I Am Abraham (2 page)

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 Keene, 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 hear 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

D
OWN
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.

They dragged me up the hill, and that’s how I landed in New Salem, on a bluff over the Sangamon River in the dusty bowels of central Illinois. It was a bald spot at the edge of the world that not even a man who fell right out of the Sangamon would ever have bothered to notice. But that’s what pulled me into its orbit. I’d arrived without baggage, a wanderer without a pinch of paper in his pockets, a man from nowhere who’d come to another
nowhere
called New Salem. It did have one rudimentary road, cut out of the forest, but that road seemed to vanish inside its own navel. And it did have a sawmill, with a flimsy little dam that could have been mistaken for a beaver’s bridge. It did have a general store and a blacksmith’s shed, and a few log cabins that housed a doctor and a justice of the peace, almost by accident, or twist of fate.

It was as if I’d sailed
into
New Salem, and had never even known what I was looking for. Men with dust in their eyes, like mechanics under a bridge, washed the mud off my bones, fed me, clothed me, without once asking where I had come from. I could have been born in one of those cabins.

I was promised the clerkship of a new general store owned by some little baron from Springfield named Denton Offutt. But there was no store, and I couldn’t hunt up Offutt on my own. I had to stitch myself together and wait until Offutt arrived with nothing but pieces of timber and a parcel of land—that was his notion of a general store. I had to build the damn thing with my own axe and carpenter’s awl.

Offutt was a meticulous man who wore kid gloves and patent-leather shoes on the frontier. But he wasn’t unkind. Both of us slept in the back of the store, with our own buckskin shirts as a blanket. Offutt farted a lot for such a meticulous man. We sold seeds, saddles, sugar, and salt. And if he lent me out to split rails or build a coffin—Pa had taught me all the tricks of a carpenter—I kept whatever profit I received and didn’t have to share it with that entrepreneur. But he would badger me about something else.