Free Alligators of Abraham by Robert Kloss Page B

came from within, our Abraham’s rapturous last clatter.
    Later your father said, “I know well what such a gun does. He would have died without pain.”
    And your town seemed crazed for the weeping and gnashing and singing of the unpaid in the streets, even as the skies opened into torrents of rain and those unpaid, who had so far kept to the forests, now clogged the streets, singing and wailing.
    And there were those who claimed Mary Todd gave Abraham’s guard a hundred dollar bill and told him to take the night off.
    *
    And now the clamor for vengeance, for blood, now the hunt for this disgruntled fur farmer, Booth, with a hundred thousand dollar bounty placed on his head. And soon Booth lay cornered in a lit and burning barn, and his terrible screams and the black smoke and the red moon, and they identified his blackened corpse by dental records, they said, or by intuition, or by what they took as the word of the barn owner. And there are those to this day who insist he fled “yonder” via ferry where he married a rancher’s daughter, and said that he died an elderly man of ninety-eight, a wealthy rancher of beef cattle, a father of eight boys and three girls.
    And there were those who insisted love letters from Mary Todd were found in Booth’s satchel, and in these she used phrases like “love eternal” and “Royal Union.” And there were those who insisted Booth’s death drove her mad, that she called to him from her asylum bed while his ghost paced the floors.
    *
    Your grandmother called Abraham’s death “the greatest tragedy we’ve ever suffered” and she commissioned renderings of “Honest Abe” riding an eagle above snow peaked mountain tops, his ghost shimmering over a red, white, and blue mountain top.
    And in what remained of rebel lands they erected statues and composed what they called “hymns” in Abraham’s memory.
    *
    â€œLet us bind up our wounds”
    And then came the morning you woke into your mother and your grandmother’s absence, their closets emptied of clothing, the gathering of dust where once was your mother’s stationary, her ink pots and fountain pens no more. Remember how your mother left only a framed photo of your father and you and herself from years before. And remember this house emptied of your mother and your grandmother’s frenzied scratching and now only the sound of your breathing and the distant vibrations and roaring of your father’s mowing machines, starting and idling and choking and stuttering to stops and then starting again.
    You slept on the sofa where your mother so often slept, your mother who had become the mere cold indent of velvet and stuffing. And your father woke you with the smell of gasoline upon his hands, his breath, as he said unto you, “A terrible event has befallen our family” and he placed his hands upon you, his face ruddy and bearded and moist now with tears, and he groped for you, and he said, “Oh my son, my son, your mother has passed unto another land” and no matter how you struggled beneath his weight, your father pulled you ever deeper into his terrible warmth.
    He chiseled a headstone with the inscription, “Beloved wife, Attentive mother” and this headstone he erected next to Walter’s. And while he read passages from his grandfather’s leather-bound Bible, the words your father spoke seemed less a language of dust and brimstone than of the motes of rust and oil, the fumes from below.
    And your father gestured to his lawn of mowing machines, the pools of oil in mud, nowhere a blade of grass, and he gestured to the house, and he said unto you, “What will happen now that she is gone?”
    And when you never saw her in town, nor did she return, you thought, Perhaps she is underground , and in the long nights you watched the space under those trees, the shadows and the stone marker, for some evidence of