The Amalgamation Polka (28 page)

Liberty leaned over, inclining his face to within what he hoped was respectful range, and was abruptly startled by the unexpected sensation of her thin, papery lips pressing somewhat indecorously against his. There was no suitable comparison. It was like sparking with your own granny.

“He smells,” she announced decisively.

“Oh, oh,” stammered Liberty, still slightly distracted by the intimate matriarchal touch. “Terribly sorry, I’ve been traveling through open country for some weeks now, occasions for refreshing oneself being understandably rare.”

“I didn’t say I minded. God knows the promiscuous bouquet of man and beast I’ve had to endure on this forsaken farm. Yours is rather pleasant, actually, puts me in mind of black pepper.” Turning to her husband: “Remember Aunty Dell’s rabbit stew? How it smelled after sitting overnight in the pot?”

“Because once we were done, you spit in it to keep her and her brood from sampling any.”

The woman snorted contemptuously. “They were all such unregenerate thieves. What could I do?”

“Now, now,” he soothed, “those times are long past.”

“Yes,” she snapped, “to be replaced by worse ones.”

“Now don’t go riling yourself up again. You know what can happen.”

Her pale, bony fingers had begun plucking restlessly at the covers. “Goodness,” she exclaimed, noticing Liberty still standing politely before her, “this boy must be famished. Take him down to the kitchen and have Nicey fix him some supper. “

The old man sighed. “You know Nicey’s been missing for two days now.”

“I know no such thing.”

“We discussed the matter only this morning.”

“I have no recollection of any fugitive being reported to me since Horace run off for the swamp with a side of bacon.”

“Horace?” repeated Maury patiently. “That was over twenty-five years ago.”

“What ridiculous nonsense. You were always no-account on dates, anyway. If Nicey’s gone, who’s been cooking my food?”

“Old Portia.”

“Old Portia?” she shrieked in alarm. “You permit a crazy woman to prepare our meals? What careless stupidity! It’s a wonder we’re not all poisoned. Remove her from the kitchen immediately, and I want her replacement to be personally witnessed by you tasting each portion on my plate before it is served to me. Do you understand?”

“Yes, dear.”

“And I should think you would do well to have your own dishes tasted, also. I’ve never been able to fathom why I wasn’t laid out in my grave decades ago, brought low by the cruel burden of managing this absurd jamboree all by myself.”

“Now, Ida, I believe there you are exaggerating again.”

“How dare you? I never exaggerate. If you hadn’t wasted your life puttering about in that damn shack teaching a monkey how to hold a pencil or whatever profitless folly you’re engaged in out there, you’d know I speak the truth. Conditions on this property have been so monstrous, even from the moment I said ‘I do,’ that a simple recitation of the plain facts sounds like a ten-cent melodrama.”

“I will not have you blackening the value of my work.”

“Show me a result and I won’t.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, Ida.”

“Then don’t.” She settled back regally into the immaculate plumpness of her pillows and, through emphatically shut eyes, instructed, “Now go. Get that boy fed. When everything else has gone up the flue, we can yet demonstrate to the world that southern hospitality still prevails through the smoke and the dust.”

“Nicely put.”

“Write it down for me so I can read it later.”

As they hastily withdrew, Liberty thought his ears must be mistaken on hearing Grandmother mumble drowsily, as if already adrift in sleep, a single indelible word—and that word was “Shit.”

Out in the hallway, as his grandfather fiddled with the latch, a flimsy contrivance of bent nails and string, Liberty was finding himself somewhat disconcerted by the wild fantasy of bringing both fists crashing down onto the back of this stooped old man’s white, white head when Maury shot him an amused glance and said, “She’ll outlive all of us.”

That night, after a distinctly satisfying platter of dodgers and chicken fixin’s concocted seemingly out of thin air by the moody monkey woman, who apparently was not the dreaded Old Portia, and a julep-fueled rehash of Maury’s rigidly selective views on history, nature, politics and religion—an arrogant amalgam of fact, fancy and folly that would have been outright laughable if it weren’t so potentially lethal—Liberty was shown by his grandfather without comment to a second-floor room he guessed at once must have been that of his mother. He felt as if he’d been conducted into the private sanctum of a great museum where were stored priceless rarities the public was never permitted to see. But after a long, deliberate, respectful exploration of the room he could find little that was demonstrably hers. The bureau, the trunk at the foot of the bed were both disappointingly empty, as was the closet, though he did manage to locate there the loose floorboard under which she had secreted her precious diary. All that remained now were some dried mouse droppings. It was a chamber from which all evidence of previous occupation had been thoroughly expunged.

Then there was the bed, the one dominating article of furniture. He walked around it a few times, actually contemplated curling up on the hardwood floor, but finally plain weariness of bone and heart nudged him mattressward where he lay like a painted figure atop a sarcophagus, pondering the imponderable mysteries of time and family. The smoldering fantasies of revenge, the grand schemes for personally administering a sublime brand of exquisitely calibrated justice usually found only in the wishful pages of airy romance or in visions of afterlife proceedings before the bar of God, now seemed hopelessly childish and futile. These ghastly people who had, over years of reiterated tales of their fabulous exploits, assumed in youthful reverie ogreish proporions of utter invincibility appeared in their furrowed flesh to be little more than puny, imprisoned creatures, old, deranged, lost. And what could one do about that?

If he slept at all during his first fervid night on ancestral ground, it was a slumber hardly worthy of the name, an anxious roll between the sheets, endeavoring in vain to elude unwelcome visitations from the ever-present past, memories of his mother mostly, but her memories, not his, yet somehow through a kind of occult agency transmitted clearly and abundantly, scenes from a young girl’s passage through the privileged world of the southern landed gentry and, strangely enough, the heart’s most piercing intensities fully refracted through the implacably commonplace: the emblazoned side of the gin house at dawn; the spooky intelligence in her spaniel’s wet brown eyes; Mother Maury at the piano at candle lighting, each distinct note as pure, as melancholy, as transient as the fading western sky; the thrill of Baylor’s lips behind a peeling oak tree at the Charleston cotillion; a rusted shackle lying untouched for months in the shade of the big house—a shifting cargo of perilous remembrances sufficient at times to scuttle even the sturdiest ship of being, often resulting in such convulsive episodes as “the month of tears,” so termed by a sardonic Thatcher, when Mother (his mother) rarely left her New York room, seemingly unable to keep from bawling for hours at a time, and Liberty, a frightened and helpless son, resolving then with all the fierce determination of a half-formed eight-year-old mind that once grown up he would find and punish terribly the fiends responsible, whoever they were.

Now, as he thrashed about in the lair of the beast, so to speak, mulling obsessively over the unforeseen intricacies of his visit, ruefully concluding that he, too, was as trapped as his forebears in the venomous nettles of the overarching family tree, he became aware of a disturbance in the atmosphere, faintly at first, then swelling swiftly in volume, the sound of querulous voices raised in contention and though muffled by the intervening walls, still capable of conveying to his attentive ears an audible quality of daggers slashing at the air. It’s me they’re arguing about, he understood at once, a visible embodiment of their once beloved daughter’s unforgivable treachery, the insidious canker in the genealogy, a corruption to be coldly felled, sectioned and kindled into fine powder. It is Grandmother, Liberty surmised, who wishes him gone, returned to a banishment too good for him and his kind. But perhaps Grandfather, amused by his youthful audacity, had begun warming to him and might, after a probationary day or two, take Liberty aside for a private palaver on the hypocritical paradoxes of life above the Mason-Dixon line, then attempt to satisfy what must be a natural parental curiosity about the fate of his daughter, a woman he last glimpsed in the flesh more than two decades ago. And, if Grandfather asked, how would Liberty reply? She is dead, sir, he might explain, first driven to distraction, then harried to her grave by Furies you and Grandmother incubated and nourished to exact petty vengeance for a courageous assumption of moral duty you people, in your mutual blindness, could not perceive as anything other than willful disobedience, Furies I recognize even now leering from the wallpaper, decorating the trees, perching atop each and every fence post, Furies gathering themselves, I fear, for the final hunt, and this time, Grandfather, the quarry will be you and your invalid wife. Could he actually dare utter such damning language to a man who was still as much a stranger as he was kin? Well, Liberty was a pirate, remember; he knew how to bide his time until the moment was ripe for running up the black flag.

Maury came for him at dawn with a steaming cup of what passed for coffee in those straitened parts, a groggy Liberty startled at his window by the postdiluvian spectacle of flattened grass, dripping leaves and countless metallic-bright puddles of water standing about in the yard, as if the land itself had broken out into weepy eruptions.

“Rheumatoid’s acting up in all this dampness,” complained Maury, clutching his grandson’s shoulder as they laboriously descended the gallery steps. “Sleep well?”

“Apparently so,” admitted Liberty, not having heard a single drop.

“Rain on the roof, a soothing elixir vitae to the weary wayfarer. How many times, frazzled and sore, have I found myself, even in woefully inadequate foreign quarters, nodding plumb off to the gentle lullaby of an evening drizzle in my ear? Suppose it reminds us of the womb or some such truck.”

“How’s Grandmother today?”

“Wouldn’t know. Elsie does a bang-up job of tending to her. I haven’t slept in the same room with the woman since Nullification. Watch your step there”—brusquely yanking him around an impressive pile of dog manure. “A good soaking turns this place into one big crap farm. All varieties and shapes, too. There’s a cash crop for you.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Probably make a better job of it than with this cussed cotton. Got bad rust in that field there,” he noted, pointing through the trees. “And a plague of caterpillars in the one yonder. And I’ve just received word another of the gins has seized up, so we’re only working two today. If I weren’t already crazy the futile attempt to coax a marginal profit out of these shiftless people and this played-out land would’ve brought the asylum cart to our door years ago. See those banks?” He indicated several distant acres of cleared ground laid out in ridged rows of soil and straw. “Those are my eating potatoes. Finest leatherjackets in the state. As you shall soon discover later at table. Ah, here we are.” He had led Liberty through the mud and the mist to a long, narrow, weatherbeaten shack from whose malodorous interior seemingly emanated every unbearable sound of which human beings in distress are capable. “The sickhouse,” he announced, in grand butlerian tones.

“What’s all this commotion in here?” demanded Maury, stepping through a filthy curtain of frayed linen.

An overwrought woman with a milky eye and the letters
A M
branded on her cheek rushed forward. “It’s Goldie, Master, she got a griping in the bowels and it pains her terrible.”

“Well, what do you expect me to do about it? Brew up some of that cross root or fence grass and pour it down her whining throat.”

“Already did, Master, and she’s worse than ever.”

“Well, we shall see about that. Goldie, where are you? Goldie!” Out of the clustering mob of howling, wailing, women, children and babies, all uniformly plastered from sole to crown in such a baked-on crust of matter biological and mineral it was obvious no bar of soap had approached anywhere near skin in weeks, if not months, came a timid young woman in a stained calico gown split up the back.

“Now then,” asked Maury not unkindly, “where do you hurt?”

She pointed shyly to her belly.

“Lift up your dress.”

Removing the ring from his belt, Maury chose one of the longer keys and began insistently pressing the business end into various spots on her stomach and abdomen while inquiring, “Does this hurt? Or that?” and the girl repeatedly shook her head no.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” he declared. “Have her back in the fields by noon.”

“But Master,” pleaded the ward mistress, “she can barely walk.”

“Are you deaf? Did you hear what I said? Maybe what I should do is send for Doctor Cooper, eh? Get ol’ Doc Coop over to examine all of you malingerers. How’d you like that?”

“Now, now, Master, we don’t need that old fool mucking about in here. My medicine’s as good as his. Maybe I’ll make up one of my turpentine and chestnut seed poultices for Goldie. Haven’t tried that yet.”

“Oh, really? Thought that peanut brain of yours might be able to come up with something. I’m sure, Goldie, that shortly all this nonsense will pass away and you’ll be out there in the bottom pulling bolls like a machine.”

Several small children who had attached themselves to Liberty almost immediately remained fast at his side, clutching tenaciously at his trouser legs. He felt immobilized in body and mind.

“How’s Bridget?” asked Maury. “She’s the one I’ve come to see.”

Glancing away, the ward mistress pointed mutely to a lump under a ratty blanket. Nearby, two naked women struggled together on the dirt floor, apparently in the final stages of childbirth.