Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Read Online Free Page B

he enjoyed the applause he got. It gave him a role in the world, his first and his longest-running. Young Lincoln was bookish and strange-looking; as he aged, he would acquire other unprepossessing traits (shyness around women, depression). But when he opened his mouth to tell a story, he could be the life of any party. He could put his height and his ungainliness to work; being funny-looking makes you even funnier.
    Among the staples of his repertoire, after he graduated from riddles about the father of Zebedee’s children, were off-color stories (scatological more often than sexual, though he told both kinds). One of his favorite off-color stories—his law partner William Herndon, who wrote it down, said he heard Lincoln tell it “often and often”—incidentally showed how story- and joke-telling worked for him. It was about “the Man of Audacity.”
    “There was a party once, not far from here,” it always began. Among the guests “was one of those men who had audacity . . . quick-witted, cheeky, and self-possessed, never off his guard on any occasion.” When supper was ready, the Man of Audacity was asked to carve the turkey. He “whetted his carving knife with the steel and got down to business,” but as he began, he “let a fart, a loud fart, so that all the people heard it distinctly.” Silence. “However, the audacious man was cool and entirely self-possessed. . . . With a kind of sublime audacity, [he] pulled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, put his coat deliberately on a chair, spat on his hands, took his position at the head of the table, picked up the carving knife, and whetted it again, never cracking a smile nor moving a muscle of his face.” Then “he squared himself and said loudly and distinctly: ‘Now, by God, I’ll see if I can’t cut up this turkey withoutfarting.’”
    If you fart, go further with it. If you are funny-looking, be funny. If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.
    Storytelling served another function for Lincoln, which he discovered as early as his days in Indiana. In 1826, when he was seventeen,his sister, Sarah, married a neighbor, Aaron Grigsby. She comes to us, still living, in the memory of one of her Grigsby in-laws, forty years after her wedding: “Her good humored laugh I can see now—is as fresh in my mind as if it wereyesterday.” In 1828, laughing Sarah died in childbirth. Of Lincoln’s blood relations, everyone—infant brother, mother, sister—was now gone, except his problematic father. In 1829 he took it out on the Grigsbys, on the occasion of a double wedding of two Grigsby brothers. With the help of friends, he contrived to have the grooms led to each other’s beds on the wedding night; he then wrote a satirical account of the mix-up, in pseudo-biblical prose. “So when [the grooms] came near to the house of . . . their father, the messengers came on before them, and gave a shout. And the whole multitude ran out with shouts of joy and music, playing on all kinds of instruments of music, some playing on harps and some on viols and some blowingrams’ horns.” It is pretty tame stuff, but it amused the neighbors; one claimed decades later that it was still remembered in that part of Indiana, “better than the Bible.” There truly was not much in the way of entertainment in rural America.
    Mocking the Grigsbys would not bring sister Sarah back—no mockery of anyone or anything could do that—but it could distract the troubled mind. If life makes a terrible bargain for you, a funny story can push it aside for a time.

    In 1830, when Abraham was twenty-one, the Lincolns moved once more, to central Illinois. A year later, Abraham and Thomas parted ways.
    Abraham had little to do with his father after that; the rest of their story is quickly told. Thomas continued his life of farming. By this time he had bonded with John Johnston, his second wife’s youngest son by her first marriage, and, like Thomas, a farmer for life. Even as Sarah Bush