The Amalgamation Polka (29 page)

“Dead, eh?”

“She tried, Master, she tried awful hard not to fail you, but them galls was just too much for her little body.”

“Well, get her buried then, and I don’t want you to be carrying on all day about it either, understand? Plant her and get back to work. And by tomorrow I want at least half these shamming wretches cleared out of here. I got more people in this sickhouse than I do in the damn quarters. Come,” he said to Liberty, who was daintily prying each child’s hand, a grimy finger at a time, from his pants. “If I have to swallow one more breath of this deplorable air, I’ll need one of Aunty’s bark concoctions myself.”

They trudged up the muddy lane toward the Big House in thoughtful silence. The clouds had broken up into ragged pieces a mild west wind was tidily dispersing. Sky’s the same wherever you go, mused Liberty. Comforting notion to carry with you on your transit through life.

On the front gallery, awaiting their return, stood the overseer, Clement C. Malone, a transplanted northerner who had wandered into Dixie before the war in search of a job suitable to his talents and temperament. Apparently he had found it.

“My grandson,” asserted Maury, admitting, to Liberty’s astonishment, the blood relation for the first time. “Come all the way from New York state.”

Malone cocked an interested eye, examining Liberty as if he’d never before beheld a living human of this particular age or sex. “That so? I hail from Brattleboro, Vermont, myself. Used to teach school up there.” His grip felt like a clutchful of twigs wrapped in an old glove.

“Passed through the place once,” Liberty remarked.

“Business? Pleasure?”

“Believe I was running away from home at the time.”

The overseer glanced at Maury and chuckled dryly. “Itchy feet seem to run in the family. Contagious too—most of the servants being likewise affected.”

“Easy now,” cautioned Maury. “I don’t pay you to strew insults upon my name.”

“Or to do anything else, for that matter,” Malone replied, avoiding eye contact by fumbling around in his pockets for something he couldn’t find.

“Now, Clement, I don’t notice you wanting for food, shelter or clothing.”

“There are other wants.”

“Yes, but none you really need filled. As I have previously explained, with great forbearance I might add, this plantation is a joint-stock enterprise. We rise and we fall as one. When I have money, you shall have money. If everyone had grasped this simple principle from the start, had pulled together as a team, perhaps we wouldn’t find ourselves in our present predicament.”

“With all due respect, sir, I would venture to suggest that with the unforeseen, catastrophic events now ruling us it wouldn’t have mattered how hard we pulled, we would not have been able to outpace the bluebellied tide. In fact,” he added, with a sly gaze in Liberty’s direction, “looks like the advance guard has already arrived.”

“Mr. Malone, the entire country can go down for all I care, but here at Redemption Hall we are staying up, do you understand? We are not going down.”

“Tell that to the hands. Two more bolted this morning.”

“Who?”

“Moses and Ella.”

“Perfidious bastards. Well, let them go. I want only the faithful around me. In the pattyroller times we would have treed ’em and hung ’em from same. I should have whipped the pair of them more often when they were younger. That’s where you take your durable lessons in love and devotion—at the tip of the lash.”

“Horace quit hoeing again today after about an hour and says tomorrow he might not do any hoeing at all.”

“Well, then, lay into him, man, lay into him good.”

“Be happy to, Mr. Maury, but I wanted to check with you because, as you know, the administration of discipline in our current circumstance can provoke some additional, rather inexpedient problems.”

“You provide the correction and I’ll worry about the consequences.”

“Very well, sir.” And, with a tip of his hat, he abruptly departed.

“The bottom’s dropped out of that imbecile’s gut,” Maury muttered, and then, as if struck by some untoward occurrence, invisible to Liberty, sullying the immutable perfection of the clear horizon, he froze completely for a spell, studying the empty distance as if positively entranced, his expressionless face dominated by what Liberty remembered his mother describing as “faraway eyes,” that invariable precursor to a day spent brooding in his office or, worse, striding around the property in full possession of what the intimidated family termed his “manwrath,” harassing dependencies and kinfolk alike. But the mood seemed to pass off quickly enough, and a minute later he was civilly, even cordially inviting Liberty to wash up for the noon dinner, an occasion of occasions, since on this very special day Grandmother had decided, against Maury’s better judgement, to venture forth from her sick room in order to take her meal with her only surviving grandchild.

Aided by two wheezing, hopelessly inept servants, one on each frail arm, the old white lady was clumsily maneuvered out of her bed, down the creaking staircase and across the barren hall to the dining room, all the while as if wrestling with a sack of dry sticks, where the infirm, impossible woman was unceremoniously deposited in her bespoken padded wheel chair. Once seated, she waved her skeletal fingers in a gesture of impatient dismissal and addressed the waiting room. “I swear, I’ll never become accustomed to those unscrupulous black hands touching me where no proper lady should ever be touched.” She glared accusingly at the slaves now arranged in a respectful rank against the wall, arms decorously folded in attitudes of patient attendance.

“Now, now,” soothed her husband.

“Are you daring to imply, Mr. Maury, that I am imagining such improprieties?”

“I didn’t say that, Ida.”

“I know you tend to regard me as hardly more than an antiquated fool, so bereft of her senses she cannot distinguish between assistance and assault.”

“When you’re crazy, Mrs. Maury, I shall be the first to inform you.”

“Yes, and how would you know, dawdling about in that precious hideaway of yours like a feeble-minded recluse, and what, I’d like to know, has all this blasphemous projecting gotten us but fresh graves in the yard and a mess of crippled niggers?”

Ignoring the question, Maury leaned back in his chair and called out sharply through the open doorway, “Ditey! We’re ready for the potatoes now!”

“Jonah,” said Mrs. Maury to one of the ministering domestics as she continued to fuss ceaselessly with her silverware, “you and the others wait outside until requested. I can’t bear to eat with all those devil eyes boring into me.”

“Nerves bad today?” asked her husband. “We could increase the drops this evening.”

“At this point, Asa, what does it matter? Awake or asleep, it’s the same accursed life I’m passing through, the same death. And you, boy.” She rotated her chair in Liberty’s direction. “Excuse me for not addressing you by your Christian name, but I find my tongue simply refuses to pronounce the word. You bring a green perspective to all this moth and mildew. What is your opinion of our Redemption Hall?”

“With due respect,” replied Liberty, “it’s a bit more than I can adequately absorb in a single day.”

Her nose made a horrid snorting noise that could almost have been the beginning of a laugh, but wasn’t. “I’ve been here half a century, and I haven’t absorbed a single thing.”

“Ditey!” Maury shouted again. “Where are those potatoes? I promised the lad potatoes!”

“I do have a question,” submitted Liberty, somewhat hesitantly. “Redemption Hall. What is it exactly you seek to be redeemed from?”

“Ourselves,” cracked Grandmother.

“There may be more truth in that remark than you intend,” Maury observed with a grimly indulgent smile. “My own grandfather, Samuel Maury, cleared the land and named the plantation. An enthusiast of the most dangerous stripe, a bit too enchanted by moonbeams, if you know what I mean, he envisioned the Hall as a sort of school for the natural man where souls were to be educated in the ways of God and, through a magical metamorphosis I’ve never been able to fully comprehend, attain to a paradise, not only spiritual but material as well. You sit at the very heart of what was designed to be a new Eden on earth.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened? He went bankrupt. If it weren’t for Whitney and his gin—and who’s to say the Lord was not working mightily through the inspirations of the inventor—the entire estate might have passed out of family hands. As it was, once seeds could be separated from fiber quickly and efficiently, rational Maurys could reestablish the enterprise on a healthy cash basis.”

“Whose abundant rewards we reap today,” interrupted Grandmother.

“Too many folks lost in spiritual error,” Maury continued. “We would not find ourselves in the midst of war and desolation had we not strayed so far from the teachings of the Testament, where the prescriptions for the good life are laid out clearly and precisely. This confusion over the issue of bondage is absolutely baseless. Servitude exists as the foundation for every great civilization from the ancients on. It’s the axis of the divine plan. Read Genesis 9:25–27, Genesis 24:35–36, Leviticus 25:44–46, among others.”

“What about Hebrews 13:3?” interjected Liberty. “‘Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.’”

“I’ll admit Satan can be found here and there peeking through the bars of sacred verse, but we should bear in mind that he is indeed caged.”

Grandmother responded with another dismissive snort. “Why I ever even agreed to marry you and settle down on this exhausted patch of nothing is a mystery known only to the angels. Or perhaps the demons,” she added. Her small round head with its wispy halo of thinning gray hair swiveled about to address Liberty. “I’ve wasted my life shackled to an idiot, and I pray to God you should possess better sense. Your mother was the smartest of the brood, and you can only hope you’ve inherited a portion of her brains, which, of course, she must have gotten from me since, well, you’ve just heard a sanitized version of the lunacy that resides on the other side. And to think I could have eloped with that young Franklin boy and run off to Europe and spent my declining years in a Roman villa well out of all this consternation.” She looked to Liberty for signs of sympathy and, when none were forthcoming, quickly averted her head with a theatrical sigh.

“Ditey!” bellowed Grandfather with genuine heat. “Bring the fucking potatoes! Now!”

“Your mother,” Mrs. Maury went obliviously on. “Such a beauty, too.”

“Not as beautiful as Aurore,” commented Grandfather.

“No, not as beautiful, but she could have had any man in the state. We were so sorry when we heard about the accident. We even gave the niggers the day off to mourn. Honestly, I don’t believe Redemption Hall has ever been the same since.”

“No,” Maury agreed, gazing somberly down at his own reflection in his empty plate, “none of us have.”

“Even though, of course, we had always regarded her as dead long before the actual event, the news of its terrible reality came as quite a shock.”

“We made a mistake with her,” interposed Maury in an uncharacteristically chastened tone.

“We made a mistake with all of ’em,” she snapped back. “That’s what happens. What are we supposed to do about it now? Five of ’em gone already, and the other might as well be for all we know. Chasing after glory and a storybook life that never could be, never was for anybody. Just a silly, destructive dream, that’s all. A dream that’s failed, as we have failed as a family. And now it’s our turn to go, and frankly I’m looking forward to it. The fire and ice of hell couldn’t be much worse than what I’ve been privileged to endure as a dragooned member of this dissolute clan.”

“Stop this nonsense at once,” ordered Maury angrily. “You’re tired and hungry and don’t know what you’re saying.”

“The boy knows. He understands. I can see it in his eyes.” She reached over to pat the back of Liberty’s hand. “I’m so glad you were able to make this visit. You can tell the others what became of us. The world blew up and took Ida and Asa with it. Tell them that. That’s what I want them to hear.”

At the sound of approaching footsteps, as arrhythmic and heavy as bricks being dropped singly onto the floorboards, the dinner party turned as one to observe an ancient woman dressed in a parti-colored frock bearing a huge chipped bowl of steaming vegetables. Her crooked nose had obviously been broken sometime in the distant past and never correctly reset, and her left ear reduced to a twisted knot of cartilege stuck to the side of her balding gray head.

“What in the name of weeping Jesus is this?” demanded Mrs. Maury, indignantly examining the dish placed on the table before her. “These aren’t potatoes, they’re goddamn turnips!”

“There ain’t any more potatoes,” replied Ditey, wringing her hands, wiping them on her dress. “This here is all we got.”

“There were potatoes yesterday,” insisted Mrs. Maury, stabbing a turnip with her fork. “What happened to ’em?”

“All et up, I expect.”

“Yes, and I’m sure all you thieving ingrates made a fine meal of it too, leaving us to dine on this miserable hog food. And they aren’t even properly cooked. These things are as hard as stones.”

“I did the best I could, Missus.”

“Well it wasn’t good enough, and it’s never been good enough, you worthless bitch.” Grandmother lifted her knife as if preparing to carve some fowl. “Hold out your hand.” And with a single swift movement she opened the cringing woman’s palm to the bone. In an instant, with a savage cry, Ditey was upon her, the chair overturning, both women toppling to the carpet, Ditey’s hands, blood spilling from the one in shocking amounts, locked tight as iron collars about her mistress’s scrawny neck, a stunned Liberty only half-risen from his seat as Grandfather, with astonishing celerity, charged around the table, seized a chair and brought it crashing down upon Ditey’s head in a dreadful splintering of wood and skull. Then, yanking the unconscious cook from atop his wife’s body, Maury knelt down beside her, wiping the blood off her neck and face with the napkin Liberty, at a loss to do anything else, had handed him. “Get some water,” he ordered.