I Am Abraham (11 page)

I started out the cabin, but I couldn’t leave her—it would have been like selling that little girl’s loins into eternity. I knew they’d have her out on the road again an hour after I was gone, that some
pride
of raucous men and boys would dip their peckers into her, one by one, and poke her until a permanent silliness settled over her eyes. And that miserable man must have read into my mind. He grabbed my shinbones.

“Don’t kill me, Captain Lincoln.”

I was even more suspicious.

“I served with you,” he said. “In the Black Hawk War. I was under your command with the Sangamon boys.”

I didn’t remember him at all. I wouldn’t have forgotten that heap of red hair.

“Who was the sergeant of our company?”

“Jack Armstrong,” he said.

I didn’t care if he got drunk with Jack and the Boys a hundred times over, or if he served with me on the plains. He was no different from those scavengers who scalped little girls and torched entire settlements. So I grabbed his windpipe again. He didn’t plead or cry. His eyes went all white, like a wounded animal. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to be haunted by the rattle in his throat for the rest of my life.

I wasn’t some prairie rat who murdered strangers. I was a member of the Long Nine, Legislators from Sangamon County who hovered over Illinois like a pack of hungry lions. The nine of us had brokered a deal to remove the State capital from Vandalia to Springfield, seat of Sangamon County. I’d rattled the other Legislators, bullied them, and sweet-talked them too.

I tried not to think of that little girl and her rapacious Pa as I rode into Springfield, a town that didn’t have as many dwarfs and whores as Vandalia. It had its own sense of civilization, with a courthouse in a square dotted with general stores, millinery shops, several hotels, and a barbershop. Still, I was troubled as I arrived on Justice Green’s horse. Hogs and roosters seemed to crowd horses and their riders right off the streets, and I felt forsaken, since I had nowhere to live.

I entered the largest general store on the square and encountered one of the clerks. He was a young feller of twenty-two or so, and it amused me, because he wore a ruffled shirt. He had blue eyes that could startle if you looked long enough, and both his ears were covered with a lick of dark hair. His name, I soon discovered, was Joshua Speed, and he was a full partner in the store. I was carrying a saddlebag on each shoulder, the Kentucky cavalier who was twenty-eight years old and had never really had a legal residence.

Joshua knew I was a member of the Long Nine, and had heard me speak in the halls of Springfield and Vandalia. I peered through endless rows of merchandise that could have been the fixtures of some fanciful bazaar. And Joshua caught me looking.
He
was the cavalier. His Pa owned a plantation outside Louisville. Speed had gone to a real academy, not a blab school, to learn his ABCs, and he belonged to the Louisville elite. He could have stayed put, married some heiress, and managed his Pa’s affairs, but he ran from all the aristocrats and wanted to make his own rough life on the frontier. I suppose that’s why he was drawn to a country lawyer like me. And I liked his Louisville manner. I hadn’t met much chivalry on the plains.

The mattress and other stuff I wanted tallied up to seventeen dollars. I couldn’t even strike a bargain with the cavalier. I had no cash in my pocket, but I told him that if he credited me till Christmas, I might be able to pay him then. And it was odd, because he wasn’t even interested in my seventeen dollars. Joshua must have seen the anguish on my face. He had a large room with a large double bed, and I was welcome to share it without cost. It smelled of charity, but I realized soon enough that Speed, with all his fine airs, was just another stray dog without a permanent home.

He pointed to a stairway that was part of the store. I climbed up the stairs with my saddlebags, located Speed’s bedroom, which was more like a barrack. I figured Speed’s clerks also slept in the same prison. I plunked my saddlebags on the creaky floor and went back downstairs.

“Well, Speed, I’m moved.”

Trouble is Joshua wasn’t such a sound entrepreneur. He would disappear for a week and return with his clothes all ruffled, and then ask me out of the blue if I’d ever been engaged. No, I said, I’d never had any kind of
embrigglement
. I couldn’t talk about Miss Ann, or I would have had the
unholies
all over again. Meantime, he absented himself from the store again like some truant and returned with a torn lip and welts on his face.

He did have an
embrigglement
, it seems—a gal he kept in storage at a brothel near the edge of town. Her name was Sybil Weg. He could visit her whenever he liked,
sport
with Sybil, stay with her for weeks at a time. But it wasn’t enough to have a pretty lady at his command. Joshua wanted to marry Sybil Weg. He wouldn’t have been the first cavalier to marry a whore, but this damn sporting house refused to release her.

Sybil shared his passion for books, he said. “You can talk Shakespeare or politics with her—she’ll listen.” And when he tried to steal her from the brothel, her manager, known as Niles, thrashed him in front of Sybil’s other clients, a list that included the mayor and all his men.

I tried to reason with Joshua. “Speed, you’re in Illinois now. You can
live
with her at the brothel.”

“That’s not good enough,” he said.

Sometimes he’d howl in his sleep, wake up all the clerks, kick me in the middle of a dream, scratching my shins with his toenails till they scarred up, and I reckoned I’d have to do something about Sybil Weg if I wanted to maintain the peace in our little paradise above the store.

I
T
WAS
A
MANSION
next to the cornfields, on a street that didn’t even bear a name. I knew I was risking my future in Illinois, but I couldn’t watch Speed suffer like that. I had to take up the alarm in a town where the sheriff and the mayor were both on the other side. This sporting house had seen a load of lawyers and Legislators. I knocked three times and announced myself twice. A maid in narrow skirts led me into the parlor, where I stood under a cluster of chandeliers; none of the candles had been lit yet, and I had to squint just to catch a little light. There were meat pies on the table, but folks had gnawed into them, and as the maid lit the candles with a long fire pole, I could puzzle out the teeth marks in the pies.

I asked to see Mr. Fred Niles.

He came down into the parlor wearing a cummerbund and a silk cravat. I was startled some. I’d expected to see a former prize fighter, like the ruffians in Orleans who watched over the crib-houses and could knock a man senseless with a single blow. But Niles was a mulatto man with the exquisite bones of an aristocrat. There wasn’t a mark on his face. His eyes seemed much too soft for a brothel keeper.

“You’ve come here to see about the Louisville boy,” he said in a Kentucky drawl.

“Sir, Joshua Speed’s not a boy. He owns the biggest general store in town.”

“He’s still a boy,” intoned the mulatto man. “His people would never tolerate Sybil. He could bring her to Kentucky as his concubine, and I offered to sell her as such. But she’d only come back here in six months. It would break her heart, having a whole damn society snub her.”

I didn’t know how to answer Niles. I considered sending for the Clary’s Grove Boys and having them stir up a tiny tornado at the mansion, but Jack and his Boys had gone over to the Democrats, and I was loath to ask a favor of them. Besides, that wouldn’t solve a thing. Niles could move his sporting club out of the mansion and settle someplace else. I had to defeat him with pure sagacity.

“Mr. Niles, couldn’t he purchase Miss Sybil from you and have some sort of trial marriage? You could keep his cash on deposit, and if the marriage don’t work, well . . .”

I could see the ripples in his cummerbund as he guffawed.

“Mind you, Counselor, we don’t have rental brides at this establishment. I groom every gal, teach them manners, and marry ’em off at a whopping profit. Sybil is a rare breed. I’m saving her for a general from Ohio.”

I had to sabotage that sale, yet I didn’t have much insight into Niles, who seemed to own Illinois from a mansion near the cornfields.

“Sir, Joshua is twice as rich as your general. You’d have a better sale with him.”

I had offended this sporting-club man, and I could feel the anger well up inside. He clapped his hands and a blonde angel appeared in petticoats, clutching a parasol. Her hair was piled into a beehive, like Marie Antoinette and some of those other royal ladies. She had no blush on her cheeks. Her eyes weren’t painted. She bowed to Niles and permitted me to kiss the white glove on her hand. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, but I could tell that something was going on between our local Marie Antoinette and her fancy feller in the silk cravat.

Niles introduced us. “Sybil, meet Joshua’s man
.
I suspect he’s come to kill me, and he’s shy about it. He sits up in the Legislature, with other nabobs—the Honorable Abraham Lincoln.”

Sybil twirled her parasol, as if a body told her it might rain under the chandeliers.

“Joshua has talked about you,” she said, in a voice that was savage and cultivated at the same time. I wondered if Niles had found her in some lonely corral. He purred at Sybil, but I saw the menace in him now, the wild twitch under his cheek that was a touch away from murder. He must have had a pike in his cummerbund.

“Honey, tell Mr. Lincoln why you could never marry Joshua Speed.”

Suddenly all that polish and high tone were gone, and she was a seventeen-year-old child who had no more education than I ever did. Niles hadn’t groomed Sybil—he’d just about manufactured her.

“Mr. Lincoln, Louisville would swallow me raw. I’m not cultivated like Mr. Josh and his people. Why, his family is from the finest linen.”

That son of a bitch had rehearsed every syllable for her.

“But Joshua loves you,” I said.

She twirled her parasol again, blinked, as if she’d half forgotten her lines, and then she pulled out of that slumber Niles had put her in.

“We’ve never left this establishment, not once. We’ve never had a proper dinner, just wine he pays for by the glass. Mr. Lincoln, I have ten marriage proposals a month.”

“But do you love him?” I had to insist.

Her eyelids trembled. She searched Niles’ face for some artifact or clue. He wouldn’t help.

“
Yes
—while I’m with Mr. Josh. And then the maids come in and wipe his jelly off my legs. And they wash my ass too and perfume me for the next customer. I’m a high-card whore, Mr. Lincoln, and I could never be a storekeeper’s wife.”

She tossed her parasol at Niles and ran out the parlor. The parasol struck him on the chest like a blunted spear. He laughed and pretended to lick at his wounds.

“Young Joshua is always welcome with his pocket money, but if he tries to
elope
with her again, even his Mama won’t recognize him.”

I never told Joshua I’d visited the mansion, or that I’d seen Sybil. And a few months later she
did
marry that Ohio general, just as Niles had predicted. There was a short notice of it in the
Sangamo
Journal
, where Niles called Sybil his niece and never mentioned the general by name, for there was no Ohio general. She’d been banished to another bordello in the hinterland, where Joshua would never find her.

I was riding the circuit with ten other lawyers and the district judge when we all stopped at a tavern a hundred miles north of Springfield—there was a ruckus going on behind the tavern. I figured the barn had been rented out to a Bible camp. I didn’t find a bundle of preachers and church criers—I met lawyers and judges who must have been on another circuit ride, but I couldn’t fathom why we had all descended upon the same patch of land.

That barn was no Bible camp—it was a traveling bordello. And Sybil was the star attraction. Now I understood that devil of a sporting-house man. He wasn’t banishing Sybil—no, he was punishing her for the sin of falling in love with a Louisville aristocrat. Joshua’s courtship had shaken the mansion loose from its pegs and shoved a mulatto brothel keeper into the public eye. Sybil would float from barn to barn until she was used up, and then Niles might marry her off to some butcher in Beardstown.

I had to deliver three dollars to the dwarf who served as her bodyguard and wait in line for an hour to see Sybil. She didn’t recognize me at first. She was wearing war paint and a flimsy silk garment—I could see her nipples and her honey pot underneath. But she was too tired and forlorn to intoxicate a man.

“Pilgrim,” she growled, “it will cost you an extra dollar if you want my bum.”

I didn’t see a parasol in this barn, just a filthy pallet and a shallow tub where she must have washed a customer’s balls. Her eyes couldn’t seem to focus under a whore’s mud. Her shoulders were shivering—Niles was more sinister than I had imagined. The only bridal veil she’d ever wear was inside a box.