The Amalgamation Polka (19 page)

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he began. “I am Professor McGurk.” From scattered points of the room, great cheers at this information. “I have recently returned from a grand tour of Europe in which many of the more notable crowned heads sampled the demonstration which you are about to witness. What I will show you this evening are the entertaining effects of an exhilarating chemical compound upon the human brain. You will observe your fellows altered and positively transformed and transported beyond the mundane concerns of our dull daily life. This is a metamorphosis perfectly natural, perfectly safe.

“Now, I am going to require some six or seven adventurous souls willing to risk passage through that delicate veil that obscures us from the numerous delights beyond and who also possess a mere twenty-five cents as the price of admission, Don’t be shy, step forward, everyone who desires to partake of the gas will be accommodated. This, I need not remind you, is the experience of a lifetime. You will not want to miss it.”

There was a shuffling of chairs as several men rose and advanced toward the stage.

“I want to do it,” Liberty said suddenly, standing and fumbling in his pocket for a coin.

“If you go crazy,” declared Potter, obviously amused, “it ain’t my funeral.”

“Never said it would be,” answered Liberty, heading for the stage.

“Here’s a bold lad,” said Professor McGurk, reaching down to help him up. “Perhaps he’d like to go first.”

“Sure.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Liberty.”

“Liberty, eh. Well, I guarantee you are about to be liberated.” He handed the boy a rubber mask attached to a length of tubing whose other end was fitted into the stopper of a large glass jar. “Place the mask over your mouth and nose, and when I give the signal I want you to breathe in as deeply as you can. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be sorry,” called a voice from the crowd.

McGurk fiddled around with the jar, released a metal clamp on the tubing and, nodding his head, said, “Now.”

Liberty inhaled. He felt something cool and sweet rush headlong into his lungs and even when he stopped inhaling, pulling the mask away from his face, the inward rushing kept on, filling not just his lungs but all the organs of his body. His arms and legs, seemingly emptied of all bone and tissue, were also filling with this most peculiar vapor. Then a most terrific rushing, as loud and rapid as a train, went shooting up his spine into his head and exploded against the roof of his skull, pretty flecks of colored light cascading warmly, gently over the rolling meadows of his brain—all these weird sensations occupying no more than a brief moment, but Liberty seemed to have found himself in a new place where “moments” were not only meaningless, they did not even exist. No longer securely lodged in his mind, he was swelling into a pleasant space vaguely bodylike in form that seemed to act as a strange prism upon the world, sharpening its colors, amplifying its sound.

When the professor asked if he would care to imbibe a second time, Liberty reached into his pocket for another coin. His attention was shifting constantly and haphazardly from the sensations within to the phantasmagoria without, where events occurred in a perpetual past as if he were actually remembering what he was witnessing. It appeared that one of his fellows onstage was engaged in standing on his head while another scurried about on all fours barking like a dog, and at some point he seemed to join in with all for a rousing chorus of “Oh Susannah.” After some unknown passage of time, he discovered himself back at his table, where he quickly downed two beers and informed his uncle that he looked like a lobster.

Then Liberty was moving through a fog where each flame of each gas lamp stood, haloed, separate, distinct, eyes of fire guiding one on to a catastrophe unforeseen. Faces loomed in and out of the mist like clouds with human features and all the speech around him sounded like Chinese, though he had never heard that language spoken before. It felt like an infinite rain was falling inside his head.

Then they were seated in a red parlor surrounded by women in silken robes, a sweaty man with a moustache pounding away at a piano and singing in a harsh voice a tuneless version of “Jimmy Crack Corn,” each of the lamp flames swaying in rhythm and singing along in harmony. He realized he had never hated a particular song with such venom. Now his uncle’s face looked swollen and about to explode.

Then he was in a room with papered walls and on the paper were pictures of birds in flight and he could hear them crying as they passed in ranked formation. Somehow his pants were off and he was seated on the edge of a bed, a girl kneeling between his knees and washing with a warm rag his awakened privates and suddenly it was like he was sneezing at the wrong end of his body.

Then, the girl was gone, and miraculously, without benefit of balloon and basket, he was ascending upright through a sun-splashed sky; below, the isle of Manhattan, as vivid and unreal as a fairy tale dragon bathing its battered flanks in the cooling confluence of waters; every rooftop a shiny scale; every plume of chimney smoke a dark venting of noxious vapors from the creature’s infernal interior; and the hectic inhabitants of the city itself a plague of mites infesting the great slumbering body. From the dizzying heights he now occupied it was impossible to discern whether such a visitation was salutary or malign, distinctions growing more and more obscure with each elevating second. Imagine then the view from the Maker’s porch. Who to receive the favor of His munificent eye? Host? Parasite? Both? Through the lens of eternity was the difference of any consequence whatsoever? Did He care? The questions themselves seemed trivial. Perhaps these mundane discriminations were symptoms of a profound error, a fruitless sorting of beans with faulty equipment. Even at an angelic altitude, vexatious thoughts. New York.

When news of Sumter
arrived, Roxana promptly took to her room. For five days no one saw her but Thatcher, who carried the meal trays up the stairs and carried them back down again, largely untouched. “Fine,” he’d reply to all inquiries, “she’s just fine.” But his manner grew uncharacteristically abrupt, his temper short, and he seemed increasingly prone to periodic intervals of arrested motion when his body simply ceased to function, the eyes turned inward, and he’d stand fixed as a hunter in a painting straining to hear over the next ridge the awful baying of the hounds.

Lying alone in his garret in the comfortless dead reaches of the night, anxieties about both parents dancing like devils about his bed, Liberty would listen to his mother crying, sometimes for hours, and pray to a dubious God he could neither fully believe in (behold the gifts He had showered upon this particular family) nor fully reject (matters could be worse, much worse) that whatever obstacles impeding the Fishes’ natural migration be speedily removed so that happiness might be more fairly pursued. Of course it would be Carolina who commenced the big ball, and though Liberty had never met his maternal grandfather or even glimpsed his likeness, he could not help but imagine a pop-eyed, sunken-cheeked Grandpa Asa yanking the lanyard on the inaugural cannon.

In the morning after the first night of what would be years of perpetual night, a rueful Thatcher studied his son across the neglected breakfast table for some interminable minutes before remarking, “I suspect I know how you may be feeling on this dreaded occasion, but I want to emphasize to you that your mother and I do not wish to see you, despite the understandable pressure of your convictions, stealing off to a recruiting office. I know that halfwits on both sides have been claiming rather vociferously that if the worst did come, the worst would be over in a handful of weeks, so there will no doubt be a terrific rush among certain impetuous hotheads to enter the fray before it abruptly concludes. But I ask you, as your father, to please refrain from such rashness. You are too young.”

“I’ll be seventeen in a few months.”

“A foal who’s barely strayed from the barn. Please do not burden your mother with more cares than she already has. You realize how frightfully difficult this time is for her.”

“As if I would ever require even a gentle reminder. Every tear is a drop of scalding oil upon my own skin, and…and…” He faltered for a moment and had to glance hurriedly away. Outside the half-open window the sun shone idiotically on, the proud maples waved their soft fresh leaves at him and somewhere a dog was barking with great urgency, as if the production of that one grating sound was absolutely vital to the execution of the day’s business. “The situation,” he resumed, “is no less intricate for me.”

“I understand, and I sympathize thoroughly, but I must ask you now to promise me that you will not even attempt to enlist without the specific permission of your mother and myself.”

Liberty’s gaze went skittering about the room in a vain attempt at avoiding his father’s steady, unblinking stare. “I’m sorry,” he admitted quietly. “I don’t believe I can, in all conscience, do as you ask.”

Thatcher gave a brief nod, rose heavily from his chair and left the room.

Liberty remained at the table, scrupulously warding off any thought whatsoever, and calmly finished his coffee. Then, wandering out into the hallway, he paused at the parlor door from behind which could be discerned a low murmuring and the rustle of quick rodent-like footsteps—Aunt Aroline pacing nervously to and fro and muttering to herself. From upstairs came only a profound silence. Once the sobbing commenced again, he didn’t know if he could restrain himself from fleeing the house. On the front porch he found Euclid planted in Roxana’s chair and rocking to a firm genteel beat, a country squire contemplating the compass of his property on out to the distant hills where the green mottling of spring was well under way. Without turning his head to see who had approached, Euclid simply opened his mouth and began to speak: “I saw the dawning of this day long, long ago. I been praying for it nightly since I was a little chap buried in darkness down in Mississip, brushing flies off Master John’s babies. Be patient, says the Lord, a mighty house requires a mighty foundation. But now the good work has finally begun, only there will be storms, Liberty, blows to shake the spirit of the sinners as well as the saints, angry thunders, trickster lightnings and infinite seas of infinite blood all boiling and heaving. I saw all these afflictions as a muffin back on the Twelve Trees.”

“But they’re saying six weeks, Euclid, ninety days at the most.”

“That’s man talking and man is nothing but air and noise and the sound he makes never did nobody any damn bit of good. Should hush up now and listen to the Lord. He’s the Grand Projector and His business ain’t necessarily our business. This here is going to be the knockdown of all knockdowns. You say ninety days. Try nine hundred. Try nine hundred and more.”

“I’m thinking about signing up.”

Euclid rocked rhythmically on. “Beautiful sky today,” he observed. “Hunter’s sky. That’s the Lord’s Traveling Exhibition up there, Liberty, and oftentimes those passing shows can lay such a powerful peace upon your soul you think you just might drop from the plumb pleasure of it.” He stopped rocking. “What does the voice say?”

Liberty smiled. “Which one?”

“Your true voice, baby doll, the one in your heart.”

“Euclid,” confessed Liberty shyly, “I honestly do not know.”

“Then you have a confusion upon you. Go out into the woods and set the issue before the rocks and the trees. The leaves will tell you what to do.”

An hour later, seated on a moss-padded boulder shaped remarkably like a monarch’s throne, Liberty pondered his destiny, much, so he imagined, like an ancient troubled king, before him an almost perfect circle of dead earth in which no living thing grew or trespassed, and apparently never had, this tranquil glade neatly scooped out of the traceless depths of the forest always for him a supremely magical place where it was said witches once capered and primeval tribes performed elaborate rituals of a thrillingly hideous nature, and whatever presences had been invoked by those pagan mystics must linger still else why did the soil remain so indelibly poisoned? Once he thought he had even glimpsed the spade-tipped tail of some green leathery creature slipping deftly behind a large stump at his approach. And once he had heard voices conversing in a guttural foreign tongue right out of the unbodied air before him and, as he attended to their intriguing confabulation, he discovered, after a mysterious auditory adjustment, he could actually comprehend their gibberish, his mind translating the nonsensical sounds into recognizable English that instructed him where to find a birthday coin given him by Aunt Aroline that he, careless boy, had promptly lost. The coin glittered in the exact center of the contaminated circle. Euclid was right. Solutions to the important riddles of this rough-and-tumble world could only be discovered through an appeal to the sphere unseen. But now, though, as he debated the question of the hour, taking up both sides in equal turn, the woods and stones remained frustratingly mute. Eventually, the words in his head trailed away and, entering a region where, language and logic spent, he simply surrendered the struggle and in that very instant it was not a voice but the silence that spoke clearly to him, and at once he stood and went down out of the forest to a road on the edge of town and a sad, saddle-backed cottage of cracked boards and crazed windows where a one-wheeled buggy stood tilted on its axle in the dried mud before the door. Loud, persistent knocking finally summoned a female voice from within. “Who’s there?” it cried.

“Liberty,” he announced softly, and in reply the bolt was instantly drawn and the heavy oaken door opened on a tiny woman no larger than a ten-year-old child. She was wearing a peruke and a soiled and torn ruby gown.

“Liberty!” she exclaimed, hugging him warmly about the waist. “I’ve just been thinking about you. Come in, come in,” she commanded, pulling him roughly into a dim cluttered space fragrant with pine smoke, stale grease and the distinctive effluvium of human bodies, numerous and unwashed, at close quarters.

“I knew,” declared Mrs. Fowler with a twittering enthusiasm one hinge removed from outright mania, “the moment I woke this morning that the sun would not set without an appearance of your face at my door, so I immediately decided that today’s pie, in your honor, would be rhubarb. And so it is, my special rhubarb pie for Liberty.” And she produced from a sideboard in a shadowy corner he could barely perceive a heavy platter whose circular cap of crust he did recognize once it had been shoved up under his flaring nostrils.

“Excellent!” he pronounced, frankly unable to distinguish the singular scent of that tart vegetable from the sundry robust odors clamoring for olfactory attention.

“It has a secret ingredient,” Mrs. Fowler confided in a coquettish aside, “I cannot divulge to the others but which I can reveal to you, Liberty.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping into stage whisper. “Gunpowder,” she murmured confidentially.

“Gunpowder?”

“It adds a certain tonic charm to any dish.”

“In which case I may require an extra slice,” he submitted politely.

“Gobble up what you will, Liberty. My family mislikes plant pie.”

In the gloom to which his eyes had gradually become accustomed, Liberty discovered baby Lucius teetering stark naked in the middle of the floor, sucking industriously on his thumb and clutching in his other chubby fist what appeared to be a dead mouse. From obscure corners came the rustlings of other creeping things, bestial or mortal or both. Despite having known the family since the advent of memory, Liberty had never been able to ascertain with any surety the precise number of Fowler children nor had he ever been informed of Mrs. Fowler’s Christian name.

“I had to send Phineas to town,” she explained, “simply to clear some space around me. You know what he can be like once something momentous settles over his brain, up and down, in and out, it’s enough to put a parson into a pucker. I do hope you’re not vexing your own mother unnecessarily.”

“No, ma’am, she’s taken to her room.”

Mrs. Fowler gave him a curt nod of approval. “Exactly where I would be if I had a room to take to. But what are we doing standing about in the dark and jawing like a couple of damn fools? Lucius!” she called out sharply as she began leading Liberty back into the well-lit kitchen, “what the devil do you have in your mouth? Drop the thingum on the floor, baby, that’s right, on the floor. That child,” she uttered, shaking her head in exasperated wonder.

Settled before a relatively clean table in a relatively filthy kitchen, Liberty stared almost uncomprehendingly at the mammoth slice of pie Mrs. Fowler had set out for him. The filling oozing threateningly from between the crusts was of a suspicious tinge and consistency. When he finally dared a bite, employing one of Mrs. Fowler’s prize possessions, a recent gift from a dotty Boston aunt, a pronged silver utensil she called a “forp,” he encountered a taste best described as sweetened saddle soap. In fact, he was so absorbed in exploring the bracing novelty of this flavor that he failed to notice at first that Mrs. Fowler had quit her anxious puttering about and was now leaning precariously upon the back of a chair and emitting a stuttering series of distressing noises.

“Mrs. Fowler?” he inquired tentatively.

She turned around to reveal to him her flooded eyes, her hot red cheeks. “Don’t think I am ignorant of what you boys are secretly planning. I have been dreading this day ever since that awful man was elected president. I’ve been young, I know what youth is like, an occasion for folly and artlessness unbounded, deaf ears to elders all around, I understand, but I will not permit my oldest boy to throw himself convulsively upon the pyre, and, if Mr. Fowler had not gone to Canada to seek his fortune in pelts, he would be here at my side blocking the door against the both of you. Mr. Fowler, as do I, abhors violence. He believes all disputes can be readily settled with a shot of old orchard and a deck of cards. If Mr. Fowler were here he would deal out a hand of faro and nobody would be going anywhere. Mr. Fowler understands the proper conduct in life and Mr. Fowler is never wrong.”

“Yes, ma’am” was all Liberty could offer in reply to such fervent reasoning, though he had never seen a Mr. Fowler or any other man about the place and lately had begun to wonder where all the fresh babies kept coming from.

“I always knew you possessed more than a single grain of sense, which is more than I can say of my Phineas. You’ve always been death on a speech, Liberty, ever your parents’ child, I suppose, and Phineas listens to you with far greater attentiveness than he does his own mother, so I ask you, please, try to talk some reason into that cast-iron noggin of his, would you?”

“I’m not so sure, Mrs. Fowler, that he really listens all that well to anybody,” replied Liberty, recollecting the time young Phinny, eager to sample the rumored delights of erotic bliss, dropped his pants and despite repeated warnings stuck his erect penis into the presumably honey-slick knothole of a dead tree containing what he swore was an abandoned beehive only to painfully learn that numerous angry tenants remained in residence, and as he ran howling across an open field, his unmentionables aflame, toward the relief of Wilson’s Creek, onlookers in a passing coach, namely his sweetheart Elmina Carlisle and her stuffy mother, were treated to an unobstructed view of his predicament, their combined shrieks adding to the general effect of wanton mayhem and causing the horses to bolt.

“I have faith in you, Liberty,” she said, patting him affectionately on the head. “You could coax snakes out of the ground with the music of your voice.”

“Mrs. Fowler, I really must object—”

“Ssssh,” she cautioned hastily, finger to her lips, “hush now, here he comes.”

A door slapped shut, clumsy footsteps approached and into the kitchen stumbled a tall, freckled, cream-faced boy about Liberty’s age bearing upon his shoulder a sack of ground flour which he unceremoniously dumped to the floor, causing a puff of white powder to explode gently upward.