I Am Abraham (10 page)

L
IGHTNING
AND
THUNDER
mocked my grief. It wouldn’t stop raining after Annie went into the ground. I rescued a family of hogs from our flooded road. We had to put all our chickens in the attic, keep our horses on a hill. I was at the blacksmith’s shop building a coffin when I suffered such a black spell I wasn’t sure to survive. I couldn’t bear the thought of rain or sleet falling on Annie’s grave. I’d heard about the hypochondriasis that had attacked other men, a kind of permanent melancholia. Julius Caesar may have suffered from it. He had the
hypo
—that look of misery—before most battles. It wouldn’t wear off until he dipped his armor in enemy blood. And from the reports I’d heard, Black Hawk suffered from the same sunken spirit. No wonder I liked that gloomy warrior. Witnesses swear he carried the
hypo
with him wherever he went, that he cried in front of his own braves, and they didn’t think the less of him. They knew his melancholia couldn’t prevent Black Hawk from riding with the wind, or from wrapping women, children, and old men in some strange cloak that white men couldn’t wear. He himself had become an old man. He no longer had the breath to swim in the Mississippi. And after the generals finally captured him, Black Hawk wept for his people and for the gooseberries he would never pick again.

The generals couldn’t unman him, but I had unmanned myself—didn’t even have the strength to wield an axe. Our schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, who barely had a child left to teach, had to lock up all my razors. There were mornings when I couldn’t even manage to remember my name.

Mentor brought me to Justice Green’s house on a secluded hill a mile south of New Salem. The Squire and his kin were quite kind to me, but I had to wear a bell if I strayed too far from his abode. The Squire tucked me in at night and strapped me to my bed in case I had the habits of a sleepwalker. While I dreamt, Annie wouldn’t lie still. She rose out of her coffin like a paraclete in a shroud and decided to run away with her Abraham. It was some kind of elopement
after
death. We traveled on my pony, her fierce tra-la-las rending the night air, but the horse must have gone blind overnight, because no matter what direction he took, we always ended up in the same spot—the graveyard in Concord.

The Squire heard me scream and said that a game of checkers might be a good palliative—my checkers hopped over his like Black Hawk’s braves. But his court wasn’t in session while I was his guest—his prisoner—his compatriot.

“Squire, I’ll move into the woods.”

“You will not,” he insisted, and he had near three hundred pounds of him to hold me in check.

I lived like that for two weeks, tied to a bell. The
hypo
grew worse and worse in rotten weather. An ashen sky added to my delirium. I kept having a notion to carpenter my own box right next to Ann’s. The Justice and his wife had to strap me to a chair when the winds were fierce. And suddenly the Squire’s isolated hill crackled with a strange sound—it was the hum of ponies. You could feel their breath before we sighted a single one. We were besieged with guests—the Boys from Clary’s Grove.

Jack stood on his pony like some trick rider and yelled with his hands cupped against his mouth. He’d come to kidnap Captain Lincoln, he said, and would wait there until the Apocalypse. Jack did a handstand on his saddle to prove how determined he was.

“The wife has heard about his
hypo
, and she intends to feed him some of her own sunshine. She’s a shouter—she works miracles.”

I didn’t believe in Mrs. Jack’s biblical sunshine, but I still believed in Mrs. Jack. So I hugged the Squire, got rid of the bell, and rode to Clary’s Grove on the rump of Jack’s saddle.

I felt much more at home in the dishabille of Clary’s Grove—its squealing babies and piglets, its pissy clay floor, and all its ruffians, with their farts and groans. Mrs. Jack ruled this chaotic kingdom without ever having to unseat Jack. Hannah Armstrong must have been twenty-four by now, her teeth with varying shades of ebon, some pure black.

“Abraham, it must hurt like a hundred devils, losing Ann. I’d perish in a minute if I lost my Jack. Some would consider it ain’t manly to grieve, but I’m not of that persuasion. If I had to cross over, and Jack and the Boys didn’t grieve for five whole years, I’d rip at them from the grave.”

She really must have been a witch, or some mistress of the weather, because this dark cabin became lit with a preternatural light minutes after I arrived at Clary’s Grove—or perhaps it was the combination of Hannah and the sunlight. Because the
hypo
commenced to lift—and the black ink inside my soul receded a little. Hannah put some baking powder on my cheeks to lighten my somber look. And she lent me one of Jack’s razors.

“Know this, Mr. Lincoln, if you slit your throat, Jack will certainly slit mine.”

I listened to myself roar—the sound of my laughter startled me—that’s how long I hadn’t heard it. But the
hypo
had a wicked will. I was sad as Moses a minute later, with a tear on my cheek that formed a riverlet in the baking powder.

“It’s the blue unholies,” she said. “It comes and goes.”

She grasped it much better than Mentor Graham or Squire Green—the
blue unholies
that could arrive with a certain kind of wind, like a sirocco, or a winter pull. I didn’t have to wear a bell at Clary’s Grove. Hannah had her trust in me.

We slept near the fire, and amidst the cacophony of farts that
protected
these Clary’s Grove Boys, Black Hawk arrived like some apparition—or devil—with the ink in my mind. I could have rubbed his forehead with my hand. That’s how close he was. He was wearing his tribal bonnet and his war paint. I had summoned him from the spirit world, but Black Hawk had certain oddities. He almost seemed like a white man under his war paint. He had Pa’s weak eyes and the shoulders of a carpenter, not the suppleness of a chief who could hide women in the wind. I didn’t know how to address this personage. I tried to take the cuss off my own curious situation.

“Pa,” I said, “it’s your only living son, Abraham.”

He leaned over, and one of his feather tips scraped against my scalp.

“Lincoln, you shouldn’t have left me in the ground.”

I near shivered out of my pants, because this devil now had a girl’s voice; not the resounding music of a church crier—this crier couldn’t have shattered glass. I was listening to the soft, honeyed tones of Miss Ann. And it was hard to deal with when she also had the looks and manner of a white man in war paint.

“Abraham,”
she
said, “will you ride with me to heaven, sit with me in the Lord’s own saddle, and forsake the brittle bread of this world?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and rode through the roof of a cabin filled with all the familiar stinks of Clary’s Grove. I was giddy in that first gush of air. I was never sure who I clutched—Black Hawk, or Miss Ann.

“Annie girl,” I shouted into the wind, “couldn’t I see your face?”

We traveled over battlefields, where Injuns and settlers lay, with clumps of clothing scattered about—a bonnet, a boot, a mirror that blazed in my eye, and then we wheeled over New Salem, with its sawmill on a cliff, and its cabins and road looking like irregular ruts on a merciless bald plain, but I couldn’t hold on forever. I fell out of the sky, like some plummeting human bird, and landed in the Sangamon, while the Bible crept into my skull. I thought of Saul, the king who was, and David, the king who was to be, and how David
scalped
the Philistines, cut off their foreskins and delivered them in full tale to the king.

Then I tumbled
outside
the Book, woke like an orphan, without kings or Injuns or Miss Ann. I couldn’t abide this dark world. And I had no harbor. I was still caught in the currents, bobbing up and down in the river, without a creature in sight. And then the Lord mocked my five years in New Salem. Its citizens had rescued the drowning man-child, turned me into a land surveyor, lent me an abode. It was the bitterest sort of lesson with Annie in the ground. I took Jack’s razor out of my pantaloons, having decided to end it all with a single cut, but someone snatched that razor from my hand—wasn’t another inflammation in my mind. “Ma,” I said, “Ma.” It was an angel with blackened teeth and a burst of sunlight in her hair. She rocked me in her arms, singing tra-la-la, and cradled me into the deepest slumber I had ever had. I could still
feel
the sludge of that river, as if I hadn’t crept out of the Sangamon, never studied land surveying and the law, and had arrived at another empty cliff, where strangers groomed me into a crocodile without grammar and the sad gift of words, so I wouldn’t have to mourn Miss Ann. A crocodile could covet, I suppose, but it couldn’t have contemplated the color of her eyes and the richness of red hair.

9.

Embrigglements

A
COUPLE
OF
MILES
out of Salem I saw a ragged girl at the side of the road. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen—she stood like a scarecrow, pummeled by the wind. She had astonishing red hair and a silver sheen in both her eyes, and she was one of the skinniest girls I had ever met. She wore paper shoes. Her hands and face were filthy. There’d been beggars on this road before, but not a beggar like this.

I didn’t have much nourishment in my saddlebags—some raisins and dried apricots—but I offered to share whatever I had. She wasn’t interested in apricots.

“Mister,” she said in a monotonous voice, “would you like to see my titties? Only cost ten cents.”

She could have been rehearsing that little speech half her life. I had pity for this child—and a terrible anger at whoever had put her up to this task. I climbed down from my horse. I was swamped by a pair of scrapping boys who crept out from behind a tree in farmers’ overalls; they had rusty, makeshift hatchets in their hands, but they didn’t try to molest me.

“Sir,” they said, “you could marry up with my little sister for half an hour. We can provide the wedding veil.”

My dander was up, but I couldn’t have helped that sad girl by ditching her two older brothers. Someone else was in charge of this enterprise. So I played along with their scheme.

“That’s mighty fine, but where will the wedding take place?”

“At our mansion,” they said. And clutching the reins of my horse, I followed them along a crooked path to a single, isolated cabin that would have made Hannah Armstrong’s shack at Clary’s Grove look like a sultan’s palace—this
mansion
had no real roof and its one window was covered with rotting oilcloth. I entered the cabin with the ragged little redhead and her two brothers; she insisted on holding my hand.

“Husband,” she asked, in her singsong voice, “what’s your name?”

She had no light in her eyes—nothing at all. And I was worried that the engineer of this enterprise had drugged her with a drop of opium.

“I’m Abraham,” I told her.

“And I’m Becky Sue . . . and it would tickle me, sir, to become your bride.”

A voice shot out of the dark. “Not so fast. We haven’t arranged the particulars.”

I squinted hard and saw a man sitting at a table that tilted to one side. He fired up a lantern, and that’s when I noticed he had the same astonishing red hair as the ragged girl.

“Are you her Pa?” I asked.

“And suppose I am? Are you prepared to pay?”

I didn’t see a single cot or pallet in that God-awful hole. They must have slept in the forest and used this cabin as a marriage bower.

“What I’m prepared to do is break your head.”

I’d startled him. He had the hysterical laugh of a hyena. “Son, there are four of us—with Becca. And one of you.”

“I’m an officer of the courts,” I bellowed.

He kept up that hyena laugh.

“In those pants? I’d say you were a water boy at the circus.”

He must have signaled his sons, for they shook their shoulders like a couple of lunatics and licked the rusty edges of their hatchets. I wasn’t amused by them, and it didn’t take much of an effort to seize the hatchets out of their hands.

“Are you a magician?” their father asked.

I wanted to take the girl with me to Springfield and deliver her over to the sheriff; but I could tell how frightened she was, and how frightened she would have been riding into a strange town. She was a little touched in the head, even without the laudanum. And she might have been more comfortable with these critters than at some asylum. I had to decide—lightning quick.

“Father, I travel this road all the time, and so do my associates. And if they ever find your little girl selling herself to strangers, I won’t bother with the sheriff. I’ll come back and kill you—and kill your sons.”

It was damn awful to say, but it had to be said. I wouldn’t have harmed those two half-mad boys. But I loped across the cabin in the somber lantern light, plucked that man out from behind his table, and commenced to strangle him. His two sons sat in the corner and whipped their heads while that ragged girl begged me not to harm her Pa. I took half the wind out of him before I let go. I had to scarify her Pa, play the monster and
scarify
them all. I couldn’t even say goodbye to the little redhead, my quondam bride. It would have softened me in their eyes. And they had to fear me worse than the Devil.