Free I Am Abraham by Jerome Charyn Page A

hugged each other and moved away from him.
    “I’ll account for nothing,” I said in my reedy voice.
    Folks guffawed in their seats. “Friends, he’s as fine as any soprano.”
    I didn’t have to ask the gods for help—the reediness went away. And my voice could have shot out of a barrel.
    — I’ll account for nothing.
    I commenced to pace that platform like a panther in a tall hat.
    “I fought against this man,” I said. “I would have followed his tracks, but there weren’t any. He saved a young girl from getting scalped, and to calm her down he read Lord Byron to her.”
    “Who’s Lordy Byron?” someone rasped with mischievous delight.
    “Shut your trap!” said another from the opposite end of the hall. “That’s Captain Lincoln. I rode with him in the Sangamon brigade.”
    “Then why don’t he talk like a soljer.”
    “Because,” said this unnamed recruit of mine, “that’s the way a real soljer talks.”
    I watched that orneriness grow as I paced the platform—the beady yellow eyes that jumped out of the semidarkness. Vandalia wasn’t a town that believed in too many lanterns inside its town hall.
    I may have won a seat in the Legislature, but I didn’t have much purchase here; I could calm this mob for a minute, distract it, but little more than that—these Vandalians belonged in a circus, not Black Hawk.
    I whispered in a soldier’s ear, and we marched with Black Hawk behind a public curtain, while the audience hectored us and stamped their feet.
    “Kill Black Hawk and the Injun lover!”
    The soldiers clamped on their bayonets with jittery hands as we went out the rear door and climbed into a military ambulance. Vandalians hissed and hurled mud cakes at us all, but Black Hawk never wavered in the carriage. He had a lot more dignity with mud all over him than most suckers with mud on their coats. I wasn’t as gallant as Black Hawk—I ducked those mud pies. I accompanied him and the soldiers to the edge of Vandalia and climbed down from the carriage.
    He spoke to me for the first time.
    “You have courage, Captain Lincoln.”
    “Majesty,” I said, “I jest climbed on a platform and yodeled a bit.”
    He shook his head. “Not that. It takes courage to return to such loud people.”
    And I found myself in a predicament, having to defend white folks to a king.
    “You must have had some troublemakers in your tribe.”
    He laughed with his yellow teeth. He had real juice in his eyes. “Yes, but they do not talk constantly and make an ugly face that could frighten a squirrel . . . and you must not praise me so much, Captain. I remember you and your riders. My own riders were fascinated by the size of your head. We are not as civil as you have made us. My riders would have liked to have your head as a trophy.”
    “Then why didn’t you give it to ’em?” I asked like a substitute judge at Justice Green’s court.
    “I nearly did.”
    And he rode off in that ambulance, a king in an alien land.

7.
    Snow Bride
    I DIDN ’ T EXPECT A bunch of dwarfs to clap at me with their cymbals, and white horses to dance in the snow with silver ribbons on their legs. Still, I did expect some kind of a homecoming. I had none at all. I landed in New Salem in the middle of a storm—the flakes were sharp as crystal and scratched my cheeks. I couldn’t even return to my old room at Rutledge’s tavern. Rutledge had winked out while I was in Vandalia. He removed to Mack’s old farm, seven miles from New Salem, but I did find Ann wandering about near the tavern, with snow on her eyebrows. She must have been collecting things for her Pa. But she shied away from me and cringed, as if I’d come to deliver a blow. And she sang from the Book, like a woman trying to break some deep spell.
There is none holy as the LORD: for there is none beside Thee: neither is there any rock like our God.
    She was summoning up her own strength. “Abraham,” she cried, “I’m worse than Jezebel. I lured you into the