Free The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright Page A

intended result. So, I would like for you to always bear in mind the pernicious effects of this insult. Will you do that?”
    “Yes.” His voice barely audible.
    “Because, as I hope you now understand, the word ‘nigger’ is the most foul sound that can be formed by human lips and tongue. There is no comparison with anything else. It is the verbal equivalent of a raised whip. Not all the blasphemies uttered by all the infidels of the world against God and all the churches and ministers and priests can equal the hatred embedded in that singular word. I don’t want you to ever employ that word in any manner whatsoever upon any other person, no matter what slight or crime you think they may have committed against you. People who do so are callous fools deformed by ignorance and fear and not worth associating with by day or night. I know you feel bad about what happened to you today, but believe me, those boys would not have made suitable playmates. Their souls are soiled, as are no doubt the souls of their parents, their relatives, their friends. All touched by the curse that has been laid against this land. I know it hurts, but sometimes, Liberty, all one can do before such malignant idiocy is be polite as possible and gracefully withdraw. There are certain terrains where the wise general seeks to avoid battle. Because there will come other days, other fields, where one will be presented with the opportunity to beat back the tide of hatred and work to lift the curse that weighs heavily as chains upon us all, free and bonded alike.”

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