Alligators of Abraham Read Online Free PDF Page B

into his pocket, or the white gloves of the dandy proudly displayed, or gesturing over the landscape as if sighting new lands to conquer, and now even General Grant was photographed, slouched or perhaps dozing on some saloon chair, and silver-haired General Lee was snapped, gazing off, buckskin gloves aloft, astride his white stallion, and, so too was the pious blue-eyed killer General Jackson, with calfskin Bible clasped to his breast.
    Soon howitzers the size of railroad cars sat upon the hillsides and there the grasses gently trembled.
    And General McClellon wanted only to drill and issue medals for posture and manliness and he suggested if he had “a Napoleonic impulse” he would march upon the capital and take the country from that “Apish Abraham” for himself, and he insisted to his wife that the people of the land, and all the soldiers, would cheer him the while, but he had no stirring to engage in any conflict but the conflict of how much sugar to ladle into his tea or how long to trim his whiskers.
    And General Grant, ordinary and scrubby, with no gait, no station, no manner, wandered off in the night, dazed and wild with whiskey, and woke three days later some hundred miles south of his camp and there he worked in a general store and boozed until ordered home by Abraham.
    And your father was considered mad by many for the way he moaned in his sleep, and the way he anticipated enemies in all the shadows of the buildings, and how he bayoneted behind curtains for “spies” and how he claimed, “No man may kill me by bullet alone” and of this, tangled rabble Abraham could only sigh, could only say, “We must use those instruments at hand” and thus they set out to annihilate the enemy.
    And many lined the tops of hillsides with blankets and chairs and nibbled picnic lunches of cold roast goose and baked ham and drank lemonade as they watched those first battles with opera glasses and applauded the hardy volleys and the heroic “hurrahs,” until the fury and horror of the rebels outclassed your boys and the wailing of the rebels turned your boys’ blood cold, and your boys scurried in every direction, some spouting blood, some covered in dirt and mud, some glazed in the eyes, some screaming names of relatives and some screaming gibberish, and how those along the hillsides knocked over their chairs and fled on horseback while the gun smoke and the screams of dying men clouded their way.
    And soldiers lined the streets, exhausted and bloodied, and newspaper men snickered, “Where are your proud boasts from which you went forth? Your banners and your bands of music? Your ropes to haul back prisoners?”
    And soldiers camped in the streets, expressionless, soot and blood streaked, and women in aprons ladled bowls of chicken broth from vats, and now these soldiers in vacant lots and on front steps, in basements and on porches, clutched their rifles and whistled in their dreams, whistled the sounds of shells into the ears of comrades, the brothers and cousins and boyhood friends they held close in sleep.
    And recruits wandered barnyards and prairies, baffled and circling and humiliated and terror-numb, and stray dogs followed them with tails flickering, with low hungry moans, and lapped the blood spreading their brows, their throats, with clammy tongues and yellow breath.
    And this fellow with his blood and mucus-thick whiskers, and this man, the bones white and blood blackened, punching out where his leg shattered, and every other officer injured, through the faces, the skulls, through the chest and neck, the wheezing sounds and sucking noises—This man’s horse struck and knocked down by eight bullets and before he could pick himself up, five more bullets slammed into the dead animal, and before he could die, he simply lay beneath this house of meat, this fortress of rot, and later wrote home, exhilarated, “The air was alive with lead,” although he