I Am Abraham Read Online Free PDF

also served as my ABC. It was bitten and raw at the edges, where Pa had thrown my book of fables into the fire. I burnt my hands rescuing it. And Pa would have thrown it back into the fire if my Angel Mama, who wasn’t yet an angel at that time, hadn’t shielded me from Pa’s blows. It’s his learnin’ book , she said. Let him learn. She had no butter. So she blew on my hands with her sweet breath and bathed them in her own spittle. And she sang to me about Jesus. Ma had been a shouter at church, just like Hannah. But she commenced to cry in the middle of her song. I wanted to catch Ma’s tears in my red hands, and I couldn’t. So I held on to Æsop with all my might, even when I near drowned in the Mississip, or when I had to fight off ruffians in Orleans. They could have my pantaloons and my coins, but not Æsop’s Fables.
    Jack asked me to read the fable I liked best, but I sang it like a shouter at church.
    “Four Bulls slept in the same field, and the Lord of the Lions was desirous to have these Bulls become his dinner.”
    “What the hell was stopping him?” the Boys asked, unfamiliar with the rhapsodic charm of a fable.
    “Dunderheads, the four Bulls would have ruined him with their horns,” said Jack. And he begged me to continue.
    “The Lion had to conquer by degrees, had to proceed with a program of whispers and malicious hints, to sow discord among the four Bulls, to foment jealousy and disunion, until each Bull was suspicious of the other and fed in different parts of the field. And then the Lion devoured the four Bulls one by one.”
    Jack commenced to crow. “Ain’t that our motto, Boys? Never let a Lion into your house.”
    The Boys sucked on their clay pipes and drank from their own little jars of whiskey. Soon they were snoring and swallowing their own spit.
    “That’s not the motto at all,” said Mrs. Jack. And I realized soon enough that she had all the sagacity of a frontier judge. “The four Bulls are the heroes . . . and the victims here. They fell prey to their own disorder and disunion. No man or Lion could have defeated them four at a time.”
    “Mother, be quiet,” Jack said, fingering his gambler’s glove with the five metal digits. And he meant to crown her with his jar of whiskey—that’s how mean he looked. I couldn’t have abided that, even if Jack had succored me in his home. And it wounded me to watch Hannah. She wouldn’t pull away from the madness in her husband’s eye. As he strode up to her with his wild glare and his menacing glove, I plucked the jar out of Jack’s hand. The Boys were astonished, and Jack was struck dumb with indignity. No one had ever interfered with him in his own house.
    The Boys weren’t worried about my welfare.
    “Jacky, if you break her bones, who will feed us, who will mend our clothes? We can’t get along without Mrs. Jack.”
    Jack didn’t have to listen to his own Boys; the whiskey had unmanned him. He sank to his knees and commenced to snore. The Boys couldn’t even hold on to their whiskey jars. They flopped beside Jack. The piglets squealed and the babies wailed on my new floor. Hannah was trembling, and I trembled too. We hadn’t conspired against Jack, but it felt as if we’d traveled the globe together—and I could have been her father, brother, son.
    But I feared for my own life in a cabin filled with desperados who wore armor imbedded in their bodies and grunted in their sleep like backwoods cavaliers. I wanted to light out of there, to be rid of the Clary’s Grove Boys—rid of myself, rid of Mrs. Jack and return to the maelstrom that had sucked me under. I ought to have drowned, and did, a dead man who suddenly bolted out of the bottom, full of barnacles and stink weeds and fish in my pantaloons, and landed on the shore like a helpless sea monster, rescued by pioneers who’d carved a little clearing on a bluff, hidden from nature and mankind, and where a vagabond like me might collect himself and find his own