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.