Skeletons (12 page)

Those words seem more appropriate these days.

Madness is what I first thought we were in the middle of. Seemed the whole world was plagued like mad dogs. There was a summer back in Indiana when I remember rabies sweeping through; seemed every other critter caught it. We did more hunting and less food eating that year than ever in my life, and I got purely tired of the taste of vegetables. One of the better things about the Confederacy during the war was that they had most of the vegetables, and so had to eat most of 'em.

The best of times, the worst of times . . .

Sure looked like madness to me, men made out of little but bones running the streets, hunting flesh-and-blood people down like dogs and then turning them into skeleton men. Not the kind of world you'd think to wake up to, not the kind of Judgment Day. I'd all but ruled that out as a possibility.

What, then, if not the Greater Power's doing, was the root of this thing? What, then, did it mean?

Some personal happiness for me, for one thing. Just seeing my old home in Springfield brought me that. I reached it just as dawn was breaking, after walking all night through the madness. I must say the sight of its boxy structure, the five windows in a line on the top floor—even the white fence out front seemingly unchanged, heartened me. But what was this? When I entered the front door, I discovered the reason the house appeared unchanged. It had been turned into a museum! With tasseled ropes strung across the rooms and "No walking" signs on the rugs. Glory be. I wondered what Mary would say to that.

And then there she was, walking in on me while I toured my own home, almost afraid to touch anything because of all those signs.

"Father . . ."

"Mary."

She walked right in the front door as I passed it on the way to the other side of the house, and we stood there like two courting youngsters for a moment before she rushed at me and held me around my middle.

"Oh, Abraham, what's happened? How can it be . . . ?"

"I don't know, Mother, but it is, and here we are."

She looked up at me, and as I was getting used to looking for features around all those skulls and bones, I saw her face. It was an old face, but it was as I had first known it so long ago, before all her fears took hold and little Willie and Eddie's deaths robbed her of her strength.

"My goodness, Mother, I do believe you're smiling." She held me tightly. I must confess I was sorely unprepared for this return of the belle who had roped me.

"Mother," I said, holding her tight myself, and letting all those early memories come back to me.

"It's not the way I thought it would be, but it's just fine," Mary said, and then I looked behind her and there in the doorway were Eddie and Willie themselves, just as they had looked before sickness took them, and behind them stood my Tad, whom I hardly recognized, he was taller and older than when I had last seen him.

"You little codgers!" I bellowed, loud enough, I'm afraid, so that I startled Mary into letting go of me. But I was already at the doorway, scooping the two little boys up, one in either arm, pulling in Tad after them and marching them around to get the feel of them.

"Hello, Mr. President," Tad said half seriously, in his old lisp, giving me a salute.

"And you, Eddie, don't you have anything to say to your commander in chief?"

He put his little arms around my neck, and heavens if I didn't begin to cry myself at the feel of him, for it was him, all right, and no ghost.

"That's what I always dreamed, Abe, what I always wanted paradise to be, all of us together again," Mary said, and damned if she didn't break down and cry again, and the rest of us with her.

I thought briefly of the silliness of it, five skeletons standing in a museum bellowing, but the truth of it was, the more time went on, the less I saw the skeletons of all of us, and the more that faint ghost of what we were was all I saw.

"Well, Mother, I don't know if this is paradise, but it's sure what we've got."

"And," she said, "if only Robert were here, it would be complete."

"Robert!" I said, thinking of my firstborn. "Where is he?"

"I don't know," Mary said sadly. 'The last time I saw him I was ..." For the first time since she had walked through that door, I saw a trace of the melancholy that had so affected her. I shuddered to think that it might return.

"Well, Mother," I said brightly, "I'm sure he'll come back. He'll know where to find us." I put Eddie and Willie down, and already they were ducking under those tassels, looking for old places to play.

"Abe, do you suppose ..." Mary said hopefully, giving me one of her do-it-for-me looks.

I looked down at her and smiled. "Mary, the house is ours, isn't it? And if they turned it into a museum, I can't see there's any other legal owner than the ones they
museumed
it for, do you?"

"Oh, Father!" Again she threw her arms around me. I can't say there wasn't a moment of tenderness between us. "Abe, I'm so happy, it will be just like it was."

Yet, hearing the clamor outside, the sound of intermittent violence, I wasn't sure it would ever be like that.

To my surprise, though, for a while it was. I was pleased, and not a little astounded, at the amount of respect accorded us in our
rehabitation
of the old house in Springfield. After the first days of violence and upheaval a kind of lull ensued, at least in our part of the world. I understood that those of our kind had more or less occupied the city, but that many humans were either in hiding or fleeing to other parts. What visitors we had those first days wandered in from the street, and I must say the shock they evidenced on seeing the former owner reinstated was comical to behold.

After a while we were mainly left alone. I found my time well occupied in reading and catching up on the world. A few walks to the local library, with Eddie and Willie in tow, gave me enough looks at encyclopedias and recent newspapers to at least give a taste of the startling changes the world had undergone in the last one hundred and thirty years. The greatest shocks were of the discovery of the advances of the scientific men. If they hadn't caused the recent event of which I was a part, they had certainly kept busy with plenty of other projects. The telephone, and especially the television, were startling new toys to me, and though we had neither in the house, it wasn't long before I had grasped their significance. Jet airplanes, the automobile, the advances in medicine—all of these were filled with wonder.

My education in the short run was most propelled, however, by a serendipitous discovery in the hallway of our Springfield home, which kept me busy for a time. It seems one of the museum curators, seeking to enhance the living history of the place, had installed in one of our old bookcases a complete set of
leatherbound
biographies of the presidents of the United States. I have to admit that those before me little interested me. But those who had governed after me provided me with a complete overview of the politics of the nation and the world since I had left it. I can't tell how many hours of every day found me in my study, slouched low in my chair, one long leg draped over the chair's arm for comfort, absorbing this living testimony. I even admit to reading the volume devoted to myself, by a fellow named Sandburg. I told myself it was just for reference, to gauge the accuracy of the other volumes, but I know it was out of pride. I came away from it embarrassed at his praise.

So passed our time in Springfield. Though we were ghosts, we still proved to have appetites of a meager sort. Though Mary complained of the lack of servants, she was perfectly content to cook on the serviceable stove the food which Tad and I brought home from our short forays into the neighborhood markets. It was interesting to me the way our food was ingested, the way it seemed to vanish on passing through our ghostly lips, leaving the bright skeleton within unblemished.

Mary had her house, and except for their rare walks with me, Eddie, Willie, and Tad were kept close out of Mary's fears, not all of them unfounded, of what could happen to them outside. But the boys, especially the two younger ones, found plenty of mischief to get into inside, turning what the curators must have thought priceless objects in our house into broken relics. Though Mary was especially happy during this time, I saw little signs of her old troubles, especially in her fear of leaving the house.
         

"We can't just stay in here forever, Mother. Like it or not, there's a world out there that won't stand still for us."

"Why not! We gave them everything once, we owe the world nothing."

"Mother—" I tried to reason with her.

"No! Please, Abe, soon Robert will come, and everything will be perfect."

"Mary, I can't live like this. It's like"—I tried to avoid saying it, but darned if the analogy wasn't perfect—"being back in my tomb."

We both knew her act well, the old clinging fear, and for a while I let it work on me, out of guilt and out of responsibility.

One day, though, soon after I finished the last of the biographies, I felt the roof of the house pressing down on me like a closing coffin, and I had to get out.

"Where are you going!" Mary said shrilly, seeing me put on my old stovepipe, which the curators had been kind enough to save for me.

"Just to the library, Mother," I lied.

"I wish you wouldn't even go there, something could—"

"Something could happen right here," I said, almost testily. I found an unaccustomed rage rising in me, one I had to fight to temper. "We could be flattened by a boulder from space. A madman could rush in off the street with a bomb. I must go out, Mary."

And not looking back, I doffed my hat and went out.

I didn't go to the library, but headed for my old law office. That, too, I had learned from my readings, had been preserved. I longed to see the place where I had worked. I was halfway there when a sound down the street made me turn to see what all the shouting was about.

"Papa! Papa!" shouted Eddie, running after me with Willie close behind.

The two of them stopped before me.

"Permission to follow, sir," Willie said.

"Does your mother know you're here?" I said sternly.

Willie smiled. "No. She's mending a suit of clothes for Tad. Got him standing on a chair."

"Well. . ."

"Please, Papa, please!" Eddie implored.

"I promise we'll be good," Willie said.

"All right," I said, secretly glad for the company, "but you'll have to back me up with your mother later.”

“We'll tell any fib you want us to!" Eddie said. I laughed loud like a fool, right there on the street. "All right, you codgers, let's all jump in the soup together."

To my surprise and delight, when we reached my office, Billy Herndon himself stood in the doorway to greet me.

"So it's true," he said. On the faint ghost of his dark-complexioned face was a mixture of disbelief, shock, and, I believe, relief.

"Why Billy," I said as Eddie and Willie ran into the office, hooting with pleasure at finding all the old papers to be scattered, objects to be broken, "I do believe you're drunk."

"Thank God I am, Mr. Lincoln," he said, closing the door behind us as we entered the room and locking it.

On Billy's desk, sure enough, was a quarter-empty bottle of bourbon, and next to it, in the wastebasket, were three other empty ones. The rest of the room was as I had remembered it, with many books stacked in haphazard piles, except for the addition of a television set, switched on but showing no picture, and a radio, on but only hissing.

"Do you sleep with these contraptions on, Billy?" I asked.

"They come on periodically," he said. He poured himself another drink as he spoke. "There's news from both sides. It's a way of keeping in touch."

"I see. . ." I said.

"Mr. Lincoln, has anyone contacted you?"

I looked at him in surprise. "Contacted me?"

"There are people in Springfield, our people, some of them from the old days. There's a movement to get some sort of organization, to find some sort of leadership. . ."

He stopped to drink the bourbon, and as always I was taken by the ghostliness of the act, only the shroud of human features taking part in the process, the bourbon going nowhere but through his lips, leaving his bright bony skeleton intact, uninvolved. The
likker
seemed to have its effect, though.

He stood tall and thin, looked at me with his piercing black stare. "Don't you know what I'm talking about, Mr. Lincoln?"

"No, Billy, I don't."

`There's another war! Us against . . . them!" Again he stopped to pour a drink.

"You don't seem too taken with the idea, Billy.”

“How could I be! How could anyone be! Do you know how... bizarre all of this is?"

"Yes, I do," I said. "I've been puzzling it out ever since it happened."

"What's to puzzle out?" he nearly shouted. Even Eddie and Willie stopped their rifling through my desk long enough to stare at him.

He lowered his voice and looked at me conspiratorially. "Mr. Lincoln, the scientists, the human ones, have said the earth has gone into some sort of cloud in space. There was a lot of discussion of it on the television before most of their channels went dead. There's been some broadcasts from our side, too. To me it's all talk. The plain fact is, we were dead and now we're alive. All of us. Everyone back, from the cavemen through Genghis Khan. Even Stephen Douglas!"