Alligators of Abraham by Robert Kloss Read Free Book Online

the slow melt of ice along the floor boards sopping into the Persian rug, Abraham’s face buried in his hands, how he attended not to his papers, his war. And how Abraham paced, moaning, before the boy’s casket. How he slept before his son, his great figure curled, his legs drawn up and how his white stockings and whiter flesh shown beneath his black trousers, and when he sat awake all your valley knew the sound of his pitched weeping. And in the still midnight how Abraham said unto his wife, “I need a glass of water” and instead journeyed to the body of his son on display and laid kisses upon that once sweet brow, and how he sought to remove the silver dollars from the boy’s lids, whispering, “Please, please my boy, oh my boy, my heart—” Remember how servants found Abraham asleep and draped over Willie’s casket, the boy’s jacket sodden with Abraham’s tears, and Abraham wept for what he called “his guilt,” and so it was said Abraham cleansed and cleansed until the blood dripped from his rubbed-red hands.
    And now Abraham and his youngest son Tad curled into bed with each other, and Abraham whispered stories until this tender lad dozed. And Abraham excused himself from cabinet meetings for his weeping, for his dazed expression, his strange wandering mind, and he called out “Quiet down now Willie” or “Play with your carriages elsewhere lad,” and when his sobs were heard by those he trusted most, these said unto each other, “We may need a new president.”
    Remember how Abraham twice exhumed Willie, stood by while government workers shoveled free and mounded the soil. How he fell upon the casket raised above the soil. How he fell upon the figure of his boy once the crowbar pried free the lid, the dust and gases of the grave and all others fell to coughing and gagging while Abraham held tight the disassembling body of his son, the body grown to dust, to soil, the body burrowed through and rotten, the body of hair grown long and tangled, the body of fingernails, of gases. This body of the boy he kissed now, this body he wept upon, this body ever of his boy, this body ever of his body.
    And it was said Mary Todd would not rise from bed for the death of Willie, and it was said Abraham crouched by her catatonic figure and fed her soup by prying her gray lips open with one hand and sliding the spoon in with his other, and he hummed the tunes he knew she had loved to hear Willie sing “Yankee Doodle” and “the Camptown Ladies” and Abraham said finally, “Mother, you must pull together or you see that white building across the way?” and he gestured to the hospital across the street. “Mother, we will have to send you there. And my heart will be too lonesome to bear.”
    Your father sent letters at the time of Willie’s death which read, “I know well our Abraham’s pain.” And indeed, in years past, your father constructed pyres of dead leaves and branches and stray kindling on the anniversary of Walter’s death, and he sat in the weird glow of his blaze while ashes collected in his hair, in his beard. Remember how his eyes gathered the flicker of flames, how his hands wrenched the turf loose into clumps of sod while the black smoke drifted ever about him, and when you asked why he set these fires, he turned to you with his eyes smeared with tears and sweat and soot, and he said unto you, “If I don’t, how will my boy ever see?”
    He asked your mother to “gaze upon my boy for me please” and he said, “I will light these rebel cities into fires in his honor.”
    And your father wrote you a letter in the aftermath of Willie’s death which read, in part, “A boy must ever grow to wither and die. We gaze upon the pink of his brow and know well the infirmities of the flesh. Ever we are born into the house of our death. Ever we are heir to the dust. My son, I