Skeletons (6 page)

In spite of my fear, I laughed, thinking of Peter Sun, this latest and perhaps best mask I had worn. I had worn many masks. Who would I be now, in this newest of worlds? Philosopher? Assassin? Jester?

For a moment I let my life wash over me—there was pain, and some joy, and much shame. I thought of my childhood in Cambodia in the 1970s, my time in Thailand, my years in America, at Yale University. I thought of where I was now.

Who will you be next?

Whoever it was, I would be alive.

I wrapped myself in the night and, unafraid to live, slept.

I ... awoke.

There was a memory fading behind my eyes. A theatrical play. Laughter. The loudest part I remember. And then something louder, the sound I heard all too many times around Washington, around the Union the past four years. A gunshot.

Into me, no doubt. Did I feel it? I felt something, like someone slapping me hard on the back, the way Joshua Speed, my old friend from Springfield, used to do. "Go at 'em, Abe!" he'd say. It made me sad to deny him a position in the administration, but even in politics, as my aunt used to say, things can't be too obvious. A man can't use lightning to chop a log, that'd be cheating.

So I'm awake. Now I remembered. The play,
Our American Cousin
. Ford's Theater. My God, is Mary all right? Poor Mary, she was always afraid of this kind of thing. Was she shot, too? There must have been more than one assassin, they did have those guards outside the box, didn't they?

Then ... the memory faded.

Where was I?

I was most definitely not in my box in Ford's Theater. No bunting here. Only a box in the dark, by the feel of it. My God, did they bury me alive? Was I shot, and pronounced dead, and buried, and me still with the world? What in God's teeth was wrong with these men! Maybe they let that George McClellan pronounce me dead, he'd take to that job quick enough.

At least I could breathe. And move, a bit. My, but I felt stiff and sore. And the back of my head ached. I should have been panicking now, but somehow I could only think of something comical, a picture of me in here all dead and buried with my headache, and poor Mary out there with one of her migraines because I'm gone.

I worried about Mary.

Well, it was time to test my waters. So I lifted my elbows up and tried to push on the door. These big elbows of mine got in their own way, and finally I had to put my arms out straight, next to my body, which felt as if it had been dressed in the damn wool suit, the expensive but itchy one, and then lay my palms up flat against the roof of my little house and push up.

Oddly, it felt like my hands were soft right down to the bone, and that the bones themselves were doing the pushing.

But darned if it didn't work! Up went the door on its hinges, at least a few inches. Must be in Springfield, I thought, because the dirt in Springfield is at least soft from all the rains. Or maybe they plunked me down in Washington, like I didn't want, where you could just about float a casket away in the swampy, mosquito-infested muck they called the nation's capital.

The nation . . .

My God, what was happening to the Union? Five days after Appomattox, what in hell would happen to Reconstruction with
Andy Johnson
at the helm? Not to be slapping myself on the back too hard, but
Andy Johnson
? My God, Andy was a good man, and a necessary man—but he was also a
sot
, to be plain, and a damned southern one to boot! And with his temper! The Congress would eat him for breakfast, and leave nothing for lunch!

My old bones creaking like they'd never creaked before, I pushed that casket door all the way open. It fell back easily, and no dirt, Illinois or otherwise, fell on me. A burial vault.

And not too dark, thank God. A little light filtered in from a glass cut in the roof overhead. I stood up slowly and hit my head. The coffin was set into some sort of wooden receptacle. Felt nice and smooth, like mahogany or walnut. Lord, did those long bones of mine ache.

There were the dusty remains of flowers scattered about, which puzzled me. Hadn't I only been in here a few days at most? I picked a flower up, felt it turn instantly to dust. Well. Perhaps the drying actions of vaults.

It was best to take things as they came.

On trying to maneuver myself out of that receptacle, I found a silver plate on a shield attached to the coffin which read:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

SIXTEENTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

BORN FEB. 12, 1809

DIED APRIL 15, 1865

I chuckled on reading that. Not so fast, I thought. Some fancy engraver might have to make himself a new plate to fix that last date! It was the kind of work I didn't mind him doing at all.

I got myself out of that receptacle, and finally stood tall and straight, listening to every bone in my body crack itself like a good set of knuckles.

Still feeling the stiffness work itself out of me, I surveyed my little stone house. They hadn't done bad for me. There were the dusty remains of evergreen branches on the floor of the vault. My, they'd gussied my afterlife house up like the floor of a Kentucky cabin. There was just enough light to study the two huge doors that held me in.

I didn't like the look of those doors, solid as two tree stumps. And the stump is the part you don't cut down.

I lifted my hand to scratch my beard, and got what I'd have to say is the shock of my short new life.

In the dim light I could see through my hand to the bones beneath.

I quickly pushed the sleeve of my fancy shirt up and studied my arm. Bones, surrounded by the merest hint of me. I found that if I turned my arms a certain way in the light, I became more visible, but never more than a trace. If I felt my arm, it felt solid enough to me, unless I squeezed hard, in which case I felt straight down to bone. By the looks of me I was little more than a walking skeleton.

Well.

I had to sit down and think about that one. The edge of the casket's receptacle was as good a place as any.

Thinking further, I turned, just able to study myself in the polished wood of the casket. The light was very dim, but what I saw unnerved me quite a bit.

I saw my own skull, with the shadow of a bullet hole in the back of it.

Again, turning my head in the light this way and that, I could make out bits of me. It was certainly me, all right, ugly as ever. What had they called me during the first presidential race? The Ape? Well, I'd never been much to look at. But this skeleton business made me considerably less attractive to look at, I had to admit.

I tried my smile, saw the barest hint of my own lips giving their melancholy grin, and mostly, behind it, the bone white of a smiling skull.

My, my.

Damned if this didn't give me the shakes. But I didn't let them last long. No sense in that. The only sense was in getting to the "nub" of the question. What was it Billy Herndon always said about me? He said I was given to thinking more than any man in America. Perhaps this was true. I just couldn't see the sense in keeping all the gloss and trappings on a question. Take all the gloss away, strip off the trappings, and you had the real idea to hold in your hand. Then you could study it plain and simple. None of that fanciness for me, thank you.

Well, that was the only thing to do now. Think it out. The first and most logical thought was that the Bible thumpers were right, and that the Armageddon had come. Isn't that what they promised, that the dead would rise? Yes, but if so, they had also promised they would rise up to heaven. This vault didn't feel much like heaven to me. I had no doubt I'd find Springfield just outside those heavy doors. And while I'd liked Springfield well enough, it sure wasn't any heaven.

So what had happened? My second thought was a selfish one. Perhaps I had been raised from the dead. Old blasphemer that I was, I couldn't think in any more than joking terms that I'd somehow raised myself from the dead, or that someone had done it for me. I had as big a sense of self-importance as the next man—except for that fool McClellan, whose dose was considerably larger than any man's I'd ever met, including Stephen Douglas—but I couldn't believe one man, even me, was that important to the Union or anything else to be singled out for this honor.

Maybe science was involved? Maybe those fellows who had built us those iron warships, all those new guns, and come up with all those new ways of killing had come up with a way of doing the opposite?

I thought of five, then ten, then twenty possibilities. The plain fact was I didn't have enough facts to go on. I needed more, needed more true things to hold in my hands and study. I needed newspapers to read, and things to see with my own eyes before I could puzzle this one out.

So, sighing heavily, I stood, stretched those long bones of mine out, and prepared to do battle with the two stone doors of my little prison.

To my surprise there was no battle at all. When I put my hands on the doors, there was an inside latch and they opened easily, producing an opening of blinding sunlight.

Shielding my eyes, I stepped out into the world.

It was a cool, dark, moonlit night. Late spring, by the feel and smell of it. And though there were subtle differences from my remembrance, I knew this place. Oak Ridge Cemetery, sure enough in Springfield, in Illinois, in the United States of America.

For a moment I was overcome with being alive.

Whatever the circumstances, I surely felt alive. Almost too much so. I had an amount of energy I don't remember possessing at least since I was younger. Almost too alive. I nearly swooned and had to sit down.

I turned to look at my stone vault. It was really rather pretty in the moonlight, and well kept, two columns and a big-bricked front. I let my eyes play over the greening hillsides rolling away from my stone house. This was definitely Oak Ridge Cemetery, certainly Springfield.

My eyes finally sent their startling message to my brain: every grave around me, every vault and tomb, was opened to the sky.

I was not the only one come back to life.

I studied the hillside below me. I saw a flow of skeletal figures making their way to the iron-black gates of the cemetery. With all my thinking, I was apparently late in making my escape. Unblocking my view from the corner of my little vault, I now saw that there was a massive exodus of skeletons from this place, figures streaming from every direction to the exit.

Using my hill as a general's perch, I studied the four corners of Oak Ridge and saw the same thing: open graves, open tombs. The city of Springfield beyond looked changed, yet felt the same. Obviously it had been some time since I'd been interred. But how long . . . ?

I was startled by the appearance of a machine near the entrance to the cemetery, far below. A wagon, made of metal. In the back were shovels and a wooden casket, very plain. So the inventors had been at work after all. And no horse pulling it! Remarkable. But understandable. It moved along a thin road bordering the cemetery and seemed headed for the exit until it came in sight of the crowd of skeletons. Suddenly it stopped, and then began to go backward.

The skeletons on the edge of the mob saw it and pursued. Two of them hopped onto the front of the truck and pulled a door open, dragging a man out. The wagon stopped moving. Another man was pulled from the other side. At this time I also noticed the coffin on the back of the truck open, and a skeleton climb out, frisky as a kitten.

The two men had been thrown to the ground, and as I watched, the skeleton from the back of the truck lifted a shovel and leaped from the truck. As his fellows held one of the men down the skeleton beat him with the shovel until he was still, then turned his attention to the other man, whose cries I could hear from where I stood.

My first reaction was to stop this mad violence and force the skeletons to let the two men go. Wasn't this the right action to take? I had never liked mob rule. But something visceral held me back. It seemed right. Not only that, but I felt a bloodlust arise in me that frightened me. Not only did these two men deserve to die, they had to die, if possible. They were the enemy. Which was a very strange way for me to feel. Not in all the years of the great conflict which divided this Union did I want to see a man die. In all the battles did not one death of one Confederate soldier bring me joy; certainly, from not one of my orders of refusal to stop the execution of a spy or deserter did I ever feel satisfaction. But that was just what I felt at this moment: immense satisfaction. Not only that: I wanted to join in the melee—to kill the living myself.

These were repulsive feelings, but I felt them.

And now a remarkable thing happened below. As the cries of the second man ceased I saw the first rise in a new life. His flesh fell away, and he was now one with his skeletal brothers. Soon his companion joined, too, and the two of them remounted their wagon, urging others to get in the back, and the wagon made its way slowly to the front gate. The skeletons there parted, cheering, and others climbed on board as the metal wagon moved through the gates, out of the cemetery, and toward Springfield. Other skeletons, not content to wait their turn to get through the gates, were climbing the wrought-iron fence in various spots, like white bony insects.