The Amalgamation Polka (37 page)

“I knew this damn war would devise a way, no matter how labyrinthine, of depositing you in that accursed place.”

“I had to go.”

“I know.”

Liberty then related, in as temperate and objective a tone as he could maintain, the whole sordid account of what he had found in Carolina, of the melodramatic events aboard the
Cavalier,
of the fate of Grandfather Maury. As he spoke, Thatcher seemed to slump visibly in his seat. “Worse even than I could imagine,” he muttered.

“His head bobbed to the surface once before the final descent, his infatuate will, I suppose, keeping him afloat to direct one last shot of malice straight to my heart.”

“Such hatred is a near unquenchable force.”

“In his case it required an entire ocean.”

Thatcher sighed. The clock ticked tartly on. “Let’s go visit your mother.”

She had been buried in the midst of her scrupulously tended flower garden beneath, so Thatcher explained, a summertime quilt of unendurable color; now the sole evidence of once-thriving life lingered only in the brown brittle weeds piercing winter’s dreary monochrome like a fusillade of fallen arrows. A well-trodden path had been worn in the snow between house and plot. The simple stone, topped by a thick white crust, read:

ROXANA MAURY FISH

1822–1862

Beloved Wife and Mother

Freedom’s Warrior

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here,” confessed Liberty.

“There was nothing you could have done.”

“Except, perhaps, the one thing…”

“Yes, you and those damn envelopes. It was as if you were trying to protect her from enemy fire.”

They stood together in joined solitude and pretended to study the barren ground as the sere branches around them rattled in the chill wind.

“She would have been so proud of you,” declared Thatcher.

“I didn’t do anything different from any man on either side.”

“But you were her son.”

Liberty said nothing.

“Stay as long as you wish,” advised Thatcher gently. “I shall be inside.”

Sometime later Liberty looked up with a start, wondering where his father had gone. He hardly noted the dripping woods, the churning sky, the solitary doe in the clearing on a distant hill picking its way daintily through the high drifts, but he could hear his mother’s voice, her firm podium voice, as clearly as the squirrels chattering at him from the nearby trees: “Like flowers listing toward the sun we ever incline, each separate one of us, black and white alike, despite the obstacles abounding, toward the virtues, the necessities, yes, the absolute pleasures of our own personal Fourth of July, physically, mentally and spiritually. This is the handprint of the Creator upon our natures.” Then Liberty knelt down in the snow, kissed the palm of his own hand and pressed it against the cold marble.

As he rose and turned to go, he saw, standing respectfully back in the shadows of the open doorway at the rear of the house, a wizened little man leaning heavily upon a cane.

“Euclid!” cried Liberty, dashing recklessly across the frozen yard to lift his old friend dramatically aloft in a fervent bear hug.

“Enough, boy, enough,” protested Euclid, tapping Liberty sternly on the back with his stick.

“But look at you now, you’ve changed not at all.”

“Liberty, you couldn’t get away with fibbing me at the age of six, too late to take it up now.”

“All right, you’ve shaved your head.”

Euclid ran his fingers over the phrenological wonder of his bare skull. “Spirit told me to. I should be setting out any day now and traveling light is traveling easy.”

“Traveling where?”

“Canaan Land, of course.”

“Isn’t it a trifle soon to be making that trip?”

“I’m not the chap who works up the schedules.” He reached over and gripped Liberty’s unshaven chin. “I see the boy’s just about gone from your face.”

“I’m an old man, Euclid, full of an old man’s thoughts.”

“I always suspicioned you’d come through.”

“More than I ever knew.”

“Now come,” he beckoned rather curtly, leading Liberty with painstaking deliberation down the precarious, uneven steps to his private quarters in the cellar where, in the earthen floor at the far end of the room, beneath a highly detailed map of the Erie Canal, had been constructed a miniature model of the entire waterway from Albany to Buffalo, complete with working locks and wait houses and relay barns, bridges and towpaths, including even snubbing posts, and all the major villages along the route represented by clusterings of little enameled cottages.

“I am,” marveled Liberty, “utterly flummoxed. The time, the diligence, the sheer act of such an undertaking lies thoroughly beyond comprehension.”

“Don’t matter none,” explained Euclid. “I was conjuring up a spell. I was fired by the extravagant notion that if I put an honest hand to this job and never flagged, every hour I worked on my ditch would be an hour no bullet could find you.”

“A few came mighty close, Euclid, but then, I am a master dodger.”

“And this,” declared Euclid proudly, “is for you,” producing from his pocket a stunningly executed, hand-carved replica of a genuine canal boat, accurate in all particulars, trimmed in bright blue and gold, and across the stern in florid cameo and layered in gilt the word “
ROXANA
.”

“Euclid, please, you’re piling on the agony,” protested Liberty, turning the perfectly crafted object over and over again in his trembling hands.

“Then, what say, baby doll, we baptize this ark.” From a sawbuck table Euclid fetched a pitcher of water and, bending down with a grunt, carefully filled his modest creation to the berm. “Your mother, you know, spoke often of her tremendous desire to see Niagara Falls. Near to Buffalo, eh?”

“Near enough.”

Then both got down on their knees in the dirt on either side of the “Grand Western” and began taking polite turns nudging the little packet along, halting dutifully before each lock while Euclid manipulated the gates, then onward again, passing under the numerous low bridges, Liberty occasionally crying out the warning “Everybody down!” Euclid with one of the many tiny figures he had fashioned to populate his imaginary country reenacting a drunken captain’s comical spill into the drink, and drifting dreamily on past all the fabled towns, Schenectady to Herkimer, across the Long Level, Rome to Syracuse, through the Montezuma marshes, Rochester to Lockport, until finally, giddy and wet, they arrived at the bustling terminus.

“Done!” proclaimed Euclid with an almost postprandial satisfaction. “We made it safe to Buffalo.”

“And the Falls a mere coach away.”

And, so saying, the two men reached across the canal and clasped hands, muddy fingers and all.

“Kindness of such magnitude, I fear to admit, embarrasses me greatly,” said Liberty, unable for the moment to meet Euclid’s dark, penetrating eyes.

“The quality your aunt knows as adhesiveness need never be tethered or hobbled,” Euclid explained. “She’s a gentle beast who will neither run off nor do harm.”

“A quality conspicuously absent lately from my own congealed portion of the world.”

“Then, Liberty, baby doll, you got to feel free to help yourself to another platter.”

That night, nestled snugly into his own high feather bed beneath the only roof he had ever called his own, he was, without any awareness of a transition, plunged precipitously into dreams of terrific violence that shuddered him awake hours later to a quaking darkness and bedclothes damp with sweat, unable to locate precisely where or even who he was. Then he remembered. It’s America, he thought, and you, whoever you are, will be all right. It’s America, and everything was going to be fine.

Stephen Wright

THE
AMALGAMATION POLKA

Stephen Wright was educated at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught at Princeton University, Brown University, and, most recently, The New School. He lives in New York City.

Also by
Stephen Wright

Meditations in Green

M
31
: A Family Romance

Going Native

Acclaim for Stephen Wright’s

THE
AMALGAMATION POLKA

“An omnivorous approach to the period of Bible-thumping abolitionists, fire-breathing secessionists, the Underground Railroad and a bitterly unamalgamated America reunited only after the deaths of 600,000 soldiers, North and South…. There are shades of Hawthorne, Irving and Melville.”

—
Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Brilliant….[
The Amalgamation Polka
] poses formidable and provocative questions that most writers today rarely confront with any seriousness or complexity….[Wright] takes the entire recalcitrant country by the scruff of the neck and stands it before a mirror to ask the enduring question: Who are you?”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“This dark and lyrical tale of madness and prophecy speaks uncannily from within its period, in the tradition of heartbroken humor, which America’s lapses of faith in its own promise have always evoked in the finest of our storytellers, among whom Stephen Wright here honorably takes his place.”

—Thomas Pynchon

“Stephen Wright writes flawlessly…. He taps an authentic comic tradition in American writing, running from Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr…. He has invented an extreme-sport version of it.”

—
The Oregonian

“Deliriously original…. An amazing, alchemical blend of dead seriousness and giddy high spirits.”

—
The Baltimore Sun

“A soaring work by an extremely talented writer rapidly establishing himself as one of the major talents of our time…. Wright’s
Polka
is a believable celebration of the rich stew of humanity.”

—
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Summoning virtually every shade in the American canon (Melville to Cormac McCarthy, Twain to Pynchon) yet possessed of a rollicking, morbid tone all its own, Stephen Wright’s
The Amalgamation Polka
does for the Civil War era what the author’s previous books did for the late twentieth century…. Will bring a smile to your own lips as it sets your brain on fire.”

—
The Village Voice

“Ambitious [and] entertaining…a wonder to behold.”

—
The Washington Post Book World

“A grand and bizarre epic of the Civil War era [that] works brilliantly…. Bestows profound rewards.”

—
The Boston Globe

“[
The Amalgamation Polka
] has all the elements of enduring art: a high purpose, a masterful use of language, engrossing conflict, catharsis [and] also does what we ask all great literature to do: it inspires us to a loftier destiny.”

—
The San Diego Union-Tribune

“A work of high imagination, and we have never seen the time or its people portrayed quite like this.”

—
Chicago Trbune

“Captivating.”

—
People

“Stunning in its power….
The Amalgamation Polka
is a daring, challenging work. It dances, with considerable vigor, to a grimly jaunty beat distinctly its own [and] can be harrowing or sublime, sternly sobering or pleasurably outlandish…. You just want to keep reading.”

—
The Seattle Times

“Consistently brilliant.”

—
The New York Observer

“The writing is so good that you forget you’re reading about the past…. The language is so generously arcane and richly evocative that it begins to feel, well, as if it might just be the future.”

—
Esquire

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JUNE 2007

Copyright © 2006 by Stephen Wright

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data for
The Amalgamation Polka
is on file at the Library of Congress.

www.vintagebooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-38659-5

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