A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (19 page)

A
BRAHAM LINCOLN BEGAN
his cross-examination as if he had never met the man in the witness chair, a preposterous conceit that Cage found unsettling and insulting, as perhaps Lincoln meant it to be for some strategic legal reason. Since he was peering at Cage as if he was a stranger, Cage returned the favor, assessing Henry Truett's lawyer as if he was encountering him for the first time.

Lincoln had risen steadily from his chair and was standing with his hands locked behind him and his head inclined toward Cage in an anonymously friendly way. He was so tall that if he had put on his top hat it might have almost touched the trapdoor in the ceiling of the courtroom, the door that conveniently opened in the floor of Lincoln and Stuart's office overhead.

Cage had been questioned that morning by Stephen Douglas, acting as the state's attorney in the murder of Jacob Early. Douglas had kept his flamboyance in check, saving it no doubt for his summation, as he led Cage through the events of that March night with numbing specificity. Cage certainly didn't mind his thoroughness. It was odd to be on the side of the Little Giant, the political enemy of all his friends, but on this occasion Douglas—in prosecuting Truett—was the friend of justice.

Cage was the first prosecution witness—Reed and the others who had been in the Globe and witnessed the shooting were to be called later—and it seemed to Cage that if there was such a thing as a sure outcome to a murder trial they would all provide it.

Truett, sitting next to Douglas, looked meek and miserable. He had lost considerable weight and his skin had a jailhouse pallor, and from the way he stared fatalistically out the window it appeared he could allow himself no real cause for hope. Behind him the benches were full. The trial was a public excitement, every bit as much an occasion as a political debate.

“Now,” Lincoln began, “you told Mr. Douglas you saw a pistol in Truett's pocket.”

“I did.”

“And that upon seeing the pistol himself, Early jumped to his feet.”

“Yes.”

“Did you and Early see the pistol at the same moment?”

“I don't know.”

“Is it possible Early saw it at a different moment?”

“Yes.”

“He might have noticed it later than you did.”

“I suppose so, but I doubt it, because—”

Lincoln smiled and nodded as he cut Cage off.

“I'm just interested in the ‘suppose so' right now. Is it accurate to say that Early might have noticed the pistol later than you did?”

“It's accurate to say that.”

“In which case he might have jumped to his feet before he ever saw the pistol.”

Cage was saved from answering this by Douglas's objection.

Lincoln said “hmmm” as if the judge, in sustaining the objection, had given him more to contemplate. He grabbed the lapel of his coat and walked a few steps to the left and then a few steps to the right, then turned to face Cage again.

“You told Mr. Douglas he raised a chair in his arms.”

“Yes.”

“He raised the chair after he jumped to his feet?”

“Of course.”

“Just want to be sure. But I reckon it would be kind of hard to raise a chair and remain seated at the same time.”

Lincoln gave Cage a sly smile as the people in the courtroom laughed. It was the first hint Lincoln gave that he and Cage might know each other and share the same sense of the absurd.

“Since as you say it might be possible that Early noticed the pistol later than you did, then is it possible that Early raised the chair before he saw the pistol?”

Cage saw where it was going, that Lincoln had already drawn him into a world where the things he saw with his own eyes and the principles of logic were ruthlessly beside the point. There was no answer to his question, of course, but yes.

“Can you show the court by standing and raising your hands the approximate angle at which Jacob Early held the chair?”

Cage stood, raised his hands at shoulder height, as he remembered Early doing.

“That is the attitude of the deceased, to the best of your memory, at the time he held the chair?”

“Yes.”

“And that is the approximate height—again, to the best of your memory—at which he held the chair?”

“Yes.”

“It was a wooden chair?”

“It was.”

“Substantially made of oak or hickory or some similar substance?”

“Probably.”

“A heavy chair?”

“I didn't lift it.”

“But you saw Early lift it. Did it appear to be a heavy chair or a light chair?”

And so on it went, Lincoln slowly taking hold of the narrative, the self-evidently malicious and premeditated murder of Jacob Early by Henry Truett, and twisting Cage's testimony until it supported the idea that Truett had killed Early in self-defense.

Cage's testimony was over in an afternoon, but the trial lasted three days. He had resolved to put the whole unpleasant episode out of his mind and get back to work, confident that justice would inevitably be done and Truett would be found guilty, but he couldn't keep himself away from the crowded courtroom when it was time for the attorneys to address the jury. Like everything else in Springfield the final courtroom arguments represented a proxy political battle, in this case the first of many contests to come between Douglas and Lincoln.

“This man who lay dying on the floor of a tavern,” Douglas began, “was he a petty knockabout, a shady denizen of the criminal ranks? Was he a gambler, a debtor, a man on the run from the law or from his own immoral confederates? No, I think he was not any of these things. I
know
he was not any of these things, and so do you, gentlemen.”

Douglas sighed, he stared at the floor in a pose of despair over what had befallen the human race. Then, after a pause in which Cage could almost audibly hear him counting out the beats he thought would be required for the maximum dramatic effect, he raised his head and stared at each man of the jury in turn. They were all seated and he was standing, but he was so short he was already at eye level with them.

“He was one of you, one of us. A patriot in the war against Black Hawk, a Methodist preacher vouchsafed to deliver the Word, a man who stood against all forms of extremism and depravity. He was, in short, gentlemen, the very heart of our hopeful prairie community, this citadel of temperance and goodness, the moral bricks of which it could be said he laid with the hand of a master mason.”

The longer he went on, the more extravagant his claims for Early's character became, and he spent an equal amount of verbal energy sketching the low, vindictive, and unscrupulous behavior of the accused. It went on and on, a great set piece of legal coloratura that the packed courtroom enjoyed more than subscribed to.

Lincoln's summation by contrast was short. It was direct. Where Douglas had tried to flatter the jury by painting them as the sole bulwark against a spreading evil, Lincoln provided them with a single idea to consider.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I don't know what happened that night in the Globe. There were men there who saw it, and who testified in this courtroom with honest intent, so that you could arrive at the truth and deliver a fair verdict. You heard them. You heard them say that Jacob Early raised a chair, that Henry Truett raised a pistol. What none of them could say with the confidence required to send a man to the gallows is who raised which weapon first. The idea that a heavy chair could be a weapon is no little matter. It is no defense lawyer's trick. It is a fact of our physical world. Henry Truett was angry at Jacob Early. We don't dispute that. He spoke intemperately. We don't dispute that either. And in speaking intemperately he provoked Jacob Early, and what we will never know—what we can never know—is whether Early had it in his mind to smash Truett over the head with a crushing blow that could have splintered his skull. But it's that very fact—the fact that we
can never know
—that must be the challenge to your consciences as you go off to the jury room to determine whether Henry Truett will live or die.
Can never know
—those are the words you must live with into your old age, those are the words that will haunt you if you make a decision today that will end a man's life, a decision that can never be undone.”

Cage heard that the jury had found Truett innocent three hours later, when he was picking up a book of poetry he had ordered from a New England publisher. Suddenly people ran into the bookshop to talk about the startling verdict. The whole city was like an audience flooding out from an energizing time in the theater, desperate to talk about the surprise ending they had just witnessed.

But Cage had been in the room when Jacob Early was shot, and what he had witnessed was not theater. It was cold-blooded murder, and the man who had committed it had been set free because of an absurd, made-up counter-argument that Early had been the aggressor.

He left the bookstore and walked outside, dodging the carriages that now crowded the street, making a simple walk home a hazard for pedestrians. For all its new status as the state capital, Springfield still had boggy streets. And despite a new city ordinance against pigs, the creatures still ranged freely, doing their part to stir up the filth. The statehouse was still unfinished—the assembly would convene once again in Vandalia for its upcoming session in December—and construction debris and shouting workmen and drays loaded with building materials added to the chaos.

He understood that Lincoln had had a role to play and had played it well, but he was sick at heart with the miscarriage of justice he had just witnessed, and angry at the way Lincoln had maneuvered him to play a part in it. To try to settle his mind he unwrapped the book he had just bought:
Voices of the Night,
by a new Massachusetts poet—his age? younger?—he had read good things about. The author had the improbably perfect name of Longfellow. It was a slim volume, a first modest offering to the world. As he walked, he thumbed through the uncut pages, reading a line or two at random and then glancing up to make sure he didn't collide with a teamster's wagon or a rooting sow.

“I heard the trailing garments of the Night,” was the first line of one of the poems. He didn't read on, didn't want to. There was no way the poem could sustain the mysterious pitch of that one perfect line. He read it again as he made his way down the street, and was about to read it again when one of the stray dogs that the town trustees had vowed to keep off the street raced silently up to him and buried its teeth in the flesh of his calf. The pain was unthinkable and inescapable. He yelled unashamedly and looked down at the dog in disbelief. He hit it on top of its flat head with Mr. Longfellow's thin poetry book, but the dog's jaws just clamped down tighter, producing new horrible harmonies of pain. He kicked at the animal with his untrapped leg but only succeeded in falling down onto the dirt street.

People swarmed to his aid without accomplishing anything as the dog kept growling and thrashing. Lying in the street, Cage was so preoccupied with the ever-escalating pain that he couldn't open his mouth to communicate with the people who were trying to help him.

Just when it began to seem to Cage that his situation was a hellish nightmare out of Dante, that this creature would gnaw on his leg throughout all time, a huge human foot intervened and kicked it splendidly hard in the ribs. Cage heard the dog yelp and at the same moment felt the release of its jaws. It raced off whimpering in pain and outrage down Adams Street until it disappeared into some secret lair.

“Think you can walk?” a familiar creaky voice said from above as Cage lay there panting in pain.

Cage nodded and let Lincoln help him up. He was in his tall hat and was carrying a law book and a bag of raisins. He bent down to inspect Cage's bloody leg.

“I can see the tooth marks through your trousers. Looks like you got punched with an awl. We better get our friend Dr. Merritt to clean it out and put a dressing on it.”