A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (35 page)

The mystery of Joshua Speed's errand was revealed an hour before dinner, when he came riding up the avenue in the still-strong summer light in the company of a very lovely and composed young Louisville woman named Fanny Henning. She slipped off her horse and handed the reins to Cato, the groom, in a sustained gliding motion. She shook hands confidently with the dozen people gathered on the porch to meet her, and during dinner she did not shrink from fully engaging in the one table-wide topic of conversation—the case of Joseph Smith and the Mormons.

When asked her opinion, Miss Henning said the influence of this peculiar prophet and the power of the Nauvoo Legion rather frightened her, but quickly added she only knew what she had read in the papers and that perhaps Mr. Lincoln, who was from Illinois and served in the state assembly, would have a more informed view.

“I've read around in the Book of Mormon,” Lincoln said from the unswollen side of his mouth, “and in my opinion the Bible is better written by a considerable margin.”

“That's because God Himself is the author,” Mrs. Speed said, “and not some angel no one has ever heard of.”

Lincoln didn't bother to mention that the Whigs
,
just like the Democrats, had been chasing down Mormon voters for years, ever since they had arrived in Illinois. But that was politics, and the talk had now shifted to theology.

“If all other things are equal,” Joshua Speed said, provoking his devout mother, “is it any stranger for God to bury golden plates for Joe Smith to find in New York than for him to present stone tablets to Moses on Mount Sinai?”

“Well, my dear son, all other things are
not
equal, as you know perfectly well. Because the Ten Commandments are the undisputed word of God and these golden plates are—well, I don't know what they are. They're plates!”

While the conversation went back and forth Lincoln spooned soup into the side of his mouth and did his best not to stare at Fanny Henning: at her radiant face and sumptuous brown hair in the candlelight, at the intoxicating way she rested her hand on Speed's forearm as she gently chided him for disagreeing with his mother. Cage monitored Lincoln's gaze as a way of not staring himself. He too was infatuated. Fanny was not as beautiful as Matilda Edwards but her poise and animation made that simple measure irrelevant. He watched her turn her head and smile at Speed, her hand still on his arm, and the way Speed winked at her in response. Once again Cage found himself craving something he was not conscious of missing in his complicated relationship with Ellie: the enclosing warmth of another human soul.

“She's not perfect, you know,” Speed told the two of them later as they walked across the stone bridge in the late-summer night. Fireflies lit up the darkness around them with the rhythm of a telegraph experiment. Steadier light came from the slave cabins in the distance. They could smell cooking and hear a lonely fiddle playing.

“That's old Rheuben playing ‘Balm in Gilead,' ” Speed said. “When I was a little boy, I used to lie in bed with the window open and go to sleep listening to that.”

“How is Fanny not perfect?” Lincoln asked.

“She's moody sometimes, and she can be a little bit self-righteous. I guess you could say that about almost anybody.”

“But you're going to marry her, of course,” Cage said.

“I don't know. Should I?”

“Of course you should,” Lincoln said, spitting a gob of blood onto the ground. “We all should get married. Maybe I made a mistake with Molly.”

“You did not,” Cage firmly told him.

“I agree with Cage,” Speed said. “There's no reason in the world a wife should create confusion and agitation. She should simply make a man happy.”

He expelled cigar smoke into the air, where it mixed with the vaporous band of the Milky Way overhead. Cage remembered the offhand invitation Speed had extended for him to visit Ellie, the same way he might have told him to take a turn in a game of horseshoes. Growing up in a world in which so much had been provided, in which so much was assured, had freed him from any urgent need to claim possession or ownership. More than Lincoln or Cage, he was a man at ease, a man who could afford to wait for his chance to come around. He made a gesture for silence as the three of them stood there on the other side of the stone bridge, looking down the broad path that led to the big brick house. He wanted them all to listen to the purity of his slave's voice as he sang about the balm in Gilead that makes the wounded whole.

They embarked on the
Lebanon
a week later for the return journey. Speed still had a few leftover pieces of business in Springfield, so he traveled back with them, the three of them taking berths in the common room below the waterline. The water in the Ohio was low and the voyage tedious, the captain of the vessel making such careful, probing progress through the channels that Lincoln was convinced they could make better time poling a flatboat or even walking.

The
Lebanon
carried an abundance of cargo in its holds—dishware, whiskey, clothes, tools, and furniture bound for St. Louis or the merchants' shelves in the river towns it passed on the way. Every afternoon about four o'clock another sort of cargo emerged to take advantage of the open air. A dozen slaves, each attached to a chain by an iron clevis around his wrist, were ushered onto the after section of the main deck. There they would sit down and play cards or sing, though their voices were lost to the sound of the great stern wheel paddles churning the water and they occasionally had to slap at the burning sparks emanating from the twin iron chimneys above. The slaves' owner was a prosperous-looking farmer named Mr. Kelso, and he would sometimes leave them in the charge of his grown son while he joined Speed and Cage and Lincoln on the upper deck, where they sat at a table next to the bar.

“You've got to give them air,” Mr. Kelso declared on the third or fourth day of the voyage. “Poor devils, you can't keep them chained up in the dark all day. Their feelings, sir, are no less acute than ours.”

He said he had bought the Negroes at auction in Lexington and was taking them down the Mississippi to his place near Port Gibson. “They're a finer lot of fellows than I could have found back home,” he said, “and at a cheaper price. They're a little melancholy to be leaving the scenes of their childhoods behind, and that one there—Andy, the one tuning his fiddle—I had to separate from his wife, which troubled him a great deal at first. But they're all coming along well enough, cooperating with each other, getting used to their new state in life, curious about where they're going next. Liveliness is the thing to look for when you're investing in a slave, wouldn't you say so, Mr. Speed?”

“Liveliness is a good barometer.”

“You want a man with some spirit, and some common sense. If you treat them well, get them decent clothes, plentiful food, work them hard but fair, use the whip sparingly, a certain harmony sets in that's good for both master and nigger alike. And they're better off here than in Africa, by a long stretch, if you ask me. All those cannibal chieftains rounding up and eating their neighbors, and sending the ones they don't eat off to die in some Musselman's gold mine.”

He stepped on the head of a turtle-shaped cuspidor at his feet. The shell lifted up and he expectorated with satisfaction into the receptacle hidden inside. He then stood up, shaking hands all around as he excused himself to help his son escort his charges back into the hold for their dinner. When he was gone, Speed snorted with suppressed laughter. “What a type he is,” he whispered to Cage and Lincoln. “A real know-it-all. How are we going to endure the rest of the voyage listening to his pronouncements of the obvious?—‘You've got to give them air!'—Well, yes, I rather suppose you do!”

He laughed again and rolled his eyes to heaven. But the obvious fatuity of Mr. Kelso was not the uppermost concern in Cage's mind. He was staring at the slaves on the deck. Lincoln was too. Andy, the man who had been separated from his wife, was playing some sorrowful air on his fiddle when, seeing Mr. Kelso approach, he put the instrument away into its case and stood up with the rest of the Negroes and began shuffling across the deck, out of the sunlight and back into the hold. The men were compliant, orderly. You could see the fatal resignation in their eyes as they marched forward with the chain running between them.

“A trotline,” Lincoln muttered, glancing at Cage. “A human trotline.”

Speed did not hear the reference, or notice the seething discomfort in his friends' attitude. He was still talking, though he had dropped Mr. Kelso and returned to the theme of marriage, whether it was possible for one man and one woman to make each other happy for life.

“Fanny comes from a splendid family,” he was saying. “And God knows she's a beautiful woman, in body and in soul. Another man wouldn't hesitate for a minute. What is it about me, do you think, that makes me—”

“For God's sake, Speed, will you shut the hell up?”

The words flew out of Cage's mouth before the thought behind them had even formed. Speed's contented voice, his untroubled assumption that the slaves on this ship would receive the same benign, paternalistic stewardship that he imagined they enjoyed at Farmington, his inability even to envision the cruel servitude that would just as likely be their fate, and above all his infuriating, insulting assumption that others should applaud him and his family for their enlightened conception of human bondage—all this caused Cage to suddenly erupt. It was not all his friend's fault, and he knew it. There was the toll of his own conscience, for having spent three weeks at Farmington holding himself back from voicing his opinion about the insupportable rot that underlay the Speed family's plantation paradise. He was ashamed of himself. He had seen the whip marks on Cordelia's back, he had seen her trembling in fear at the thought of being sent back to Kentucky. How had he allowed himself to fall so far into complacency on the one subject in the world that demanded a raging denunciation?

Speed's reaction to his outburst was to laugh as if he was going along with the spirit of some joke that he didn't quite understand. Then his face tightened and he said, “What?”

“How can you go on about whether or not you'll be marrying Fanny when that man down there has just been torn from his wife?”

“I'll go on about whatever I want, Cage.
I
didn't tear that Negro from his wife. And I don't like you bringing Fanny into this argument—if an argument is what we're having—in the first place. What does she have to do with it? If you weren't such a good friend and such a formerly agreeable companion I might have to issue a challenge. Should I issue a challenge, Lincoln?”

Lincoln had been silent until now, and he was silent a moment more, his face set, watching the last of the shuffling slaves disappear beneath the overhang of the deck. “It is a troubling sight
,
Joshua,” he finally said. “I admit that the whole thing unsettles my soul.”

“Well, what exactly would you like me to do about it?”

“I don't know,” Cage said. “It can't go on.”

“It can and it will,” Speed answered, his voice still testy and hurt. “It will go on until we have no more need of it and it simply dies away. And you might not believe me, but I hope that day comes soon. I'm not foolish like that man. I don't for a minute believe that slavery is a noble institution. But it exists, it's always existed, and the abolitionists who want to stamp it out aren't reckoning the cost to our country. Do you want a war, is that what you want? And by the way, your airy high-mindedness is really irritating, Cage, especially as it comes after you've enjoyed three weeks of slaves laundering your clothes and cooking your meals.”

“I'm aware of my own hypocrisy, but there's a—”

“Oh, fuck yourself, Cage. Go write a poem about your discovery that slavery is not the finest invention in the world, and see if it changes anything!”

Speed stood so abruptly and aggressively as he said this that his chair fell to the deck behind him. Cage stood as well, in response to Speed's hostile posturing. But he felt so absurd and ashamed that he couldn't really entertain the idea of a fight, much less a duel. They glared at each other theatrically until Lincoln told them to sit down and stop making a spectacle of themselves.

“I don't like my friends to be at war,” he said. When they grudgingly sat down again he got out of his own chair and turned his back on them and walked over to the railing. Cage and Speed had nothing more to say to each other, so they just contemplated Lincoln as he stared sternward, watching the great paddle wheel agitate the river. After a while he came back to them and said he believed he would have an orangeade at the bar.

“And just so you'll know,” he said, “my tooth is hurting again, thanks to the two of you.”