So began the only real schooling Abraham Lincoln ever had.
Every morning for the next four weeks, Abe and Henry climbed the stairs to the false cabin. Every day, Henry taught him something more about finding and fighting vampires.
Every night, theory was put into practice as Henry challenged Abe to hunt him in the dark.
Gone were my cloves of garlic and flasks of holy water. Gone were my knives. What remained were my stakes, my ax, and my mind. It was this last weapon which Henry spent the majority of his time improving—teaching me how to hide from a vampire’s animal senses. How to use its quickness to my advantage. How to drive it from hiding, and how to kill it without putting my limbs (and neck) at risk. But for all of Henry’s lessons, nothing was more valuable than the time we spent trying to kill each other. At first I had been astonished by his speed and strength—convinced there was no way I would ever be its equal. Over time, however, I noticed that it took him longer and longer to subdue me. I even found myself landing the occasional strike. Soon, it was not uncommon for me to best him three times out of ten.
“I find myself in a curious position,” said Henry after Abe had managed to pin him one night. “I feel rather like a rabbit that has taken a fox for its pupil.”
Abe smiled.
“And I like a mouse who has taken a cat for its tutor.”
Early autumn came, and with it an end to Abe’s stay. He and Henry stood outside the false cabin in the morning sun—Henry with his dark glasses, Abe carrying a few belongings and food for his journey. He was already weeks overdue at Little Pigeon Creek, and likely to get a thrashing from his father for coming home without the money he’d promised to earn.
Henry, however, saw fit to remedy this with a gift of twenty-five dollars—five more than I’d promised my father. Naturally, pride demanded I refuse this gift as too generous. Naturally, Henry’s pride demanded I accept it. I did, and thanked him profusely. There was much I had thought of saying at this moment: Thanking him for his kindness and hospitality. Thanking him for saving my life. For teaching me how to preserve it in the future. I thought of apologizing for the harshness with which I had first judged him. However, none of this proved necessary, for Henry quickly extended a hand and said, “Let us say good-bye, then say no more.” We shook hands, and I was off. But there was something I had forgotten to ask. Something I had wondered since we first met. I turned back to him: “Henry… what were you doing at the river that night?” He looked strangely stern upon hearing this. More so than I had seen him the whole of my stay.
“There is no honor in taking sleeping children from their beds,” he said, “or feasting upon the innocent. I have given you the means of delivering punishment to those who do… in time, I shall give you their names.”
With that, he turned and walked back toward the cabin.
“Judge us not equally, Abraham. We may all deserve hell, but some of us deserve it sooner than others.”
FOUR
A Truth Too Terrible
The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.
—Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to George Robertson
August 15th, 1855
I
My dear sister is gone….
In 1826, Sarah Lincoln had married Little Pigeon Creek neighbor Aaron Grigsby, six years her senior. The couple had moved into a cabin close to both of their families, and within nine months announced that they were expecting a child. Shortly after she went into labor, on January 20th, 1828, Sarah had begun to lose an unusual amount of blood. Rather than fetch help, Aaron had tried to deliver the baby himself, too frightened to leave his wife’s side. By the time he’d realized how grave the situation was and run for a doctor, it was too late.
Sarah was twenty years old. She and the stillborn baby boy were buried together in the Little Pigeon Baptist Church Cemetery. On hearing the news, Abe sobbed uncontrollably. It was as if he’d lost his mother all over again. On hearing the details of his brother-in-law’s hesitation, Abe’s grief was joined by rage.
The no-good son of a bitch let her lie there and die. For this I shall never forgive him.
“Never” turned out to be only a few short years. Aaron Grigsby died in 1831.
By the time he turned nineteen, Abraham Lincoln had covered nearly every inch of every page in his journal with ink (in ever-smaller lettering as he neared the end). It held seven years of remarkable records. Insights into his disdain for his father. His hatred of vampires. Accounts of his earliest battles with the walking dead.
It also held no fewer than sixteen folded letters between its pages. The first had arrived barely a month after Abe left Henry’s cabin and returned to Little Pigeon Creek.
Dear Abraham,
I trust this finds you well. Below is the name of someone who deserves it sooner. You will find him in the town of Rising Sun—three days upriver from Louisville. Do not construe this letter as an expectation of action. The choice is yours, always. I merely wish to offer the opportunity for continued study, and provide some small measure of relief for the injustices done you, as you will no doubt seek their redress on your own.
Beneath this was the name Silas Williams and the word “cobbler.” The letter was signed only with an H. Abe rode to Rising Sun a week later, telling his father that he was off to Louisville to look for work.
I had expected to find the place plagued by a rash of disappearances or pestilence of some sort. However, the people seemed in excellent spirits, and their town in excellent health. I walked among them with my weapons hidden beneath my long coat (for it had occurred to me that the sight of a tall stranger with an ax might engender concern among the citizenry). I intruded upon the kindness of a passerby, and asked where I might find the local cobbler, for my shoes were very badly worn. Having been directed to a modest shop not more than fifty yards away, I entered and found a bearded, bespectacled man hard at work—his walls covered with worn and dismembered shoes. He was a meek creature of some five-and-thirty years, and he was alone. “Silas Williams?” I asked.
“Yes?”
I cut his head off with my ax and left.
When his head fell to the floor, his eyes were as black as the shoes he had been polishing. I have not the faintest idea what his crimes were, nor do I care. I care only that there is one less vampire today than there was yesterday. It is strange, I admit, to think that I owe this fact to a vampire. However, it has long been said that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Fifteen more letters arrived in Little Pigeon Creek over the next three years, each with nothing more than a name, a place, and that unmistakable H.
There were times that two would arrive in as many months. There were times that none arrived for three months’ time. Regardless of when they came, I always set out as soon as my work would allow. Each hunt brought new lessons. New improvements to my skills and tools. Some were as effortless as the beheading of Silas Williams. Others saw me lying in wait for hours on end or posing as prey—only to turn the tables when the vampire attacked. Some required a day’s ride or less. Others took me as far as Fort Wayne and Nashville.
FIG. 12 - ABE STANDS AMONG HIS VAMPIRE VICTIMS IN A PAINTING TITLED ‘THE YOUNG HUNTER’ BY DIEGO SWANSON (OIL ON CANVAS, 1913).
No matter how long the journey, he always carried the same items with him.
In my bundle I carried whatever food I could, a pan for frying pork, and a pot for boiling water. These were wrapped in my long coat, which I had paid a seamstress to further alter by removing the inside pockets and sewing a thick leather lining in their place. The whole was tied to the handle of my ax, which I kept sharp enough to shave my whiskers. I added a crossbow to this little arsenal, too, one that I had fashioned myself using the drawings in a borrowed copy of Weapons of the Taborites as my guide. I continued to practice with it when time allowed, but dared not wield it in battle until my skills were much improved.
While hunting vampires offered a surplus of vengeance, it paid nothing in the way of real money. As a young man, Abe was expected to help provide for his family. And in keeping with customs of the time, any wages he earned belonged to his father until his twenty-first birthday. As one might imagine, this didn’t sit well.
The idea of handing my earnings to such a man! Of my labor rewarding his lack thereof. Of doing anything to benefit one so shiftless. So selfish and cowardly! It is no more than indentured servitude!
Abe was always looking for a job, whether clearing trees, hauling grain, or ferrying passengers from the banks of the Ohio to waiting steamboats on a scow of his own construction. * In early May 1828, when Abe was still reeling from his sister’s death, a job came looking for him for a change. One that would change his life.
James Gentry owned one of the largest and most prosperous farms around Little Pigeon Creek. He’d been an acquaintance of Thomas Lincoln for the better part of ten years and was unlike him in just about every imaginable way. Naturally, Abe had always looked up to him on account of this. For his part, Gentry had come to admire the tall, hardworking, and modest Lincoln boy. His own son Allen was a few years older than Abe, but a pinch less mature. The industrious farmer wanted to expand his reach (and his profits) by selling his corn and bacon downriver in Mississippi, where sugar and cotton were king, but where other goods were in great demand.
Mr. Gentry asked if I would join Allen in building and piloting a flatboat of his goods downriver—stopping in Mississippi and points south to sell quantities of corn, pork, and other sundries. For this he would pay me the sum of eight dollars each month, and purchase my steamboat ticket home from New Orleans.
It’s likely Abe would have accepted this job even if there’d been no promise of money. It was a chance to escape. A chance for adventure.
He put his ax (and in fairness, the carpentry skills he’d learned from his father) to work building a sturdy, forty-foot flatboat from green oak, cutting each plank and fastening it to his frame with wooden pegs. He built a shelter in the middle of the deck, which he made big enough so that he could stand inside without fear of hitting his head on the ceiling. Inside were two beds, a small stove, and a lantern as well as four small windows that could be shut “in the event of attack.” Finally he coated the seams with pitch * and fashioned a steering oar. **
At the risk of sounding proud, I must say that she turned out rather well considering that she was the first I had ever built. Even when we burdened her with ten tons of goods, she drew less than two feet of water.
Allen and Abe launched their fully loaded flatboat on May 23rd. It was to be a journey of more than a thousand miles. For Abe, it was to be his first glimpse of the Deep South.
We battled winds and currents, and kept an ever-vigilant eye on the river ahead. On many occasions, we were forced to free our modest vessel from mud or brush after running aground on a bank. We filled our bellies with the endless reserves of corn and pork on board, and washed our clothes in the ever-present Mississippi when they grew offensive. For weeks this continued. Sometimes we covered as many as sixty miles in a day, sometimes thirty or less.
The young men would holler with excitement when they crossed paths with a steamboat, those miraculous, gleaming stern-wheelers puffing and splashing their way against the current. Their excitement would build at the sight of distant smoke rising from the river ahead, then crescendo as they approached and passed, shouting greetings and waving to passengers, pilots, and clerks.
The noise of engines and churning water. Black smoke rising from its chimney and white steam from its pipes. A boat that could take a man all the way from New Orleans to Louisville in under twenty-five days. Were there any limits to the ingenuity of man?
This excitement having quieted, they would float for miles with nary a sound.
It was a sort of peace I have rarely enjoyed since. As if we were the only two souls on earth—all of nature ours to enjoy. I wondered why a creator who had dreamt such beauty would have slandered it with such evil. Such grief. Why He had not been content to leave it unspoilt. I still wonder.
When the sun dipped out of sight, Allen and Abe would start looking for a suitable place to anchor—a town, if possible. One night, not long after they’d passed through Baton Rouge, Lincoln and Gentry tied up on the Duchesne Plantation, securing the flatboat to a tree with rope. As was their routine, the young men fried their supper, checked to see if the ropes were secure, and adjourned to their shelter. Here they would read or talk until their eyes grew weary, snuff their lantern, and sleep in perfect darkness.
I woke with a start and reached for the club that I kept near. Springing to my feet, I saw the trace of two figures in the doorway. I daresay they were a good deal surprised at my height—and a good deal more surprised by the ferocity with which I bludgeoned them about the head. I chased them (bludgeoning my own head on a crossbeam as I did) out onto the deck, where the moon revealed them in full. They were Negroes—seven in all. The other five were busily trying to untie our boat. “Off with you devils!” I cried, “before I brain the lot of you!” To make them know my sincerity, I cracked another across his ribs, and raised my club to crack another. This proved unnecessary. The Negroes fled. As they did, I chanced to see a broken pair of leg irons around one of their ankles, and knew the truth at once. These were no common thieves. They were slaves. Likely escaped from this very plantation and looking to throw off the scent of the dogs by making off with our boat.