RUNNING FROM OFFICE: A FANTASY

 

Abraham Lincoln sat on the stairs lacing up his shoes. Not even John Hay would join him on a day like this. Hay just shook his head when the Chief appeared at his door with running shoes in hand. And no use asking Lamon: his stately bulk required the clearest and mildest days for exercise. Strength he had in plenty, but durability on the road? Very little. It had occurred to Lincoln more than once that at the close of one of his speeches to the19th Michigan or the 123rd New York State Volunteers, to add a footnote: Would any bright young man, light of frame and with sound lungs, with the bitter experience of miles of marching through Georgia and Carolina, care to be a presidential companion in exercise? To wit, running to clear the pipes, refresh the sinews, and free the heart. Shoes and stockings supplied.  Should have the ability to tolerate tales from Artemis Ward and Petroleum Nasby, as well as be resistant to tasteless stories from the Tycoon. An all-weather employer.

 

Lincoln stood, stretched his back, twisted his hips, bent over and reached his fingertips a ways below his knees and above his tippy toes, took three deep breaths, then jounced his way to the entrance, opened the door, looked this way and that, and set off down the portico stairs, across the lawn, with a left at Pennsylvania Avenue past Seward’s. Yap yap from Midge, Seward’s notion of a watchdog. “Yap yourself,” he called over his shoulder, though it weren’t worth the effort. Still you need to show the critter who’s the dog and who’s afeared.

 

On past Miss Arlene’s Souza’s which past sundown doubles as a house of chance for the likes of Thaddeus Stevens and other casino haunters. It’s the piano playing they go for, to find some other solution besides the execution of the death sentence for what they call desertion when a private does it, but term it a strategic retreat when it’s a high-tailing general like Rosecrans at Chickamauga. Seems every morning and half the days come midnight he was writing orders to Suspend execution of death sentence for James Brown or Please make a commutation of this case as suggested within. Left right left right post pone post pone.

 

Past the broken board with the rusty nail. As usual, after the first few minutes there is the temptation to fall back to a trot and then a walk. Then turn around before you become as sweaty as a baboon in July. Why push yourself on such a damp and dark day when there’s a good chair by a warm fire? Which is why he preferred to have Hay by his side--you went twice as far in half the time, plus you got the bad jokes out of your system, to the great relief of Edwin Stanton. Better all around.

 

Huff and puff, huff and puff, clomp clomp clomp, his lungs taking in the fresh air—a good rhythm rolling—he felt like it could go on forever. Not that it could. For half an hour the euphoria would last, by which point the slope up to the Naval Observatory would take on a nasty character. He grunted at a passerby, a stranger with surprise in his eyes. Taking in the views of Washington City. Well, sooner or later he knew he’d be no better than scenery. Maybe after the war there could be a job with P. T. Barnum, in tandem with Tom Thumb and the Great Blondin.

 

Really, where would he go afterward? Home? He couldn’t picture it. Life had taken on a such a different cast. He’d just have to let time take its course. What he could picture, sharp as a razor, was himself that very first day in Springfield, back to springtime of1837, and his breeches six inches above his ankles, a bundle of clothes on his shoulder, and three dollars in his pocket. Himself the raw stranger and everyone else familiar with names and places and local habits. Come the third day he would have gladly have given his last dollar to be back behind his Daddy’s plow and assured of a home-cooked dinner. That was the day, the first day. The first time ever that he had traded Vulcan’s boots for the mocassins of Mercury and took to the countryside. Cast aside his cares and woes and ran for his life.

The Reader

General Robert E. Lee closed the book, set it aside. Three weeks and three books. Granted, stories, yet they felt so real. At the end of the second, Wilkes Booth shoots the president, Abe Lincoln, in the shoulder, but you can tell, it wasn’t like that to begin with, that Booth must’ve killed him. Shot and killed him.
Lee scratched his right eyebrow. He’d met Abe Lincoln just once, at the White House, letting him know face-to-face that he was resigning his commission in the United States Army, that he would not take command of the U.S. forces. He hadn’t said, I am more Virginian than American.
The president was not his enemy. It had not been a war between enemies, awful as it was. War is forever like to like, mortal to mortal. Lincoln had not asked him to reconsider. I expected this, he had said. A tall man, gray-eyed and serious. No buffoon, no ignorant westerner; nothing of what they said about him in the South was true.
He knew now, and hadn’t known it at the time, but it was Abe Lincoln who was the other general. Not even Grant. That it was Abraham Lincoln’s hand that had guided the armies of the North. And, oh, how Abraham Lincoln had bemoaned that General Meade allowed him to slide across the Potomac unscathed and the war to continue. That would have been the end.
Hindsight told him everything, and nothing.
The books had appeared on his doorstep wrapped in paper and tied with string. He knew right off, knew it again from the first page of the first book, with the picture of the penny on the cover, that the times were inside out. But that was already an old story—even before they fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. Or not inside out—more like the strip named for the astronomer from Leipzig, twisted back on itself, always coming back to the beginning. August Ferdinand Mˆbius.
And now with the third and last book read, and the child Sarah saying, Be careful what you say about what’s still to happen, what should he do? Burn these books? Is he to keep them on a shelf, in sight, out of sight? Books no one has ever written, not as yet. Books that would write themselves, print themselves, wrap themselves up and deliver themselves just like an ordinary parcel. And that the last word of the last book should be [the name of his faithful horse,] Traveller.

The Baker

He shed his coat and donned an apron.
“You’re sure you want to do this?”
“Well,” he said, “here your dough sits waiting for the baker’s hand. Tell me what happens if you let it go till morning?”
“It goes flat, but that’s happened before. I still knead it and shape it into loaves. It’s just that they turn out flat. It still is bread and tastes like bread. I don’t throw it away.”
“How long did you say it would take to rise before putting it in the oven? If memory serves, about two hours does the trick.”
“So it is. You said you used to help your step-mother Sarah Johnston with the bread? Very often?”
“Often enough. And I call her mother. Call? Well, far as I’m concerned she’s very much alive, probably baking bread too, right now, unless it’s a cherry pie, like when I visited her not long before I boarded the train to Washington City.”
“And you’re sure you want to do this?
“Mrs. Matcham, how many times do you want me to say it? Now buckle up my uniform and let me go to it.”
It was just the two of them in her kitchen, herself the widow risen from the dead and her time-traveling visitor, the sixteenth president of the United States. They had had an early Sunday dinner at the Little French CafÈ, then seen a movie, East of Eden, and come home. There was no dropping him off at the Orrington Hotel where he had spent Saturday night. There’d been no talk of what to do once the evening wore on to night.
It was when he was touring her kitchen at lunchtime that he had discovered her old one gallon crock covered with a damp tea towel. He’d lifted the towel from the rising dough—sourdough, dating back to her grandmother, and taking its time. “Bread,” he had said. Then sniffing it and declaring how it smelled like home. “Haven’t had a moment like this since I was a youth and about to turn twenty-one.” Then in the car after Raymond Massey and James Dean he had brought it up again, “What about that bread?” And she gave in. Or was it the excuse they both were looking for?
At any rate, here they were in her kitchen. She added a teaspoon of Arm-and-hammer baking soda to the dough and a cup of white flour. “This here’s the tin of whole wheat flour—it’s dark bread I bake most every time.” She caught her word choice and syntax—already she was sounding like him—but it couldn’t last, she knew that. And nothing for it but to let the moment shape itself, her impossible visitor rolling up his sleeves and taking his stance at her kitchen table.
“You sure this table isn’t too low for you?”
“None of that. The coward’s way is an ugly way. Alrighty,” he said, pouring the dough onto the floured board. And then he was all business, turning the dough back on itself, rotating it as he went, up and over, round and round, adding handfuls of flour as he went. Twice as fast as she ever managed it. “Think this’ll make about three loaves. You call ‘em French. Good enough. Do you ever braid them? That’s what Mother Sarah does. Says it gives you more crust and more crunch. Her very words.”
“Sometimes,” said Joan, not used to having anyone but herself in her kitchen.
“My Daddy didn’t like to see me working like this, said it was woman’s work and I belonged in the fields, but Mother shooed him away and he knew better than to argue. He was a slave-driving man, a term I don’t use lightly. But come twenty-one, I was a free man. I kissed Mother Sarah good-bye and left home for good. We shed tears that morning, me and Mother. There, that should do’er. Pass me that knife if you please, and we’ll divide ’em up. One two three loaves. It’s like geometry, a 120_ angle, and then divide what’s left.” His hands were flying like the wind. “Now for the braiding. There. Set the hourglass. Now what shall we do?”


-I think this is a story of my mom and Lincoln making a loaf of bread.

The Step Mother, Mid-April, 1865

            Mid-day and a break from chores, though chores of a Saturday were hardly worth considering. She was sitting by the fire in her rocker, her knitting in the basket alongside, Mrs. Stowe’s book on the table at her elbow. Something about the day didn’t feel right, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. From the moment she woke, she was uneasy. It wasn’t a dream, not that she could remember.

What was that dream? Hopeless, an old woman chasing after dreams, who ever heard of such a thing? Dilly-dallying when she had yet to clean the ashes out from the stove. And there it was, plain as day. The trick is to give up the chase. She was taking a cherry pie over to Prudence Twilley and half-way along realizing she’d forgot the sugar—nothing worse that a sour cherry pie. Could they sprinkle sugar on top and make up for the lack of sugar inside? Like having your coffee with cream once the coffee is drunk. And she’d lost one of her shoes, not that she minded walking barefoot—it’s easier to wash clean a foot that a shoe any day. So there she was hobbling along one-shoed with her sour cherry pie covered by a tea-towel and the next thing you know she’s tripped on a root and is down on one knee, working her way back onto her feet, and the tea-towel here, the pie over there—face-down. She brushes off her skirt best she could, picks up the pie tin, the pie no worse for wear—that’s the magic of a dream for you. She took a pinch just for a quick taste. Sweet as honey? How could that be? Now she has both shoes. Things are picking up. But which is the way to Prudence’s? She lost her bearings. Good thing it’s a dream or she’d say she’s lost her marbles. The road stretched out in either direction, each direction about the same as the other. Tears were running down her cheeks. And that’s when she woke up, the dream now as fresh as a daisy. And the tears still running. It wasn’t the first time a dream had been forgot and then came back like a water buffalo.

            She had been a widow for close to half a dozen years. She didn’t think about Thomas much these days, a hard-driving man, though a good enough man considering. Witnessing the murder of his father—another Abraham—when he was but a boy, shot dead by an Indian. A terrible memory to carry forward. To his dying day that was the dream that would startle him awake, crying What? A severe man at home. There was no comfort for the loss of his daughter Sarah, the apple of his eye, to die that way, so neglectful. Spilt milk. And the day his son come of age, that was that, a kiss on the cheek for his step-mother and a close hug, and he was gone. Never did the father see his son again. It’s the price you pay, the father hard-driving, the son at twelve with the strength of a grown man, his axe ringing in the woods, the two of them doing the work of three men. What the son said after the election and before going off to Washington City, how he loved her as true as any son can love his mother. That apple pie that she had baked that mirning was a real pie with real sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg and piping hot when they sat at table, with good coffee fresh from the grinder. He had seconds and then thirds. True, she loved him as one of her own, always had.

            She remembered his sitting at her feet as she read aloud, the Arabian Nights his favorite, unless it was that Crusoe book. Even back then he relished the idea of working for yourself, and no one saying git up you lazy lout. Thomas, if only you knew. The President of these United States, your own son.