Alligators of Abraham (12 page)
And the president said to your father, “We need to clean them out. Don't you see, dear fellow? We need to burn them up like in the old days.”
The president explained that the long rains floated alligators down rivers, through tall grasses and into towns. These alligators, grown fat from corpses mounded in rivers, their faces and eyes and snouts tangled with dead leaves and weeds, bulged and asleep along the banks, awake and sunning their mouths while overhead gulls swirled and shrieked.
He explained that alligators were invading cities, crashing general stores, slurping the syrup from peach tins. Jagged and blood-crusted they thrashed into butcher shops, devouring the best cuts of meat and the worst, the bone and the gristle, swallowing the head and the skin and the butcher's knives as the butcher fended at them, and then the butcher's bloody apron and the butcher's bloody shoes. They hissed on the lawns and moaned in the coiled barbed-wire, barbs burrowing into their soft bellies the more they thrashed.
And veterans fired rifles from bedroom windows and front porches while their wives and sons lay maimed and rotting and disappearing into the bloody gullets of alligators.
And alligators scuttled after elderly men, the echoing thumps of canes against alligator leather, the writhing sounds, as a wretched body is broken in half, as an aged body dies, and they attacked elderly women, and their jewels and furs disappeared, bones crunched and gray-skin sucked. And when the elderly were gone the alligators consumed their dogs, and so the howling of dogs, the strangled yelping of dogs. And alligators devoured dandies, their velvet jackets and their silk trousers, and many heard the screams of rich sons and proclaimed this a divine justice, and now the hymns of the unpaid echoed from shantytowns throughout the land as they sang, “From the valleys of the dead come the alligators of Abraham.”
And now, everywhere, the oil-black spray of blood and the blood dripping from enormous gullets, the screams of men, the static of soldiers echoing from within caverns of meat and leather, and soon the weeping and gnashing of those who wondered of the cruelty of a god who would allow men to survive a noble war only to be devoured, pleading and pissing themselves, by mindless beasts.
And your father listened to the president with wide milky eyes, and when the president asked, “Will you again perform the great sacrifice for your nation?” your father gestured to the fields behind your lawn and spoke of the prairies he knew as a young soldier, how in the night these prairies were born into wild fires and from those years distant he still knew the heat upon his brow and thereafter the bloom of wild flowers from the ashen prairie soil, the grasses grown long and plentiful. “They seemed now as green oceans in their bounty” he insisted. And your father spoke of the figures of natives touching torches to the grasses, their shrieks as the valley entire lit into shimmering flame. And your father said, “These ancient peoples understood better than we the role fire plays in a rebirth” and your father mused, “Very likely they are near some original knowledge.”
And even after the president departed, your father read to him from his leather-bound bible, flipping to pages at random, reading again and again, no matter the page: “On the second day the Son of the Lord God journeyed to the valleys of flame and soot where he was scorched to a char. There devils danced along the molten shore while the Son writhed for our sins. The miracle of the resurrection came now from the char of this man-god, for the next day he rose again.”
*
“In search of you we wander the land”
And in the summer you returned to find the skies as if smote with locusts, for now your father burned the fields nearest your house and stood half-naked amidst his flames, conjuring them with a canister of fuel and subduing them with his steel shovel. And you watched from your bedroom window, the heat warming the yellowed-glass, until your father stood in the doorway, enflamed and blackened and bellowing your name until you attended his side. “I need you beside me out there,” he said. “I fear I may destroy us all.”
And your father gestured to your mother's headstone, to Walter's. And your father said of your half-brother, “If I pried open his casket, if I set his dust to flame, his particles and bones, would he rise again? Would he wrap his arms about my neck and speak again his sweet breath to my face? Would he say again in his voice of the angels my name as âPapa'?”
And at his commandment you wandered the fields he built into valleys of fire, gagging and coughing, blinded for the smoke and your tears. And you begged him to never again make you return. And you pulled at the cuffs of his trousers and wept, although by now you were taller than he. And your father gave you a white mask with a long beak and said “I have known these to do much good against the infectious atmosphere.”
And your father gestured to your house through the smoke and the waves of heat, stalked the hallways, his black boot-prints beaten into your mother's carpets, and held your mother's portrait, and drew soot lines in the dust of the glass, saying, “If I burn down our house will your mother return to those rooms? Will she grow from the soil as if newly budded? Will she smile at me as if she had never gone?” And your father curled onto your mother's sofa, and there he forced himself to sleep, yet even in his dreams he understood she would never return to him.
And your father heaped his wheelbarrow with paintings pulled from the walls and portraits from your mother's desk, cracked open their glass frames and cast the images to the mud-lawn, rolled your mother's carpets and peeled her wallpaper in long strips, the yellowed dust of glue motes swirling, and he built towers of flame from these until your mother's face, and your own face, puckered into ash. Your father returned from the house, his arms stacked with albums, and from these he tore portraits and cast them onto the burning heap until the hundred faces of your life and your father's life and your mother's life gathered into the fumes of oil and dust. And when he came to a photo of Walter your father grabbed hold of your collar and said, “Oh god, oh my boy.” He pressed the photo into your palm and said, “You do it, goddamn you. You burn my dear sweet boy.” And your father burned your mother's sofa, her books, her photographs, her pens, her clothing, her buffalo boots, her china, and he sculpted the dust with mud and grass into figurines he called “Wife” and “Son.” And your father placed his lips upon these, their breasts, their various orifices, and he murmured mournful sounds unto them, saying, “My god, my darling, if I may redeem myselfâ” and, “Oh my boy how I have failed you.” And your father wandered the ash heaps of his construction, and, how he prayed not from his bible but from a language of his own creation, a language of dust and mold and an intonation heaved with sinew and blood.
And your father commanded the resurrection of your mother and your brother, and he jutted his saber against the sky, and your father stooped over the ashes, blew unto them as if from his lips whispered the breath of life, and your father bathed these in his elixirs, and you heard through your window the wail of his weeping as they dissolved into the mud. And your father stooped over the mud and the dust, and he spoke of the cities he would raze and the mothers and children he would see butchered and the rivers that would flow with red, the streets he would fill with decay if only they would return to life. You knew his rage when they did not. How your father bellowed and gnashed his teeth and wailed and lobbed his jars of elixir into bonfires along the fields until the basement shelves and trunks emptied, and your father stood nude and sooty amidst the explosions of his fields while the once grasses trembled into waves of fire and smoldering oxygen, and how the fields glowed, and how the fields throbbed, and how soon wagons arrived carrying copper vats and men in overalls with uncoiled canvas hoses, and they sprayed the fields and the now blazing houses, some of them boarded-over and some of them only now vacated of their occupants.
Explosions of fire and gasoline tore the skies, and those once green fields now smoldered to dust. And within your room and from your stoop you awaited your father's return from the light he built, and you waited in the silence of his lapsed bellowing, within a world vacant of his horror. And when your father did not return you found unopened trunks within his office, and within these lay journals written in a language of smeared worms, of dead fish, and you found texts chronicling the campaigns of Napoleon, the campaigns of Caesar, the campaigns of Genghis Kahn, and you found images of your mother and his first wife in the place of words, bare-breasted and smiling, bent over and the darkness there, and you gazed upon the naked apparition of your mother, and you gazed upon the woman who was his first wife, who for so many years you had contemplated as washed ashore, tangled in weeds and crabs. You gazed upon the black and white figment of her parted anus, and you tucked these pictures into your trousers and your shirt pockets, and you carried these with you wherever you went, through all your days remaining within this house.
And from the porch stoop you gazed over the black stubble landscape where no apparitions tread but the shadows of birds, and you wandered the blackened nothingness and everywhere underfoot the dull crunch of charcoaled-life, the scorched bones of birds and rabbits and gophers, but no where did you find your father preserved beneath the ash, lips blown away but teeth intact, sneering or gasping in horror. And you fell asleep with the photographs of your mother and your father's first wife upon your chest, and you dreamed these women on either side of you, murmuring and kissing, the heat of their breath rank upon your neck. And when you woke the photographs were gone, and in their place a handprint stained in soot and gasoline.
And you woke in the night to the thumps you believed were his boots, and you woke to a smell you thought a mixture of gasoline and formaldehyde, and there in the doorway this image of a man in his uniform, the red plume from his hat, this image of a man and his saber, this image of a man in burned and oily rags, this image of a man stripped to nothing but his boots and half-burned skin.
You watched the moonlit valley of ash and mud and broken glass and at the merest creak in the floorboards your heart shuddered, and you prayed, “Oh Lord please no” and returned to waiting when it was not him. And when you again left by train, this time you vowed to never return.
*
“Let thine eyes beyond the things that are equal”
In those days there remained yet the figures of the unpaid within statehouses, and as the agitation for higher wages continued, a great cry went up amongst the captains of industry, and soon the president read from note-cards at podiums, promising to clean out the statehouses, and how those doors were kicked open by hooded militias, and soon the white smoke of rifle fire, the screams of unpaid senators, their white, dead eyes gazing upward.
Militiamen crowded into apartments with their knives and rifles, and here they spoke of the stink of the unpaid, the laziness and stupidity of the unpaid, here they said all crime extended from the sloth and vile nature of the unpaid, here they said the unpaid wanted nothing more than the flesh of the paid woman, and how the children of these wandered in rags, and how their women should be sterilized and the men castrated, and they said, “The only good unpaid is a dead unpaid” and told jokes of the unpaid swinging from trees by their necks, of the unpaid swallowed by alligators, of the unpaid beaten to death by their employers and how no decent person would bother to dig a grave for the bodies, and how the bodies were tossed into ditches, dumped in the river, gathered in sacks and loaded onto barges.
And government funded militias roamed the streets on horseback and in carriages, paying “visits” to “Abraham towns,” setting fire to tarpaulin tents and knocking over tin shacks with baseball bats, tying unpaid men to carriages and the sounds of those men screaming, the trail of their blood, their carcasses left for the rats and gulls, and how numerous militiamen fornicated forcibly with unpaid women in the back of carriages and behind general stores.
And the white hoods of militias shone in the light of burning shantytowns and tarpaulin cities, and here they called unpaid mothers “she-bitches” and young children “puppies,” and they rode through tin shacks and thrashed the screaming masses in the fire light, flickering and blackening, while even those who escaped the blaze were forever married to a scorched new flesh.
Now the streets were clogged by militiamen in carriages and on horses, their faces hooded except the whites of their eyes. And militiamen leaned against carriages, whispering to the women who passed, and when the unpaid husbands objected, thrashed them with rifle-butts and boot-tips, the spatter of bloody teeth, the screams of wives dragged into the back of carriages and fornicated with at bayonet point.
Such was the way the great menace was subdued. And the wages of railroad workers and coalminers were cut to less than seventy-cents per day, or half a rotten steak, and when the lowly paid and former unpaid organized in meeting halls, the militias arrived with clubs and pistols and assassinated the leaders of these unions. And those who went to these meetings were jailed as anarchists, and those who protested in the streets were shot or beaten as agitators, and statesmen called militias into railroad yards on the command of railroad magnates and furious crowds of the lowly paid set fires to train cars and engines, and along the yards and coalmines came strikes and riots and outbursts of rifle-fire and clubs and pistol-shots from the militias, and again oil millionaires and coal barons and railroad magnates raised costs and lowered wages, and the “Abraham towns” decayed into peeling walls and roaches and leaking pipes and rat-infested water-closets. Yet rather than sedate the agitation, more workers struck, the bricklayers and granite-cutters, the cigar-makers and stone masons, the men producing piano plates, the mill hands and the rail carriers, the trackmen and factory hands, and these were branded “anarchists,” and these were called “instigators,” and even in their beds they were not safe from the clubs of militias, from the fires of militias.
