I Am Abraham (6 page)

A solitary Indian wandered into camp. He was wearing a torn military tunic with moccasins and a wampum belt. His fingers were gnarled and his face was a little nest of crags. This old man startled us, because he was the first Injun we’d seen on this endless march, except for a couple of scouts. He wasn’t like that mysterious feather in a missing soldier’s boot. He hadn’t come to taunt us in this battle between white men and Indian braves who couldn’t be found. He was a victim, a scavenger looking for scraps of food, but men from another company grabbed hold of him and swore he was a spy for Black Hawk. They’d had their own little summary court-martial and wanted to nail him to a tree. I whacked at them with my wooden sword.

“Be gone from here,” I said. These ruffians might have nailed me to the next tree if my own ruffians hadn’t come along. They weren’t that eager to battle with Jack Armstrong and his Boys. I could read the ferocious hunger in the old man’s eyes—the fear that he wouldn’t be able to scavenge and that his next meal might be his last. I watched him tear into our stock of beans and could conjure up the time I lay like a sick animal in my flatboat, wondering if I’d starve to death.

Soon as he was fed, the Injun told us his fate. He’d been cast out of Black Hawk’s tribe on account of his daughter, who became the concubine of a colonel. The old man wandered from army post to army post, lived among white men, and like his daughter, scavenged and stole. We stared at this Injun who once rode with Black Hawk, stared at him with a new kind of respect—and pitied him too. But we didn’t have the means to hire him as a scout. He gave his wampum belt to Jack, and let us have his last lick of tobacco. I had to send him off to scavenge somewhere else, or he might have stayed with us forever as our company mascot. It was unsettling. That old man was the nearest we’d ever been to a warrior.

The boys were silent after that. Then they looked at me and scratched their heads.

“Captain, what was it like, being a tall bachelor and a tomcat in Orleans?”

“Sweet as honey pie,” I said.

I’d regaled them time and again with ribald stories of how I’d kept my own pretty lady in the back streets of Orleans when I wouldn’t have known what to do with a lady—a captain with a wooden sword who liked to talk of poontail when all the while I was frightened of the whores in their crib-houses, of their damp aromas and the depths of their eyes . . .

We were chasing a phantom on his own former hunting grounds, where he could shift from warrior to wolf and back to warrior again. Our spies kept finding scalps, but it didn’t look like Injun work, and we wondered if there was some insane butcher among our own people, or if that wolf-warrior was practicing to become a white man. So we were on the lookout for anything that was sinister or strange. And one afternoon, as we slogged upstream, we fell upon a traveling juggler who sought to entertain us as we marched. He seemed quite suspicious for a skinny man without much of a chest, and he tossed little canisters into the trees and captured them behind his back, while standing right above the rapids.

“Juggler, what the hell are you doing here in this lone country?”

And for a second I thought he was Black Hawk himself, assuming the form of an imbecile who juggled for soldiers without a penny in their pockets.

“Fellow pilgrims,” he said, “I can hear the dead whisper. And I can smell a scalping party. I’ll stay with you awhile.”

“Then you’ll have to join the militia. . . . Sergeant Jack Armstrong, will you swear him in?”

The juggler bolted into the woods, but crazy as he was, he proved to be a prophet. We marched inland and stumbled upon a settlement that had mostly been burnt to the ground. It didn’t have the look of a real fort with barricades—but a pigpen on the prairie, with a roofless barn and a ramshackle fence that Black Hawk’s braves must have torn to pieces with their tomahawks. The whole settlement had that sickening, sweet smell of seared flesh. We found a doll in the rubble and a torn bonnet. Two of the settlers had been scalped; there was a rough red mark on what remained of their heads, as if some madman had been sawing at them; most of their fingers were missing; one settler had a raw cavern where his nose had been; another had a leaky hole for an ear. Even Jack was unmanned for a little while. He and the Boys commenced to shiver while they stood and gaped. I didn’t have that luxury. I had to write a report in my captain’s book. I had to walk through the rubble and count the dead—six men and a woman, who had a skeleton’s face. The fire had sucked up all the flesh.

“The thing that hath been, it
is that
which shall be; and that which is done
is
that which shall be done: and
there
is no new
thing
under the sun,” I recited from Ecclesiastes while we buried the dead.

Suddenly we were no longer militiamen on maneuvers, picnicking in the prairie grass. We were thrust into a war where the enemy was a wisp of smoke, where madmen reigned with rude hatchets. We clung to each other in the rain. My marching orders were never clear. We heard coyotes howl. Half my men had the chills.

We wandered into a ghost town on the plains, an abandoned fort near Dixon’s Ferry, where the wind whistled through the walls. I couldn’t ascertain if the Sauk and the Fox had driven Army regulars out of the fort, or if it had been deserted long before Black Hawk’s rebellion. There wasn’t much sign of life, not even a kettle with the blackened dregs of some bitter soup, or a regimental flag on the flagpole. And in the middle of this wasted land was a fifteen-year-old girl, all dressed in calico, as if she were waiting for us to deliver some apple pie. There was something peculiar about this girl. She had lost the power of speech.

We fed her a stale biscuit and a morsel of cheese. The biscuit broke in her hand, that’s how hard it shook. Finally I had to feed her with my own hands. She couldn’t have had a morsel of food in days, I imagine; her mouth moved like a frantic engine. I’m not sure why, but I stroked her hair. That seemed to calm her. She clutched at my arm with a preternatural strength—seems I was the last lifeline she had on the plains. It tore at me to look at her in that calico dress.

“Captain,” said one of my ruffians, “maybe she belongs to that juggler we met near the Rock River. Jugglers like to travel with dummy girls.”

Why would that juggler, mad as he was, have left her alone in a fort that was rampant with wild grass? But I solved some of the mystery. She was wearing a bracelet around her ankle with Indian feathers and beads, and that ankle was filthy with blood, and had scratches running to her calf. Her left nostril was also ringed with blood. Black Hawk’s braves must have grabbed her off that burnt settlement where the two settlers had been scalped. Had they tagged her with a bracelet like a prize chicken, presented her to their women and children as a trophy to scratch at and shove around, and then tired of her? They hadn’t torn her calicos; her bonnet still sat on her head with its strings. After she finished cracking the biscuit with her teeth, she commenced to lick my hand.

“Stop that,” I said, pulling my hand away. She rocked her shoulders, and I wondered if her misadventures among the Indians had indeed made her into a dummy girl.

“Missy, what’s your name?”

She wouldn’t answer. She clutched at the pleats of her dress and started to dance in the wilderness of that empty fort—I could hear an orchestra in my brain, the thump of piano keys, the scratch-scratch of violins. She whipped her head back and forth, back and forth.

“My name is Emma,” she said in a perfectly natural voice. She was the last living soul of that luckless settlement, and she told me a singular tale. Black Hawk’s men hadn’t caused that massacre. It was a band of renegade Sioux. They did all the burning and scalping. She remembered the black paint they wore, and how their hatchets swept through the air and split a child’s back. They would have finished her, too, if Black Hawk hadn’t heard their war cries and frightened them off.

“You saw the chief?” I asked, a little astounded. “What did he do, Miss Emma?”

“He wept.”

Black Hawk wanted his homeland, she said, not this desolation.

“How do you know this? Did he have interpreters?”

“His English was a versed as mine, Mr. Lincoln. And he had the gentlest eyes. He sang poetry to me.”

Suddenly I was suspicious of her tale. “What sort of poetry?”

Her eyes were caught in some strange rapture as she spun about in her calicos and chirped to a band of desperate soldiers.

With spiders I had friendship made,

And watch’d them in their sullen trade . . .

My boys were baffled. “What’s she blathering, Captain?”

I could scarce believe it, an Injun quoting Lord Byron and
The Prisoner of Chillon
. How could I explain to my boys that Black Hawk had a philosophical bent, and understood that his whole life, with and without all the skirmishes, was a kind of captivity? And I didn’t even have to ask why he deposited her at a dead fort. That philosopher was saving her for us. Black Hawk was a much better general than the generals we had. He had to fight the Regular Army, a worthless militia, and renegade tribes, when all he wanted was to pick gooseberries in his own garden.

A sadness and a cynical wind invaded my thoughts. I released my men of all obligations after their enlistment of thirty days was up. “Boys, be gone,” I said. “Go on back to your farms and your wives.”

Jack and the Clary’s Grove Boys were loyal to their captain. They didn’t want to leave me alone in hostile territory. I had to insist.

“Jack, your Hannah is ten times more valuable than this war.”

I was mustered out after another month and joined up again, this time with Captain Jacob Early, who had his own independent band of scouts and spies. We were supposed to move with the stealth of Black Hawk, but we couldn’t even capture the wind, and we always happened upon a battle after it was fought. We were buriers rather than hunters. Our company was disbanded on the tenth of July, and I was mustered out again.

I returned to New Salem, quiet as a dead fort. I couldn’t seem to shake free of the Black Hawk War. I relived all the little campaigns. I kept seeing a brutal red sun in my eyes as I wandered among the ravaged people, whole families splayed out in the wild grass in some forlorn symmetry, husbands and wives trying to reach one another just as the hatchet fell, their fingers like blackened claws—it was something a militia captain couldn’t forget. I was the veteran of a war where soldiers rushed around with their muskets, making a lot of noise, while civilians were split open and lay in the sun with half their heads.

4.

Justice at the General Store

I
HAD
A
ROUGH
patch, clawing my way back into civil life, where I had to think of cash receipts, when all I could recollect was tomahawks. I went into business with William Berry, who’d been a corporal with me in the militia. We started up a general store that soon had a license to sell whiskey at 12½ cents a glass. But McNeil & Hill had a much bigger and better store. We couldn’t compete with their prices, so my partner raided our own whiskey barrels. Berry had witnessed the same hatchetings as I did, endured the same bad dreams. He’d wander through the village in midwinter, and I had to track him down. I’d find him weeping in the snow with whiskey on his breath, caught in his own puddle of piss. I had to warm his feet near the stove while he muttered about all the women and children he had buried in north Illinois. I couldn’t talk him out of drinking up our entire stock. Berry & Lincoln winked out, and I went into debt.

The luminaries elected me postmaster at the next general meeting in Rutledge’s tavern. There wasn’t a single
nay
, since no one else vied for the job. The pay was pitiful. The luminaries feasted on Annie Rutledge’s bodice with their little pink eyes and welcomed the new postmaster, his post office a tiny counter at McNeil & Hill. The mail piled up in pyramids at the general store, and I had to deliver letters out of my hat, stomping around until my feet were sore. But I couldn’t survive on a postmaster’s pay. I was appointed assistant land surveyor, even if I knew nothing of a surveyor’s art. I learned as best I could and bought myself a compass and surveyor’s chain. I had to wade through swamps and briar bushes to set up the simplest measurements. And soon I was surveying roads and farms and settling boundary disputes—I charged 37½ cents to survey a small town lot, but I also built fences and an occasional barn. I wrote up deeds and served on juries. I wanted to become a lawyer in the worst way, but I didn’t have the wherewithal. Whatever I did I did alone.

I sat in on Justice Green’s court. Sometimes I acted as bailiff, or I pleaded for the plaintiff if that plaintiff had no one else to plead for him. I crept into the legal profession through the back door—that is, Justice Green’s own bench at McNeil & Hill. That’s where our court was located whenever Justice Green decided to be in session, which was as often as his mood and the weather struck him right. On rare occasions I sat in for Justice Green himself. I had no legal status. I didn’t wear any robes. I just sat in his chair.

One of the cases on my
docket
was a family feud, a farmer versus his son. I could have been witnessing my own Pa and
his
son as a slightly younger man. This boy wasn’t a rawboned giant, but he could have been Abe Lincoln. His Pa had hired him to build a barn; they’d settled on a price. Efram the boy was called. He slaved like a dog, working beside his Pa, morning, afternoon, and night. He beveled every single board. He scratched and scraped and put up the roof, but after he was finished, his Pa said he didn’t owe him a cent, since Efram was underage. Efram broke his father’s jaw, and now the farmer was suing his son for damages.

They stood before me on the second Tuesday in October of 1833. The farmer’s name was Obadiah. He was a man in his fifties, like Tom Lincoln, my Pa. He had Pa’s surliness, even the same rotten eye. His broken jaw must have healed up, because there wasn’t any sign of the break except for a certain blueness. It was Efram who hadn’t healed, Efram who had all the bruises. He wasn’t nearly as tall as his Pa. He shifted around in the sawdust, his shoulders slumped, like some half-wild creature who wanted to burst out of his clothes.