I Am Abraham

by Charyn, Jerome

  “Miss Ann,” I said, “you’re far, far from twenty-one.”

  I tried to kiss her, but she pulled away. The light in the clearing burnt a deep red in her hair. My whole damn body was like a wounded pulse. And Miss Ann seemed to take a little pleasure in my pain.

  “We’re back to bargaining,” she said. “Well, Mr. Lincoln, what would you like?”

  “To see under your bodice,” I said.

  The words could have flown from the beak of some bizarre parrot. That’s how wildish they were. But she didn’t blush to hear them. And she didn’t look down as she removed her bodice and her chemise. Her silver eyes were fixed on Abe Lincoln. My knees buckled out for a moment. Even my pony stared at her bosoms. They were higher and firmer than I had ever imagined, the nipples pink in the sunlight, each breast with tiny islands of blue veins.

  I didn’t howl in the warm wind that came off the little trees. I reached over and touched her nipples with my rough hands. Then I surveyed her breasts with the same hands. In all my dreams I couldn’t have created another such delight. The pony snorted.

  Ann had freckles on her shoulders. We stood like that, my hands trying to remember the contours of her flesh. I can’t even say how long we were in the clearing . . . until she broke the spell in a voice that was half a whisper.

  “Abraham, that’s more than Mack has ever seen.”

  She was shivering now. She put her chemise back on, and I hoisted her into the saddle; we rode in silence, with Annie near the horn.

  6.

  Vandalia

  THE STATE CAPITAL was a town of eight hundred citizens, with its own peculiar civilization—you could find a passel of squaws, hucksters in velvet hats, women in the finest skirts, cardsharpers in candle-lit coffeehouses, and Legislators who had to live in one of Vandalia’s clapboard inns—I chose the Sign of the Green Tree, which might have also been a haven for gamblers and whores. I had two other bed companions at the Green Tree; one slept with a pocket pistol under his pillow, and the other slept with a knife.

  The long carriage ride must have weakened my fortitude, because I doubted whether I would survive Vandalia’s own vandals and varmints who might steal your wallet and slit your throat while bathing in French perfume. That was called frontier justice. But I was tall enough and mean enough to navigate on my own. The harlots in petticoats and dainty boots followed me along patches of winter grass that masqueraded as sidewalks in Vandalia. They had hideous smears of lipstick on their mouths and as much war paint as one of Black Hawk’s braves. Their eyes looked like bits of burning charcoal.

  “Mr. Long Man,” they cooed, “would you like to take a trip to paradise?”

  And while they cooed and grabbed at my arms, a dwarf would come out of nowhere, creep under my coattails, and commence a digging expedition in my pockets. I had to hurl him into the frozen streets by his outsized head, or suffer the fate of a pauper.

  Soon the harlots and their dwarf accomplices tired of me and moved on to another Legislator. There was an endless flow of human traffic; I saw bodies, alive and dead, curled up in some dank corner. Vandalia had a hurdy-gurdy man, who cranked up his mechanical banjo and croaked Christian hymns with all the raucous holler of a bullfrog. It mortified me to listen. He could have been stealing from Annie’s own hymnal.

  Vain man, thy fond pursuits forbear . . .

  Reflect, thou hast a soul to save.

  I’d swear he was a spotter for pickpockets and thieves. I avoided him and all the other likely birds of prey. But I was still in mortal danger at the Legislature. The Statehouse, which had collapsed in a firestorm, was rebuilt with shoddy material. This ramshackle pile of brick faced the town square like a tottering, two-story mountain. There must have been leakage throughout the building, since the walls bulged in peculiar places, and we all had to worry about plaster missiles falling upon us. I never entered the building without my hat.

  The Senate convened right over our heads, while we lower members of the Elite occupied a less grand salon on the ground floor. We could hear the Senators tramp around in the midst of their sessions; the ceiling swayed, the dust flew, and we soldiered on, with cracks appearing in the walls. On several occasions we had to run for our lives.

  Members of the lower house sat three to a table in chairs that could be moved about. We had cork inkstands and quill pens, and a gigantic sandbox served as a spittoon. For refreshment we had a pail of water and a quota of tin cans that hung from a wall. And our evening sessions were lit by candles in great brass holders, leaving shadows on the wall that looked like a constant camel train.

  I was the youngest member of the lower Elite—that’s what I had been told. And I kept to Justice Green’s credo, remaining as silent as I could. Surrounded by lawyers far richer than Abe Lincoln, I resolved to listen. And while more practiced Legislators championed their own pet bills, I joined a committee or two, shook hands in the halls, and discovered as much as I could about border passions and frontier politics. Others speechified about incorporating banks, bridges, and female academies, but I couldn’t have done much to widen or deepen the Sangamon River, even if I had politicked day and night. We didn’t incorporate too many female academies, but we did appropriate funds for the killing and maiming of wolves and wild cats. I can’t recall how I voted on that measure.

  I sat with pen and paper at the Sign of the Green Tree half a dozen times, but I couldn’t seem to accomplish a letter to Ann. It wasn’t Mack, or the ghost of him, who got in the way. Mack wasn’t such a heart smasher, more like an invisible man. I jerked my own jelly night after night, with spiders and ants as my lone companions in the privy, while I rose above the stink and dreamt about her aromas and red bush. I kept imagining Ann under a wedding veil, and it frightened the tar out of me—I wanted to rip that veil and run like a prairie hog. But I heard her Bible songs in my ear.

  What are thy hopes beyond the grave?

  How stands that dark account!

  Vandalians were making a rumpus in the next room. The lantern shook. I shivered in my nightshirt. And like a fool with his own dark account, I never writ that letter to Ann.

  A CELEBRITY HAD COME to the capital. The generals had used some of Black Hawk’s own stealth to wear him down and capture that old warrior, and now the country had put him on display. He wasn’t shackled. He met with that dictator, Andy Jackson, at the White House. He stood with Jackson in the East Room—general to general, king to king—while an artist sketched them together and Jackson palavered about peace treaties with Black Hawk’s band, when he was nothing but an Indian killer with a chief on his hands too famous to kill. And then Black Hawk was hustled off to a fortress inside Virginia. He remained there less than three weeks. He’d become a national sensation, like a monster in his own monster show. He even wrote his autobiography—The Book of Black Hawk. It was the first account of an Indian chief that ever appeared in the press. He went on a speaking tour—the crowds lined up for him in Philadelphia and Baltimore, entranced by an Injun in a blanket who could vanish with all his warriors into the wind. People wanted him to vanish right there—he wouldn’t. They were still eager to hear about his late rebellion against Illinois.

  But the Vandalians didn’t consider him much of a warrior. He was no different from a caged animal. They built a straw dummy of Black Hawk and set fire to it. He had a hard time lecturing at the town hall. A dozen soldiers stood near Black Hawk to guard him from any threats to life and limb. He was wearing a silk hat over his Indian bonnet—and a frock coat, like some medicine salesman. People wanted to know why he had murdered women and children. They were mystified when he answered without the help of an army interpreter. His English was far more melodious than theirs. They were struck dumb by the sound of it, yet I grabbed at every word. It near ripped my throat to listen—and watch a man with such skill and pluck treated worse than a zoo animal in the capital of Sangamon County.

  “I did not murder,” he said, like some tragedian at a playhouse. “Children died. That is tr
ue. But I took no delight in this. I fought to save my homeland. I had to set houses on fire, or the white generals would not listen. They were deaf to all my pleas. ‘Go away, Black Hawk,’ they said. ‘Go away. You are a nuisance.’ And so I made them listen.”

  The audience was silent for a moment. Folks hadn’t expected to meet an Injun with a logic as fine as any white man’s. Then they grew angry. And they wanted to attack the stage.

  “Liar, liar,” they shouted, “you and your devil tongue.”

  A small army of them strode onto the platform and were ready to tear into Black Hawk, even with a dozen soldiers at his side. These were Andy Jackson’s scalp hunters in another guise. So I leapt onto the stage and hurled them one by one into the laps of their neighbors as gently I could.

  “Who is that giant?” the audience screeched. “Is he an Indian agent who’s gone sour?”

  “No, no,” someone shouted from amidst their fold. “That’s Long Lincoln, the Legislature man from New Salem.”

  “Well, he’d best account for himself before we hang him with the Injun.”

  I stood in front of Black Hawk, who hadn’t twitched once, while his bodyguards hugged each other and moved away from him.

  “I’ll account for nothing,” I said in my reedy voice.

  Folks guffawed in their seats. “Friends, he’s as fine as any soprano.”

  I didn’t have to ask the gods for help—the reediness went away. And my voice could have shot out of a barrel.

  —I’ll account for nothing.

  I commenced to pace that platform like a panther in a tall hat.

  “I fought against this man,” I said. “I would have followed his tracks, but there weren’t any. He saved a young girl from getting scalped, and to calm her down he read Lord Byron to her.”

  “Who’s Lordy Byron?” someone rasped with mischievous delight.

  “Shut your trap!” said another from the opposite end of the hall. “That’s Captain Lincoln. I rode with him in the Sangamon brigade.”

  “Then why don’t he talk like a soljer.”

  “Because,” said this unnamed recruit of mine, “that’s the way a real soljer talks.”

  I watched that orneriness grow as I paced the platform—the beady yellow eyes that jumped out of the semidarkness. Vandalia wasn’t a town that believed in too many lanterns inside its town hall.

  I may have won a seat in the Legislature, but I didn’t have much purchase here; I could calm this mob for a minute, distract it, but little more than that—these Vandalians belonged in a circus, not Black Hawk.

  I whispered in a soldier’s ear, and we marched with Black Hawk behind a public curtain, while the audience hectored us and stamped their feet.

  “Kill Black Hawk and the Injun lover!”

  The soldiers clamped on their bayonets with jittery hands as we went out the rear door and climbed into a military ambulance. Vandalians hissed and hurled mud cakes at us all, but Black Hawk never wavered in the carriage. He had a lot more dignity with mud all over him than most suckers with mud on their coats. I wasn’t as gallant as Black Hawk—I ducked those mud pies. I accompanied him and the soldiers to the edge of Vandalia and climbed down from the carriage.

  He spoke to me for the first time.

  “You have courage, Captain Lincoln.”

  “Majesty,” I said, “I jest climbed on a platform and yodeled a bit.”

  He shook his head. “Not that. It takes courage to return to such loud people.”

  And I found myself in a predicament, having to defend white folks to a king.

  “You must have had some troublemakers in your tribe.”

  He laughed with his yellow teeth. He had real juice in his eyes. “Yes, but they do not talk constantly and make an ugly face that could frighten a squirrel . . . and you must not praise me so much, Captain. I remember you and your riders. My own riders were fascinated by the size of your head. We are not as civil as you have made us. My riders would have liked to have your head as a trophy.”

  “Then why didn’t you give it to ’em?” I asked like a substitute judge at Justice Green’s court.

  “I nearly did.”

  And he rode off in that ambulance, a king in an alien land.

  7.

  Snow Bride

  I DIDN’T EXPECT A bunch of dwarfs to clap at me with their cymbals, and white horses to dance in the snow with silver ribbons on their legs. Still, I did expect some kind of a homecoming. I had none at all. I landed in New Salem in the middle of a storm—the flakes were sharp as crystal and scratched my cheeks. I couldn’t even return to my old room at Rutledge’s tavern. Rutledge had winked out while I was in Vandalia. He removed to Mack’s old farm, seven miles from New Salem, but I did find Ann wandering about near the tavern, with snow on her eyebrows. She must have been collecting things for her Pa. But she shied away from me and cringed, as if I’d come to deliver a blow. And she sang from the Book, like a woman trying to break some deep spell.

  There is none holy as the LORD: for there is none beside Thee: neither is there any rock like our God.

  She was summoning up her own strength. “Abraham,” she cried, “I’m worse than Jezebel. I lured you into the wild and stripped down like a harlot.”

  My knees were knocking. I would have clung to Ann, kissed her eyes, her ears, and cheeks almost as hollow as mine, if only she had let me cling.

  “Miss Ann, I’ll treasure that moment in the woods all my life.”

  She tittered like someone half crazy as she peered from beneath her winter shawl.

  “You could be Satan come to taunt a troubled girl,” she said.

  “Satan wouldn’t have such big hands and feet. He’d mask himself as a much prettier man.”

  “Abraham, why didn’t you write from Vandalia, or send me a crushed flower in the mail?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was like a circus dummy in the snow. The trees had gone as bald as convicts, but I was bold enough to grip her hand in the dark.

  “We could run away,” I said.

  I could have been a leper with a leprous hand. That’s how quick she broke free. “And become your whore, I suppose—your pretty lady. And live without the benefit of the Book?”

  With Ann around I didn’t feel a failure washed ashore like river trash. “But I could marry you.”

  “It would still be a sin,” she said. “I’m pledged to another man. I’d have to writ him a letter and ask for my release . . .”

  “I’ll write Mack,” I said.

  Now her silver eyes wandered in different directions. “Don’t you dare—I’d have to move into the wilderness, or else marry that sinner Sam Hill. He offered to buy me from Pa. I’ll become his harlot with a bridal veil. I’d rather run nek-kid in front of a thousand men.”

  “I wouldn’t let ye.”

  And she laughed. “Abraham, we’re just too poor to marry.”

  We were too poor. I didn’t even own my saddle. That was the crusher. But she fell into my arms, as if she were my bride. We kissed until our mouths were flecked with blood, and she rubbed into me—I prayed my jelly wouldn’t spill. We ran inside the gutted bones of the tavern until the storm broke. I was reckless with my bride, carrying her onto a pony I borrowed from Justice Green’s barn. Ann slept in my saddle, my little horse with rags around his hooves to keep us steady in the snow. But the snowdrifts were too deep. And I had to pilot my pony from the ground, clucking at him and pulling at the reins. I near lost my way in a narrow patch of woods.

  Ann must have woken from a dream. The woods were dark, even with that eerie white blanket. There wasn’t much of a moon, and the wind was howling.

  “Abraham,” she asked, “where are you, honey?”

  “With you and the horse.”

  “I have a solution,” she said. “We’ll get rich and pay off what my Pa owes Sam Hill and Mack. We’ll go someplace fine—after we’ve been to the preacher and you promise not to stray from the Book.”

  “Promise,” I said. B
ut I’d already strayed. I was deef to God, like King Saul. I couldn’t hear His voice—only Ann’s. I’d read the Book, how Saul tried to kill that ruddy boy, David, God’s anointed one. I wasn’t anointed. I was closer to Saul, that unholy king who was higher than any of the Hebrews from his shoulders up. We were both cut loose from other men.

  We’d arrived at the gate of the farmhouse. I carried her down from the saddle, would have carried her to the farmhouse door, but she knocked away my tall hat and tugged at my scalp.

  “I’d best go in alone.”

  A fork appeared in her forehead, like some thunderbolt under the skin. Her eyes were wandering again. The warmth was gone. She could have been a witch, passing over into the other world, not my Ann, but a shouter who had shoved me away.

  The Lord killeth and maketh alive; he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up . . .

  She was like a gunslinger with the Book, could spit from the Bible with both barrels. She ran into the snow—I thought it would bury her alive, but she waded deeper until she got to the door.

  I stood there with my pony, a sinner in the dark. Our tracks were gone. We could have been stuck in a wall of white cake. The silence in the woods was unnatural. The wind had died, or fled to another county. And that’s when I saw him, a great big black bear prowling in all that whiteness, his eyes red as a silk garter strap, but raw red, with a crazy dance. He must have been starving. I clutched my pony’s ear, kept him from kicking and shying, yet I couldn’t look away from the bear’s red eyes. The Lord might have sent him searching for sinners. He rose up on his hind legs, swiped at the air with his claws, and raced into the wilderness like a furry black furnace breathing yellow fire.

  8.

  Unholies

  GOD WAS ABSENT from Illinois that summer of 1835. The rain pounded relentless and wouldn’t let up until the wells overflowed and washed cabins over the cliff, and New Salem was like some ark on the Sangamon River, but with an outbreak of brain fever. It was the hottest summer in history—apples fell from branches like dry little bombs; flowers closed tight as fists—and the fever struck like lightning. Sam Hill wandered in the streets, with his galluses near his ankles, his eyes ablaze, his cheeks flooded with a green fluid. The blacksmith’s wife ran into a wall and split her head so deep, we feared she wouldn’t survive. Our doctor’s little girl went raving mad; she bit her own Pa and ripped at whoever came near her with her long fingernails. Coffins had to be built, and I became the coffin builder.