A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (5 page)

He shifted his weight, leaned back on a bony elbow and stared into the fire. For a moment he looked, with his long narrow head and with his looming brows casting dark shadows over his sunken cheeks, like a skeletal old man. The others were laughing at something Jim Reed had just said, but Lincoln remained silent. The absence of his good humor was so acute it seemed as if he had removed himself not just from the conversation but from the earth. In an instant he had gone from being the soul of this society to its self-banished exile.

Stuart and Early and the others argued above his brooding silence—ignoring it, no doubt used to it. But Cage had only just met Abraham Lincoln, and he did not seem like a man you could pretend was no longer there.

S
OMETHING CALLED THE ALAMO
had fallen. David Crockett, the frontier wit and former Tennessee congressman, had improbably been inside the Texas fort and killed by the Mexican army along with the rest of the insurgents. There was a great stir in Springfield about the news, men gathered in the muddy streets gossiping and throwing out opinions as hogs grunted and foraged indifferently alongside them. It was winter still, but the sun was bright, melting yesterday's icicles that clung to eaves and business signs. The bell announcing a stage arrival rang out from the Globe Tavern around the corner.

Jim Reed was holding forth on the courthouse lawn in a state of righteous agitation, leaning against the whipping post and reading aloud from the pages of the
Sangamo Journal.
He announced that a Jonathan Lindley from Illinois was among the dead, though neither Cage nor the half dozen other men on the lawn recognized the name.

“ ‘The countenance of Crockett was unchanged,' ” he read, shaking his head impatiently at the newspaper writer's maudlin prose. “ ‘He had in death that freshness of hue, which his exercise of pursuing the beasts of the forests and the prairie had imparted to him.' ”

Reed turned to Cage with a pained grin. “Yes, of course,” he said, laughing bitterly, “we all well remember the freshness of hue that death imparts.”

Clean-shaven, wearing good clothes, his hair barbered close to his oversized ears, Reed nevertheless still had more than a trace of the feral intensity Cage remembered from that day at Kellogg's Grove. He liked Reed well enough and was friendly with him in a cautious way. A fearless, impulsive, go-ahead sort of man like Reed was a beacon in war, but in the four years since Black Hawk's defeat he had not adjusted well to the torpor of peace, and had thrown himself into one ill-considered business after another out of sheer restlessness.

“Santa Anna didn't even bury the bodies,” he announced when he returned to the newspaper. “They just burned them like dogs.”

The men on the courthouse lawn seethed in outrage. Reed proposed forming a company of old Black Hawk War comrades to march south and represent Illinois in avenging the martyrs of the Alamo and in securing the liberation of Texas from the Mexican tyrant. If the enterprise went well, he said, they could all be wealthy and important men in a boundless new empire.

“I'll put my name to that list,” Ashbel Merritt said. “I'll go to Texas right now without another thought.” Ash was a doctor, though he took such a public and pugnacious role in Whig political battles that it was sometimes hard to associate him with the art of healing. He was slight, and had thinning blond hair, pale skin, and silken side-whiskers: bland-looking, except for the animating ferocity in his eyes.

Billy Herndon's father, Archie, always eager to be whipped up, also spoke well of the idea. But before the talk of riding to the rescue of Texas went any further one of the men pointed to a figure walking out of the land office. “Lincoln's in town!”

The group in front of the whipping post adjourned without comment and reconstituted itself in front of Abraham Lincoln.

“Yes, I just heard the news myself,” he told them. “Crockett dead. That's a hard one to believe, especially since he's always promoted the opinion that he was sort of immortal.” He was shaking hands as he spoke—“Hello Jim, hello Ash, hello Archie”—and when he shook hands with Cage he gripped hard and leaned in a bit. Cage stood at five feet and ten inches. Lincoln was even taller than he remembered, and was smiling down upon him just now with what felt like a lordly benevolence.

“Well, it's been a while,” Lincoln said. “But I remember you and I hope you remember me.”

“Of course I do,” he answered. If Lincoln hadn't been a memorable personality in the first place, Cage would still have been aware of him and curious about him, since he was a rising member of the state's General Assembly now and was always being written about in the newspapers. But they hadn't seen each other for almost four years, since that day at Kellogg's Grove. Lincoln didn't live in Springfield, but in New Salem, which was twenty miles away, and most of his legislative activity took place in Vandalia, which at that time was still the Illinois capital.

“I'm glad I finally ran across you,” Lincoln said, “because I read your—”

“Let's all go over to Speed's store,” Reed interrupted, literally herding the men down the street. “When there are great questions to be settled we ought to be standing around a stove and not quacking on the street like ducks.”

Cage joined the group as they walked down to Joshua Speed's store. More people followed and drifted in, until the open space at the back of the store was filled and the onlookers crowded against the shelves of hardware and medicine and the mattresses that were lined up vertically against the wall. Arguments rippled back and forth about the Texas adventure. Some of the men thought it ought to be none of their business because it had happened in a foreign country and the Americans in the Alamo had known—or should have known—exactly what they were getting into. Others decreed that any place where American blood had been spilled by a tyrant ought to by God be considered henceforth American soil.

“Mexico is unstable and corrupt,” Reed said. “As a matter of principle, Texas should be salvaged from it.”

He spoke in a tone of sonorous finality that suggested his should be the last word on the subject, but opinions kept blasting forth anyway. Joshua Speed, who owned the store and who was long used to his hospitality being taken for granted, mostly contented himself with opening the door of the stove and stirring the fire with a poker. He had dark wavy hair, a straight nose, a lean face. He had grown up in comfortable circumstances in Kentucky and, perhaps as a result, was in possession of one of the town's calmer spirits.

Cage stood at the back of the group, listening and not offering much in the way of opinions, though the memory of those dead men strewn on the prairie prejudiced him against enrolling in another war, this one not against a fraying Indian confederacy but the nation of Mexico and its professional army. The air was soon oppressed with cigar smoke, none of it emitted by Lincoln, who stood off to the side with one elbow resting on a windowsill and his opposite arm hanging by his side. In civil society, or as civil a society as this raucous, opinionated crowd represented, he appeared more singular than he had the day Cage had met him after the panic at Kellogg's Grove. He had gained some weight since that hungry summer, but he did not seem capable of gaining much, and his proper suit of dark jeans only accentuated his height. But he was still powerful-looking, his skin burnished and his frame taut from the surveying work he did to help piece together a living while he served in the legislature.

He was listening mostly, nodding his head reflectively every now and then in the manner of an actor waiting backstage for his cue, until there was a lull in the conversation and everyone automatically looked in his direction. “What do you think, Lincoln?” Speed finally asked him.

“Well, I think I ought to detach myself from these learned speculations pretty soon so I can get back to New Salem before dark. But if you're pressing me for an opinion on this Alamo business I'd say it's a terrible tragedy for those fellas and their families but they were Mexican citizens, or at least were supposed to be according to the colonization laws as I understand them. We could all head down there and get ourselves into the business of overthrowing a foreign government, as Jim and some of the rest of you think we ought to do, but I believe I'll stay here in Illinois unless Santa Anna takes a notion to invade the United States.”

Lincoln's remarks didn't end the squabbling about what honorable men must do as a result of the events in Texas, but they had a mysterious clarifying effect, shifting the course of the argument away from the need for instant and aggrieved action to leisurely philosophizing about national interests. By and by the talk swerved to the inevitable topic: the presidential election six months away, the Democrats and their goddam convention ploy, Van Buren's high-handed scheme to give the vote to free Negroes.

“Van Buren lubs de niggers,” one of the men said. “He lubs to see dey kinky heads at de ballot box.”

This bit of minstrel mockery was contagious, the men doing their best to top one another in servile diction and darkie jokes. Cage laughed along—the jokes were funny, especially Lincoln's—though the sheer weight of ridicule directed toward their fellow human beings troubled him. He was a Massachusetts man, or at least had been a Massachusetts boy, a state where the word “abolition” could be breathed aloud. Not so in the supposedly free state of Illinois, where the papers were full of advertisements for the return of runaway slaves and household indenture was impossible to distinguish from outright Southern captivity. But he had wandered the world and scrabbled hard for purchase somewhere, and this was where he now was, among these ambitious young men of his own age. It was in their society that his fortune and reputation had to be secured, where his dreams could advance, and so there were opinions he knew he ought best keep to himself.

When the gathering finally broke up and the men were filing out of the store, Cage felt a hand on his elbow.

“Can't you spare an old friend a minute's conversation?” Lincoln asked. They fell into step beside the plank fence surrounding the courthouse, picking their way carefully through the muddy slough that was Springfield's main street.

“I was greatly agitated by your book,” Lincoln said. “I should have written you a letter about it. I'm convinced there won't be a finer thing ever written about the war.”

“Thank you,” Cage said. “My own opinion is that I brought it out too hastily. Some of the poems I can't bear to look at anymore. I should have had the patience to look for a proper publisher rather than just print it on my own.”

“No, it benefits from that very impatience. It has the feel of a book that was forged in the fire and brought out blazing hot. I've read it six times. I could recite it to you, if there's any part you've forgotten. How far did the war take you before it turned you loose?”

“I was at Bad Axe.”

“Were you so? All the way to Bad Axe? You were in the way of some real fighting then.”

He said this with a glum undertone that suggested envy, though Cage by now wished he had seen none of it, that he had not been part of the force trailing Black Hawk and the starving remnants of his people through the Trembling Lands. He wished that his own musket had not added to the fusillades that shot Indians out of the trees in the wooded islands between the Mississippi channels. He had watched them tumble branch from branch like squirrels. He had seen women and children gunned down in the muddy sloughs as they tried to escape across the river. By the time his fellow volunteers were carving strips of flesh from dead warriors to cure and use as souvenir razor strops he was thoroughly estranged in his mind from the war. In his
Sketches,
he had written about such things only obliquely, in lines infused with a shame and anger that he worried might seem unaccountable to a casual reader. But to write the literal truth of the obscenities he had witnessed would have meant disgracing poetry itself.

“Our little spy company got mustered out up there on the Bark River,” Lincoln said. “We got close to finding Black Hawk's trail a time or two, but those were lean days and they didn't have anything to feed us so they told us just to forget about Black Hawk and to go on home. How we got home was a wonderment in itself. Another man and me got our horses stolen, so we had to walk back through those miserable bogs taking turns on John Stuart's horse all the way to Peoria. I was a wretched creature when I got home to New Salem.”

“Not so wretched now, it seems,” Cage said.