Read Online Alligators of Abraham by Robert Kloss - Free Book Online

light of the cities your father burned to husks, your father along the hillsides, the cigars he smoked, the ashes mounded at his feet, smudging his horse. And the tide of refugees as they drifted from burning cities. The bayonets awaiting them. “Bring them Hell,” your father shouted. “Make them know what they brought on themselves.” And those women wrestled into ditches, their corsets gutted by bayonets, screaming in the light of their burning city, and those buildings burned and devastated into half-walls and heaps of brick and ashes, and the burned carcasses of horses in the streets and the cats that picked cleaned the ash-bones, and now babies and mothers, covered in dust, slept against the husks of buildings while soldiers marched the scorched and dusty road, while your father smoked his cigars and nodded ashes to the burned-out city streets.
    And soldiers slept in rebel yards, bloodied and bandaged, and stray dogs licked at their wounds, and hogs rooted at their flesh, ate their toes, their hands. Soldiers slept on the laps of soldiers, in the arms of soldiers, and soldiers dying and bleeding and draining onto other soldiers said, “Tell Mother I died a hero.”
    Here the awful universe of battle, the sloping forest of flashing steel, men gulping blood, men falling armless, legless, headless into the mud, into the fields, into the trampled dust.
    Soldiers wandered back-roads and through swamps half-naked through clouds of dust, covered in filth and vermin, those soldiers who wandered hollow-eyed and collapsed along roads to be trampled over by those who followed.
    And in the smoke of combat men fired upon their own commanders, even generals taking volleys from their own men, and generals were carried from the field coolly smoking cigars, coughing blood.
    Men lay moaning and bleeding in the dust, and from their knapsacks they removed lockets and photographs, the images of sweethearts and wives. And if they could not remember the voices of these women in those last moments, or the sensation of touch, or the whisper of breath, if they could not remember the warmth pressed to their sides, their hearts, they could at least say unto these icons, “I have ever hastened to return to you,” and rarely could they say names, rarely could they remember them for the numbness unfolding, the immeasurable whiteness.
    And there were two ways for surgeons—the way of those who would not be paid, these conducting themselves with blood and pus-stained hatchets and bone-saws, their leather aprons and the ether they sometimes used. And they hoisted bodies screaming unto tables and there they hacked appendages apart at the most obvious place. And if no appendage revealed itself as infected they prayed unto the Lord to guide his hand, to choose a leg or arm to sever. Appendages piled bloody and fly-gathered at the tent entrance, and the bodies piled in nearby fields, and soldiers lit these with gasoline-soaked rags and bundles of dead grass.
    And there were those who would be made wealthy. In those times embalming surgeons advertised in newspapers and ladies magazines, and embalming surgeons agreed to follow the sons of wealthy families at a “discreet distance” waiting for the death of those they agreed to “handle.” And no embalming surgeon would reveal his “secret formula” although there were those who claimed “no arsenic” or “of chemicals all natural” as if one could drink the stuff from barrels. And there were those who advertised in the papers: “Bodies embalmed by us never turn black but retain the color and countenance of those asleep.” Embalming surgeons amassed fortunes from widows and parents who wished for the remains of sons to be returned “as they were when alive.”
    Embalmers followed marching soldiers in wagons with the words “Embalming, Deodorizer, Disinfectant” whitewashed on either side, and embalming surgeons