I Am Abraham by Jerome Charyn Page B

month.”
    “But do you love him?” I had to insist.
    Her eyelids trembled. She searched Niles’ face for some artifact or clue. He wouldn’t help.
    “ Yes —while I’m with Mr. Josh. And then the maids come in and wipe his jelly off my legs. And they wash my ass too and perfume me for the next customer. I’m a high-card whore, Mr. Lincoln, and I could never be a storekeeper’s wife.”
    She tossed her parasol at Niles and ran out the parlor. The parasol struck him on the chest like a blunted spear. He laughed and pretended to lick at his wounds.
    “Young Joshua is always welcome with his pocket money, but if he tries to elope with her again, even his Mama won’t recognize him.”
    I never told Joshua I’d visited the mansion, or that I’d seen Sybil. And a few months later she did marry that Ohio general, just as Niles had predicted. There was a short notice of it in the Sangamo Journal , where Niles called Sybil his niece and never mentioned the general by name, for there was no Ohio general. She’d been banished to another bordello in the hinterland, where Joshua would never find her.
    I was riding the circuit with ten other lawyers and the district judge when we all stopped at a tavern a hundred miles north of Springfield—there was a ruckus going on behind the tavern. I figured the barn had been rented out to a Bible camp. I didn’t find a bundle of preachers and church criers—I met lawyers and judges who must have been on another circuit ride, but I couldn’t fathom why we had all descended upon the same patch of land.
    That barn was no Bible camp—it was a traveling bordello. And Sybil was the star attraction. Now I understood that devil of a sporting-house man. He wasn’t banishing Sybil—no, he was punishing her for the sin of falling in love with a Louisville aristocrat. Joshua’s courtship had shaken the mansion loose from its pegs and shoved a mulatto brothel keeper into the public eye. Sybil would float from barn to barn until she was used up, and then Niles might marry her off to some butcher in Beardstown.
    I had to deliver three dollars to the dwarf who served as her bodyguard and wait in line for an hour to see Sybil. She didn’t recognize me at first. She was wearing war paint and a flimsy silk garment—I could see her nipples and her honey pot underneath. But she was too tired and forlorn to intoxicate a man.
    “Pilgrim,” she growled, “it will cost you an extra dollar if you want my bum.”
    I didn’t see a parasol in this barn, just a filthy pallet and a shallow tub where she must have washed a customer’s balls. Her eyes couldn’t seem to focus under a whore’s mud. Her shoulders were shivering—Niles was more sinister than I had imagined. The only bridal veil she’d ever wear was inside a box.
    I startled her once she heard my voice, and she recognized my singular size.
    “I could take you out of here, Miss Sybil. Joshua will look after you.”
    She clucked at me like a crazed chicken. “Josh can’t even look after himself. Niles would slit his throat.”
    “Niles ain’t the law,” I said. “We could run to the sheriff.”
    The clucking stopped. “Lincoln, you’re one fine imbecile. The sheriff also owns a piece of my tail. You’d best be gone. That dwarf is vicious. He’ll tattle on me. And don’t you tell a word to Josh. I wouldn’t want him to see me in such a circumstance, you hear? Promise , else I’ll blind ye with a stick.”
    She didn’t have a stick, and I wasn’t afraid of Niles and his dwarf. It was another matter. She was so pathetic in her porous silk blouse, I had to promise . . .
    Niles didn’t last very long, even with the sheriff and half the town behind him. A rich slaver, who’d come from Missouri to look for whores who could perform the filthiest tricks while swinging from a chandelier, didn’t cotton to a colored sporting-club man and broke his neck in a drunken brawl. He never even sat in jail. He bribed the coroner and sailed