I Am Abraham (9 page)

He shook his head. “Not that. It takes courage to return to such loud people.”

And I found myself in a predicament, having to defend white folks to a king.

“You must have had some troublemakers in your tribe.”

He laughed with his yellow teeth. He had real juice in his eyes. “Yes, but they do not talk constantly and make an ugly face that could frighten a squirrel . . . and you must not praise me so much, Captain. I remember you and your riders. My own riders were fascinated by the size of your head. We are not as civil as you have made us. My riders would have liked to have your head as a trophy.”

“Then why didn’t you give it to ’em?” I asked like a substitute judge at Justice Green’s court.

“I nearly did.”

And he rode off in that ambulance, a king in an alien land.

7.

Snow Bride

I
DIDN
’
T
EXPECT
A
bunch of dwarfs to clap at me with their cymbals, and white horses to dance in the snow with silver ribbons on their legs. Still, I did expect some kind of a homecoming. I had none at all. I landed in New Salem in the middle of a storm—the flakes were sharp as crystal and scratched my cheeks. I couldn’t even return to my old room at Rutledge’s tavern. Rutledge had winked out while I was in Vandalia. He removed to Mack’s old farm, seven miles from New Salem, but I did find Ann wandering about near the tavern, with snow on her eyebrows. She must have been collecting things for her Pa. But she shied away from me and cringed, as if I’d come to deliver a blow. And she sang from the Book, like a woman trying to break some deep spell.

There is
none holy as the LORD: for
there is
none beside Thee: neither is
there
any rock like our God.

She was summoning up her own strength. “Abraham,” she cried, “I’m worse than Jezebel. I lured you into the wild and stripped down like a harlot.”

My knees were knocking. I would have clung to Ann, kissed her eyes, her ears, and cheeks almost as hollow as mine, if only she had let me cling.

“Miss Ann, I’ll treasure that moment in the woods all my life.”

She tittered like someone half crazy as she peered from beneath her winter shawl.

“You could be Satan come to taunt a troubled girl,” she said.

“Satan wouldn’t have such big hands and feet. He’d mask himself as a much prettier man.”

“Abraham, why didn’t you write from Vandalia, or send me a crushed flower in the mail?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was like a circus dummy in the snow. The trees had gone as bald as convicts, but I was bold enough to grip her hand in the dark.

“We could run away,” I said.

I could have been a leper with a leprous hand. That’s how quick she broke free. “And become your whore, I suppose—your pretty lady. And live without the benefit of the Book?”

With Ann around I didn’t feel a failure washed ashore like river trash. “But I could marry you.”

“It would still be a sin,” she said. “I’m pledged to another man. I’d have to writ him a letter and ask for my release . . .”

“I’ll write Mack,” I said.

Now her silver eyes wandered in different directions. “Don’t you dare—I’d have to move into the wilderness, or else marry that sinner Sam Hill. He offered to buy me from Pa. I’ll become his harlot with a bridal veil. I’d rather run
nek-kid
in front of a thousand men.”

“I wouldn’t let ye.”

And she laughed. “Abraham, we’re just too poor to marry.”

We
were
too poor. I didn’t even own my saddle. That was the crusher. But she fell into my arms, as if she were my bride. We kissed until our mouths were flecked with blood, and she rubbed into me—I prayed my jelly wouldn’t spill. We ran inside the gutted bones of the tavern until the storm broke. I was reckless with my bride, carrying her onto a pony I borrowed from Justice Green’s barn. Ann slept in my saddle, my little horse with rags around his hooves to keep us steady in the snow. But the snowdrifts were too deep. And I had to pilot my pony from the ground, clucking at him and pulling at the reins. I near lost my way in a narrow patch of woods.

Ann must have woken from a dream. The woods were dark, even with that eerie white blanket. There wasn’t much of a moon, and the wind was howling.

“Abraham,” she asked, “where are you, honey?”

“With you and the horse.”

“I have a solution,” she said. “We’ll get rich and pay off what my Pa owes Sam Hill and Mack. We’ll go someplace fine—after we’ve been to the preacher and you promise not to stray from the Book.”

“Promise,” I said. But I’d already strayed. I was
deef
to God, like King Saul. I couldn’t hear His voice—only Ann’s. I’d read the Book, how Saul tried to kill that ruddy boy, David, God’s anointed one. I wasn’t anointed. I was closer to Saul, that unholy king who was higher than any of the Hebrews from his shoulders up. We were both cut loose from other men.

We’d arrived at the gate of the farmhouse. I carried her down from the saddle, would have carried her to the farmhouse door, but she knocked away my tall hat and tugged at my scalp.

“I’d best go in alone.”

A fork appeared in her forehead, like some thunderbolt under the skin. Her eyes were wandering again. The warmth was gone. She could have been a witch, passing over into the other world, not my Ann, but a shouter who had shoved me away.

The Lord killeth and maketh alive; he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up . . .

She was like a gunslinger with the Book, could spit from the Bible with both barrels. She ran into the snow—I thought it would bury her alive, but she waded deeper until she got to the door.

I stood there with my pony, a sinner in the dark. Our tracks were gone. We could have been stuck in a wall of white cake. The silence in the woods was unnatural. The wind had died, or fled to another county. And that’s when I saw him, a great big black bear prowling in all that whiteness, his eyes red as a silk garter strap, but raw red, with a crazy dance. He must have been starving. I clutched my pony’s ear, kept him from kicking and shying, yet I couldn’t look away from the bear’s red eyes. The Lord might have sent him searching for sinners. He rose up on his hind legs, swiped at the air with his claws, and raced into the wilderness like a furry black furnace breathing yellow fire.

8.

Unholies

G
OD
WAS
ABSENT
from Illinois that summer of 1835. The rain pounded relentless and wouldn’t let up until the wells overflowed and washed cabins over the cliff, and New Salem was like some ark on the Sangamon River, but with an outbreak of
brain fever
. It was the hottest summer in history—apples fell from branches like dry little bombs; flowers closed tight as fists—and the fever struck like lightning. Sam Hill wandered in the streets, with his galluses near his ankles, his eyes ablaze, his cheeks flooded with a green fluid. The blacksmith’s wife ran into a wall and split her head so deep, we feared she wouldn’t survive. Our doctor’s little girl went raving mad; she bit her own Pa and ripped at whoever came near her with her long fingernails. Coffins had to be built, and I became the coffin builder.

One of Annie’s younger brothers sought me out while I was building a coffin in the blacksmith’s shop. He couldn’t stand still, that’s how nervous he was. He kept pawing at my shirt.

“Are you Senator Lincoln, sir? I don’t mean to bother ye none, but can I speak with you, Senator?”

I tried to calm him down. “I’m not a Senator, son. What’s wrong?”

“Sister’s sick,” he said, his eyes bulging with sadness and a hint of fever. “She’s begging for you, Senator.”

He’d run seven miles, all the way from Sand Ridge, his Johnny suit covered in mud thick as molasses. We couldn’t slosh around in all that muck on my little horse—he would have failed us in the middle of the journey, fallen down. I’d have had to lash that pony until he bled. I didn’t have the stomach for it, and no amount of lashes would have gotten us a minute closer to Ann.

I carried the boy on my back, because he was ill with the fever and worn out, and we navigated through the mud until we came to Sand Ridge. The Rutledges should have been against me, caught as they were in McNeil’s grip, but they worried over Ann, and their faces were raw with the signs of that worry. For the first time they felt like kin.

Jim Rutledge clasped my hand with his own red paw. I could see the veins on his nose. He must have had too many drams.

“Is that you, Lincoln?”

I nodded yes. He couldn’t have mistaken a man who was as high in the shoulder as King Saul. But he kept scrutinizing me.

“Is the dyin’ bad in Salem?”

I didn’t want to scarify him. We lost Preacher Martin’s wife this morning—found her stiff as a board, and bathed in green bile. “Where’s Miss Ann?”

“You won’t let her cross to the other side, will you, Abraham?”

“I’ll cling to her best I can, Mr. Jim.”

Ann lay behind a closed door in the Rutledges’ sickroom—a kind of storage closet. I knocked gently as I could and entered the room. Her sick bed loomed like a gigantic cradle. Her beautiful red hair was all knotted out, and as bumpy as a copper mine. Her sered mouth was like a blister, and her silver eyes were sunk deep inside her head, as if Satan’s own assistant had been gouging at her with a stick. But she smiled so, so wanly when she saw me and held out a quivering hand. All her ripeness was gone. She was a rattle of bones.

“I was hoping you’d come, Abraham. I’ve been adding trinkets to my trousseau. Pa says you’ll have to pick the preacher.”

Her hand was spittin’ hot. I trembled at the touch.

She shut her eyes. “Postman,” she rasped like a river pilot, “are you looking for a concubine or a bride?”

I wouldn’t cry in front of Miss Ann.

“Abraham, you sure know how to deliver a letter, but you never delivered me none of your own.”

“I
jest
couldn’t. I let Mack come between us like a ghost.”

“I love
you
, Abraham,” she said in a kind of stutter, soft as silk, “not the ghost that got away. I don’t have the breath for it, honey, but if I tell you the words, will you sing my favorite hymn?”

I didn’t want to sing about death and destruction, but I did.

Vain man . . .

Thy flesh, perhaps thy greatest care,

Shall into dust consume;

But, ah! destruction stops not there;

Sin kills beyond the tomb.

The lines seemed to soothe her, but I couldn’t hold on to the heat in her hand—it went cold as a bird caught in an ice storm.

“You never danced with me, Abraham. Ain’t you my beau?”

“Annie, my legs are too long. I’d ruin it if we ever did the reel.”

She tried to laugh, but the sound rattled ominously in her chest, and turned into a terrible cough—her eyes seemed to dance right out her skull.

“Silly,” she said, “we wouldn’t have to do the reel. You could trot without moving your legs at all.”

She tapped out a tune on the sideboard of that cradle bed with the last bit of vigor she had left.

“Tra-la-la-tra-la-la-la.”

She shut her eyes in the middle of her tapping, the tra-la-las tapering off. Her head swayed to one side like a magician’s harp, and fell upon my shoulder. I sat with her close to an hour. And for the first time since I could recall, I prayed to God.
Keep her with us, keep her with us
. No one else in that farmhouse seemed to have the fortitude to keep her from crossing. Her sisters and brothers sat in the gloom, while her Ma and Pa slunk back and forth, carrying water from the well. There wasn’t an ounce of healing music among them. They lived in their own shattered silence, waiting for Ann to cross.

I visited her every morning, wiped her forehead, sang bits and pieces of her hymn. I washed her hands and feet, praying I could cover her bones with some of my own flesh. I kissed her arms, ladled broth into her mouth with a long wooden spoon. I willed her to stay awake and look at me.

“We’ll have our own farm, with a hundred roosters that can lay eggs.”

“Oh, Abraham,” she muttered, “there’s never been a rooster what can lay an egg.”

“Ours will, ours can.”

Her eyes were clear as well water. I fondled the blisters on her mouth with my finger as she fell into a long sleep. I couldn’t revive Ann, no one could—it was like watching Ma sink of the
milk
sick
right in front of my eyes, only worse, much worse, because I wasn’t a child, with a child’s meager stash of tricks. I had all the cunning and strength of a grown man, but much as I tried, I still couldn’t hold on to Ann, save her from her own fiery wind and the Lord’s fierce pull.

It didn’t matter that I groveled near the ground like an earth creature, bereft of the Book. I built the coffin with my own hands, sanded it down so it looked like that cradle of hers. When I saw her in the box, with her brittle hair and the silver sheen gone out of her eyes, I just about broke to pieces. I should have consoled her brothers and little sisters, but they were the ones who consoled me.

“Abraham, you kept her here long you could. It’s the Lord’s will. He took her from us.”

I wasn’t much of a believer in the Lord’s will. Some satanic angel had been dealing out dice with Ann’s soul. I hadn’t shaved in weeks, or had a genuine meal. My old, worn raiments were rotting on my back. I looked like a vagabond out of the river when we buried her in the graveyard at Concord—Annie’s vagabond.