Alligators of Abraham Read Online Free PDF

with all my soul” and he gestured now to your mother’s closed door, saying, “You look after her.”
    Entire towns were said to enlist and prepare to march. And brothers marched with brothers and fathers marched with sons. And now young men kissed their sweethearts and promised to return before the month was out, and young men shook their father’s hands as if they were now equal, they hugged their sobbing mothers and tousled and patted their kid brothers on the heads and hugged their sisters, young ladies in ribbons and bonnets who perhaps pinned for and secretly mourned for some boy down the road who somewhere bade his own family farewell, for along the land this scene was played out a thousand, thousand times, and these boys pledged their hearts, never realizing all the girls they would meet along the way, receiving kisses in a good many places, and giving the same.
    Main Street brimmed on either side with this sea of blacks and grays, with beaver coats and coon coats and woolen coats and bison hides, with the blood exuberance of mothers and fathers and children, their red faces cheering and singing, the flags they waved, and remember marching bands led the way, batons and tubas and clarinets, how thereafter the cobbled street filled with the stiff backs of militiamen, young boys and men dressed in hand me down uniforms from wars past, the stained suits of fathers and uncles and grandfathers, suits of wool and dust and mothballs, these men and boys, the jolting of their boots, their bayonet tips. And remember, at the fore of these, your father taciturn atop a white stallion, his saber aloft and flashing. Remember the air streaming with the litter of red, white, and blue confetti, while flags were unfurled from every window, lamppost, balcony, while children dangled from lamp posts and oak tree limbs, giggling and hooting and cheering the death of those rebels. And while your mother wept first for the light of a sun so long unseen, she soon recognized every boy marching past as the son or cousin or second nephew of some man she had known as a school girl, and she said this soldier’s presumed name as if it were of precious substance yet when she saw your father astride his horse her face seemed to gray and she fell silent.
    And now your city became a city of militias marching from distant towns, a city of parades and confetti, of flags unfurled and waving, and all waited for the announcement of attack, and many silently feared the rivers would soon fill with rebels armed and murderous and bent on fornicating with your women, reclaiming their unpaids, obliterating all the factories and forcing the little boys of the land to till the soil.
    And you and your mother watched the sky, the moon pale and frozen, those stars and the soft chirruping of crickets and frogs, while from somewhere came a high whistling, a low crackling, another whistling, and you grew rigid and your mother murmured, “Only fireworks” and thereafter you listened stiff and trembling to the far-off sounds of some anonymous celebration.
    And your father and the first militias left the towns of their birth, very often the only towns they had ever known, and men such as your father believed those boys would return, unscathed, in a few weeks’ time, while young men on the march wrote home to their fathers, “I will ever remember these sublime moments when even the most common amongst us are willing to sacrifice for their country” and soon everywhere in newsprint and plastered to the sides of buildings was the illustration of a grinning fellow who said, “Joining the army is like small pox…it’s catching!” and letters home from young boys named Johnny or Peter were written by firelight, full of wonder at “life’s richness” and “the great adventure before us.”
    And what proud young man did not pose in full regalia, with arms folded and expression stern and noble, or a hand slid