Alligators of Abraham by Robert Kloss Read Free Book Online Page B

called the “civilized world,” no more the whistling of steamships, no more the passage of ships mounded with burlap and tarpaulin-covered pelts. This war continued and now rivers alive with the woolen-coated figures of troops, bayonets aloft, the soldiers patrolling, steel eyes penetrating, the cigarette and pipe smoke fumes of soldiers, faces lost in the blue smoke coiling, faces lost as if traversing a fog. These steamships silent and drifting past your town, the gusts of steam, the whistles, the black eyes of soldiers in place of all you had ever known.
    And now the gloomy drift of ironsides, their black smog and slow chugging, their names like Alligator and Cairo and Stonewall and the eyes of children shielded from their grim armor, their monstrous works. These machines Abraham insisted they build, and so they did, for in those times no ambition seemed beyond the clutches of man.
    â€œFear thee not for I am with thee”
    The bullets of the enemy spurted up the dust as if from a pelting rain.
    And this war continued into the wilderness, that dismal wilderness, into dense thickets and choked undergrowth, into the uncanny light, the strange quiet. And when the brush caught, the bodies alive but unmoving on the floor of the forest burned, their screams lost in the crackling of trees, in the fumes, the hellish light, and their bones ever after, bleached and ashen. The sky trembled with soot, and one camp cried to the other, “You hear that Reb?” and the other cried, “I surely do. I surely do.”
    This war continued and men knew now to fear the dust clouded on the horizon, the ominous stream of wagons and glittering gun metal, the white wagon covers against the smote black landscape.
    And everywhere the debris of war, massed in unsightly ruins, wheels broken and poles shattered, ammunition and burst shells scattered, and rats crawling within the corpses of horses, and scurrying throughout the remnants of blankets and hogs rooting the rotted harnesses, canteens, bits of leather, and the buildings burnt and crumbled, the trees torn and rent, the ground strewn. And in fields and in forests shallow graves were found dug and opened by wild dogs and foraging soldiers, overgrown with wild flowers and forget-me-nots, and now polished skulls lay along the floors of forests and fields, and leg bones, arm bones, and rib bones, the toes of shoes, and weather-worn uniforms emptied of life, the grinning bony fleshless faces.
    â€œAre 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.