A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (17 page)

Forget what? Was something unendurable in his own spirit driving the theme of this poem, or was it just an exercise, a brief abstract glimpse into what he imagined a man with a tormented mind would feel? He read the poem without giving much of a clue, without a touch of oratorical flight. There was nothing original in the language—“lonely hooting owl,” for God's sake—but there was a frightening conviction at the poem's core that made it seem
,
just then, in that room, that an unrevealing man had suddenly laid himself bare.

The group was caught a little off guard by the raw sentiments in the poem and it took them a moment, once he had finished it, to proclaim it the finest product so far of the Springfield Poetical Society. It should be published in the
Sangamo Journal
without delay.

“Maybe,” Lincoln said, “but people might get the wrong idea. If they think I'm planning to stab myself they might decide it would be the waste of a vote.”

“That's easily solved,” Speed said. “Don't put your name to it. After all,
you
didn't write it. You told us that yourself. It was written by the poor fellow whose bones you found.”

“Yes,” Lincoln said, “and the skeleton belonged to Stephen Douglas, who killed himself at the prospect of John T. Stuart beating him for Congress. Except of course if I'd found Douglas's little skeleton in the first place I would have thought it was that of a squirrel.”

It was Cage's turn next. His “beaten path” musings had led to the first draft of a poem, written one night in a strange feverish rush. He had not had a chance to reflect on its meaning, or even to determine if there were any meaning to it at all. He knew that it was in a somber key, that it was vaguely apocalyptic, that it was some sort of declaration to himself that he had his own course to run.

“The beaten path, the traveled way,

The turnpike leading on

Through forests dark, 'neath burning skies,

The trail imprinted on the earth,

Though Earth itself be gone.”

Years later, in the snowbound silence of a Sierra winter, when he was no longer Micajah Weatherby but just some ravening thing conscious only of the need to keep itself in existence, this poem would come back to him. It would seem almost like a predictive dream, something he had created in an earlier life to alert his future self that there was a way ahead, a way over the mountains and out of the starving winter camp. His poetic ambitions would by then have come to nothing, his very imagination something his being no longer had the strength to fuel. But he would keep saying the lines to himself as he fought through the waist-high snow—the lines that declared against all evidence that there was some kind of road ahead.

But he was not that person yet. That ordeal was still to come. He was in the county clerk's office in Springfield, Illinois, on a Wednesday night in March, surrounded by young men like himself, each of them eager to applaud the extraordinary accomplishments of his friends but each believing in secret that it was he that would be judged most remarkable when the history of their circle was written.

Cage was not immune to this illusion. He was not immune to the applause that followed his recitation. Lincoln stood up and said the next bones that would be found in the forest would be his own, the skeleton of a man who had killed himself from envy. Cage laughed and waved off the compliment, but he thought he could indeed see a jealous pall in his friend's face, a variant of the jealousy he himself had felt that night when he saw Lincoln scratching the ears of the dog who was the self-appointed guardian of Ellie's door.

They had not spoken of it—what was there to speak of? Cage was in no position to question another man's private recreation. He had never told Lincoln he regarded Ellie as “his,” he had never exactly expressed that to himself. And he had no business in feeling possessive about a woman whose allure in the first place had something to do with the fact that she would not be owned even as she allowed herself in effect to be bought and sold.

The meeting broke up earlier than usual, but Lincoln asked Cage afterwards to head down the hall with him to his office.

“Did I succeed in striking a true tone with that poem?” he wanted to know. “Or was it just an exercise in gloom?”

“I thought it was good. A little too theatrical in places. Are there as many exclamation points in the written poem as there seemed to be when you read it aloud?”

“Probably more. There are points that need emphasis, after all.”

“Let the meter carry the emphasis. Try to limit the exclamation points. But it's stronger and more daring than anything you've written before. I agree you should publish it.”

“I always trust your judgment. I never know how much attention to pay to the praise of the others. I don't want just encouragement. I want to matter as a poet. I don't have your talent, of course, but I think I could matter. Have you heard anything from Little and Brown?”

“They don't want it.”

“I'm astonished. How could anybody not want to publish work of such obvious merit?”

“They regard it as provincial. Irrelevant.”

“They're fools! Did you hear? I've just used up one of my limited supply of exclamation points to emphasize that fact. Don't be discouraged, Cage. None of us should be discouraged. There's a long road ahead and we'll get to where we're meant to be by and by.”

His tone was so warm and his friendship so gratifying that Cage was able to forget, at least for a moment, his unreasonable jealousy toward him. But it was just as well when Lincoln announced he had to get back to work—he would be up all night, he said, amending a complainant's bill about the death of half a dozen sheep due to foot rot. The longer Cage stayed in his presence, the less sure he could be that he would not lose his resolve and bring up the subject of Ellie.

He was on his way home from Hoffman's Row when Jim Reed spotted him and took him by the arm. “Come over to the Globe with me and I'll buy you a drink. I've got something I want to talk over with you.”

When they entered the hotel they saw Jacob Early in the sitting room, contentedly reading a thick book by the fireplace. He greeted Reed—his old spying company partisan—with hearty goodwill. Toward Cage he was more reserved.

“I believe we were on opposing sides when that damned abolitionist came to speak.”

“We were,” Cage said.

“But you were at Kellogg's Grove, so I'm happy to extend my hand in comradeship.”

“I'm happy to accept it, Captain.”

The three men chatted for a moment about nothing of consequence, and then Cage and Reed left Early reading by the fire as they sat down at a table on the other side of the room.

“What does the capital of Illinois have?” Reed asked after he had ordered a gin sling. “It has saddlers, watchmakers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, doctors, booksellers, mechanics, and of course more lawyers than anything else. It's got brickyards, it's got mills, it's got a foundry, but do you know what Springfield doesn't have?”

“What doesn't it have and what do you want me to throw away my money to get for it?”

Reed laughed with hearty complicity, making Cage even more cautious when it came to considering going into business with him. He had a long face, a long straight nose, protruding ears, piercing eyes: overall the feral intensity of a born salesman.

“A tallow chandler is what we don't have! Think of the freight charges we have to pay to bring candles from Philadelphia when we should be making them right here, in the capital of Illinois. And soap! If we had a soap boiler and—”

“I'm asking you if you are the author of that damned resolution!”

Cage and Reed turned to the sound of the outraged voice that was suddenly echoing in the sparsely populated room. Cage had never met Henry Truett, the man who was standing there shouting at Jacob Early, but he knew who he was. He was the son-in-law of Big Red May, the Democrat who had been elected to Congress in 1836. Big Red had gotten Truett appointed as the land office register in Galena, a very cozy position that came with a nice salary and boundless ancillary ways in which to speculate and fill one's own purse. But the appointment had spurred infighting and intrigue among the local Democrats—pitting Big Red against the rising power of Stephen Douglas—and according to the papers the Little Giant and his faction had issued some kind of resolution calling for Truett to be removed from office.

Just now Truett looked like a man who should not merely be removed from office but put into a cage. His face was flushed with rage and the glow from the fireplace had turned it monstrously livid, a shiny waxen mask from which two unreasoning eyes stared down at Jacob Early.

Early was calm. He remained in his chair as he inserted a silk bookmark into his volume and set it down on a nearby table.

“Who told you that I wrote the resolution?”

“I'm not going to tell you that.”

“Well, if you won't tell me where your information came from, I won't tell you whether I wrote it or not.”

“You are a damned scoundrel and a damned hypocrite! I know you wrote it, but you're a coward and won't admit it.”

Early remained seated and struggled to remain calm. Despite the insult from Truett, he appeared to want nothing more than to be left alone to sit by the fire and read his book.

“If you want a formal confrontation with me, Mr. Truett,” he said after some deliberation, “will you do me the kindness of putting your complaint in writing as a gentleman should?”

He then picked up his book again and dismissed Truett with a wave of his hand. Inflamed, Truett leaned forward. From across the room Cage saw the handle of a pistol in Truett's overcoat pocket. Early must have seen it at the same moment, because he dropped his book and stood up and lifted his chair to shield himself from the armed madman confronting him. Truett clumsily pulled the pistol from his pocket. It was already on full cock. The two men began circling each other around the fireplace, Early with the upraised chair, Truett waving the gun around looking for a clear shot.

Cage's instinct was to remain where he was, but Reed had a bolder temperament and he sprang out of his chair and started to stride across the room to take the pistol out of Truett's hand. “Now listen here,” Reed was saying, but before he could finish his sentence Truett had found his shot. He pulled the trigger and the sound of the explosion filled every atom of atmosphere suspended in the quiet tavern. Early collapsed to the floor with a surprised shriek, his legs buckling under him as the rest of his body fell as straight as a plumb bob. The heavy wooden chair he had been holding came crashing down at the same instant, one of its arms splintering as it hit the Turkey carpet. The gunpowder smoke that instantly filled the room hurled Cage back to that crowded and besieged cabin at Kellogg's Grove. Truett, looking almost as surprised as the man he had shot, bent down and laid his pistol rather formally on the floor. He looked around as if he expected somebody to tell him what to do next, and when nobody did he ran out through the back door of the hotel.

“By God I think that man has shot me!” Early said when Cage reached him. He was lying on his back with his arms spread, blood already soaking the fibers of the carpet beneath him.

“Yes, you've been shot,” Cage said. “But we'll get you to Dr. Merritt immediately and all will be well.”

Cage and Reed and three other men lifted Early with great care and walked out of the hotel and down the street to Ash Merritt's house, only half a block away.

“Well, I don't think he ought to have done that,” Early observed as they bore him along. There had been a sleet storm the day before and they were careful not to slip on the still-icy ground. Early's lips were pale and drawn back in pain, but his sense of bravado demanded that he entertain his bearers with a commentary. “Such a thing is uncalled-for and it makes me mad.”

Ash was waiting at the door. He had heard the shot and was expecting someone. “Hello there, Dr. Merritt,” Early said as Cage and the others carried him through the parlor and set him on the narrow surgical bed in the doctor's office. “I'm a Democrat who has been shot by a Democrat, so I guess I shouldn't complain if now I have a Whig for a doctor.”

“Well, it's a topsy-turvy business all around
,
Jacob,” Ash said. “But I'll do my best for you.”

Early said he desired to shake hands with the men who had carried him out of the tavern. He gripped Cage's hand tight and asked him to go back over to the Globe and see if the carpet was ruined.

“If it is,” he said, “tell them that if I'm alive I'll replace it, and that if I'm dead I'm sorry.”

When Cage and Reed got back to the tavern, a crowd had already gathered to analyze the shooting scene, though the chair had been righted, the bartender was in the act of blotting up the blood on the carpet, and the pistol that Truett had dropped had been picked up and safely stored behind the bar.

The air was still full of the grainy smell of gunpowder and the slick scent of blood, and the shock of what had happened still ruled the room and the thoughts of the people in it.

“I thought there was something wrong about Truett the minute he walked in,” Reed said, picking up the gin sling that was still sitting on the table. “And then I saw that pistol butt in his pocket.”

“You saw that too?”

“Damn right I did. He came in here to murder Early, no doubt about it.”

Jim Reed drank with a steady hand. In the moment Cage was impressed. He envied Reed's commanding coolness, the satisfaction he seemed to take in being in control of his nerves and his mood at a time of such distress.

“Did you see where the bullet went in and where it came out? I'm no anatomist but you can be sure Early's got a hole in his liver. He'll be lucky if he lives till morning.”