Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [70]
I find myself staring at him for hours on end. Holding him against my chest and feeling the gentle rhythms of his breath. Running my fingers over the smooth skin of his fat, delightful feet. I admit that I smell his hair when he sleeps. Nibble at his fingers when he holds them near. I am his servant, for I shall do anything to earn his slightest smile.
Abe took to parenthood with a passion. But two decades of burying loved ones had taken their toll. As the months went on and Robert grew, Abe seemed increasingly obsessed with losing his son, whether to sickness or some imagined accident. In his journal entries, he began to do something he hadn’t in years: he began to bargain with God.
My only wish is to see him become a man. To have his own family gathered beside him at my grave. Nothing else. I shall happily trade every ounce of my own happiness for his. My own accomplishments for his. Please, Lord, let no harm come to him. Let no misfortune befall him. If ever you require one to punish, I beg you—let it be me.
In accordance with his hopes of seeing Robert reach adulthood, and in hopes of preserving the happiness he’d found in married life, Abe came to a difficult decision in the autumn of 1843.
My dance with death must end. I cannot risk leaving Mary without a husband, nor Robert without a father. I have this very morning written Henry and told him that he should no longer count on my ax.
After twenty years of battling vampires, the time had come to hang up his long coat for good. And after eight years in the State Legislature, his moment to be recognized had come as well.
In 1846, he was nominated as the Whig candidate for the United States Congress.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
EIGHT
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
“Some Great Calamity”
The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good.
—Abraham Lincoln, in a speech in the House of Representatives
June 20th, 1848
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
I
When Abe retired from hunting in late 1843, he left one of Henry’s errands unfinished.
I made innocent mention of this in letters to Armstrong and Speed, and (as had secretly been my hope) both expressed interest in completing it. Because they remained relative strangers to the art of hunting vampires, I thought it best if they worked together.
Joshua Speed and Jack Armstrong met for the first time in St. Louis on April 11th, 1844. If Speed’s letter (to Abe, written three days later) is any indication, it didn’t go well.
As your letter instructed, we met at the tavern on Market Street yesterday midday. Your description [of Armstrong] was precise, Abe! He is more bull than man! Broader than a barn and stronger than Samson himself! Yet you failed to mention that he is also a cur. As thick-skulled as he is thick. You must forgive my saying so, for I know he is your friend, but never in my thirty years have I encountered a more disagreeable, pugnacious, humorless man! It is obvious why you recruited him (for the same reason one recruits a big, dumb ox to pull a heavy cart). But why you—a man of the finest mind and temperament—would keep his company otherwise I shall never comprehend.
Armstrong never wrote about his impressions of Speed, but it’s likely they were just as unflattering. The wealthy, dashing Kentuckian was spirited and chatty, qualities that Armstrong would have found irksome in the toughest of men. Speed, however, was soft-handed and slight, the very kind of “dandy” that the Clary’s Grove Boys would have stuffed in a barrel and sent down the Sangamon.
Out of nothing more than respect for you, dear friend, we agreed to forgo our grievances and see the errand through.
Their target was a well-known professor named Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, dean of medicine at Kemper College.
Henry had warned me [about McDowell]. The doctor was an “especially paranoid specimen,