The Amalgamation Polka (34 page)

“Trouble yourself no further with the insufferable Wallace,” advised Maury. “If he’s not careful he might soon find himself piloting a barge on the River Styx. I can personally pledge to you that we shall reach our promised destination sooner than expected and that it shall be a happy astonishment for all.”

“Thank you, sir,” exclaimed Mr. Fripp, vigorously pumping Maury’s hand. “Your words have lightened an oppressive and ever-shifting load. And, may I add, your mere presence on board lends strength to us all.”

“Fate, Mr. Fripp, need not always be untoward. The Deity, in his veiled munificence, directed me to this ship, and I hold no doubt that He will guide each of our blessed souls safely into port.”

“I’m certain you are correct, Mr. Maury. Please excuse my silly complaints and anxieties. It isn’t often one stumbles upon a Christian brother whose conviction is quite so granite ribbed. Such an example makes infidels of us all.”

“I am merely a pawn in the benevolent fingers of a greater Hand.”

“I may as well confess to you, Mr. Maury, that upon first encounter Mrs. Fripp recognized at once the glare of piety radiating from your countenance, and Mrs. Fripp is an extremely devout woman whose ability to detect the divine in another is downright nonpareil.”

“A talented lady in numerous departments,” commented Maury.

“Quite so. And she will be gladdened to hear your reassuring assessment of our current position and probable future. In fact, it would surprise me not at all if she does not immediately abandon her bed and bucket to join us for supper in the salon.”

“I wouldn’t prod the poor woman into a state of health she has not yet authentically attained.”

“No fear of that,” replied Fripp, obviously eager to be off and relay the good news. “Phoebe does what Phoebe wants. No violating that commandment. And now, gentlemen, if you’ll please excuse me, I must check in on our patient.” He hastened away like a gambler intent on placing a last-minute bet.

“Queer sort of duck,” mused Maury. “Seems quite capable and solid at first glance, but then you deduce the stuffing is all feathers and balloon gas.”

“Shouldn’t wonder that you’d perceive every stranger as a probable charlatan,” replied Liberty.

“Into the hold with ye,” barked Maury, shoving Liberty clumsily on ahead of him. “It’s time to review the next act on the bill.”

Below deck, fumbling with the keys, muttering nonsensical oaths under his breath, Maury turned to his grandson and confessed, “Along with numerous other burgeoning ailments, my eyesight also seems to be failing. Used to be I could knock a squirrel out of a tree with a long rifle at a hundred yards. Now probably couldn’t even see the critter.”

“Hard luck,” observed Liberty. “Imagine losing the ability to read skin tone correctly. Your whole flimflam goes up the flue.”

But before Maury could compose a suitably cutting response, the proper key had been found, inserted into the lock, and the cabin door swung open upon the following informative study in mass and gravity: Monday, per usual, curled up asleep on the hard steel floor, his phlegmatic snores coincident with, and almost as deafening as, the
Cavalier
’s unfettered engines, and, suspended from an overhead pipe, Tempie’s naked girlish body swaying pendulumlike in time with the roll of the ship, her stained and torn shift tightly tied in a determined complexity of knots around her now grotesquely elongated neck.

“What in damnation!” cried Maury, springing forward, a knife instantly in hand to cut down, with Liberty’s assistance, his daughter, laying the limp body across the bale of cotton from which she had doubtlessly taken her last step into space. Maury bent anxiously over her, cocking an ear above Tempie’s stupefied, gaping mouth, pausing as if to listen at the edge of an impossibly deep well. “Dead,” he said, the pronouncement spat out like an unexpected pit in a pie. Liberty felt abruptly unbound, as though all his insides had been loosed and anatomized, and existence revealed as a rudderless spin through absolute darkness.

“You goddamn worthless coon!” yelled Maury, directing a sharp kick into the unprotected ribs of a dazed Monday, who still in the process of coming awake looked about in unblinking bewilderment at this contrary foreign place he couldn’t, at the moment, remember having seen before and certainly never wanted to see again. “Damn you!” And out dashed another kick Monday tried unsuccessfully to dodge. “Get up off of your raggedy ass!” Maury leaned down, seized the shivering man by the collar and hauled him bodily onto the bunk. “Why I ever thought a superannuated trunk minder could conceivably mind a mere child for less than half an hour is a riddle His Omnipotence will have to explain to me in the hereafter. Now, what in tarnal hell happened in here?”

With aching slowness, Monday’s gaze wandered from Maury to Tempie’s stilled body, to Liberty, who refused to meet his eye, back to Maury, then down to the floor.

“You harken to me, you black son of a bitch. I don’t care if you’ve taken thirteen vows of silence and had a conjur doctor’s frog bone waved over your woolly skull. I want it explained to me in clearly understandable terms why there is a fresh corpse in my cabin.”

Monday neither budged nor spoke.

“I await your lordship’s response,” said Maury scornfully, and then, quicker than sight, his open palm whipped out across Monday’s gray-bristled cheek. “I’ll have an answer, by God, before anyone leaves this room, dead or alive.” And his arm, which was preparing to strike again, was abruptly halted in midair by Liberty’s grip.

“That’s enough,” he declared, staring unflinchingly into the curdled heart of his grandfather’s rage. “How much more violence need we endure? Isn’t it obvious the poor man slept through this whole horrid tragedy?”

“Mr. Fish,” warned Maury, reaching up to clutch Liberty’s wrist, “kindly remove your hand from my person or I shall have to remove it myself.”

“Listen, why don’t we pretend the workings of civilization have actually had a meliorating influence on our barbarous culture and remove all our hands from one another, black and white alike, and keep them removed?”

Warily, without breaking the fervid sight lines that held them bound, grandfather and grandson physically disengaged themselves and stepped delicately backward.

“Need I remind you,” said Maury, “that this man is my property and I will do with him as I please.”

“No, you will not,” replied Liberty, the muscle of his tongue fortifying each separate syllable.

“Don’t speak to me as if I were some addlepated field hand. The last person to address me in such tones spent a month in bed nursing broken bones and spitting out teeth.”

“I don’t want to fight you, Grandfather.”

“I ought to have known you’d betray me, too. Your mother and that cursed Yankee blood galloping through your veins.” His attention remained steadfastly fixed upon the girl’s carelessly arranged anatomy, roving methodically among the hills and dales of her cooling flesh, as if seeking some undiscoverable category of solace there in the extinction of this rare specimen, last of her breed, lost forever. “The whole world’s polluted,” he announced finally. Then, without so much as a glance, he ordered Liberty to report to Captain Wallace and inform him “what has transpired down in this iron cell.”

At dawn Captain Wallace and off-duty members of the crew held a brief ceremony for Tempie, whose remains had been sewn inside a meal sack for formal deposit overboard. Liberty spoke of one he knew not well but comprehended enough to recognize that from birth she had been unfairly sentenced to a life so circumscribed she literally could not turn around without getting her limbs scraped, her soul chafed, so perhaps it was fitting that when finally sought, death was invited to make an appearance out here on the open sea, where amid the immeasurable flow of sky and flood there were no visible obstacles, only the clarity and space for one troubled spirit to find its way home.

Roused from her sickbed by the prospect of a funeral, Mrs. Fripp diagnosed herself as fit enough to totter up on deck and launch enthusiastically into a slightly discordant but still forceful rendition of her favorite childhood hymn, taught to her personally by her Mammy Silvey when she was but five years old, “Good-bye, I’ll Meet You in the Kingdom, By and By.”

Maury, of course, refused to attend the services, preferring to sit brooding in his stateroom with the bruised and mute Monday for company, and upon Liberty’s return, without preamble or cause, he simply opened his mouth and began to speak, as if an underground torrent of words had been running through him for some time now and at this random moment just happened to erupt into daylight. “It’s all gone to flinders, everything, you, me, Mother, Redemption Hall, all the pretty pictures, gone, and perhaps that’s all our splendid life ever was, a procession of pretty pictures we poor deluded fools mistook for the actual scenes depicted.

“I’ve been anchored here all morning, lad, speculating and studying on this here bale for so many hours I have come to appreciate that this peculiar object is not, in fact, a ‘bale’ at all, but something else entirely. It’s a…it’s…I don’t know what it is.” He paused to release a stuttering sigh, his body seeming to visibly deflate. “It’s a thing. That’s the best I can do. It’s a thing. This is a thing,” pointing to his valise; “that’s a thing,” his tarnished wedding band; “you and I are things. And we should all be quite content with the stone certainty of that apprehension.” He raised his head, found Liberty’s sympathetic eyes. “Am I making any sense whatsoever?”

“Tempie’s gone.”

“I know, I know. But despite her forfeiture and this unfortunate lapse in my dialectics, the work can still go on. The work must go on. I will not be pulled down. The universe must offer me other terms. We simply begin again in what we can only hope”—the stirrings of a modest smile playing over his lips—“will be a more agreeable clime. So!” He clapped his hands against his knees and stood. “The time has come, I believe, for us to go make our visit to the captain.” From a mahogany traveling chest he produced a pair of silver pistols and passed one over to Liberty. “I’ll handle Wallace. You keep a weather eye on the crew. This could be a rather ramstuginous affair.”

Liberty hefted the gun and examined the tooling. “You don’t actually expect me to aid in the criminal commandeering of this ship?”

“Of course I do. Why else are we on board? Remember, despite the genetic confusion raging within, half of you is all Maury.”

“The superior, undefiled half?”

“There are duties and obligations to the neglected side of this family you have not yet begun to remit.”

“Yes, and there are mercies and moralities you owe a lifetime’s worth of interest on.”

“Such an all-fired pugnacious fellow you are—a quality, mind you, I admire mightily. Puts me in recollection of me. What an estimable soldier you must have made. Tell me, did you ever kill a single member of the—I reject, of course, the appellative ‘enemy,’ so let’s try ‘foe’—a single member of the ‘foe’?”

“That’s a private matter between me, my conscience and my God.”

“If you had, you know, that dead reb might have been an uncle.”

“And this hypothetical uncle might just as handily have killed a hypothetical nephew.”

“Answer me this then. You absconded from your own army when the circumstances suited you, yet you have failed to make even a sole attempt to flee my own company, which I ruefully admit can often be found wanting a certain vital adhesive nature. Why?”

“Even the dullest clod could conclude straight off that a prodigy such as yourself required something more than a good deal of looking after.”

“Well, then,” answered Maury, chuckling like a parrot in the first honest expression of amusement Liberty had yet heard him produce, “we are come to common ground. Liberty, I like you. Now I know that such a sentiment issuing at this late hour from the two-sided mouth of an old horned reprobate like myself, even as he waves another piece in your face, may strike one as insincere, if not outright mendacious, but recollect, we were near total strangers from opposite sides of the hedge when we met. We needed room to sidle up to one another, appraise each other’s scent.”

“So I passed the inquest?”

“Like a Philadelphia lawyer. Which eminently qualifies you as an able practitioner of all manner of black arts and heroic derring-do. Here’s your chance to act the true Confederate, indulge the rebel edge in ye. I know it’s there. I’ve caught glimpses of our dear Stars and Bars flapping behind those furious blue eyes of yours. You’re ready, I’m ready, the moment is ready. Wallace will be up on the bridge. If you can prevent any of the crew from entering—”

“No, Grandfather, I’m sorry, but I simply cannot,” said Liberty, handing over the pistol. “In fact, I intend to inform Captain Wallace of your insane plot.”

“You disappoint me, Liberty, you disappoint me mightily.”

He did register a fleeting impression of Maury moving abruptly forward with the celerity of a maddened bear, but no impression whatsoever of the shiny barrel of Maury’s revolver slashing downward to crease the left side of his head. At one instant he was in full attendance to the moment, in the next he was not. Later (whatever that odd word meant), consciousness seeping slowly back from wherever it had fled, he discovered himself gazing with a remedial scientific detachment down a perfectly aligned row of identically shaped, uniformly gray mushrooms, each, he now realized with deepening alarm, crucially lacking a stem. His befuddled brain was attempting to juggle these disturbing visual facts into some sort of rational sense when suddenly he understood that the geometrical phenomenon he had been examining with labyrinthine wonderment for what seemed days now was not some new form of plant life at all but an engineered row of steel rivets bolted to the floor against which his bleeding cheek now lay pressed. Staggering to his feet, he noted impassively, through the elusive prism of sight, that both Maury and Monday were gone. Head clanging, the world gone soft and pliant, every object sprouting a mysterious, fuzzy growth, Liberty made his tender way through the ever-shifting bowels of the ship and up the rubbery ladder to the bridge, where he happened upon a tense tableau that might have been entitled “The Tables Turned.” With Monday glumly situated off to his left, Maury, a loaded revolver filling each hand, held Captain Wallace and two jittery members of the crew in an uneasy detainment which the collected captain appeared to be taking not all that seriously.