by LeAnne Howe
I didn’t.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Forces her head up.
See the legacy you and your husband bestow!
Mary Todd Lincoln studies the hanged men.
SAVAGE INDIAN
You made me your confessor.
You desire agony, Gar Woman.
You swallow addiction
And grieve and grudge all, even
Your husband, his wistful dreams of another woman.
And your sons.
The truth, say it.
Mary throws a teacup at Savage Indian.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Never!
She throws the saucer, a teaspoon, and items on her bureau at him. They scuffle, and he finally subdues her.
SAVAGE INDIAN
You wanted to punish Lincoln for dismissing your Engagement.
You believed he loved another woman, until
You realized the death of each baby aroused his deepest Pity.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
I didn’t kill them.
SAVAGE INDIAN
For a broken engagement, you punished him unto death.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
I didn’t.
SAVAGE INDIAN
You exacted pain.
What of the bribes you took from your husband’s Enemies?
The Washington salary you covertly arranged for yourself
With the help of the gardener John Watt.
What of Mr. Lincoln’s annual address in 1862?
You sold his speech to Congress to the New York Herald16
She they would publish it before he could give it.
What manner of wife …
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Hides her face in her hands.
A woebegone
A bedraggled Nightjar.
I would embrace all my bad deeds
If I could but see Eddie, Willie, and Taddie once more,
In this life.
SAVAGE INDIAN
The truth,
No more harm can be done
From your words.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
The truth.
I want to die.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Knocks her to the floor.
Another lie.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Grabs a flint from his pouch, stabs him several times.
Yet he does not bleed.
SAVAGE INDIAN
A strong blow from a dying woebegone.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Leave me, Savage, I’ve suffered
An absent husband, sons who craved their father,
All manner of brutality, but
I suffer you no longer.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Shakes her by the shoulders.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Twists out of his grasp and slaps him.
Stop, fiend.
All right, all right, all right.
I needed money,
For the household, for the staff…
And after poor Eddie died,
There was such an outpouring of pity for his mother,
I thought…
She calms herself, smooths her dress.
Grief became my friend, my work.
Her voice trails off.
She stands and looks at the thirty-eight Dakota bodies.
She touches their swollen feet.
Yes, I drink laudanum-laced tea,
Laudanum dulls my memory.
I still see my dress and bloody gloves from that night.
In the future they will one day be on display in the museum in Springfield. Alongside my husband’s.
That is what people will want of me. My sacrifices.
And you,
In the future I see your feathered headdresses,
Boxes of your people’s bones made ready for study.
We are a pair, you and I,
Relics to be studied.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Pensive.
Not paired.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Indeed, paired! In the future they will be staging plays about us.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Disgusted. Goes to the window.
I’ve risen and searched
The empty scaffolding in Mankato,
Heard the faint cries of the Dakhótas on the wind,
Impossible to count as stardust…
Mr. Lincoln and all his generals thought they could end
Our race.
Where is he now?
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Drinks from a small bottle of laudanum.
Coughs from the bitterness.
Where are you?
On a dusty museum shelf,
Next to the mummy-cat.
Forgotten.
I take heart that in the future, Grand Army of the
Republic will be sent to
Clean up what pitiful lands you have left.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Hears a Dakhóta drumbeat.
Another lie!
But Robert Todd Lincoln of Manchester, Vermont,
A man in his eighties, ever his father’s son,
Will burn your most odious letters
And their soured opinions,
Shielding your opium habits
From the public.
Your motherly abuse,
This I have seen.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
She holds a mirror in her hand.
I told you, we are a pair.
Abused. Abuser.
Now, I beg you.
SAVAGE INDIAN
He turns from the window. Takes his time. Scalps her. Slits her left eyelid, then her right eyelid, sews the flesh above both eyes open with wire.
Observe, Gar Woman.
She stares in the mirror.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Breathless.
“Madness overcame her,” they will say.
“Such a pity,” they will say, “she had to flee to Pau, France.”
SAVAGE INDIAN
Hair taken, face deformed with your eyes hooked open …
MARY TODD LINCOLN
I have been touched by God.
Turns to Savage Indian.
Again, please.
15. Jason Emerson, The Madness of Mary Lincoln (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 168–169.
THE ROPE SEETHES
THE ROPE
Yes.
16. Stephen Berry, House of Abraham: Lincoln & The Todds, a Family Divided by War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007): 102.
NOTES
I still remember my surprise when reading The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln by Mark E. Neely Jr. and R. Gerald McMurtry (1986). I’d recently visited the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, and purchased a few books, including The Insanity File. I was reading along when the words “attributed the fiendish work inside her head to an Indian spirit” leaped off the page. Mary Todd Lincoln said an American Indian spirit was causing the anguish and pain she began experiencing each night in 1873. Why hadn’t I known this, I wondered. At the time I was teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the American Indian Studies and English departments. Over the next seven years, I read more about Mrs. Lincoln and conferred with colleagues and friends about why she believed an American Indian was haunting her. Many books were important to my research: The Madness of Mary Lincoln by Jason Emerson (2007), Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography by Jean H. Baker (1987), House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War by Stephen Berry (2007), and Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk (2005). I also read local and state newspapers from the nineteenth century that helped contextualize the era in which the book is set.
I would like to thank the following people for their support, literary advice, and enthusiasm for the project: Susan Power, John Lowe, Stephen
Berry, Bao Phi, Rilla Askew, Paul Austin, Keith Cartwright, Dean Rader, Andrea Carlson, Philip Deloria, Natalie Diaz, Brenda Child, Jace Weaver, Laura Weaver, Jim Wilson, I. B. Hopkins, Marla Carlson, Magdalena Zurawski, Andrew Zawacki, and Reginald McKnight. Thanks also to the English department at the University of Georgia, Athens, where I currently teach. Finally a special thanks to Chris Fischbach for believing in the project, along with the wonderful staff of Coffee House Press.
Coffee House Press began as a small letterpress operation in 1972 and has grown into an internationally renowned nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, essay, poetry, and other work that doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories.
Coffee House is both a publisher and an arts organization. Through our Books in Action program and publications, we’ve become interdisciplinary collaborators and incubators for new work and audience experiences. Our vision for the future is one where a publisher is a catalyst and connector.
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