Lincoln Raw

About the Cover

The picture on the right is a copy of an ambrotype taken on May 7, 1858. Forty-nine-year-old Lincoln had just won the Duff Armstrong Almanac murder trial, and 22 year-old Abraham Byers stopped him in the street outside the courthouse. When Byers asked Lincoln to pose for a photograph, Lincoln protested. He said that his rumpled white linen suit was not fit for a portrait; nonetheless, the younger Abraham prevailed. The cover is a reverse image of Byers’ photograph, showing Lincoln’s face as if viewing it in a mirror. The novel that follows is an attempt to interpret his life the way he likely perceived it.

Credit goes to Heather Steward Fowler for creating this cover, which with a single picture, captures the essence of Lincoln Raw—a biographical novel.

Copyright © by DL Fowler 2014. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Heather Steward Fowler

For additional information visit http://dlfowler.com

Visit the author’s blog http://dlfowler.wordpress.com

ISBN 9780996380553 (ePub)

Published in the United States by Harbor Hill Publishing

Dedication

Gertrude S. Baccus

(1908-2001)

My teacher, who inspired me, believed in me, and loved me, as she did for so many students over the years.

Contents

About the Cover

Dedication

Author’s Notes

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty One

Chapter Thirty Two

Chapter Thirty Three

Chapter Thirty Four

Chapter Thirty Five

Chapter Thirty Six

Acknowledgements

Additional Reading

About the Author

Your Opinion Matters

Readers Guide

Author’s Notes

The inspiration to write a novel based on Abraham Lincoln’s life came in part from reading Jackie Hogan’s Lincoln, Inc.: Selling the Sixteenth President in Contemporary America. As a sociologist, Hogan explores the ways we employ Lincoln today (as American culture has done since his death) in our political, ideological, personal, and national struggles; the ways we simultaneously deify and commercially exploit him; the ways he is packaged and sold in the marketplace of American ideas. In Lincoln, Inc. we see our proclivity for projecting onto Lincoln the way we see ourselves, who we think we are, and who we wish we could be.

Lincoln Raw is a biographical novel in which I attempt to look at life through Lincoln’s eyes as he was coming of age. I focus on his humanity by dramatizing his responses to the world as he likely saw it, filtered through his sensitivities, emotions, and values. As we look at the events of his life—beginning with childhood—and keep our focus on how he responded to various forms of disorder, injustice, and abuse, we can better understand the passions that drove many of his policies and decisions as president.

I build Lincoln’s story around events that have been described by those who were close to him. When confronted with different versions of emotionally charged events, I do not discount those incidents, but synthesize the accounts to produce scenes which seem consistent with his development at the time they occurred. I am indebted to the biographical works of Michael Burlingame and Joshua Shenk, among others, for their insights into Lincoln’s personality and the events that shaped his character.

Every character in the novel—except one—is a real person with whom Lincoln interacted in some way. In each case, they are presented in a manner consistent with the way in which they were regarded by Lincoln. For example, throughout his life Lincoln demonstrated an attitude toward his father that suggested the elder Lincoln was abusive and unfair. The son’s assessment may not have been accurate, but it was the perception that he lived by. Lincoln also probably saw his marriage as being less blissful than might have been the case. As with all of us, perception is reality. We respond emotionally to our perceptions, and those responses contribute to the development of our character.

Writing about Lincoln is tricky, in part because today’s author must reconcile three distinct periods of Lincoln scholarship that take different slants on who he was and what he believed.

During the first period (the demi-God era, including biographies written from the time of his death until the early 20th century), Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, and son, Robert, wielded a great deal of influence (some say censorship) over what biographers should say in molding his legacy.  The image Mary championed seems to have differed from how she treated him while he was alive. Robert, who was often embarrassed by his father’s backwardness (his unkempt appearance, frontier style of language, and lack of formal education), likely wanted to recreate his father in the image of the man he wanted to remember. After his father’s death, Robert committed his mother to an insane asylum for a brief time and destroyed many of her private papers and letters. Biographers of this period were also sensitive to the nation’s need for a narrative that would facilitate healing after the assassination and Civil War.

The result of these influences was a tendency to discredit perspectives that were not in sync with the needs of the era. Casualties of such biases included two people who knew Lincoln intimately: Billy Herndon, his law partner, and Hill Lamon, his friend and bodyguard. It was Herndon who first exposed the Ann Rutledge story based on extensive interviews with members of her family and people who lived in the small village of New Salem. Objections to the Ann Rutledge stories by Mary Todd and Robert contributed greatly to the efforts by biographers to discredit Herndon.

Ironically, in the current era of Lincoln studies, that discrediting has been discredited, and today's leading Lincoln scholars such as Michael Burlingame and Joshua Shenk suggest that sufficient evidence exists to support the hypothesis that a close bond between Lincoln and Rutledge existed. They also argue that proving whether the relationship rose to the level of an engagement is trivial compared to understanding the role her premature death, combined with the deaths of his sister and mother, played on Lincoln’s psychology.

The second era of Lincoln (the Romantic period) was dominated by efforts to convert the demi-god into a folk hero. Carl Sandburg made an indelible contribution to Lincoln's legacy by spotlighting his meager beginning (though he soft-pedaled it to a degree) and his meteoric rise to power.

The third era, beginning about the middle twentieth century, has focused on Lincoln's psychology and asks the question, what made this man?

Lincoln Raw draws mostly from the current era of scholarship and tries to show Lincoln's personality development by looking at events through his eyes. By most accounts he was emotionally sensitive, introspective, and melancholy. In his time, those characteristics often attracted awe, admiration, and respect. During Lincoln’s time, melancholy people were considered to possess special insights and consequently, were regarded as exceptional, rather than deficient.

Lincoln's misunderstood, almost conflicting, views on slavery and abolition are part of what attracted me to his story. In his speeches over decades in public life, he was equally critical of radicals at both ends of the spectrum. Despite his professed life-long hatred for slavery, Lincoln discouraged abolitionist policies. Instead, he repeatedly declared slavery should be allowed to die a slow death and drew a hard line against allowing the extension of a bad thing [slavery]. To him, slavery was wrong, specifically because of its unfairness—It is wrong for a man to eat bread from the sweat of another man’s brow. Nonetheless, he held that it was protected by the Constitution where it was in place when the country was formed.

The same level of conflict that appears in his politics also shows up in his religious views, which when explored honestly and wholly, should give all of us pause when we claim that God is on our side. Lincoln declared more than once that he was not Christian (most prominently in a conversation with Newt Bateman which is captured in the latter third of this book), but he articulated and lived the teachings of Christ more fully than most people who claimed to be faithful in his day.

Much of the dialogue in these pages is drawn from original sources, including letters, speeches, journals, and notes from interviews with Lincoln’s contemporaries. Some original material, particularly italicized excerpts from speeches and writings, has been edited for clarity.

Like most of us, Lincoln employed a variety of voices. For instance, his oratorical voice, which matured over the years, was distinct from his conversational voice, just as his storyteller voice differed from his letter writing voice. He sounded different when engaged in formal conversations than in casual banter with an intimate. In Lincoln Raw, his narrator voice falls somewhere between his storyteller voice (especially in the use of present tense) and the style he might have employed when writing a letter. In each case, given how much language has changed over the past two centuries, I have found it helpful to adapt Lincoln’s voice so it is more attuned to modern readers. Even so, I tried to maintain as much as practical the colloquialisms and language style that were true to Lincoln’s times and usage. I was particularly surprised to learn that the expression what’s up? was in common usage in mid-nineteenth century America.

If reading Lincoln Raw prompts you to investigate his life in more depth, you’ll find an abundance of scholarly material in the sources I have listed at the end of the book under Additional Reading.

I hope you enjoy reading Lincoln Raw—a biographical novel and I look forward to your comments.

DL Fowler

March 25, 2014

LINCOLN RAW

a biographical novel

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter One

The Executive Mansion, Washington City

April 14, 1865

People gossip about my face. Some say I’m steeped in gloom over little Willy’s death. Others insist this great conflict weighs on me like an oxen yoke. According to my copper-headed Kentucky playmate, Austin Gollaher, I was melancholy even as a baby.

In my youth, neighbors called me lazy. Cousin Dennis Hanks pronounced me a dullard. Today, some contend my countenance betrays uncommon wisdom, while others argue I’m simple and indolent, a gorilla posing as a man. A man’s shadow merely betrays his presence. To know him, we must probe the stripes from which he bleeds.

Still in my faded dressing gown and broken down slippers, I look out my office window upon the city. Traces of last night’s pyrotechnics hang in the air, and yesterday’s mantle of gray has yielded to splashes of red, white, and blue. Flags and buntings announce the Rebel Army’s surrender while reflections from the morning sun dance on the Potomac like scattered jewels.

The river’s stench must have stopped General Lee’s men from crossing over when they had the chance, warning them of an invisible plague lurking in its waters. Seeds of disease are deposited in the Potomac by rivulets of human waste and refuse that flow along our streets and into its currents. Even this great mansion is no safe harbor from the pestilence. Our little Willy was taken by an epidemic of fever, and Mother is almost insane from grief.

I covet the luxury of mourning in the same fashion she does. Willy is not the only son I’ve lost since assuming this Office, and with every soldier’s death, a piece of me dies also. The blood of those who’ve perished in this great conflict could fill the little Knob Creek near my boyhood home, and their families’ tears would flood the fields around it.

I give a letter to my secretary, George Nicolay. Hardly more than a boy, he’s entirely trustworthy, and nothing escapes his keen eyes. On our walks through the city, he can spot mal-intended ruffians from blocks away, though if we were set upon, reckon I’d be the one protecting his bony frame.

The letter is a reply to General James Van Alen who complains I exposed myself carelessly while visiting Richmond this week. Nicolay thinks it best to assure him appropriate precautions will be taken in the future. My friend Ward Hill Lamon, Marshall of Washington City, a massive man equal to me in height but much greater in girth, reminds me daily of those who want me dead. Hill claims there are more than eighty plots against my life. There are times he could have added me to that list. Nonetheless, were it not for my decision to dispatch him to Richmond on Wednesday, he’d be haranguing me over Mrs. Lincoln’s plans to attend theatre this evening.

A recent dream buoys me; its details are etched in my memory, carved there by repetition. Invariably, it foreshadows momentous events. The morning would be made even brighter if it heralds the much anticipated news from General Sherman that the remaining rebel units under General Johnston have capitulated.

In my vision, I float at a rapid pace across a dark expanse of water to an unknown destination. But this time, unlike the previous occurrences, Austin Gollaher appears and calls me back to a memorable Sunday morning of our boyhood.

In 1816—my seventh year as I am told—we live on a tiny farm near the Gollaher family in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Once a wilderness, now this patch of earth is regarded as a peaceful valley. Surrounded by spiraling hills and deep gorges, our place lies along a branch of the Rolling Fork known as Knob Creek. Father tells us stories of the times before the Indians were vanquished from these parts—a time when they tormented people as far east as Virginia. He witnessed their inhumanity when he was a child.

When not tending the farm, Father works at the distillery down where the creek and Rolling Fork join together. That is, unless he’s hunting, or out in the woods brooding, or dreaming up schemes to make a better life.

Last year’s winter lingers as the next one begins. The few sprouts that emerged from our late-May planting succumbed to aberrant snows and frosts in June. We replanted, only to suffer more crop-killing frosts through late July and August. A half-inch layer of ice stayed on the ground through most of September, but has finally melted during a brief interlude of moderate October weather. The resulting runoff swells our little branch to its brim.

As the morning sun breaks over the horizon, a biting wind whistles through our cabin, confirming that the year-long winter has merely taken a respite and lurks nearby, ready to resume its assault. I roll out of my cornhusk bed to find Mother fixing breakfast. She’s a rugged woman, but today she’s decked out in her best Sunday dress. Her coarse black hair cascades onto her shoulders. It’s the dress that snugs around her waist, rather than draping loosely from her bony shoulders to her narrow hips. She wears it when she hauls us down to the holy-roller camp meetings to hear preachers who’ve come through these parts; she can whoop it up with the best of them. It’s also what she wears when Father is away and she sets about on affairs of her own.

I exchange glances with my sister Sally. Her eyes are deep-set and grey like my own. In spite of her being two years older, she looks up at me, and me down at her. She’s stout like Father, but that’s the only way they’re alike.

We don’t ask what sort of business Mother is up to, but at breakfast, she tells us Mrs. Gollaher will be calling today.

I cock my head. And Austin, too?

Yezzun. The two of y’all ‘ll have the whole day to play. Father done gone off scoutin’ for land ‘cross the ‘hio River.

How long he be gone?

He be back when he be back, as always, she answers.

Folks often talk of Providence smiling on them. When that happens, their insides must get warm the same as mine do when Mother tells me Father is away.

After breakfast, I take a perch on our split-rail fence and wait for Austin. He’s three years older than me, but not taller. We’d rather be dead than apart, even though we don’t always see eye to eye on things.

Once, while we’re playing at his cabin he says, You loose a coon or fox from your father’s traps again, I’m tellin’.

I say back, We’ve no right takin’ more ‘n we need. It’s mean to harm animals for no reason.

We argue until Mrs. Gollaher takes his side and scolds me. It doesn’t matter what they think. Right is right.

A week later, Father hauls me along to check his traps. He gets a coon in the first one, and about a dozen yards away a fox struggles to get free from a snare. Father yells, Ha! and crows about his trappin’ skills. Then he loads his flintlock and aims at the coon’s head.

My shoulders grow taut.

The rifle’s report sends a sharp pain ricocheting through my throat and head.

I choke back tears as Father walks over to the next trap and bends down to inspect the fox. He crouches like a thieving pirate digging through his plunder, shakes his head, and sends me to the next trap thirty yards away. The trap sits at the end of a game trail, which winds through a thicket and comes out near the creek. In it he has caught another fine fox.

I’m standing there telling myself it’s wrong to kill two handsome foxes on the same day when another report from Father’s rifle sends tremors down my spine. Tears seep down into my throat. After a moment, I straddle the wooden cage and bend over to open it. At first, the critter hunches down, recoiling toward the rear of the trap. I slap the back of the cage with my hand a few times to coax it, and finally it springs out and races into the brush. I’m still astride the cage, smiling, when Father walks up and cuffs me on the side of the head.

You stupid boy, he mutters. Then he grabs my ear in his meaty hand and drags me home where he whips me. On hearing the whaps of the switch raising welts on my back, Mother races outside and grabs Father’s hand.

She snarls, This time ya done gone too far.

Father flings his switch down next to my bare feet and glowers at her. After a long silence, he storms away, muttering. He ain’t none of mine.

Where ya goin’? Mother shouts after him.

Huntin’, he shouts back.

His words ring in my ears. He ain’t none of mine.

What I’m always eager to hear Father grumble is, Git jeself down to Hodgen’s Mill with a sack of corn. Yer ma says we’re gittin’ low on meal. The Miller Hodgen, a large man whose nickname is Mr. John, grinds our corn by hand. He lives with his plump mother Missus Sarah in a spacious home built of stone and evenly sawn boards.

Missus Sarah’s first question whenever I arrive is, Hungry, Abraham? And without waiting for my answer, she serves up a fancy plate loaded with sweet cakes. While I’m devouring her pastries, she sits next to me at the finely carved table. Smiling, she opens Robinson Crusoe and reads aloud. At the end of each page, she coaxes me to sound out the words and prompts me to take a stab at reading a line on my own.

When you speak, dear boy, she tells me, do so properly like Mr. Crusoe in the book. Well-spoken men go far in this world.

Though we read for over an hour, it seems like only a few minutes have passed when Mr. John comes in from the mill, carrying my sack of meal. That’s Missus Sarah’s clue to put aside her book to set the table for supper. I’m always invited to join them.

Sometimes, they let me stay with them for days, sleeping in a bedroom all to myself on a real bed. Mr. John often says they wish Mother and Father would give me to them for good. But when the homesickness sets in, they always send me off well fed and smiling.

Once, Austin and I are down at the mill together when Ol’ Zack Evans, a swarthy, near-skeleton of a man, rides up on his blind rickety nag. When the beleaguered animal balks at the platform, Mr. Evans kicks her hard in the sides. The burly miller jumps down from the platform, seeming to shake the earth, and pulls Mr. Evans off his mount, pinning him to a post.

Mr. John’s nostrils flare. If ever you kick a horse again, I’ll give you a thrashing you’ll never forget.

Mr. Evans stares at the ground.

I pull back my shoulders, straightening from my slouched posture, and say, Mr. Evans, the other day your boy tears off a bird’s head and throws it at my feet. At first, he laughs, and Austin, here, warns him he’ll get a good whuppin’ if he doesn’t say he’s sorry. Your boy just shakes his head and says, ‘Abraham don’t never fight no one.’ I ball up my hands into fists, clench my jaw, and stare hard at him ‘til he buries his face in his hands and cries. Then he confesses he behaved shamefully. Now, your boy oughten not do such as that, and neither should you kick any more horses.

Several days later while returning from the mill alone, a brown-and-white dog is lying on the trail at the base of a precipice. Its shallow breathing is the only sign it’s alive. I kneel beside it, set down my bag of cornmeal, and stare up to the top of the bluff. It’s a long drop. The little fellow whimpers as I pet him, and his right foreleg shakes. His eyes look like he’s been crying. No way he can walk far. It’s a good thing he’s not too heavy to carry.

After a while, though, my arm tires, so I drop the sack of cornmeal under a shade tree and lay my dog on the ground. A few yards away, there’s a small spring where I fill my cap with cool water. Honey, that’s my new pet’s name, laps up badly needed refreshment while I fashion a crude splint for the injured leg, winding straps of soft bark from some nearby pawpaw bushes around a couple of saplings I’ve cut down to size. Mr. John made one just like it once. My doctoring is good enough for Honey to hobble behind me the rest of the way home.

I’m within hailing distance of the cabin when I stop and tie Honey to a tree using the leather tie on my sack of meal. Since Father won’t be at all happy about my new pet, Mother must approve before he sees him.

In near darkness, I steal up to the cabin and peer through the window. Father is asleep by the fireplace, so it’s not hard to slip in and whisper to Mother, Down by the big sycamore, I’ve tied up a dog. His leg’s broke. Please, let me keep him in our empty pig pen. Father says we ain’t gonna have no more hogs for a while, and it’s got a roof to keep the rain out.

Mother smiles and asks where the dog came from.

I explain how I found him and beg, Father won’t like my dog; he’ll see its broken leg and complain he’s useless, but you and Sally will love him. Please, tell Father not to shoot him or give him away.

She rubs my coarse, black hair. People say we favor each other in looks and in temperament. Nothing of that sort is ever said about Father and me.

She says, Seems ya loves the poor critter. I’ll make sure your pa doesn’t do it no harm.

Mother and I collect Honey from his hiding place and make him a home in the old pig pen. True to her promise, Mother convinces Father to let me keep him. But just the same, he’s mean to my dog and always calls him ugly.

Every time Father looks askance at Honey, it makes me cringe. I’ll never forget the darkness in his eyes when he discovered the first pet I brought home.

Back during the springtime of my sixth year, a litter of new born pigs catches my fancy over at the Hodgen’s farm. I take them up and hold them one by one, stroking their cute little snouts. The smallest one nuzzles up against my chest and makes little loving squeaks. He so captivate me that Mr. John cannot get me to put him away. Finally, he says, Abraham, you can have it if you can get it home.

My heart almost bursts. Ya made this the best day of my life.

Mr. John chuckles. What you gonna name him?

Let’s see … why … how about, Friday after Mr. Crusoe’s man in the storybook?

Well, take good care of Friday, he replies.

I gather up the hem of my tow-linen shirt forming a make-shift sack and carry him home cradled against my bosom. To make a bed for him, I line a hollow log with corn stalks, shucks, and leaves.

The poor piglet squeals all night, bringing grunts and muttering from Father who tosses about in his bed. In the morning, the first thing he says is, That pig’s gotta go. I hope he’s just hungry and rush outside with corn meal, bread, and milk, but Friday doesn’t touch any of it. He just continues his relentless squealing.

At last Mother says to me, Ya best take that pig back to its mama; it’ll die if ya keep it here.

It breaks my heart, but what Mother says is always the truth and the law to me. With my head bowed, I take Friday back to the Hodgens.

When the little fellow goes in the pen with his mother, she snorts with delight. He scurries to her teats, making joyous little squeaks. After she suckles him for a while, he looks happy and becomes so playful. I beg Mr. John to let me take him back. He nods, and I gather up Friday in my shirt and carry him home again.

On my return Mother plants her hands on her hips and glares at me. How would ya feel if’n somebody took you away to a strange place and ya never saw yer ma or sister ever again?

My heart pinches and my throat turns raw. Tears roll down my cheeks.

Mother rubs my head. Now, if ya really loves that pig, you’d want him to be at home so he could be happy.

I continue blubbering, begging her to let me try him one more day. When he sees how much I loves him, he’ll change his mind. But the next day he still won’t eat, and Mother convinces me to take him back once more. This time, however, she agrees to let me carry him back and forth. That way, we can play together by day, and he can suckle on his mother and sleep with her at night.

After two weeks, he finally learns to eat on his own, and Mother lets me bring him home for good. I play with him and teach him tricks. We even play hide-and-go-seek. He always peeps around the corner of the cabin to see if I’m coming after him.

Father comes beside me one morning during Friday’s feeding time and pours out a pail of corn. He says nothing, but licks his lips as he watches the pig devour its breakfast. Each morning thereafter he joins me in the feeding ritual, increasing his offering as the little fellow grows. Eventually, Friday gets too heavy for me to carry around and starts following me everywhere—to the barn, the plowed fields, even the forest.

We spend most days in the woods where I teach him how to brush leaves aside to find acorns and nuts. Sometimes he takes a lazy spell, rubs against my legs and stops in front of me to lie down. I can decipher his language when he says to me, Why don’t you carry me like you used to do? When he grows a little larger, the table turns and he carries me. He does so as happily as I ever gave the same service to him.

One night Father stares darkly at his plate of venison stew and says, That hog’s fat enough for slaughterin’. Think we’ll do the business tomorrow.

My breath hangs in my throat.

Mother asks, Abraham, is somethin’ the matter?

I leap off my stool and run to bed without finishing my meal. I lie awake weeping, plotting to rise early and steal poor Friday away to safety. If Father thwarts me … there must be some way to punish him for his cruelty.

Come morning, despite being famished, I pass up breakfast and hurry outside to check on Friday. The sight of Father filling a barrel with water, and the smoldering fire nearby for heating stones to make it scalding hot, takes my breath away.

My heart races as I slip past Father and coax Friday to follow me to the forest. When Father discovers us missing he hollers, You, Abraham, fetch back that hog! You Abraham, you Abraham, fetch back that hog! The louder he calls, the farther and faster Friday and I run until we’re out of hearing range. We stay in the woods waiting for nightfall. On our return, Father scolds me and switches me with a stick until my back oozes. He ties my pet to a tree stump and threatens to whip me twice as hard if I interfere again.

After another restless night, I rise early and sneak outside, planning once more to take Friday to hide in the woods. My heart sinks. Father is up before me again, his eyes narrow and dark as he prepares my pet for slaughter. Without breakfast once again, I start for the woods—this time alone.

Not long afterwards, Friday’s squeals stab at my heart. I take off running, gasping for breath through mucous and tears, as if it’s my life Father wants to take. A half mile away, at the creek, the sound of flowing water covers distant noises, and I race along its bank, finally in control of myself, breathing in unison with the current’s rhythm. Calm settles over me when I stop to rest and distract myself by floating twigs downstream. Now and then, my serenity is disturbed by thoughts of how to mete out the punishment Father deserves. My mind often ponders what kind of world lies beyond our little Knob Creek farm. Maybe I’ll run away.

By noon, my stomach growls, and I start for home. From the edge of the clearing by our cabin, Friday comes into clear view; he’s split open, gutted, and hanging from a pole. Mist covers my eyes, blurring Friday’s image. My stomach wrenches into knots, and my heart is heavy. I turn and race back into the woods and keep running along the creek side, determined to put as much distance as possible between me and Father’s treachery.

A mile deep into the woods my legs grow weary, and hunger pangs prick my stomach. I stop and forage for acorns to stay my appetite. Once my hunger is abated, a tall hickory tree offers shelter from the glaring sun. My eyes sting from the saltiness of my tears. I rub them and blink, then rub them some more and blink again. The stinging subsides, and I gaze up at the overhanging branches, studying the leaves’ shapes and following patterns in the rippled bark of the limbs. In time, sleep overtakes me. When my eyes open, dusk is settling over the forest. I get up and wander home, resigned to accept whatever punishment Father has in store for me.

A couple of months later, we’re all settled in for supper when Mother sets cured ham on the table. The sight of it makes me gag. Forgetting any thoughts of hunger, I make a beeline for bed and burrow under a layer of animal skins to block out everything around me.

The next morning I glare at the spot where Father had slashed Friday’s throat. Tears trickle down my cheeks. With a chip of bark, I scrape into a pile every grain of soil that had taken in Friday’s blood and heap twigs and hot coals over the little mound. Pain gnaws at every bone in my body as the fire burns down to a bed of fine white ashes. I gather up the hem of my tow-linen shirt, forming a make-shift sack, and collect some soft dirt from the edge of the clearing to spread over the ashes, covering the earth’s memory of my pet’s murder.

So when Father looks askance at my new dog, something pinches at my heart.

One time, on our way to Hodgen’s mill, Honey sets off after a coon. In no time, he gets himself stuck in a hollow log, and it takes me considerable effort to extract him. On arriving at the mill, Mr. John says we’re last in line and the wait is long. Instead of going in with Missus Sarah to read, I pass the time exploring a nearby cave.

A few yards inside, I find myself wedged between two large rocks. Faint glimmers of daylight cast shadows off the jagged walls around me. For some time, I struggle to get loose, exhaling the last wisps of breath still in my lungs, contorting and angling myself every which way, trying to pry the boulders apart with my hands, but they don’t budge. No effort is successful. I cannot gain my freedom.

All the time I’m wrestling with those rocks, Honey is whining and darting between my confinement and the mouth of the cave. But once darkness engulfs us, he races off, barking. When he doesn’t return after several minutes, thoughts of dying in the pitch of night, or being eaten by a bear, weigh on me. On considering the first prospect, my body quakes, on the latter, my eyes shut and my throat seizes up.

About the time I’ve given up hope of being found, Honey’s barking is back, and shimmers of light reflect off the cavern walls. Next, come echoes of Mr. John’s anxious voice calling my name. I let out a holler. Before long, my dog and my friend are standing in front of me. Being big and strong, Mr. John makes quick work of pulling me out. At one point, however, I’m resigned that my salvation will come at the price of leaving a patch of my hide on the coarse surface of the rocks.

Outside the cave we’re greeted by a large search party, including Father. The good miller glares at Father and speaks sharply. Now, Tom, Abraham here is my prisoner. You must promise not to whip him or even scold him. The trouble he’s been through is lesson enough. I doubt he’ll be going into that cave again.

Father tightens his hands into fists and says, I’ll raise my boy how I sees fit.

Mr. John puffs out his large chest. I’ve told you before, me and my Ma would be grateful for you and the missus to give us young Abraham. We love him like a son and would take right good care of him. Now what I’m tellin’ you is, if ever you raise a hand to him about this matter, I’ll come and fetch him away and never give him back.

Father knows Mother would never forgive him if the Hodgens take me in for good. On top of that, he’d have no one to slough off chores on. Once home, he heeds Mr. John’s warning, but his meanness comes out in other ways. He works me long hours each day at tilling the fields and whips me if I work too slowly. He says to me, That nosy miller cain’t blame me fer beatin’ the laziness outta ya. It’s fer yer own good.

 In early autumn of that same year, an itinerant preacher, the Rev. Mr. Gentry, visits our settlement. His face glows to match the shine of his bald head as he inspects the outdoor church we’ve built under the shade of a large maple. It’s perfect for camp meeting, he says. God led you to build the church in this spot for the special purpose of winning souls. Its pulpit is carved out of a stump, and the benches are whipsawed from felled trees.

Under the sway of Rev. Gentry’s fire and brimstone sermons, Father makes another trip to the mourner’s bench, repenting of his sinful ways. Afterwards, he gets called upon to pray aloud before the entire congregation. Our neighbors whisper among themselves they hope it sticks this time. He proves their sentiments are anchored in fact when one night, after making a public prayer, he comes home and kicks Honey’s bad leg.

The next morning I confess to Austin, Don’t know ‘bout Father’s religion.

What makes you say that? he asks.

I tell him about Father kicking my dog and say, All Honey did was lay his nose on Father’s knee, tryin’ to be friendly. Can’t believe anybody with even a little religion would kick a dog, ‘specially kick its bad leg that’s all twisted from a fall.

Maybe your father thinks it’s no harm to kick a dog. Could be he s’poses God don’t care much for dogs.

I wrinkle my nose. Why, he’d be a mighty funny God if he doesn’t like a good dog.

If Father’s behavior isn’t enough