I Am Abraham (35 page)

It came upon the midnight clear

That glorious song of old,

From angels bending near the earth

To touch their harps of gold . . .

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,

O rest beside the weary road

And hear the angels sing!

Their sounds rose to the barreled ceiling, and then sailed back down, with an unbroken melody that disarmed us, not with the sweetness of those angels in their chant, but with an accordion that wheezed like any
convalescent
, with soldiers who could barely hold a tune, and nurses who had the rough contralto of some wild man; and still all the singing meshed in that long gallery under the roof, and we mourned as soldiers mourned, not for some fine prince of peace and war, but for the broken earth in battles yet to come, for the living and the dead we would never meet, for a lone palomino who sat idle in his stall, waiting for a rider who would never come.

33.

Summerland

M
OTHER
HAD
CRASHED
out of
jail
—that self-imposed asylum in her bedroom—and started to shed her winter veils. Her mood hadn’t shifted much. She locked up the Green Room, where the embalmer had worked on Willie, and kept the key. She appeared one morning in Tad’s room like a stranded mermaid, without her crêpe, or a stitch of clothes, and hugged him as if nothing at all had ever happened. Elizabeth had to cover Molly in a blanket and lead her back across the hall, but Tad was overjoyed. He came marching into my office like a trooper and sang in front of my whole darn Cabinet.

Mary Lincoln’s my Maw again,

Mary Lincoln’s my Maw again!

God save the Union, hurrah, hurray, hurroo!

I had to dress him most mornings. He wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to get him into his socks. But he had a new house to explore—the Presidential cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, an asylum for disabled veterans with its own secluded splendor, along the road to Silver Spring. I didn’t want to tell my boy that I was one more
disabled veteran
, desperate for a little break from the sad eyes of the telegraph office’s cipher clerk—with his cavalcade of dire news.

The Soldiers’ Home had the advantage of being in the hills three miles north of the capital, where no one could see Mother trot around
nek-kid
in front of her little boy. And we could avoid that thunderous roll of wagons carting night soil from the canal. The diggers on board would sing their drunken songs about some favorite harlot and topple off their wagons. I’d find them in the morning, under a tree in the President’s Park. And so we skedaddled to the Soldiers’ Home the second week of June; there were no drunken diggers or dead cats in these hills, no carcasses of rotting horses—just four cottages and a central asylum with a grand tower, where soldiers would lean over the ledge like circus devils and signal with their semaphores to the encampments down below. Tad often shared mess kits with some of these
active
soldiers. They dubbed Tad a
3
^rd
Lieutenant
, and made him part of the Presidential detail—the War Department had even conjured up a uniform for him.

The Presidential cottage, with its gables and chocolate-colored trim, was near the site of our first
national
war cemetery, and I could see that field of white stones and markers from my bedroom window. The casualties of Bull Run were buried in this tranquil retreat, but that relentless chip of the shovels wasn’t tranquil to mind or ear. We had new arrivals every week, more than thirty—boys who’d survived Bull Run with some horrendous wound and lay in a forgotten ward until they stopped breathing; other boys with brittle eyes who
disappeared
all of a sudden, and still others who had to be dug up from some distant cemetery and delivered to the Soldiers’ Home in a funeral truck or military ambulance.

The diggers sang to themselves—not bawdy songs, else Mother would have chased them from the grounds—just tunes about some sweetheart or lost Kentucky home. And ofttimes Tad would wander over to the graves in his uniform and bring them a piping pot of coffee together with Mary’s finest cups. But I couldn’t beat my own son to the checkerboard. The minute I descended the stairs, I’d discover Tad at the great big cloth board I’d carried from the White House, with the checkers all lined up, and Tad sucking at Bob’s Harvard pipe, without a pip of tobacco in its bowl.

“
Paw
, will ye take a game?”

I didn’t have my heart in it, not with the diggers who seemed just next door, with coffins that could have been varnished crows, and that chipping music in my ear, and Tad like a little general at the board, puffing on his pipe, while he leapt over my checkers with the merciless exuberance of a hussar.

“King me,
Paw.
”

I crowned a couple critters until I had to stare at a brace of checker-kings and wonder if I had any moves left. I couldn’t
hive
the enemy now, couldn’t own the board. A Commander-in-Chief was like a flatboatman who had to pilot his vessel from point to point and couldn’t set his course farther than the eye can clear. But I wasn’t much of a river pilot—or President—against Tad. He could have shucked me into the corner day and night, with his relentless leaps.

M
OLLY
WOULD
STROLL
the cottage grounds with a black-eyed Susan in her hair. Mind you, it wasn’t a sign of merriment; no country air could cure her of Willie’s death. She’d gone way inside where civil strife couldn’t interrupt her mourning. So I was stunned when Mary came up to me in her nightshirt with some of the old razzle in her blue eyes and that black-eyed Susan in her hair.

“Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “I’ve
seen
our boy.”

“Which one—Bob or Tad?”

“
Willie
,” she said. “Our beloved boy. He visited me last night, kissed me with his angel lips. He said I shouldn’t cry just because he had crossed over. We’ll all meet in Summerland, he said. And so I have been picking flowers, dear, to pass the time.
Susans for Summerland.
”

“Summerland? What’s that, Mother?” I asked, kind of jealous over her visiting rights with our Willie. “Is Summerland another cottage at the Soldiers’ Home?”

She wouldn’t allow my heathen heart to ruin her joy.

“Why, it’s heaven, dear. It’s where I’ll meet up with my two lost boys. And we shall never be lonely again. Father, the fightin’ would be done in a minute if you wore a posy in your hair.”

And she was even amorous after that. We hadn’t kissed in months—longer, not since Willie took sick and died. I’d been hungering for her, and never even noticed. But Molly was no mourner under her nightshirt. I hadn’t sniffed her flesh in such a long time. I was randy as a goat after she unbuckled my belt, and licked that gorge between her bosoms. She lay there like a luminous ghost, never moved once, but moaned with a child’s delight. And I had to thank Willie’s apparition for it.
Wasn’t
Willie
. It was those damn mediums who hit us like a plague of locusts in the summer of ’62.

Mrs. Keckly had introduced my wife to the world of mediums. She herself had once been part of the same spirit circle. So I caught up with Keckly, while she was delivering a satin dress to Mother. I met with her
in camera
, on the porch.

“Madame Elizabeth,” I whispered, like a man holding a pistol to her head, “do you believe in all that spirit stuff?”

“Yes.”

Keckly looked me in the eye, and was bold about it.

“That stupefies me,” I said. “My wife is gullible enough, and she’d shake the world apart to have what she imagined was a glimpse of her boy.”

“Well, sir, has she suffered from it? Mrs. President has been getting rid of her veils, hasn’t she? She’s been visiting soldiers at the hospitals, putting flowers on their pillows, acting as their scribe. . . . Hasn’t she been more of a wife to you? It sweetens her temperament to talk to Willie. Where’s the harm?”

Mrs. Keckly hadn’t been curtained off as a child in a Lexington mansion, like my wife. She’d been whipped and beaten, preyed upon by her master’s son and abused by other men. She still had welts on her back. She couldn’t have bought her own freedom without some hard sense, looked after her boy, and earned her keep as a couturière. She ought to have been a bit more skeptical about a place called Summerland.

“Madame Elizabeth, what’s it like—Lord Colchester’s little paradise?”

Keckly was much too clever to fall into one of my bear traps.

“It’s not his paradise to win or lose,” she said with a flutter of her lip.

I rolled my eyes and pretended exasperation when I was as calm and regular as the wind on my porch—it was much easier to make a point if some folks figured you were half insane.

“Will a body tell me what Summerland looks like? Is it an endless field of goldenrods where children who have crossed can romp without a single chore?”

“Mr. Lincoln, sir, it’s not a farm or a field. No mortal can imagine it, not even you. But it’s where I’ll meet my dead boy the moment I cross. And if it has horsecars for coloreds and horsecars for whites, I’ll kill those cars and bring my boy back down.”

Keckly didn’t vanish from our hill. She went back inside the cottage. Then other women came, the wives of certain Senators. And a few men marched up the hill, shady characters who hid their eyes under a hat. I couldn’t do a thing. They all had a pass from the Lady President. Then a stoutish man arrived, much more regal than the rest. He climbed out of a carriage and kept fingering a felt hat. I didn’t have to consult a medium to imagine who he was—Colchester, the charlatan himself . . .

Mary wasn’t amused—I’d invaded her sanctuary, and she didn’t like it. She was sitting around a long table I’d never seen before; it must have come from the attic—else that charlatan had borrowed this
spirit table
from his hotel. It was like a flimsy vessel that could seat twenty voyagers. Colchester’s table reminded me of a sinking barque. All the women were dressed in black, and wore their veils. Mrs. Keckly was with them, near my wife, while the charlatan’s male conspirators kept their hats tilted over one eye, like the Devil’s own dominion.

“Mr. Lincoln,” my wife said, without her Southern lilt, “have you strayed into our hall?”

That old fork of irritability appeared above her eyes. Soon her whole face rippled like a barn on fire. But Colchester calmed her down—as if she were his unruly colt. He had blue veins on both his cheeks and advertised himself as the illegitimate son of some baron.

“Mrs. Lincoln, I’m delighted to have the President. We have nothing to hide.”

“But he cannot sit at our table,” she said. “He will weaken our chain, and the electrical spark will never, never pass—Willie won’t talk to me with my husband in the hall. He will remain in the ether, lost to us. And I won’t allow that to happen.”

“He’s an intruder,” said one of the bereaved wives, her tongue poking through the veil like a pink spoon.

“Nonsense,” said Colchester, like some unctuous snake. He reminded me of Mother’s other confidant, Chevalier Wikoff, but Wikoff wasn’t half the scoundrel Colchester was. Wikoff didn’t prey upon bereaved mothers, didn’t pull on their purse strings and suck their blood. “We’re not a closed society—please sit with us, Mr. President.”

So I sat down between Keckly and the charlatan on one of the cottage’s cane chairs. There were no lectures or introductions, no wanderings of the piano, and not a single spirit rapped on the wall. We didn’t have to sit in the dark—the angels in Summerland weren’t shy about sunlight, it seems. Colchester asked us to clutch each other’s hand.

“That is paramount, Mr. President. Once our chain is broken, the spirits will slip right through your fingers.”