A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (12 page)

“Shall we catch up with our friends?” Speed suggested.

They trotted forward in pursuit of the main party. It was still early in the summer and the carpets of sunflowers had not yet emerged, but the grass was tall and in its boundless reach seemed more infinite than the sky above. Cage experienced a vestigial spasm of something that it took him a moment to identify—the fear of being caught on horseback on open ground. The Black Hawk War kept surfacing that way in odd moments. Up ahead, twenty yards or so in advance of everyone else, Abraham Lincoln rode with Ash Merritt and Simeon Francis, the editor of the Whig newspaper the
Sangamo Journal.
The three of them were locked in an intense political discussion.

The outing had been arranged by Mrs. Abell and her husband, Bennett, as a strategy, it seemed, of introducing some of Lincoln's Springfield friends to her sister Mary Owens. This was the young woman who had come from Kentucky with the intent of marrying him, or at least of taking his measure prior to making a commitment. Whether they were engaged or not Cage didn't know. Nobody did, and Lincoln and Miss Owens seemed particularly uncertain of that fact themselves.

If they had been happily betrothed, surely they would have been riding together. But Lincoln was twenty yards in advance of Miss Owens, listing perilously in his saddle and gesticulating with his long arms as he plotted some political maneuver with the editor and the doctor riding alongside him.

When they caught up with the rest of the caravan Speed fell into conversation with Bennett Abell while Cage reined up next to Mary Owens. He had met her only that morning, but she had been so friendly and curious he had warmed to her immediately.

“Here's Mr. Weatherby at last,” she said. “Did you find Speed's hat?”

“We did.”

“He should go to a different hat maker. A man's hat should never blow off like that. It should fit properly, even in a high wind.”

“My sister has all sorts of opinions,” Mrs. Abell said to Cage. “About men's hats and everything else.”

Mary Owens smiled patiently but kept her eyes ahead on Lincoln and his friends. She was a big, well-proportioned woman, not beautiful but alert and intelligent, with a conniving sense of humor. Cage had known her for a mere few hours, but his clear impression was that Lincoln ought to marry her at once.

“What do you suppose they're talking about up there?” Mrs. Abell was asking.

“I can tell you exactly what they're talking about,” Miss Owens said. “They're conspiring about what to say in the next Sampson's Ghost letter. Do you know about Sampson's Ghost, Mr. Weatherby? I'm assuming you're a Whig and read the Whig paper.”

“I do read the
Journal,
though I'm not what you'd call a fire-breathing Whig. I'm not a fire-breathing anything. Sometimes I even read the
Register
to stretch out my mind a little.”

“I suppose a poet needs a stretchy mind. Tell me this. Do you always sign your name to your work?”

“Of course.”

“What do you think of people who write things and have them printed in the newspaper under a made-up name? Do poets do that?”

“Sometimes. But I think mostly politicians do that. They do it quite a lot.”

“No doubt because if they signed their names they'd end up having to fight a duel.”

She said this flatly. She was referring to the letters Lincoln and some of his Whig friends had been writing for the
Journal
and signing as Sampson's Ghost. This was the invention they had come up with to darken the name of James Adams, Ash Merritt's opponent for probate justice of the peace. Sampson's Ghost was a character like Hamlet's father. He had risen from the dead to claim that Adams had cheated him out of his property. But that was only half of it. In the corporeal world, Lincoln
,
just out of the gate as a lawyer, was energetically suing James Adams on behalf of a widow and her son who were claiming he had fraudulently seized the title to the family's homestead.

When he had read the first letter, Cage had wondered whether it was a good thing for a lawyer to create a fictional stand-in to slander the character of the man he was soon to face in court. If there were any boundaries left between law and politics and character assassination, Lincoln had been very busy lately trying to erase them.

Cage had merely followed all this in the papers. He hadn't spoken to Lincoln about Sampson's Ghost. A man's business and his manner of conducting that business were his own affair. And he had seen enough of politicians to know that they had different standards of conduct, brazen and underhanded ways of doing things that were so pervasive and so widely acknowledged to exist that to criticize them was pointless.

Mary Owens, however, was apparently not so philosophical. She had been introduced to Lincoln's Springfield circle only this morning, and so far the encounter had been a mixed affair. She clearly liked Speed, who was always even-tempered and never took anything too seriously. Cage thought she liked him as well, but she definitely did not like the way that Ash Merritt and Sim Francis had commandeered her supposed suitor and ridden off with him to plot political strategy. And she didn't like the fact that Lincoln had let them do so.

“What do you think of Dr. Merritt?” she asked Cage. “Is he going to win his election?”

“Do you care?”

“Not a bit. But Mr. Lincoln does, so I suppose I should try to pretend for his sake. Though he's doing a fair job of ignoring me.”

“Don't you think you're being too sensitive?” her sister said.

“I'm sure I'm not, Betsy, but thank you for alerting me to the possibility.”

The track they were following narrowed as it led them into a dense screen of sycamore and cottonwoods bordering a branch of the Sangamon. The warmth of the sun vanished in an instant beneath the overspreading branches and the latticework of leaves and pea vines, and suddenly there was a crypt-like coolness to the air. There was a ford ahead, though the bank leading down to it was rather steep and muddy and the water was higher than usual after a wet spring. Lincoln and Merritt and Francis had already crossed and their horses were picking their way up the slippery opposite bank, their legs covered with mud and the stirrups of the riders dripping water.

Mr. Carman, who was with the party, was now solicitously escorting his wife across the branch behind the leading riders.

“You'd better stay close to me, Betsy,” Bennett Abell said, riding up to his wife's side.

“Well, who's going to see my sister across? What in the world is Abe doing? He's just riding on with those men as if there were nobody back here at all.”

“I'll be glad to ride with Miss Owens,” Cage volunteered. Under her bonnet Miss Owens's face might have been sunburned from their summertime ride across the prairie, or it might have been flushed red with anger.

“Thank you, Mr. Weatherby,” she said distractedly as she kept her eyes trained ahead to the crest of the far bank, where Lincoln and his companions were disappearing again into the trees.

The crossing was not particularly hazardous, and Mary Owens was quite capable of accomplishing it without Cage riding by her side. But the stony bed of the ford was slick, and the water was high enough that the horses would have rather not ventured into it in the first place. They had to be urged through to the other side. Mrs. P was so eager to be out of the water that she scrambled up the bank with heedless energy, then slid backward for a moment when she couldn't find purchase on the steep trail. The mare Miss Owens was riding was more sure-footed but at one point during the crossing she shied and skittered so violently she might have unseated a less skilled rider.

“I don't blame her,” Miss Owens told Cage when they were onto firm ground again. “She saw a snake. I think it was a cottonmouth. Do you have those in Illinois?”

“Yes, of course, though we have lots of other water snakes as well.”

“Well, I didn't get a good look at it. I was too busy trying to stay in the saddle. But my horse is definitely of the opinion it was a cottonmouth.”

Her skirts were wet and her clothes and face had been spattered with mud kicked up by the horse's exertions. Nevertheless, she had enjoyed the challenge of crossing the branch and would have been grinning if she had been in a better mood.

“You were very gallant to a helpless abandoned lady.”

“He gets preoccupied. Don't be too hard on him.”

“Oh, you can be assured that I'll be too hard on him.”

They crossed another stretch of prairie and when they approached the shady bluff above the main course of the Sangamon that was their destination, Cage asked Miss Owens if she would mind him taking leave of her and riding ahead.

“So you can warn Mr. Lincoln that there's a storm coming? No, I think it's best that you stay right here.”

To make things worse, Lincoln and his confederates were already ransacking through the picnic supplies. When the rest of the party rode up, he was eating a doughnut and had his back turned to them. He was in the middle of telling a story to Merritt and Francis, who were so intent on hearing it they also did not notice that they had just been joined by the women.

“He comes out of the tavern and there in the street is a dog licking its balls. The dog is performing this service for himself in such an industrious and satisfying way that Stephen Douglas turns to his friend and says, ‘I wish I could do that' ”—

“Lincoln,” Cage said.

But Lincoln was already laughing so giddily as he approached his conclusion that the world was shut out to him.

“And his friend thinks about it for a spell and turns back to Douglas and says, ‘I wouldn't try it. He might bite you.' ”

It was only the sudden horrified look on his listeners' faces that caused him to turn around and see Mary Owens glowering down at him from her horse. He choked for an instant on his own laughter and then did his best to rescue the unrescuable situation. He walked up to Mary with the half-eaten doughnut in his mouth and offered his hand to help her dismount.

She might have been justified in swatting it away, but as it was she just ignored it and slipped off her horse and picked pieces of dried mud off her dress as Lincoln stood there chewing, his big Adam's apple nervously heaving up and down.

“Well, Mary,” he cautiously said, “I'm glad to see you got across that branch all right.”

“Are you? You didn't even bother to look back to see whether or not I'd broken my neck.”

“Why, because I knew you could take care of yourself.”

He laughed, but it was no joke to her. She was doing her defiant best not to break into angry tears, and she walked away to join her sister so Lincoln wouldn't be there to see it in case the dam of emotion broke.

The party loitered on the riverbank for several hours, eating cold chicken and cornbread. They were in the middle of an old Kickapoo sugar camp and there were gashes on the trees where the Indians had collected sap. Miss Owens never left her sister's side, so it was impossible for Lincoln to break her off and try to make a suitable apology. They all rode back to town in the heat of the afternoon, crossing that same troublesome branch, this time Miss Owens issuing a curt “No thank you!” when Lincoln did his awkward best in asking to safeguard her.

“Well, Cage, what do you think she wants?” Lincoln asked as the two of them drifted behind the main party together. “She won't stand still for me to say I'm sorry and she won't allow me to do what she says I didn't do in the first place.”

“She'll cool down and then the two of you can have a civil conversation about it.”

“A civil conversation about everything that's wrong with me? You can be sure I'll look forward to that. What do you think is wrong with me, so I can get a head start on her?”

“Where that woman's happiness is concerned it seems to me that everything on God's footstool is wrong with you. For one thing, you don't pay any attention to her.”

“I do when we're alone.”

“Well, for God's sake, do it when you're in company, instead of riding off to hatch one of your many plots. And that's another matter: she doesn't like Sampson's Ghost, she doesn't like character assassination in the newspaper, and she doesn't like you being the anonymous author of either.”

Lincoln looked over at Cage, raising his eyebrows in surprise to such a degree that the movement lifted the brim of his new straw hat.

“You say that with enough heat,” he told Cage, “that it might be your philosophy as well.”

“It is my philosophy. Put your name to what you write, or don't write it at all. In any case, I like Miss Owens. She's intelligent and thoughtful and good-looking into the bargain. I think you ought to marry her.”

“I think I ought to myself.”

“Then adjust your character immediately, or you won't stand a chance.”

E
LLIE LEANED AGAINST THE WINDOW FRAME
in the sunlight as she read the pages Cage had brought her. Her hair was undone, spilling down upon the bodice of the linen petticoat she had just put back on. The strings of the bodice were untied, its border of fraying Moravian stitchery running gracefully beneath her bare shoulders and across the tops of her breasts. She read in silence, and he watched the suddenly enticing fabric heave slightly with her breathing.

She finished reading, neatly folded the two sheets on which he had copied out the poem, and reached out to hand them back to him without saying anything.

“Keep it. It's for you.”

“Thank you.”

She set the papers down on her writing desk and stood looking at him from across the room.

“It's about me, it seems.”

“More you than anybody else. Do you like it or not?”

“As much as I like any poem. Probably better.”

“Well,” Cage said. “I suppose I won't try that again.”

She sat on the bed and gestured for him to join her, but to reinforce his self-respect he remained sitting in his chair and smiled casually at her as if his feelings had not been crushed.

“You've put me on the spot,” she said. “I don't know how to react to something like this when the author is sitting there in front of me as I read it. I'm not a critic of poetry, though I'm sure it's very good. And I'm not sentimental, you must know that. It seems to me that if you want to say something to me you ought to say it outright and not in verse.”

She turned and stretched herself down toward the foot of the bed, facing him.

“It would be silly for you to be in love with me.”

“I agree. You've misread the poem if you think it's a declaration of love.”

“Well, poems are so easy to misread. And I told you I'm not a critic.”

She had reached out to entwine her hand with his—playfully, fondly—and this time he gave in and joined her on the bed, lying with her as they looked up at the cracked ceiling. It was mid-afternoon on a stultifying summer's day, the heat suppressing everything but the noise of the wagon teams rumbling down the streets carrying blocks of stone from the quarry to the town square, where the old courthouse had been torn down and the new statehouse was slowly rising in its place. There was, for once, no screaming from the old woman and her son who were Ellie's landlords. Perhaps they had finally succeeded in killing each other.

“Whether it pleased you or not,” Cage said, “I was moved to write it.”

“Don't think I wasn't pleased. But what's the point? You don't plan on marrying me, and if you did, I wouldn't let you.”

“And why not
,
just out of curiosity?”

“Because then I would be your wife, and you would want to show me around to all the people on Aristocracy Hill, and the people on Aristocracy Hill would not like me very much.”

“I have nothing to do with Aristocracy Hill. I don't care about those people.”

“You don't want to advance yourself?”

“I do, but on my own terms, in my own way.”

“Well,” she said, smiling at him, “then we're more alike than I thought. Which means you should definitely never try to get me to marry you.”

“You have my sacred pledge that I will never marry you. I want a wife who would pretend to like my poetry.”

She laughed gently, turned her head from him to look across the room at her overflowing sewing basket and heaps of fabric.

“Would you ever want to be in business with me?” she said after a deliberating moment.

“In business? You mean…”

“No, I don't mean
this
business. I mean a proper shop. A millinery shop.”

Cage sat up in bed and drew up his knees, staring down at her where she still languidly lay. But the teasing look and tone she had been using in their discussion of marriage was gone. In fact, he thought he had heard a tremble in her voice when she introduced the topic of business.

“This would be a terrible time to open a shop,” he told her. It was true. Eighteen thirty-seven was turning out to be a very bad year indeed. Property wasn't selling because nobody had any money, farmers who had not already lost everything were in a deepening welter of debt, banks everywhere had suspended specie payments and were facing liquidation.

“The bubble has burst,” Cage stated.

“Bubbles burst and then rise again, don't they? And Springfield is the capital now. It won't go completely bankrupt.”

“You should read the papers. We're not the capital in reality quite yet. We've only just begun building the statehouse and the legislature is still meeting in Vandalia. And you can be sure there'll be an attempt to repeal the law so that the capital isn't ours after all.”

“I'm sure your friend will keep that from happening.”

“Who? Lincoln?”

“Joshua says he's lonely and should come around to see me. I've heard he's irresistibly ugly. Is that true?”

“Of course not, though you'll have to make up your own mind about his appearance
,
just as you make up your own mind about everything else. By the way, you might want to have him ‘come around' soon, since it looks like he'll be getting married. Shall I arrange it?”

“Don't be like that. I don't like the jealous tone in your voice.”

“It's an impatient tone because everyone is always trying to push me into business when all I want is to be left alone to write, even though you find my poetry worthless.”

“Of course I never said it was worthless.” She slid off the bed and began to dress. “I just prefer that you would write it about somebody other than me. And I wasn't pushing you into business, I was doing you the favor of presenting you an opportunity.”

“Shouldn't you present this opportunity to Speed first?”

“He likes our arrangement as it is.”

“So do I.”

“Dear Cage, I know this much about you: you like nothing as it is. You want more.”

He knew he should not say it, but he did: “More of you.”

“Oh, but I have to protect you.” Her smile was warm now, her eyes deceptively bright. “You already have more of me than is good for you.”

When he left Ellie's presence he was irritated with himself. He should have known that she was not the kind of person who would be moved by an unexpected poetic offering. Whatever he'd meant to say—and what was that, exactly?—he ought to have said in plain bold language. The poem had been an impulsive gesture, the product of several sleepless nights during which he had been tortured by a need to claim her full attention. He realized now what a juvenile stroke it had been, a blundering broadside of metaphor designed to impress rather than to truly communicate. She had seen through him at once, which only made her more damnably appealing to him.

It was election day. He waited in line in the summer heat to approach the voting window in front of the courthouse. Half of the men in line with him were staggering under the effects of the free beer given out by the buckets by Whig and Democrat operatives, and drunken scuffles—exacerbated by men deriding opposition candidates at the tops of their voices—were breaking out all around him. He stared at the tickets he had clipped from the pages of the
Sangamo Journal.
Lincoln's name was not on the list of candidates. He was not up for reelection this year, but he might as well have been, since he had been so busy campaigning out in the open and behind the scenes for his fellow Whigs. Cage had barely seen him since the disastrous outing with Mary Owens, but he was visible enough in the papers. Depending on whether it was a Whig paper or a Democratic one, Lincoln and his colleagues were either spending long days and nights in a desperate attempt to keep the state bank solvent in the face of an economic collapse, or working to bankrupt Illinois on behalf of rapacious speculators.

Two men were clawing at each other a few feet away from the line Cage was standing in. They expressed their political convictions in outraged grunts as they rolled into a mudhole. They were so equally matched and held each other so tightly that neither could get a hand free to slap his opponent or shift his center of gravity, so they just ended up in an exhausted stasis as if they had decided to take a nap together in the mud. The men in the voting line watched the wrestlers eagerly at first and then as the contest stalled regarded them with no greater interest than they watched the carriage traffic on the street.

Cage too turned his attention away, looking down at the ticket he had clipped out of the paper. Ash Merritt, running for probate justice of the peace, was one of the names on the list. He happened to turn the ticket over. Printed on the back was a fragment from a letter to the editor. Cage's spirits sank. It was yet another Sampson's Ghost letter, written by but not signed by Lincoln, once again attacking the character of Ash's opponent. The letter was witty but exuberantly mean-spirited. Maybe James Adams really was a land-swindler, really was the defrauder of innocent widows, as Lincoln kept claiming in these anonymous letters, but Cage couldn't recall reading anything that amounted to real evidence.

This gleeful, freewheeling character assassination disturbed him, disturbed him even more as he sweated in the heat waiting for his turn to cast his vote. When he was in Lincoln's presence, Cage couldn't keep himself from being beguiled, convinced he was a man of noble purpose, his powerful ambition harnessed to the common good. But from a distance, in the pages even of the Whig newspapers that were so friendly to Lincoln, he saw only another grasping politico.

As it turned out, Cage must not have been the only one who thought Lincoln had overreached, because all the Whigs running for county office were elected except for Ash Merritt, who was overwhelmingly defeated by the supposedly villainous James Adams.

Lincoln was rebuked. He was chastened. And a few days after the election he was at Cage's door, looking drained of blood, his hair lank with sweat and his face alarmingly gaunt. He was one of those men who could go for a decade without gaining an ounce but might lose fifteen pounds in the course of a single stressful week. Even his knock had been mournful, and when Cage opened the door Lincoln seemed almost to fall into the room. Without saying a word he undid his tie as if it was strangling him and then sprawled backwards onto the bed.

“Do you want a glass of water?” Cage asked.

“I don't want anything.” He lifted his head and glanced around the room, staring at the books on the shelves.

“I'm finished, Cage.”

“I doubt that's true.”

“You may doubt it all you want, but if I can't get even the simon-pure Whigs to vote for my candidate what kind of future do you suppose I have?”

He suddenly fixed Cage with a concentrated look.

“Did
you
vote for Ash?”

“Yes, but I was tempted not to, after that last Sampson's Ghost letter.”

“Well, there you have it. There's your proof that I don't have a friend left in the world.”

“You have a friend still, but I don't care for anonymous letters and I won't pretend that I do.”

“That sounds like the righteous thinking of a man who won't come into the fight.”

“Is it a fight or is it a game?”

“Well, I reckon it's both. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Fight or game, I'm out of it now. I might as well leave Springfield. Anyone can see I don't belong here. Everybody flourishing around in carriages, and I'm in debt and despised and unfit for marriage.”

“Who says you're unfit for marriage?”

“Who do you think? Mary Owens.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“In her elegant Kentucky way. I made a kind of proposal in a letter, leaving the matter of marriage for her to decide.”

“That sounds like no proposal at all.”