by Laura Argiri
“Dear me,” said Lincoln, when the ogre had struggled to sit up and had descried him there. “You fell out of bed.” Never mind that I tumbled you out and used my next-to-last strength to do it. “You must have been drinking.”
“Impossible. I never drink.” John Ezra rubbed his head. “How dare you calumniate me, sir? And how did you get in here?”
“I heard you fall,” said Lincoln sweetly. “I was just coming up to discuss something with you.”
“Last I heard, you were too ill to come downstairs.”
“I still am, but as you can see, I’m here regardless. With a temperature of a hundred and two, which makes me somewhat punchy and jocular, but—I wanted to tell you that your son is in my flat. He knocked on my door last night a few minutes after you hit him. He had a gastric hemorrhage, Vickers said, from stomach ulcers. He’s very ill, in danger even, and Vickers says he isn’t to be moved, so I’ll keep him with me for the meantime. You receive that intelligence with the most astonishing lack of normal human response, sir.”
“Oh, keep him awhile if you like. I hadn’t noticed his absence. You and he can lie up on couches all day and read poems like the pair of spoilt belles you are at heart. He’s the most useless boy in Christendom, and you’re the most useless schoolmaster. Now go downstairs and tell Jewel to bring my coffee.”
“Go tell her yourself. She’s your own harpy-for-hire. Why don’t you ask her to marry you while you’re there? The two of you are a marriage made in h…eaven.”
“Are you being insolent, sir?”
“Probably. Get up and call your own old revenant and ask her for your own coffee.”
John Ezra looked at him then in a more focused and venomous way than he’d expected, and Lincoln felt fear for the first time that morning—he was lightly delirious, but he felt the cold little blade of dread on his nape. Then he thought: “What can he do to me? I can’t do worse than to die. Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, though I have no god, and if this man finishes me, I shall still be some form of myself, and free. So what have I to lose?”
“Hear me out, Reverend. I’m not here to ask you foolishness like why you do these things and why you don’t adore the ground your son walks on. I’m here to say, if you’d like to forget that you ever had a child, and never spend another penny on him, that can be arranged. I’ll do it for you. If you like, I’ll take him off your hands,” Lincoln said. “When he’s well enough to travel, I’ll take him, and we’ll simply go. You wouldn’t hear from him again. He could change his name and sever…all ties. The way you’re going, you’ll have his blood on your hands figuratively and literally and every way in between.”
“Did he put you up to this?” asked John Ezra sharply.
“Put me up to it? He’s not even conscious. Vickers sedated him. I would have proposed taking him away earlier, but that I was afraid of giving him my ailment—”
“And now?”
“Of the two dangers, I think you are the most acute, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, better than you imagine. And one of the things I now realize, sir, is that you have been plotting against my plan for my son, perhaps for years.”
“If you mean that I’ve tried to keep him under tutelage rather than teaching school, yes, I have done that,” said Lincoln. “I refuse to preside at the head of a lunatic asylum of a school in which one of the teachers is a child. A child whose time should be spent preparing for his own brilliant future, at that. If you’d ever traveled, if you’d seen any proper schools, perhaps you’d appreciate what a lunatic scheme yours really is. I also refuse to be an accessory to your taking advantage of his youth to make him work without a salary. The Thirteenth Amendment put an end to that sort of arrangement. I know you don’t quite believe it, but this town is part of the United States, it’s not some personal fiefdom of yours. Here as well as elsewhere, slavery is obsolete, and even if it weren’t, your child isn’t your slave.”
“Brilliant future, my foot,” persevered John Ezra. “I know what you two are up to. You’ve put it into his head that he’ll go north to college someday.”
“What makes you think that?” Lincoln couldn’t believe that Simion, even in a moment of high passion, would let fall the crown and prize of all their seditions. How many times since the first had he rubbed his warning in?
“He’s more insolent and disrespectful than ever, as if he doesn’t expect to have to deal with me much longer. If he thought so, he’d never dream of trying my patience as he’s done. But rest assured that I have caught up with both of you; he’s shown that he can do your job, and I intend that he shall do it ere long, and he is certainly not going one step out of this town. And if he does, he shan’t have one red cent from me, he can starve. As for you, are you fool enough to think I’d simply give him to you? What d’you take me for?”
“You don’t really want to know that and wouldn’t understand it if I were to say. Will you answer my question?”
“If you’ll answer mine,” said John Ezra, looking the nearest he ever did to calculating fiendishness.
“What do I take you for? Very well,” said Lincoln, whose head felt very clear in that moment despite the sudden pain and tightness in his chest. “I’m an atheist, but I believe that there are polarities in the world…powers, maybe unconscious powers, of light and darkness, progress and atavism, that…war…together. Simion is a creature of bright white light and you’re an avatar of darkness, and that’s what I take you for. I don’t know what monstrous irony brought the two of you together. But if there’s a devil, you’re his creature and you kiss his arse, even though you might not know him if you saw him. The first Sunday I went to church here, I thought, These people are of the devil but don’t know it. You, you’re too primitive a thing to be wicked in the accepted sense. You’re like some creature of the ocean depths that shoots out poison when it sees light. You have to be doing all this boozing to numb yourself to some insupportable knowledge. What do you…see…when you look inside yourself?”
It must have been dreadful indeed, for John Ezra shot out a hand and seized the lapel of his desperately fragile opponent’s coat and threw him to the floor with such violence that Lincoln barely felt it when John Ezra picked up his desk chair and brought it down over his supine back and shoulders. For Lincoln, there was a crack and a flare of razor-bright light as one of his ribs broke and a small artery in his right lung burst and he went almost voluptuously down and down, into the pillowy depths of his fading strength.
And this was how Simeon Lincoln left Haliburton: a couple of months later, in January, the minute his rib had healed, despite the rage of winter and his own.
He’d wakened in his bed in his flat several days after his encounter with John Ezra, and asked no one in particular what time it was, for the clock was peculiarly indistinct in his vision. Simion had answered him and told him that it was a quarter past four in the afternoon, adding, “of the tenth of November.” The complete story accounting for this nine-day caesura was not long in the telling: a broken rib, a pulmonary hemorrhage of the kind that usually ended in a funeral, a threatening suggestion of pneumonia.
Simion himself looked sick and subdued, but he made light of it and said that he would send for Vickers directly.
Vickers was the one who told Lincoln, “You have to leave, you know. The minute you’re remotely fit for travel. You’ll die if you stay here.”
“I’ve been here seven years without dying. And all those seven years I’ve been intending to see Simion safe out of here,” said Lincoln, though daunted in his heart. He was well awake now, but his vision was still badly blurred. It was worse than it had been after any hemorrhage he could remember. And even flat on his back and straight from sleep, he felt air-hungry.
“I’ll be all right,” said Simion, looking hard at the floor. “I’ll…benefit by certain arrangements that’ve been made.”
“And there’s a place for you at an excellent sanatorium in Savannah. It’s calle
d Snow’s Establishment,” said Vickers. “There’s a private room waiting for you once you’re well enough to travel. The place is high-class, it’s got a library and all. I’ve wired them and made all the arrangements.”
Lincoln had the strength for a token protest: “But it seems that you haven’t consulted the principal in this affair.”
“The time for arguing the matter is past,” said Vickers. “If you stay here, you’ll not only die like a dog, you’ll be likelier by the day to give your germs to this one. You’ve got to go, and go soon. Before you get up the strength to go back up and lecture John Ezra on theology and make him take an ax to you. What on God’s green earth were you thinking of?” asked Vickers, a battleground weariness on his old face.
“How is the dear Reverend?”
“Oh, Christ’s Liquor has burst forth,” said Simion. “Like the Red Sea when it drowned the Egyptians, or something. He’s been on a rampage. Speaking of axes, he took one to the Tuttles’ still, and Virgil Tuttle gave him a good dose of birdshot from his old musket. Father must’ve been out of his head to try to terrorize Mint Springs folks. The Tuttles don’t come to church here and aren’t scared of him.” Then, quickly: “It’s all right, I’ve been here. I’ve only been up a couple of days myself, so I heard about this third-hand. We have an arrangement with Father, thanks to Dr. Vickers. The way it’s set, Father won’t make a fuss about your staying here until you’re well enough to travel. When I’m able, I’ll take the school. I’ll stay here, I won’t live at home anymore. And when I’m old enough for college, Father says he’ll pay me my wages and not make difficulties over my leaving. Dr. Vickers told him he’d report the whole affair to the magistrates at Charlottesville otherwise.”
“And he agreed?”
“Yessiree, he did,” said Vickers with a grim grin. “And he knows that if he doesn’t keep his word, I’ll be on the road to Charlottesville to make an affidavit. I’ll get him arraigned on attempted murder, armed assault, hitting a consumptive with a chair, and trying to drive his own child to the grave, whatever the fancy Latin name for that is.”
“Filicide,” Simion supplied smartly.
“Right, right. I’d like to see him hung. I told him that,” said Vickers.
“I’ll be fine,” said Simion again, though no one had asked him. It was less a reassurance than a conversational doorstop.
That was 1875, a winter swathed in a constant moving veil of snow, and the white numbness seemed to enter Lincoln and Simion too. They could make no serious protest against the inarguable finality of the situation. Simion packed Lincoln’s books up, took his classes, and tried to amuse him in the evenings. Only once, reciting from the Iliad, did he show his state of mind. When he reached the passage about the grief of Achilles at Patroclus’s death, he paused and sat dead still and pale, eyes fixed on some distant horizon; he seemed unaware that he’d been reciting, or that he’d stopped. As he sat there half-tranced, like a little statue, it occurred to Lincoln that Simion’s looks had aggravated John Ezra’s rage; his preadolescent face had begun to take on adult definition, and it had become apparent that he was going to be an extremely good-looking young man. Indeed, with that adult sorrow on his fourteen-year-old brow, quite beautiful.
Simion accompanied Lincoln to the Charlottesville train depot in Vickers’s carriage, a long and hideously cold winter journey. During the trip, Simion did the curious thing of curling up on the carriage cushions and resting his head on the covering of old furs and lap robes over Lincoln’s lap, and Lincoln’s thin hand was tempted by his hair and settled gently in it. Once they were at the station, Simion settled Lincoln into the sleeper car arranged for him by Vickers; when the departure whistle sounded, they clasped hands. In the distraction of this intimacy, Lincoln reached into his greatcoat pocket and produced a pouch of stiff brushed vellum, which he transferred to Simion. “I’m leaving more of this job to you than I ever meant to,” Lincoln told him. “All I can do is tell you to hold your father to his agreement.” And say nothing about how fragile it is lest you lose your nerve, and pray to the Great Emptiness up there that it will be honored, he added silently. “And I’ll tell you again—in terms of knowledge, you’re already fully prepared, you can hold your own with the best in the land, and any progress you manage in the meantime is icing on the cake. In that respect, I’ve not failed. Go now,” Lincoln said, “this thing is about to leave.” As he obeyed, Lincoln threw after him the familiar command, “Now find some soap and wash those paws!”
Before Simion did, though, he opened the envelope, which proved to contain his diploma, backdated to last June, and a certificate attesting that he had held the top place in his class since entering the Haliburton Elementary and Latin School and graduated valedictorian. The train pulled out; it was finished.
He had the sense that he was walking into the arena for the final trial of nerves on the first day of June 1878, when it was time to go and claim his wages and see if John Ezra planned to honor his word. Now Simion was sixteen; he would be seventeen in the coming autumn, and he was old enough to sit for this year’s Yale entrance examination. During the two years he had spent as assistant teacher under Davie Darnley, he had been living alone in Lincoln’s flat. He had been living hand-to-mouth—grubbing through the fields after the potato digging was done and scavenging the leavings, gathering wild fruit when he could find it and robbing orchards when he couldn’t, stealing eggs, and shooting unwary woodland birds. He’d had to make a series of forays back to John Ezra’s house to retrieve his things—furtive, speedy dashes that had to be perfectly timed during John Ezra’s deepest morning sleep, while the old man rifled his nightmares for material for his next homily. Now it felt strange to come deliberately when he knew that John Ezra was awake.
Today, contrary to custom, John Ezra was not at home, and neither was Jewel. It was strange to be in this house, alone and perfectly safe. Simion went up to his old room and looked out the window, down through the leaves of the ancient apple tree; its leaves were still the fresh, raw green of new spring, its blooms barely gone. He found himself asking questions in his head. (What’s the etymology of the name Odoacer? When did Canute reign as king of England?) And he remembered how he used to ask himself such questions as part of a game he’d played with himself in the days before Lincoln came.
Sitting by himself in the hayloft or the crotch of the apple tree, he would become still and suddenly attentive. There would seem to be three men in black before him. He sensed that one of them had a weapon in his black pocket. Like the Sphinx, they would offer him his life in return for the correct answers to three questions. Then he’d answer the three hardest questions he could think of. What, oh, what is the forty-third line of the Æneid? The cube root of 758? How does one measure an angle formed by two secants, by two tangents, or by a secant and a tangent without a circle? The relief he had derived from his correct answers was not affected by the fact that he was both the questioner and the questioned. The end of the hallucinatory game always left him weak with relief, grateful for either bright sunlight or white sky without the interrogators’ presence.
“Now,” he thought, “why did I want to do that? Because it felt so good when I stopped? I must have been a funny little thing, doing foolishness of that kind and hoarding things as I did.” He recalled also his speculations about whether he actually was an apostate of Hell, a demon, or a spook. He could remember worrying obsessively about that in earlier years. It made him wake up in the black hours of the early morning and try to remember where he had come from. But he had found nothing beyond the beginnings of memory and no memory of any dwelling save this house. When he dared the black powers to come and claim him, none of them stepped forward. A fey child would have probably heard their approach in the wind or the aching of floorboards, but Simion knew that he heard only the ordinary noises of the night. Sometimes this disappointed him, but to this hubris, also, there was no response. The white and black powers were alike in their unresponsiveness: That was t
he main thing he observed about demons and gods.
He wondered if he’d left anything important in his room. The necessary haste of his removal of his belongings might have made him careless, and he didn’t like to leave anything in this house. He opened drawers and found useless, abandoned things—some too-small underclothes, nutshells, empty ink bottles. Then he remembered slitting his mattress, making a hiding place for those Yale catalogues that he treasured as a devout Catholic does blessed beads or a vial of Lourdes water thick with filth and miracles. By night he had sifted through the electives in the Sheffield Scientific School listings, like carven gems: “Human Anatomy. Pharmaceutical Compounding. Paleontology. Mineralogy. Crystallography. Rational Mechanics. The Theory of Vibratory and Undulatory Motion.” It occurred to him to check the slit. He lifted the bedclothes, groped around for the hole, and slipped his hand in with difficulty. It ultimately closed on crumbly paper, and he pulled out a Yale catalogue—an old one, the oldest, 1859, the first that Lincoln had given him; how could he leave this of all things?—which had managed to slip far into the old cotton mattress.
Now he found a pencil and made a note in one of its margins. “I wonder,” he wrote, “if the sciences will bring us around full circle, past the bloodshed and fetters of my father’s co-religionists, to the light that we had when what we learn as ancient Greek was a spoken language, and that I find trapped in these words like light in amber.” One Greek poet or the other had told him what amber looked like; he had never seen actual amber. Ancient light and modern love, he thought; crystallography and mineralogy and the theory of vibratory and undulatory motion.
As the afternoon wore on, Simion wondered where John Ezra was. He’d timed his arrival tactically, so that John Ezra would have had time to recover if he’d been squiffed last night. Gone out of town? For what? The waiting threatened to dissipate the courage he’d gathered. He read and reread the course descriptions in the catalogue in the same spirit that a Christian in his situation might have repeated in his head, I will fear no evil. The evening came, the night wind started to blow—startlingly cold as it was in these altitudes except in the middle of July—and Simion watched the sun go down.