What is needed is a good lawyer. Or hundreds of them.

Short Story: “A Light in the Mansion”

(Executive Mansion, in the year 2018.)

…A crisis on the border has awakened the inhabitant.

Many times I sit up all night in that wooden creaky chair outside the Executive Office door listening to the clock tick and I’ll hear the old man pacing hour after hour.

Occasionally the door opens and he emerges.

He casts a long shadow down the hall and that’s a dim cold hallway indeed, tonight. Night shirt, scraggly beard Old Abe. Skinny as a rail – but not half-crooked, as he sometimes jokes.

Wrapped in his old shawl, sleepless; he sometimes speaks. He may moan in anguish- he quotes the Bard, performs his favorite, Lear, to himself- and writes. On a troublesome night like this he usually appears in the doorway around midnight to see if I’m asleep at my post.

“Guard duty for Eternity? At least the work is steady.”

“Yes, sir.”

“-Be careful what you wish for. I see I won’t have to grant you pardon for sleeping on duty. You’re wide awake.”

A national crisis of conscience has awakened the spirit of Mr Lincoln:

“It is the old specter of Know-Nothing-ism. The tired outcry over immigration.

I always curried favor with the large immigrant populations-all of them. I, in the early days on the hustings, wrote for the German newspapers in Illinois- campaign bumpers mostly- translated by others of course. On the stump I would have gladly delivered a speech in ten languages- including jackass and Ancient Greek and Hebrew if I could- and a few of my opponents could do so. But simple is best.

“This twitter fellow- my successor- he’s got a “leaky faucet” don’t he?”

“… Sir?”

“That is, he has a preexisting condition of the mouth…” The President continued.

“I used to ride circuit – we’d all ride together and my co-counsel used to spout so much beloved nonsense he used to have to lag behind himself to let his brain catch up.”

“We have such a case at the southern border tonight.”

“Sir?”

“You forget I can see from here to next Tuesday.” Mr Lincoln waved his hand formally; from the portal of the executive mansion stood a line of ladies stretching as far as the eye could see into the darkness, all with a silent appeal to the chief executive.

“The mothers. For some reason unbeknownst to President Twitter they would like to be reunited with their children.

…Re-union has a ring to it. Is a moral imperative written into the case law?”

The President, from nowhere, dumped
an enormous pile of paper that stacked as tall as himself and he sighed.

“Son, what do you think the law and precedent will tell us about the case of these children, the tender internees: is seeking freedom a criminal act in your estimation?”

“Sir.., I would think not, so”.

“… that, seeking asylum with a child, on behalf of a child, is that a natural duty of the mother in such a case?

-It’s in the declaration. That is the first guarantee of freedom there in the Declaration. Life, liberty.”

The President, with his dead-level gaze, continued. “That is my compass – that’s my polestar. That’s the direction of freedom.”

He gestured outward into darkness.

Down that long hallway of the mansion one saw a succession of mothers – supplicants. “Mr Lincoln hear my plea.”

Lo. Behold thy mother, he muttered, a bit whimsically. “Our troubles have just begun.”

Sure enough there was Mrs Lincoln at the head of the line.

Mrs Lincoln, dressed in suffragette white, carried a placard which said in bold print: “Save the children!”

Mrs Dolley Madison stood right alongside carrying a sign upon which were the words “Save the country!”

Mrs Coretta Scott King carried a sign that said “Save the people- Now!”

Mr Lincoln smiled. “Those are the words to a stirring tune the first lady heard one time; composed by a shy little lady with dark brown hair at a grand piano. When I hear that tune I know I won’t rest until my soul work is done. It seems there is always a powerful little lady behind an enormous change in the Nation.”

The President grinned his weary grin.

The Chief returned to his desk and with great care wrote a page under the Executive Mansion letterhead in which I saw the characteristic cursive known to all.

“ ‘Save the country’ –

…Those are your orders. Beyond which I cannot go, as the young man said at the gate of the pretty lady.”

jk
6/20/18