A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (2 page)

He walked south to Aristocracy Hill, where Ninian Edwards's grand house still stood, looking much the same as it had when he and the other ambitious young men of Springfield had congregated there for hops and balls and windy political talk, arrogant enough to believe that any room that held them was the staging ground of their futures. Those futures were now revealed—certainly Abraham Lincoln's was. He was venerably dead now, sealed already within a tomb of myth. Would anyone ever really believe he had once been young—young and confused and desperate for success?

As for Cage Weatherby, his future appeared to him on this bleak night to be just a listless pageant of increasing obscurity and age.

After another hour of wandering in the warm May darkness he walked back through the square on the way to his hotel and stopped on the corner of Washington and Fifth, remembering. Of course: this was where Speed's store had been. But it was not here anymore. It had been demolished or burned down and then swallowed up by another modern brick row.

While he was standing there he saw a doorway shingle:
Lincoln and Herndon.
This must be where the new law office was. New to Cage, anyway. When he had left Springfield in the damnable summer of 1846 the office had been on the other corner of the square. This building, like all the others, was a funereal display tonight, everything draped in black. But there was a light burning in one of the back windows overlooking the alley. It was late now, eleven o'clock. The streets were finally starting to empty, though there were plenty of people who apparently had no rooms to sleep in and were passing the night before the funeral just walking back and forth.

He tried the street-level door. It was unlocked. His lonesome, grieving mood gave him leave to enter. The stairway creaked and he trod heavily in the darkness to make it creak louder, worried that he would take someone by surprise and be greeted with a bowie knife in the ribs. At the top of the stairs a glass-paned door was wide open. Inside were two long tables formed into the shape of a T. Billy Herndon sat alone at one wing of the top table, staring down with more absorption than was warranted at a piece of pie. It was like a painting by some Flemish master—the clever pool of lamplight, the ruddy-faced subject, the untouched pie on its white china plate, the thick green folds of the baize that covered the working tables.

“Billy,” he said from the doorway, “it's Cage.”

Herndon looked up with no hurry and no apparent surprise, though the two men hadn't seen each other in twenty years. He stood up without a word and with tears in his eyes. He held out his hand. Cage crossed the room to shake it. The office was bigger but essentially the same as the old one had been—a messy, overflowing room with random stacks of books and papers and pleadings, floors that looked like they had never been scrubbed. Not the sort of place to inspire confidence in a man trying to win a lawsuit or escape a murder charge, but an initial impression of shabbiness was a vital part of the way that Abraham Lincoln had worked his spell.

“You want this pie?” Herndon said. “I hate the idea of it.”

“All right.”

Billy handed him a fork. Although he had eaten dinner, Cage was still hungry. Partly this was due to the hollowing effects of sorrow, but the memory of true starvation, of that Sierra winter, accounted for something more, a kind of fretful ravening that was now a permanent part of his consciousness.

“My wife made it,” Billy said. “She's a good hand with a crust, but today of all days I do not want to eat a piece of pie.”

He poured bourbon into a glass and then leavened it with a splash of water from a pitcher. He said he had another glass somewhere in the office. Cage told him not to bother.

“I don't remember you as a temperance man.”

“I wasn't particularly, back then. I'm more inclined to it now, for some reason.”

“Well, God bless you, sir, and God bless our murdered friend.”

He took a deep sip of his bourbon and sat back, looking warmly at Cage.

“I read your poem, of course. Along with the whole country. By God it's a masterwork. It will be remembered.”

“Maybe. It doesn't matter.”

“Of course it matters and you know it. ‘Those were the arms that swung the axe, that broke the ice and set the waters free.' Very fine. Very fine indeed. You see, I've memorized it already.”

He didn't have the line quite right, though Cage didn't bother to correct him. The poem came from something Lincoln had told him many years ago, how as a young man he had been employed to break up the ice on the Sangamon to open a channel for a steamship trying to make its way past New Salem. Setting the waters free was too obvious a metaphor for emancipation, but that had not bothered Cage when he composed the poem and it did not bother him now. At a time of national and personal distress, subtlety was a fussy virtue.

“You saw him?” Herndon asked.

“This morning.”

“How do you think he looked?”

“I wish I hadn't seen it.”

Cage took another bite of his pie and pushed the plate aside across the table.

“He was coming back here to practice law with me,” Herndon said. “He said we'd take up again as if nothing had ever happened. Though I doubt that when it came to it she would have let him. Do you know the name for her in Washington? The hellcat.”

“Don't call her that. Not now.”

“Have you heard how she treated Springfield? We bought the old Mather place for her, spent fifty-three thousand dollars. Hundreds of workmen working night and day to build a marble tomb. You can go see it now, I'll take you there. By God, the name Abraham Lincoln is already carved into it! But she turns her back on us
,
just the way she always did. Not good enough for her husband, not ‘quiet' enough. Threatens to bury him in Chicago if we don't start all over again out at the new cemetery. She has no friends here, Cage.”

He finished his drink in one quick, practiced swallow and poured another. Billy Herndon was no longer the fervent young clerk of Joshua Speed's store, ten years younger than Lincoln and Cage but always ready with passionate opinions about the abomination of slavery or the treachery of Jackson. He was emotional and high-tempered and had been nursing the hurt of Mary Lincoln's dislike of him for years. But he had worshipped her husband, of course. He now wore his own version of the president's beard, though in his case the unshaven upper lip contrasted too strongly with the robust whiskers below, so that the top of his face looked strikingly naked. The beard had some gray in it, but his hair was still dark and combed into a disorderly clump on top of his head.

Billy gestured with his glass, not subtly, to Cage's empty sleeve.

“Did you ever talk to him, after that?”

“No.”

“Were you there when Baker was killed?”

“Not far away, but I couldn't see anything, or hear anything either.”

“This horrible war. We could never have imagined such a thing back then, could we? How did you get here all the way from California in time?”

“I'm at Chicago now.”

“Are you so? I didn't know that.”

He had been in bed with Ellie when he heard the news. The illicit nature of their union—“union”: there was the word again, inescapable forevermore—had long worn off and they had been lying there feeling, in their settled comfort with each other, satisfyingly chaste. A stout one-armed man and a still slender and still unattainable gray-haired woman, neither asking too much more of life than what was there before them. The news came by telegraph only an hour or so after Booth had struck. When they heard the excitement below Ellie's house on Clark Street he guessed what had happened—more than guessed. Though he had never consciously prophesied Lincoln's murder, he felt a calm confirmation flood through him. The moment he had been waiting for without knowing it had come to pass. They both dressed quickly and followed the crowds to the newspaper office. An hour or so later the door opened and someone stepped out with a piece of paper in his hand. Although Cage and Ellie were too far back to hear, an almost visible wave of shock traveled through the people massed in front of them and hit them with its full force. They clung to each other as they tried to absorb the news that he was truly dead, then walked back through the streets as the sobbing and wailing and cries of vengeance went on all around them. They stayed up all night, Cage writing his poem. Ellie's weeping maid brought in coffee and they drank it in amazed silence as they sat at the window looking down on the crowded streets, where people were racing back and forth, asking one another for news as if some urgent detail could countermand the finality of what they had already heard.

“The news was just too large,” Herndon was saying now, as if he had somehow been sharing Cage's own recollection. “Too large to enter my brain.”

“What will you do now, Billy?”

“Well, keep practicing law without him, I suppose. But that won't be any fun at all.”

Herndon settled back into his hard wooden chair in a slouch. He looked out of his office window as if there were a view to be contemplated, but there was nothing to see but smudged glass and a range of tar-covered roofs that only deepened the blackness of this black night.

“All the lawyers in town got together a few days ago,” he told Cage. “They asked me to put forth the resolutions: his noble character, kind heart, iron integrity, on and on. But it started to feel somehow not complete, not the full portrait. So I added one little phrase about how he wasn't maybe quite as broad-minded as some other men. Well, there was hell to pay for that, I can tell you! Logan himself jumping up to protest as if I'd blackened his memory forever.”

“It's natural. People grieving.”

“Well, ain't I grieving too, Cage? Wasn't he my friend as well? The thing is I don't care what Logan says. I don't care what the hellcat herself says. By God, if we let it happen they'll just steal him away from us, make him the most broad-minded man who ever walked the earth and it'll be like the real Lincoln never even existed.”

He lifted a big volume of Kent's
Commentaries
with a secret ceremonial flourish, as if he were removing the lid from a tomb. Beneath it was a small sheaf of loose pages covered with his undisciplined handwriting.

“I've been up here scribbling for the last two nights. I believe I might write a book. What do you think about that?”

“There'll be many books about him. Why not one from you?”

“You misunderstand me. I'm not talking about just a book, I'm talking about something essential. The verifiable truth about him, not sentimental blather. And not just what I know firsthand but what I can find out from people like you—people who really knew him.”

“Mary?”

“Mary too. But I doubt she'd even answer a letter from me. And what do you think the odds are of her telling the truth about anything? You know her—she's going to think she can hold history by the throat. That's why I need your help. Set down a few recollections, Cage. Send them to me. Do you promise?”

Cage said he was too tired to promise anything; he would think about it. But by the time he had stood and shaken Billy Herndon's hand and walked back down the stairway to the street he had decided he would not burden himself with presenting the true story of Abraham Lincoln to the world. To hell with history and to hell with everything just now that was not his quiet room at the Chenery House. As he walked outside every step registered his increasing girth and gravity. A single piece of pie seemed to have made a telling difference. His collar was too tight and he could feel the strain in his shirt and coat. The sense of constriction excited the phantom pains in his missing arm. He had once thought he had trained himself to recognize those pains as illusory and therefore disregard them, as a sleeper upon awakening can talk himself out of the reality of a nightmare. But he was as much in as out of a nightmare tonight, and the pains were real, a burning restlessness as the severed nerves probed and throbbed, trying to capture the shape of a thing that was gone and could never be again.

He did not need to write down his memories, for Herndon or anyone else. They would come unbidden throughout the remainder of his life, a life whose course had been formed, as the course of the country had been formed, by the spirit and will of one man.

But for all the memories, Lincoln was distant from him tonight, distant in power and fame, conclusively distant in death. Cage saw, walking through the empty square, that the lights were on in the statehouse where his friend lay, where the guards were still keeping him company and the mourners still filing through on the eve of his interment. The light leaking through the windows, though, looked forlorn and weak—a lonely hearth fire on a vast dark prairie. And above the statehouse, almost invisible against the night sky, flew the black pennon of death.