I Am Abraham (14 page)

She stared at the horn between my eyes and said, “I’ll leave you to your own devices, Brother Lincoln.” And she went back to sit with all the other matchmakers, while I watched her little sister like a bird dog. Mary was
almost
voluptuous again, but she didn’t have the same silver glow under the chandeliers.

“Now, Mr. Lincoln,” she said with a slight lisp, “do you think you might start pursuing me again?”

And there wasn’t the least hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

T
HE
WEATHER
TURNED
. I could sniff the snows that would soon pile up on the prairie. I could
feel
the flakes covering the woods and the fallow fields. I had a dream just before winter solstice, the darkest night of the year. I was climbing Quality Hill, but it had no mansions on this night. It was a graveyard, and the falling snows had a dizzying effect. I lurched across the yard. That singular snow didn’t cover any graves with its own fierce powder—it
uncovered
the tombs, wiped away stone and rotten wood. I didn’t see raw bones and funeral clothes devoured by worms. I saw my mother’s face—not a skeleton—but cheeks and lips alive with color, a mouth as moist as mine. And I had such a longing for Nancy Lincoln. I’d forgotten how bereft I was with her in the ground.

When I woke up, I was still caught in that dream. I had to struggle out of it. Joshua was lying there in his nightshirt, chewing on the collar in his sleep. And I realized that I’d always be an orphan around Quality people. I’d always see the contempt in Mrs. Elizabeth’s eyes. I’d always have to do my own version of the Viennese around the Todds—Long Lincoln tripping over his feet like a big buffoon.

I commenced to scribble a letter to Mary Todd. I composed it like a brief, outlining to Molly why I couldn’t marry her. We weren’t compatible, as her sister knew all along. I was a lawyer who lived in his shirtsleeves, and Molly was an aristocrat who’d had her own personal slave in Lexington. She couldn’t have abided my chaos and colossal mess. And I declared point by point why I didn’t love her and never could.

I showed the letter to Joshua. I could tell how disconcerted he was.

“Will you deliver it for me, Speed?”

But he was the lawyerly one right now.

“Burn that letter, Lincoln. Go see Mary, and if you don’t love her, tell the girl. Be careful not to say too much. Give your goodbye and for land sakes, don’t linger.”

I buttoned my coat, walked through wind and snow, and hiked up Quality Hill.

Ninian and his wife were either at some soiree in the middle of a snowstorm, or else they were hiding from me. Molly and one of the servants came to the front door. This girl must have been from the Islands, because Molly spoke to her in French. I loved to listen to the patter of her
Parlez-vous.
There was a touch of hysteria in her voice tonight, as if she were crying out a lament. I’d forgotten how late it was. Molly was wearing her nightgown and a shawl. She clutched a lantern, and it wavered in her right hand. I must have looked like a snowman from Mongolia. Molly was frightened of monsters, but the worry marks disappeared, and finally she laughed.

“You might have given me a little notice, Mr. Lincoln. I would have worn a much fancier gown—in your honor.”

Then she saw my worry marks. She and the Island girl wiped the snow from my head with their handkerchiefs.

“Matilda,” she sang to the girl in Lexington English for my own benefit—the lilt had come back into her voice. “You’ll make a toddy for Mr. Lincoln, hear? He must be half frozen to death.”

The Island girl ran into the kitchen, and Molly led me through the darkened halls with her lantern. She trembled now. She must have seen the little doom that was coming.

“Mr. Lincoln, you wouldn’t have risked this weather for a lantern party. Something must be on your mind.”

We went into Ninian’s library. Molly lit the gas lamps, and the light sparked up and bloomed until the library looked like it was half on fire. We sat together on one of the love seats. I hadn’t been alone with Molly like this in a long time.

She held my hand with her tiny fist—my own fist was like a red claw.

I could feel the heat of her hand.

“Mr. Lincoln, what is wrong?”

She had already caught the blizzard in my eye. She held my hand even tighter.

“Puss,” I said—that was my pet name for her. I liked to imagine her as a kitten with many colors. “I
jest
can’t marry you—I don’t love you. Perhaps I never did.”

She commenced to sob. Her head whipped back and forth, back and forth. “It’s my just reward for leading on so many suitors. Some Illinois devil is punishing me right now—Satan himself!”

She let go of my red claw and commenced to wring her hands. I was
paralyzed
. But I seized her up and sat her on my knee for a second. Then I walked out the door—just as that Island girl had come along with my toddy. I didn’t think it polite to drink it
after
I’d broken my engagement to Puss.

Perhaps I was the snowman of Mongolia—or worse—who’d come to the plains of Illinois to ravage whole populations, or break the hearts of Kentucky belles.

I plunged through the snow drifts in a dream.

Next morning that Island girl, Matilda, brought me a letter from Molly sealed with the Todd family’s own special wax. I hadn’t been wrong. Molly released me from my obligation to her, but said she would hold our engagement in reserve as an open question—or
wound
, I thought, an open wound. She herself hadn’t changed her mind, and felt as she always did, with great affection.

Lincoln, you are free. I will not wrap you up in a cloak of words. Promises do not bind. I will marry for love, and nothing short of that.

Your Puss forever, Mary Todd

I should have been relieved but I wasn’t. I felt like riding the snows back up to Quality Hill and carrying Puss off to the nearest preacher. I could not. I’d broken off the engagement and I’d have to let it lie there like a sick skunk. That sick skunk was Abraham Lincoln. I had a spell of the
blue
unholies
I hadn’t had since Salem. And I couldn’t even count on the comfort of Josh’s camaraderie—his Pa had died. Joshua was selling his own share of the general store and moving back to Farmington, his Pa’s plantation outside Lexington. The cavalier was returning to his Kentucky roost.

Josh read that twisted look in my eyes. He hid all my razors from me. And he had his own bit of mourning to do. He’d promised not to kidnap his pretty lady—Sybil Weg—and hightail back to Farmington with her in the same saddle.

“I hate to leave her, Lincoln. But I’d like to bestow a little trust fund upon Sybil. Will you attend to the details?”

I couldn’t even handle the details of my own life. I ran off the track. Pa had once told me that if you entered into a bad bargain, you had to hug it all the harder. Well,
I
was the bad bargain. I avoided all the Quality people on Quality Hill. Ninian Edwards commenced to advertise that Abraham Lincoln was now crazy as a Loon—talked to himself, wore the same filthy shirt, and shunned his own clients. I wasn’t crazy. I was as wild and desperate as a hunted bear—bereft of humankind. I belonged to nobody. Should have stayed with Pa, and earned my keep with a hatchet.

I took to bed that January, while the Legislature was still in session. I couldn’t bear to watch the dark descend upon Springfield. I lay near a lamp and never wandered, not even when Joshua brought me a bowl of soup.

It was the weather that helped me by littles. It rained less, and the dark storms subsided near the end of January.

Took my seat in the Legislature in the same rumpled shirt, with black rings under my eyes, and when Joshua left for Kentucky, I did feel like a Loon. I kept hearing about Molly and the cat fits she threw at her brother-in-law’s mansion. She slapped one of the servants, tore up the vegetable garden. She even slapped one of her suitors. She visited her own people in Lexington and returned a little
riper
for it. She slapped a woman in Mrs. Elizabeth’s sewing club in an argument over Henry Clay. Town gossips commenced calling her “that violent little Lexington Whig.” I imagined Molly disguising herself as a man and become a duelist. Dueling had been outlawed in Illinois, but Molly could have crossed over to one of the Missouri islands with a pepper-pot in her cummerbund.

And to escape these phantasms and my own recurrent blue spells, I decided to visit Josh at his plantation. I had to voyage by steamer and stage, and a locomotive that left you with a mask of soot on your face, like a minstrel man. It was worth the displeasure. Farmington was like no plantation I had ever seen—it was ten times larger than New Salem, and ten times as rich. It brimmed over with all the hard sweat and labor of a working farm, where hemp was planted and twisted into rope and rags. As I landed at this farm for the first time, I rode down a long drive lined with locust trees—at the end of the road was a brick mansion that bristled in the sun, and a labyrinth of outbuildings and barns surrounded by fields and gardens. It could have been the mirage of some perfect village that fell out of a fairy tale.

Still, Farmington wasn’t a fairy tale—it was a village of flesh and blood . . . and a small army of slaves. And once I settled in, I was startled to discover that I had my own colored servant. He’d been schooled and churched at Farmington, and was a better Christian than Abraham Lincoln.

I wanted to establish a degree of respect with this servant I had suddenly acquired. So I asked him his name.

“Abraham,” he said.

This
Abraham was wearing Josh’s hand-me-downs. He was like a Southern gentleman in slightly cracked boots and a shirt with one missing ruffle. He knew his Shakespeare. Joshua must have teased my favorite plays into him.

“Lions make leopards tame,” he said, mouthing Richard II. And I probed him like some lord of the catechism.

“And what does it mean, Abraham?”

“That lions rule and leopards don’t,” said my scholar-slave. And I could feel the sand in my craw, since Molly and me had both been fond of that foolish king—Richard II—who could speak in verse but didn’t know how to rule. I hadn’t come all the way to Louisville to have my deepest memories scratched. And I’m not so sure what happened next, but I tumbled into a black dream. I could feel my soul crack into a hundred shivers, like Richard’s looking glass. I drifted as only a dead boy could drift. And when I returned from that void there was a pillow under my head. Abraham, my colored valet, was patting my chops with a piece of hemp and reciting one of Richard’s soliloquies.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories about the death of kings . . .

“Boy,” I said unkindly, because I was wounded by his equilibrium and his pluck, “who taught you to recite from King Richard?”

“Mr. Josh. He says he missed talking Shakespeare with you.”

I’d never been humbled by such a scholar. He could hunt and fish and ride a horse, and soon I rarely took a step without him. All the Speeds considered him a prodigy. He often sat near us, at a small table he himself had carved, though I’m sure he preferred to be with his own people at dinner time. Joshua was grooming him to run the plantation.

Mrs. Speed wasn’t overbearing, like other Kentucky matrons. And she told me that reading the Bible at regular intervals might be the best
tonic
for the blues.

“Mr. Lincoln, I intend to fatten you with peaches and cream and a little of Jonah’s whale. Hurts my heart to see such a melancholy man.”

We had another guest—a local gal with pearl-black eyes, Miss Fanny, Joshua’s fiancée. It made me lonesome looking at her. And it just killed my soul to think of my lost fiancée. But something was wrong at the next table. Abraham didn’t touch his peaches and cream. He left us in the middle of the meal, with his thumbs in his pockets.

“That boy has an awful lot of sassafras,” said Miss Fanny, rising up in her chair like a swan with black eyes.

“Pay him no mind,” Joshua said. “We had to lease out his wife for a little while. There’s a sick child at the next plantation and Captain Jones could use another hand.”

“But he has no call to sit there and smart—and leave without excusing himself.”

“He’s worried about his wife,” Joshua said. “That little girl might have the measles, and . . . he’s kind of moody. Pay him no mind.”

I found a note in my boot next morning; Abraham had scribbled it with a little polish.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

That scholar was quoting from Richard again, Richard in the dungeon, all alone, cropped of his crown. It wasn’t so cryptical, even in the crookedness of black polish. Our Richard had run away. Joshua knew about it long before I read the note. And I was startled to find Miss Fanny in a hunter’s hat with two silk tails—it wasn’t her first hunt for runaways. The hounds had been collected from their kennels. Their skin was sleek, and their backs rippled with anticipation; they barked, and the lead dog leapt up and licked her hand.