Alligators of Abraham (7 page)

Soldiers wandered back-roads and through swamps half-naked through clouds of dust, covered in filth and vermin, those soldiers who wandered hollow-eyed and collapsed along roads to be trampled over by those who followed.

And in the smoke of combat men fired upon their own commanders, even generals taking volleys from their own men, and generals were carried from the field coolly smoking cigars, coughing blood.

Men lay moaning and bleeding in the dust, and from their knapsacks they removed lockets and photographs, the images of sweethearts and wives. And if they could not remember the voices of these women in those last moments, or the sensation of touch, or the whisper of breath, if they could not remember the warmth pressed to their sides, their hearts, they could at least say unto these icons, “I have ever hastened to return to you,” and rarely could they say names, rarely could they remember them for the numbness unfolding, the immeasurable whiteness.

And there were two ways for surgeons—the way of those who would not be paid, these conducting themselves with blood and pus-stained hatchets and bone-saws, their leather aprons and the ether they sometimes used. And they hoisted bodies screaming unto tables and there they hacked appendages apart at the most obvious place. And if no appendage revealed itself as infected they prayed unto the Lord to guide his hand, to choose a leg or arm to sever. Appendages piled bloody and fly-gathered at the tent entrance, and the bodies piled in nearby fields, and soldiers lit these with gasoline-soaked rags and bundles of dead grass.

And there were those who would be made wealthy. In those times embalming surgeons advertised in newspapers and ladies magazines, and embalming surgeons agreed to follow the sons of wealthy families at a “discreet distance” waiting for the death of those they agreed to “handle.” And no embalming surgeon would reveal his “secret formula” although there were those who claimed “no arsenic” or “of chemicals all natural” as if one could drink the stuff from barrels. And there were those who advertised in the papers: “Bodies embalmed by us never turn black but retain the color and countenance of those asleep.” Embalming surgeons amassed fortunes from widows and parents who wished for the remains of sons to be returned “as they were when alive.”

Embalmers followed marching soldiers in wagons with the words “Embalming, Deodorizer, Disinfectant” whitewashed on either side, and embalming surgeons wandered battlefields in their silk top hats and camel-hair jackets, sifting the still smoking and writhing aftermath, and soon those men stood like butchers in leather aprons and with sleeves rolled, connecting hoses to figures as-if-asleep on tables, and how the red fluid was drawn from the bodies while the yellow fluid was injected.

And the skin of thousands of dead soldiers took on a yellow glow and neither did they age nor putrefy nor gray. And your father gazed upon the aspect of these men and said it was a “genuine miracle” and he wrote to your mother, “If only such capabilities existed when Walter—how different our lives may have been.”

And Abraham journeyed those lands when all was silent along the fields of combat, sifted through the rubble and kicked at the skulls smoldering in dust. And Abraham spoke unto the gathered generals and politicians and the press and unto those former soldiers who sat in chairs, their pus and blood-smeared bandages, and to the wives of those attending, and how this man Abraham said, “We come here not to dedicate, nor consecrate, nor hallow this ground. The men who have lived and died and struggled here have consecrated it far beyond our low powers to add or detract. It is for us to commit to the great task before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the conflict for which they gave the last full measures of their lives—that we resolve these dead have not died in vain—”

And there were those who scoffed and snickered and said, “See here the gibbering ape.”

Houses throughout your town were abandoned, the windows punched out by neighborhood children. Families officially “went west” to stake a claim toward a future, and no one remembered these families planning to move although they remembered the covered wagons of the military in their yards or militiamen drinking the bottled milk from their front stoops.

And your school chums found notes in their desks accusing them of rebel sympathies, and even your teacher's voice seemed tinged with twang, and it was so that she disappeared the very next week, and soon a man who knew nothing of your class or your studies stood at the front of the room and said, “Let us now open our books” and the children each opened a different text.

And the neighbor across the way disappeared, his milk bottles gathered on his stoop until runaway workers carried them to the forest, and when you asked your mother where this man went she said she dreamed that he had piled into a covered wagon with a mattress and burlap sacks filled with clothing and feed and his chickens and rabbits thrashing in cages and hutches, while everyone else called this neighbor a “rebel sympathizer” and said it was only a matter of time. And soon the house was boarded over by militiamen and indeed there were many such houses now and it seemed half the houses one passed were houses boarded over or houses in the process of being boarded over by militias crowded into wagons with hammers and boards and other implements. And your friends investigated these abandoned houses while you watched from your porch, rifle across your lap. And your friends whispered of the rebel flags they found bannered throughout your neighbor's house, the portraits of gray woolen generals in his personal office, their bedroom, above the child's bed.

And now children accused classmates of accents, of smelling like rebel foods, and children met in the mornings before school and bloodied noses, their pale faces spattered with red, eyes smote with tears.

And detention centers or “camps” constructed of concrete and barbed wire were initially denied, then proudly confirmed with headlines: “Our Country Kept Safe.” These centers constructed and filled with turncoats, traitors, and spies, for the impulse to “turn rebel” was pervasive in the low times of war. Your grandmother claimed insomnia for thoughts of rebels lurking in honest men's clothing. She would sniff the air, cautiously, and imply she could smell them even now, or at least she could scent the stink of their cooking.

Children dreamed the rebel flag suspended over the blackboard or rebel families tunneling from the prison yards, dirt-smeared and soon camped in the streets. Rebel families soot-black and burning lawns with lit torches, touching them to houses and fences, all the neighborhoods smoldering and blazing to stubble. And arithmetic and Latin classes were regularly interrupted by the wearied screams of half asleep children.

And the
Gazette
reported that the interned had started baseball leagues, and the Goober Peas held a narrow margin over the Boll Weevils in the pennant race, and they were said to have knitting circles and book clubs, and they were said to sing carols and pray in churches, and the goods of the prisoners made their way into general stores, and these goods were labeled
“Made by the Interned,”
and there they remained, no matter the price.

And from those camps came the frequent reports of rifle fire. And many greeted this rapture by muttering “good riddance.”

It was said that the rebels kept their prisoners crowded into patches of dirt and most slept in holes with woolen blankets tossed over, and when they drank they drank from maggoty swamp water that doubled as their toilet, and they died retching, and when they ate they ate only a ration of salt, and some applied this to the rats they caught, or to the bunk mate who died, or to the clump of dirt they searched for worms, or to the festering maggots of the drinking water—

And it was said that when your father liberated one of these camps he found the soldiers of his country as skeletons, all caved-in sockets, all ribs and hip bones. And the sound of whistling came when they tried to speak. And when they tried to move nothing happened. These men your father found in heaps of black-bloated dead, and when they pulled free men yet living, your father said, “Are you actually men? Are you not corpses?”

And when they spoke finally, worms and maggots wriggled from their gummy mouths.

And your father fell then to weeping, and for days he could not cease, and when he emerged from his tent your father spoke only in chattering, in wild eyes, in clicking and humming.

Now this other general, Grant, lay siege to the rebel capital and their leaders fled and the citizens starved within. Now the long wait, where Grant and his men drank potato and shoe polish concoctions they called “Oh be Joyful” while within the city they ate the worms from their bread and the weevils from their coffee, and when this was gone they ate parched corn, and when this was gone they ate their shirts and boiled their boots and ate the wallpaper, their shirts, the dust of plaster, and always the whistling of shells and the crumbling of buildings, always the fumes of blackened corpses, always the city of rats.

*

“How I long to look upon you. To smile and remember your face”

And then one morning you woke to the clattering of a wagon. And there stood your father, and from the window your mother watched with huge eyes as you embraced him and the old general held you back with the kid-glove smoothness of his hands, saying, “You're too old to hang about my coattails now. You may shake my hand as any other man.”

And in those days your father spoke little of what he had seen or why he was returned, and the boys at school whispered that your father had “come unhinged.” Remember your father and the way he inspected behind the furniture before he sat in a room. Remember how he read the evening paper with a rifle on his lap, the bayonet affixed, and how he once said, “Have I cut my hands? Blood, blood, everywhere—hurry, get a rag,” but when he held them out they seemed as clean and pure as ever.

Remember how your father would not return to work because “I have more important business to attend to” and “I have seen my true calling along those ravaged landscapes.” And when he told your mother, she would not respond, nor would she look at him. And your father considered her eyes and whispered unto you, “There is an uncanny intelligence alive there” and to her he said, “Where have you been these years?” and to this your mother was silent.

The newspapers theorized your father suffered from “exhaustion of the nerves” or a “terrible melancholy.” And the papers reported how your father raved to “persons unseen,” and he fired his revolver at shadows, bayoneted the wind. Remember he wore his uniform through the day and into bed and he removed his cap only at dinner or for church services, although he now refused to worship any god but one of his own devising.

Your father returned home intoxicated by the advancements in technology lately made, for he had observed the death of men three hundred yards distant through the sights of rifles, and he had known the devastation of exploding shells, the slow drifting hulks of ironclads through the rivers and seas. He had watched men dead some weeks yet intact and scarcely yellowed. And your father brought you to a mounded tarpaulin in the backyard and he pulled this aside to reveal the silent red machine. “The salesman suggested steam powered,” your father explained, “as the fuel is readily found.” Your father, however, had long understood the importance of the combustion engine and had opted for the gasoline machine: “It may not be as accurate or as gentle as that mower you have known, but I have found that the greatest success comes through methods most brutal.”

And your father, ever in full regalia, fueled his mowing machine while the smoke on the horizon flared hues of red, and in the shadows of those cities distantly burning he tinkered amidst the spent tufts of lawn, and through the days none could escape the constant roar. And your father at last sighed with contentment when blistered stubble alone remained. Your father no more sat watch against the militias nor dashed off letters insisting he was “quite recovered” or how he longed to “once again obliterate our enemies along the plains.” The mutton-chops of his youth become as full as the bushy whiskers your grandfather wore in the daguerreotypes suspended along the wall.

And always your mother wept and always she explained her tears for a stubbed toe or a cut hand, although she complained from the sofa where she lay swaddled in quilts. And your father ever outdoors, ever starting and restarting his machine, ever wild and cursing amidst the blue fumes.

And all the women seemed women in black, their gauze faces and dipped black parasols, their gloves of black lace. Soon even girls who were not engaged to dead soldiers now dressed in mourning and claimed secret engagements, pregnancies, and they walked stiff backed, haughty, and there were those who commented, “The poor dear, the poor sorrowful dear and her sacrifice.” They dressed always in black and some men watched these black trussed widows purchasing a flank of rotten meat or a can of peaches, and they longed for their lonely widow flesh, but your father merely desired the lawn mowers their husbands left behind.

And now, many days, your father ran into the house with his blackened shirt and his black dripping hands and commanded you duck beneath the window while he too crouched, and he pressed his oil hand to your mouth, while outside widows in black lace dresses and black parasols knocked on your door, their thin frownless lips as they said, “We know you are in there, General. Your tracks are apparent.” And your father said, “I promised them I would trim their lawns as a payment, as a gentleman should, but they must have forgotten our arrangement in their grief. Now stay down. I believe she senses you there by your rustling.”

And in those days your mother remained ever at her desk, dressed in mourning, her soft grunts as she composed, the murmurs she made and her tongue lolling along her grayed lips. Remember the letters your mother wrote and folded over, slow and delicate, and how she tied these with pink and blue ribbons, and how she hid these in a split tree trunk outside your house. Remember how she glanced around as she did so, never suspecting you watched through the window. Remember how she found you running your fingers over the kitchen table as if you could read the imprints of her message, as you imagined what she must write to the man who gathered these letters, who left those letters your mother read in the bathroom, giggling and sighing to herself. And remember the night your mother woke you with a hand to your mouth and whispered, “If you tell your father, he will kill the both of us. And I will never speak to you again.”