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Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln
From: Columbia University
| By:
Richard Slotkin |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Abraham Lincoln is one of the most famous presidents of the United States, for his leadership during the American Civil War and his subsequent assassination. But how does one acquire the character to become such a man?
Richard Slotkin, a professor of history at Wesleyan University, visited Columbia University to discuss historical fiction, describing the mix of imagination, literary technique and in-depth historical research that went into the writing of his book Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln. Here, Slotkin discusses why the young Lincoln presented such a compelling opportunity for a historical novel, and closes with an excerpt from his work that combines a historian's understanding with a writer's talent for landscape, dialogue, character, and human emotion and action. |
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| Abraham Lincoln. | |
 chose to write about Abraham Lincoln because he is a mythic figure in American culture. He was at the center of controversies that remain central to our national life more than 100 years after his death. And for all that has been written about him, he remains a figure full of imaginative potential, symbolizing possibilities deeply yearned for but still unrealized in American history. If he had not been killed, could he, would he, have made a difference in the bitter history of racial oppression that followed the failure of the reconstruction? |
Lincoln is the president whose ideas and actions transformed the federal union into a modern republic. Of his successors, only Franklin Roosevelt is comparable as a reshaper of both the forms of government and the ideology of American nationality. More books have been written about Lincoln than any other American--some 40,000, I'm told. One poet said he was one of the most interesting men since Christ. |
Lincoln is still a touchstone of cultural controversy and political theory. His ideas and policies are still cited by academics, ideologues and polemicists left, right and center as representing both the best and the worst of the American liberal tradition. Historians and biographers tell us what the completed man was like, what his mature ideas were, and give us an idea of the contradictory mix of traits that composed his character: his deep melancholy and coarse humor, his moral idealism, his Machiavellian politics, his compassionate heart and his iron fist. |
From the backwoods to the White House
What I wanted to do was to imagine how he got to be that man. He was by birth and education something like white trash. Where did the intellectual brilliance come from? What was the basis of his famous compassion? What hatreds and resentments did he have to overcome to achieve it? Where did the iron come from that allowed him to hold his course through all that blood? And what did he make of the racial conflict that was at the bottom of his and the nation's trial in the Civil War? |
Only in fiction does the historical writer have the freedom to fully imagine the life of his or her subject, to represent for the reader the subject's inner life, which can never be documented. At the age of 21, he walked out of the woods and into the small frontier town of New Salem, Illinois, with one ragged, ill-fitting set of clothes on his back. He had no money, no friends, just a job clerking in a general store. He had nothing behind him but his family's experience of poverty and failure and a total of six months of formal schooling, which he acquired in bits and pieces at very wide intervals. |
Yet, within six months his townsmen would nominate him as their candidate for the state legislature and the elected captain of the Sangomon County Militia for the Black Hawk War. Three years later, he became a leader of his party in the state and was on his way to becoming one of the most respected trial lawyers in the region. |
Where did Tom Lincoln's son get the nerve, the ambition and the skill to make that leap? It is the novelist's privilege and obligation to consider that question; to listen seriously to all the rumors and gossip about Lincoln that have been collected over 160 years; to engage imaginatively with the ordinary details of pioneer life, the sights, sounds and smells that would fill Abe's memory and constitute the language in which he would have to begin to learn to think; to read all the books he read as a child. |
There weren't all that many, and we know what they were: Aesop's Fables, The Arabian Nights, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe. We can try to understand what a brilliant, uneducated boy would have made of these books. We also know his school texts, Grimshaw's History of the United States, which, interestingly enough, sees the politics of the Whig Party as the fulfillment not only of American national destiny but also of biblical prophecy. This is what he read, and it shaped his politics for the rest of his life. He read The Kentucky Preceptor, also called The American Preceptor, The Columbian Oratory and Scott's Elocution, which offered a liberal sampling of the classics, republican oratory from classical and modern times, Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible. |
Transformative encounters
In some cases in the novel, I chose to dramatize an intellectual influence, transforming a reading or indirect relationship into a face-to-face encounter. The flatboat journey, going down to New Orleans, is the central episode of the novel. The feminist reformer Frances Wright; the great Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, later the father of John Wilkes Booth; and Joseph Davis, the elder brother and mentor of Jefferson Davis, all were, in fact, active in places that Lincoln visited during one of his two journeys down the river. Lincoln was certainly familiar with Wright's articles and lectures. He lived not far from where she was living in Indiana. Joseph Davis was a close personal friend of Wright's; from a utopian plantation she was running, she actually sent a slave to Davis to be disciplined. Lincoln loved to read Shakespeare and, in later life, saw many performances by all of the Booths, father and son. |
Although the meetings in the novel are imaginary, they could have happened. They are really in the book because they dramatize vital turns in Abe's development. They demonstrate his skepticism about utopian projects, his understanding (which I dramatize by means of the Davis character) that the best of slavery is still very bad. They show his discovery that he can dominate a scene with his wit and presence, that what he wants most in life is what the great actor wants--a part to play and a stage on which to play it. |
Lincoln's ideas about race
Anyone who writes about Lincoln in our time must at some point confront the question of his ideas about race. The color line has always been the primary basis of social division in the United States, and the moral character of an American literary or historical hero is measured by the way he or she faces that line. |
Lincoln was certainly a racist in the sense that he shared the belief that mankind was divided into distinct types endowed with particular gifts. But Lincoln was never what was called a Negro-phobe, as were most of his white contemporaries in both the North and the South. Frederick Douglass said that he was almost the only white leader with whom he felt entirely at ease as one man to another. |
When Lincoln writes about black people, his characteristic approach is to identify with them, to put himself imaginatively in their place. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master of slaves." Although he trimmed his abolitionism to the limits of politics, he was consistent in asserting that blacks are as fully human as whites, and therefore entitled to the fundamental rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence: "Has the lighter face the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule you are to be slaved to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own." |
His most powerful antislavery argument was, in fact, the assertion that if left to grow, slavery would someday be applied to poor white men like himself. As the novel shows, he was a colonizationist who believed blacks should be freed but returned to Africa. Viewed in the hindsight of our own time, colonization seems to imply agreement with the segregationist view that a racially integrated democracy cannot or should not be achieved. |
But the colonization Lincoln espoused was based on the belief that black people were, in fact, fully capable of self-government, which orthodox racism denies. His early views are in some ways more harmonious with those of Martin Delany and other early black nationalists. It was not the supposed racial incapacity of blacks but the irrational prejudices of whites which, he said, made integration impractical. |
The development of Lincoln's compassion
In this excerpt I'm going to try to bring all of this together, and it is based on an anecdote told by Lincoln himself. It's from the rather brief autobiographical sketch he prepared for his campaign managers in 1860. Lincoln wrote an apology because he thought that "there is not that much of me." He summarizes the circumstances of his birth and education with extreme brevity, but tells only one story about his early childhood. This is in his own words: "A few days before his eighth birthday, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin and with a rifle gun standing inside, shot through a crack, and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game." |
I was attracted to the story precisely because it is the only story he tells about his childhood and because he suggests that killing a turkey had an effect on his conscience. He gave up hunting large game, which was an exceptional moral choice in a part of the country where you lived by hunting for your meat. What was there in this turkey-shoot story that would cause Lincoln to emphasize it so? And why offer this story to the public as something they needed to know about their future president? |
In dealing with this, the novelist brings a lot of things to bear--historical and social knowledge of the kind I've talked about, but also personal elements as well: one's own memories of childhood; what it's like to be 8 years old; what it was like to watch a boy child at that age, having raised him through the years. All of this becomes part of what you do in making sense of the historical character. And part of the work of any person growing up is the development of conscience and the understanding, in the simplest terms, of how a man or a woman is supposed to act in the world. |
Abe's mother, Nancy Hanks (called Mam in the novel), speaks for carefulness and compassion. Abe's father, Tom Lincoln (called Pap), exemplifies the hard-fisted values of frontier manhood. Behind Pap looms the figure of Abe's uncle Mordecai Lincoln, the most successful of his relatives and a man widely known as a cold-blooded Indian killer. This is a historical figure; this is no invention. |
Young Abe does not know that he will in the end come to despise and reject his father and idealize the kindness and intellectuality of his mother. At the age of 8 he is torn between the two. He is unwilling to stay home with the women but uncomfortable with the bullying and smutty talk of his male peers. So he escapes to the company of another isolated figure in the community, an old Indian named Johnny Konkapot, who offers a different model of how to be a man. There was a real person of that name, an Indian survivor of the wars in that region, who befriended young Lincoln and his friends. He taught them how to fish and hunt. When he was dying, he asked Abe to compose his epitaph. This is the epitaph Lincoln wrote for Johnny Konkapot: "Here lies Johnny Konkapot. Have mercy on his spirit, God, as he would have if he were God and you were Johnny Konkapot." |
The basis of a humane consciousness and conscience is compassion, the ability to comprehend, to empathize with lives different from our own--another sex, another race, another species--the ability to understand that the hurt we do to others is as bad as the hurt done to ourselves. It's a lesson Abe has to learn for himself, working only with the basic elements of his frontier environment and at the cost of his innocence. |
Excerpt from <I>Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln</I>
The summer turned. They harvested their first crop of corn. It was a small crop and with Lincolns and Sparrows working together took no time to pick, strip, scrape, and pound to hominy and meal. Then Pap went off to carpenter Miz Grigsby a cherry cabinet for cash money, and Tom Sparrow and Dennis Hanks went to cut timber for their cabin. There was mostly women's work around the cabin and three women to do it. |
He went back to the swimming-hole, but the fun of it had gone off. With Denny gone there was no one to keep Allen Gentry and the Grigsbys from spoiling the fun with their bickering and bullying. The joking got mean sometimes, and the stories warn't funny like Denny used to tell, but having to do with shameful secret things like nekkids or what Matt called (hee-hee!) buckin'-and-groanin'. You had to let on to know what they was about, and enjoy them, or get laughed at yourself. |
Abe wandered off upstream on his own, pretending he was tracking game. On a small mud beach he saw the track of a moccasin. He dropped down, as his Uncle Mordecai would have done, for Injun sign. Then he moved off, swift and silent--well, silent according to the playing of the game. He came through a screen of brush to the back of Konkapot's camp. It was empty. Good. He was about to start creeping down to the brush shelter when suddenly the branch over his head began to shake all by itself. His heart bumped, he turned--and there was Konkapot. He gestured for Abe to come on in and sit. |
The two of them sat, Injun fashion, at Konkapot's fire-pit. Konkapot stroked the ashes with a stick and a little orange flame lifted like the head of a pet snake. Konkapot looked at Abe. "You come talk Konkapot." |
"Talk," Abe agreed, then remembering the first time he'd met Johnny at Grigsby's still-house added: "Or don't talk." |
Konkapot considered that. Then he grinned and shook all over like he had the chills. Abe reckoned he was probably laughing, but without letting breath out. Konkapot took up a short-stemmed pipe, then a pinch of crumbled brown leaf. Lit a twist of grass in his fire, set it to the pipe, breathed up some smoke and let it out. He made like to offer it round a whole circle of people, but wasn't anyone else there. Then he offered the pipe to Abe. Abe sucked a little into his mouth--it bit his tongue, he spit it back out. That seemed somehow not good manners, so he smiled, the smoke got up his nose and made him cough. It left a taste in his mouth that was sweet and bitter by turns. |
They sat there, not talking, while Konkapot smoked the pipe out, his lips making little popping noises when he puffed. From a distance, the smoke had a spicy smell. Konkapot's not-talking went on past the time Abe expected he'd start again. |
Then Abe noticed Konkapot was looking at him. Not like he usually looked at the boys, his eyes touch-and-go like a bird afraid to light. He was looking at Abe measuringly, nodding to himself. Then he said: "You' pappy gone to make meat. Don' take you." |
"I ain't old enough," said Abe. "I ain't so old as Matt. Jest a little tall." |
"Nah," said Konkapot. "You hunt: plenny good. Good t'ing you not shoot b'ar dhat time!" Konkapot did his silent laugh again. |
"I ain't no hunter," said Abe. "Never shot at nothin' bigger'n squ'rl, and never hit one yet." |
Konkapot took the point seriously. "Not ready yet, make meat," he allowed, "but you can larn hunt." He leaned forward: "Dhese men," he said, and waved his hand around as if the trees were a bunch of the most pitiful people he ever heard of, "dhese men make meat." Spits. "Easy make meat, dhese time here. Plenny deers. Plenny squ'rl. Dhese year, plenny." |
Abe had never heard Konkapot say that much all at one time before. It was astonishing. And it seemed to exhaust the old man too, for he stopped talking and sat there so quiet it seemed like he'd stopped breathing. Then he whispered--like his breath was wore out--"You got listen. You want deers-meat, got to listen deers." |
They sat quiet again, Konkapot looking at Abe, mild and friendly, but real clear. Abe thought Konkapot might talk some more, but he didn't. |
After a while Abe stopped expecting him to talk. |
Then he noticed the light had gone orange, the sun was dropping, he'd best get back to home. |
Konkapot nodded his head, yes, as if something was agreed. "You come back, I show you listen. I show you hunt." |
So as summer slid into fall, and Pap and Denny roved out farther afield hunting deer (for the woods near the settlement seemed to be hunted out), Abe slipped off into the brush with Konkapot, and the old Indian taught him the woods. It was a different learning from Pap's. Pap could put his eyes on an oak, tell you right off how many puncheons or staves or shakes a man could split himself out of it. He could use up a tree just looking at it. Konkapot looked at a tree and told you what kind of critters lived in it or fed on it, or what kind of "givin's" it offered you. That's a bee-tree. This one, make rope from strings under his bark. Blackoak, bark keeps your asshole tight. Burning-bush berries, eat him you can shit plenty too much, all you want. This small tree, all twisted back on itself? He'll find you water: just dig-- he knows how to listen water. |
He showed Abe where sang-roots like to grow. How to spot their wiry stems and berry buds in a tangle of weeds. Man-roots, he called them: when you dug them up they were crotched like men, and also--Konkapot made a fist to show the unbelievable hardness of cock a man could get by eating that root. If you was weak or tired, chaw on it and your spirit come back to you. The skin of the earth was a thin dress laid on riches and powers. Listen her and she lifts her dress, she shows you--everything. |
This is what roots are teaching. |
Listening was Konkapot's secret of hunting. If you wanted the good of critters, you had to learn to listen how they think, what makes them scared, when are they hungry and what do they like to eat and where would they look first to get it, when did they want ... and Konkapot would put his trigger-finger through a thumb-forefinger hole, by which Abe figured he meant the same as buckin' and groanin'. Now was getting to be the time for that in particular. So now you were to take doe-sign for a promise of buck, vixen for fox, sow-bear for the boar, and so on. |
How can a man know what a critter thinks? A man can't even tell what another man is thinking. |
Konkapot brushed the words off like dust. Men and critters got the same breath: hungry, they got to eat, scared, they go hide; cock stands up, they want the woman. Get old, get shot--they die, both the same. Listen. |
Mam at the supper table: "Where you been all day, Abe? You been down to the swimmin'?" |
Sary looked at him. "Aaron says you been talkin' to that ol' Konkapot." |
Pap looked up from his vittles. "Konkapot," he said. |
"He's teachin' me how to track like an Injun," said Abe. "You always said, Injuns is the best for trackin'." |
Pap nodded. He had said that, and he was right. Still, "I don't want you spendin' all your time with an Injun. I can show you trackin' myself when the time come. And there's plenty to do 'round here." |
But in truth there wasn't much to do, and Pap off hunting was not around to see. |
Konkapot's salt lick was the other side of a patch of swamp. There was an old beaver-dam, long time ago there'd been a pond, but it since bogged up. Hunters from the settlement went round it, but Konkapot knew how to pick his way across mostly dry-shod, and on the other side, where spring fed the swamp, there was a little salt-seep. |
Deer came down to it in the early morning: their coats a reddish-brown softened over with a breath of gray. Look how shy they step, how careful. Their little pointed feet and long legs, like walking tiptoe. Look how their ears turn, this way, that way, listening. How when they need to listen, they become still: wasn't for the shine of their eyes, you'd think it was mist among gray branches. Nothing listens good as deer. |
It was three does, and a young fawn born just that spring: the ghost of his baby-spots mottled the soft leaf-tones of his hide. The deer stepped mincingly out of the trees, their ears swiveling. They came down to the lick. When two dropped their heads to nuzzle the lick, there was always one with her head up, ears swiveling. Deer are worried. Scared all the time. That's how they live. Good to be frightened some time. |
That's what deers larn you. |
Konkapot gave Abe the rifle. He winked and pointed. That meant for Abe to aim the rifle at the deer. The two of them were stretched out behind a downed oak. Abe checked the rifle's flint and priming: good. He carefully poked the gun over the log, slowly, thinking he must point the rifle as silently and delicately as the deer moved. He rested the long barrel on the log and sighted on the deer that was standing, head erect, watching while the others took salt. His eyesight ran the length of the barrel out to the deer: the animal littled by distance, but somehow enlarged in the notch of the rifle sight. |
Abe pressed the hammer back slow and steady with his thumb, willing that the sound of the hammer cocking would be no more to the deer than the tick of a water drop, not even as loud as twig-snap for that was danger to a deer, frightened all the time, listening listening, nothing in the world can listen to everything the way a deer can listen ... the doe's head turning, bright liquid eyes watchful, black wet nostrils flexing and flaring, tasting the air, the ears turning to the drip as the hammer went to half-, drop, and full cock the doe worried about it, a second doe raised her head, the deer afraid of him and she didn't even know who or where or what he was. This was how Uncle Mordecai felt with that Injun in his sights. Shoot now shoot now shoot now or they'll spook and run away shoot shoot shoot. |
The deer raised their four heads all at once and stood there, frozen, all four pairs of ears swiveled in his direction, then away, then back again: the silence of their listening seemed to fill the air out to the end of space. |
I can't shoot them while they're listening. |
Abe's thumb eased the hammer back, releasing the cocked spring, easing it down with tense care and delicacy so that not the least sound should frighten the deer. He looked down at the ground, ashamed to look at Konkapot. |
But he couldn't do that forever. When he looked up, Konkapot was watching him, and nodding his head in approval. |
Back at Konkapot's camp they sat quiet. Then Konkapot said, "One time: Sperits make dhis place. People live under groun'. Long time. Plenny cold. Plenny dark. Hungry? All dhat time." He thought a moment, then said again, "Hungry." |
But there was a young man, he said, a good hunter. He understood, knew how to listen what those animals were thinking. He would go out and hunt, always trying to make meat to feed the people waiting for him, hungry. He killed, killed a lot. But always, you know, he felt inside--because he could understand how they thought, those animals down there, he knew what they were feeling when he was killing them, he understood, and so he was always sorry. And one time he said it, right out loud, he killed a deer and said he was sorry, it was the only way his people could live themselves and not die, yet he was sad about it: inside. |
Then out there in the dark in the underground he saw two lights shinning--like deer's eyes when they come to your fire at night, curious as any damn squirrel. Only tall ... this deer was very tall. Looked at him a certain way: with her eyes. Then she run off. And so he tracked her--he could tell it was a doe, she didn't drag her feet the way a buck will but stepped very light, but still a big doe, very big, very tall. And he thought how the meat of that doe would feed the people, such sweet good meat, and so much. But then, the more he tracked this doe the more he was also sorry to have to kill her, for she was so tall, the tallest doe he ever heard of, her steps so beautiful to follow, and her smell on the ground. |
And then: he come upon her, sudden. He don't catch her: she's waiting for him, listening for him to come and waiting for his arrow like a gift, like she makes herself a present to him. And that hunter, that young man: he saw how she been listening him that whole time, just like he listened her, smelled him just like he smelled her. He picked up his bow. He set his arrow. He was going to shoot. He took aim at her: and that time, going to shoot, he looked in her eyes. |
"Not deer's eyes." Konkapot nodded his head, looking far away. "Woman eyes." |
The hunter dropped his arrow to the ground. |
Then it wasn't a deer, but a tall woman. She was the color of a deer, only with a woman's skin, and her legs very long but only two of them. And she had a dark brush like a woman, not a white one like a deer. "So she took him--dhat hunter--she showin' him: a certain place she got, a certain hole: and other side dhat hole." He raised his hands and arms, his head, and swiveled his body side to side, indicating everything around them: trees, late sunlight coming through them, the brush, sounds of birds, the smell of a cookfire. Konkapot smiled. "So dhen: good t'ing you don' shoot, some time." |
It was like an Aesop story, to tell Abe a man didn't have to pull trigger just because he had the drop. There was a time to kill, and a time to let be. |
So then: that was Konkapot's learning. |
October 1817
It was early fall, the sun gone ripe. Pap and Denny had hung the smokehouse full of deer carcasses. Reuben Grigsby paid most of what he owned for the kegs. And for sign (Aunt Betsey said) their works found favor in the eyes o' the Lord, here come their hogs back that had run off, returning like the Prodigal. Or better, said Mam, for the Prodigal come lean, but these were fatted on the mast they snouted off the forest floor--beechnuts, acorns, butternuts, mulberries. Now winter was in the air they hankered for husks and scraps. |
Pap poured out their cash money on the table. Mam looked over his shoulder, Abe and Sary stood to her side; Denny and Aunt Betsey peeped over Tom Sparrow's shoulder at the pile of coins and paper. Pap counted it out. If he warn't out of reckoning, he had to allow they had enough to go to Vincennes and pay the first installments on both claims. Might even be some extra--if there was, Pap had a mind to a cow.
"The Lord been good to us this year," said Pap, and rapped his knuckles on the board, and everybody said Amen. "Pra-aise Him!" said Aunt Betsey, like it was Meeting. |
That night Mam came up to Abe and Sary and read them Moses in the desert, and manna from the heavens. |
Next afternoon when Abe went out to the sinks, there come an unaccountable hush over everything. Air still, not a breath in the leaves. No bird. Only, high up in the cloudless blue above the trees, he could see turkey-buzzards circling and drifting north and east. Abe judged they were watching the woods past Whitman's, up towards the headwaters of Little Pigeon. Then he heard a sound rising behind the northward trees, a low rushing sound like a wind. But the air was still, not leaf budged, not insect clicked, not. |
A huge black cloud glided sudden up out of the trees, moving by itself swift and steady but still no wind, its edge no sooner seen than its full dark body rising after it, lifting and stretching and stretching out, the trees bowing and clashing their leaves in the down-draft. |
"Mam!" Abe yelled as the cloud came up and up and he saw its edges were fraying out in winged flying scraps--not a cloud but a cloud of birds, a million million of them, the air full of their whooing, and the wind of their wings made the air shudder as if flat hands were pounding over the mouths of his ears. The sky blacked out as the birds piled up over the cabin, shit splattering like a downpour on the roof-shakes. |
I stopped suddenly. Pap threw the door open and they stepped outside. There was the clearing again, the sun pouring hot through the still air, everything splotched with bird-shit. The bird-cloud wheeled northeastward towards the headwaters of Little Pigeon, circling down now, like a black whirlpool with its root in the woods north of Whitman's. |
"A pigeon-roost," said Pap, his voice hushed, Meeting-like. "Ain't seen the like since I was a boy." Then Pap noticed Abe, grabbed his shirt, and shook him almost like he was mad, only he was happy, fierce-happy. "Get Uncle Sparrow. Tell him it's a pigeon-roost--he'll know what to bring!" The he ran for the horseshed, hollering for Nancy to get some salt made, plenty salt ...
They broke through the brush into a patch of open woods. Beyond was a thicket of old trees, black branches thick and rough with leaves--until you looked again and saw every one of the limbs crowded with hundreds of birds, ranged along the branches like mourners seated in a carcass wriggling for room. From back in the grove came the sound of tree-limbs snapping, crashing down, a sudden lift in the constant all-encompassing bubbling of the birds, the pattering incessant bird-shit rain. |
Old Reuben was the first on the ground, stalking round and round his campfire like a tethered wolf. When he saw them he hollered, "Hi-yi!" You damned tenderfeet! I been a-waitin' here since I seen them buzzards! Can't fool a buzzard, and you can't fool Reuben Grigsby! We can smell a killin' on the way!" |
"Dang it, Grizby!" Tom Sparrow yelled. "Git out the way and let a man make some meat!" |
As each family arrived they built bonfires and unpacked their gear. The men grabbed poles or ax-helves and went among the trees. Abe hung back. It was full dark, the bonfires washed the outer pillars of the grove with orange tongues of light. The fire gleamed in the million eyes of the birds so that it looked like the branches were full of fire-flies. Listen birds, Abe tried to tell himself, but it was too many to listen, and what was happening in the trees was no more hunting than swatting flies. From behind the fire-lit pillars he heard the thumping of the poles and the crash of branches, men yelling, the sudden intense up-bubbling of sound among the pervading coo and rumble of the pigeons. |
Matt popped up alongside Abe, his face soot-smutched, grinning, his eyes brilliant blue in the fire-light. "C'mon Abe!" he yelled, his hoarse tight voice already rasped raw and the night just starting. "C'mon with me! We gonna kill us a goddamn mess o' these goddamn birds!" |
Something bound Abe to the spot. If you can't listen a thing you ain't got the right to kill it. |
Matt jerked on Abe's arm; then his eyes sharpened: "What's the matter? Ain't you 'lowed?" |
That broke the tether. Of course he was allowed, he warn't no girl nor baby! A bolt of terror and also a kind of joy shot through him, he grabbed an ax-helve and pelted on Matt's heels into the grove. |
Limbs were crashing and thumping, a million birds cooing and hooing and oodling all around and overhead, birds whirring at your eyes like giant moths. Abe started swatting with his ax-helve, bashing birds out of the air like a man batting flies. Men with poles were thumping the tree-limbs and the birds' bodies would drop like ripe fruit, or sometimes a whack would crack the limb and the weight of the birds do the rest, the men ducking from under as the limb fell--then club and club the live whirring that slapped at your knees, Abe swinging the ax-helve blind into the flutter and squirming around his shins like a man beating down swarms of bird-sized bugs, swat, splatter, thump. Abe's bare feet churned in a muck of birds. Shit rained down, splat on his head, stinging an eye. "Next time wear a hat!" Denny hollered. Now the men were bringing in kettles of burning smutch, greenwood fed with hog fat, and the greasy smoke dropped more birds out of the upper branches. Everybody was swaying and running and roaring and singing and laughing, faces blacked with smutch-smoke and blood and bird-shit, hooting and hallooing like they gone crazy, clubbing everything that moved. |
Smoke still drifted among the trunks when they started gathering the bird-harvest by morning light. They scooped the feathered beak-thorned lumps into sacking or hide bags, or strung 'em in dozens in thongs to sling from saddle and pack-frame bows. They tromped half the dead into the mud--more than half. No need to take bruised fruit with so much prime lying all over the ground. The mud itself was more than half bird-shit. |
Pap showed teeth in the filthy mask of his face: "That's what I call a pigeon hunt!" |
Aunt Betsey said it was the same as the manna from heaven. They emptied the sacks of dead pigeons, plucked split and gutted the bodies, strung and spitted them to smoke or laid them in salt, all of it in a frenzy of haste to be done before the dead birds rotted or went fly-blown. |
Whether it was manna or just good luck, Abe finally couldn't stand any more of it, and sneaked off for a bathe in the creek. There was a thicket of young cottonwoods above the swimming hole, and as Abe came up to it he heard Matt Gentry's hoarse whisper: "Git down!" |
Matt was crouched in the thicket, blue eyes flashed in his dirty freckled face, his hair was a matted red tangle. He kept grinning and sticking out his tongue, "Look! Look!" he rasped and jerked Abe close. Through the screen of leaves Abe saw pink and white shapes moving by the water-- |
"I got 'em!" Matt rasped. "Waited for 'em to go wash an' I snuck 'em, an' now I got 'em!" |
All Abe saw was the flash of it and couldn't hardly remember exactly after because he had no names for what he was seeing, only women/girl shapes, six seven eight of them curved and bending, splashing and chattering in high birdlike voices, the doubled bulges of their chests with eyes in them, buttock splits and black-tails at the groins ... |
Matt's mouth kept running like he couldn't stop it anymore "I seen 'em, I seen all of 'em, I seen their nekkids, I--!" |
Abe screamed at Matt and grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. Fury whipped through him, red as blood and fire like when he tried to kill Andy Simms, and he threw Matt away--then went for him furious like a swimmer thrashing across the pool. Matt was crying and yelling, "You crazy son of a bitch!" |
Something snatched Abe and threw him sideways in the brush. He lit and rolled, ready to come again-- |
But there was Denny holding Matt by the arms, Matt yelling, "Lemme go! Lemme kill him! He's ruined everything!" |
"Ease up there, hoss," said Denny. "The game has got away." There was no sound from the pool. The women and girls must have heard them and run off. |
"I'm goin' to drop you," Denny said to Matt. "When I do, you git on home."
He let Matt go. Tears had cut runnels in the dirt of Matt's face, washing some of the freckles clean. His blue eyes were full of righteous outrage and his mouth was twisted with it. "He's crazy!" He took a breath. "Hangin' 'round that old Injun. He was panting. "Goddamned Injun-lover!" |
Denny grabbed Matt and shook him: he was more than twice Matt's size. "I said that's enough now. You git!" Denny dropped him, and Matt scooted off into the brush. |
Denny looked seriously at Abe. He shook his head. "You got to larn to take things easier," he said. "Wasn't any of our womenfolks got see'd." |
Tossing and turning on the shucks all night: why didn't he take things easier? Nobody cared a hang how the pigeons come or how they killed 'em. Nobody but whoever was kin to those women cared if Matt and Denny had see'd their nekkids.
Dawn light in the chinks. He crept down from the loft. Mam was asleep in the pole-bed with Aunt Betsey: Pap off to Vincennes, all the luck of their year in a leather pouch. Pap took his luck as it come. So did Denny. |
He eased out the cabin door. |
On the far side of the clearing something moved: brown against brown tree-trunks, color wouldn't show what it was but his eye caught the movement. |
The cabin door was ajar. He reached in and to the right, where Pap's long rifle always leaned ready to hand, just where it had been that day when the lawyer and the nigger rode onto their land in Knob Creek, just where Grandpappy's rifle must have been leaning the day Uncle Mordecai plugged the Injun. The cool barrel in the palm of his hand. He lifted it, eased it round the door-post careful not to knock it. Then he had it, right hand on the curving neck where the stock flowed into the body of the piece. He looked to the priming: primed. |
He would need a rest for the long barrel. Woodpile off to his right. He moved that way, glidingly. Lowered himself behind the woodpile and took his rest. All the time his eyes were open as Konkapot taught him, not probing the edge of the woods like a finger poking something--taking in everything in general not one thing in particular, letting all the light around into your eyes, all the little movements ... |
There: brown against brown. Now it was becoming something, moving stiffly, jerkingly this way, that way. Now it is this: a wild cock-turkey, stepping point-toe into the yard, pecking grains and bits of offal off the ground. He's got long legs, longer than a chicken's, and a body like a big brown melon. There he spreads his fan. There he lifts his head: a shinny knobby red-and-blue cockhead lifting on his long scraggy neck. A bright eye--head profiled left, the wattles swagging off the nose like a bull's balls. Head profiled right. |
Abe eased the rifle forward on its rest: soundless. Eased the hammer back, his hand muffling the snick as it came to full cock. Come on, Abe thought as if his spirit was talking to the bird's, come here come closer so I can kill you. I want to kill you, I want you to come closer so I can kill you. |
Listen him, Konkapot said, Listen what he is how he think. |
The turkey stopped. Wasn't sure. Profile left. Did he hear something? Turkey thinks: Hungry. Lots corn-seed. Bits of dead pigeon. It's easy. I sure as God am one lucky turkey! Profile right. Profile left. The eye bright with greed. |
In the flash before the barrel-smoke blanked it out Abe saw the cock-head explode.
"I got him!" Abe yelled. |
He crouched by the turkey. It flopped, its scaly legs jerked, and its wings flared and quivered. Its red naked neck ended in rags of skin and a small spout of blood scrawled signatures in the dirt. He remembered the warty head, the wattles looped over the beak, the beady eye, left right, hungry, frightened. Gone. |
Then Mam was there, and Aunt Betsey behind her, both in their shifts, Denny with one gallus holding up his trousers. "Whoo-ee," said Denny, "plugged the head at forty paces. There's a lucky shot!" |
Abe wheeled on him hot: "It ain't luck!" he yelled, and realized he was crying. |
Mam paid them no mind. She looked into Abe's eyes and he looked back. It had been so long, an age of the world since last she saw him so, and he saw her: how deep her eyes were so blue, night-blue not gray-blue like his own, and the smooth dome of her forehead, the narrow tapering planes of her cheeks, and her wide thin-lipped mouth smiling at him real gentle. She said, "Mebbe if you give thanks for this turkey, Abe, it'll set better with you." |
"...though what we'll do with more bird-meat I'm sure I can't tell," he heard Aunt Betsey mutter. |
So he sighed, closed his eyes, and said the words inside. Thank you, thank you, I'm sorry I killed you for nothing. He wasn't sure, was he saying it to God the turkey or Konkapot. Behind his closed eyes he kept seeing the bright eye of the bird in its red-blue gnarled and warty head. Boom!
From the book Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln, by Richard Slotkin. Copyright © 2000 by Richard Slotkin.
Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt & Company, LLC. |
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