Alligators of Abraham (11 page)

And in those days, when you were not in classes, you sat in the shadows of picture-houses watching biblical projections like
The Original Sin
, the sounds of static moans and the fumy black and white apparitions of a hundred positions of copulation, and
Sodom and Gomorrah
, the curves of women topless and women outfitted in pale diaphanous negligees, the parting of legs and those dark furs beneath, while greased men in headdresses carrying some manner of sword lingered behind stone monuments, and beneath the dialogue came the sound of meat dully slapping, the panting of viewers.

And there were pictures about soldiers returning, bearded and head bandaged, and the tin static explained that these boys lost all recollection of their identities when struck by some rifle butt or concussed in a shelling, and they returned to pale and beautiful fiancées who in their absence had clipped a great many roses into wicker baskets as gifts for dying convalescents and the “down and out fellows” who lingered on the streets, these women who had always remained “true to dear Johnny, wherever he is.” And a great many women wept during these pictures while the men said, “Be strong, Mother,” and there were always considerable lines to see these pictures, for even as the years passed and widows married and grandchildren replaced those sons dead and those dead men became merely the fellow in photographs and letters tucked away in trunks, there was thereafter, and always until these generations passed, this hope that those who were reported dead were reported in error, and the approach of every carriage seemed the hopeful approach of a lad who had spent these years within the fledgling cities of the prairies.

And when you were not in classes you wandered the streets of this city, watched the women along those streets, their lace gloves, their parasols, their bird-plumed and flowered hats, and in the shadows of their hats, and when the sun cast across their expressions just so, their faces seemed shaped into your mother's, before they returned into their own. And you followed these women, at a distance, along the walks until they reached their brownstone apartments, their brick houses, and you lingered in the shadows across the way for some glimpse through the blackened windows of a glove, of a neck, and how you longed to pelt those windows with stones, to shout, “Mother!”

And in those days when you were not in classes you lay in the coarse moistness of the various women of the land, these women who smelled of smoke and sweat, heavy laden with perfume and make-up, who murmured and moaned against you on well-stained sheets, these women you called by names they invented: Miss Ruby, the Peach, Cherry Pie. And in their arms, in the drift of their moans, in the faded light of oil lamps, you dreamed of the dust sifted around your mother, her hair tangled and fallen over her shoulders, her brow, and you thought of the man she corresponded with, and you dreamed the fury of their congress.

And there were days with these women when you merely wanted them to hold you, to stroke your hand, to murmur and whisper unto you, to say that they would never leave you, to say you were precious beyond all others, to say no harm would befall you, to say there is purpose to all motions, to insist that love resides at the center of all families. And you held a tintype with your mother's image, your mother with her hair pulled up and the whale-bone curves of her figure, her silk dress, and you said to these women, “Tie your hair in this way and I will pay you extra” and you gestured to your mother's austere expression and you said, “Look like this, please” and these women never asked who the woman was in this photo, and they scarcely smiled at her, and the man with his saber to her left, and the small boy with his ruffled shirt and velvet waistcoat to her right.

And there were afternoons in these women's arms when they called you son and you called them mother, when you thought perhaps your mother somewhere now called to an emaciated child in the street, paid him with candy or boiled loin to sing the songs you sang as a little boy, to read aloud those books you read, to thump together the lead soldiers, to make war noises unto these miniature men and their miniature guns, and how your mother brushed the hair from his smutty brow, touched her fingers to his cheek, called him by your name in those moments, called his eyes “beautiful” there in the oil lamp shine.

Certainly many mothers of the missing, and of the dead, paid street children to dress in moldered and dusty clothes found in trunks, to skip upon long silent floors, to sing songs long unsung. Mothers bathing the children and toweling them and tucking them into beds and kissing their brows, and certainly these children were gladly taken into homes, fed breakfasts and sent to schoolhouses, thankfully assuming the names of men obliterated years past.

*

“I will see beyond the clouds”

And although you had received no word from your father these months, you returned home for holidays with luggage in hand and there you found the lawn crowded with “for sale” signs and tarpaulin shrouded lawnmowers. And when you set your luggage upon the porch your father took you for one of those wayward men who came around, men in sooty jackets with stained-brown teeth and bleary eyes who sat smoking in your mother's room where they smeared her carpets with the dirt of manure from their boots, and their yellow eyes glinted as they haggled with your father, and their voices vibrated along the halls and the stairways and your father called these men “horse thieves,” and his eyes went to blood as he raised his saber, and how before his might these men gave him more money, or they cracked him across the jaw, or they backed away against his bellowing. And for holiday dinner you opened dusty cans of peaches onto your mother's china plates while your father counted his new wealth and these men loaded their mowing machines into horse carts and wagons.

And how your father situated a tin bathtub onto his ravaged lawn, and he said unto you, “We will bathe in a new kind of water” and he did not smile as he said so. And while you studied your rhetoric and your mathematics your father gazed out over his lawn, sodden and dead. And in the evenings while you read your Aeschylus and your Carlyle in the low glow of oil lamps, your father dedicated himself to the ancients and what they knew of the perseveration of the flesh. He said, “We continue to find their bodies thousands of years after death. We continue to find them grinning and brown and quite intact.” And in the morning he filled the tub with chemicals labeled Supremol, Bleachol, Rectifant, and he swirled powders and dried leaves from jars with a broom handle, and when he wafted the fumes to his nostrils he toppled, and he reached for you from his staggered posture, and from his mouth fled a deep mindless moan.

There were days when your father lay within this tub, nude and asleep, while robins plummeted from tree limbs and rabbits dropped belly up in the grass and moles died within their tunneled-soil although their stink was scarcely known for the fumes of your father's chemicals. How he soaked his clothes in this tub and wandered tightly wrapped in them, and dressed as such your father seemed a living wick and you thought, “If only he would start one of his fires now—”

And from your room you watched him wandering and falling into the mud, sobbing within his sodden clothes, while along the lawn lay the emptied husks of bottles and jugs.

And your father stripped to his trousers and out-puffed his chest and said, “The hue seems improved.” He sought the lines of his skin to cease. And then your father tottered in the backyard, pale and naked, and soon laid writhing in the mud.

And in the morning you found him slick with dew and alcohols, unable to speak but in a voice of shattered teeth, his pupils lodged somewhere in the back of his skull, and you cried unto him, clutched his clammy frozen skin, watched while he woke into the world undead and yet still mortal.

And your father strode the outer edges of his lawn, unclothed or dressed only in mud-sooty trousers, pinching his skin, checking his pulse and muttering, “Is it the same?” and how he took your arm and told you to run in place and when you had done so he pressed his ear to your chest and counted in whispers. And your father felt no tightening in his organs, no fires along his veins, his heart and arteries not throbbing into something eternal.

Your father said unto you, “All of this will be gone soon” and he gestured to his house, his vats, his tub, his mud-lawn and all the land beyond, and then he gestured to you and to himself and said “and we will remain.”

And your father said, “Perhaps we need electricity” and when the storm clouds loomed he bound himself to steel rods with chemical sodden clothes and raged through the night while lightning tore the skies, his silhouette thrashing in the light, crazed within the smell of ozone. And from your bedroom, you prayed the lightning would not strike, or you prayed the lightning would devastate him to cinders.

And how many evenings you sat before your father in his trophy room, in the mustiness of his hides and furs, their cruel frozen postures, while he spoke of how men in the old days sought some source of eternal youth, how men in rusted armor stabbed and shot and force-marched entire civilizations, how men walked other men at bayonet tip and executed them in swamps and left the bodies to the humidity, flies, alligators hissing in the black green deep. And when soldiers lost their way and returned upon this path, those shot through bodies seemed much the same as when they had left them, days and weeks before, and how these soldiers gulped the muck and mud, their faces smeared with peat and moss, and they laughed, and they believed themselves eternal, and their bellies bulged, and soon they died of boils, of rashes, of retching and vomiting and dehydration.

Evenings you studied your Homer while your father paced his library. And your father said, “The ancients removed the organs,” and “They would remove from here and here and here” and, gesturing to regions various about his figure, “but it is apparent I need these to survive, so I have altered their process somewhat,” and your father lined the cellar walls with his mason jars, and your father said, “Ponce de Leon sought his life entire for this” and he gestured to his jars and the luminous liquor within, and your father wandered the house and yard, drinking until his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and the merest whiff of this solution sent you spiraling.

How many days did you find your father snoring and cluttered with emptied jars, crouched before your mother's and Walter's gravestones, mumbling, “I must be doing something wrong,” and later consulting his lists of chemicals, his notes, and muttering to himself, “I must have misheard.” And again he stirred the mixture, poured the liquor onto the lawn, pressed his head to the soil, saying, “This does not seem to be the thing we need.”

*

The president journeyed in railroad cars and carriages with his tucked away flasks, his pocket-sized whisky bottles, journeyed until he found your father, slick with fluids and raving of the dead, setting small fires along what was once the lawn, and the president sighed, and the president said unto your father in the black smear of ravaged grasses, “Well my friend, I see we have both lately fallen from the wagon.”

And the president said, “We need you, old friend.” Your father gazed along the landscape with milky eyes, while president continued, “We must finish the sacred task—the nation is not yet secured,” and your father wept in his fumes, he gnashed his teeth, he rent the last of his ragged clothes.

The president explained there were “insurrectionists” who left satchels of gunpowder near Abraham's casket, and these exploded, scattering the arms and legs and heads of tourists into blood and char. And there were statesmen who called the insurrectionists “rebels” while others considered these some new menace altogether, and these statesmen cited the pamphlets insurrectionists circulated, demanding “equality for all” while others called for “the heads of tyrants” and left more satchels near monuments and these devastated carriages and street cars and sent seared bricks through windows and pellets through the skulls of elderly women.

These insurrectionists claimed they fought against the lowering of payment along the land, for it was said in those times if one man left his place of employ for another job he would be shackled and made to lay railroad lines, and it was also said that if a man journeyed along the land looking for new work he would be forced to labor in coal mines until death, and it was said that if a man seemed to stand around looking “shiftless” he could be beaten and shackled and forced to work coal mines. And all those who worked in mines and along railroads now lived in shantytowns called “Abraham Villages,” and it was said books were forbidden in these towns because Brown's example taught that education becomes a devil in the mind of the unpaid, and religions and preachers too were forbidden, as Brown had preached in a language of fire and that must never happen again. Statesmen passed laws determining the inhabitants should be paid only in “lesser cuts of meat” and burlap, for it made no sense to pay wages to these who were not allowed to traffic the various stores and shops and markets. And these laws were heralded and trumpeted by all the papers of the land as a “great step forward” and there were those who called this change in law “Abraham's Law” in honor of the sainted Emaciator, and all along the land those who owned these mines and railroads, and those who speculated, and those who banked, and those who passed the laws looked at what laws they had created and they agreed it was good.

And listening to the moans of insurrectionists, coal barons in their mansions said, “Man cannot live by bread alone, but man who cannot live by bread and water is not fit to live” and they sent messages to the statesmen along the land, saying, “If you want to keep your job, you will obliterate these menaces.”

And there were those who asked, “Should the unpaid again be made to labor at the tasks of our choosing, and for no wage but the worst cuts of meat, if their souls cry for something other?” and there were those who said, “Why don't they just go back to wherever they came from?” and there were others who proposed sending the unpaid somewhere dense and white and subzero, for there were yet those who felt tender toward the unpaids, and there were those who could not bear the mustering of militias along the land, who could not again withstand the report of rifles and the burning of buildings and bodies.