Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 3)

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Shields had said, on that day six years earlier, “It feels like we’re Hamilton and Burr!”
    Lincoln had replied, “We are in no way similar. They had a long-standing enmity based partly on politics and more on hotheadedness.”
    “Okay. Plus they used guns, with which I might have had the advantage. But just the drama!”
    Lincoln replied, “Here’s the drama,” and he reached up, extending his arm as high as it would reach overhead and swung his saber, lopping off an overhanging branch.
    Shields said, “I feel it would be best that we become and remain ever friends.” He dropped his sword and approached the tall man.
    “Me, too.” Abe shook his former opponent’s hand.
    As they walked away together towards the boats that would carry them back across the Mississippi to civilization, Shields admitted, “Even my wife laughed at that Rebecca’s rough humor.”
    Abe responded, “And I weep that those confounded letters ever came to light.”

They asked Abe for another story

    They asked Abe for another story, and placed before him some of the green, cloudy liquor, at which he balked: “I hear that stuff’s poison.”
    “Nah! Look at us!”
    So he tried it, grimaced, said, “Always hated licorice,” and started a story. A few minutes into it, he called for another drink of the absinthe.
    “Well, on the subject of famous old duels, old Andy Jackson got himself into quite a handful of them. There was one when he was real young; this would have been back in ’ought-six, I believe, and it was with a man name of Charles Dickinson. Dueling was against the law in Tennessee, so they went up somewhere on the Red River in Kentucky. Now Ol’ Hickory was better with swords, and he knew Dickinson to be a crack marksman. So he stood there, steeled to take his chances when the better shot fired. He took a bullet in his chest, right close to his heart, and acted like it didn’t trouble him too much. Well, he was to carry that bullet right there in his chest next to his heart for the rest of his days, but right now it was his turn to fire. You could say he took his time in aiming at his man, but I bet he was recollectin’ at that minute how Dickinson had called him, in his own hometown papers, ‘a worthless scoundrel, a poltroon, and a coward,’ all, I found out later, because Jackson had won on a wager at some horse race, and Charlie had lost.”

“Do you really think that’s the whole reason for shooting at one another?”

    “Do you really think that’s the whole reason? For shooting at one another?”
    “Well, back in those days, fightin’ words like coward is all it took, ma’am, amongst red-blooded wilderness men like those two. And yet I have wondered, sometimes, in my mind, if there weren’t more to it.”
    Edgar said, “Dickinson had insulted Rachel Jackson.”
    “Well, there you have it,” Abe said.
    They were momentarily silent, each unconsciously reaching for a glass.
    “Nowdays we feel dueling is uncivilized. But that’s the way we ought to settle all these wars: let the two leaders come face to face, each with a sword, and not bring all these young boys into it to do their fighting for them. And maybe, like with Shields and me, they’ll recognize their own foolishness before anybody gets hurt.”
    James J. Shields was a state auditor in Illinois. A major general in the current war, and a friend of Zachary Taylor, whom Abe supported also, he had come to America in 1822 from Ireland. In print, he had “insisted that debtors pay the state’s bank the face value on money they owed it, and not the devalued price.” This is what had initially angered Abe.

Abe crossed the river for the duel near Alton, Missouri

    Lincoln’s saber duel with Shields, a Democrat from Illinois, on September 22, 1842, arose because of a series of anti-Shields letters published in a Springfield newspaper, written by “Rebecca”; Abe admitted to writing one of them. The others might have been written by Lincoln’s future wife, Mary Todd, and one of her friends. Abe crossed the river for the duel near Alton, Missouri, where it was still legal.
    Still later, Malinda stood at the bar, waiting for her order to be poured. Walt came up, put his arm around her, played with her curls. Let his fingers trace down her back and give her ass a gentle squeeze.
    “Is that all you like me for, Walt?”
    “No, no. I just want to show that I do like you, and much more than I’ve so far expressed. Please don’t be disappointed in me. Too much.”
    Later still, when they were alone, he told her, “When you asked me, ‘Is that all you like me for?’”
    “Yes?”
    “My dear, I could list a hundred reasons why I like you. Your personality, more electrifying than those of any thousand other girls out there. Your enjoyment of and capacity for good, strong drink. Vanity. You praise my work. You know my work. But none of that matters. The real reason, I feel, is pathetic, and yet I’ll tell you, to protect myself from vanity. No doubt you know it already.”
    “Well, why don’t you just tell me?”

“The way you look at me!”

    “It is vanity. I like you because you like me, a phenomenon to which I’ve long been unaccustomed. You talk to me; I talk to you. So simple, yet so extraordinarily moving! We enjoy each other’s company. You lavish me with attention. I had convinced myself that the days of such attention from young and lovely women were long, long gone. Even now, I suspect the sincerity of it. And yet I can’t do without it, and how quickly I came to rely upon it! I’m ashamed. And yet you’re so giving of it, without my asking, that I’m an irredeemable addict. I don’t doubt it, really, for I can see in your eyes a fascination, a worship, even—which I have seen before, but only in the eyes of women and young men who turned out to be certifiably insane. But you, you’re not, you might be crazy, but it’s a crazy I’d follow anywhere. The way you look at me!”
    “Oh, Walter! The way you talk! No one ever talked to me like that! Who lavishes whom?”
    “You see how you are, sweet little darling? These rustic American girls! They can’t use who and whom correctly to save the farm!”
    “You think I do have a brain?”
    “I know you do! I want to discover it, uncover it, explore it, fathom it, publish it to the world! I want to sink my teeth in it.”
    She threw herself on top of him, grabbed his beard, bit it. “You’re so crazy, Walter!”
    He kissed her face all over, laughing. They both laughed.

Copyright © 2022 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.