Alligators of Abraham (6 page)

“Are your days as the days of man?”

And your father's armies marauded and ravaged. They pillaged and burned cities and towns and farms and into the yards of the rebellious they went, and they shot and butchered their hogs in the dust while rebel wives rent their dresses and screamed. “These boys,” your father wrote your mother, “can kill and dress a hog in a minute flat.”

There was not a city your father would not burn. And there lived not a race he considered immune to the horror he brought. And he sneered, and he said, “My aim is to thrash the rebels and all they love” and he said, “War is cruelty” and he said, “War is all hell.”

Your father wrote your mother from the black clotted fields, the moaning of men in the background, the whistling of shells. “I have seen much of the suffering of the world” he wrote, and “I have inspired much ruin and horror. I feel my heart gone cold to the deaths of a thousand, thousand boys by my hand” and in another letter, “Had we fought this very war those years earlier, perhaps Walter's death would not now affect me so.”

From the field your father wrote of those newspapers he loathed more than anything, their criticisms and what he called “innuendos,” their attempts to “sabotage our efforts,” and he called them vermin for the way they lingered along the edges of camps, printing strategy and battle plans before the battles occurred. And your father called them worse than traitors since they committed their sins for money, and he often wrote, “I would see them all dangling from ropes,” and he wrote to your mother, “I've sent letters to a few of the government fellows, my darling. You will see what comes of your newspapers.”

And soon the
Gazette
doors were kicked in by militiamen and the windows were boarded over, and no one heard again from the publisher or the editors or the writers or the photographers or the printers. And lost without her obituaries, your mother slumped to the wall, and she flailed, and she wheezed, and she clawed lines into her throat. And your grandmother observed her and muttered, “I suppose we can't eat until you know about those dead boys?” and your mother thrashed against the wall until the plaster cracked, and her hair and blood mashed into the wallpaper.

The
Gazette
was confiscated in bundles and the papers were incinerated in town squares and in the streets of your town, the jolting of bayonet tips, the gusting of black ashes, your mother watched these swirl as if she saw the names of the dead.

And soon the
Gazette
re-opened with a “Patriotic” staff. And the headlines touted momentous victories even if there were no victories, and the front pages showed Abraham cutting ribbons in front of school houses and Abraham shaking hands with priests and Abraham congratulating his war department beneath headlines like “Uncle Abe Cooks Up a Winner” and there were no obituaries listed, no names listed but the names of those heroes lately decorated with medals and plaques. Your mother tore through these pages, and she wailed.

Your mother brought stationary and charcoal nubs to the cemeteries, and rubbed onto those sheets the sooty names of the dead, until her hands and face smeared as black as her clothing. Along those grim pastures your mother was but one of hundreds of black-dressed women who stooped to gravestones, weeping and smearing and murmuring to themselves the names of the dead.

And your grandmother sighed as she washed your mother's charcoal hands, and she said, “It won't be long before that Abraham gives this entire country over to those lazy unpaids.”

*

“How may a man be just with God?”

And now what had been a low crackling, contorted into a moan, and the moan slow gathered into a voice, and so it was that these speakers now spoke the names of the dead and fallen. And your mother fell to weeping, to hyperventilating, and her arms went numb with the rhythm of her transcription, and she bellowed for you to take up the pen, and she hovered as you scratched what you heard, and she sighed, and you smelled the stale of her breath—

Remember how men and women wandered streets against the near constant drone of names, their ears plugged with cotton—

Remember how the sky opened with this endless crackling deluge and many stayed home from work rather than miss the death or the not death of some son or nephew or cousin or uncle or next door neighbor or former paperboy, and now the milk bottles piled and curdled on hundreds of porches and stoops until the unpaid ventured from the forest to gulp them by the moonlight, their cream-smeared lips.

And now classes were interrupted by the naming of a cousin or a father or even the teacher's own son, and remember your teacher became mere gray flesh as the sound of her son's name and his age and his address lingered, and the chalk snapped against the board, and the stick fell to the floor, and from within this gray flesh was born such a terrible sound.

Remember how names droned and crackled until those who wandered Main Street wandered with ears stuffed with blood and pus-soaked cotton, and they no longer stopped to talk or greet each other or shake hands, instead passing with eyes to the cobbled walks while low moans issued from their throats. And the streets stood vacant save those tottering women with ears fat like cabbages, their handbags filled with cuts of aged-meat and canned peaches.

And when the speakers ceased their torrent of names and the air hummed with silence, there were those who believed the war was concluded. But when the speakers spoke again they spoke in the voice of conscription, and remember now the names of those “randomly” selected to serve were called into the open air, and all the wives of the land looked sidelong at their husbands and their husbands had gone pale.

The mother of many a boy such as you said, “Your father claims his back troubles will keep him from the war. Other days he insists his game leg is the ailment,” and remember how that mother gazed as if with great longing before finishing, “Have you ever seen that man so much as limp?”

And those lines of men with their pipes, their cigarettes, coiling from the bars and taverns, and many children returned from school to houses emptied, save a note which read “GONE INTO HIDING LOVE MA AND PA.” Or they returned to their mother's weeping while their father hummed the melody to “Yankee Doodle” before he turned to his child and said, “I'll probably be leaving for the war any day now” or those fathers who now wore stumps for hands, or who smelled of whisky and no longer worked but sprawled on the sofa resting a glass on their bellies, or those fathers who pontificated from their front stoops about “doing something about all those unpaids” who they were expected to die for, those unpaid who had shot their hand off or their foot off or their knee cap off not to die for, those gibbering workers everyone suspected would take their jobs, victorious or no, and all would soon become as unpaid workers themselves beneath the brute rule of these unpaids now, suddenly, paid.

And remember the mandatory military age was raised from forty to fifty and soon men hobbling on crutches and canes, or cowering under sinks or behind bookshelves were called to service, and these men staggered to military offices or they were found and marched to offices by militiamen, and while most said their rifles did not work this mattered not, for their bayonets did and these were the sort of men who preferred the thrust of a good bayonet.

And only the names of dandies or the sons of fur barons escaped conscription for these fellows paid vagrants to enlist in their place. And when these sons and nephews with golden locks, with black velvet jackets and purple silk top hats, heard their names uttered, they plucked gold coins from their purses and to the nearest urchin they said, “You there boy—”

And now secretaries wore eyes black-blotted by husbands who suspected them of consorting with the unpaids.

And men such as your father said, “You see now how this fellow of yours, this Abraham, intends to replace us. You see now the whole plot revealed,” and those lines of workers with their lunch pails entered the factory, their laughter amongst each other. And this language they spoke with each other seemed a monstrous tongue, and now many men said, “I can't believe my son is off fighting so some savage can take his job.”

“I am hollow without you”

And militias stampeded the streets and they fired buckshot into crowds and the crowds returned fire and brandished planks of wood, and dandies fled to country estates while the rest of the town burst shop windows with bricks, lit torches, battered down city house doors while the militia waited within, their eyes fat and their bayonets affixed.

And you attended to the porch, your father's rifle on the ready, while your mother lay on her sofa with her lists, and along the night, explosions and sirens, and you did not sleep nor stir from your post while the horizon hazed with red smoke, while workers were rooted out of forests and church basements and thrashed to death with clubs and bullwhips, and the wide soulless eyes, the unpaid bodies pitched forward, covered in flies.

Remember the sun blotted into blackness as neighboring towns burned.

And the bodies of unpaid workers swung from gas lamps and speaker poles and tree limbs; the beaten and mutilated bodies, their necks elongated like the necks of swans, their eyes jellied and popping; the shadows of swinging bodies cast by fires onto cobbled streets and against brick exteriors while overhead, gulls swirled and shrieked.

And the bodies of rioters lay bloodied and smoldering, banked against gutted out shops, blanketed beneath the ashes of incinerated awnings. And the bodies of rioters and militiamen became the nests of rats, and when your mother pointed to the smoke along the horizon she said, “That's flies you see there,” and when she saw your rifle she snorted and she said, “You don't think you'll use that on someone?” and you said, “If it's in my heart, I will. It's in
his
heart, isn't it?”

And of the bodies gone black in the merciless sun your father wrote to you, “The microbes are constant and everywhere” and he wrote, “Hold a rag to your face” and he wrote, “If you do not hold this fast I will command your mother to wrap it unto your face.” Your father insisted disease carried on the wind. He wrote that you must boil water upon the stove and toss this steaming into the tin tub, and there he bade you strip, and there he bade you scrub until the waters reddened. How you sobbed and wailed as your flesh scalded. And of his own constant days amidst such rot, your father said he did not need to bath or cover up because “my life entire I have been exposed to such contagion. By now I am immune.”

And from the speakers the voice of Abraham said unto the people, “In times of rebellion and to suppress said rebellion, we must arm those you have so long considered unarmable and we must pay those we have so long considered unpayable, and I, as President of these here parts, do solemnly declare those who have never been paid must now be paid” and how many of these runaway unpaid came clattering into army camps trussed in the rotten outfits of their previous employ, speaking languages unknown, gesturing for firearms, and many of these unpaid were handed pitchforks and wheelbarrows and were told to clean the fields of corpses. They were paid in promissory notes and many took their notes to the stores and feed mills and were given pouches of boll weevil infested tobacco and torn burlap sacks.

Your father called this proclamation a “terrible folly” and he said, “We trusted those runaways who came into our camps to clear roads of debris and to erect forts, but they worked only when our rifles commanded them, and they fled at the first sign of trouble. The spirit of the unpaid,” your father often said, “is not a sturdy one.”

And little sent rebel employers scurrying faster than the thunder of their former employees marching, and nothing terrified the captured rebels more than the bayonets and impish laughter of their former unpaid, who cackled and hooted and called them “Boss.” And when the unpaid soldiers lost battles, they were shoveled into pits like dead chickens, and when they waved white flags they were shot through the necks or the skulls or the chests or beaten with clubs or rifle butts and made to moan and told to “Beg!” and if they begged they were shot in the back of the skulls and if they did not their hands were chopped off and then their ears and these were worn in necklaces by rebel bands. And those who were not murdered were returned to their former employers and were whipped and beaten and again made to work without pay if they could yet walk or breathe.

These acts were not reported in the papers. And these unpaid were not wept for along the land.

And now all the night lit by the light of the cities your father burned to husks, your father along the hillsides, the cigars he smoked, the ashes mounded at his feet, smudging his horse. And the tide of refugees as they drifted from burning cities. The bayonets awaiting them. “Bring them Hell,” your father shouted. “Make them know what they brought on themselves.” And those women wrestled into ditches, their corsets gutted by bayonets, screaming in the light of their burning city, and those buildings burned and devastated into half-walls and heaps of brick and ashes, and the burned carcasses of horses in the streets and the cats that picked cleaned the ash-bones, and now babies and mothers, covered in dust, slept against the husks of buildings while soldiers marched the scorched and dusty road, while your father smoked his cigars and nodded ashes to the burned-out city streets.

And soldiers slept in rebel yards, bloodied and bandaged, and stray dogs licked at their wounds, and hogs rooted at their flesh, ate their toes, their hands. Soldiers slept on the laps of soldiers, in the arms of soldiers, and soldiers dying and bleeding and draining onto other soldiers said, “Tell Mother I died a hero.”

Here the awful universe of battle, the sloping forest of flashing steel, men gulping blood, men falling armless, legless, headless into the mud, into the fields, into the trampled dust.