I Am Abraham Read online

  “I don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus,” I said.

  “Neither does Jack.”

  “Then what was he doing in church, ma’am?”

  “Trying to kidnap me.”

  Jack was riding with his Boys, after bloodying up a little town and feasting himself on a farmer’s wife, when he heard Hannah’s voice, and couldn’t recover from it. “It haunted him. That’s what he said.”

  The Boys had never been hypnotized by lady shouters and their cries to Jesus. But Jack walked right into the church—a cabin without a window that my own Pa might have built. This cabin had to burn candles on the sunniest day, she said.

  “And did he drag you out of church, ma’am?”

  She knew all about the Boys from Clary’s Grove. Hannah had seen Jack ride on his horse, proud as a border bandit as he went around pillaging people. But she still wouldn’t have gone with him, even if her face was all on fire. The ruffian got down on his knees in front of that congregation of farmers and their kin. Her Pa was mortified. He couldn’t conceive of losing his own little girl. He whisked her away from church and locked her up in the cellar. She didn’t have to tell me what happened next. He forced himself upon Hannah while she screamed, and her brothers and sisters heard all that commotion and carnage. They wouldn’t interfere with their own Pa, but none of them had counted on Clary’s Grove. When Jack couldn’t find Hannah, he followed her Pa home, bust into his cabin, ripped open the cellar’s trapdoor, went down into that pit of black clay, saw Hannah in the dark, sittin’ there like a bruised animal. He swaddled her in his own shirt, leapt out of that clay pit with Hannah in his arms, while her Pa begged for his life. Jack had an inclination to murder the whole family, but he was clever enough not to harm Hannah’s kin. She might have shivered at the horror of it all, and then blamed him. So he sat her down on his saddle, washed the blood and filth off Hannah’s face, and delivered her to Clary’s Grove.

  It must have been like entering a new kind of paradise for Mrs. Jack, away from those predations of her Pa, but I didn’t see much that was heavenly in that sinister cabin she called home. It didn’t even have a proper dirt floor. You entered the cabin at your own risk. It was rife with little caverns and holes, and I worried about mud slides for the babies and piglets of Clary’s Grove. Jack’s own booty troubled me the most—rings that were still attached to some poor devil’s blackened finger, a snuffbox brimming with ants, a few dented skulls, gold teeth with the remains of their bloody roots, sacks of shit that the Boys must have collected to fling at their enemies, I suppose. The stench could burn off a man’s nostrils, and as much as I admired Hannah, I never got used to it.

  I had to be neighborly so I sucked on Hannah’s pipe. The tobacco was like a bomb in my head. But I couldn’t sleep because we had visitors—three ragged men with soot on their faces and scars on their cheeks, and the darting yellow eyes of maniacs. They were pilferers and vagabonds who preyed on frontier women. And they must have been from some far country, or they wouldn’t have come near Jack Armstrong’s camp.

  Their yellow eyes had a preternatural gleam. They were carrying long, rusty knives. They poked around in the mud and dust outside the door; Clary’s Grove was either wet or dry, depending on where the creek happened to gush from under the ground.

  “Mother Cunt,” they said to Hannah, “are ye the whore of Babylon or another harlot?”

  I hunkered up on my pallet to rush at these vagabonds, but Hannah whispered for me to stay put.

  “I’m Hannah Armstrong,” she answered in the voice of a church shouter, “mistress of Clary’s Grove.”

  “Well, we are desperate characters. And if we don’t have the run of your yard, you’ll never see the light of day again.”

  She sang to the vagabonds. “Lord Jesus is in my arms.” And she must have seen the Lord while she sang. Her face lit up, and the sweetness of her voice confused the vagabonds. Now I understood how Hannah had hypnotized Jack and the Boys. But I couldn’t just sit there. So I stood up on my battered knees and faced these pirates.

  “Be gone,” I said. My mournful squeal broke the spell they were in. They commenced to roar and slap their sides, while their scars rippled.

  “Brothers, the mistress of Clary’s Grove is living in sin, with Lord Jesus. Have you even seen such a tall pilgrim in your whole life?”

  These pirates shouldn’t have taken their brutal yellow eyes off Hannah. She ran out the cabin with her long rifle, clutched the barrel with both hands, and struck the first and second pirate with the silvered edge of the stock. Their blood began to spew, and their skulls seeped a strange white fluid. I heard the crack of bone as they seized their heads and wandered about, half blind. But the third pirate rushed right past her and was about to attack one of the babies with his knife. I was roaring mad. I tripped the sucker, grabbed him by the seat of his pants, and hurled him out the cabin like a sack of shit. And for a moment I did think of becoming his finisher once and for all. These pirates preyed on women. Wolves had much more honor than they did, but I just didn’t have the stomach to become a one-man execution party . . .

  The Boys returned after a week with dust in their mouths. They were pilferers of another kind. They might have plucked all the feathers out of a full-fledged camp, and battled for the spoils of war, but they would never have harmed a lone woman. The Boys were widow makers, yet Jack would often give up half his treasure to whatever widow he and the Boys had made.

  After all their rooting around, they returned with nothing but some potatoes and a bag of beans. Hannah didn’t scold them. She knew they were hapless cavaliers. They’d destroy a town and then rebuild it in their own reckless fashion. They couldn’t hold a hammer or plumb a straight line with a carpenter’s awl. And the Boys were stupefied when they discovered that the crooked cabin they had built with their own hands now had a wooden floor. I’d also corrected the walls.

  Jack Armstrong commenced to groan.

  “Abraham,” he said, “we brought you here to convalesce, not to prettify.”

  Hannah watched him with the shrewd eyes of a shouter. “Jack, that’s small thanks. We have a creek right under the cabin you built without a floor. We might have lost a child in one of those secret wells. And he’d be floating down the Mississip before we ever found him.”

  “Mother,” Jack said, “it’s awful hard to acknowledge the deeds of a new friend.”

  And then the Boys took to admiring the new strictness of their walls. They saw me as a wizard and I let them think I was. Jack noticed the book I was carrying in my pocket—a penny edition of Æsop’s Fables that had also served as my ABC. It was bitten and raw at the edges, where Pa had thrown my book of fables into the fire. I burnt my hands rescuing it. And Pa would have thrown it back into the fire if my Angel Mama, who wasn’t yet an angel at that time, hadn’t shielded me from Pa’s blows. It’s his learnin’ book, she said. Let him learn. She had no butter. So she blew on my hands with her sweet breath and bathed them in her own spittle. And she sang to me about Jesus. Ma had been a shouter at church, just like Hannah. But she commenced to cry in the middle of her song. I wanted to catch Ma’s tears in my red hands, and I couldn’t. So I held on to Æsop with all my might, even when I near drowned in the Mississip, or when I had to fight off ruffians in Orleans. They could have my pantaloons and my coins, but not Æsop’s Fables.

  Jack asked me to read the fable I liked best, but I sang it like a shouter at church.

  “Four Bulls slept in the same field, and the Lord of the Lions was desirous to have these Bulls become his dinner.”

  “What the hell was stopping him?” the Boys asked, unfamiliar with the rhapsodic charm of a fable.

  “Dunderheads, the four Bulls would have ruined him with their horns,” said Jack. And he begged me to continue.

  “The Lion had to conquer by degrees, had to proceed with a program of whispers and malicious hints, to sow discord among the four Bulls, to foment jealousy and disunion, until each Bull was suspicious of t
he other and fed in different parts of the field. And then the Lion devoured the four Bulls one by one.”

  Jack commenced to crow. “Ain’t that our motto, Boys? Never let a Lion into your house.”

  The Boys sucked on their clay pipes and drank from their own little jars of whiskey. Soon they were snoring and swallowing their own spit.

  “That’s not the motto at all,” said Mrs. Jack. And I realized soon enough that she had all the sagacity of a frontier judge. “The four Bulls are the heroes . . . and the victims here. They fell prey to their own disorder and disunion. No man or Lion could have defeated them four at a time.”

  “Mother, be quiet,” Jack said, fingering his gambler’s glove with the five metal digits. And he meant to crown her with his jar of whiskey—that’s how mean he looked. I couldn’t have abided that, even if Jack had succored me in his home. And it wounded me to watch Hannah. She wouldn’t pull away from the madness in her husband’s eye. As he strode up to her with his wild glare and his menacing glove, I plucked the jar out of Jack’s hand. The Boys were astonished, and Jack was struck dumb with indignity. No one had ever interfered with him in his own house.

  The Boys weren’t worried about my welfare.

  “Jacky, if you break her bones, who will feed us, who will mend our clothes? We can’t get along without Mrs. Jack.”

  Jack didn’t have to listen to his own Boys; the whiskey had unmanned him. He sank to his knees and commenced to snore. The Boys couldn’t even hold on to their whiskey jars. They flopped beside Jack. The piglets squealed and the babies wailed on my new floor. Hannah was trembling, and I trembled too. We hadn’t conspired against Jack, but it felt as if we’d traveled the globe together—and I could have been her father, brother, son.

  But I feared for my own life in a cabin filled with desperados who wore armor imbedded in their bodies and grunted in their sleep like backwoods cavaliers. I wanted to light out of there, to be rid of the Clary’s Grove Boys—rid of myself, rid of Mrs. Jack and return to the maelstrom that had sucked me under. I ought to have drowned, and did, a dead man who suddenly bolted out of the bottom, full of barnacles and stink weeds and fish in my pantaloons, and landed on the shore like a helpless sea monster, rescued by pioneers who’d carved a little clearing on a bluff, hidden from nature and mankind, and where a vagabond like me might collect himself and find his own future.

  2.

  A Feckless Candidate

  THEY WERE STUNNED when they saw me, assumed I was an apparition, since no one had ever come back alive from that desperados’ den. They pawed at me, pinched my arm. The town had abandoned all hope for their Abraham, hadn’t even bothered to raise up a rescue mission. But I couldn’t cash in on my own good luck. My venture with Offutt soon petered out. His store was still standing, though Offutt himself had disappeared with all the saddles and bags of salt. I lived in that deserted store with nothing but dust and dried beans, and a few field mice to keep me company around the bare walls and barren front room. Offutt stole the glass from our window, stole the counter, stole the chairs. That lonesome store rocked in the wind like a prairie schooner and moved an inch or so every time we had a sandstorm. I’d hug my knees in the corner and pray that those howling pellets of sand wouldn’t eat into my eyes.

  Justice Green and the schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, begged me not to wander. New Salem couldn’t afford to shed another citizen. So I mucked about, doing odd jobs. I mended pickets after a storm, built coffins for the next plague year, swabbed the sores on the town’s workhorse, and shoveled shit. And when I had to shut the store, I removed to Rutledge’s tavern. It was the centerpiece of New Salem, even if it sat in the dust like every other building, and didn’t have a reliable roof. It did have a window, covered with grime and a trail of dead beetles, and its speckled light fell with a pernicious randomness that had nothing to do with the time of day. The tavern’s rear wall swirled like a gigantic kaleidoscope, with its own feast of colors that suddenly went black—we lived with a lot of candles at Rutledge’s. It’s where the luminaries of the village would congregate over a dram of whiskey and talk of their own prospects. Unless there was a river-run between New Salem and Springfield, the village would peter out, like Offutt’s store. That’s why New Salem had been built on a bluff over the Sangamon—to encourage river traffic, but the river was as unreliable as their roofs. It could overflow one season, become a puddle the next. And since I was a flatboatman who had come pitching out of the Sangamon’s waters, I was looked upon as the pilot who would initiate the Springfield–New Salem run. But the Legislature at Vandalia wouldn’t risk such an enterprise—it was filled with drunken louts who didn’t care a whit about New Salem. And that’s why the luminaries wanted their vagabond, Abe Lincoln, to battle for a seat in the lower house. They’d heard me pontificate around the cracker barrel at Offutt’s before it was defunct. They nodded and shut their eyes when I said that women ought to have the right to vote.

  “They’re not cattle, are they? A woman can sign her name and ponder over a deed as well as a man.”

  They kept nodding, because they wanted their own man in Vandalia who would plead for the village’s navigation rights. Meantime they surveyed Rutledge’s daughter like pig-eyed men begging for a glimpse of her breasts. That’s how secretive and salacious they were. They’d follow her right into the bathhouse if Rutledge gave them half a chance. I heard them talk about her berry bush when Rutledge wasn’t around. But they were the luminaries of New Salem, and I was their candidate, who couldn’t even defend the most voluptuous gal in the county.

  Ann Rutledge had red hair and a face that was a marvel, with sultry silver-blue eyes, full lips, and nostrils that were shaped like perfect little bells. It stopped you in your tracks to watch her breathe in and out. She was deliciously plump. Annie attended to the tavern, but she’d been a pupil in Mentor Graham’s class when I first drifted into New Salem as Mr. Offutt’s prospective clerk. Now Ann was nineteen, as nubile as a fine young she-cat, who hoped to continue her education one day at the female academy in Jacksonville.

  Every bachelor in New Salem who didn’t have one foot in the grave—and even those who did—courted Ann. Her bodice heaved while she stood still, and her flesh seemed to shiver like some kind of forbidden fruit. But she was no temptress. Ann had made her pick. She decided on one of the luminaries—John McNeil. He owned a farm with grazing land and was a partner in New Salem’s most successful store, McNeil & Hill. Sam Hill was another of her suitors, but Hill didn’t have his lithe look. McNeil was a heart smasher, with whiskers that were barbered every day, shoes that a porter at the tavern blacked and polished with his own spit, and shirts ordered from St. Louis. He was older than the village vagabond by eight or nine years, and I couldn’t have encroached upon his territories.

  I wasn’t wounded by his wealth, his silk shirts, or his proximity to Ann. His grammar hurt me most, and his diction. McNeil hailed from New York. And he had that pith of speech I envied in a man. I bathed in my own bile when I imagined the letters he must have written to Ann while he was on some sojourn to Springfield or St. Louis, wearing ruffled shirts and the finest cologne. He also corrected my first campaign address after I decided to run for the Legislature, though he never put on airs or tried to show off his learning at my expense.

  “Lincoln, a speech should be like the crack of a whip, but tinged with honey. You have to trap every vote like a hunter. And what kind of speech will lure the voter in?”

  “One that’s short and sweet.”

  “But not too sweet.” And he cut into my paragraphs with a heartless precision. I didn’t even have to deliver my own address. It was printed up as a handbill with McNeil’s help and distributed to the people of Sangamon County. There was some of McNeil’s pith in it, but the modesty of the music was mine.

  I mentioned how river navigation was much more practical than a railroad that would never be built, though the Sangamon was an ornery river that could flood an entire plateau, fling trout above the shore
line like a plague of locusts, or dry up in August and leave cracks in a riverbed as wide as a pregnant sow. I talked about the significance of education for every single man, how a lack of it would doom us and make us deaf to our own history, so that we would run around like blind beggars who couldn’t even tell where we were from. I talked of my own peculiar ambition, how I wanted the esteem of my fellow men. I had no wealthy relations to recommend me, having been born in the most humble circumstances, with a Pa who was half blind.

  The first reaction I had to my handbill was from Ann Rutledge. Her lip was palpitating, and there was consternation in her silver eyes.

  “Why, Mr. Lincoln, you’re mighty fine about education for men, but not for women. I couldn’t find one word in your writ about the right of women to vote. Does that mean you think women should not read at all?”

  I was the worst sort of scoundrel, ruled by political whim. I believed that women ought to vote. But it was Ann’s fiancé who discouraged me from mentioning women’s rights in my first address. Men would rather die than share the vote with women, he said. So I heeded Mack, as we called McNeil.

  “Mistress, it’s my maiden voyage. A man has to be careful of the shoals.”

  She pulled down her bonnet over one eye and said, “Would that you were a little less careful, Mr. Lincoln, and a little more candid.”

  I walked out the tavern with my tail tucked between my legs. And when I navigated the wooden planks that were laid across the sodden road, there was Hannah Armstrong in her own best bonnet. I was delighted to see her, even if she had the most wizened face I’d ever encountered on a twenty-year-old. She clutched my handbill, and it seemed like a malignant sign.

  “You have the poetry, Abraham,” she declared in her shouter’s voice. “But you’re feckless. You didn’t mention womenfolk once in your handbill. Ain’t we half the populace?”

  “More than half, I’d imagine. But you’ve caught me at a disadvantage. I have to appeal to voters.”