The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “For me?” Simion opened his silver eyes very wide. Lincoln could not help but be pleased with his manner. He wasn’t behaving like a child about to be lectured; there was no fear or sullenness in his demeanor. He’d made Lincoln the gracious gift of his trust. He was simply ready to listen.

  “For no other reason. Listen to me—I think I can get you out of here and into Yale by the time you are sixteen. I never have had any intentions of letting John Ezra keep you here. This town will kill you stone dead if I don’t get you out. I’ll teach you your Greek and every single other thing I know that might be of use to you. I’ll make sure that you’re ready to sail through that entrance comp when you go up there to take it. But I can’t do what I want to do for you unless you work with me. We have a very big secret here, and you mustn’t let slip the barest suggestion of my intentions for you. Do you understand? If you let slip an idea like this, you could get yourself maimed or killed. You could get me maimed or killed. A couple of nights in your father’s jail would just about cook my goose. So I need to be able to trust you, and you have to do exactly as I say. And you have to have patience! Patience is the hard thing for you, but you’ll have to manage it. Besides, if you don’t do your part in this and stop aggravating him for stupid, frivolous reasons, exercising your jaws and getting them slapped for your pains, I’ll stop your lessons,” Lincoln told him, “and if you miss many of them, you will most assuredly not get into Yale.”

  “I’ll behave.”

  “That was a little too fast,” said Lincoln. “It’s been like this ever since I took you to Charlottesville. I understand what’s itching you—you want out right now—I understand this business of wanting out right now. When I was in the hospital in Richmond getting packed in mustard plasters and being stuffed with sulfur tonic, I wanted out right then. But, after every cataclysm this fall, you and I talked, and you said you’d behave, and then you didn’t behave. Not sensibly. You tried for the last word in these exchanges with your father, and you might have gotten the last word, but you also got your little tail beaten black and blue. You appear to set a mighty store by the Last Word, but having the Last Word in an argument with a maniac is not important, at least in comparison with some other things. Such as getting out of this town in one piece and of sound mind. Are you following me?”

  “You’re saying I shouldn’t argue with him even when what he says is a big bloody lie?”

  “I’m saying that when he starts after you, you should aim to get out with as little harm as possible, and without giving him anything to think about. I’m saying that you must put a lid on all this cheap sass and know-it-all talk in which you’ve been indulging yourself all this autumn. You absolutely must, Simion. If you have a big sedition in the works—and my sedition for you is the size of Texas—you don’t draw attention to yourself with little ones. Do you understand?”

  “Like sins,” said Simion.

  “Exactly! So you’ll be hungry like the wolf and subtle like the fox—what implications does this have for your daily conduct?”

  “I’ll keep our secret. I won’t mouth off to Father,” said Simion.

  “Promise me. And remember that a man of honor keeps his word.”

  “I swear it,” said Simion. And, to the best of his abilities, he kept that covenant.

  Lincoln helped Simion to send off for his own Yale catalogue, a thing the child would do ritually each of the next few years, and kept after him to see that he kept this contraband hidden from John Ezra. He resisted John Ezra’s pressure to make Simion drill the younger scholars and take over more of the drudgery of teaching in preparation for full-time drudgery at the school.

  Over their next few years as companions and conspirators, Lincoln fed both the patience and the yearning like a pair of delicate flames.

  So, seven years—marked off not only in accomplishments and Yale catalogues, but in violence and damage. Lincoln’s health eroded under constant apprehension, a slow harm exceeding any good that the pure high air did him. John Ezra, meanwhile, devoted himself to his child’s spiritual development, inflicting sprains and bad bruises more often than not, but a concussion and a broken wrist too, and one time gave him a kick in the back that inflicted some obscure internal injury and terrified Lincoln over a fortnight in which the child’s urine was pink with blood. Several such times he watched Simion knit himself back together; yet there was one thing from which he mended least or not at all. He’d always been bothered by his wretched stomach, and now he was tormented by it. From the time of that first assault that Lincoln had witnessed at the dinner table, Simion seemed to have a stomachache as constant as some children’s runny noses, and he would touch only a few of the simplest foods. And those only under the quietest, most undistracted conditions—Lincoln could not have counted the times when it took him an hour to cajole Simion through a mouthful of meat and a baked potato. But for the schoolmaster’s secret bribes of chocolate or barley sugar, he mightn’t have eaten even that little.

  One way that Lincoln measured his victories was a series of ascending notches on his kitchen wall, where he marked off the level of the child’s fair head every few months. Teaching him was as easy as pouring water downhill, but those dated notches were among the more difficult rewards. Every inch and pound and winter without some harsh cold-weather illness or insidious cough mattered, and those were difficult gains.

  Still, in the seven years of the schoolmaster’s stay in Haliburton, they both would know the fierce happiness of revolutionaries, of those clinking glasses behind the barricades. Lincoln, his whole life warmly, dangerously illumined by his seditions, would think: “I’m father and mother to a genius, I’m the one forming him, I will pour everything I know into him, and Hell shall not be triumphant in this case.” Occasionally, cooking with fever in the cold black hand of those mountain nights, he would reflect that a singular honor had befallen him. Not only was he privileged to foster a genius, he’d been given his chance to make war upon the Adversary—upon backwardness itself, upon atavism in the flesh, not just upon some figure of religious fantasy in no wise so terrible as that black thing really is. In a curious way, his life had been given back to him. He carved Non omnis moriar! into the paneling of his bedroom wall, even as the number and seriousness of his lung hemorrhages rose and he got used to running a constant low fever—I shall not wholly die! And Simion took his princely education as the ultimate compliment, a pledge of his escape.

  The next autumn, when Simion was barely fourteen—his birthday fell on October 24, it was Allhallows—John Ezra ceased his growls and ham-handed sarcasms about useless so-called geniuses and declared war.

  Lincoln had been in such straits as to allow Simion to take over his classes for the last fortnight, and the irony of the situation was not lost upon the schoolmaster. He had also been the beneficiary of the boy’s very competent housecleaning and very amateur cooking during this period, for he was quite undone—he had only to get out of bed and walk through his rooms to feel his bones ache, his temperature rise. For this reason, he was in bed and as near as he could bear to idleness, with a Russian lexicon and a copy of Prestupleniye i nakazaniye—taking the solitary times between sleep and fever to learn another language. That was how he was occupied on the evening of the Feast of All Saints when he heard Simion’s frantic fists beating on his door.

  Simion pitched forward at his feet when he opened it. The boy bent double, as if he wanted to tie himself into a tight knot. Mouthfuls of blood, his salt and coppery life, and bile so brilliantly yellow that it made Lincoln think of poison, splatted onto the threadbare study carpet. As it had more times than he liked to remember, the electric shock that precedes terror, the dread of hearing the blood-cough from Simion, ran down Lincoln’s veins. Then he realized that Simion was not coughing but retching. It was awful-sounding retching, but it was not that breaking cough that was as good as a signed death warrant and a waiting hangman’s cart.

  “I’m bleeding,” he said. Lincoln could think of noth
ing but to pour ice water down Simion’s throat and give him some of the drops that Vickers had left for his own ailment. He pulled the goose-down puff off his bed and wrapped the boy up in it, for he had begun to shiver violently. He drew him into his bedroom, as near as possible to the fire, and held him through the shaking crescendo of the chill. Finally it seemed to subside.

  “But what—”

  Simion struggled to get his breath in and out a couple of times, then whispered. “Father’s angry,” he managed. “About…well…my taking over for you while you’ve been ailing this term.”

  “I’d like to know who else he thinks would be capable of such a thing—”

  “The point is, he’s found us out,” Simion got out. “He’s getting low on booze, so he’s foul and suspicious about everything. Now that I’ve been teaching your classes, he sees that I can, and to him that means that I ought to have been doing it all along, so that he…sorry, I’m just repeating his words…doesn’t have to pay you to lie abed. And he’s incensed at the despicable conspiracy we’ve practiced upon him, so he came at me…at supper, when this great light broke upon him…and he got me in the belly and I felt something give inside me, the place where it hurts a lot of the time anyway. I…he had his fork in his right hand like he intended to use it on me, so I didn’t have my eye on his left, and naturally he got me with it, and I started throwing up blood.” In a very small voice: “I’m scared. It’s worse than the other times he’s hit me. What do we do if he’s knocked a hole in me somewhere in there? Oh, God, it hurts!” Lincoln had not been able to conjure a reply before Simion drew tight again and brought up a mouthful of yellow bile brightly skeined with blood, then an almost undiluted red mouthful. Lincoln put his fingers to the boy’s head, his wrist; his forehead was cold and slick with sweat, his pulse fast and shallow. Simion went quiet and white, pulled his knees up almost to his chin, and lay there with his eyes closed.

  Lincoln felt that he really had no choice. “I’m going for Vickers,” he said, groping for his outdoor clothes.

  “But he said you were to stay in bed until the middle of November,” whispered Simion. “He said you weren’t even to go downstairs.”

  “I’m going for him. I thought I heard hooves—you rode Thistle over here, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m taking him. Then your father can’t follow me. Darkness…darkness is the trick here. I’m going to put out all the lights so he doesn’t think to come up here. I’m going to leave you one box of matches in case…something happens so you have to have light. Then I’ll take the rest of the matches with me so that in case he comes crashing in, he won’t be able to make a light and locate you. If you hear him, take your matches and that down quilt and get in the closet, pull the door to after you, and be quiet! I’ll be back the first moment I can. I want you to keep as still as you can until we get back,” said Lincoln, his tentative hand on Simion’s cold shoulder. They exchanged a look fraught with the same emotion, both of them keenly shamed at their powerlessness before the force of the fist.

  Lincoln tucked the covers up under the trembling boy’s chin, snuffed the lamps, and took a candle downstairs to light a lantern for his journey. With this lantern in one hand, he struggled onto John Ezra’s horse and struck off down the black road, into the black woods, and rode at an open gallop toward Mint Springs. The weary old animal’s every footfall seemed to vibrate through Lincoln’s thin body; he was queasy and dizzy from the jolting and the motion. Yet he managed to bring Vickers back in record time and hear the blessed words, “Naw, it ain’t his lungs, he hasn’t got the consumption. His lungs are clear to auscultation, I’ve been watching them like a hawk since…you know…anyhow, what he has is hellacious stomach ulcers,” said Vickers. “I’ve been thinking for a while that he was developing them, and now I’ve got my proof—you see this yellow bile and mucus along with that blood?”

  “Indeed I do. How dangerous are stomach ulcers?”

  “They’re no laughing matter. You’ve seen ulcers on old folks’ shins…happens when the circulation goes punk. Ugly-looking things. People don’t bleed to death from those, but his are tucked up in that hellish stomach of his with plenty of blood vessels near ’em, and we can’t put an ice pack on ’em if they let loose. They can hurt like Hell, and in the worst case, he could bleed to death from them. That probably won’t happen, but these ulcers, they’re debilitating. Make him queamish and queasy so he don’t half eat, and even the little bleeding spells run people down considerable. Look at him—shocky as he can be.” Vickers stroked his chin and felt in his pocket for his pipe, then thought better of it.

  “Well, what do we do about this?” Lincoln demanded.

  “I can leave him the same drops I compound for you, to slow the bleeding, but you and I know that medicines aren’t what he needs most. He has got to get clear of John Ezra, or I can’t vouch for him. You say he’s ready for college and you’ve been stalling on graduating him, I say go ahead and get him out of here.”

  “Yale won’t take him yet. You could enter at fifteen in my time, now you have to be sixteen at least,” said Lincoln.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because they’re afraid…what with all the work, and the cold and all…that sickly, precocious little creatures will take sick with the consumption,” said Lincoln, with bitter irony. “It’s a rule. They have it in the catalogue.”

  “Well, you ought to write ’em and see if they’ll make an exception.”

  “I’ve already written them, goddamn it to Hell! You think I haven’t?”

  “Write ’em again. Tell them that here we have a boy whose father is going to murder him if he has much more time to do the deed in. I’m going to leave you some paregoric to quiet his stomach down and make him stay still, and some drops that’ll thicken up his blood, like the ones I give you, Mr. Lincoln. What’s that you’ve been reading?” he asked—not because he was callous, but because he was seventy-eight years old, weary, and sick at heart with what he’d seen; thus his eyes lit willingly on the fallen Russian novel, which acted as a prop for the laws of natural irony. “That ain’t English. Ain’t even French.”

  “It’s Russian. It means Crime and Punishment.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Crime and punishment. And something all but unknown in this region. Remorse.”

  “You read too damn much, both of you,” sighed Vickers. “Reading saps the vitality.”

  “It’s what I do instead of drinking. Reading keeps me from having to think continually about what I see here and the essentially retrograde nature of humanity.”

  “You got you a point there,” sighed Vickers.

  The next morning, his whole skin prickling with fever-chill and excitement, Lincoln put on his best suit and crept downstairs to inform Darnley that he must assume the entire responsibility for the school that day. He took Thistle, still tacked up from last night, out of the school stable, and urged the horse up the town’s main street. John Ezra’s stable was the neatest and most innocuous-feeling part of his establishment, and the schoolmaster lingered there. He unsaddled Thistle and put his nose-bag on, giving him a few rubs with the currycomb while he ate. Finally he braced himself to go inside the house. He didn’t knock, for he knew that Jewel would only tell him that the Reverend was “resting.” Instead, Lincoln simply admitted himself by the front door, glimpsing the old harridan snoring by the kitchen stove and the ground-floor rooms in their natural squalor, and went upstairs. Through the open door of Simion’s room, Lincoln noted upon his desk the heap of themes he’d been correcting before his summons to supper and bloodshed.

  Lincoln then let himself into the reeking sanctuary where John Ezra “rested.” He had thought that he would sit there and let his hate seethe until the old beast woke up, but then it occurred to him that his plan was too sporting by half and that he’d do better to take John Ezra by surprise when he was groggy and unmanned. So he took John Ezra by the shoulder of his coat and shook
him ungently. John Ezra grumbled and let loose a loud blat of sour gas.

  “Ugh, you brute,” said Lincoln. He jabbed him in the belly with his index finger and got nothing but a grunt for his pains. Then his eye lit upon John Ezra’s straight razor and he considered the ease, the painless ease, of silently opening his throat from one ear to the next: Let him bleed this time. But practical considerations swayed him against it: the wild unlikelihood that he, in his own bled-white condition, could transport a critically ill child over winter wilderness to some outpost of civilization with a train station without being caught and without killing either or both of them with the exertion. Then he felt his mouth tighten, and in the mirror he saw that his whey-face could yet conjure a fiendish smile; he thought: “Yet there’s a way that requires no exertion at all and uses the weapon I already have.”

  Playing Erl-King to the Erl-King, he bent over the slack mouth and rebuked his own nausea and gave the creature a kiss crawling with enough germs to kill twenty decent people. It was a deep, luxurious kiss, full of deadly spit and administered in a transport of loathing so acute that Lincoln found himself panting like a dog when he finally pulled away. When he got his breath back, he spat several times into the cold hearth, then rinsed his mouth with the inch of icy water in the bottom of the pitcher. He felt a little crazy in the head, as if he’d been briefly insane while he did that. And it probably wouldn’t even give that invulnerable scum a cold.

  Wanting this over, he gave John Ezra some sharper shakes, then knelt behind him on the bed and used his whole strength to heave him over onto his side. He saw blue sparks before his eyes and felt his fever start to sing, so he took pause. John Ezra commenced to snore. When Lincoln felt steady again, he came round and took John Ezra by his coat shoulder and a handful of his pants and gave a mighty tug. John Ezra fell heavily onto the floor.