I Am Abraham (15 page)

“Now, Thunder, you be still,” she said.

I’d never seen such a specimen. That dog’s whole body pointed toward someone else’s destruction. Thunder’s eyes were yellow; his paws gripped the earth like talons.

He didn’t take much notice until Joshua included me in the hunting party; then he bumped me with his skull; it was a kind of initiation rite, I reckon. I had to hold on to a musket with a barrel longer than my leg—it was used to hunt deer, large birds, and runaways. I didn’t know what to do with this
deer
gun
. I carried a bullet pouch and a bandolier, but I wouldn’t have shot a buzzard or a runaway, even if my life depended on it. Yet there I was, in the middle of a hunt.

Joshua let that pack of hounds have a good whiff of Abraham’s work clothes—a woolen sock, a slouch hat with sweat marks, a worn pair of pantaloons. Thunder’s nose quivered with the raw delight of Abraham’s sweat.

“Speed,” I whispered, “you ain’t gonna shoot that boy, are ye? You taught him Shakespeare, for God’s sake!”

“I might not have a choice,” he said. “We’ve had a rash of runaways.”

And so we went on into the woods with five plantation boys—one was part Injun and meant to be Thunder’s pilot, but Thunder piloted him; the dogs leapt about in their own twisted, crazy arc; they seemed to crash right through trees. The forest was an enigma to us, with beaver dams, holes and traps, and hidden bear dens, but a battery of pleasures to the dogs; they trampled snakes and ran down a doe, with Thunder breaking her legs in one long stride and leaving her with a gash in her neck, while he was still tracking Abraham.

Soon the hounds returned to us, whimpering like babies; they’d lost Abraham’s scent; their yellow eyes commenced to cloud. Thunder was bewildered and yelped louder than the rest; he’d never suffered such a defeat. He still had the doe’s blood in his mouth; but his ears flopped and his coat twitched, as if infected with flea bites.

Miss Fanny raged under her silk ribbons. “Joshua, are we hunting that boy, or chaperoning a bunch of worthless, lazy dogs?”

The whimpering stopped as some naked god stepped out of the woods with a stride as perfect and muscular as the dogs. The different pieces of him glowed in the forest’s bewildering light—it was a black man who’d bathed himself in lime to mask his own scent.
Abraham
. He was translucent where he stood.

Miss Fanny cupped a hand over her eyes. “Joshua, punish him, you hear? I will not be obliged to look at that boy’s testicles.”

I would have hit her until her teeth clattered in her mouth, but she wasn’t my fiancée.

“Mr. Josh,” the boy sang in that Shakespearian tongue of his, “I went to visit my wife.”

Joshua seemed chagrined, as if that coat of lime the boy wore had chastened him.

“You could have asked my permission, Abraham. I wouldn’t have denied it.”

“Then I will ask your permission, sir—after the visit.”

“How is your Kate?”

“I did not get to see her. Captain Jones’ hounds were barking up a storm, and I might have been shot as an intruder. I did not want my Kate to mourn while she was looking after that little girl with the measles.”

And he marched right past us in that suit of lime. I could have sworn he signaled to me with one eye. But the forest light was no better than a mirage. And that image stays with me still. Joshua was obliged to whip him, of course. But he didn’t have his heart in it, though Miss Fanny incited him, her tongue twisted in her mouth, like some reptile with a horn in the middle of her head.

“One more stroke,
dearest
. Another! Another! Teach that boy a lesson. He has no business attending to his wife while Captain Jones has an illness in the family.”

Josh had to cage Thunder, who was delirious over the smell of Abraham’s blood and took to whimpering and whining and banging against the bars of his kennel with such force that the damn contraption spilled and spun around like an iron boulder; the dog made such a racket that Joshua had to hurl an old boot at him.

“
Thunder
, be still, or I’ll sell your hide to the glue man.”

And that hound sat like a sergeant in his ruined kennel without whimpering once.

Josh returned to the whipping post, which was nothing more than a legless chair strapped to a rail. Abraham sat on this
throne
with his arms tied to the rail, leaving his back exposed to Josh’s lashes and the raw wind. Josh used a fresh-cut switch. Abraham kept his eyes open and winced not once. He didn’t look at man or beast, as the lashes bit into his back, while every soul at the plantation—colored and white—stood around the throne, as if they were at some raree show. Neighbors were there, too, from plantations near and far. The children had long strings of candy. They looked drunk with a kind of pernicious joy.

Miss Fanny was in a frenzied state. “Joshua, salt up his wounds and feed him gall.”

And then a little colored boy arrived from one of the cook houses with some kind of snuffbox, as if he were carrying a silver chalice. Josh removed a yellow salve from the box and traced every wound with a bit of balm. Then he untied Abraham, slid him out of the chair, covered him with a cloth, and the little colored boy accompanied him to a cook house.

Abraham never appeared at our dinner table again. Mrs. Speed pretended he didn’t exist. Miss Fanny talked about her latest shopping bonanza in Louisville, how she was gathering up her trousseau like some avaricious spider with pearl-black eyes. I doubt Joshua listened to a word she said. I wondered if he was thinking about the plains, about all the prairie dust and the hogs roiling in the rain. He’d marry his black-eyed Fanny, remain the manor lord of Farmington, but that punishment of Abraham must have cost him plenty, like some public auction of the soul.

I ain’t sure why, but my melancholia had wrapped itself around that whipping post, as if Josh was a magical man who could drive out
unholies
with a sharpened stick, while I drank up all that blood on Abraham like a backwoods demon. I was no demon. I was a solitary man who breathed in a parcel of that boy’s pain, shrank from Josh’s fiancée, and lit out of there as fast I could.

12.

Puss in the Parlor

I
RODE
ACROSS
THE
prairie for months at a time in that curious pilgrimage of a circuit court. We were entertainers—I was as adroit as any juggler who had to juggle between judge and jury. The judge, in his ermine robes, was king of our little court. And you couldn’t mock him in front of the jury. You had to maneuver around him if you wanted to win your case. But if our king was dead against your client, you had to let him go. It was known as the
morbidity rate
of frontier justice.

That summer I was invited to a soiree at the home of Simeon Francis, editor of the
Sangamo Journal
. I wondered why his Missus kept insisting—I went to the soiree. There were the usual nabobs and the latest crop of belles. I didn’t take a shine to any of them. Their necks were too long, their talk a little too shrill. I tired of ’em after twenty minutes. I thanked Mrs. Francis and muttered goodbye when I picked up Molly’s scent, the sweet nectar that sat between her bosoms. So I wasn’t startled when she walked in, but I was shivering like a holy man, and had to clutch a wall.

Her hair wasn’t half as red as I had remembered. Her eyes still had that oceanic pull. I wanted her to shrivel without me, to look as sad and forlorn as a Widder Lady. I kept staring at her bodice like some creature at the monster show who hadn’t been near a woman in a hundred years and was made mad by her scent.

It didn’t embarrass her, not at all. She had a gorgeous swelling under her throat.

“Molly,” I said, but I was frozen in my pantaloons—and lost, like King Richard, in one of his melancholy fits. It was Molly who loved to chide me the moment I had a fit.

“When will my poor
Richard
be himself again?”

She didn’t chide me now. She marched right past with the least little nod and entered Simeon’s parlor. I wanted to run howling to the wolves with the skirts of my coat in my hands. I stayed there and watched her chat with all those Quality people. Still, I couldn’t stop staring. She drank some cider, hiccupped once or twice, and pounded on her chest with her fat little fist. Then she turned and glanced at me with a beehive of contradictions. That glance was as mercurial as her own nature, as if she could devour Illinois in a hurricane of hate and then have that hurricane melt away.

I marched over to her without a word, squeezed her hand in front of Mrs. Francis and all the other matrons. Molly’s eyes darted for a moment—like a pinprick of fear—and then her face settled into a pale smile.

“Molly, Richard will never be himself again—but he’s trying.”

And she roared in the middle of that soiree. It was a reckless sound, a deep-throated laugh that flew up from her bodice.

W
E
MET
BEHIND
closed doors, in Mrs. Francis’ salon, far from Quality Hill. I hated the intrigue. It was against my nature to steal looks at Molly like a liar and a thief. We were never alone. “Puss,” I said, “couldn’t we scurry somewhere, or drive through town in a rented carriage?”

But Puss was much more of a lawyer than I ever was.

“Lincoln,” she said, “I do not trust the women and men of Springfield—they’re uncertain and slippery. It’s best to keep the business of our courtship from all eyes and ears.”

So I had Puss in the parlor, clutching her hand, and listening to her breathe and trying to imagine the bump of her heart.

“Lincoln, I will not have another long engagement and watch it melt into nothing.”

And so I played out my hand, like my old allies, Jack Armstrong and the Clary’s Grove Boys, who love to bluff and could never win at liar’s poker.

“Puss,” I said, “we’ll marry up this year.”

“Come out of the wilderness, Mr. Lincoln. We’re not children. I’ll be fifty before you make up your mind.”

“November,” I whispered.

“That’s not exact enough,” she said like a circuit judge. “We’d slip into December if we aren’t careful.”

“The fourth,” I said. “The fourth of November.”‘

And my Molly smiled. The little creases had gone out of her eyes—what some people called an old maid’s web. But then that little fork appeared in her forehead, like the Devil’s own mark, and much, much bluer than the little fork Ann Rutledge had.

“You must not tell a soul. Not my sister and my brother-in-law. I don’t want their meddling.”

“We’ll need a minister . . . and I’ll need a best man.”

“Then you’ll walk through enemy lines, Mr. Lincoln, and be as stingy as you can.”

I made my maneuvers, went to that Episcopal man, the Rev. Charles Dresser, and asked him to perform the service in his own parlor, on the night of November the fourth, 1842, but he was not to breathe a word. I went to Chatterton’s jewelry shop on the west side of the square and ordered up a gold wedding band with the inscription,
Love Is Eternal
. Was it Molly’s own devil mocking me? Did I inherit that fork of hers in my forehead? Fool that I was, I realized that the fourth of November was a Friday. And Fridays had never been lucky for the Lincolns. My own sister had given up the ghost on a Friday, with her dead infant in her arms. And Friday was when it first began to snow on poor Annie’s grave, but I couldn’t go to Mrs. Francis’ parlor and ask Puss to postpone our marriage. It would have been like a curse.

I went to the Globe Tavern, on the north side of Adams Street, and rented out a room for matrimonial purposes—we’d have our bed and board. I’d dream of undressing Molly, of solving the little cords and bows of her bodice, reaching under her crinoline, cracking every little wire until the whole contraption dropped to the floor like a shattered bell, and then pulling her underskirts over her head, while I breathed in her aromas with both nostrils, and ran my rough hands through every sweet curve of her flesh. What if I failed Molly and couldn’t perform my matrimonials? And my jelly spilled before I ever had a chance? I was mighty discouraged. That room wasn’t much bigger than a coffin with a couple of pillows . . .

Mrs. Elizabeth came to visit my law office on the eve of the marriage. I hadn’t seen her in over a year. The strings of her bonnet were all entangled. She’d been crying, and she had a handkerchief knotted in her fist. At first I thought her Pa was coming with his own Kentucky rangers to ride me out of Springfield. It had nothing to do with her Pa.

“You cannot wed Molly in a minister’s office. I will not abide it.”

I had all the ammunition now. “But it’s Molly’s wish,” I said.

“Then you must dissuade her, Mr. Lincoln. I am her sister, her flesh and blood.”

It was like going on a skunk hunt for aristocrats, but that skunk was Molly’s kin. So I went to Puss and pleaded with her, and she flared up. Her face was on fire.

“She’s a hypocrite. She said all the Todds would cut me dead if I married a Lincoln. And now she’s faced with a fait accompli. And she doesn’t want to be left out.”