Jack was shaken to the point of being sick on his boots. Shaken by the fact that he’d been an inch away from death. By the glimpse he’d caught of those black eyes; those fangs after breaking free. He didn’t say a word on the ride home. Neither man did. They reached New Salem after sunrise and were about to part company in silence when Jack, who was continuing on to Clary’s Grove, pulled up his reins and turned toward the general store.
“Abe,” he said. “I wanna know everything there is to know ’bout killin’ vampires.”
SIX
Ann
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming… I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost.
—Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby,
mother of two sons killed in the Civil War
November 21st, 1864
I
New Salem hadn’t grown as quickly as Denton Offutt hoped; in fact, it may have lost a few residents in the months after he opened the store. The Sangamon was still a long way from being “the next Mississippi.” Navigation remained a treacherous affair, and all but a few steamboats remained trapped in the wider waters to the south, with all of their precious customers and cargo. It didn’t help matters that New Salem had a second general store closer to the center of the settlement, siphoning off customers before they’d even had a chance to reach his front door. By the time the ice began to break on the sluggish Sangamon in the spring of 1832, Offutt’s store had failed, and Abe was out of a job. His anger is evident in an entry dated March 27th.
Bade farewell to [Offutt] this morning, the last of the goods having been sold or traded; my belongings were moved to the Herndon place until such time as I am able to make other arrangements. I care not that he has gone. I feel no sadness at his leaving, and feel not tempted in the slightest to follow his listless example. I have never known idle hands, and shall not know them now. I resolve to remain. I shall prosper yet.
As always, Abe was true to his word. He did whatever it took to make money: Splitting rails. Clearing land. Building sheds. His relationship with the Clary’s Grove Boys paid its first dividends, too, in the form of the odd jobs they intimidated locals into giving him. He even found work as an “ax man” on one of the few steamboats making its way up the Sangamon, standing on its bow and chopping away any obstructions that slowed its struggle north. And through it all, he never stopped hunting.
I have given a great deal of thought to what the barkeep said. Have I ever wondered why Henry takes such an interest in hunting vampires? Have I ever wondered why he sends me in his stead? I admit that I have spent many an hour perplexed by these questions. Wondering if perhaps there is some deeper truth in them. That I am the sworn enemy of vampires doing the bidding of a vampire? There is no eluding this fact, nor the paradox inherent in it. That I am being used to further the unseen ends of one vampire in particular? I must admit the possibility. Yet after deliberating the whole, I have come to this conclusion:
It matters not.
If indeed I am nothing more than Henry’s servant, so be it. So long as the result is fewer vampires, I shall serve happily.
Henry’s letters began to arrive more frequently, and Abe ventured out when they did. But he didn’t venture alone.
I have found in Jack an able and eager hunting companion, and have endevored [sic] to share with him the whole of my knowledge with regard to destroying vampires (I needn’t teach him anything of quickness or bravery, for he enjoys a surplus of both). I am thankful for the help, for Henry’s letters have been coming so frequently that I find myself running from one end of the state to the other.
One night Abe found himself running through the streets of Decatur with a bloodied ax in his hands, Jack beside him with a crossbow. No more than ten paces ahead of them, a bald man made a beeline for the Sangamon River. The right side of his shirt was soaked with blood, and his right arm was dangling by his side, attached to his body by nothing more than a few bits of sinew and skin.
We ran past a pair of gentlemen on the street. They watched our little procession speed by, yelling after us: “You there! Stop at once!” What a sight we must have made! I could not help but laugh.
Abe and Jack chased the one-armed man to the water’s edge.
He dove in and disappeared beneath the black water. Jack would have gone in after him had I not grabbed him by the collar and yelled “no!” with what little voice I had left. Jack stood on the bank, gasping for breath and pointing his crossbow at every bubble that surfaced.
“I told you to wait for my signal!” yelled Abe.
“We would have been waiting all damned night!”
“Well, now we’ve lost him!”
“Shut up and keep a sharp eye! He has to come up for air sooner or later….”
Abe looked at Jack, his fury surrendering to a quizzical smile… then to laughter.
“Yes,” laughed Abe. “I expect he shall be coming up for air any day now.”
Abe put a hand on Jack’s shoulder and led him away from the riverbank, his laughter echoing through the sleeping streets.
If [Jack] is wanting in anything, it is patience. He is too quick to spring from hiding—and, I fear, too eager to share what he knows with his companions from Clary’s Grove. I am ever reminding him of the need for secrecy, and of the madness that would overtake all of Sangamon County if word of our errands were to spread beyond the two of us.
He’d been in the county all of a year, but in that short time Abe had become something of a local celebrity. A “young man whose hands are just as skilled with an ax as they are with a quill,” as his schoolteacher friend, Mentor Graham, put it. Abe had seen and heard enough from his customers to know what was on their minds.
Chief among their concerns is the river itself. What a state it is in! Barely more than a creek in some parts; choked by all manner of driftwood and obstructions. If we are to enjoy the bounty of the Mississippi, it shall need to be greatly improved, so that steamboats may navigate it freely. Such improvement, of course, will require a tremendous sum of money. I know of only one way (outside thievery) to procure it.
Abraham Lincoln decided to run for office. In announcing his candidacy for the Illinois State Legislature in a county newspaper, he struck a populist, if somewhat defeatist, chord:
I am young, and unknown to many of you. I was born, and have ever remained, in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and if elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.
Shortly after Abe’s announcement, word of a “war with the Indians” reached New Salem.
A Sauk war chief named Black Hawk has violated a treaty and crossed [the Mississippi] into the village of Saukenuk to the north. He and his British Band * mean to kill or drive out every white settler they encounter and reclaim land believed rightfully theirs. Governor Reynolds has put out a call for six hundred able-bodied men to take up arms against these savages and protect the gentle people of Illinois.
Despite his political ambitions (or because of them), Abe was among the first in Sangamon County to volunteer. He would recall his excitement years later.
I had lusted for war since I was a boy of twelve. Here, at last, was my chance to see it firsthand! I imagined the glory of charging into battle—firing my flintlock and swinging my ax! I imagined slaughtering scores of Indians with ease, for they could be no quicker or stronger than vampires.
The volunteers gathered in Beardstown, a growing settlement on the banks of the Illinois River. Here, the men were given a crash course in the barest essent
ials of warfare by a handful of experienced militiamen. Before journeying north, Abe’s unit—a ragtag group of volunteers that included men from New Salem and Clary’s Grove—elected him to serve as their captain.
Captain Lincoln! I will admit that tears filled my eyes. It was the first time I had felt such esteem. The first time that I had been elected to lead my fellow men, and their sacred trust gave me more satisfaction than any election I have won or any office I have held since.
Among those marching off to battle with Abe were fellow vampire hunter Jack Armstrong and a young major named John Todd Stuart. Stuart was a slender man with “a high forehead and neatly parted black hair.” He had a “prominent” nose and “unkind” eyes that “did his gentle nature an injustice.” Stuart would play a crucial role in Lincoln’s postwar life, as an encouraging lawyer in Springfield, as a friendly adversary in Congress, and most of all as the cousin of a raven-haired Kentucky belle named Mary Todd.
The realities of war proved far less exciting than Abe’s imagination had conjured. With thousands of Illinois militiamen engaging the rebellious Indians to the north, there was little for the volunteers to do but sit and swelter. From an entry dated May 30th, 1832—after weeks spent camped out miles from the fields of battle:
My men have suffered greatly (from boredom), much blood has been shed (by mosquitoes), and I have swung my ax mightily (chopping firewood). Surely we have earned our place in the annals of history—for never has there been so little war in a war.
In early July, Abe and his men were finally discharged and began the long journey home, not a single war story to tell among them. Abe reached New Salem (where he found two letters in need of his “urgent attention”) less than two weeks before the election for state legislature. He resumed his candidacy at once, shaking hands and knocking on doors day and night. Unfortunately the field had ballooned to thirteen candidates while he’d been away battling mosquitoes. With so much time lost and so many candidates splitting votes, he didn’t stand a chance.
Abe finished eighth. But there was a silver lining, one that even the depressed and defeated Lincoln couldn’t help but see: of all three hundred votes cast in New Salem, only twenty-three had been cast against him. Those who knew him overwhelmingly endorsed him. “It was merely a matter of shaking more hands.”
His political career had begun.
II
Lincoln needed a success in the wake of his first political defeat, and he knew just where to find it. From an entry dated March 6th, 1833:
I shall do what Offutt could not. By God, I shall run a profitable store in New Salem! Berry * and I have today purchased the whole on $300 of credit, which we have every expectation of paying back within two years’ time. In three years, we shall have saved enough to purchase our building!
Again, the realities proved far less exciting than Abe’s imagination. There were already two general stores in New Salem by the time Lincoln/Berry opened its doors, and barely enough demand to keep those open. Historians have puzzled over why a man with Abe’s intellect and his father’s “horse sense” didn’t foresee the problem of adding a third store to the mix. Or why he seems to have so thoroughly misjudged his partner, William Berry, who proved shiftless, unreliable, and “perpetually drunk.”
The answer seems to be something more than ambition. With the store on the verge of collapse less than a year later, Abe’s journal entries grow increasingly exhausted; desperate. One in particular stands out—not only for its abruptness, but for its closing reference to (we can only assume) his mother.
I must endure.
I must be more than I am.
I must not fail.
I must not fail her.
But fail he did—at least as far as the world of dry goods and ladies’ hats was concerned. The Lincoln/Berry store simply “winked out” in 1834, leaving each man with debts of more than $200. In the end, the unreliable Berry couldn’t even be counted on to stay alive. He died a few years later, leaving Abe saddled with the whole amount. It would take him seventeen years to pay it off.
Had the timing been different, Abe might have packed up and left New Salem forever. But as it happened, there was another election for the Illinois State Legislature just a few short months off. Having little else to do (“none of Henry’s letters having arrived of late”), and encouraged by his good showing the last time around, Abe resolved to run again—and this time, he was determined to run properly. He traveled the county on horseback and on foot, stopping to speak with anyone he encountered. He shook the hands of farmhands toiling in the scorched fields and won their respect with demonstrations of his own frontier-learned skills and God-given strength. He spoke at churches and taverns, horse races and picnics, peppering his stump speech (undoubtedly written on scraps of paper in his pocket as he traveled) with self-deprecating stories of flatboat mishaps and mosquito battles.
“I have never seen a man with a greater gift for speaking,” remembered Mentor Graham after Abe’s death. “He was an ungainly—some might say unpleasant-looking—fellow… tall as a tree, with pant legs that stopped a good six inches above his shoes. His hair was in a constant state of untidiness; his coat ever in need of pressing. When he took his place in front of the crowd, they studied him with furrowed brows and folded arms. But when he launched into his address, their doubts vanished, and they were inevitably moved to thunderous applause—even tears by its conclusion.”
This time he shook enough hands. Abraham Lincoln was elected to the Illinois State Legislature on August 4th, 1834.
A poor son of the frontier, with nary a dollar to his name and not a year of schooling to his credit, sent to Vandalia * to speak for his fellow man! A rail-splitter seated beside men of letters! I admit that I am intimidated at the prospect of meeting such men. Will they accept me as their collegue [sic], or shun me as the unlearned clodhopper with holes in his shoes? In either case, I suspect that my life is forever changed, and cannot help my excitement as December nears.
Abe’s feeling proved correct. His life would never be the same. He would soon count statesmen and scholars among his friends; trade the backwoods folksiness of Sangamon County for the burgeoning sophistication of Vandalia. He’d taken the first step on his way to being a lawyer. His first step on the road to the White House. But it was only one of two turning points that year.
For he had also fallen madly in love.
III
Jack was giving serious thought to turning his crossbow on Abe. They’d just made a miserable 200-mile trip north to the town of Chicago, sleeping under the freezing stars of late autumn, trudging through knee-high mud and waist-high water, “and the ganglin’ fool’d done nothin’ but talk ’bout a girl the whole damned way.”
Her name is Ann Rutledge. I believe her twenty or one-and-twenty years, though I dare not ask. It matters not. Never has a more perfect creature graced this earth! Never has a man been more in love than I! I shall write of nothing but her beauty in these pages for as long as I live.
Armstrong and Lincoln sat with their backs against the rear of a stable stall and their bottoms on a bed of loose hay, their breath visible in the cool night air coming off of Lake Michigan. A horse’s backside loomed over their heads, every twitch of its tail giving rise to the fear that something naturally foul was about to occur. They’d been waiting for their prey all night, one of them speaking in smiling whispers, the other contemplating murder.
“Have you ever been in love, Jack?”
Jack gave no answer.
“It is a strange feeling indeed. One finds oneself intoxicated with happiness for no reason at all. One’s thoughts turn to the most peculiar things….”
Jack pictured a steaming pile of manure falling into Abe’s mouth.
“I long for the smell of her. Do you think me strange for saying so? I long for the smell of her, and for the feeling of her delicate fingers in mine. I long to look at—”
The stable doors opened outside. Boot heels against wooden planks.
Abe and Jack readied their weapons.
The vampire could not smell us over the animal stench, nor hear us trampling hay. His footsteps ceased; the stall door opened. Before he had time enough to blink, my ax was thrown in his chest, and Jack’s arrow shot through his eye and into his brain. He fell backward, shrieking and grabbing at his face as blood ran around the sides of the arrow. Upset by the noise, his horse reared up—I grabbed it by the bridle for fear that it would trample us both. As I did so, Jack pulled the ax from the vampire’s chest, raised it above his head, and brought it down on the creature’s face, splitting it clean in two. The vampire was still. Jack raised the ax above his head a second time, and brought it down with even greater force. He did this a third, a fourth time, striking the creature’s head with the blunt side of the blade again and again until nothing more than a flattened bag of skin and hair and blood remained.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Page 13