I Am Abraham (7 page)

“And how much in damages are you asking, Mr. Obadiah Young?”

The farmer kept staring around the store. We had an audience of onlookers, since Justice Green’s sessions were often the best entertainment in town, much more amusing than a monster show. I noticed Annie Rutledge slouching in a chair beside John McNeil. He was combing his whiskers and staring into her eyes.

“Five dollars,” the farmer said, holding up the fingers of one hand. “Or fifteen days of solid work.”

He seemed satisfied with his own summation, more than satisfied. His features were positively glowing, as if caught in the blaze of a fire.

“Efram Young, did you strike your father on the fifth day of September last?”

The boy was as sad a specimen as I’d ever seen. He had none of his father’s glow. And he had great trouble finding his own speech. His eyes were etched in darkness, even in the light of McNeil & Hill’s lamps. He pondered with a finger near his mouth, and finally he spoke in a voice pitched as high as my own. It was like a squeal.

“I did, Mr. Justice Lincoln.”

I had an inclination to hold the boy’s hand. “I’m not a regular justice of the peace, Efram. I’m only sitting in for the law.”

“Then what ought I to call you, sir?”

“Abraham, or Mr. Lincoln. . . . And why did you strike your own father on that fore-mentioned day?”

Again the boy withdrew into himself to find his words. It rubbed at my heart, but I dared not reveal my own sympathy.

“Because he t-t-t-tricked me out of my wages. A promise is a promise.”

And now the farmer rose up like a rooster and glared out his good eye. “I can promise him until an army of angels nest in my hair. It ain’t a binding contract. I
own
that boy, Mr. Lincoln—until Efram comes of age.”

But I could see that something else was troubling the boy; his eyes shrank deeper into his skull, and his shoulders shook, as if the
molding
of his body helped him shape his words, and he was a rifle about to spring.

“Pa beat me black and blue when I was a child,” he blurted out. “I ain’t never healed, Mr. Abraham. I’m
deef
in one ear.”

And now Obadiah snarled. “That ain’t relevant—not in this case. I can beat my son if he wants beating.”

My mouth commenced to twitch. I wanted to lash out at Obadiah, pummel him as I would have pummeled Pa, but I had to uphold the law. I’d listened to the judgments and readings of Justice Green. I’d watched him suffer under the rudeness of laws he had to defend.

“Lincoln,” he’d mutter over a game of checkers, “everything is open to interpretation.”

So I pondered for ten minutes, with a pulse beating near my eye like a hammer under my skin. “Efram Young,” I said, “you had no cause to strike your father. The court cannot condone it. But I will grant your father no damages. A contract is a contract, even if you are legally bound to him. . . . Obadiah, you will pay your son what you promised, and he will also work two weeks without profit. Illinois has spoken.”

That’s how Justice Green would finish his sessions.
Illinois has spoken
. I’m not sure I gave much satisfaction to Efram or his Pa, who searched around for a congenial eye. His son simply marched out of McNeil & Hill, like there was no substance to him at all, and he was a feather caught in the wind.

A substitute judge wasn’t allowed to celebrate the decisions of his court. But the spectators hurrahed and stamped their feet and poured punch into my mouth. Nothing excited them as much as a court case, where they could smell victory and defeat. I didn’t see Ann rejoice. She still slouched in her own brooding contemplation, as if she had been summoned to court as the first lady judge. Her beauty was reflected in the fireplace—the light broke against the walls, and her red hair seemed to blaze, as her bodice shifted in the shadows, grew larger and larger until it swallowed half the store. I wanted to leap into that reflection, lose myself in it. Ann was spoken for, but my nearness to her in the glow of the fire was like the deep whisper of a magical harp—that harp of a thousand strings.

Ann finally rose out of her chair and pecked at my arm with one finger; she had a tiny twitch between her eyes that she couldn’t control. “Why, Mr. Lincoln, that dear boy does appeal to me. But you cannot reward him for striking his father.”

McNeil was still combing his whiskers.

“Mack,” I asked, “do you agree with your intended?”

“Lincoln, I would have flayed that old skinflint alive, law or no law. What kind of a father would cheat his own boy?”

Mack’s announcement made me singularly sad. I’d dreamt of striking Tom Lincoln, not for any wages lost, but for my own birthright as a reader, for the hours I had to give up to drudgery, for the words I might have won over, for the scholar I might have become rather than a shipwreck caught in strings of language that would forever remain a mystery.

Then I recalled that Pa couldn’t read the Scriptures or a line of Shakespeare. He was the doomed ship, wandering in a sea without words. I pitied him for the first time in my life, or was that some frontier Satan mocking the pity I had for myself? I didn’t believe in Satan.

5.

Miss Ann

M
ACK
WAS
A
heart smasher with his own dancing walk in wine-colored shoes. He was the only one of us who carried Lord Byron in his saddlebags. That’s how he must have wooed Annie Rutledge. We all heard him recite from
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
.

And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart

And from his fellow bacchanals did flee . . .

But Mack had another name—McNamur. I’d first discovered it on a deed. And then I’d found it in letters addressed from New York. I didn’t spy on him as postmaster of New Salem, but I had to deliver John McNamur’s letters to John McNeil, the nabob of Illinois. Finally he confessed to Ann. His Pa had fallen into ruin near Albany, and Mack had come out west to make his own fortune. He’d changed his name to McNeil, he said, to keep his father’s ruin from falling on him. And now he was returning to Albany to rescue his father and mother and bring them out to his farm seven miles from New Salem, where he intended to make a home with his future bride.

Mack pleaded with me. “Will you look after her, Lincoln, for the love of Christ?”

There was talk that our Childe Harold was a gambler and a rake who would run out on his creditors every two or three years and
rekindle
himself. I didn’t believe it. He was our pilgrim, Lord Byron of the prairies, who’d abandoned “concubines and carnal companie” to be with Ann. The heart smasher rode off with tears in his eyes. Ann’s former suitors didn’t give Mack a moment of reprieve. They wanted Ann to break her vows. I heard them whisper about the sweetness of her berry bush. I won’t lie. I also dreamt of Ann’s dark aromas when I should have been protecting her from that vile brood of cock-suckers.

I kept away as much as I could, but Ann accosted me while I was carrying letters in my hat. “Lincoln, why haven’t you come courting?”

“Mack’s my friend.”

“Well,” she said, “that hasn’t stopped half the tomcats of New Salem. Didn’t you promise Mack to look after me while he was gone?”

I was a lustful, lying hypocrite, and my tongue got all twisted in my mouth. I yearned to see her naked, to touch all her parts, to feel her nipples and the fur between her legs. Her other suitors had tomcatted in every town, and all I ever did see was the outside of a crib-house in Orleans. But my tongue untwisted, and I rolled out another lie.

“I was mighty reluctant, Miss Ann. I didn’t want you to think I was readying to hop into Mack’s shoes.”

“Lincoln,” she said, commencing to laugh while I suffered, since her bodice was breathing like the Devil’s own engine. “You couldn’t walk within a mile of Mack’s boots. They come from a shoemaker in St. Louis who doesn’t even have to advertise his wares—Senators stand in line.”

And so I
courted
the town’s one and only sweetheart, but it was a courtship without a handle. We never kissed. We never went riding in the woods. I wasn’t much of a heart smasher. I delivered Mack’s letters and could see the excitement flare up on her face. She blushed at the very glimpse of the prize I plucked out of my hat. Then she’d go off to some hidden spot and read that letter. I knew she had memorized the words. She wouldn’t recite them to a cavalier in a ragged hat stuffed with letters, but I imagine they were as potent as Lord Byron’s lines.

Maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare . . .

She’d stroll right past me, muttering Mack’s words to herself. It was like an affliction. It lasted for a week. Then she would post
her
letter to Mack and look for Abe Lincoln, but I was a busy man, laying out new roads as land surveyor. I went at it with my marking pins, following the illusive line of the Sangamon River, like some Columbus with a sixty-six-foot surveyor’s chain. And if I couldn’t become a heart smasher, I wanted to be something else. I’d run for the Legislature right after I returned from the Black Hawk War. I didn’t know much about canvassing, and I was trounced—came in next to last. I could feel my own damn mortality, so I decided to make another run. I wasn’t for that dictator, Andrew Jackson, who squeezed the piss out of Congress and ruled over us as “King Andrew.” That heartless son of a bitch annihilated more Injuns than any other man in America and herded all the rest into the Territories—they were no more than cattle to King Andrew. So were his horde of
little people
—the Democrats—who helped him win. He beckoned them into the White House in their buckskin drawers.

I was a Whig, like the luminaries of the town. We despised anything to do with the dictator, yet I still had a strange affinity with him. He was a heart smasher who went about in the finest silk shirts and could draw crowds like a magnet in an electrical storm. And I knew I couldn’t win without that magnetism. So I campaigned in a silk shirt, like Andy Jackson—and Lord Byron. Jack Armstrong and his Clary’s Grove Boys were Democrats, but they decided to back their old captain. I ran across the county rubbing shoulders and shaking hands, with the Boys as my welcoming committee. Justice Green was my manager.

“Lincoln,” he said, “whatever stand you take, there’ll always be someone to take the opposite side. Best be neutral. That’s politics.”

“But it’s a coward’s way,” I said.

“Lincoln, it’s called electioneering. You can palaver all you want once you’re in the Statehouse. But until you get to Vandalia, you electioneer.”

So I marched around in the briar patches and was introduced as Captain Lincoln of the late Black Hawk War in Byron’s silk shirt with an open collar. I didn’t talk about voting privileges for the female population of Sangamon County. I didn’t mention those despots and dictators, the Democrats. I didn’t utter a word about education. I told tall tales, and the farmers liked them filled with smut. They couldn’t get enough of Marie Antoinette’s chamber pot or George Washington’s privy. And I borrowed some barnyard fables from Æsop, but instead of the Lion and the four Bulls, I had a Queen Lion.

“Boys,” I said, “the four Bulls had their designs on this Queen. They meant to poke her until she was silly.”

The farmers guffawed and slapped their thighs. But one of the farmers was a bit more perspicacious than the others.

“Captain Lincoln, a Lioness is still a Lion.”

“Sir,” I said, “the four Bulls couldn’t have subdued her singly. Their plan of battle was to steal upon the Lioness, and one would mount her while the others watched. But they’d never met a Lioness with a bread basket between her legs. She swallowed the four Bulls inside her royal quim.”

That’s how I proceeded until I didn’t have enough spittle to recite another tall tale. But I won a seat in the Legislature, with the second-highest score in Sangamon County. We had a torchlight parade. Justice Green led the parade with a cutlass that he tossed into the air like a baton. Children flew kites in my honor and wore devil masks; the kites glowed in the dark and swirled over the treetops like gigantic bats. The blacksmith’s wife danced with me. Rutledge near burned my scalp with his torch. “Hooray for Lincoln, hooray!” The luminaries slapped my back while they assessed my worth in the Legislature. Fizzle-sticks skated over my eyes. I was feeling as blue as a posthumous child. Seems like every soul in the county was there save one. And then she marched out of her father’s tavern. Her eyes had a terrible flicker in that flare of light. Some dark dream had invaded Annie Rutledge. For a moment I thought she had run off the track. But that darkness fled. And she was gentle Ann, who had nursed me through many an illness while I boarded at her father’s tavern.

I should have been ashamed, because I had lewd thoughts about Ann when I was slugging for votes—I’d endowed the Lioness in my fables with Ann’s own bodice and quim. I wasn’t ashamed at all. It was dreaming of her quim that drove me from campfire to campfire and made me feel
palpable
in my pantaloons.

“Did you miss me, Abraham?”

“
Yes
,” I howled like a tomcat. I wanted to squeeze her nipples and touch her down below. I wanted to break her teeth with my own sucking mouth. Æsop wasn’t in the barnyard. It was Abraham Lincoln, the teller of tall tales who had never been near enough a woman to break her teeth or breathe in the aromas of her berry bush.

I snuck off with Miss Ann right at the tail end of the parade, kidnapped her on my pony. I’d never been as bold in all my life, not even when I was a river pilot set upon by a small band of slaves that had been woken into thievery by their master. It was on the Mississip, outside New Orleans. I flew at them with both arms while their white master watched from the shore. “Slug him, Jefferson,” he said, “slug him, John.” My heart was thumping like a crazy man as I pitched them into the water. But it thumped much faster now.

“Where are we going, Abraham?”