I Am Abraham Read online

  “Lincoln,” she said, growing formal, “would my husband or his Boys ever vote without consulting me? Women vote in ways that were never assigned to us. And men ain’t clever enough to grasp it by the handle. But I expected more from you.”

  Hannah confessed that she hadn’t been able to decipher my handbill on her own. It was her preacher who had read the handbill aloud. And then Hannah had chanted it like a hymn.

  I escorted her to McNeil & Hill, seized her hand once when she couldn’t navigate a plank. It was the unschooled, like Hannah and me, who had such a hunger for words. We were like pariahs with a strange music inside our heads, a music we only half understood.

  I meant to play checkers with Justice Green, but I wasn’t in the mood.

  A sudden excitement had come to New Salem. The luminaries raced round, looking for the swords and muskets they had buried somewhere before I was ever born, when they were captains of their own militia, involved in some blood feud they no longer remembered. Now the panic was everywhere. Women wouldn’t even venture into their own gardens. Children couldn’t play near the road. In fact, I couldn’t find one child. The goats were tethered; cows moved right into the cabins. I heard whispers of an Indian uprising. Not a word had come down from the governor, but there were rumors that a farmer’s wife in the next county had been ravaged and left to wander with nary a stitch of clothes. We kept hearing her screams, even without the governor’s writ, and wondered when she would show up in New Salem, with mud under her eyes and marked with a savage’s white paint across her back.

  3.

  The Black Hawk War

  COVERED IN COW dung, Black Hawk had decided to declare war on Illinois. The chief of the Sauk and Fox tribes left his roost in Iowa, a patch of territory he’d never wanted, and crossed into northern Illinois with his warriors, his women, and his children in April of ’32, ten months after I had landed in New Salem. He wanted to fight soldiers, not farmers and old men, but he’d had to kill the half-crazed farmers who shot at him. And he knew the soldiers would murder his children, so he traveled in his own war cloud, where only the wisest tracker would ever see him. Black Hawk was looking for his old hunting grounds near Rock Island, and was willing to destroy soldiers and land agents who had lied to him. He scalped the agents and nailed their carcasses to pickets the agents had built to wall him in, and smeared himself in their blood. He’d promised to remain west of the Mississippi, but there was nothing in Iowa for Black Hawk—Iowa was a pigpen.

  The land agents had huckstered him, the generals and the governor of Illinois had sold him a bill of goods. Black Hawk was sixty-seven years old, and before he died he wanted to see and feel the ancestral lands where he had picked gooseberries and plums as a child and fished along the rapids. Iowa had no gooseberries and no plums; he wanted Rock Island back. It was now the site of Fort Armstrong, with a garrison of soldiers that wasn’t grand enough or sufficient to subdue an army of the Sauk and Fox that could still move by stealth and hide in the shadows like apparitions in war paint.

  I understood the attachment Black Hawk had to his native village, but my pity for him and his own lost nation was mingled with the remembrance that he was an Injun like any Injun, no matter how grandiose he happened to be. Yet I couldn’t help admiring him, even in his cloak of excrement.

  The governor of Illinois hoped to raise up a militia fifteen hundred strong to put down the insurrection and was offering a reward for every Indian hide. He promised Sangamon County its own contingent of a hundred men. I knew it was a killing party, but I had no choice. I would have been drummed out of New Salem and tossed back into the river. So I joined our little company and was elected its captain. I was given a sword and free grub that kept body and soul together. But I didn’t relish chasing after a war cloud of women and children.

  I had no trouble finding recruits. The whole of Clary’s Grove joined the company, and I made Jack Armstrong my trusted first sergeant. He kept the other ruffians in line, poking at them with the digits of his gambler’s glove. He near blinded one or two, but I couldn’t get him to relinquish that damn glove. Few of my men could read or write, and they weren’t much used to marching in formation. They stumbled into one another with each order I gave, and several recruits shouted in my ear, “Fuck Black Hawk, sir.”

  We passed through a shrunken forest, crossed a stream that smelled of piss, and marched to Beardstown in a reasonable time—it was fat with gamblers and whores who hoped to pounce on raw recruits. But the gamblers had a hard time of it, and the harlots left after one day. We were locked inside a horse corral that had become a temporary camp for sixteen hundred men, crowded together like hogs. We barely had enough room for a shithouse—none of the officers slept inside the corral. The regular soldiers despised us. They pretended we were insects, outside their own concern.

  It seemed an imbecilic way to fight a war, but I was only a captain, with a contract for a month. The Clary’s Grove Boys couldn’t abide a prison camp. They prowled that corral like marauders, broke into the supply sergeant’s tent, and swiped five buckets of whiskey and wine. I could hear bodies sway and shout, and I was convinced that Black Hawk and his braves had come to camp in my sleep. At dawn, as the companies moved out of camp, Jack serenaded me with one eye shut, while his Boys shat in the middle of the road and marched into trees.

  The Provost Marshal rode up to us in a great fury, his eyes goggling out of his head. I had to return to the Provost’s tent while my company wandered across the plains without marching orders. I went before a military board of captains and colonels—told ’em how I had my sights on becoming a lawyer. One of the colonels frowned and said that lawyers were the biggest wastrels and liars in the land. I was sentenced to wearing a wooden sword.

  I had to strap it on in front of the Provost Marshal. I returned to our company like some mediocre player strutting around in a soldier’s suit. The boys did their best not to laugh. We’d lost contact with our own regiment while I was under arrest. And we had to strike out into the wilderness on our own. Lincoln’s company of louts.

  We marched through woods and swamp that twisted under us like a hundred snakes until our ankles were caught in the muck; the first of us who broke free had to pull at the others, and we didn’t arrive at the mouth of the Rock River until the ninth of May. We still hadn’t seen one sign of Black Hawk and his men, not even the women and children he could hide in the wind. The U.S. Army regulars chased this phantom on his phantom river. They paddled upstream in their barques while we militiamen slogged around in the muck of the riverbank. Horses vanished into the mud; wagons kept sinking. Soldiers disappeared without a trace, and then we’d find a boot with a feather in it, and we wondered who would be Black Hawk’s next victim. We slept standing on our feet and arrived in Prophetstown like a little band of petrified stragglers. Order and discipline had broken down. Some of the other companies fled back to their own farms.

  A solitary Indian wandered into camp. He was wearing a torn military tunic with moccasins and a wampum belt. His fingers were gnarled and his face was a little nest of crags. This old man startled us, because he was the first Injun we’d seen on this endless march, except for a couple of scouts. He wasn’t like that mysterious feather in a missing soldier’s boot. He hadn’t come to taunt us in this battle between white men and Indian braves who couldn’t be found. He was a victim, a scavenger looking for scraps of food, but men from another company grabbed hold of him and swore he was a spy for Black Hawk. They’d had their own little summary court-martial and wanted to nail him to a tree. I whacked at them with my wooden sword.

  “Be gone from here,” I said. These ruffians might have nailed me to the next tree if my own ruffians hadn’t come along. They weren’t that eager to battle with Jack Armstrong and his Boys. I could read the ferocious hunger in the old man’s eyes—the fear that he wouldn’t be able to scavenge and that his next meal might be his last. I watched him tear into our stock of beans and could conjure up the time I lay like a sick a
nimal in my flatboat, wondering if I’d starve to death.

  Soon as he was fed, the Injun told us his fate. He’d been cast out of Black Hawk’s tribe on account of his daughter, who became the concubine of a colonel. The old man wandered from army post to army post, lived among white men, and like his daughter, scavenged and stole. We stared at this Injun who once rode with Black Hawk, stared at him with a new kind of respect—and pitied him too. But we didn’t have the means to hire him as a scout. He gave his wampum belt to Jack, and let us have his last lick of tobacco. I had to send him off to scavenge somewhere else, or he might have stayed with us forever as our company mascot. It was unsettling. That old man was the nearest we’d ever been to a warrior.

  The boys were silent after that. Then they looked at me and scratched their heads.

  “Captain, what was it like, being a tall bachelor and a tomcat in Orleans?”

  “Sweet as honey pie,” I said.

  I’d regaled them time and again with ribald stories of how I’d kept my own pretty lady in the back streets of Orleans when I wouldn’t have known what to do with a lady—a captain with a wooden sword who liked to talk of poontail when all the while I was frightened of the whores in their crib-houses, of their damp aromas and the depths of their eyes . . .

  We were chasing a phantom on his own former hunting grounds, where he could shift from warrior to wolf and back to warrior again. Our spies kept finding scalps, but it didn’t look like Injun work, and we wondered if there was some insane butcher among our own people, or if that wolf-warrior was practicing to become a white man. So we were on the lookout for anything that was sinister or strange. And one afternoon, as we slogged upstream, we fell upon a traveling juggler who sought to entertain us as we marched. He seemed quite suspicious for a skinny man without much of a chest, and he tossed little canisters into the trees and captured them behind his back, while standing right above the rapids.

  “Juggler, what the hell are you doing here in this lone country?”

  And for a second I thought he was Black Hawk himself, assuming the form of an imbecile who juggled for soldiers without a penny in their pockets.

  “Fellow pilgrims,” he said, “I can hear the dead whisper. And I can smell a scalping party. I’ll stay with you awhile.”

  “Then you’ll have to join the militia. . . . Sergeant Jack Armstrong, will you swear him in?”

  The juggler bolted into the woods, but crazy as he was, he proved to be a prophet. We marched inland and stumbled upon a settlement that had mostly been burnt to the ground. It didn’t have the look of a real fort with barricades—but a pigpen on the prairie, with a roofless barn and a ramshackle fence that Black Hawk’s braves must have torn to pieces with their tomahawks. The whole settlement had that sickening, sweet smell of seared flesh. We found a doll in the rubble and a torn bonnet. Two of the settlers had been scalped; there was a rough red mark on what remained of their heads, as if some madman had been sawing at them; most of their fingers were missing; one settler had a raw cavern where his nose had been; another had a leaky hole for an ear. Even Jack was unmanned for a little while. He and the Boys commenced to shiver while they stood and gaped. I didn’t have that luxury. I had to write a report in my captain’s book. I had to walk through the rubble and count the dead—six men and a woman, who had a skeleton’s face. The fire had sucked up all the flesh.

  “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun,” I recited from Ecclesiastes while we buried the dead.

  Suddenly we were no longer militiamen on maneuvers, picnicking in the prairie grass. We were thrust into a war where the enemy was a wisp of smoke, where madmen reigned with rude hatchets. We clung to each other in the rain. My marching orders were never clear. We heard coyotes howl. Half my men had the chills.

  We wandered into a ghost town on the plains, an abandoned fort near Dixon’s Ferry, where the wind whistled through the walls. I couldn’t ascertain if the Sauk and the Fox had driven Army regulars out of the fort, or if it had been deserted long before Black Hawk’s rebellion. There wasn’t much sign of life, not even a kettle with the blackened dregs of some bitter soup, or a regimental flag on the flagpole. And in the middle of this wasted land was a fifteen-year-old girl, all dressed in calico, as if she were waiting for us to deliver some apple pie. There was something peculiar about this girl. She had lost the power of speech.

  We fed her a stale biscuit and a morsel of cheese. The biscuit broke in her hand, that’s how hard it shook. Finally I had to feed her with my own hands. She couldn’t have had a morsel of food in days, I imagine; her mouth moved like a frantic engine. I’m not sure why, but I stroked her hair. That seemed to calm her. She clutched at my arm with a preternatural strength—seems I was the last lifeline she had on the plains. It tore at me to look at her in that calico dress.

  “Captain,” said one of my ruffians, “maybe she belongs to that juggler we met near the Rock River. Jugglers like to travel with dummy girls.”

  Why would that juggler, mad as he was, have left her alone in a fort that was rampant with wild grass? But I solved some of the mystery. She was wearing a bracelet around her ankle with Indian feathers and beads, and that ankle was filthy with blood, and had scratches running to her calf. Her left nostril was also ringed with blood. Black Hawk’s braves must have grabbed her off that burnt settlement where the two settlers had been scalped. Had they tagged her with a bracelet like a prize chicken, presented her to their women and children as a trophy to scratch at and shove around, and then tired of her? They hadn’t torn her calicos; her bonnet still sat on her head with its strings. After she finished cracking the biscuit with her teeth, she commenced to lick my hand.

  “Stop that,” I said, pulling my hand away. She rocked her shoulders, and I wondered if her misadventures among the Indians had indeed made her into a dummy girl.

  “Missy, what’s your name?”

  She wouldn’t answer. She clutched at the pleats of her dress and started to dance in the wilderness of that empty fort—I could hear an orchestra in my brain, the thump of piano keys, the scratch-scratch of violins. She whipped her head back and forth, back and forth.

  “My name is Emma,” she said in a perfectly natural voice. She was the last living soul of that luckless settlement, and she told me a singular tale. Black Hawk’s men hadn’t caused that massacre. It was a band of renegade Sioux. They did all the burning and scalping. She remembered the black paint they wore, and how their hatchets swept through the air and split a child’s back. They would have finished her, too, if Black Hawk hadn’t heard their war cries and frightened them off.

  “You saw the chief?” I asked, a little astounded. “What did he do, Miss Emma?”

  “He wept.”

  Black Hawk wanted his homeland, she said, not this desolation.

  “How do you know this? Did he have interpreters?”

  “His English was a versed as mine, Mr. Lincoln. And he had the gentlest eyes. He sang poetry to me.”

  Suddenly I was suspicious of her tale. “What sort of poetry?”

  Her eyes were caught in some strange rapture as she spun about in her calicos and chirped to a band of desperate soldiers.

  With spiders I had friendship made,

  And watch’d them in their sullen trade . . .

  My boys were baffled. “What’s she blathering, Captain?”

  I could scarce believe it, an Injun quoting Lord Byron and The Prisoner of Chillon. How could I explain to my boys that Black Hawk had a philosophical bent, and understood that his whole life, with and without all the skirmishes, was a kind of captivity? And I didn’t even have to ask why he deposited her at a dead fort. That philosopher was saving her for us. Black Hawk was a much better general than the generals we had. He had to fight the Regular Army, a worthless militia, and renegade tribes, when all he wanted was to pick gooseberries in his own garden.

  A sadness and a cyni
cal wind invaded my thoughts. I released my men of all obligations after their enlistment of thirty days was up. “Boys, be gone,” I said. “Go on back to your farms and your wives.”

  Jack and the Clary’s Grove Boys were loyal to their captain. They didn’t want to leave me alone in hostile territory. I had to insist.

  “Jack, your Hannah is ten times more valuable than this war.”

  I was mustered out after another month and joined up again, this time with Captain Jacob Early, who had his own independent band of scouts and spies. We were supposed to move with the stealth of Black Hawk, but we couldn’t even capture the wind, and we always happened upon a battle after it was fought. We were buriers rather than hunters. Our company was disbanded on the tenth of July, and I was mustered out again.

  I returned to New Salem, quiet as a dead fort. I couldn’t seem to shake free of the Black Hawk War. I relived all the little campaigns. I kept seeing a brutal red sun in my eyes as I wandered among the ravaged people, whole families splayed out in the wild grass in some forlorn symmetry, husbands and wives trying to reach one another just as the hatchet fell, their fingers like blackened claws—it was something a militia captain couldn’t forget. I was the veteran of a war where soldiers rushed around with their muskets, making a lot of noise, while civilians were split open and lay in the sun with half their heads.

  4.

  Justice at the General Store

  I HAD A ROUGH patch, clawing my way back into civil life, where I had to think of cash receipts, when all I could recollect was tomahawks. I went into business with William Berry, who’d been a corporal with me in the militia. We started up a general store that soon had a license to sell whiskey at 12½ cents a glass. But McNeil & Hill had a much bigger and better store. We couldn’t compete with their prices, so my partner raided our own whiskey barrels. Berry had witnessed the same hatchetings as I did, endured the same bad dreams. He’d wander through the village in midwinter, and I had to track him down. I’d find him weeping in the snow with whiskey on his breath, caught in his own puddle of piss. I had to warm his feet near the stove while he muttered about all the women and children he had buried in north Illinois. I couldn’t talk him out of drinking up our entire stock. Berry & Lincoln winked out, and I went into debt.