And the runaway unpaid wrote novels about how they toiled in the fields in ragged linen, in the winds and rains and no matter any frenzied weather, how they dined on rancid meat and wormy meal, their many deaths along the landscape, early and frequent, the singing whips and blood spatters, the strange kindnesses, the hymns and spirituals meant to summon some deliverance. And there were those who wept at these novels, claiming they proved the intelligence and wit of the unpaid, while your father scoffed at these “gross deceptions,” for he had seen the “simplicities of the unpaid” during his travels, watched them at their brute and illiterate toil while their employers basked in culture and luxury. Yes, your father said he knew the unpaid well, smoky-skinned, childlike, inherently villainous, and he insisted, “Your international bankers and their agents within the press will see this brought to a headâthis man Abraham is their pawn to bring about our ruin.”
And there was agony along the land and pistol fire within the statehouses, rumors of insurrection and rumors of ever more ravaging. And your father smoked his cigars, and your father grimaced, and your father spat cigar juice into the dust of the yard, and when he read of Abraham's election he said, “The damned fools have done it now.” Now there was threatened a great cleaving of the nation, and men arrived at your father's door requesting the wicked machinations of his heart, his talent for horror, the vastness of his evil. And your father gestured to you playing in the tufted lawns, and he gestured to your mother in the shadows of her room, and he said, “Consider me Cincinnatus.”
*
“For that which I greatly feared is come upon me”
And when Abraham journeyed from his home to the capital he journeyed aboard railway cars rather than by carriage, and men such as your father sneered at what they called the “unnecessary luxury,” the plush carpets and velvet lined walls. And so Abraham, loose and leathery, silent and smiling with his wife and sons, ever watchful while the locomotive lapped the miles and licked up the valleys, moving to speak only during those speeches he made from railway platforms and town halls, his high-thin voice carrying: “In your hands entirely, rests the momentous decision of insurrection.” And back again into cars, back again reading and dozing and listening to the chatter of his wife and the play-war noises of his children, the rhythms of their lives within the motions of this great machine, slow chuffing, festooned in red, white, and blue, while his eldest son, Robert, gulped whisky in the drink car and leaned over the conductor's shoulder with hazy eyes, gazed out windows at shirtless men of foreign origin, shouldering iron beams, the world struggling forth before them.
And the rumors of assassination, of the rewards offered to banded rowdies to fall upon the president in his car, to tear apart the rails and set fire to the bunting, rewards celebrated by mayors and police departments in the cities along the land. And after Mary Todd heard a “queer ticking,” barrel-chested men wandered the railcar compartments, shod in overcoats, pockets stuffed with common revolvers, investigating the areas behind curtains and beneath tables and within washrooms, and at stops they peered into the street before Abraham followed, waving and throwing kisses.
And for this journey a telegraph machine and an operator were always aboard and on the ready. Abraham studied this machine, its workings, the messages it received, and he puzzled over the code, and finally he said, “This is not a democratic instrument” and “What good is the diminishing of time and space if a trained and educated few alone may hold the key to this knowledge?” And now Abraham passed his time sketching various systems by which “all man shall know,” and when Abraham first met with the engineers of the land he slid these sketches to them and said, “Here, do this” and it was made known the new president would spare no expense in having these visions realized.
And on this journey Abraham stopped and spoke at numerous farms and factories, your father's factory included, and remember now how you sat upon your father's shoulders amidst those gathered crowds, and how they cheered and whistled and swooned as he stepped from his carriage, this gangly Abraham, honest and regal in his top hat, this oaken Abraham, his pant cuffs too high and the white socks beneath, his sleeves rolled, the bones of his wristâYou remember his broad smile as a bison half-drugged and shackled was led before him. How he stroked the creature, noted the luxurious coat even as the bolt gun was given over. How the beast bellowed and then dropped once the shot was fired. How hoots and hollers and cheers went up as Abraham said, “I presume I am not expected to employ the time assigned me to mere flattery of farmers as a class. My opinion of them is neither better nor worse than other people; but farmers being the most numerous class, it follows that their interest is also the largest interest” and then publicity shots of Abraham posing with one loafer resting on the hulking corpse, the wide milky eyes, the fat tongue fallen and black in the silver light, and another of Abraham and Jacob Flanders III in bison coat and muffs shaking the president's hand, while your father stood almost ghostly white in the background, sneering, although it is true there were those who insisted your father smiled.
And headlines along the land proclaimed the nefarious intentions of this new president:
Africanus Abraham I Seeks to Enslave the Gallant & Noble Paid South
and
Africanus Abraham I Seeks to Arm Runaway Workers in Tyrannical Power Grab
and
Africanus Abraham I to Use Conscription to Free Up Jobs for Beloved Runaway Workers
and men such as your father gestured to headlines and said, “The man's complexion is dark enough, and his mind slow enough, that we may reasonably and dutifully question the purity of his blood” and men along the land waved these papers, hollering, “You bet it's true!”
And when Abraham entered the capital city he entered disguised beneath a woolen overcoat and a soft felt hat, his expression obscured by new whiskers, grown for the young girls of the land who wrote him noting his “hollow cheeks” and asserting these would “considerably improve” his appearance and that “all the ladies” would “tease their husbands” to vote for him, and men stood on either side of him, their pockets stuffed with knives, derringers, common pistols.
Your father guffawed and sneered and beat the porch boards with his folded up newspaper at the “cowardice” and “buffoonery” of this “preposterous ape” who made our “highest office the seat of clownery.” And it was the conviction of all men of your father's class that “we will be in servitude to the lower races in no time.”
Abraham stood on capital steps and before mostly silent crowds, and to those who would read these words in the days to come, he said, “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I have the most solemn one to âpreserve, protect, and defend' it.” And there came a smattering of cheers, and there came hoots and whistles, and there came hisses, and there came cries of “unpaid lover.”
And in the evening thereafter Abraham rested his feet on some gold-embroidered stool, reading
King Lear
in the lamplight, his children singing and chasing each other along some corridor while men armed with pistols ever stood in doorways and leaned against bookshelves, their pockets bulging with revolvers, for in those days many men sent letters to this president promising “yer neck stretched like a chikens, sir,” for these and many about the land considered Abraham “nothing but a goddern swarthy unpaid.”
And it was this first evening while he rested that Abraham was handed telegrams informing him forts along the land stood under rebel duress, and now the lights of rockets purpled the smoking sky, all the past left behind by the light of this fort, and now indeed the great matter was at hand.
“By the blast of God they perish”
And there were yet flashes of light and cracklings of rockets in the skies when work crews in blue woolen uniforms thronged the streets, erecting wooden poles along the edges of well-trimmed lawns. And while crowds gathered they affixed speakers to these poles, although most called them tin horns or Abraham's trumpets, for there were many in the days before they first spoke who believed these were no more than automated instruments, and some men even stooped alongside their sons and pointed and said, “You see? That is where the steam enters.” And while all speculated on the eventual sounds of these horns, your father understood the silent language as no other, and many evenings he walked along their lengths, gazing upward, and he straddled the poles as if to climb and when this failed he pressed his ears to the wood, as if vibrations within granted some knowledge, and your father shushed you when the gulls overhead screamed, cupping his ears and inclining his head as if those birds understood what he could not, and your father spent his nights on the front porch, seated on his rocking chair and polishing his saber, watching these speakers and the gulls who circled.
And you watched from schoolhouse windows when the speakers flared into something like life, rusted and scratched, and as if spoken into a cavern, an echo, this voice articulated: THIS IS ONLY A TEST DO NOT BE ALARMED THIS IS ONLY AâAnd you remember the eyes of those classmates, their fat black pupils, sheened with sunlight and vibrating, while your teacher drew letters on the board beneath the groan of this technology, until she dropped her chalk, until all children covered their ears and lined the windows and ran into the open grasses, screaming and weeping and gazing into the sky as if angels would announce themselves, while many men and women rushed into the streets and lawns and fell to their knees, muttering prayers into the dense throbbing of that cracked and echoing voice, while your father remained on his porch, polishing his saber, his pistol on the ready, and your mother pressed oily rags into the crack beneath her door and curled again on her sofa.
When Abraham's speakers finally opened they opened with a voice of locomotives whistling and steel rails vibrating. They spoke in a voice of bridges collapsing into rivers, the jangle of wood and rock and iron, the peeling apart of metals, and there were those who discerned patterns and melodies within these noises and housewives long-dulled by the texture of life found the allure of new possibilities, abandoning their children to the gloom of their homes to amble into saloons and sweet talk wild-eyed young men. And elderly men found these sounds an aphrodisiac and now wandered rigid and frothing and in lucid moments they claimed their wives called these speakers the “best use of tax dollars imaginable.” And the fur barons who lived in the mansions along the hillsides praised how effectively the humming masked the breathing and eating noises of loved ones, and young men found within these patterns the shifting of the Northern Lights and travelled with eyes closed, fingering the sky. And some preachers claimed the unpaid fornicated in fields under the influence of these speakers, no longer stealing chickens and root vegetables, instead they frittered away their hours bobbing in and out of each other. And there were preachers who said the unpaid built fires in reverence to the speakers and prayed in the shadowy light for deliverance from the injustices of this world.
And of these sounds, dogs howled and cats hissed and your grandmother moaned and your mother refused to ever again leave her room, so you slid plates of sliced meats into her room, and she slid emptied plates out.
And none discerned what your father surely did when he gestured to what he called the babbling herds, these men and women half-naked to their britches, praying in the streets and fornicating and lighting fires and sacrificing stray dogs. And of these he said, “You see what comes of Democracy.”
And now your father set your grandmother to cleaning his dress blues, and throughout the hours of the day he polished his saber and cleaned his revolver, even as the static swelled into a roar and your bedroom filled with the sounds of forest fires, crackling and gusting embers, with skies sizzling, with the screams of those trapped, and you trembled within this maelstrom until your father roused you from bed, and he said, “It will be all right. I promise you,” but you heard only the crackling and the roaring, and he took you by the hand, the smooth warmth, and he led you to the hearth where your mother and grandmother sat, their fat terrified eyes as the raving of a thousand speakers echoed throughout your house.
When those speakers woke they woke into Abraham's voice, crackling and cavernous, and you amongst the thousands of thousands, vast and silent, mesmerized, while Abraham declared the elimination of those who pledged rebellion. Now with your family, within the glow of the hearth and the wood smoke, Abraham's voice echoed, “Our wayward brothers have crossed the final line,” and “Shall the great ambitions of our forefathers whither into the very dust?” And while Abraham called you into his service, as his voice hummed in the language of rockets aloft, of wailing shells and clotted dirt, now throughout the land five hundred children were roused from bed by militiamen. And in the name of liberty and patriotic sentiment came this great cobbling together of sleep-eyed fragments from every children's choir in town, these children wrested from musket-fisted fathers and baying hounds, these pale-faced children in their furs and their father's furs, soon lined shoulder to shoulder and stifling yawns before City Hall, where they clasped red and white candles by the copper stems. And what fine songs from the lips of these, from the deep night to the rise of dawn, and even after those songs ceased from the mouths of children, they were again cast unto all from these speakers, the tinny warbling of children recorded and born again and never abating even before the muted light of gas lamps, their faces lit red, white, and blue by the bursting of fireworks.
And now your mother and father said nothing to you although through closed doors, the thumping of fists against walls, the clattering of picture frames onto the floor, your mother weeping. And your grandmother in her robe, unable to sleep for the crackling songs of children, her gray flesh and blue flannel nightgown, her sips of hot brandy and her fogged eye glasses and how she said unto you, “This country was sure better off before we got that colored president,” and more brandy sipped, and from the throat of this ancient woman, a belch unsuppressed and released. The stink of her dinner, the brandy.