by Robert Kloss
And when Mary Todd learned of those auctions held for scraps of Abraham’s bloody clothes, the locks of his hair cut by the coroner and given as tokens to those who had pledged fidelity, of the fortunes made from these “blood relics” she said unto her son Robert, “It isn’t fair” and “I should gain a percentage, at least.” And Mary Todd told Robert to cut himself, “Here” and she gestured to a vein on his arm, and she told him to smear his father’s jackets and slacks with this, and she told him to smear his father’s shirts until he became dizzied. And when all our Abraham’s clothes were blood-sticky, Mary Todd smiled and said, “These will fetch a tidy sum” and when Robert protested she said, “No one will know the difference.”
And still these shopping binges in cities along the valley, the names she assumed and the veils and hats and wigs she wore, and her hotel rooms filled with boxes of lace curtains, footstools, shoes, handkerchiefs, jewels, and all these shipped in railroad cars and loaded into her apartment until she and Tad slept on the floor or in the hallway, while the apartment was transformed into a forest of boxes and dust and cobwebs. And from deep within the heart of this mess came the stink of food rotting, pork loins and bottled milk and cakes gone untouched.
And when Tad died of “dropsy of the chest,” when his thin, young face finally knew peace and they set him within his casket, Mary Todd raved in a language all took as gibberish.
And she would not sell Tad’s clothes nor Willie’s, instead keeping those, all the toys and trinkets and photos of the boys arranged before her. But she sold all of Abraham’s, and when these were gone she sold all of Robert’s childhood outfits and called these “Abraham’s youthful garments” and from these sales Mary Todd made what she called a “tidy sum.” And soon she wandered the streets with paper money falling from her pockets, and when she attempted to tell the shop girls to charge these furs and gloves and shoes, her mouth could only say “GASDGDASHOAUG” and her jaw moved slow as if fractured, and she woke in alleyways with her pockets rifled through, and cut and bruised and bleeding from the lip, and “violated in that most terrible way,” she insisted, saying, “I can feel their fingers yet, I can smell their wickedness.”
And in the papers and gossip columns along the land all wrote how she was unfit for the memory of our Abraham, how she was “most pathetic,” and shrewish, and sinister. And it was “revealed” now that in the hours and days after the death of our Abraham, Mary Todd had been unable to weep, and she had wandered covered in his browned-blood and brain matter, a hint of a smile playing upon her expression when the Secretary of War explained, “We have not yet captured the assassin, Madame.”
And it was said that Mary Todd met young men through the papers and these bought her furs and made love to her in bridal suites in exchange for what she called her “Still considerable influence in certain circles,” and when her recommendations opened no doors these young men wrote letters to the editors of major papers condemning her “Wretched stink” and “Godless ways”.
And Mary Todd dreamed of forest fires, and capitals burning, and hillsides and ravines born into smoke and licking flame, and in these dreams all the women and little boys of the valleys wept from sheets of flame, until the Chloral Hydrate pills she dropped in glasses of scotch took hold, and how she snored with a slumped open mouth and half-shut eyes, and she staggered when finally awake, and her eyes slouched, and she slurred in new languages, and when she reached her hand toward Robert’s shoulder her mouth twisted into the names of the dead, into the faces and shadows of Willie and Tad and Abraham.
It was in these days that Robert now said of his mother, “She’s become too much of a burden” and as the doctors restrained her and drugged her and locked her in a padded room, Robert told her, “This is for your own good.” And through the grating he said, “Mother, you’re ill, you can’t see it, but I’m worried you’ll harm yourself” and she clawed at the door, and she spat, and she said, “The Lord must hate me to kill all my babies but let you live” and she said, “You better pray they never let me out.” And there were those who warned Robert, “She carries a pistol in her girdle in case you ever visit” and there were those who insisted Robert smiled at this and said, “Well, she’ll gather quite the bit of dust waiting for that day, won’t she?” and “The old bird’s damn lucky I didn’t strangle her the night my father died” and “We’ve become a better people, but don’t you think there’s a certain authority to the way the ancients dealt with their relatives?”
“Again you come for the one I love most”
And along the land there came a great gnashing for the soul of our Abraham. And there were those who dressed in black hoods and snuck into Abraham’s crypt and opened Abraham’s casket. They brought the body into the open air until anxiety gripped their souls and they could go no further. When government agents arrived the long dead body of our Abraham laid in the dirt before the crypt, moistened in the morning dew, yellowed and the face slightly crooked, the jaw unhinged, the hair long and wiry, but otherwise as if recently dead. There were government agents who fell to their knees and whispered to the Lord God, and there were those who crossed themselves at the sight of our Abraham, and there were those who turned away from this body, un-aged and sprawled on the soil before them.
And there were a thousand plaster masks labeled as Abraham’s death mask, and these sat upon the mantles and in the libraries of fur barons and leather merchants and bankers and steel and railroad magnates along the valley. And there were those who owned our Abraham’s blood spattered top hat, his blood-crusted scarf, and they wore these to society balls and church services as the height of fashion, and in those days many a priest kissed the bloody blots. And there were those who took pills made of Abraham’s flesh and there were those who said “never forget.” And the new president proclaimed a day in Abraham’s honor and all prayed unto his sacred name, and images of Abraham’s death shown illuminated from magic lanterns gifted to children, and the faces of little children along the valley glowed nightly with Abraham’s death, their dreams cascading with red and throbbing with screams of “Murder! Murder! Murder!” And there were those who kept his hair in lockets, and those who held flecks of his dried blood in vials, and there were those who said this blood, if dropped into water, would “enhance virility.” And the actress who Abraham’s bloody wound lay upon now wore her brown stained dress to society parties, and she was applauded as she insisted the stain, if touched or rubbed or licked, would have a curative effect, and it was said Robert invited her to balls and insisted she wear this brown-spattered dress as they danced, as they made love, so he could wear the dust of his father upon his hands, under his fingernails.
And now the new president became the old president, and the man who became the new president was a man your father revered as a greater general than even he was, and your father often said from the gloom of his porch, “This man Grant stood by me when I was insane and drifting, and I stood by him when he was stone drunk,” and this president Grant wore the same disheveled suit each day, his beard and hair unkempt and wiry, and he stank always of grain alcohol and slumbered through his cabinet meetings, and when Grant read his proclamation to unearth Abraham and place the body on display for “all nations and peoples to see” he did so from notecards handed to him by cabinet members, and when this new president read, “the people must never forget our Abraham and the sacrifices he made for his nation” he did so with such a slur there were few who understood him.
And there were great parades of confetti, and fireworks splayed red, white, and blue along the horizon when this man Grant unveiled Abraham’s glass casket in the capital lobby, and there were wide grins at the ribbon cutting while all seemed impressed at the tubes ever connected to his body, the constant flow of yellow and red fluids, the air tight canister they kept him in, the pillow they rested his shattered head upon. Citizens who drifted along the velvet rope said, “It’s just remarkable” and “This is the greatest moment of my life” and they lit can
dles, and they draped wreathes and bouquets of wild flowers, and they changed the names of their children to “Abraham” although by then no one remembered his position or his accomplishments, knowing only that he had been a great and famous hero.
“To pierce the heavens”
And when you gazed upon Abraham so displayed you thought only of your father. Indeed much reminded you of your father in this city crowded with the statues of generals gesturing to unseen battlefields, and you wandered this city, lost against the jostling and clattering and ceaseless neighing of horses, the street cars screeching and showering sparks onto the cobbled roads. And the buildings and bricks and windows and roofs of this city were not husks. And the crowds of this city hummed in a thousand languages. And you wandered lost from the moment you stepped off the train, and you wandered with a sense that all men were watching you, that their eyes were pressing down onto you, their sneers and ridicule, and you understood they would just as well steal your wallet as call you friend.
And in the city there were rooms filled with the flickering of what were then called magic lanterns, although the images they cast were far more exact than the magic lanterns of your youth, the low gloom of images playing on the walls, onto screens through the smoke of tobacco fumes, and therein these rooms you watched many a moment recreated in flickers while voices spoke in the crackling cadences of phonographs, broadcast with hidden speakers. And you reclined in the plush chairs of these rooms, shoulder to shoulder with other men, with the women they sometimes brought into these shadows, and you watched the exhibition of the death of Abraham, the silver glint of a bolt gun, the black burst of blood, Mary Todd and this man Booth in the fields along the city, and the acts she performed upon him, with her hands, her open mouth. And you gasped into the gasping of other men, the shuddered moans, the quickened breaths of the women they brought. And there were images of Abraham as a prairie lawyer, the thin crackling of his voice as he denounced the paying of the unpaid, as he thumped his fist against his palm, and the tinny thump of hooves, the static screams as Abraham rode on horseback lashing the unpaid with a bullwhip. And there were evenings after these exhibitions when women and men in top hats and silk scarves left saying, “I never really appreciated how much Abraham hated the unpaid” and there were depictions of Abraham burning the store-bought goods of the unpaid, Abraham thrashing the unpaid until they gave up their foodstuffs, Abraham firing rifles into crowds of mostly bare-breasted and charcoal-smeared unpaid women, which earned him now the nickname “The Great Emaciator.” And there were “news programs” of newly paid running amok in “sparkling” carriages smoking ten dollar cigars while their families starved at home, chasing the comely daughters of paid folk while their families starved at home, and you heard those in the room sigh, and you heard them say, “All of this as our dear departed Abraham foresaw.” And programs depicted the charcoaled and shoe-polish smeared faces of unpaid in the state houses of former rebel lands, eating fried chicken and picking lint from their feet, leering at married paid women, drinking moonshine and firing pistols into chandeliers, passing legislation banning paid men from all restaurants and drinking fountains, and of these images even Grant said, “It is the daily news writ in lightning! And, sadly, it is all too true.”
And in those days, when you were not in classes, you sat in the shadows of picture-houses watching biblical projections like The Original Sin, the sounds of static moans and the fumy black and white apparitions of a hundred positions of copulation, and Sodom and Gomorrah, the curves of women topless and women outfitted in pale diaphanous negligees, the parting of legs and those dark furs beneath, while greased men in headdresses carrying some manner of sword lingered behind stone monuments, and beneath the dialogue came the sound of meat dully slapping, the panting of viewers.
And there were pictures about soldiers returning, bearded and head bandaged, and the tin static explained that these boys lost all recollection of their identities when struck by some rifle butt or concussed in a shelling, and they returned to pale and beautiful fiancées who in their absence had clipped a great many roses into wicker baskets as gifts for dying convalescents and the “down and out fellows” who lingered on the streets, these women who had always remained “true to dear Johnny, wherever he is.” And a great many women wept during these pictures while the men said, “Be strong, Mother,” and there were always considerable lines to see these pictures, for even as the years passed and widows married and grandchildren replaced those sons dead and those dead men became merely the fellow in photographs and letters tucked away in trunks, there was thereafter, and always until these generations passed, this hope that those who were reported dead were reported in error, and the approach of every carriage seemed the hopeful approach of a lad who had spent these years within the fledgling cities of the prairies.
And when you were not in classes you wandered the streets of this city, watched the women along those streets, their lace gloves, their parasols, their bird-plumed and flowered hats, and in the shadows of their hats, and when the sun cast across their expressions just so, their faces seemed shaped into your mother’s, before they returned into their own. And you followed these women, at a distance, along the walks until they reached their brownstone apartments, their brick houses, and you lingered in the shadows across the way for some glimpse through the blackened windows of a glove, of a neck, and how you longed to pelt those windows with stones, to shout, “Mother!”
And in those days when you were not in classes you lay in the coarse moistness of the various women of the land, these women who smelled of smoke and sweat, heavy laden with perfume and make-up, who murmured and moaned against you on well-stained sheets, these women you called by names they invented: Miss Ruby, the Peach, Cherry Pie. And in their arms, in the drift of their moans, in the faded light of oil lamps, you dreamed of the dust sifted around your mother, her hair tangled and fallen over her shoulders, her brow, and you thought of the man she corresponded with, and you dreamed the fury of their congress.
And there were days with these women when you merely wanted them to hold you, to stroke your hand, to murmur and whisper unto you, to say that they would never leave you, to say you were precious beyond all others, to say no harm would befall you, to say there is purpose to all motions, to insist that love resides at the center of all families. And you held a tintype with your mother’s image, your mother with her hair pulled up and the whale-bone curves of her figure, her silk dress, and you said to these women, “Tie your hair in this way and I will pay you extra” and you gestured to your mother’s austere expression and you said, “Look like this, please” and these women never asked who the woman was in this photo, and they scarcely smiled at her, and the man with his saber to her left, and the small boy with his ruffled shirt and velvet waistcoat to her right.
And there were afternoons in these women’s arms when they called you son and you called them mother, when you thought perhaps your mother somewhere now called to an emaciated child in the street, paid him with candy or boiled loin to sing the songs you sang as a little boy, to read aloud those books you read, to thump together the lead soldiers, to make war noises unto these miniature men and their miniature guns, and how your mother brushed the hair from his smutty brow, touched her fingers to his cheek, called him by your name in those moments, called his eyes “beautiful” there in the oil lamp shine.
Certainly many mothers of the missing, and of the dead, paid street children to dress in moldered and dusty clothes found in trunks, to skip upon long silent floors, to sing songs long unsung. Mothers bathing the children and toweling them and tucking them into beds and kissing their brows, and certainly these children were gladly taken into homes, fed breakfasts and sent to schoolhouses, thankfully assuming the names of men obliterated years past.
*
“I will see beyond the clouds”
And although you had received no word from your father these months, you returned home for holidays with luggage in hand and ther
e you found the lawn crowded with “for sale” signs and tarpaulin shrouded lawnmowers. And when you set your luggage upon the porch your father took you for one of those wayward men who came around, men in sooty jackets with stained-brown teeth and bleary eyes who sat smoking in your mother’s room where they smeared her carpets with the dirt of manure from their boots, and their yellow eyes glinted as they haggled with your father, and their voices vibrated along the halls and the stairways and your father called these men “horse thieves,” and his eyes went to blood as he raised his saber, and how before his might these men gave him more money, or they cracked him across the jaw, or they backed away against his bellowing. And for holiday dinner you opened dusty cans of peaches onto your mother’s china plates while your father counted his new wealth and these men loaded their mowing machines into horse carts and wagons.
And how your father situated a tin bathtub onto his ravaged lawn, and he said unto you, “We will bathe in a new kind of water” and he did not smile as he said so. And while you studied your rhetoric and your mathematics your father gazed out over his lawn, sodden and dead. And in the evenings while you read your Aeschylus and your Carlyle in the low glow of oil lamps, your father dedicated himself to the ancients and what they knew of the perseveration of the flesh. He said, “We continue to find their bodies thousands of years after death. We continue to find them grinning and brown and quite intact.” And in the morning he filled the tub with chemicals labeled Supremol, Bleachol, Rectifant, and he swirled powders and dried leaves from jars with a broom handle, and when he wafted the fumes to his nostrils he toppled, and he reached for you from his staggered posture, and from his mouth fled a deep mindless moan.