I Am Abraham (16 page)

“Molly, you’ve been staying with her and Ninian for over two years.”

“Yes, as my father’s little ambassador. But how long will she welcome me once my father cuts us?”

“Aw, Puss,” I said, “you’ll have to include her.”

And we did. I walked into a howling rain in my wedding suit and went up to that mansion on Quality Hill. The minister was there. A fire had been lit. Puss came down the stairs in a white muslin dress skirt without a bride’s veil or flowers in her hair. And her sister trolled out of the kitchen with trembling hands and panic in her eyes—the wedding cake had fallen flat.

Puss wouldn’t even console her.

“Gingerbread is good enough for Mr. Lincoln . . . and his wife.”

And so we were married in that parlor. I slipped the ring onto Mary’s finger and intoned the Episcopal vows. “With this ring I thee endow with all my goods and chattels, lands and tenements.”

I didn’t remember much after that, except that I had no goods and chattels—nothing but a whimsical law practice and a bridal suite at the Globe Tavern. We rode there, under the beating rain, in Ninian’s carriage. Puss didn’t complain, though that barren little room must have felt like a slap in the face. I dried her hair while she played with the ring. We were both in some kind of torment and nervous state. We undressed in the dark. I approached that coffin-bed in my nightshirt. She wasn’t wearing a nightgown. I could see the swoop of her shoulders in the little light coming off the rain. The rest of her was woven into the dark.

“Mr. Lincoln,” she sang in that cultured voice of hers. “I’d be much obliged if you took off that damn shirt. I want to feel your manliness.”

I closed the curtains and we lay down together like wolf cubs wild with wonder, and I was maddened by my own paucity of knowledge—about ardor and its acrobatics, and all the fine little
ravelments
of love. First thing I felt was the soft bump of her belly, and then her fat little fingers on my cock. I wasn’t prepared for the
wisdom
of Molly’s touch. I leapt up like a man with St. Vitas, and I could have spilled all my jelly right on the spot if I hadn’t asked the Lord to lead me out of this affliction. It was the delicate
burn
of Molly’s eyes in the dark that calmed me down, not my prayers to the Lord. I licked the sweetness of her bosoms, reveled in the perfumery between her legs. Molly moaned like a little girl at a nun’s palace. And that soft, almost painful purr deepened into a croak as I crept into Molly, and it was as if I had lived forever inside her wet well.

13.

Duff & the Shadow in the Glass

I
T
WAS
SIXTEEN
years—a flat sixteen—since our
honeymoon
at the Globe, with the constant rattle of the Springfield stage right outside our window to remind us of our narrow circumstances, with other guests at the tavern barking day and night, and I wondered when Mary would abandon the Globe, abandon me, and race back up Quality Hill. But she never complained, never winced once. She was Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, the wife of a country lawyer who
et
his vittles with a knife. And our habitation together was like a clothesline that leapt across the high plains during an Illinois
ripper
and still hooked itself to something—our own lives.

I was the culprit, a circuit rider always on the road, and Molly felt stranded in Springfield. It was the beginning of the
deluge
—that invisible cloth between us, the silence of wear and tear, the moodiness, the uncertainty, the anger deep under the skin. The childish
dimple
had gone out of her eyes. Marriage had become a broken bower where she had to boil my shirts and watch me stride into the kitchen, almost like a stranger, covered in dust. Yet she often smiled at that puzzling picture of my rawness and took some pleasure in scrubbing the dust off my bones, with her little hand as a washrag, circling over my skin with all the artistry of a harem girl.

That was our moment of delight. There’d been births and desolation and a terrible dying, and we still survived. Molly did have some solace, a little boy who smashed her heart from the moment he was born.

Bob was Mother’s
first.
She had suckled Bob like some Arabian prince—the boy was unknowable, always would be, and could have been a fallen angel who landed in our lap. He commenced to run away from home before he was six, would hide in some root cellar or wander to the edge of town. What was he looking for? Where was he trying to alight? Lord knows. Molly had devoted half her life to Bob. When she had her blinding headaches, Bob would comfort her—he was the only one who could.

Her
blinders
were more frequent after our second boy was born—Eddie had a weak lung and coughed so hard he couldn’t stand. I prayed we could keep Eddie with us if we didn’t let any sinister angels into the house. Mother tried with all her might, fed him honey from her own mouth, while his lungs filled with black blood, until some angel grabbed him up when he was a few months shy of four. That was eight years ago now. Mother still couldn’t stop grieving—and we didn’t have much matrimonial bliss. Molly grew more and more mercurial, like that big sister of hers, Mrs. Elizabeth; she’d have boxing matches with the maid, hurl a book at my head. Bob soothed her some; he could spend an entire afternoon holding her hand.

Molly sent him to a highfalutin academy to soak up whatever learning he could. She dressed him up like a lord, in a velvet coat and kid gloves, and I wouldn’t be startled if that boy was a little ashamed of his Pa. He didn’t have a trace of my Kentucky drawl.

I had to content myself with Willie and Tad, my two wild boys. They were born after Eddie passed, but they couldn’t rep1ace him—no one could, not in her affections. So they ran wild. They tore up our little garden, and other gardens in the neighborhood. Tad wasn’t more than a couple of years out of the cradle. He never learned to talk proper. He had kind of a lisp. Willie and I were the only ones in the world who could understand his chatter. Tad remained a mystery to his own mother and our Irish maid, who would fuss over him, because Tad couldn’t solve the
impediment
of buttons and belts. Mary had to tie him into his clothes, but she couldn’t decipher a word he said.

“Mr. Lincoln, you’re as bad as your own boys. But I’m wild to see Bob. A woman can have a normal conversation with him.”

Bob had his sights set on Harvard, and that was Mary’s doing. Harvard was closer to Lexington, Kentucky, with all its airs, than it was to a town in Illinois.

I’d walk to the office with Tad on my shoulders and Willie clutching my waistcoat. I had a premonition that morning, as if something strange and original might happen. I didn’t dare look into the mirror, because I would have seen a shadow that wasn’t supposed to be in the glass. And I worried that harm might come to my boys. So I spat three times in the sand and held on to Tad as tight I could, but I could still feel some presence—like a lick of air with its own perfume—following me and the boys.

My law partner, Billy Herndon, wasn’t that anxious to see them. He knew how destructive the boys could be, and he was preoccupied with my political career, even if I hadn’t been elected to
anything
in nine years. Billy was rather petit for a man, but he liked to wear kid gloves and patent-leather shoes and douse himself in toilet water. He was in his drams a lot, and Molly couldn’t bear the sight of him. He’d rubbed her wrong a while back when she was the prettiest belle in town. Billy was rather blunt. He admired her dancing and meant to compliment her—told Molly she moved with all the suppleness of a snake. She cursed Billy for that remark and wouldn’t invite him into the house, even after Billy and I sealed our partnership with a handshake.

What some folks in Springfield didn’t know was that Billy was always hiding runaways. I could come into the office at noon and find a colored boy gnawing on a potato under my desk. Another boy might be in the closet. I’d play checkers with that boy until Billy found the means to sneak him past the slave catchers in a beer barrel. I had to bite my lip and keep quiet. Those catchers had the law of the land on their side.

Billy was always getting into scrapes. He’d crash his head through a window in a brawl, and I had to pay for the damages before the sheriff got to Billy and sent him off to jail. And so he was obliged to forgive me for my own little boys.

He’d stifle a groan whenever he saw Willie and Tad. And he’d sit like a martyr while they climbed up into the bookshelves and tossed our books like bombs. They spilled the ink out of their wells and scattered all the briefs written in my own hand, since Billy didn’t have the faintest idea how to write a brief.

And while all this
merriment
was going on, there was a knock on our door. The curtain was down, and I could see a figure in the glass, like some strange shadow. At first I thought it was a runaway slave hoping for some succor. But it wasn’t a runaway. Billy and the boys heard me gasp. I was trembling, because that figure looked like a ghost out of my past.

“May I come in?” the ghost asked in the rich voice of a shouter at church.

“Please,” I squealed in that damned high pitch of mine.

She was wearing a shawl and a winter bonnet. I hadn’t seen her in a century. She was a widow now—her husband had died back in ’54, and I hadn’t even sent Hannah as much as a note. Clary’s Grove had winked out together with New Salem—settlements that never had much of a chance. She had the same wrinkles she’d had when I first met her as a twenty-year-old matriarch. Lord alive, she looked younger now than she did then, as if the wrinkles had reversed themselves. Still, I could see the trouble lines on her forehead. And I knew she hadn’t come to Lincoln & Herndon on a social call. I was still trembling when I asked, “How are you, Mrs. Jack?” And while Hannah revealed the tribulations of her son, William “Duff” Armstrong, she still had a crackle in her eye for my own mischief makers.

“They’re fine boys, Abraham.”

She told me about Duff’s
incident
with a certain James Metzker. They’d been attending a two-week revival meeting at Virgin’s Grove near the old abandoned site of New Salem. And at a makeshift bar near the revival camp, Duff and a friend of his got into a drunken brawl with Metzker. Hannah’s boy was twenty-four—he whacked James Metzker in the eye with his slung shot, the favorite weapon of the Clary’s Grove Boys. The slung shot was
peculiar
to Clary’s Grove; it was an eggshell filled with melted zinc, covered over with calfskin, and tied to Duff’s wrist with a piece of powerful string. Metzker didn’t survive that blow. Duff might not have been indicted, but a house painter who was also at the meeting—Charles Allen of Petersburg—swore to a coroner’s jury that he had seen Duff strike Metzker in the full light of the moon and hurl that bloody slung shot into the grass; Allen himself had collected it.

“My boy will rot in jail,” Hannah said, clutching her shawl. “He was caught in the moonlight by another man.”

“Means nothing,” Billy said. “We have the best cross-examiner in the county.”

“Now don’t you give her false hopes,” I muttered, pretending to scold my junior partner. “But every witness has a weak point, and I’ll find it if I can.”

T
HE
TRIAL
WAS
HELD
in Beardstown a month or so later, at the Cass County court. The prosecutor there thought he had a pretty case. Duff was a wild boy like his own dead Pa. He even wore that polka-dot bandanna of Clary’s Grove—a sure sign of his guilt. But the prosecutor, who was called Big Hank and had a way of breathing fire at a jury, hadn’t bothered to uncover my own brotherhood with Clary’s Grove.

He moved among the jurors with all his grandeur and built up his case against Duff
and
Duff’s dead Pa. I didn’t much care for how he dirtied Jack’s name. But Beardstown was his bailiwick, and a lawyer like me had to bite his own lip.

Big Hank produced the house painter, and that man swore up and down that he had seen Duff strike Metzker.