by Robert Kloss
And remember in those days your father populated the far edges of the lawn with chicken cages and rabbit hutches, for he insisted the feces of those animals provided an uncommonly emerald hue. And remember when finally your mother ventured out of doors, pinching her nose as she said, “It was never my dream to live in a barnyard.” And the red bloom of your father’s face and the thrashing of the chickens, the furious wringing of their necks, the feathers and screams, and how they spouted blood when cast to the lawn while some scampered in circles and some beat their wings against the turf until the air misted white with their feces. And how you wailed, and how your mother screamed, “He’s a murderer! He’s a butcher!” while in this midst of slaughter your father spoke only faint grunts.
But the murder of a few chickens was a common thing in those days. And indeed many of the lawns of the valley were invaded nightly, chicken coops and rabbit hutches pulled apart and lawns trailed with chicken feathers and rabbit ears, plucked and bloody. These were crimes quickly blamed on those unpaid who migrated into your town and into towns along the valley. Truly your town now seemed a town of unpaid workers, drifting and foraging, hiding out in barns and forests, their jaundiced eyes populating the night. Remember the smoke black faces of workers crouched in shadows, the long-off clanking of their shackles broken apart and pried open, devastated against rocks or with mallets and pistol shots. And so men such as your father bunkered down on porches with cigars and rifles and muskets and common pistols, observing the shadows for the eyes of the unpaid. And no paid man trusted the intentions or the soul of an unpaid, and it was your father who proclaimed, “I have seen the tremendous horrors that lurk in their hearts,” and always in those times your father spoke in the voice of the world on the horizon, the world set afire and smoldering, the world of shells whistling like dying horses, the world of bodies cleaved into the soil.
Boys such as you often discovered the gutted husks of rabbits strewn and you followed the blood trails to the forests, to deadfall and bison-hide shelters, and there the unpaid moaned and snored and licked their lips and shivered and mumbled in an unknown language. In the mornings men such as your father found handprints blood-smeared on hutches, and they said, “This neighborhood has gone to hell.” And now all neighborhoods became neighborhoods of rifles readied, of men crazed and camping on porches and along the land men threatened to “shoot the next damn unpaid I see.”
And there were also those who said these unpaid were a great untapped resource, and then runaway unpaid were given shelter and employ in your town, although it was only legal to pay in satchels of tobacco and hand-me-down clothing, and prominent men such as your grandfather called such practices the “opening of Pandora’s box.” And soon the unpaid peered through shop windows and worked as butcher’s assistants, their bloody aprons and gristle smeared hands, and unpaids shoveled dung from the streets and swept courthouse steps and barber shop floors, and now mothers directed their sons and daughters to the sidewalks on the opposite side of the street. And shop windows were smashed in by bottles, by bricks and awnings folded into flames.
Remember how unpaid songs carried from the forests, remember the beat of their dancing—and those unpaid singers in unpaid shows who mimicked the unpaid. Remember the flare of their unpaid lips and the haunting fatness of their unpaid eyes. Remember their lily skin charcoal painted. Remember their dances, the dazed jovial language these blotted faces spoke, and how these singers seemed nothing like those you heard in the forest. For in the forests their mouths bellowed sounds like ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
And now pastors and do-gooders decried the exploitation and ill-treatment of the unpaid, dressing them in hand-me-down suits and dresses, bunking them in their basements. And now during Sunday service, while women such as your grandmother sang hymns about sturdy Rocks and Faith, unpaid spirituals rose through the floorboards, and women such as your grandmother wrinkled their noses and claimed they could not hear “our beautiful Godly hymns” for all the “heathen wailing.” After service, the women of your grandmother’s ilk shook their pastor’s hand and said, “You have made your bed good sir” and “I hope they don’t murder you in it.”
And unpaid women in plain white cotton dresses spoke from the courthouse steps at the instruction of those pastors, and they said, “Babies was snatched from their mother’s breast and sold” and they said, “Children were separated from sisters and brothers and never saw each other” and they said, “Course they cried. You think they would not cry when sold like cattle?”
And there were those who said, “Send them all away to some place cold” and there were those who said, “Just pay them” and there were those who said, “To pay would pervert their primitive natures” and there were those who said, “Integrate them” and there were those who said, “The institution of unpaying is the paid man’s burden—we must look after the heathen races” and there were those who said the institution was as “holding a wolf by the ears” and there were those who decried the furthering of the institution into western lands and there were those who said the whole of history demanded it.
And then came this man Brown who said, “Without shedding of blood is not remission of sin.” This man Brown, who rose at the back of some long ago church to say, “Here, before God, in presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery” and thus the fury of his terrible swift sword when he said of our national crimes, “These may be purged but by a language of fire. These may be cleansed but by a tide of blood.”
And your father read to you how Brown rode from house to house with his unpaid cohorts in tow, the swords and pikes they carried, the many butchered bodies they left split open in their terrible wake. Your father’s voice spoke in the sounds of these terrors and you dreamed the screams and the sword swipes and the blood spatters. And your father waved this paper, and he shouted for all who would listen, how such bloodbaths would become “common” once the unpaid were paid.
And now along the land, drunken men caroused on horseback and in carriages, shooting unpaid workers who lingered on street corners, unpaid workers leaning against door jambs, unpaid workers tossing dice in alleyways.
And women such as your grandmother refused to attend services when the pastor said, “Our unpaid brothers may find deliverance with the sword” and after your grandfather’s death your grandmother refused to sleep alone for the persistent roaming of the unpaid. Now this woman was always at your house, telling you stories of old men, dirty in thought and deed, and how Brown and the unpaid he loved and commanded were “sex maniacs.” And she told you of her nightmares, the groping hands of the unpaid as they unfastened her dressing gown; their faces pressed to windows and fogging the glass, their yellow eyes, shifty and leering, behind the mist. And the fears of women such as your grandmother seemed confirmed when newspapers depicted unpaids with erections and bulging eyes under the headlines: “Would You Let This Man Bake Your Bread?” And your grandmother could not sleep for dreams of their calloused hands, their red tongues extended and dry, “like sandpaper, all over me” and so she rattled about your house, drinking brandy, and there were nights she woke you with stories of what she saw from the window: the hunched over bodies of runaway workers silhouetted along front lawns and backyards, dashing and gasping for air, the hunched over bodies of runaway workers weighed down with iron shackles. Their moon-lit faces smeared with the sudden feast of raw chicken eggs. The rhythmic bobbing of their throats.
And the runaway unpaid wrote novels about how they toiled in the fields in ragged linen, in the winds and rains and no matter any frenzied weather, how they dined on rancid meat and wormy meal, their many deaths along the landscape, early and frequent, the singing whips and blood spatters, the strange kindnesses, the hymns and spirituals meant to summon some deliverance. And there were those who wept at these novels, claiming they proved the intelligence and wit of the unpaid, while your father scoffed at these “gross deceptions,” for he had seen the “simplicities o
f the unpaid” during his travels, watched them at their brute and illiterate toil while their employers basked in culture and luxury. Yes, your father said he knew the unpaid well, smoky-skinned, childlike, inherently villainous, and he insisted, “Your international bankers and their agents within the press will see this brought to a head—this man Abraham is their pawn to bring about our ruin.”
And there was agony along the land and pistol fire within the statehouses, rumors of insurrection and rumors of ever more ravaging. And your father smoked his cigars, and your father grimaced, and your father spat cigar juice into the dust of the yard, and when he read of Abraham’s election he said, “The damned fools have done it now.” Now there was threatened a great cleaving of the nation, and men arrived at your father’s door requesting the wicked machinations of his heart, his talent for horror, the vastness of his evil. And your father gestured to you playing in the tufted lawns, and he gestured to your mother in the shadows of her room, and he said, “Consider me Cincinnatus.”
*
“For that which I greatly feared is come upon me”
And when Abraham journeyed from his home to the capital he journeyed aboard railway cars rather than by carriage, and men such as your father sneered at what they called the “unnecessary luxury,” the plush carpets and velvet lined walls. And so Abraham, loose and leathery, silent and smiling with his wife and sons, ever watchful while the locomotive lapped the miles and licked up the valleys, moving to speak only during those speeches he made from railway platforms and town halls, his high-thin voice carrying: “In your hands entirely, rests the momentous decision of insurrection.” And back again into cars, back again reading and dozing and listening to the chatter of his wife and the play-war noises of his children, the rhythms of their lives within the motions of this great machine, slow chuffing, festooned in red, white, and blue, while his eldest son, Robert, gulped whisky in the drink car and leaned over the conductor’s shoulder with hazy eyes, gazed out windows at shirtless men of foreign origin, shouldering iron beams, the world struggling forth before them.
And the rumors of assassination, of the rewards offered to banded rowdies to fall upon the president in his car, to tear apart the rails and set fire to the bunting, rewards celebrated by mayors and police departments in the cities along the land. And after Mary Todd heard a “queer ticking,” barrel-chested men wandered the railcar compartments, shod in overcoats, pockets stuffed with common revolvers, investigating the areas behind curtains and beneath tables and within washrooms, and at stops they peered into the street before Abraham followed, waving and throwing kisses.
And for this journey a telegraph machine and an operator were always aboard and on the ready. Abraham studied this machine, its workings, the messages it received, and he puzzled over the code, and finally he said, “This is not a democratic instrument” and “What good is the diminishing of time and space if a trained and educated few alone may hold the key to this knowledge?” And now Abraham passed his time sketching various systems by which “all man shall know,” and when Abraham first met with the engineers of the land he slid these sketches to them and said, “Here, do this” and it was made known the new president would spare no expense in having these visions realized.
And on this journey Abraham stopped and spoke at numerous farms and factories, your father’s factory included, and remember now how you sat upon your father’s shoulders amidst those gathered crowds, and how they cheered and whistled and swooned as he stepped from his carriage, this gangly Abraham, honest and regal in his top hat, this oaken Abraham, his pant cuffs too high and the white socks beneath, his sleeves rolled, the bones of his wrist—You remember his broad smile as a bison half-drugged and shackled was led before him. How he stroked the creature, noted the luxurious coat even as the bolt gun was given over. How the beast bellowed and then dropped once the shot was fired. How hoots and hollers and cheers went up as Abraham said, “I presume I am not expected to employ the time assigned me to mere flattery of farmers as a class. My opinion of them is neither better nor worse than other people; but farmers being the most numerous class, it follows that their interest is also the largest interest” and then publicity shots of Abraham posing with one loafer resting on the hulking corpse, the wide milky eyes, the fat tongue fallen and black in the silver light, and another of Abraham and Jacob Flanders III in bison coat and muffs shaking the president’s hand, while your father stood almost ghostly white in the background, sneering, although it is true there were those who insisted your father smiled.
And headlines along the land proclaimed the nefarious intentions of this new president: Africanus Abraham I Seeks to Enslave the Gallant & Noble Paid South and Africanus Abraham I Seeks to Arm Runaway Workers in Tyrannical Power Grab and Africanus Abraham I to Use Conscription to Free Up Jobs for Beloved Runaway Workers and men such as your father gestured to headlines and said, “The man’s complexion is dark enough, and his mind slow enough, that we may reasonably and dutifully question the purity of his blood” and men along the land waved these papers, hollering, “You bet it’s true!”
And when Abraham entered the capital city he entered disguised beneath a woolen overcoat and a soft felt hat, his expression obscured by new whiskers, grown for the young girls of the land who wrote him noting his “hollow cheeks” and asserting these would “considerably improve” his appearance and that “all the ladies” would “tease their husbands” to vote for him, and men stood on either side of him, their pockets stuffed with knives, derringers, common pistols.
Your father guffawed and sneered and beat the porch boards with his folded up newspaper at the “cowardice” and “buffoonery” of this “preposterous ape” who made our “highest office the seat of clownery.” And it was the conviction of all men of your father’s class that “we will be in servitude to the lower races in no time.”
Abraham stood on capital steps and before mostly silent crowds, and to those who would read these words in the days to come, he said, “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ it.” And there came a smattering of cheers, and there came hoots and whistles, and there came hisses, and there came cries of “unpaid lover.”
And in the evening thereafter Abraham rested his feet on some gold-embroidered stool, reading King Lear in the lamplight, his children singing and chasing each other along some corridor while men armed with pistols ever stood in doorways and leaned against bookshelves, their pockets bulging with revolvers, for in those days many men sent letters to this president promising “yer neck stretched like a chikens, sir,” for these and many about the land considered Abraham “nothing but a goddern swarthy unpaid.”
And it was this first evening while he rested that Abraham was handed telegrams informing him forts along the land stood under rebel duress, and now the lights of rockets purpled the smoking sky, all the past left behind by the light of this fort, and now indeed the great matter was at hand.
“By the blast of God they perish”
And there were yet flashes of light and cracklings of rockets in the skies when work crews in blue woolen uniforms thronged the streets, erecting wooden poles along the edges of well-trimmed lawns. And while crowds gathered they affixed speakers to these poles, although most called them tin horns or Abraham’s trumpets, for there were many in the days before they first spoke who believed these were no more than automated instruments, and some men even stooped alongside their sons and pointed and said, “You see? That is where the steam enters.” And while all speculated on the eventual sounds of these horns, your father understood the silent language as no other, and many evenings he walked along their lengths, gazing upward, and he straddled the poles as if to climb and when this failed he pressed his ears to the wood, as if vibrations within granted some knowledge, and your father shushed you when the gulls overhead screamed, cupping his ears and inclining his head as if those birds understood what he could not, and
your father spent his nights on the front porch, seated on his rocking chair and polishing his saber, watching these speakers and the gulls who circled.
And you watched from schoolhouse windows when the speakers flared into something like life, rusted and scratched, and as if spoken into a cavern, an echo, this voice articulated: THIS IS ONLY A TEST DO NOT BE ALARMED THIS IS ONLY A—And you remember the eyes of those classmates, their fat black pupils, sheened with sunlight and vibrating, while your teacher drew letters on the board beneath the groan of this technology, until she dropped her chalk, until all children covered their ears and lined the windows and ran into the open grasses, screaming and weeping and gazing into the sky as if angels would announce themselves, while many men and women rushed into the streets and lawns and fell to their knees, muttering prayers into the dense throbbing of that cracked and echoing voice, while your father remained on his porch, polishing his saber, his pistol on the ready, and your mother pressed oily rags into the crack beneath her door and curled again on her sofa.
When Abraham’s speakers finally opened they opened with a voice of locomotives whistling and steel rails vibrating. They spoke in a voice of bridges collapsing into rivers, the jangle of wood and rock and iron, the peeling apart of metals, and there were those who discerned patterns and melodies within these noises and housewives long-dulled by the texture of life found the allure of new possibilities, abandoning their children to the gloom of their homes to amble into saloons and sweet talk wild-eyed young men. And elderly men found these sounds an aphrodisiac and now wandered rigid and frothing and in lucid moments they claimed their wives called these speakers the “best use of tax dollars imaginable.” And the fur barons who lived in the mansions along the hillsides praised how effectively the humming masked the breathing and eating noises of loved ones, and young men found within these patterns the shifting of the Northern Lights and travelled with eyes closed, fingering the sky. And some preachers claimed the unpaid fornicated in fields under the influence of these speakers, no longer stealing chickens and root vegetables, instead they frittered away their hours bobbing in and out of each other. And there were preachers who said the unpaid built fires in reverence to the speakers and prayed in the shadowy light for deliverance from the injustices of this world.