This next hillside trembled with a different anxiety, for here all tunnels led to brick walls and broken glass and bundled straw, or they led to strange kinds of doom, for here you found hives of wasps and a dead man lost in barbed-wire, and you closed his eyes even as you gagged for the spoilage, and you found the points of knives and bundled dynamite and rusted nails. And when you entered the tunnel that smelled of lilacs you understood that this must be the tunnel or some horrid new trap and into this you continued without impediment until soon you sensed a clearing, and you stood upright in a room of wilted flowers and statues of men sculpted from leather and metals and hair, and these men wore woolen uniforms with hats, and these men held sabers, and these men wore white masks in the shape of birds. And now you entered a room of oak shelves and these shelves were filled with leather-bound books of onion skin pages, and smeared upon these pages were formulas and diagrams and paragraphs composed in an almost perfect calligraphy, although the language seemed unreadable:
fdaafdadgf dafdagar arebear abeatergouah gearer
. And within the pages of other texts were sketches of men inserting themselves into women and men inserting pointed and stumped instruments into women and men pressing women from behind and men pressing themselves into the mouths and the anuses of women and images of numerous men inserting themselves into a single woman and in many of these pictures, men watched from within nearby bushes or from behind trees and fondled themselves.
And you continued through corridors lined with torches you lit and they illumed a wall decorated with long ago photographs of your mother or a woman who seemed to be your mother, and with much older tintypes of a woman with dark hair and dark eyes, and these women sat on sofas in lace garments with legs spread and black hairs opened, and other times wearing only pearl necklaces or lace underwear, and sometimes on the lap of a young man in regalia and in some he looked as your father had while in others he seemed too young, too soft, too human to have ever been such a man. And in these portraits he smiled almost drunkenly and sometimes women perched on his penis and sometimes they clasped his penis and sometimes they kneeled on the floor with it in their mouths.
And the walls seemed constructed with stacked alligator skulls, draped with alligator skins, and you entered a chamber where a man slumped in a wicker chair, this man who watched you with long rusted exhalations, his face flickering in your lantern, his long-off and absent expression, the gauntness of his cheeks, his gray wiry beard. And his ancient jaw opened slowly, and he wheezed dust, and within this moment seemed the apparition of all moments, and he said, “These dogs have watched you” and he gestured to the skulls of alligators arranged in mounds along the floor, and he coughed and spat, and he watched with distant colorless eyes, and he said what may have been a name although it seemed more a language of hissing. And he said, “My boy has been here. My boy has accomplished much.”
And you said, “Yes he has.”
“You call me
Father.”
And he smiled with yellow teeth and blackened teeth and absent teeth and said, “We have been born up by the wind and carried just so” and he gestured to the walls around him.
And you said, “I know, Father.”
And he said, “I should cast you into the pits” and he said, “No man slouches so” and he said, “The blades from these machines are surely impressive.”
And you said nothing, and when his silence demanded some sound you said, “It was an immaculate lawn.”
And he sneered. And he said, “My family lives inside alligators,” and smiled with black teeth.
He said, “My family will never die.”
And he said, “Much ancient knowledge insists.”
And he said, “We have been ferried across this river. We have supped upon eternal fruits” and he gestured to an arrangement of clay pots near his chair, his small and twisted hand, the black spots upon this pitiful paw.
He said, “I have never aged.”
And he said, “I will never die,” and he watched you with a half-smile, and how the half-smile grew.
He seemed to squint and said, “Are you one of my boys? Has the fighting stopped, lad?” and then he looked closer and said, “No, no, not one such as you. You never fought those men.”
And you said, “I know, Father.”
And he said, “You never burned those cities.”
And he said, “If you weren't already dead, I would kill you.”
And how he leaned forward and reached with his crippled hand, and how he sneered with black teeth, and how he gazed with blank bottomless eyes, and how he said, “I will outlive you by a thousand generations.”
He said, “I will exterminate your seed.”
He said, “We have been such men. We have lived with hearts of fire.”
And he tried standing and could not, and he reached for the revolver holstered upon his hip but it clattered to the floor, and your father wheezed and said, “I have lived inside the alligators.”
You thought to reach forward, to steady him upon his chair, to right his cap, to brush off his jacket, to close his eyes now, for all time, but you remained where you stood.
*
And now you wandered this civilization of ruin and leather, past the husks of all shops and factories, beyond where once was your school house, along where once the fields and the fur farms were, and you continued until you found your men laboring upon some distant road, their bandanas, their dirt-smeared faces, and there you smoked and watched them work, and when they did not work fast enough you said nothing, and when they seemed to slacken in their effort you said nothing, and when the sky darkened you smoked your cigar in the light of the city there on the horizon, a city of glass and steel towers, glowing in its florescence. And the smallest of those towers far outstood even the tallest of your father's monuments. And along the heavens you watched the slow passage of several lights and some seemed to land in the fields, and some seemed to wink into the sides of towers. And the towers seemed to smolder and smoke and glow. And you and your men watched the fall of these constructions in cold silence, the long collapse into heaps of ash and soot and glass. And they gasped, and they prayed, and they said unto you, “What of our families? Our children? Our mothers?” And you said, “I have seen worse horrors” and you gestured toward the city from which you had emerged, and you said, “I found the corpses of many men inside,” and you said, “but I found no living men.”
From what dust do we arrange ourselves? From what lonesome ashes are we returned again to these fields and meadows, to the tall dry grasses, the prairie clover and yellow primroses? Gray-bearded and toothless, we are returned to the tops and the base of hillsides. And some rusted howl again rises from our throats until we are returned to the middle. Where once we murdered now we embrace, and here one man says unto another: “And I stabbedâdo you recall?” and “There was some boy, there, in the dust, and I could not help him, for we were enemies.”
It is all too much to have been the men we were and continue on. To have been the rarest of men, to have felt the exhilaration of the infinite upon our brow only to return to our mother and our father, to till the fields and sup at the table, to lay with this woman, to create new life with her, to see her into the soil, to know her all the days in the middle but to not dare tell her the great truths of our youth
.
And when some fireworks flare, or some machine backfires, who cannot think, “Now a volley!” and “Take cover!” Who cannot wheel up with their rifle and prepare for the ultimate? Who will not pray for one last barrage to rend the flesh and free the ghost? Who will not beg for one last chance to lay low, some man such as ourselves, and to know again the unforgivable?
And when we find again some bleached chin in the soil, some moldy skull, some broken stick that may have been the leg of this boy we once knew, some rosy lad who nestled against us in the night, who clutched our arm as he died, whose girl-back-home we wrote this final word, this boy whose name we cannot recall, whose face escapes us, save for the most lonesome expressions
.
And we need not speak to recall the steam along the fields in the morning, and the glow of sun through the thickets, the rustling of wind against tall grasses
.
And here we know each other, in the shadow of the trees, the long-off bloom of dust, the shroud of our coming march
.
Â
The Alligators of Abraham
owes tremendous debt to many. First, I must acknowledge the following texts for providing the foundation:
Fur, Fortune, and Empire
by Eric Jay Dolin,
Citizen Sherman
by Michael Fellman,
America 1900: The Turning Point
by Judy Crichton,
The Wilderness
by the editors of Time-Life Books, The
Civil War: an Illustrated History
by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ric Burns, and Ken Burns,
The Civil War: A Film
by Ken Burns,
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust,
The Portable Abraham Lincoln
edited by Andrew Delbanco,
Touched by Fire
edited by William C. Davis,
Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography
by Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt,
Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies?
by Kenneth V. Iserson,
Morgan: An American Financier
by Jean Strouse,
The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American century
by Steven Watts,
Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition
by Leonard F. Guttridge.
To the following editors for publishing early excerpts: Andrew Borgstrom with
Mud Luscious Press
, James Tadd Adcox with
Artifice
, Katherine Sullivan with
Vinyl Poetry
, and Edward Mullany and Brian Mihok with
matchbook
.
To my early readers, Steve Himmer, Matt Bell, Amber Sparks, and all those at the Salem Writers Group.
To J. A. Tyler for his tirelessness and to Corey Zeller for setting things up. Thanks also to Matt Kish and to Adam Braver and David Ohle.
Finally, to Iris who is always willing to help, and to Karissa who gives all of this meaning and purpose.
Â
Robert Kloss
is also the author of
How the
Days of Love & Diphtheria
.
Â
WE TAKE ME APART
MOLLY GAUDRY
AN ISLAND OF FIFTY
BEN BROOKS
WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS
SASHA FLETCHER
GRIM TALES
NORMAN LOCK
THE HIEROGLYPHICS
MICHAEL STEWART
I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR
MATHIAS SVALINA
THE OREGON TRAIL IS THE OREGON TRAIL
GREGORY SHERL
CATACLYSM BABY
MATT BELL
DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL
KEN SPARLING
THE ALLIGATORS OF ABRAHAM
ROBERT KLOSS
THE IGUANA COMPLEX
DARBY LARSON
MEAT IS ALL
ANDREW BORGSTROM
HOW THE DAYS OF LOVE & DIPHTHERIA
ROBERT KLOSS
THIS SEMI-PERFECT UNIVERSE
WILLIAM TODD SEABROOK
TO THE CHAPEL OF LIGHT
JOSHUA YOUNG
POISONHORSE
BRANDI WELLS
BILLIE THE BULL
XTX
FLOWING IN THE GOSSAMER FOLD
BEN SPIVEY
THEATER-STATE
JACK BOETTCHER
FUCKSCAPES
SEAN KILPATRICK
SLOW SLIDINGS
M KITCHELL
BLACK GOD
BEN SPIVEY