The Amalgamation Polka (20 page)

“Phineas!” exclaimed Mrs. Fowler. “Burst that bag and you’ll work it off shoveling shit in the barn for a month.”

“But I already shovel shit nearly every day,” her son quickly replied, rolling an eye for Liberty’s benefit.

“Don’t you dare direct such profane language my way. I’ll not tolerate such disrespect under my roof.”

“Why should you when you can go to town and get freely insulted any damn time you please.”

The slap she attempted to administer across his cheek was easily dodged and as Phineas headed out the door, he grabbed Liberty by the shoulder, saying, “Meet me by the woodpile.”

“I’ll meet you by the woodpile,” promised Mrs. Fowler heatedly, “birch rod in hand.”

Phineas raised a threatening fist, turned his back and departed.

“It’s a disjointed world, Liberty,” remarked a melancholic Mrs. Fowler, touching her hair as if it had just been mussed. “No snug fit to the parts anymore. We are tumbling and tumbling into a great abyss, I fear, perhaps one with no bottom. Go out and speak with him, Liberty. Tell him there’s rhubarb pie.”

He found Phineas seated on a fence post, studying his fingernails with grim intensity. “I’ve been to the rally,” he announced flatly. “The whole town’s in a positive jimjam.” The mayor had orated in his usual florid manner for more than an hour and then read a telegram from the governor promising that the state would chaw up all other states in the contest for duty and honor and glory. The band played, miserably, not a tune anyone in the crowd could recognize. Dogs scampered wildly about. Girls granted boys knowing smiles never revealed before. Then Wilbur Jenkins, rigged up in a fancy captain’s uniform, displayed the regimental flag his wife had stayed up all night sewing and asked for volunteers to step forward and take the oath. “And every man in the square but for me, Pegleg Tom and Ben Brown, that thieving coward, dashed cheering up to the table as if someone had just shouted ‘Free beer!’ I felt so bad I had to come right home. I don’t know what to do. She don’t want me to go.”

“Neither do mine.”

“Well, we could just desert the old homestead, march off like brave Greeks and let the old folks know by mail once we’re there.”

“Where? The battlefield?”

“No,” Phineas replied, eyes alight at the prospect of the stirring drama before them. “Richmond.”

“Got this dust-up won already, have you?”

“Do you think it’ll be over before we get our chance?”

“No, I reckon there’ll be more than enough killing and dying to go around. My father’s always said that breaking up chains requires a bigger, hotter fire than the one to forge them in the first place.”

“Perhaps there’s time then to lay seige to the mothers.”

“As a rehearsal for the rebs?”

“We’ll dazzle ’em with elocutionary rockets, Liberty, we’ll invest ’em with inductions, divert ’em with apostrophes, we’ll bombard ’em with a prioris, and if all else fails, we’ll simply outflank ’em and head smartly on out.”

Unlike most military campaigns, which rarely proceed as intended, Liberty’s crucial scene with his mother turned out to be not at all the lachrymose ordeal he had feared. She received him cordially in her bedroom, costumed in no mask of pale grief but appearing as herself, in the role he had largely known her by, eyes unringed, the whites startlingly pure and bloodless, complexion fair as a country milkmaid’s, her silvery black hair freshly washed and brushed. To her son she looked like a perfectly healthy adult woman who had decided, for understandable reasons, to simply remain beneath the shelter of the covers for a few days. He hesitated just inside the door.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, carefully closing the well-thumbed copy of the Bible she had been idly leafing through, a book to which she maintained a long, difficult, ambiguous relationship but one she could not, at least as yet, entirely abandon.

“It took a certain amount of time to accumulate the required courage.”

“I was expecting that, too. Come, sit beside me,” she urged, patting the blanket. “I want to feel your weight on the bed.”

As he settled into the soft knolls and hollows of the feather mattress, he noticed now, up close, a disturbing vagueness to his mother’s presence, a slight truancy around which attention skirted.

“Have you been eating properly?” she asked, then, feeling his forehead, “Do you have a fever?”

“No greater than the country’s.”

She sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I could say which would matter at this point. I couldn’t keep you from wandering as a child, I certainly cannot lock you up in your room now.”

“And there’s always the window.”

“I’ve known all these turbulent years that one day the turbulence would certainly invade our home, but I think I willfully refused to admit just how frightfully personal it might be.”

“But I’ll be back before summer,” he argued, the promise sounding ridiculously hollow even to him.

“Don’t, Liberty. Please stop. I have found that the unpleasant episodes of a life are more fruitfully endured when regarded through the strong lens of truth. All I ask is that you write regularly and that you try to refrain from imprudence. Don’t play the hero for anyone. There will be more than enough fools scrambling for that position and you will, no doubt, witness what becomes of them. The satisfactory fulfillment of one’s duty is heroism enough for anybody. Remember: the successful transit of even a single day is heroic beyond measure.”

“You understand this is an obligation I cannot shirk.”

“Yes. And you understand that I am a mother.”

“A grade that outranks the highest general.”

“Good, now give me a kiss.”

She smelled of soap and hyacinth and her own particular Roxana scent, somewhat vanillalike, ever allied in his mind with sentiments of safety and love, and as he paused in the doorway to say good-bye (for the last time as it turned out; he would never see her again) he was presented with a privileged glimpse into the nature of nature when for one eternal aching instant he beheld his mother as a complete discrete being, entirely isolate from himself, with a history his knowledge of which would remain forever spotty and elusive, and a present he could never fully inhabit, and he figured his own uncertain passage into muddling maturity had already begun.

The army was settling
into uneasy bivouac when sometime after dusk it began to rain, an omen some claimed, though whether for good or ill was not altogether clear. In the dark, men tripped over objects that weren’t there, dogs barked for no discernible cause. Even the battle-tested horses seemed spooked, whinnying without provocation, snapping occasionally at passing humans. “There’s a higher officer than Little Mac or Bobby Lee directing the course of this campaign,” claimed Sergeant Wickersham, attempting to calm the “strawfeet.” “On this field we’re all outranked, private and general alike. And that commander ain’t going to let the Union go down. He ain’t going to let you boys go down.” Corporal Albion Franks, a veteran of Bull Run and the Peninsula who’d been listening nearby, averted his face and spat carefully into the dirt.

And all through that long rainy night the remaining regiments came straggling into camp, spectral beings from realms underground gathered out of the fog, the silence of their grand procession broken only by the jingle of metal and the steady monotonous hissing sound of their feet upon the road.

Liberty and Phineas Fowler sat huddled cold, wet and miserable inside their tent, munching on handfuls of dry coffee mixed with the last of their sugar. No fires, the general had ordered, no talking either. The opposing armies now lay as close to one another as weary travelers sharing a narrow bed, their restless shifting throughout the night setting off periodic flurries of picket fire, the muzzle flashes darting like bright reptilian tongues through the drizzle and thickening fog, attempting to sense within this tense obscurity the adversary’s precise location. Sleep would be a rare commodity tonight on either side—especially for Liberty, who the previous day had discovered gunpowder in his canteen and, this morning, that his ramrod had gone missing. “Once the ball’s in motion,” Sergeant Wickersham had assured him, “you’ll be able to fetch another easy enough. The field’ll be scattered with them.”

“I didn’t like the sound of that,” complained Fowler, wiping the grime from the metalwork of his Enfield. “How many of us do you reckon are going to end the day no longer in need of muskets or anything else for that matter?”

“Ill reflections, Phinny. Lieutenant Quincy says it’s such thoughts that help draw the minies.”

“But how do you know I’m not having thoughts like this because I’m already sensing the balls coming toward me?”

“They’re coming for all of us, Phinny, and I would suggest the best remedy is whatever rest we can pinch from this grudging night.” He rolled over onto his dry side, which became immediately wet.

“I’m scared, Liberty. I don’t know if my soul is adequately prepared.”

“Go talk to the chaplain.” He could feel the leading edge of a cold taking up residence in the back of his throat.

“Chaplain Poague doesn’t like me. He believes redheads are all bound for perdition.”

“Yes,” said Liberty, trying to determine if that was a rock or a root pressing so insistently against his hip, “and all southpaws are thieves. I’ve heard the speech.”

“You’d think they would provide us with spiritual counsel of a loftier quality, especially on the eve of battle.”

“Well, what do you expect? Look at our officers.”

Fowler examined this sobering opinion for a full silent minute or two before remarking, “We are indeed commanded by a most peculiar tribe of gentlemen, that’s for certain. Why just the other day I saw Captain Dougherty kissing that damn fool dog of his right on its slobbering lips. ‘He’s my sweetheart,’ he said. What do you make of that?”

“I try not to find fault with expressions of true love wherever they might appear.” Liberty had shifted his body into a relatively comfortable position and if, as he suspected, sleep should prove elusive, at least he could provide some relief for his aching limbs. So, arm for a pillow, he lay there on the dank ground shivering like a drenched puppy, but was it the cold, the ague or these pesky studies on death that seemed to have arrived unbidden for not just a visit but an extended residence? Death appeared to him to be the natural hollowness about which all life was uneasily constructed. And perhaps its distance to you varied considerably over the years, a black planet inexorably orbiting your being, near, then far, but eventually, over time, moving closer and closer. It was now quite apparent to Liberty that your own personal demise differed dramatically in color and tone from the shocking yet still vaguely remote passing of friends and even family. Liberty wondered how he would behave tomorrow at death’s nearest approach thus far. Would he be brave, would he flee, and if his hours, in all their novelty and consuming intrigue, should actually come to an end, what would that be like, to be transformed from a warm, upright breathing creature of passion and hope into one of those discarded sacks of decaying meat he had glimpsed just yesterday coming up the mountain, mules and men tossed carelessly by the roadside in a tangled heap of aborted life? His imagination stopped, paralyzed before the prospect of eternity, in whose features he could discern only a yawning pitch darkness and an icy wind. His nerves seemed as taut as fiddle strings, helpless before whatever grim invisible hand chose to play them. But consolation of the sort available in such a desperate emotional situation was found at last, however momentarily, in a variation of Father’s favorite injunction: your grandfather Azariah didn’t help Colonel Knox haul sixty tons of artillery three hundred miles over the Berkshires in the dead of winter for you, at the crossroads of honor, glory and all that is right and moral in the universe, to torment yourself with oppressive speculations, let alone cut and run before the foe. The notion of the Union and his family’s long, intimate and convoluted relationship with its history seemed to call him back to himself. His mood actually brightened. Thoughts were weapons, too, as his mother had repeatedly instructed. Duty, then, duty and a resignation to the hazards of fate, would carry him, safely he prayed, through the perils of the advancing day, which by the time he had finally managed to soothe somewhat his anxious heart was already beginning to reveal itself faintly against the eastern sky. Now the four batteries of twenty-pound Parrott rifles perched on the hills behind opened up with a startling roar that once begun seemed to go on without cease until the reluctant sun itself died into the west. The ground heaved, the air shook. By the time Sergeant Wickersham arrived, most of his men were up, gathered in a ragged group, every eye searching Wickersham’s face and gestures for signs of confidence.

“Easy, my boys, easy. Remember the Lord and you’ll all be fine.”

“No coffee?” asked Private Haskell, an inveterate guzzler of even the stingiest, meanest brew to qualify for the name, but the sergeant was already gone, his progress down the row of laggards’ tents marked by a fading refrain of grunts and oaths.

“Well, at least the infernal rain has stopped,” remarked Private Goodspeed. “I didn’t sign up to fight the weather, too.”

“Considering your valorous achievements so far,” answered Corporal Bell, “you didn’t sign up to do much of anything else, either,” which ignited an explosion of laughter and left Goodspeed, always too slow with a witty response, staring dolefully at the ground.

“I’d take on the rebs any day compared to these goddamn gray-backs,” complained Private Coxe, popping a pair of newly discovered lice between his thumb and forefinger. “I can’t seem to outrun the little buggers.”

“They like you, Thaddeus,” joked Bell. “They smell fresh linen and good grub in your pantry.”

“The only fresh linen in this man’s army,” said Private Bromfield, an attorney’s son from Albany, “is the hankie in General Hooker’s breast pocket.”

“And we’re not too sure about that,” added Bell.

A white-bearded private, eyes rolling loosely around in his head, came stumbling past shouting, “It’s a-coming, it’s a-coming, all out it’s a-coming.”

“What’s that you say?” yelled Fowler. “What’s coming?”

“Oh, you’ll see, young duck, you and all your green comrades will see soon enough.” And he vanished into the mist, his monitory cry trailing eerily behind him.

“Who in the hell was that?” asked Liberty. His boots were wet, his clothes clammy and a decidedly unpleasant ache had sprouted up behind his right eye.

“Oh, that’s just Old Man Perkins,” explained Corporal Bell. “Pay him no mind. He gets quite exercised before every engagement, and then, when it begins a-coming, you’ll see him a-going quick enough.”

A Confederate shell, then another and another, came crashing into the trees overhead, producing an immediate shower of shredded leaves, twigs, bark and splinters, then an entire branch big as a railroad tie and complete with an abandoned bird nest plummeted down directly onto Private Goodspeed’s head, knocking him senseless to the ground.

“Quite a novel effect, don’t you think?” asked Lieutenant Rice, a grocery clerk from Elmira who had decided to attend the war in what he apparently deemed the protective guise of a fop, hands adorned with frayed kidskin gloves and knotted around his scrawny neck a bright red silk scarf which Sergeant Wickersham kept cautioning would make him an extra fine target for the secesh. “Rather like trying to conduct a dance in a collapsing saw mill.”

Fowler’s eyes were jerking frantically about, as if searching for the door out of this place.

“Not exactly what we expected, is it?” remarked Liberty, picking the wood chips out of his teeth, and before Fowler could reply all the Federal cannons went off at once and the artillery battle had begun. The noise was so tremendous the troops could barely hear Sergeant Wickersham ordering them into line. On Liberty’s left Private Alvah Huff, a lover of cards and money in that order, began to repeat aloud The Lord’s Prayer, mouthing the words so rapidly they lost all sense,blurring into one long indistinguishable sound. Without losing a beat in his chant, he removed from his coat pocket a deck of playing cards he then scattered carelessly at his feet.

Suddenly, amidst the din, Liberty heard a voice clear and calm, “I’m right behind you, amalgamator.” He swiveled around to confront the leering eyes of Private Arthur McGee, former horse thief, company bully and small-town racist. “Welcome to your last day on earth.”

“Well,” drawled Liberty, “I shall try not to leave it as I found it.”

“Listen to me, you little nigger lover, by the time the sun sets on this day you’re going to be dancing with your Ethiopian pals around a campfire in hell.”

“That so? Then I’ll be sure to save a place for you.”

Instantly, Liberty’s jacket just below the collar was seized in a huge meaty fist.

“Seems like you want to get rowed up Salt River before this here ball has even begun,” McGee hissed, spraying Liberty’s face with a liberal quantity of spit.

“Hold!” declared Sergeant Wickersham, stepping between the two. “Save it for the johnnies.”

“McGee don’t lie,” growled McGee, wagging a nailless forefinger under Liberty’s nose. “McGee don’t play no jokes. Unlike people, McGee means what he says.”

“Unlike people,” responded Liberty, “I forgive you.”

McGee glared back, his face the color of raw beef.

“Get in line, you two,” ordered Sergeant Wickersham, “we’re moving up.”

“I thought the bumpkins,” commented Fowler, leaning in toward Liberty’s ear, “were all collected on the other side.”

“America,” replied Liberty. “We spread the bumpkins around evenly.”

The company was guided through a continual cascade of tree parts to the southern edge of the woods, where they were positioned with the rest of their regiment behind a freshly formed unit from Wisconsin, farm boys mostly, who were gravely studying in a murky dawn-light the sobering vista spread before them. Beyond a worn fence there was a wide rolling pasture, fog in the hollows, then another fence and a field of maturing corn and on a small knoll in the far distance stood a modest white one-room building surrounded by Confederate batteries which, even as they watched, were sending an impossible barrage of metal and explosives in their direction. One shell, dropping short, hit a rock outcropping in the pasture and, fuse still sputtering, bounced clean over Liberty’s entire regiment, detonating somewhere in the foliage behind them. Then Liberty noticed blooming upright among the tall stalks of tasseling corn blades of polished metal glinting in the early light—bayonets, hundreds of them, the rebs were in the corn. Liberty’s own rifle kept slipping through his sweaty hands, and each time he swallowed it felt as if a pebble was in his throat.

Then, with a flurry of shouted commands, Wisconsin began climbing the fence and moving across the open pasture, flags fluttering, swords waving, bugles crying. “Grand, ain’t it?” shouted Corporal Franks, a huge grin plastered across the face of a man who had never been celebrated for his smile. “Have you ever known such bliss?” Liberty stared back in open-mouthed astonishment.

Wisconsin was about halfway across the pasture when out of the hollows rose a line of Confederate infantry, muskets blazing, as simultaneously the artillery on the hill let loose a thundering salvo and Wisconsin disappeared in an angry cloud of fog and powder smoke. Through the shifting haze all that could be seen was a handful of men running back toward the rear and a pleasant green meadow littered with hundreds of blue-coated bodies.

“We’re next!” cried Sergeant Wickersham. “Guide on that schoolhouse over there. We’re going to take out those damn guns!”

Liberty was experiencing the oddest sensation: that he was no longer properly situated inside his body, that the thinking, feeling portion of himself was now hovering mysteriously ghostlike above the physical self. His hands, wrapped clumsily about his rifle, seemed miles away. Last night Private Todd had informed him, with a certain resigned conviction, that today he would be killed and asked Liberty if he would be so kind as to make sure his effects were returned home to his family in Buffalo. Liberty had scoffed at this grim premonition, but now wondered if he might not be undergoing a similar apprehension. “Think of the bondsmen,” his mother had exhorted him in a recent letter on how best to get through this terrible war. “Think of their stooped toil, their martyred agony.” The words, in his mother’s own fair hand, appeared at the moment cold and distant. All the sermons and arguments he had heard throughout his short life on the wickedness of chained servitude had, for him, come down to this: a mad charge through clouds of dense, choking smoke into the very barrels of the slavocracy. And when at last the dread order to advance was given, his body seemed light, almost weightless, and he floated over the ground like a spirit.