The Amalgamation Polka (6 page)

One early evening in
the late spring of Liberty’s eleventh year, swallows playing tag over the peaks of the house, the limpid air marshaling objects near and far in sharply defined equidistance, cricket orchestra warming up in the dank pit under the front porch, Uncle Potter, who hadn’t been seen by family, friend or local constabulary in more than a year and whose last known whereabouts involved a lengthy stroll down the Drummond Pike, a left at the North Fork and on out about sixty miles past the border of Nowhere, came thundering into the dining parlor, per custom, unexpected, unannounced and in an inveterate state of personal and mental dishabille at the precise moment Aunt Aroline, with the fussy ceremony of an anxious chef, was depositing upon the loaded table a great pewter dish out of which rose a steaming citadel of beef and bone set amid a delightful enceinte of boiled “sauce”—potatoes, onions, beets and carrots chopped and sliced and compulsively aligned in an alternating pattern emphasizing their natural chromatic harmony.

“As usual, Potter.” Roxana smiled. “I must applaud your theatrical sense of timing.”

The color in Aunt Aroline’s round cheeks, already alarmingly high from an afternoon’s labor at the oven, rapidly underwent several further degrees of pinkening. Delivering a fusillade of withering contempt in Potter’s direction and muttering something obscure about “the improper domestication of beasts of the forest,” she vanished into the kitchen, from which she refused to emerge for the duration of Potter’s visit.

Halfway through slurping up his first of many bowls of over-seasoned pumpkin soup, Potter abruptly announced to the less than dumbfounded company that he had just about made up his mind to mosey on out to the Kansas Territory and try to bag him a puke or two.

“If the language weren’t brutal enough,” Roxana replied, “you must compound the crime with an act of ultimate violence.”

“I would not have thought Mexico chafed so after all these years,” commented Thatcher.

“What’s a puke?” asked Liberty, instantly envisioning some bad-tempered collusion between a yellow-fanged mountain lion and a rabid timber wolf.

Potter’s spoon busy ferrying gobbets of thick soup through the hair-curtained portal of his mouth paused in midcourse, and darting a bloodshot glance at the inquisitive boy he replied, “A puke is a jaundiced-cheeked, snaggle-toothed, scum-licking saucebox with a massy head and a wizened brain whose preposterous upright endeavors to pass as a man are incontestably betrayed by the bestial bouquet of his musk.”

“I see you’ve given the matter some consideration,” Thatcher said dryly.

“Really, Potter.” Roxana’s attention, as ever, focused firmly upon her mesmerized son. “I enjoy backcountry vulgarity as well as the next, but must we be so entertained at the dinner table?”

Potter, now hunched mere inches away from his bowl, was slurping up soup with renewed abandon. “A puke is a puke.” He shrugged. “You can’t pretty ’em up.”

“I wasn’t asking you to. I only wonder whether we might not finish our meal before being served the full particulars.”

“Now, Roxie, darling, don’t start reefing the sail just yet. I’ve got a savory yarn to spin.”

Slicing off half the joint for himself, the rambling wanton then proceeded between noisy, spewing chews and long drafts of cold cider to relate news of the latest atrocity from the Kansas Territory: the shocking execution of an innocent Free Soiler name of R. P. Brown by a marauding gang of border ruffians pleased to dub themselves the Kickapoo Rangers. Seems the previous day a no-account puke called Cook had been found brutally murdered by a person or persons unknown. Inflamed with drink highly rectified and unquenchable fancies of revenge, the fun-loving Rangers waylaid the first misfortunate who happened along, in this case the hapless Brown, who was hauled into Dawson’s grocery in Leavenworth prior to his trial for Cook’s murder. Ticktock went the clock on the wall, ticktock. Nerves among the abductors, already strained, began in that drafty, oppressively cramped room to fray and part.

“Don’t you leer at me with such an unfettered eye.”

“Heap o’ grit, ordering me around like that. Who was it pressed that ol’ gray you now prance about upon in such princely style?”

“Speak one word more and I’ll twist that bandanna around your pipe till the lamps pop out of your ugly mug,” etc., etc., until attention turned inevitably to the bound prisoner.

“Gents, hold on now. Why try a guilty man? Was Cook tried? Has a single one of them eastern punkinheads ever come within hailing distance of the bar of justice?”

“But we got to try him,” someone suggested, “so we can decide how to kill him.”

“Arguing about how to kill a skunk?” replied another, running a filthy thumb along the bright bit of his hatchet. “You can’t please a bastard.” Rising almost reluctantly to his feet, he raised the hatchet and with one powerful swing planted the blade deep into Brown’s cowering head.

The Rangers watched like spectators at a dance as the bleeding man writhed painfully about on the sawdust floor. After a while someone said, “Reckon we better take him home.” So the groaning body was roughly tossed into a wagon bed and the Rangers, warming themselves on a demijohn of Old Monongahela, set off across ten frozen miles of the worst winter on record, when men went about draped in buffalo robes, their boots wrapped in burlap, and wild turkeys were so numbed by the cold they could be shot like targets with a pistol.

“I am very cold,” complained Brown.

“Here’s some coffee for you,” one of the boys declared, leaning over to deposit a fresh gob of tobacco juice into the open wound in Brown’s skull. “Liniment for a damned amalgamator.”

Yet drawing feeble breath, the body was rudely dumped at the door of the man’s cabin with the cry to the horrified wife: “Here’s Brown!”

Potter’s dark dancing eyes had become as still as baked pebbles. He was staring not just at but directly into Liberty, searching the boy’s gaping soul for points of recognition. “Those,” he intoned gravely, “were pukes.”

“Do what you will,” Thatcher conceded. “The Territory is not Veracruz.”

Roxana remained apart, seated at the table though out of the conversation, even perhaps out of hearing, her abtracted gaze fixed on a nearby window whose polished sash now framed in its glass a pale, distorted reflection of the lamp-lit dining parlor and its inhabitants floating in ghostly splendor within a rectangle of utter obsidian.

Over the years the westering impulse, as persistent and irresistible as sexual desire, had come to assume an almost physical presence, the neglected, unkempt urchin at Potter’s side loyal as a favorite revolver, an ill-smelling snot-nosed kid ever tugging at his sleeve, pleading with eyes too enormous for such a small child, disturbingly blank, curiously cold, as if out in the providential lands just over the next rise, beyond the keeps and customs of the day, in the murk of the forest or the wail of the prairie, might be found the heedless parents who somehow lost track of their winsome boy.

So once again, heaving his not inconsiderable bulk into the saddle, Potter rode out over the mountains, down through the Pennsylvania woods and much of the same Ohio meadow country he had traversed nine years before, the beckoning sun declining each night between his piebald’s twitchy ears, taking his meals, his sleep, in reasonable proportions at reasonable intervals, the reckless haste of his earlier aborted journey supplanted by a magnetic resolution that drew him deliberately, unswervingly, onward—to the landing at Weston and ferry passage across the Big Muddy and the novel sensation of actually leaving the states behind, entering K T, where the sky was so irredeemably vast, so
present,
a piece of it always seemed to be stuck in the corner of your eye, outdoors or in. From every vantage the land slid drunkenly away on high gentle swells of rippling, red-tasseled grass. Eventually, directed by an inner compass whose infallibility had withstood every extravagant test a life of apparent aimless vagabondage had been able to inflict upon it, Potter ambled out along the California Road past the burgeoning town of Lawrence, that impudent outpost of stiff-necked Yankee rectitude, the grand three-story brick hotel, the mobbed groggeries dispensing ten-cent whiskey by the barrelful, the sod huts and cottonwood cabins down on the Kaw, imported steam engines chugging day and night, reducing trunks of black walnut and hickory to hand-smooth planks of invaluable lumber, the call of one clanking machine—Home of the Free! Home of the Free!—answered instantly by another: Never a Slave State! Never a Slave State! and on between rustling walls of ripe sunflowers taller than a man in a tall hat, their mellow heads nodding inquisitively down, to find himself one somber midnight posted upon a windy plain amidst a company of armed Regulators, observing with an interest beyond the merely professional a dull forgelike glow fluttering unchecked off at the black edge of the world, too remote to distinguish the actual flames seesawing over the charred site of the former Goodin place.

“Wahl,” drawled Furry Ike in the tenured voice of one who’d been in a tight corner before and was likely to be again, “reckon we’re next.”

“Never fear, lads,” promised Captain Gracie, whose habitual promises, a salient element of his command style, had become understood by his men long ago to be aspects of the hollowness of a language they need no longer obey or even respect. “They’re walking into a reception here warmer than any they ever bargained for.”

“I’m not afraid, sir,” Little Johnny Phelps piped up, words he had been repeating in one form or another since sunset several long hours ago.

Raising an unwashed finger to one nostril and bending slightly forward, Furry Ike abruptly expelled a projectile of heavy mucus that either hit or narrowly missed the upper of Potter’s boot. In the dark it was hard to tell, and Potter wasn’t about to reach down and feel with his hand.

“Sorry there, pardner,” muttered Furry Ike through his tobacco-stained beard. “Misjudged my windage a mite.”

“I ain’t your damn pardner,” growled Potter, rubbing his boot in the bunch grass, “and if you come against me one more time I’ll thrash your hide five ways to kingdom come.”

“Remark like that might cause a fellow to wonder just what you’re doing here at all.”

“I expect I’m here for the same reasons as anybody else, and if saving this country means having to save a flung-up yellow-bellied cuss like you, then so be it.”

“Gentlemen,” Captain Gracie cautioned, “save your vinegar for the foe.”

Soberly then, and single file, persuaders of various makes and calibers clutched in each hardened fist, the Regulators trooped back into the solitary cabin, bolted and barred the timber door.

Dominating the one-room interior with implacable organic authority was a tree stump the diameter of a Conestoga wheel, of a magnitude so intractable the cabin had simply been erected around it, gnarled roots of an ancient complexity rising like a giant’s petrified muscle out of the packed dirt floor, the stump’s circular annulated top, planed and sanded, serving admirably as a low but permanently balanced table, now bearing half a dozen tin plates nailed into the wood to prevent theft and, seated at precarious angles in their own tallow, a pair of smoking candle ends.

On a pile of straw in the corner, visibly shivering beneath a sheet of tattered and begrimed tent canvas, lay the master of this homestead the Regulator boys had come tonight to help defend. His name was E. F. G. Conklin and he’d been afflicted for more than a month with a case of the “shakes” seemingly impervious to all attention. Even in the warm candle glow, his face possessed a stark vegetative quality reminiscent of mushroom stems, the numerous hairs of his black beard stuck like so many random wires into the waxy flesh. His lips, swollen and flaking, parted slightly to release a rattle of syllables. “Yes,” murmured his wife, Kate, “they’re a-coming.” Conklin’s bituminous eyes remained fixed ceilingward. At his side his wife occupied the sole unbroken chair, a squirmy infant with the collywobbles wrapped in a crash towel sucking noisily at her breast, a shiny new Sharps carbine lying handily across her lap. She and her ailing husband, “rifle christians” from far-off New Haven, Connecticut, had endured unscrupulous road agents, broken axles, sick oxen, mud bogs, feuding families, lost children, petty theft, starvation, sunstroke, snakes, near drowning and all the trivial abrasions of the day along the emigrant trail for the promise of prime bottomland at $1.25 an acre, the fresh start guaranteed each dawn at the lofting of the American sun along with the opportunity to help dispatch as many godless Misery-ians as possible to the Happy Land of Canaan.

“He ain’t got long anyway,” Mrs. Conklin remarked, to no one in particular.

“Neither do them ruffians,” replied Little Johnny Phelps, suddenly hopping like a bug from one foot to the other.

“Hold up, lad,” advised Captain Gracie. “If you must piss yet again grab a tin or just let ’er rip in your linen ’cause this door is corked and will remain corked until further notice.” Even in the wilting summer heat he was dressed in high stock and his best black broadcloth, as if prepared to officiate at a wedding or a funeral.

The Regulators had each taken up a position at one of the divers loopholes bored at shoulder level into the thick log walls, weapons cocked and at the ready, squinting in nervous anticipation down the length of their barrels into the perilous night, the watery eye of the moon.

The Conklins’ daughter, Zillah, a solemn, barefoot girl of ten years, clothed in an unwashed man’s tunic that fell voluminously to well below her soiled knees, had neither addressed nor even acknowledged in any manner this strange company of foul-smelling roughs who had infested her home several long hours earlier. Arms crossed behind her back, she leaned at rigid attention, as if lashed to a mast, against the cold bricks of the hearth, the magical agency of touch allowing her for a spell to partake of the stolid, unassailable properties of raw stone.

A prolonged, bovine groan escaped from beneath the trembling canvas, its rate of movement having noticeably quickened.

“Here, lass,” Potter called as kindly as he could manage, his previous attempts at engaging the child having met with sullen silence, “why don’t you fetch your pa a nice cup of water?”