And how there remained along the land the rotten husks of speakers, the decayed and worm-feasted wood, the rusted tin, the frayed wires, and there were those who felt an absence in this world emptied of the drone of speakers, of the names of the dead, and in the night as you prepared to sleep, and along the days as you packed your clothes, and through the hours you journeyed by rail and by carriage to a new city, to college, you heard only the echo and hum of those years of war, the damage of your eardrums, the hissing of your ears dying. And how there were those who paid others to call out the names of the dead, how paid actors stood on street corners uttering the names of the deceased into tin horns, calling out the appearance of the dead, their education, their accomplishments, while family and friends sat on nearby benches, dressed in mourning, weeping, remembering.
And these were the days of new religions, days of séances and table tapping, days of mystics from lands nearby who wore bath towels they called turbans and amulets of false emeralds and they insisted they were from lands unknown, these mystics who browned their faces with shoe-polish and spoke in exotic accents, who reduced mourning families to poverty and disappeared from towns after impregnating widows. And then widows wandered the streets in their black gowns and black veils and spoke of their “divine insemination,” how a spirit coiled in the dark, green mist shaped as a hand up their skirt, lips against their neck, the voice of their beloved dead in their ears, the rank gust of ectoplasm, the sticky smear along thighs.
And in those days there were many mystics who took photographs of these sitters with spirits lingering over their shoulders, smiling from the window, slouched against bookshelves, and very often these photographs involved spirits of the famous recently dead, or the famous long ago dead, images of our Abraham or Caesar or Shakespeare, rather than the recent dead of the sitter.
And it was said even Abraham's widow visited with seers, although when the turbaned mystic hummed in the static of the universe, in the radiant cadences of our Abraham, Mary Todd would only say, “Is he safe? Is my Willie well?” and when the mystic said, “He sings with the angels, he wears white gowns, he gazes upon his mother and calls down to her,” Mary Todd wept and responded with notes for the mystic to read, letters to Willie asking him if he was dressing warmly, if he was washing his hands before dinner, if he would sing to her each night. And the mystic told Mary Todd, “Pull back your veil my dear,” and the mystic said, “I hear your boy in my ear, he says, âMama, please don't hide your face. I'm here, watching you'” and she fell against the table, weeping and gnashing, and the mystic, surely wondered, “Why does she not wonder after him?”
And there were those who said the voices from beyond and the rapping upon tables brought little comfort to Mary Todd, who now rode trains to those cities along the land where her credit was still good, and how her clothing and decorating debts escalated into the tens of thousands, and she petitioned the government for relief of those debts, saying, “My husband saved this country so crooks like you could prosperâ
you cheats owe me!”
and how she rode trains to the largest cities of the valley and wandered their most fashionable districts dressed as a woman of soot, her face shrouded in mourning veil, and how she loaded her arms and Tad's arms with the most fashionable gowns and shoes and gloves, and how she attempted to pay for these with her words alone, saying, “After what I've gone throughâmy husband spattered onto my gownâ”
And when Mary Todd learned of those auctions held for scraps of Abraham's bloody clothes, the locks of his hair cut by the coroner and given as tokens to those who had pledged fidelity, of the fortunes made from these “blood relics” she said unto her son Robert, “It isn't fair” and “I should gain a percentage, at least.” And Mary Todd told Robert to cut himself, “Here” and she gestured to a vein on his arm, and she told him to smear his father's jackets and slacks with this, and she told him to smear his father's shirts until he became dizzied. And when all our Abraham's clothes were blood-sticky, Mary Todd smiled and said, “These will fetch a tidy sum” and when Robert protested she said, “No one will know the difference.”
And still these shopping binges in cities along the valley, the names she assumed and the veils and hats and wigs she wore, and her hotel rooms filled with boxes of lace curtains, footstools, shoes, handkerchiefs, jewels, and all these shipped in railroad cars and loaded into her apartment until she and Tad slept on the floor or in the hallway, while the apartment was transformed into a forest of boxes and dust and cobwebs. And from deep within the heart of this mess came the stink of food rotting, pork loins and bottled milk and cakes gone untouched.
And when Tad died of “dropsy of the chest,” when his thin, young face finally knew peace and they set him within his casket, Mary Todd raved in a language all took as gibberish.
And she would not sell Tad's clothes nor Willie's, instead keeping those, all the toys and trinkets and photos of the boys arranged before her. But she sold all of Abraham's, and when these were gone she sold all of Robert's childhood outfits and called these “Abraham's youthful garments” and from these sales Mary Todd made what she called a “tidy sum.” And soon she wandered the streets with paper money falling from her pockets, and when she attempted to tell the shop girls to charge these furs and gloves and shoes, her mouth could only say “GASDGDASHOAUG” and her jaw moved slow as if fractured, and she woke in alleyways with her pockets rifled through, and cut and bruised and bleeding from the lip, and “violated in that most terrible way,” she insisted, saying, “I can feel their fingers yet, I can smell their wickedness.”
And in the papers and gossip columns along the land all wrote how she was unfit for the memory of our Abraham, how she was “most pathetic,” and shrewish, and sinister. And it was “revealed” now that in the hours and days after the death of our Abraham, Mary Todd had been unable to weep, and she had wandered covered in his browned-blood and brain matter, a hint of a smile playing upon her expression when the Secretary of War explained, “We have not yet captured the assassin, Madame.”
And it was said that Mary Todd met young men through the papers and these bought her furs and made love to her in bridal suites in exchange for what she called her “Still considerable influence in certain circles,” and when her recommendations opened no doors these young men wrote letters to the editors of major papers condemning her “Wretched stink” and “Godless ways”.
And Mary Todd dreamed of forest fires, and capitals burning, and hillsides and ravines born into smoke and licking flame, and in these dreams all the women and little boys of the valleys wept from sheets of flame, until the Chloral Hydrate pills she dropped in glasses of scotch took hold, and how she snored with a slumped open mouth and half-shut eyes, and she staggered when finally awake, and her eyes slouched, and she slurred in new languages, and when she reached her hand toward Robert's shoulder her mouth twisted into the names of the dead, into the faces and shadows of Willie and Tad and Abraham.
It was in these days that Robert now said of his mother, “She's become too much of a burden” and as the doctors restrained her and drugged her and locked her in a padded room, Robert told her, “This is for your own good.” And through the grating he said, “Mother, you're ill, you can't see it, but I'm worried you'll harm yourself” and she clawed at the door, and she spat, and she said, “The Lord must hate me to kill all my babies but let you live” and she said, “You better pray they never let me out.” And there were those who warned Robert, “She carries a pistol in her girdle in case you ever visit” and there were those who insisted Robert smiled at this and said, “Well, she'll gather quite the bit of dust waiting for that day, won't she?” and “The old bird's damn lucky I didn't strangle her the night my father died” and “We've become a better people, but don't you think there's a certain authority to the way the ancients dealt with their relatives?”
“Again you come for the one I love most”
And along the land there came a great gnashing for the soul of our Abraham. And there were those who dressed in black hoods and snuck into Abraham's crypt and opened Abraham's casket. They brought the body into the open air until anxiety gripped their souls and they could go no further. When government agents arrived the long dead body of our Abraham laid in the dirt before the crypt, moistened in the morning dew, yellowed and the face slightly crooked, the jaw unhinged, the hair long and wiry, but otherwise as if recently dead. There were government agents who fell to their knees and whispered to the Lord God, and there were those who crossed themselves at the sight of our Abraham, and there were those who turned away from this body, un-aged and sprawled on the soil before them.
And there were a thousand plaster masks labeled as Abraham's death mask, and these sat upon the mantles and in the libraries of fur barons and leather merchants and bankers and steel and railroad magnates along the valley. And there were those who owned our Abraham's blood spattered top hat, his blood-crusted scarf, and they wore these to society balls and church services as the height of fashion, and in those days many a priest kissed the bloody blots. And there were those who took pills made of Abraham's flesh and there were those who said “never forget.” And the new president proclaimed a day in Abraham's honor and all prayed unto his sacred name, and images of Abraham's death shown illuminated from magic lanterns gifted to children, and the faces of little children along the valley glowed nightly with Abraham's death, their dreams cascading with red and throbbing with screams of “Murder! Murder! Murder!” And there were those who kept his hair in lockets, and those who held flecks of his dried blood in vials, and there were those who said this blood, if dropped into water, would “enhance virility.” And the actress who Abraham's bloody wound lay upon now wore her brown stained dress to society parties, and she was applauded as she insisted the stain, if touched or rubbed or licked, would have a curative effect, and it was said Robert invited her to balls and insisted she wear this brown-spattered dress as they danced, as they made love, so he could wear the dust of his father upon his hands, under his fingernails.
And now the new president became the old president, and the man who became the new president was a man your father revered as a greater general than even he was, and your father often said from the gloom of his porch, “This man Grant stood by me when I was insane and drifting, and I stood by him when he was stone drunk,” and this president Grant wore the same disheveled suit each day, his beard and hair unkempt and wiry, and he stank always of grain alcohol and slumbered through his cabinet meetings, and when Grant read his proclamation to unearth Abraham and place the body on display for “all nations and peoples to see” he did so from notecards handed to him by cabinet members, and when this new president read, “the people must never forget our Abraham and the sacrifices he made for his nation” he did so with such a slur there were few who understood him.
And there were great parades of confetti, and fireworks splayed red, white, and blue along the horizon when this man Grant unveiled Abraham's glass casket in the capital lobby, and there were wide grins at the ribbon cutting while all seemed impressed at the tubes ever connected to his body, the constant flow of yellow and red fluids, the air tight canister they kept him in, the pillow they rested his shattered head upon. Citizens who drifted along the velvet rope said, “It's just remarkable” and “This is the greatest moment of my life” and they lit candles, and they draped wreathes and bouquets of wild flowers, and they changed the names of their children to “Abraham” although by then no one remembered his position or his accomplishments, knowing only that he had been a great and famous hero.
“To pierce the heavens”
And when you gazed upon Abraham so displayed you thought only of your father. Indeed much reminded you of your father in this city crowded with the statues of generals gesturing to unseen battlefields, and you wandered this city, lost against the jostling and clattering and ceaseless neighing of horses, the street cars screeching and showering sparks onto the cobbled roads. And the buildings and bricks and windows and roofs of this city were not husks. And the crowds of this city hummed in a thousand languages. And you wandered lost from the moment you stepped off the train, and you wandered with a sense that all men were watching you, that their eyes were pressing down onto you, their sneers and ridicule, and you understood they would just as well steal your wallet as call you friend.
And in the city there were rooms filled with the flickering of what were then called magic lanterns, although the images they cast were far more exact than the magic lanterns of your youth, the low gloom of images playing on the walls, onto screens through the smoke of tobacco fumes, and therein these rooms you watched many a moment recreated in flickers while voices spoke in the crackling cadences of phonographs, broadcast with hidden speakers. And you reclined in the plush chairs of these rooms, shoulder to shoulder with other men, with the women they sometimes brought into these shadows, and you watched the exhibition of the death of Abraham, the silver glint of a bolt gun, the black burst of blood, Mary Todd and this man Booth in the fields along the city, and the acts she performed upon him, with her hands, her open mouth. And you gasped into the gasping of other men, the shuddered moans, the quickened breaths of the women they brought. And there were images of Abraham as a prairie lawyer, the thin crackling of his voice as he denounced the paying of the unpaid, as he thumped his fist against his palm, and the tinny thump of hooves, the static screams as Abraham rode on horseback lashing the unpaid with a bullwhip. And there were evenings after these exhibitions when women and men in top hats and silk scarves left saying, “I never really appreciated how much Abraham hated the unpaid” and there were depictions of Abraham burning the store-bought goods of the unpaid, Abraham thrashing the unpaid until they gave up their foodstuffs, Abraham firing rifles into crowds of mostly bare-breasted and charcoal-smeared unpaid women, which earned him now the nickname “The Great Emaciator.” And there were “news programs” of newly paid running amok in “sparkling” carriages smoking ten dollar cigars while their families starved at home, chasing the comely daughters of paid folk while their families starved at home, and you heard those in the room sigh, and you heard them say, “All of this as our dear departed Abraham foresaw.” And programs depicted the charcoaled and shoe-polish smeared faces of unpaid in the state houses of former rebel lands, eating fried chicken and picking lint from their feet, leering at married paid women, drinking moonshine and firing pistols into chandeliers, passing legislation banning paid men from all restaurants and drinking fountains, and of these images even Grant said, “It is the daily news writ in lightning! And, sadly, it is all too true.”