I Am Abraham Read online

  I Am Abraham

  Charyn, Jerome

  Liveright (2014)

  * * *

  Tags: Historical Fiction, Lincoln

  Historical Fictionttt Lincolnttt

  Narrated in Lincoln’s own voice, the tragicomic I Am Abraham promises to be the masterwork of Jerome Charyn’s remarkable career.

  Since publishing his first novel in 1964, Jerome Charyn has established himself as one of the most inventive and prolific literary chroniclers of the American landscape. Here in I Am Abraham, Charyn returns with an unforgettable portrait of Lincoln and the Civil War. Narrated boldly in the first person, I Am Abraham effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy, in the process creating an achingly human portrait of our sixteenth President.

  Tracing the historic arc of Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly young lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar Lincoln saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such as Mrs. Keckley—the former slave, who became the First Lady's dressmaker and confidante—and the swaggering and almost treasonous General McClellan with a parade of fictional extras: wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, speculators, scheming Senators, and even patriotic whores.

  We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who flanked the District in tattered uniforms and cardboard shoes, living in a no-man's-land between North and South; as well as the Northern deserters, young men all, with sunken, hollowed faces, sitting in the punishing sun, waiting for their rendezvous with the firing squad; and the black recruits, whom Lincoln’s own generals wanted to discard, but who play a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. At the center of this grand pageant is always Lincoln himself, clad in a green shawl, pacing the White House halls in the darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war.

  Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons—Robert, Willie, and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to vibrant, three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely seen in historical fiction.

  This book is for

  my redhead

  Lenore.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: The Silver Sword of Appomattox

  NEW SALEM: 1831–1835

  SPRINGFIELD: 1837–1842

  ILLINOIS & BEYOND: 1858–1860

  THE DISTRICT: 1861

  THE DISTRICT: 1862, Winter–Spring

  SOLDIERS’ HOME: 1862, Summer–Fall

  THE DISTRICT & ENVIRONS: 1863 & Winter 1864

  THE DISTRICT & ENVIRONS: 1864 & Winter 1865

  DIXIE LAND: 1865, March & April

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  The Silver Sword of Appomattox

  THEY COULD NATTER till their noses landed on the moon, and I still wouldn’t sign any documents that morning. I wanted to hear what had happened to Lee’s sword at Appomattox. There’d been wild rumors about the fate of that sword. One tell was that Grant had given it to a young captain on his staff who proceeded to gamble it away at a local bawdyhouse. I was mortally embarrassed, wondering if that young captain was Bob. So I was tickled to learn that Bob was on the premises, that he’d come to see his Pa.

  I’d had rough patches with him, and our accommodations as father and son had been a series of truces and declarations of war. But I locked everyone out of my office, even my secretaries, to have breakfast with Bob. We had black tea and et an apple with our knives, as I tried to imagine what a breakfast in the field would have been like.

  “Bobbie, are you gonna make your Pa beg? What happened to Lee’s sword after he surrendered it to Grant?”

  Bob rubbed his mustache a bit and said, “Poppycock—sheer poppycock,” like the Harvard man he was. And while we had our little truce, he told me the real tell.

  Lee had shown up first in his finest grays, with a dark red sash and a silver sword in a scabbard embroidered with gold. He was six feet tall, with a head of silver hair; and in walked Grant with his usual slouch, and nothing to show of his rank but a lieutenant general’s straps. He was all dusty from the road. He’d spent half the night bathing his feet in hot water and mustard, while Lee had sat alone in an apple orchard, wondering if he should wage a guerrilla war against Grant; but it would have saddened him to watch his own boys become bushwhackers. So he arrived at Appomattox with a single adjutant, bearing a white flag.

  Radical Republicans, raucous as ever, demanded that I deliver Lee in chains to Old Capitol Prison—but these Radicals didn’t run the war last time I looked. Lee scratched his name on several documents. His troops were starving, he said, and had to survive on lumps of chalk and a scatter of parched corn; Grant told him that his boys could have all the corn they required from our own cars at Appomattox Station, and then Lee stood up, bowed, and strode out onto the porch, where his war horse was waiting. Bob had been stunned to see how emaciated Traveller was. That iron gray gelding was reduced to a bag of bones. His nostrils quivered as Lee mounted up. Then Grant moved out onto the porch and took off his hat. Lee tipped his own hat as Traveller trotted off with all the pomp of a battle pony, his flanks hurling sparks of light that near blinded Bob.

  My generals must have poisoned my mind. “Bobbie,” I said, “are ye certain about the sword? Grant could have claimed it as a war trophy. He was within his rights.”

  “Sir,” Bob said, as if berating a child, “Mr. Grant wouldn’t have bothered about one silver sword. He’d come to Lee with nothing but a toothbrush in his pocket.”

  “But my commanders swear that a Rebel patrol just about captured you and Grant on the way to Appomattox. All of us might have ended up surrendering to Lee.”

  “That’s preposterous,” Bob said, resting his boot heels on my map table and lighting up a seegar. “We had them outflanked on every side. All my General had to do was wave his glove once, and the whole damn Army of Northern Virginia would have crumpled—and that’s a fact. Mr. Lee raced to Appomattox in his red sash out of dire necessity, sir.”

  Bob kissed his Pa impulsively on the forehead and strode out the room, his spurs jangling with the cadence of a captain who sat at Grant’s table. It mattered to him not one fig that he could wander into the President’s office without bothering to announce himself.

  “Please don’t tell Mother I’m here,” he said. “I have to return to my General, and she’ll hold me in her clutches for an hour. I just can’t spare the time.”

  “You could say hello, Son—that wouldn’t cost so much. And she’ll crucify me if she finds out we had breakfast and you never . . .”

  He rolled his eyes and saluted me like some martyr. But at least he’d dash in and out of Molly’s boudoir, and talk a little soljer with Tad. He loved his little brother, and wouldn’t have disappeared without offering Taddie some token from headquarters—a discarded pencil case, a broken bootstrap, or a Rebel bullet pouch Bob had picked up in the field.

  I didn’t have much peace after Bobbie’s visit. The Radicals hounded me in the halls. They wanted me to dismantle Dixie, toss out every single Southern legislature, like Grant’s discarded pencil cases. I wouldn’t listen to their rabid cries. We’re changing landlords, a little, I said, that’s all. And they cursed me and Grant.

  The papers announced that I would be at Ford’s tonight with the General and his Julia—Ford’s was serving up the same old farce, Our American Cousin, with Laura Keen
e, the the-ay-ter impresario. I was in the mood for Richard III, and the rumble of kings, but I ain’t certain she had Richard in her repertoire. The seats were packed once Grant’s name was announced and prices soared to $1.05 a ticket—it wasn’t on account of Our American Cousin; everybody wanted to catch a glimpse of the reclusive General. But at the last minute Grant declined; Julia and my wife just couldn’t get along. Mary had insulted her on our last trip to City Point; and I suspect Julia couldn’t contemplate sitting in the Presidential box at Ford’s for three solid hours with Mary Lincoln.

  I, too, would have declined, but I didn’t want to wreck Laura Keene and Ford’s. Still, it weighed on me, having to wear a fancy collar and a hat with a silk top, without the clatter of tin swords on stage or the death of one solitary king. My rotund Secretary of War wouldn’t go to the the-ay-ter with me in place of Grant. Stanton said it wasn’t safe. Any Rebel fanatic could take a shot at the President, no matter how secluded I was in my box.

  “Well, Stanton, then I might as well pass the time playing checkers with Tad, while soljers prance outside my door.”

  “Mr. President, that would be a more reasonable policy than going to Ford’s five days after Appomattox.”

  I wouldn’t listen to that taciturn man in the long brown-and-gray beard. Still, I had a hard time in the President’s palace; it was filled with sutlers who could no longer follow Grant into battle with their supply wagons and wanted me to offer them up a parcel of the South as their own private territory. These vultures were prepared to pay any price. I’d have laid them out with a parcel of my own fury, but the vultures had been loyal to Grant. So I hemmed and hawed, said I’d have to consult with Grant, and waited for my wife.

  Mary appeared in her victory dress—with silver flounces and a blood red bodice. She’d decorated herself for tonight, had bits of coal around her eyes, like Cleopatra. But not all the rouge and black paint in the world could mask Mother’s melancholy; the dyings were etched into her forehead, like raw ribbons of pain; even as the church bells pealed and the illuminations went up to mark our victory and memorialize the dead, she was reminded of the boy we lost in the White House three years ago.

  “Father,” she said, without a lull in her sharpshooter’s eyes, “what is that nonsense I read in the Herald, that you did not have the slightest wish of returning to Springfield after we vacate this old Mansion. Springfield is where we raised our boys.”

  And danced for the first time, and I had to keep from stomping on your slippers with my country boots.

  That damn mascara did make her look like a damaged queen. And she wouldn’t let up drilling me, as if all the vitriol squeezed out some of her sadness.

  “You told the Herald that you were resurrected on a river. Now that’s the baldest lie. What river remade you, Father? Your Pa wasn’t a boatman. He was a one-eyed carpenter if I recollect. And where in blazes will we go after your second term is up?”

  She’d never understand that I was an outlaw, like Jeff Davis, that the insurrection had ruined whatever comity I had.

  “To California,” I said. “I’d like to cross the Rocky Mountains on a mule and see the gold mines with Tad.”

  Mother squinted at me with the same sharpshooter’s eye. “Will we prospect for gold? And after that?”

  “Jerusalem,” I blurted, and I couldn’t say why. It must have been my Bible reading. I reckon I wanted to see where King David ruled. It was all mixed up in my mind. I kept imagining Bathsheba inside her bathhouse, and David spying on her from the roofs, and that first glimpse of the sweet roundness of her body, like a glowing moon of flesh—Molly was my Bathsheba. I wasn’t much of a king, but like a king I had signed writs that sent boys into battle. I’d had four whole years of writs. It quickened a man, took its toll. I could never become a country lawyer again, sit in my old rocker and watch a spider climb the wall. I’d grown too wild.

  We went down to the carriage, while the maids curtsied and kissed Molly’s hand. “Bless you, Madame President. The war is done.” We had our own bodyguard, Mr. John P. Parker, a detective from the Metropolitan Police, who had once lived for five weeks in a bawdyhouse, where he kept firing his pistol at the windows. Yet he was Molly’s favorite bodyguard. She must have admired his rascality. He sat up yonder with the coachman, two pistols under his belt.

  Inside the coach were our guests, Miss Clara Harris and her fiancé, a young major who worked at the War Department—Henry Reed Rathbone; both of ’em were part of Mary’s circle; she could reign around Miss Clara, flirt with Clara’s fiancé, but would have been displaced in her own carriage by the presence of General Grant.

  We rode past the stables, with illuminations everywhere, on almost every wall. People were dancing in front of the Willard; their capes floated in and out of the fog, and I worried they’d come crashing into us and entangle themselves in the horses’ reins. It was only one more of the night air’s many disillusions. Still, it troubled me, and I sat hidden behind the curtains of the carriage, but Mary waved her handkerchief, as if she could separate the dancers from that gray filigree of fog. I stared at the illumination of Grant that covered the entire front wall of the Metropolis Bank on Fifteenth Street, or part of the wall I could see: Grant’s eyes were like fiery holes in that fickle gust of light.

  Mr. Parker had to stand like a semaphore in the fog and wave a red flag from the edge of the coachman’s box, or we might have collided with half a dozen horsecars.

  Mary clutched my arm. “Father, wasn’t it grand that our Robert was at Appomattox? Did he sign any articles of peace?”

  “Mother, Bob couldn’t sign anything. He’s an adjutant. And there were no articles of peace and no articles of war. All Lee did was surrender up his troops.”

  And it troubled me that Jeff Davis was still lurking somewhere in Dixie, planning mischief with a phantom army, when there was nothing left but fools and sentimental sweethearts with their stars and bars. But I understood Mr. Jeff better than my generals. Killing had become the only cause he had left, even if the guns were gone. We’d hound him like a fugitive while war was riven in his skull—a narrative that could never end . . .

  We rode through the fog and arrived at Ford’s, with a wooden platform over the gutter that buckled in the wind. An usher led us into the big red barn of a the-ay-ter on Tenth Street, with our Metropolitan detective scowling left and right. We had to squint our way across the lobby until the lamplighter ran about and lit the lamps again. The usher screamed at him, but he shrugged his shoulders with a look of defiance. “No one warned me the Lincolns would be late.”

  I had a dizzy spell as we climbed the narrow stairs to the dress circle, and entered a little labyrinth of hallways that led to the Presidential box, with its own inner and outer doors. A plush red rocker was waiting for me near the white lace curtains over the balustrade. The performance had already begun. People clapped when they caught a glimpse of us, and the band played “Hail to the Chief.”

  The actors stood frozen, as if they were part of some mysterious tapestry. We fell into a long silence, and then those dolls on stage shoved about, and we were caught up again in their furious patter. Molly sat with one hand on my knee, while I rubbed the lace of the curtain, like some weaver of silk.

  “Father,” she whispered, “what will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?”

  “Missy and her major won’t think anything about it.”

  I couldn’t bother myself with Our American Cousin. The words flew off the balcony rail. The Presidential box was all papered in royal red. My boots sank into a carpet that was like soft, silken mud. I could have been out at sea somewhere. I wasn’t thinking of portents and dreams. I couldn’t get clear of Lee’s silver sword—it was the very last figment of war, as I imagined sutlers creating a thousand tin replicas, selling ’em to souvenir seekers gullible enough to believe they could smell the musk of silver.

  I leaned forward. The play went on with its own little eternity of rustling sounds. Then I could h
ear a rustle right behind me. I figured the Metropolitan detective had glided through the inner door of the box to peek at our tranquility. Jerusalem. I would make my own pilgrimage with Molly, Tad, and Bob. We would walk the ancient walls of the City of David. I wouldn’t have to stare at shoulder straps and muskets. I wouldn’t have to watch the metal coffins arrive at the Sixth Street wharves. And suddenly I felt a sting behind my left ear and a hollow drumming inside my head, as if some stupendous bee had attacked with a fireball. Faces floated in front of my eyes. My mouth clucked like a maddened fish. I’m President of the United—

  1.

  The Clary’s Grove Boys & Mrs. Jack

  DOWN INTO THAT whirlpool I went, plummeting to the very bottom, and seeing stuff no sane man could ever have imagined—a stag with goggle eyes and antlers tall as a tree, a coffin with silver barnacles stead of handles, a musket with a barrel shaped like a bell, and sundry other things. My lungs must have gone to gills, because I could still breathe in that dark water, then all the air swooshed out of me. I rose right into the rapids, riding under a current that was about as safe as a slingshot—branches whipped at me and near tore my eye. I must have blacked out and been washed ashore like a worthless piece of wood.

  Red faces were all around when I woke, raw as a world without light.

  “Who are ye, son?”

  “Abraham Lincoln,” I said, with water still in my lungs.

  “Are ye a convict from downriver?”

  “No, I’m a free white man.”

  It was part lie. I remember Pa beating me like a mule and lendin’ me out as his particular slave. I can still feel the strop, hear its hiss, a leather snake that snapped against my cheek, left me with a scar a finger long.

  “How old are ye, son?”

  “Twenty-six,” I said. It was another damn lie. But I didn’t want these strangers to think light of me. I broke from Pa soon as I was twenty-one and hired myself out as a flatboatman. I carried cargo to Orleans, survived the worst storms in the wigwam of my boat, bought myself a pair of boots with silver spurs, tucked away fifty dollars, and dropped the whole caboodle in a faro den. And now I had weeds in my eyes and silver fish in my drawers. My fingers were glued together, and I lay there on the riverbank without my boots—six feet four in my socks. I must have looked like a monster with wet bark to these strangers.