The Amalgamation Polka Read Online Free PDF

brain.
    Presently, though, time passing gratefully on, his darkly wrought attention began to gently unwind, and soon he was down on the floor rolling a toy wagon back and forth over the rough planks, bound for the Territory and a rendezvous with mountain men along the Green River. And not more than half an hour later he was back downstairs, dodging his aunt’s ridiculous complaints, and heading out through the meadow to the secret pond at the bottom of the ravine where giant bullfrogs dozed in the stinking mud and speckled salamanders hung suspended in the clear water as if trapped in glass. And by the following day he was away with Euclid on a huckleberry expedition at his aunt’s behest—her traditional Saturday baking ordeal drawing near—and he never again asked about Euclid’s colorless eye or mutilated back.
    His own parents so frequently absent, often for painfully extended periods, embarked on what they occasionally termed their “crusade”—Liberty had sometimes pictured them sword or lance in hand, hacking away at a wrathful dragon or, side by side, clearing a bloody path through a human wall of armed infidels—he understandably had come to regard the remaining adults in the house, Aroline and Euclid, as a perfectly acceptable set of substitute parents. And, accurately intuiting that his aunt’s plentiful and intimate problems occupied a more generous portion of her day than even she might be willing to admit, the boy tended to turn to the older man when troubles plagued his mind and set his skin to itching.
    “Euclid?” he asked, fiddling nervously with his line before allowing it to go slack and belly out into the wind. They had been seated quietly there on the rock for more than an hour, the sun mounting ever higher into a dizzyingly blue sky, the emerald flashings of countless dragonflies darting repeatedly across the eye. Neither had as yet detected so much as a nibble.
    “Yes, turnip.”
    “Can a dead man talk?”
    Euclid seemed not to have heard the question. He rubbed at his nose, spit into the water, glanced away at the far shore as if he’d just heard an interesting sound out there or momentarily expected some fascinating event to transpire among the distant pines. When he spoke, it was in the soft, uninflected voice he reserved for only the weightiest of matters.
    “Dead man do what dead man wants to do. Why’s a good boy like you fussing with such truck. These here’re bones for the big dogs to worry at, and even most of them just trot right on by, don’t want nothing to do with that stink-stick.”
    “Why not?”
    “Why not? I’ll tell you why not. Same reason they go whistling through the graveyard. This here is death stuff and common folk believe if you don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, you won’t catch it, but what they’s too scared to know is they already got it.”
    “Got what?”
    “Never mind. That’s enough philosophizing for one day. Now, where’d you see this dead man talking anyway?”
    “I don’t know.”
    The laughter rolled out of Euclid in big, generous waves. “Liberty,” he said, wiping the back of a hand across his watering eye, “this must be why I like you so much. You are one fine, funny fellow.”
    “Are dreams real?”
    “Look out,” declared Euclid, ducking his head, “here comes another. How do you fit all these whopping thoughts into that little bitty nut of yours? Of course a dream is real. You saw it, didn’t you? No different than anything else you see. If you saw a dead man moving around in there, he was real, too. Like I say, dead man do what dead man wants to do. But if you saw one standing up and walking about and talking plain to folks, most probably that’s because he wasn’t buried right. A man can’t be buried crossways in this world. Got to be buried east to west so when Gabriel blows his horn at sunrise you don’t have to turn your head to behold the jubilee. So much conjuring you got to do to keep the spirit