Alligators of Abraham (2 page)

And you were conceived soon thereafter and when names were proposed your mother said your grandfather's name and she said your father's name and finally she and her mother decided upon . And as she swelled and grew your mother observed closely your father's constant ministrations near the back of the lawn, the care he gave the grasses and dandelions along your brother's tombstone, the boy's dust and bones transplanted from the old yard, and how his fingers followed those words, chiseled and gray. And your mother observed, “Perhaps it is time now to let go of the past…” and she indicated the rise of her belly, and she said, “I'm not saying we need to remove him but if the stone were taken down and the grasses grown over—.” And for months thereafter your father would not acknowledge the condition of his wife, and on the day of your birth he lay at Walter's grave, lost in the bottle at his feet, while your mother's birthing wails sounded from the open window of their marriage chamber.

And when your father held you days later he did so with hands smelling of skins and chemicals, whispering for you to “breathe deeply” of this aroma for even in those times he was convinced of their curative properties, and indeed his hands were as a young boy's hands, as soft and gentle as your own infant hands. And now your father said, “They have not aged,” and he said, “And they will never age. My days amongst the chemicals have changed me.”

And remember now your early boyhood so often spent in the tall grasses behind the house, with your lead soldiers and the sticks and the insects, and as you grew you journeyed the dirt pathway extending into the woods, and there you and the neighborhood boys found bird and mouse skulls and other discarded and bleached bones, and these you boys carried in your pockets, hidden from your mothers. And often in the evening sun the sounds of your parents' fighting wafted from the windows, your mother's shrill cries and your father's harsh near-barking, and while you understood little of their debts, or her complaints of suppression, or how he stank of the factory, or how she said, “I belong with a different sort of man—you have a blacksmith's soul!” you understood well the murder of their tones. And when one evening she cried, “you won't be happy until I throw myself from the cliffs” you wept until the whole of within seemed bubbling out. And when your father found you in the dirt, he hefted you against his shoulder, into the strange heat, his whiskers scratching your cheek and tickling into your nose, and you sobbed into his shirt until he soothed, “Shhhhh my boy, shhhhhh,” his air warm and calm to your hair, your ear.

Remember too those mornings your father woke you by a shake of your foot. How you sneered at him beneath your covers while he said “We're going to build your mother a room of her own.” And remember soon the room which had been your nursery and playroom was wallpapered black and white with roses coiling, and then rose-colored carpets were unfurled over the floor boards, and soon placed against the walls were rosewood cabinets ornamented with angels, and within these cabinets your mother's china dolls, and her never-used china plates, and her spotless glinting silver. And on the opposite wall he placed the velvet sofa, “For when your spells overtake you my beloved,” and against yet another wall, the rosewood work desk stocked with stationary and ink and pens, “for your correspondences.” And upon completion your mother paced this room, inspected its corners and its reaches, sniffed at the wallpaper, and then she turned, saying, “Will the both of you just leave?”

And remember she stayed in this room always, the blinds pulled and her brow weighted by some damp rag, and soon the only sounds from this room were the sounds of her snores, or the fluid scratching of her fountain pen.

And now when you knocked on this door your mother would moan, “Another time, please.” And when your marks were low she signed the papers without comment, and indeed she never commented on or wondered of your studies, nor did your father, although when he heard of your detriments he chased you screaming round the kitchen table and into the back lawn where he brought you to the ground with one swat, and with a yank of the scruff he leaned you against the house and there your trousers dropped and the cool air upon your buttocks. And remember this moment was as they often were when he thrashed you, when you could but scream when the numbness fractured, and you could not help weep for the shame, for the meanness. And as your father bade you hitch up your trousers and wipe your eyes he said, “I expect to see an improvement in your marks from now on.”

And indeed your father spoke highly and fondly of the beauty of a good thrashing. And your father thrashed you if he believed you huffed after he demanded your presence, and he thrashed you if he believed you had poked sticks at his chickens; and he thrashed you if you did not play with the boys of the neighborhood, unless you played with the boys of the neighborhood when he desired your presence, and then he thrashed you for that; and he often announced he would thrash you within an inch of your life if you ever cursed; and he thrashed you for your impure thoughts and then he forced you to scrub your genitals and hands with a gasoline soaked rag; and he thrashed you if you called your mother “her” or “she” or if you were slow to fetch her food or water or if he believed you huffed when she demanded some task of you.

And your father thrashed you if you seemed to slouch or mope when you joined him on strolls to “regulate the systems,” and he thrashed you if you appeared disinterested when he paused to admire a well-manicured lawn, for he paused often and at length to press his face to the turf, uniformly cut and immaculate, and he would smile and sigh, “Magnificent” and he would thrash you for impudence if you did not immediately nod and say “Yes sir,” and he would hold you by the ear as he interrogated the homeowner about his methods and those he interrogated sputtered to tell him everything, for even in those days your father was known to all as a great and cruel man, and all called him “the General.”

And remember how your father obsessed over the care and beauty of his lawn, and how he often gestured to this expanse and said, “You see how it is as green and fine as the lawn owned by any prince or duke throughout the world” and he said, “We must give your mother everything we would give a queen, for your mother is the queen of this castle, and she has been raised with a sense of finery you cannot comprehend.”

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.