Alligators of Abraham

by Robert Kloss

  Your father crouched upon the rooftop with his father and how he knew his town had become a town of bison, a town of mooing and flies, a town of fur and horns. Remember how your father thought, “We could rebuild our city with all these bison” and in his mind your father saw a city constructed with this woolen timber, a city of churches built with hooves and horns, of general stores constructed with fur and meat, floors of ribs and legs, of streets paved with skulls and teeth, and the stuff would drip and the flies would gather, and how he knew, even as a boy, such timber was not sturdy, and how soon these buildings would decay and collapse, and how soon these buildings would be devoured by gulls, and overhead even then, your father knew the white circling, the mindless shrieking of birds.

  And how silent your father was in the glow of the fires, until he said, “Maybe I dreamed them,” without saying who he meant, and he said, “Maybe they only happened in here” and your father touched his skull with an absent gesture.

  BOOK II

  And the alligators went up all over the land, and they rested in the coasts very grievous were they; before them there were no such alligators as they, and neither after them shall be such.

  “Who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?”

  And they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every manner of thing along the land, and all the children of the land, and their mothers and the fathers of the land: and there remained not a living thing in all the cities or fields in all the lands of the nation.

  And then rebel leaders returned from their shelters in the woods or were captured by armies along the prairies and brought back in chains. And the new president freed these rebels, insisting the sainted Abraham had intended a full pardon. And rebels returned to farms mostly smoldered and charcoal black, and found their workers had either dispersed or expected pay, and all of their wives and daughters had become fierce, masculine, they wore trousers, dressed and butchered hogs, they cursed and spat. And there were those rebels, emaciated in their rags, who married Native women or journeyed south where they became blacksmiths or sheriffs, or who dwelled within sandstone houses and lived their final days speaking strange lingos.

  And this new president apologized to the former employers of the unpaid, and these were not punished but given chests of gold as recompense for their losses.

  And there were days of parades for those soldiers returning, the peel of ancient church bells, the fall of confetti and the clattering of hooves, the laurel wreaths ready for the loyal brows of those once plump and bare-faced boys now gaunt and bearded, their loose hanging uniforms, their hands readied on their pistols or knives, and some yelped, and some drew their weapons at the explosion of fireworks, those red and blue lights splayed against the horizon. In those falling lights they saw rocket fire, and in the crackling smoke they only knew the fog of war, and in the cheers and whistling of children and mothers they only knew the high horror of rebels yelling. And in the weeks following they returned to their fields, to their dinner tables, to their parents and their wives and their children, and there were days at the plow, in the musk of the cut open earth, and the familiar motions of their youth returned without hesitation, and they fell again into the life they had always known, and those not married now married old sweethearts, and some even wed the widows of their friends, perhaps to grant the dying wish of the man whose last screams they still dreamed of, the wide thoughtless eyes, while flies everywhere gathered.

  And when these men passed your father on the streets they saluted and your father very often knew them by name, and unto them he said, “The most magnificent days of my life were spent with you boys.” And those former soldiers, now farmers in dirtied overalls or lawyers in jacket and tie said to you, “Suppose you were too young for duty?” and “If only you saw your father in action. The finest general our army ever had” and with these claims your father never argued.

  “What man has the power over the spirit, to retain the spirit?”

  And when those interned, or those yet alive in camps, returned to their disheveled homes, their clothes hung like loose sacks and their eyes appeared from within hollows, and very often to these no one spoke, and very often their possessions had been ransacked or auctioned off in the name of the struggle, and so they set out west and were never again heard from. And there were those from your army who returned from rebel camps equally skeletal, describing the fetid pools they drank from and the handfuls of wormy meal they devoured and how the meat of their own recent dead seemed the only possible sustenance. And those who stood on guard at these camps, and those who administered the orders at these camps, were tried for war crimes with quiet publicity, and some were hanged, and some were imprisoned, and those who survived soon regained their lost figures. And no one spoke again of these atrocities.

  And there were days when this new president toured the devastated towns of the land, and he made ceremonial motions with shovels and smiled unto those newly paid workers who mixed cement and lingered in the shadows. The atmosphere yet swollen with gunpowder and ash, wild with the fumes of those dead still piled along the streets and rivers. And the new president gave speeches along the cities of the valley, supporting the construction of new railroads, and soon came the endless labor of barely paid workers hefting rails and pounding spikes, and in the cities and towns along the land, save for your town, there came the black smoke of steel mills, and now the men of the cities, and many of the men who once worked on farms, followed country roads into the cities, and soon all worked in these mills. And the new president toured these factories and proclaimed, “Someday our nation will be a new nation of steel.”

  “To forever hold what may not be held”

  In those days men returned having seen the vastness of the land, and from porch stoops and in the glow of the fireplace they told their withered fathers that a man may journey for weeks and not yet know the warmth of the coast, and these soldiers now could speak in the dialect of the rebels, and to their children these men explained there is no animal more ancient than the alligator, and they said the eyes of an alligator drift the black waters like the stars along the night, and not a child slept free of the hissing and yellow eyes in the ponds and rivers near their homes.

  And when those soldiers returned from the field they returned also with innovations in murder and preservation. How quickly housewives replaced picket fences with coiled barbed wire and now no unpaid, and no wild dogs, crept into her flowers or thieved her chickens. And there were those who received their sons and husbands and fathers shipped in boxes, and within these boxes lay the stilled faces of their long dead beloved, gazing up as if but asleep, although, perhaps, slightly yellowed. And in those days not a man who had seen the speed and efficiency of vast killing organizations observed the slow trudge of the oxen plow or jolted along in some horse drawn cart without a great longing for the indomitable chug of locomotives and the black impossible drift of ironclad vessels.

  And there were those who returned possessed by innovations in healing, who now understood to clean the festering wound, to bandage with clean linen, to remove the decaying limb, who knew to nurse with fresh water rather than fetid water. And when these nurses and surgeons returned from wartime hospitals they constructed new hospitals in place of churches and farms, and within these structures they preached what they had learned of sanitation and infection along the fields of war.

  And of those who lived in affliction within the slums they said, “We must drench them with lye, whitewash their buildings, burn their refuse, and throw disinfectant into their waters.” And to these words no one listened, save those who sneered, and save those who said, “Let us save the expense.”

  Your father claimed a great regard for these innovations. And often as you wandered, he gestured to hospitals and said, “There within, they perceive the death always in our midst” and he said, “These fellows alone understand the influence of the microbe” and he said, “Look alive, lad—wid
en your eyes—the infectious microbe is pervasive in our atmosphere.” And your father said, “There will come a time when those fellows may snuff death at its source.” And yet when you found your father stooped and moaning, you never heard him say, “Help me to the hospitals, boy.” And when you heard him vomiting in the tall grasses, and there in the yellow sick you found black clots of blood, never did he say, “I should go to those doctors.” And never did your father speak of his affliction, and never did you ask, and there soon came a time when you heard him retching and no longer listened.

  And there were days then when you found your father skimming the leather volumes of his library, and he said unto you, “The ancients considered no man dead whose name was yet uttered” and later he said, “No man will die who may bestow his name unto his son.”

  And there were days your father sat in the shadows of his library, reading volumes long unopened, and he brought these to his trophy room, and he gestured to the beaver and seals and the heads of bison and deer, and he said, “In days past there have been those who worshiped the bull, the bird, the baboon, the sheep, the cat, the dog, the jackal, the snake, the jaguar, and the alligator. Indeed many locked a still thrashing alligator into the throne room of their grave, for they believed a great power rested within.”

  Your father said, “And these creatures have existed always, for it was the jaguar who tore the alligator asunder, and from this flowed the blood of life, and from the hide of this creature we had now our land, and from the mist of its exhalations were born the clouds, and from the wriggling worms of its belly grew all the creeping things. And so all man house within their flesh the souls of alligators. And so was born our penchant for murder, our lust for eternity.” And your father tapped his bible, and he said, “So it is written.”

  “To give dimension to the dimensionless”

  And along the cities and the towns of the valley there was scarcely a street where some up-and-coming embalming surgeon did not unfurl a banner and open shop, and in the glint of their windows they stood in leather aprons, sleeves rolled, while a naked, yellowed figure lay upon their table.

  And you wandered the streets of your town with your father, lingered across the street from embalmer’s shops while your father smoked his cigar in his ash-smudged boots, and how the smoke let from his lips as he watched those men work. And soon you stood within those shops dizzy from the stink of his cigar, the chemical fumes, the rot of this new world, and your father asked of these men, “What fills his figure out? Is it sawdust? Grasses?” And these embalmers said, “On occasion. When the man within is ravaged.”

  And your father said, “I have ever been an instrument of death,” and he indicated those embalmers, “when I could have been as those fellows.” And later he gestured to the rivers below and said, “Many of the men clogging our rivers are men I killed long ago, or they are men I once taught to kill.” And your father sighed and said, “With my remaining life I venture toward some new promise.”

  And your father was not the only man captivated by the potential of these fluids, for in those years caskets crowded most parlors on most days, the slow drip from the ice, the green buzzing of flies, the lilies gathered and aged and wilting and scarcely masking the smell of what had been some beloved. And so these women, who dressed as widows, visited the embalmers saying, “I fear my husband may soon pass. He is rather sickly pale and gaunt since his return. What may I expect you will do for his aspect?” and then the down payments these women put on their husbands and their sons.

  And while along the nation men and women thought only of preserving their dead, your father consulted his texts and said of the ancients, “They found their god dead and torn to pieces, they found him in the bellies of birds and alligators, but they stitched him back together after all, and they revived him to his full godhead” and he said, “Do you understand? They wandered anew.”

  And there were days your father instructed you to hold a rag over your face for the fumes and to cough into this rag and to look sickly while he said to these embalmers, “My boy here does not have so long” and “If my boy should die what would you make of him?” and “For how long would he keep?” And how often you snuck away while your father observed, and you sought the crowded streets for your mother’s apparition. Indeed through the long evenings, in the dust and the shadows of your house, the shifting of the boards in the cooling night, while your father moaned and vomited and read in his library, you waited at the window, and there you prayed for your mother to appear upon the road.

  And one afternoon your father found you standing in what had been her room, and he rested his hand upon your shoulder, and he said, “Come with me.” Now he built his fires before the grave markers of your mother and Walter, “How do they look, down there? How do they carry on in that gloom? If we raised them, could we yet apply our methods, could we keep them as we wish to remember them?”

  And there were days he uttered the name of his boy and the name of your mother into otherwise silent rooms to make them “yet live.” And he slow scrawled notes and folded these over and placed them in jars and vases throughout your house, and in restaurants and taverns along the land, or your father held these notes toward the gulls circling and shrieking overhead and called, “Are you not an apparition of my boy?” And he fed these gulls blue-molded bread by hand until they waddled fat bellied along the scars of your once-lawn and how your father fastened his letters to these gulls, kicked them until they took to flight, and called after them, “Back to the sulphur lands with you!”

  *

  “I would build hillsides to reach you”

  And in those days soldiers yet washed up along the river banks, black and green-skinned, and the trout of the rivers grew fat on their eyes, on their cheek meat, and when these bodies were pulled free of the rivers trout throbbed within their throats. And militiamen in skiffs passed along these banks, their grim faces silent under the moonlight, fishing for watches or wedding bands or capped teeth, and how these bodies were pulled from the waters and packed into wagons, and flies wheezed and clouded the banks, and gulls circled, crazed for the meat decaying below. And hundreds of widows, mobs of women in black, climbed with hitched skirts along river banks, tugged onto trees, grabbed the loose forest soil for purchase and prodded at the bodies piled in the water, dammed and sodden, prodded the bodies with sticks and canes and cried aloud, “Do you see my Jerry?” or “Is Edger in there?”

  Alligators were rumored drifting upstream, and when the rains fattened the rivers ever more, when the bodies continued to float, bloating, there were those along the banks of the land who claimed to see the yellow eyes and leather hides of alligators gliding along the blackened waters, and it was said nothing attracts an alligator like the smell of a rotten kill.

  And how there remained along the land the rotten husks of speakers, the decayed and worm-feasted wood, the rusted tin, the frayed wires, and there were those who felt an absence in this world emptied of the drone of speakers, of the names of the dead, and in the night as you prepared to sleep, and along the days as you packed your clothes, and through the hours you journeyed by rail and by carriage to a new city, to college, you heard only the echo and hum of those years of war, the damage of your eardrums, the hissing of your ears dying. And how there were those who paid others to call out the names of the dead, how paid actors stood on street corners uttering the names of the deceased into tin horns, calling out the appearance of the dead, their education, their accomplishments, while family and friends sat on nearby benches, dressed in mourning, weeping, remembering.

  And these were the days of new religions, days of séances and table tapping, days of mystics from lands nearby who wore bath towels they called turbans and amulets of false emeralds and they insisted they were from lands unknown, these mystics who browned their faces with shoe-polish and spoke in exotic accents, who reduced mourning families to poverty and disappeared from towns after impregnating widows. And then widows wandered the streets
in their black gowns and black veils and spoke of their “divine insemination,” how a spirit coiled in the dark, green mist shaped as a hand up their skirt, lips against their neck, the voice of their beloved dead in their ears, the rank gust of ectoplasm, the sticky smear along thighs.

  And in those days there were many mystics who took photographs of these sitters with spirits lingering over their shoulders, smiling from the window, slouched against bookshelves, and very often these photographs involved spirits of the famous recently dead, or the famous long ago dead, images of our Abraham or Caesar or Shakespeare, rather than the recent dead of the sitter.

  And it was said even Abraham’s widow visited with seers, although when the turbaned mystic hummed in the static of the universe, in the radiant cadences of our Abraham, Mary Todd would only say, “Is he safe? Is my Willie well?” and when the mystic said, “He sings with the angels, he wears white gowns, he gazes upon his mother and calls down to her,” Mary Todd wept and responded with notes for the mystic to read, letters to Willie asking him if he was dressing warmly, if he was washing his hands before dinner, if he would sing to her each night. And the mystic told Mary Todd, “Pull back your veil my dear,” and the mystic said, “I hear your boy in my ear, he says, ‘Mama, please don’t hide your face. I’m here, watching you’” and she fell against the table, weeping and gnashing, and the mystic, surely wondered, “Why does she not wonder after him?”

  And there were those who said the voices from beyond and the rapping upon tables brought little comfort to Mary Todd, who now rode trains to those cities along the land where her credit was still good, and how her clothing and decorating debts escalated into the tens of thousands, and she petitioned the government for relief of those debts, saying, “My husband saved this country so crooks like you could prosper—you cheats owe me!” and how she rode trains to the largest cities of the valley and wandered their most fashionable districts dressed as a woman of soot, her face shrouded in mourning veil, and how she loaded her arms and Tad’s arms with the most fashionable gowns and shoes and gloves, and how she attempted to pay for these with her words alone, saying, “After what I’ve gone through—my husband spattered onto my gown—”