The Soul of Ann Rutledge: Abraham Lincoln's Romance

by Bernie Babcock

His mother had been a pilgrim on a journey. He had heard her say so many times. But the burden of her song had been "Earth is a desert drear." He had heard her sometimes try to sing. But she did not go shouting. She suffered on the way, endured, was patient, and at the last she reached a groping hand for something strong to hold her back from that country to which she believed she was going. It was with a twitching of his muscles and a quiver of the big strong mouth he thought of the passing on of his mother.

But here was a pilgrim happy, shouting, even jubilant. Who was she? What manner of person could she be? His curiosity was aroused.

As he strode on toward Turtle Ford the falling waters of the dam softened their roar into an indistinct murmur, and then like the voice of the singer and the tinkle of the bell, blended into the quiet, broken only by the call of a whip-poor-will or the whirr of a bat's wing.

The moon rose above the lacey darkness of the timber-line. The railsplitter had had no supper. Once he stopped and gathered some berries. But he was not thinking of food. The eternal mystery of the awakening of one's other self had both breathed through and enfolded him. He was not hungry. He tossed the berries down by the roadside. His pace quickened as he neared the clearing. He did not understand, but for some reason he himself experienced a lifted-up sensation. It was as if the conquering confidence and joy of the unknown singer had been contagious.

At the edge of the clearing he stopped. The shack and pig-pen and few rail-fences stood out in the moonlight like the skeleton of something to be clothed with a body. The dogs came out and barked, but crept back satisfied at sight of the tall figure. He stepped up to the door of the shack. The snoring of a man told him his approach had not disturbed the sleeping family.

He turned toward the end of the cabin where a ladder stood, which he mounted. At the square opening which served as door and window to the loft, he paused and looked in, and by the moon's indistinct light he saw the three boys of the family lying on a pallet. The dull hum of mosquitoes sounded.

He turned back to the ladder, and on its top, with his back resting against the cabin, he sat and looked out into the night. In the light all was beautiful; even the piles of brush were softened until they looked like the gray and silver tendrils of giant vines piled by titanic fairies, and the trunks of trees were columns in some mysterious and endless cathedral canopied with silvered green.

Across the wilds of the forest, which in the magic of night and the moon were so beautiful, the thoughts of the youth again traveled back to his childhood and its mysteries, and he seemed to see again a very small grave in a lonesome spot beside which his mother cried and declared with tears and choking voice that she could not go away and leave it forever. To the boy who looked on, this had seemed strange. Why should she weep because she could not take a grave from Kentucky to Indiana, the new home, and such a tiny little grave? It had been a mystery. Later he came to answer the mystery of it by calling it "mother love." He thought of that grave, far away in Kentucky, as he sat on the ladder. Then he thought of the grave of the mother who had wept beside the little grave—two graves.

Some time he too would fill a grave somewhere—and so would the singer on the heights. What was life after all? Its end was the same for all—whether a tiny grave or one long enough even for him? The question seemed to mock itself and laugh.