I Am Abraham Read Online Free PDF Page B

future.

2.
    A Feckless Candidate
    T HEY WERE STUNNED when they saw me, assumed I was an apparition, since no one had ever come back alive from that desperados’ den. They pawed at me, pinched my arm. The town had abandoned all hope for their Abraham, hadn’t even bothered to raise up a rescue mission. But I couldn’t cash in on my own good luck. My venture with Offutt soon petered out. His store was still standing, though Offutt himself had disappeared with all the saddles and bags of salt. I lived in that deserted store with nothing but dust and dried beans, and a few field mice to keep me company around the bare walls and barren front room. Offutt stole the glass from our window, stole the counter, stole the chairs. That lonesome store rocked in the wind like a prairie schooner and moved an inch or so every time we had a sandstorm. I’d hug my knees in the corner and pray that those howling pellets of sand wouldn’t eat into my eyes.
    Justice Green and the schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, begged me not to wander. New Salem couldn’t afford to shed another citizen. So I mucked about, doing odd jobs. I mended pickets after a storm, built coffins for the next plague year, swabbed the sores on the town’s workhorse, and shoveled shit. And when I had to shut the store, I removed to Rutledge’s tavern. It was the centerpiece of New Salem, even if it sat in the dust like every other building, and didn’t have a reliable roof. It did have a window, covered with grime and a trail of dead beetles, and its speckled light fell with a pernicious randomness that had nothing to do with the time of day. The tavern’s rear wall swirled like a gigantic kaleidoscope, with its own feast of colors that suddenly went black—we lived with a lot of candles at Rutledge’s. It’s where the luminaries of the village would congregate over a dram of whiskey and talk of their own prospects. Unless there was a river-run between New Salem and Springfield, the village would peter out, like Offutt’s store. That’s why New Salem had been built on a bluff over the Sangamon—to encourage river traffic, but the river was as unreliable as their roofs. It could overflow one season, become a puddle the next. And since I was a flatboatman who had come pitching out of the Sangamon’s waters, I was looked upon as the pilot who would initiate the Springfield–New Salem run. But the Legislature at Vandalia wouldn’t risk such an enterprise—it was filled with drunken louts who didn’t care a whit about New Salem. And that’s why the luminaries wanted their vagabond, Abe Lincoln, to battle for a seat in the lower house. They’d heard me pontificate around the cracker barrel at Offutt’s before it was defunct. They nodded and shut their eyes when I said that women ought to have the right to vote.
    “They’re not cattle, are they? A woman can sign her name and ponder over a deed as well as a man.”
    They kept nodding, because they wanted their own man in Vandalia who would plead for the village’s navigation rights. Meantime they surveyed Rutledge’s daughter like pig-eyed men begging for a glimpse of her breasts. That’s how secretive and salacious they were. They’d follow her right into the bathhouse if Rutledge gave them half a chance. I heard them talk about her berry bush when Rutledge wasn’t around. But they were the luminaries of New Salem, and I was their candidate, who couldn’t even defend the most voluptuous gal in the county.
    Ann Rutledge had red hair and a face that was a marvel, with sultry silver-blue eyes, full lips, and nostrils that were shaped like perfect little bells. It stopped you in your tracks to watch her breathe in and out. She was deliciously plump. Annie attended to the tavern, but she’d been a pupil in Mentor Graham’s class when I first drifted into New Salem as Mr. Offutt’s prospective clerk. Now Ann was nineteen, as nubile as a fine young she-cat, who hoped to continue her education one day at the