mounted travelers from the staid to the picturesque, while trying also to avoid, not always successfully, the plentiful clumps, some still smoking, of horse manure. “You ingling son of a bitch! I’m about full up of your pestiferous lies, your gyppo shecooneries. You smell bad, and frankly, sir, I can no longer tolerate your brazen hooking of my rightful passengers.”

Captain Whelkington halted midstride as if struck in the back with a brick. “Beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said, politely conducting Thatcher and Liberty to a spot in the shade of Corcoran’s Saloon, whose veranda posts had been chewed halfway through by horses left tethered too long outside.

“Now,” Whelkington exclaimed, turning on his competitor in a high choler, “this is the second occasion you have dared accost me in a public thoroughfare, not only embarrassing me personally but threatening my livelihood as well. I’ll not brook your interference a day more. Let’s settle this matter here and now.” And he began unbuttoning his coat.

“I’ve whipped villains meaner than you from Troy to Buffalo, and it will certainly afford me much satisfaction to fix your flint, Captain Whelkington, once and for all.” And he began to unbutton
his
coat.

Some people stopped to watch the trouble, some paused and moved on, but it wasn’t long until a sizable crowd had collected and traffic in the street was calmly parting around the two enraged packet captains.

“By the way, Captain Mumford?” Whelkington had removed his fancy hat and was wiping his forehead with a yellow bandanna. “Reside in this fair city, do you not?”

“Yes, Captain Whelkington, you know I do.” He folded his coat over a hitching rail and began rolling up his sleeves.

“Took a new missus recently, so I hear.”

“Yes, sir, indeed I did.”

“Comely woman, I expect.”

“Yes, Captain Whelkington, she surely is. Why do you ask?”

“Because I aim to fuck her from stem to stern soon as I get done tanning your scrawny hide.”

The punch would have caught a quick man square in the jaw, but Whelkington was even quicker, neatly sidestepping the blow and at the same time planting a hard fist dead into the middle of Mumford’s ample belly, where it made a sound like a struck feed sack. The fat man grunted, staggered back a step, dropping his hands just enough for Whelkington’s other fist to catch him on the point of his chin, and with a dry wooden crack his head snapped backward on a body already beginning to collapse into the hard pack of the road as Captain Whelkington walked contemptuously away, wiping his hands on his pants.

“Unfortunate you and your boy had to witness that whoobub, but actualities on this here canal tend now and again toward the sinfully impolite.” Slipping back into his elaborately frogged coat, Captain Whelkington granted Liberty a sly, subversive smile whose vague complicities were obviously not meant to be shared by the father. Liberty stared impassively, blinking steadily back at him. In the street, wheels and hooves moved around the fallen man.

“I am quite familiar with the sordid side of life,” answered Thatcher, “but I fail to see, in this particular instance, how such brutality was warranted.”

“New to the Erie Water, sir?” the captain asked, gently guiding Thatcher by the arm. “Most likely be seeing worse than this ’fore we hit Syracuse. And tame times, these. Why, back in the raging heyday of the canal there was a murder a day along these fronts. Now we’re lucky to see a body turn up every week or so.” He paused for a moment. “And let me tell you, sir, you weren’t acquainted with the good Captain Mumford and his bestial ways. Something in that man can’t stop worrying at the natural goodness in others. Just the way some folks are, all twirly-headed from the git-go. Ain’t a blamed thing you can do about it. Way the world was tossed together.” He resumed walking. “Now, how far did you two gentlemen say you’d be traveling with us this trip?”

“We didn’t,” said Thatcher. “But now that you ask, the answer is Rochester.”

“Rochester, eh?” Sizing up Thatcher as if he hadn’t exactly looked at him yet. “Certainly hope it ain’t to attend that damn abolitionist jubilee they’re having over there. Won’t have nigger lovers on my boat. Or preachers either, for that matter.”

“I’d appreciate it, captain, if you’d rein in your language some.”

Whelkington’s thick black eyebrows began inching up his forehead. “You
are
one of them coon kissers, ain’t you?”

Thatcher’s gaze held true and steady. “I can remove my coat, too, Captain Whelkington. I am, sir, entirely at your disposal.”

They walked on in silence, the private tussle between Whelkington’s principles and his purse working itself out in the muscles of his face.

Liberty, whose habit on outings with his family was to dash on far up ahead or else lag well behind, roaming at will in the general vicinity of his parents, now took his father’s hand. He kept glancing back over his shoulder, waiting for that heap of man lying facedown in the dirt to move, but it never did.

The sun, less than halfway to the meridian, had already begun to insinuate itself into the affairs of the day, the augmenting heat like syrup poured into the works of a clock, western windows and bricks all ablaze, the very air seeming to swell visibly. Down at the wharf, amidst a soft boiling cloud of pure white, a sweating and cursing crew of men, finely powdered from head hair to boot soles, was rolling barrels of flour onto one of the easting line boats. An old lumber wagon came clattering up piled high with freshly dug potatoes. Short-tempered clerks with pencils tucked behind their ears and garters on their sleeves scurried in and out of warehouse doors. In an open space near a pyramid of hogsheads labeled “
NAILS
,” a brand-new printing press sat darkly shining and isolate at the center of all the dockside commotion, an object fabulous and inscrutable, like something dropped unbidden from the heights of another world.

Halting before the
Croesus,
Captain Whelkington held up his fist for Thatcher’s inspection. “You see, I’ve already scraped my knuckles for the privilege of carrying you. You’re my prize, and by God I won’t give you up.”

Thatcher offered a wry smile. “Now I suppose I’ll have to fight you for the right not to be carried.”

“If that’s your style, I’m willing,” said Whelkington, coolly looking him over. “But if it’s not, all I seek is one favor.”

“Yes, Captain Whelkington, and what would that be?”

“Shut pan on the boat. There’s influential paying gentlemen of a sensitive nature who might take offense at the vinegar of your views. Do you reckon you can hold off on the nigger issue for the duration?”

“I can hold off if the others can. But I may as well admit to you, Captain, that I have found over the years that you can draw the shutters and bar the door and fire the hearth and yet somehow that darn topic will find a way in. And when that happens, I don’t deny it a place at the table.”

“Well, maybe what we need are stronger locks and thicker walls.”

“Or a bigger house.”

Whelkington’s eyes flared with anger, then he looked across the canal and said, “Six miles an hour. You’ll see. Ain’t a quicker packet on the whole Grand Western.”

Once under way, the
Croesus
’s smooth glide altered the immediate nature of the world, the tow line running out straight and taut to the trio of mules, their harnesses bedecked with fluttering plumes and jingling bells, plodding in synchronous step along the beaten towpath, the driver behind with reins wrapped about one gnarled fist and a long bull-snake whip in the other, the surrounding country dividing into perfect halves and passing—gable and brick, pond and paling, tree and meadow—like panels of painted scenery, in stately recessional. Arcs of water drew away from the bow of the boat in long, rippling wings carrying on their backs bits of broken light to a place far to the east where the sun would be eventually reassembled for tomorrow’s appearance. There was a sweet animal pleasure to this gentle onward motion and it seemed to Liberty as if the canal he floated on was circulating up along his body, bubbling playfully through his bones. The heat and the slow, hypnotic rhythms of the ride induced in the drowsy boy a sumptuous dreaminess which might have opened into states of knowledge only a certain languor can provide but for the commotion erupting periodically on the bow when Captain Whelkington would come charging from his monastic-sized quarters like a man whose hat was too tight for his head to loose a barrage of invective and abuse upon the bald skull of his driver, a lean, leathery twist of a man known as Genesee Red, twenty years tending his long-eared robins from the Hudson to the Erie Lake, a route along which he was legendary for his ability to sleep while not only standing upright but even walking forward. At the first bark of Whelkington’s voice, Red would come shuddering awake and instantly start lashing away in theatrical fashion at the poor mules’ galled rumps, piling on his own distinctive curses, “Git up, God Almighty! Go on there, Jesus Christ! Lift a hoof, Judas Priest!”—delicate female passengers turning away and covering their ears until the pace quickened and the satisfied captain returned to whatever rare business so occupied him in his inner sanctum, when inevitably Red’s gleaming head would begin to nod, the brisk beat of the hooves would slacken and out would rush the infuriated Whelkington like a frantic cuckoo in a capricious clock, the whole sorry episode repeating itself point for point, word for word, as if this were a crucial scene in a dreadful play requiring tireless rehearsal. After a couple reiterations, alert observers noted with amusement that the oaths “God Almighty!” “Jesus Christ!” and “Judas Priest!” were, in fact, the actual names of Red’s animules.

At the stern of the boat, clutching the tiller as if it were the tail of a felled beast he dare not release, stood the steersman, a morose, phlegmatic individual who acknowledged no person but the captain and responded to no address of any sort, no matter how genial or well-meant. The storm perpetually brewing in his face abated only momentarily on those now increasingly frequent occasions when he lifted a small brass horn to his lips, sounded a piercing metallic note and cried, “Low bridge! Everybody down!” The subsequent scramble—as all who had flocked onto the deck to revel in the view endeavored to make themselves as small as possible by squatting, crouching or, better yet, flattening themselves in their finery against a rooftop ornamented with muddy footprints, bird droppings, peanut shells, apple cores and an astonishing number of tobacco juice puddles—kindled the vaguest suggestion of light in the old canaller’s dark and pitted face.

Liberty, perched on the front edge of the roof, simply eased onto his back and let that narrow span of beams and planks slide wondrously over him, shadowed and cool in the underside where if bridges harbored secrets this was the seat in which they were lodged, the wooden corners soft and pale white with the shrouded nests of spiders, the keepers of the riddles.

Passengers aboard the
Croesus
this clear summer morning numbered about twenty-five, and a mixed lot they were. A party of young fashionables in full fig, displaying little interest in any aspects of the trip but one another. Several interchangeable families of German immigrants huddled together in refuge from the confusions of the English language; their baggage took up most of the space on the short rear deck, and they were referred to contemptuously as “those Dutch.” A bunch of broad-brimmed farmers were embarked on a mysterious mission to Utica whose grave import they couldn’t help alluding to in a veritable chorus of vague whispers that successfully alienated all within earshot. And, of course, the usual disposition of freely roving white males of dubious class and rank bound on errands no one dared question or, because of their gender and race, even think to.

One of these Lords of the Deck made his way, as if by chance, over to where Thatcher stood, gazing thoughtfully upstream, the canal winding like a shimmering snake through woodland and pasture.

“Quite a scorcher,” commented the stranger, a prosperous-looking gentleman who held himself fully erect in a confident, dandyish sort of attitude. He resembled a drawing or a painting of a man, not a mark or smudge anywhere on his person, his fair skin or his tightly tailored black suit. Words slipped from his small mouth with a distinctly oleaginous quality, lending an air of disconcerting elusiveness to the most matter-of-fact statement.