Chapter 1
The National Debt
The storm was one mile out, and young Abe Lincoln had just tied the guitar cord to the weathervane.
This was New Salem, Illinois, about a hundred years too early for any of this.
The general store was going under. It owed money to the miller, the blacksmith, the pickle man and two fellows in Kentucky nobody had ever met. Abe had started calling it the national debt. He had a plan to pay it off, and the plan had arrived that afternoon in a crate stamped DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 1950.
Abe read the crate twice. He’d had less than a year of schooling, all told, and he was not about to let a crate tell him what year it was.
Inside were a guitar the color of fresh butter, a box of knobs and glass tubes marked AMP, and a cord just long enough to reach the weathervane, if you were six foot four and stood on the pickle barrel.
He was. He did.
Now he was back behind the counter. He set his hat down by the cash box. The hat was where he kept the store’s paperwork: the IOUs, a bill for nails, two letters he meant to answer, and half a sandwich he also meant to answer.
The wind came up. The dog under the porch got up and moved back to Kentucky.
Abe put his fingers where the drawing on the lid said to put them.
Then the lightning found the weathervane.
It was one chord. It was the first electric chord in the history of Illinois, and since it had shown up a century early, it was loud to make up for lost time. It blew the front door open from the inside. It rang every cowbell in the county. Two miles out, a farmer who had slept through three tornadoes sat straight up in bed and said, “Turn it down.”
Every lamp in New Salem came on. Abe stood in the smoke with the strings still humming and felt, for the first time in his life, like a man who might pay off the national debt.
Then somebody pounded on the door.
Abe opened it. On the porch, in a nightshirt, stood the toughest wrestler in the county.
He was holding the weathervane.
Chapter 2
The Match
The wrestler did not say good evening. He held up the weathervane and said, “Did you do that?”
Abe considered lying. He was not built for it. “Me and the weather,” he said.
In New Salem there was one way to settle a thing like this. You wrestled. Everybody in town knew Abe was good at it. By the time the two of them squared up in the middle of the square, the whole town was out in nightshirts, holding lanterns. The guitar was still plugged into the sky.
Here is something nobody tells you about wrestling next to a plugged-in electric guitar. Every time a man hits the ground, the guitar hits a chord.
By midnight it sounded like a concert. By one o’clock people were dancing. By two, the store had sold out of lemonade, rock candy, lamp oil and, for reasons nobody could explain in the morning, a plow.
It was the best night the store ever had. It was nowhere near enough. The national debt was a very large debt.
Who won the match? Nobody can say. People still argue about it. What everyone agrees on is who carried the amp home.
At sunrise the wrestler hoisted it onto his shoulder, a box about the weight of a calf, and said, “Where are we playing next?”
That is how America got its first roadie.
Where they played next was a barn dance forty miles downriver, with a storm due by suppertime. They loaded the amp onto a flatboat and pushed off. They were halfway over the New Salem milldam when the boat stopped cold, tipped forward and began, very slowly, to fill with water.
The amp began to slide.
Chapter 3
The Patent
Abe borrowed an auger from a man on the bank, and while the roadie dove for the amp, he drilled a hole in the front of the boat.
The roadie looked at him the way you would look at any man drilling a hole in a boat.
But the water ran out through the hole, the boat came level, and they slid over the dam like they had somewhere to be. They did. It was a barn dance.
That was the first time the amp almost drowned. It was not the last. For the next fifteen years Abe and the roadie chased thunderstorms up and down every river in Illinois, and every river in Illinois had a sandbar in it, waiting.
The gigs paid, a little at a time. In 1848 Abe paid off the last of the national debt. The two fellows in Kentucky sent a very nice card.
Then he did what every musician does when the gear gets too heavy. He complained. Then, unlike every musician before or since, he did something about it.
In 1849 Abraham Lincoln was granted patent number 6,469, for a way of buoying vessels over shoals: air chambers on the sides of a boat that fill up and float it over a sandbar.
The Patent Office thought it was for boats.
It was for the amp.
All of it went in the hat. The patent. The paid-off IOUs. A map of where it tended to storm. The setlist, which was one chord long, because Abe could not sing and could not read music, which has never once stopped a guitar player.
The hat was no longer a hat. It was an office. Once he bought a new hat, forgot a letter in the old one, and had to write and explain.
Then, in October 1860, a letter came that was not about money, or boats, or the weather.
It was about his face.
Chapter 4
The Letter
She was eleven, she lived in New York, and she wrote to tell him he would look better with whiskers.
She did not mention the guitar. She did not have to. Everybody knows now that a man cannot play the electric guitar with a bare chin. In 1860, the only person who knew it was eleven.
Abe wrote back. He made no promises. Then he put her letter in the hat, right on top, and quit shaving.
A month later the beard was in, a storm was coming across the prairie, and Abe decided it was time.
He took off his coat. He did not put on the hat, because the hat was full: the patent, the paid-off national debt, a map of the weather, a one-chord setlist, and on top of all of it, a letter from an eleven-year-old girl that he intended to keep.
He sat down, because at six foot four, nearly, there was no other way to fit a man and an electric guitar under one lamp.
The roadie ran the cord out the window. The weather did its part.
So there he was. Vest. Shirtsleeves. Hair still arguing with the wind. A beard about a month old. Head tipped down over the strings, like a man reading something good. He played the one chord he knew, and he let himself smile a little. Not a big smile. He was Abraham Lincoln. But a smile.
Nobody painted it. Nobody took a photograph. It never happened.
But if it had, it would have looked exactly like this.
