The Amalgamation Polka (22 page)

“Know why the old man ordered me back with you? He’s sweet on my ma and don’t want nothing to happen to me. I can’t seem to ever get into the scrap. There’s always some excuse for sending poor Rufus to the rear.”

“What if I just up and bolted?”

A slow smile spread across Rufus’s babyish features. “Well then, I reckon I’d have to pop you.”

“Maybe you’d miss.”

“I come from Alabamy, Yank, and you ain’t ever seen any real deadeyes if you’ve never been to our county’s turkey shoot.”

“I’m not a turkey.”

“No,” agreed Rufus, “but you’ll do.”

At a momentary lull in the metal storm overhead, they rose up cautiously from their hiding place and had barely taken a step when they were engulfed in a sea of blue uniforms.

“Well, lookee here,” declared a big, bearded sergeant. “Drop the piece, reb.”

Rufus’s musket clattered to the ground as he obediently raised his hands.

“Glad to see you boys,” said Liberty.

“Our pleasure,” replied the sergeant. “Looks like you’ve been officially emancipated.”

“What regiment?” asked a lieutenant.

“Eighty-ninth New York, sir.”

“Don’t believe there’s many of them left. Heard they’re out of it for the day. But as you can see, we need every body we can get. Sergeant Trask, find this man a musket and get the prisoner to the rear.”

“I hope,” Liberty couldn’t help saying, “he has better luck finding it than Rufus here did.”

The boy glared savagely back at him. “You best hope we never meet again, Yank. I owe you one.”

“Yes, I know,” answered Liberty. “Gobble, gobble, bang, bang.”

Rufus, cursing furiously, was led roughly away.

“What was that all about?” asked the lieutenant.

“I think he was eying to put me on his dinner table.”

“Them rebs,” offered the sergeant. “They’ll eat anything.”

A rifle was abruptly thrust into Liberty’s unwilling hands and he was placed in line between one private visibly trembling from “the cold” and another flushed and sweat-soaked from the heat.

“I wish,” said the first, “that darn sun would get down out of the sky.”

“Hell,” replied the other. “It ain’t even noon yet. You still got plenty of time to get killed in, don’t you worry.”

They both ignored Liberty, who was frankly somewhat stunned by the growing enormity of his situation, that fate had apparently decided, for whatever cryptic reasons, to send him waltzing through the hail yet one more time.

“Why are you always so blamed nice to me?”

The sweating private spat a stream of tobacco juice on the grass. “’Cause I love you so much, Huntzinger, can’t you tell?”

Huntzinger, refusing to respond, turned away in disgust.

Orders were barked out and the line stepped bravely off, bodies slightly stiffened, heads bent, as if advancing into a bracing wind. Not twenty yards had been crossed when men began to topple like bowling pins. The balls whistled all around, the cannons continued to thunder, the combination as deafening as if a universe of boulders had gone rolling eternally down a great mountain. Before Liberty’s astonished eyes Huntzinger’s entire right shoulder and arm were torn away, and as the man fell Liberty could clearly see the exposed heart still throbbing in Huntzinger’s crimsoning chest. Men emitted strange, harrowing cries one wouldn’t have thought even a tortured animal capable of producing. Liberty felt one round pierce the sleeve of his jacket, another drill a hole in his canteen, sending a stream of water pouring down his leg. Regimental flags of both sides, all in a tangle, swayed wildly above the smoke as if these tattered pieces of gayly colored cloth themselves were principals in a contest to which humans were merely incidental. A man came crawling on all fours over the broken cornstalks, dragging his entrails behind him. “It’s all right,” he kept chanting, “it’s all right.”

The Confederate army loomed out of the haze ahead, and the line was halted. “Make leather out of ’em, boys!” shouted the lieutenant, and everyone bent to the repetitive task of loading and firing. The measured hysteria of their actions was accompanied by a mystical sense that the faster one worked, the more shots one fired, the safer one would be. They seemed now to be no longer men but transformed by the forge of battle into mechanical parts, identical cogs whirring inside some infernal engine whose demonic maker had not only fabricated but also personally selected each and every individual to serve his frankly evil needs.

Then, in the midst of this enveloping hell, Liberty spied a Confederate not thirty yards away leveling his rifle and taking dead aim at him, and he thought, I cannot believe this is happening to me, as all noise and fury fell away, faded into a nebulous cloud at the center of which vision concentrated solely on the enormous barrel and the hot-beaded squint behind it and time stopped as if the eye of a great tornado of iron were passing overhead and in that eerie interval of calm and silence he heard himself say, Now I am dead. He saw the muzzle flash and then nothing.

When he awoke he found himself seated on a hard, rather uncomfortable chair in a pleasantly furnished but foreign parlor. Across from him in a periwinkle blue rocking chair sat his mother or a woman who resembled Roxana in every significant detail from the creases on her face to the scattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, but his sense of her, of her inner being, seemed of an order he had never experienced before. She had changed or perhaps he had changed, for she was now radiating a certain candlelike mellowness that had eluded her all her life.

“You look tired,” she said in that instantly familiar, soothing, softly accented voice. “Have you been ill?”

“No,” he answered, smiling slightly. He had never felt so happy. “It’s been a long journey.”

She nodded. “I know now the answer to your question.”

“What question is that?”

“The one that so perplexed your boyhood. ‘What color is the soul?’ you kept asking. Well, I now know that it is the color of no-color.”

“White?”

Her faint, wistful smile spoke of the traversal of vast distances, the abridgment of organic time. “There is no word adequate to describe the properties of the human soul. Its peculiar tincture can only be apprehended through the visionary optic.” Her own magnetic eyes seemed to have grown larger, brighter. “Now, come here,” she said, holding out her arms.

He went to her, and in her warm embrace, enfolded in the natural fragrance of her hair and skin, he rested in the peace that was the rock-solid core of a frantic world, and in the dozing tranquillity of that enchanted space he knew with absolute certainty that his mother was dead.

“Hey, pard,” came the voice, at first faint and distant, but increasing rapidly in nearness and volume. “Are you all right?”

Liberty blinked and discovered himself staring up into the not unkindly face of a portly, blue-coated, tawny-bearded angel whose eyes possessed whites so pure, so amazingly uncontaminated, they seemed the cleanest spots on his essentially grimy person. “We thought you had pegged out for sure.”

“Yeah,” added the shorter man beside him, “we was about to dump you in the hole.”

“Creased you good, didn’t it?”

Liberty reached up to trace gingerly the extent of the burning furrow opened, interestingly enough, on the side of his head opposite to his previous wound. When he looked at his fingers they were coated in blood, as was, he now realized, the entire right half of his face.

“Guess it wasn’t your turn yet. Reckon you can stand?”

Light was draining steadily from the sky and the dissonant decibels of war had been replaced by the subdued complaints of the injured and the melancholy scrape and clink of shovel and pick. Liberty studied the beaming countenances of his saviors, members obviously of a burial party, and asked, “Who won?”

The shorter man let out a contemptuous snort. “The Reaper,” he replied.

Somehow, with the gentle assistance of his new friends Sergeant Weeks and Private Klinefelter, Liberty managed to stand erect and, between their arms, hobble painfully off the field.

In a barn filled from stalls to loft with the wounded, their laments, their effluvia, Liberty’s head was cleaned and dressed. Laid out on a makeshift operating table—a door placed between a pair of sawhorses—one unfortunate casualty was undergoing the unanesthetized ordeal of having his left leg amputated. Ignoring the man’s anguished but inventive oaths, the surgeon worked quickly, slicing away the meat in one continuous cut, then sawing through the bone, the entire procedure completed in less than a minute. “Hey, Fish!” cried the man as his stump was being sewn and bandaged. Amazingly, it was Private McGee. “Searched for you the rest of the day and look what happens to me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Liberty.

“Don’t think for a second this little setback changes anything between us. No matter where you go, no matter what you do, ol’ Pegleg McGee’ll be right behind you. Watch your back.”

“Good-bye, Mr. McGee,” said Liberty. “I wish you well.”

He went outside and sat on a bench in a kind of whirring stupor that was interrupted when the man beside him opened his mouth and, staring straight ahead, began to speak aloud to no one in particular. “I’ve not only seen the elephant, I’ve fed it, I’ve watered it, polished its tusks, swept up its droppings, and still, despite all my sweet attentions, the moment my back is turned, the damn beast tries to step on me, squash me flat.” He raised the short wing that was all that remained of his left arm.

“Maybe now, after all this bloodletting,” said Liberty hopefully, “it will finally end.”

“And maybe I’ll grow a new limb.”

Then a passing doctor, noting Liberty’s relatively functional condition, brusquely ordered him back to his regiment.

“Where is it?” Liberty asked.

“How the hell should I know? That’s your lookout.”

Reluctantly, he got to his feet and, carrying his pounding head as if it were a basket of rare delicacies, his vision still somewhat blurred, he wandered through the night until the futility of attempting to locate his unit in this utterly disorganized darkness overcame him entirely and he slumped to earth beneath a ragged apple tree, its crop picked clean by iron hands.

At daybreak he roamed, for as long as he could bear it, across the desolated field. In hours this once pastoral landscape had been translated into the interior of a butcher shop after the fall slaughter. Bodies were already beginning to bloat and blacken in the rising sun. A hatless major sat on the ground weeping, “My boys, my beautiful boys.” Liberty thought of the thousands of souls, most of them probably still undeveloped, who had departed the planet forever from this now haunted and sacred place, and then wondered if God were actually as deaf and dumb as He often seemed. In a corner of the field a spotted pig was energetically rooting beneath the exposed rib cage of a fallen soldier, the bloody remains shaking like a husk in the animal’s stained jaws.

One week later, the army still encamped in a massive sprawl along the banks of the Potomac, the letter from home arrived. Liberty would always remember, until the day he, too, died, the smell of frying bacon, the laughter from the boys playing cards, the sight of his scarred and dirty hands clutching the paper, the shadow of his head falling across the sheet as he read:

My Dear Son,

This is the most difficult letter it has ever been my painful duty to compose. I scarcely know where or how to begin….

Then his eye went leaping rapidly ahead, consuming the news in phrases that entered him like a barber’s razor: “mother’s distresses growing progressively worse…a communication from Carolina blaming her for the war…traitor to the country, traitor to the family…disinherited forever…distraught, your mother went for a ride…the carriage found below the upper bridge…broken neck…death instantaneous…”

Liberty sat on the biscuit box outside his tent until the sun sank and was sitting there still when it rose again the following morning. All around him, as the army awakened to another dull round of drilling and loafing, life, oddly enough, continued on, but he was no longer a part of it. He drifted through the days like an automaton, performing his duties without awareness or reflection.

The following week he asked Major Hudson, the cartographer, for a map of South Carolina.

The road was red
and the sky was blue and they’d been hours on the march, toiling through the empty Georgia countryside, the billowing clouds of fine coppery dust that stung their eyes and choked their throats and gilded their sweaty faces giving them the appearance of exhausted, ill-tempered devils. At rest halts they would collapse on the needle-carpeted ground in the mentholated shade of the thick pine and lie there gasping like beached fish until the order came to rise and move on. A trio of mounted officers came galloping down the line, stirring up more dust, the flanks of the horses coated with the dry red powder. “Look,” declared one of the reclining men, “it’s Uncle Billy.” “Who gives a rat’s ass?” asked another, not even bothering to open his eyes. “I’ll give all my worldly goods to buy his horse,” submitted a third, an offer whose innate preposterousness occasioned a few mild chuckles. “I’ll give my left ball,” said another, “to be home lying in my own cool bed.” Then Sergeant Ainsworth began passing among them, kicking at their feet, and they struggled up and started down the road again. The dust rising from the long column appeared, even from miles away, like a lowering cloud of red smoke.

Late in the afternoon the rain began and fell all night and into the following day. The road dissolved into a buttery paste that buried wagon wheels up to the hubs and clutched at their heavy feet and legs. By the time they arrived at the river it was swollen enough to be threatening its banks. The bridge was still passable and the army narrowed into one thin file picking its slow, careful way over the wet, slippery planks. Halfway across Major Pickles’s personal wagon slipped a wheel over the edge and the metal coffin in the bed started sliding out. Several men leaped forward and, cursing and groaning, heaved the entire wagon back onto the bridge and the stalled column moved on. Finally the rain stopped and they were settling into camp for the night when the major called for his men to gather round.

“I appreciate your efforts, boys,” he said, patting the metal lid of the casket. “You know how much this box means to me. I understand it’s been a godawful trial for the whole regiment carrying this clumsy thing along with us, but me and my family will be forever grateful for your assistance. So as the merest token of my gratitude, I’d like you all to fetch your canteens, your cups, your hats, and everybody take a dip.” He unscrewed the lid of the coffin, all-aluminum, rustproof, waterproof, eternity-guaranteed, which he had brought with him from home, dragged through five major campaigns, in the event he was called to glory and his earthly remains could be shipped back to Elmira in as sweet a condition as possible, but until that tragic day serving admirably as a first-rate barrel for the major’s private stock of fine whiskey his men were now scooping out so enthusiastically.

“Hurry, boys,” cautioned the major. “Exposure to the elements dilutes the quality.”

So there was much drunkenness in camp that night. A fight broke out among the cooks over frying rights to a stray chicken and in the ensuing melee a stove was overturned and a large pot of soup was lost to the porous sandy soil. Men could be heard singing tunes sentimental or bawdy well into the gray dawn. In the morning Private Duffie was found drowned, lying facedown in a puddle of rusty water two inches deep.

Liberty lay awake most of the night listening to the water dripping off the trees onto the tent canvas. He thought of his childhood nights in bed under the eaves and the comforting sound of the rain on the roof and thought about his father and his aunt and Euclid and how they were and what they could be doing. Then he started thinking about that other home, the one he’d never seen or visited but in his imagination. Georgia, he thought, I’m in Georgia. He was as close to that other place as he’d ever been in his life. He took out his own set of maps, kept in a waterproof pack in his pocket, and marked off with a pencil the miles traversed today. His map of South Carolina was pristine but for a small black
X
denoting a spot on the Stono River. He folded up the maps and put them and the pencil back in his pocket.

Otis Dodds, an amiable lad also from the North Country, was stretched out next to him reading a yellow-jacketed dime novel entitled
The Gold Fiend,
pausing periodically to read aloud his favorite parts. He’d read the book twice before and was fond of recommending its myriad pleasures to all who would listen. “‘I advanced with great stealth toward the locked door,’” he began, “‘and bending forward applied my curious eye to the keyhole and what I saw in the adjoining room beggars—’”

“Otis,” drawled Liberty, “if you read to me one more time from that wretched novel, I’m gonna rip up the pages and toss ’em into the fire.”

“Easy there, Liberty, go easy, boy. It’s too wet and I’m too tired to have to get up and give you another good licking.”

“Since when did you ever give me a good licking?”

“You don’t remember? A year ago I believe it was. Back in Pennsylvania, or maybe it was Virginia. I get all these damned states mixed up by now. I reckon it was the day of the big regimental rough-and-tumble. You hit me in the head with a rock.”

“It was a mistake. I was aiming at Beetclaw.”

“Well, so you say.”

“Yes, and I’ll say it again if you want.”

“Don’t get touchy with me or we’ll have to commence another go-round right here in this damn tent.”

“Suits me,” said Liberty, rolling over and turning his back on his friend.

Eventually, without speaking, they drifted off separately into sleep. Liberty’s dreams, at least the one he remembered since joining the army, always seemed to be the same. He is walking down a deserted country road, rolling green fields on either hand, a modest farmhouse, a clump of trees in the distance. A pretty young woman in the doorway beckons to him. But when he arrives at the house, she has disappeared and all the rooms are empty. A table has been set, though, for one place, a platter piled high with chicken and ham and turkey and boiled potatoes and a tall glass of cold milk, but once he sits down to eat the meal has vanished. Suddenly he is upstairs in a bedroom, a mild breeze blowing at the white lace curtains. He feels unaccountably sad and quite tired, so he stretches out on the big clean bed and falls asleep and dreams he is awake and his still body covered entirely with reptiles.

“Hey, doghead, wake up!” It was Sergeant Ainsworth’s bewhiskered face peering into the tent. “Cap’n wants to see you two buzzards right away.”

They struggled up out of their bedding and stood blinking groggily in the foggy dawn, warily eying each other and deciding, no, not yet, too early to speak.

Captain Roe was seated on a barrel under a dripping oak tree. Gathered around him were Lieutenant Wills and privates Strickling and Vail. The captain glanced up, arching an eyebrow. “Glad to see you gentlemen could join us for breakfast.” Liberty and Otis remained silent. “Actually, there is no breakfast, which is what I wish to speak to you about. The general has issued orders giving us permission to send out foraging parties and since none of you, with the possible exception of Wills here, has shown much aptitude for the various other aspects of soldiering, I thought I’d give you all a chance to try your hand at officially sanctioned thievery. How does that square with you?”

A mumbled chorus of vague assent.

“I thought this task might meet with your approval. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what we need. Lieutenant Wills will supervise the operation. Don’t take more than you can carry, and civilians and private property are to remain untouched. Understand?”

More mumbles.

“I’m looking forward to a grand supper, boys. Don’t disappoint me. And, boys, keep a weather eye out for Wheeler’s cavalry. Don’t want to find any of you lying in a ditch with your throats slit.”

They all agreed they would do what they could to forestall that particular fate.

The day was cool and pleasant and they followed the road out of camp. The land flat, empty and eerily quiet.

The first farmhouse they came to was deserted. A dead dog was sprawled in the yard, the gaping wound in its side black with flies. A silver tray and bowl had been nailed to a tree and riddled with bullets. Inside, the rooms had been ransacked, the furniture broken up, holes punched in the walls.

“Nothing for us here,” observed Wills, a short skinny man who wore a pair of hexagonal spectacles and possessed the abstracted look of an overworked scholar. The men called him Professor.

“I ain’t giving up so easy,” said Strickling and ran upstairs where the others could hear his boots tramping about the floor and the sound of objects being hurled about.

“This place has been licked clean,” said Vail, rooting through a pile of torn clothing in the corner, “unless you’re in the market for a spanking new blue baby bonnet.” And he clapped said article atop his shaggy head.

On the mantelpiece in a broken frame was a daguerreotype of a young woman with ringleted hair and intelligent eyes and a serious mouth. Liberty, wondering who she was and where she could be or whether she was even alive, removed the picture from the frame and shoved it into his pocket.

“Got yourself a girlfriend?” asked Otis.

Liberty didn’t answer.

“Probably a cousin,” joked Vail. “Ain’t you got rebel kin all over the damn South?”

“Enough to teach you some manners before you go skedaddling back to Buffalo.”

“Save your powder,” suggested Wills. “Lord knows what we’ll be needing ’fore the sun sets on this day.”

“It’s all right,” said Vail, exhibiting his toothless smile. “I like this little secesh, always will.”

“I like you, too,” said Liberty, “you knock-kneed cross-eyed son of a bitch.”

Vail beamed. He seemed to enjoy being insulted, and a good gibe at his expense was for him as good a way as any of ending a disagreement.

Strickling came stumbling down the stairs with a peacock feather in his hat. “Someone poured molasses on the bed up there,” he reported.

“Are you sure that’s molasses?” asked Otis.

“Hell,” declared Vail, “this sucker’s all played out.”

“Yes,” agreed Wills. “Let’s move on.”

As they ambled away from the house, Strickling turned and fired his revolver, shooting out the glass in an upstairs window. He laughed. The others looked at him, but no one said a word.

A mile or so down the road they encountered an aged black man with white hair in a tattered coat and pants, wrapped rags for shoes. He was hurrying briskly along and singing in a booming voice. As soon as he spied the Union soldiers, he grinned and waved his hand.

“One of your friends, Liberty?” asked Vail.

“Uncle!” Wills called out. “Any johnnies about?”

“No, Master!” the man declared emphatically. “They lit out soon’s we heard you was coming.” He couldn’t stop grinning. “Yankees,” he said, and let out a laugh, as if the very word tickled his mouth. “Never thought these old eyes would live to get filled with the sight of you people.”

“Any big plantations out this way?” asked Wills.

“Oh, yes, Master. You just keep on and you’ll come right up to Missus Sarah’s.”

“Any bluecoats been there yet?”

“No, Master, but the missus, she and the children, they’re back there expecting you all.”

“She got any food for us?”

“Oh, yes, Master, got it all buried under the trees out back. Made up to look like a grave, but that’s where the food is hid.”

“You don’t have to call anyone ‘master’ anymore,” said Liberty.

“Why, yes sir, you are powerful right about that, but I expect that’s gonna be a tight tooth to pull out of my head.”

“What are you doing out here all alone?” asked Otis.

“Why looking for you people, sir. I’m looking to join up; I’m in it for the duration.”

“We don’t need your help,” snapped Vail. “None of this is any of your business.”

“Oh, Master, I expect it surely is.”

“We’re fighting to save the Union,” said Strickling, “not your scrawny ass.”

“Yes, Master, but I’ve been pondering a long spell and I expect this here war has something to do with slavery.”

“Bullcrap,” said Vail. “You darkies seem to think everything in the whole damn country is about you.”

“It is,” said Liberty.

“By God,” exclaimed Vail, raising his rifle. “Don’t start up with me again or I’ll bust your crust, send you both to hell in each other’s arms. You’d probably like that, wouldn’t you, you goddamn nigger lover.”

Liberty leaped at Vail, thrusting the rifle aside, and managed to get both hands around his neck as they fell back into the dirt. As Liberty squeezed, Vail’s head reddened and swelled. “Get off him,” said Otis, pulling Liberty away by the shoulders. Vail sat up gasping and coughing. “You ever touch me again,” he warned, “and I’ll open you up, you little shit, from your chops to your balls.”

“Mind your language and your manners,” answered Liberty, “and you won’t have cause.”

“Either of you try that again and I’ll finish it for you,” promised Wills. “We’ve got enough enemy in front of us without turning on one another.”

In the distance the old man could be seen hobbling frantically away, toward the Union lines and his hope of becoming a soldier.

The foraging party moved on in the opposite direction in a tense silence, Vail rubbing repeatedly at his neck.

“Want my bandanna for a bandage?” cracked Strickling. He seemed to regard the entire fracas as a hilarious joke.

“You’re next, you shit-filled louse,” growled Vail.

Three miles on they came to a fine-looking two-story white house set amid a grove of oak and magnolia trees. A gaunt woman with stern, pale features stood on the veranda flanked by several children of various genders and ages, all gazing upon the approaching foe with countenances suitable to a bereaved family waiting on a station platform for an overdue train. A pair of female slaves hovered anxiously in the doorway.

Wills advanced and, tipping his hat, said, “Missus Sarah, I presume?”

Nothing moved on the veranda but the woman’s lips. “Yes,” she said. “I would expect nothing less of a boorish Yankee than to boldly address a lady to whom he has never been properly introduced by her Christian name. It is indeed the height of presumption.”