Alligators of Abraham (8 page)

*

“Who was this man?”

Then silence. And there were those who believed the war was finished. And while the last of the bands played, and the last of the church bells clanged, and the confetti gathered along the walks and in the gutters, and the last of the lovers within the crowds kissed, and the gas lamps swelled—

Now a crackling, and a sweltering, and a long buzz, and a low hum and fathers along the land collapsed with blood streaming their ears and eyes and noses, and the mothers of the land fell, moaning and wailing, their inky hands clasped to their skulls, and glass pictures shattered and windows fractured, and dogs bayed, and cats hid, and boys such as you cowered against the cold floor boards, and the workers on their licey bunks gagged on molded bread, and your teachers and neighbors in their prisons crumpled and cowered in the midst of shaved heads and burlap, black sunken eyes and skeleton arms, and those children imprisoned who were not dead of dysentery, and the curled and maddened figures of all the men and all the women and all the children along the landscape, lost in this sound.

The speakers glowed and the crackling coalesced into words and these words seemed more a language of screams and explosions and rottenness: ABRAHAM ZZZZZZIS SHOT ZZZZAMABEAZZZZZZZZZZZOUHAFOUGIS SHOT THAOUGZZZZZZZE—

And now Abraham was dead.

Militias stampeded horses along the avenues and shot out the speakers as they passed, hooting and screaming, their horses neighing, and the speakers exploded when shot, and white sparks flared and gusted into ditch grasses and these caught into flames, and the night fell to gun blasts and explosions and the crackling of half-dead speakers against the roads, until, finally now, only silence lay beneath.

“The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether”

And how quietly a bolt gun fires in a room of human sounds, of laughter, of singing, and how immediate the red hole blossoms, the cloud burst of blood, the dumb silence of the crowd, the swelling wail, and screams of “death death death.” And Abraham's near-corpse slouched, and eyes gathered, ears pressed to his chest, and there were those who touched the back of his head and felt into his skull and when black clots were pulled he gasped, “HUUUUUGGGGGH” as if drowning. And then the frenzy of the theater, the iron stink of murder, the animal screams, and how those who so long wanted him dead now wept for their Abraham, who lay sobbing black blood. And there were those who shouted “hang him!” although the assassin had scampered into the night.

They laid Abraham to bed across the street, near death and raving in tongues, and all those who stood present said he agreed with their final requests, their battle plans, their amendments to proclamations, and soon all sounds drew shut, and soon his face swelled to gray, and soon the final clicking came from within, our Abraham's rapturous last clatter.

Later your father said, “I know well what such a gun does. He would have died without pain.”

And your town seemed crazed for the weeping and gnashing and singing of the unpaid in the streets, even as the skies opened into torrents of rain and those unpaid, who had so far kept to the forests, now clogged the streets, singing and wailing.

And there were those who claimed Mary Todd gave Abraham's guard a hundred dollar bill and told him to take the night off.

*

And now the clamor for vengeance, for blood, now the hunt for this disgruntled fur farmer, Booth, with a hundred thousand dollar bounty placed on his head. And soon Booth lay cornered in a lit and burning barn, and his terrible screams and the black smoke and the red moon, and they identified his blackened corpse by dental records, they said, or by intuition, or by what they took as the word of the barn owner. And there are those to this day who insist he fled “yonder” via ferry where he married a rancher's daughter, and said that he died an elderly man of ninety-eight, a wealthy rancher of beef cattle, a father of eight boys and three girls.

And there were those who insisted love letters from Mary Todd were found in Booth's satchel, and in these she used phrases like “love eternal” and “Royal Union.” And there were those who insisted Booth's death drove her mad, that she called to him from her asylum bed while his ghost paced the floors.

*

Your grandmother called Abraham's death “the greatest tragedy we've ever suffered” and she commissioned renderings of “Honest Abe” riding an eagle above snow peaked mountain tops, his ghost shimmering over a red, white, and blue mountain top.

And in what remained of rebel lands they erected statues and composed what they called “hymns” in Abraham's memory.

*

“Let us bind up our wounds”

And then came the morning you woke into your mother and your grandmother's absence, their closets emptied of clothing, the gathering of dust where once was your mother's stationary, her ink pots and fountain pens no more. Remember how your mother left only a framed photo of your father and you and herself from years before. And remember this house emptied of your mother and your grandmother's frenzied scratching and now only the sound of your breathing and the distant vibrations and roaring of your father's mowing machines, starting and idling and choking and stuttering to stops and then starting again.

You slept on the sofa where your mother so often slept, your mother who had become the mere cold indent of velvet and stuffing. And your father woke you with the smell of gasoline upon his hands, his breath, as he said unto you, “A terrible event has befallen our family” and he placed his hands upon you, his face ruddy and bearded and moist now with tears, and he groped for you, and he said, “Oh my son, my son, your mother has passed unto another land” and no matter how you struggled beneath his weight, your father pulled you ever deeper into his terrible warmth.

He chiseled a headstone with the inscription, “Beloved wife, Attentive mother” and this headstone he erected next to Walter's. And while he read passages from his grandfather's leather-bound Bible, the words your father spoke seemed less a language of dust and brimstone than of the motes of rust and oil, the fumes from below.

And your father gestured to his lawn of mowing machines, the pools of oil in mud, nowhere a blade of grass, and he gestured to the house, and he said unto you, “What will happen now that she is gone?”

And when you never saw her in town, nor did she return, you thought,
Perhaps she is underground
, and in the long nights you watched the space under those trees, the shadows and the stone marker, for some evidence of this. None ever came.

“You who showed mercy unto us”

Remember the crowds camped under leather tents and tarpaulins, wedged seven men deep along Main Street, the sounds of breathing and coughing and sneezing and shuffling in place and of children asking their parents
When?
Remember now those crowds sleeping in pup tents or wrapped in old quilts or beneath bison hides. How no one would relinquish their place amongst the mass and the stench of those who defecated where they lie and slept in the mud slop of their puddled urine. Remember how the flies in the air seemed like smoke. Remember the fits of weeping that seemed to possess all and how strangers held strangers while they waited. Remember the tears welled in your father's eyes as he said, “If only your mother were yet with us” and how he placed his smooth young hand upon your neck.

Remember how quiet the world was in the absence of crackling and humming.

And soon a procession of carriages led by white horses until the black hearse with Abraham's body, and what remained of Willie's body, pulled by a team of black stallions, and all breaths drew firm as these continued past, bodies watching from the windows of factories and apartment houses and dangling from gas lamps and oak limbs, from rooftops, their faces and open mouths gusting smoggy clots.

And now beneath the gray black sky, the gas lamps glowing numbly, the clatter of horse hooves, and all stood at attention pressing their hands to their hearts or brows or their hands touching the shoulders of their children. And the rough tremble of wheels against the dung filthy streets, and the crowd let out a moan and then a series of moans as Abraham's hearse passed before them, and the national flags flapped, those flags smeared and blackened with mud and soot.

And soon those carriages stopped before city hall and the blue woolen soldiers carried Abraham's casket into the first room where the great man lay as if merely asleep. And your town entire filed along, and the line stretched for blocks, and all saw this man in final repose, his hands folded over his belly, his eyelids closed and almost black. Remember how not a word was spoken and only the slightest sniffling and the whipping of wind and rain upon the windows. Remember how the line moved at a nothing pace and how you turned away when you saw the edge of the casket and said, “No, no,” and your father held you tight and said, “You must. You must. You must” and he spun you forward when you again refused. Remember your Abraham's face, yellowed, as if made of wax.

It was said Abraham travelled a hundred cities over thousands of miles, and now millions more saw Abraham dead than they saw him alive.

And it was said that Abraham never saw Europe.

Or California.

And your father sighed and said, “He could remain like this forever—”

*

“You who bore us up, who showed mercy unto us”

Your father spent his days then building fires and gazing into the smoke of the skies. And your father sat in the glow of these fires and told you of the bison stampede of his boyhood, how from within clouds of dust came the tirade of a thousand, thousand horns and hooves. How churches and general stores came to rubble and everywhere the shatter of stained glass glinted and the tins of meats, of peaches, spilled open and spoiled. And the flesh of man and child lay twisted in glass and planks of wood. And your father and his mother lay beneath the dining room table while everywhere along the floor, remnants of china and tintypes and vases, wild flowers shaken to petals.

Remember your father sat in the light of the fires, before the gravestones of your mother and Walter and said, “Ruin follows everywhere in my wake” and when you said nothing he mumbled, “No, no. It is so.”

Those bison grazed the lawns and devoured gardens, those thousand, thousand bison shifting and devouring as one. Remember how your father's father found him cowering beneath the table and he said unto your father, “Get out from under there, young whelp” and remember how your father's father brought him to the rooftop while the bison milled and mooed along the neighborhoods. Remember how your father gagged for the stink of these. Remember the skies filled black with flies. Remember there seemed an ocean of muscle and fur and horns and hooves, an ocean entire of snorting monsters, of tufts, of weird mooing. Remember how men such as your grandfather sat on rooftops firing shotguns into the living mass and the death cries of bison mingled with the sounds of their eating. Remember how a bison would fall and there seemed another in its place. Remember the trampling of hooves when they wearied of devouring your land. Remember how these bison stampeded across the bodies of bison fallen. Remember along those streets and avenues, eyes and tongues distended and the flies that gathered in this obliterated meat and how your father's father said unto him, “Hurry now with that shovel and wheelbarrow. We shall have steak tonight.”

And your father said, “Each night my dreams are filled with the thunder of hooves. Each night your grandmother and the stain of her tears upon my clothing. Each night my school chums trampled in the streets and the houses of those I knew, ground to dust and splinters. Each night, within my dreams, I weep the way I wept back then.”

And your father's father fed his family the black tongue of bison and called it “sirloin” and he himself devoured the rib meat of these animals and called it “tongue.” And he said unto your father, “You would not appreciate this flesh. It would disgust you.”

And your father stood in the glare of his fires and said, “Oh Walter, oh my boy, oh where are you now?” while his hair burned to ash, while his skin molted. And he wrapped his arms about your mother's stone, and finally said to you, “If she weren't gone already, I would kill her.”

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.