The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories (11 page)

Lincoln offers a throaty laugh. His long earlobes, mossed with fine hairs, jiggle. “I see.” He plucks at Douglass's silk cravat. “And from whom does this finery derive?”

Douglass displays a band of teeth, fingers the cloth. “This? Hmmmm. Let me see.” He tips the flask. “The good widow Winchester, I believe.”

“Yes?”

“If memory serves.”

“You have had the good fortune of good widows.”

“Indeed.”

“You have provided them a great comfort, I suppose.”

“So I am given to understand.”

“I
HAVE JUST
had the oddest dream,” Lincoln says. “Do you remember the flatboat, Mary? Did you know me then? I was there, on the river. The air was like jelly, thick and full of fruit. And do you know what was with me? You will never guess.”

Mary does not answer. She is occupied at the task of scratching flowers off the bedside wallpaper with a butter knife.

“I
WAS MADE
happiest, by jing, at my election as captain of the volunteers in the Blackhawk War.”

“You look something like an Indian,” Douglass says. “Your cheeks appear chopped at.” They are past the Mason-Dixon, floating from St. Louis into Trapville.

“And then my days rail-splitting.” Lincoln sips at the flask, wipes his mouth with his wrist, and shambles to his feet. With great ceremony, he spits into one palm, then the other, lifts an invisible hammer over his head, and brings it down onto an equally invisible spike. His height is accentuated by a certain unconsummated grace. “I worked with a fellow named Cooper. His arms were like bolts of
pig iron. He celebrated every tie with a song. ‘The Sword of Bunker Hill.' ‘The Lament of the Irish Immigrant.' Do you know that one, Douglass?”

“No.”

Lincoln, still hammering, begins to sing in a reedy baritone:

I'm very lonely now, Mary
For the poor make few new friends

“Will you join me, Douglass?”

“Not just yet, Mr. President.”

“We laid track from New Salem to Bedford. In the evenings, Ann would rub my shoulders.”

“Ann?”

“With liniment.”

“Ann whom?”

Lincoln has sweat through his undershirt. His face is lit with a sudden exhaustion. “Perhaps that is what I meant to remember,” he says softly. Lincoln gazes at Douglass for a long while. “They shall set us against one another, friend, we men of honest labor, with our women between us. You do understand that, don't you?”

L
INCOLN
'
S FIRST VISION
occurs in 1860, following his election as president. He is reclining in his chambers at the Springfield courthouse, facing a looking glass. In this glass he sees two faces at once, both his own. The first is full of a healthful glow. The second reveals a ghostly paleness. He repeats this experiment no fewer than six times. On each occasion, the illusion reappears.

T
HE FLASK IS DONE
at dusk. Both men have stripped down to skivvies. “Honest Abe,” Douglass says.

“I cannot tell a lie.”

Douglass smiles. “Have you ever kept a pet, Honest Abe?”

“As a lad, I trained a jackrabbit to eat from my hand.”

“I should have thought a jackass.” Douglass strides to the edge of the flatboat and spits. “Sometimes I dream I am kept as a pet. With many merry widows to feed me carrots and meat and bits of books. My cage is made of woven flax and goldenrod.”

“That calls to mind a story, Douglass, of the merchant with a half-wit son. It seems the boy required a sip of molasses before he would to bed each night.”

“How has this anything to do with a cage?”

Lincoln frowns. “Yes. I see.” Quite independently, the pair dissolve into giggles. “Oh my,” Lincoln says.

“Yes?”

“I must relieve myself.”

Douglass issues a clarion blare through his fingers: “The business of the presidential bladder must be attended to,” he announces. “Please clear a path for the presidential indiscretion.”

Lincoln lurches toward the edge of the flatboat. He appears, at best, a man stapled together. “The bank,” he says, pawing the air.

“So then, must we by needs speak of the presidential bowels?”

“Stop it now, Douglass. Push on toward the bank.”

“Yassah!”

The vessel comes to settle in a stand of reeds. Lincoln tumbles into the water and lets out a whoop. He dogpaddles to the shore, his coarse hair washed off his forehead. Douglass notes the odd shape of his skull, as if someone had pinched him about the jaws and sent the remaining bone ballooning up. He has a small man's face, the eyes of an obedient dog. Lincoln straggles to his feet, britches clinging pinkly to his bottom.

“I am a teapot, Douglass,” he hollers. “Here is my spout.”

D
OUGLASS FINDS
L
INCOLN
alone, reclining on a settee in the West Wing. His eyes are shut, and the puffed flesh beneath them is the color of cherrywood. Douglass retreats to the doorway.

“Don't run off, Douglass,” Lincoln says, though his eyes remain shut. “I was just now thinking of you.”

“Were you?”

“Indeed. I dreamt us together. You were very brave, Douglass. You tried to save me.” Lincoln touches his beard. “Did you know, friend, that I suffer from a kinship with the shades?”

Douglass grins. “Do you?”

“For years, I have known I shall suffer a violent end.”

“That is nonsense, sir. You are surely protected.”

“I am afraid not, Douglass. That is only a belief to ease the moment. God alone can disarm the cloud of its lightning. Do you agree, Douglass?”

Douglass tries to speak, but his throat constricts, as if clenched by a fist.

Lincoln doesn't seem to notice. “For a man to travel to Africa and rob her of her children—that is worse than murder by my hand. Soon, I believe, the people of the South shall be touched by the better angels of our nature. Consider Goethe: ‘Nature cannot but do right eternally.' Are we men not a part of nature?”

“Yes,” Douglass says. “On earth and in heaven.”

Lincoln opens his eyes and Douglass notes how red they are, like portals of blood. “I am afraid with all my troubles, I shall never get to the place you speak of, friend.”

Douglass is halfway returned to New Bedford before he
realizes the source of his disquietude: Lincoln seems to have derived a strange succor from his rumination, as if grief were his only dependable ally.

W
HAT SORT OF
affiliation is this, Douglass wonders, that seeks to undo a natural repulsion? I do not understand Lincoln, nor he me. We are like two polite giants sharing the same bed and pretending not to mind. Perhaps we are friends because we must not be enemies.

Douglass peers through the telescope he has mounted on a small rise behind the White House. Lincoln is at the window behind his desk, gazing out from the dimmed room. His lips are moving, almost imperceptibly. He looks as if he has been there for years.

“I
AM PUBLIC
property now,” Lincoln tells his marshals. “Open the curtains at once.” They are returning to the capital from Antietam by carriage. “I shall not cower in this absurd darkness at the very moment when my behavior should exhibit the utmost dignity and composure.”

“Mr. President—”

“Who should want to harm me? This is nonsense.”

“But sir—”

“And what if I should die?” he mutters. “Would any of you be so much worse off?”

The marshals part the curtains. Lincoln stares into the night, his beaked profile cast in bronze by the carriage lantern. For the rest of the trip, as the corpses and shanties tumble past, his marshals puzzle over this odd vehemence; whether it is simple pride, willed naïveté, or a variety of reckless self-determination.

L
INCOLN AND
D
OUGLASS
lie together, beneath the stars. Without the gas lamps of Washington and New Bedford, the night sky appears far closer.

“Am I so ugly?” Lincoln says.

“I'm afraid so.”

“Ape-like? That is what they say, is it not?”

“Only some of them.”

“And the others?”

“‘Rawboned,'” Douglass says ruefully. “Sometimes ‘goonish.'”

“Would you believe that I dreamed to be a stage actor when I was a lad?”

“Or that I dreamed to be a free man?”

“Please,” Lincoln murmurs. “Some restraint, Douglass.”

“C
OME AWAY FROM
there,” Mary says. “What are you looking at? What is it you see in that infernal mirror?”

D
OUGLASS LIES IN
the crook of Lincoln's arm. From above, where the night clouds puff like whipping cream, their two forms compose a chain link.

“Tad plays a sort of theater game in his closet,” Lincoln says.

“He is your third?”

“Fourth.”

“And the others?”

“Eddie died at three. And Willie, Mary's favorite, just last year. Tad will die too, just before his eighteenth birthday. Sometimes, it seems everything I touch dies.”

Douglass lays his hand across Lincoln's chest. “I am not dead.”

“No. There is that.”

“I
T SEEMS STRANGE
how dreams fill the Bible. I can not say that I believe in them, but I had the other night an episode which has haunted me ever since. Afterwards, I opened the Bible to the 28th chapter of Genesis, Jacob's wonderful dream. I turned to another page, then another, and at every turn encountered some reference to a dream or vision.” Lincoln rubs his eyes. “Saul. Nebuchadnezzar.”

He is standing at the window behind his desk, facing away from his wife, who has entered in her elaborate bedclothes.

“Come away from there, Abraham.”

Lincoln can see her reflection in the glass, her mouth set in a line.

“Come to bed. You are talking in riddles again.”

“Not riddles, dear. Dreams.”

“What is the difference?”

Lincoln glances about. The lamps are dimmed, the brownish light best suited to a séance. Stacks of papers rise around him. “Have you noticed how this office has come to resemble a crypt?”

Mary yawns. “If you would simply keep your affairs in order.”

P
ASSING INTO
G
REENVILLE
, Douglass tosses in his bedclothes. His head aches miserably. Night lends the willows on either bank the appearance of hunched croppers. From behind them, a figure drifts forward, an apparition in gray muslin. Husks of corn lay gnarled in his hair. He stops short of the water, hovering, and moans.

A fury, Douglass thinks. I shall ignore him.

“Yes. I've no business with you, nigger. You are just a fat mouth, a chest full of dull powder. I have come for him. He is mine, now.”

“Yours?”

“Surely you don't imagine him to be
yours
?”

The fury opens his black mouth and shivers with laughter.

Douglass shakes Lincoln, thinking to secret him to the other bank. “Lincoln. Arise, Lincoln.”

Lincoln lies perfectly still, swaddled in his blanket. The night smells sticky and wrongly sweet.

“Please, Lincoln, arise!”

“A
BOUT TEN DAYS
ago I retired late, Mary. I was awaiting word from Appomattox. Do you remember the night? I fell into a slumber, standing right here, on this very spot.”

“Abraham. Please.”

“Soon I began to dream. I felt a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a great number of people were mourning. I wandered downstairs. There, the silence was broken by the same sobbing. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same sounds of distress met me as I passed along. The rooms were lit and every object familiar to me, but where were all the people?”

“I am leaving—”

“I was puzzled and alarmed. I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments.”

“Stop this! I will not hear another word.”

Lincoln hears her footsteps retreating.

“Around this corpse were stationed soldiers acting as guards and a throng of people gazing upon the corpse, whose face was covered. Others wept pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The president' was his answer. ‘He was killed by an assassin!' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream.”

He is still at the window, regarding the night. “Well, it is only a dream, Mary. Let us say no more about it, and try to forget it.”

Douglass, perched behind a telescope on his hillside, watches Lincoln's lips, at last, grow still.

T
HE FLATBOAT GLIDES
along toward the Gulf of Mexico. On the far bank, a group of Negroes circles a modest grave. A preacher, his robe frayed and torn, shovels dirt into the pit. A woman cries out. The dawn has made everything wet.

Lincoln climbs groggily to his feet. “My God,” he says. “My head feels like a rifle tamped to fire.” He rubs his temples and surveys the scene. “Who are they mourning, Douglass?”

Douglass shakes his head.

“Speak man.”

“I don't know.”

“Perhaps we can offer a prayer.” Lincoln directs the flatboat toward the shore.

“It is too late, sir.”

“Have you no compassion, Douglass? Stay a minute and offer condolences. Perhaps the slain—”

“Please, Lincoln, let us pass along.”

“They are mourning, friend. We shall exhibit some grace. We must not deaden ourselves to grace.”

The preacher pats a final scoop of dirt. The mourners turn, begin to file away from the bier. With a start, Douglass notes a single white face among them: the president's wife, in a plain silk kerchief. Lincoln seems to notice nothing. He presses condolences onto the preacher, whose eyes bug in astonishment.