A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (20 page)

“I was carrying a book with me.”

“I picked it up. Got it right here. Is it any good?”

Cage took the dusty book from Lincoln's hand and drew in his breath. The pain was still outlandish. “I can't concentrate on a literary discussion right now.”

“Understandable.”

With Lincoln at his side, he hobbled the few blocks to Ash Merritt's house. Lincoln couldn't keep himself from chattering away about the dog problem, which was far worse than the pig problem had ever been back in the old days. The market house was full of ownerless dogs fighting over meat scraps, biting little children, barking at horses, and causing wrecks on every corner. He was a town trustee now and was thinking of proposing a dog eradication committee, fully armed and with the authority to shoot every suspect canine on sight.

“I hope that dog that bit you didn't have the rabies.”

“I don't want to think about that.”

“They say that the rabies makes a man hard as a railroad spike and he can't stop himself from ejaculating. It's like your pecker has the hiccoughs. Rabies is a bad way to die but if you're shooting off like a geyser all the time I reckon there's a silver lining in there somewhere.”

They reached Ash Merritt's house and the doctor ushered them into his office and without asking Cage's permission cut off his good wool trousers at the knee. The wound that was revealed—a dozen or so perfect punctures—commanded Cage's fascinated attention but was of no particular interest to Ash, whose mind as usual was fixed on politics and the upcoming legislative session. He rattled on about the new Democratic governor as he almost incidentally washed out the dog bite on Cage's leg with cold water and Castile soap.

“He may call himself a Democrat but as far as I'm concerned he's Loco Foco all the way,” Ash groused. “He's anti-bank, he's hard money, he wants to gather up all the gold and silver in treasury vaults and leave the people with nothing but worthless shinplasters.”

“We can beat back a subtreasury scheme for Illinois,” Lincoln said, glancing at some legal papers he had taken out of his hat. “Carlin can attack the banks all he wants, but he's still going to need a way to fund internal improvements.”

He took one of Ash's scalpels and, without asking Cage, began to cut the pages of his new poetry book. He sat there reading with his usual unearthly absorption while the doctor applied ointment and a lint bandage.

“Do I pay you in specie or in shinplasters?” Cage asked Ash when he had finished binding the wound.

“You're a friend, so you pay me not at all.”

“That's a dangerous course,” Lincoln said, looking up from Mr. Longfellow. “Friends should pay for services as well as enemies. It's nature's plan and it's a good one.”

Cage pressed a silver dollar on Ash. Then he left and walked awkwardly home with Lincoln still insistently at his side.

“You should take to your bed immediately,” he said.

Cage waved the idea off but in fact that was what he planned to do. Ash's ointment and dressing had a slight analgesic effect, but he was still in pain and still bearing a quiet but murderous rage toward the creature that had come out of nowhere to assault him.

“I think I may have broken that dog's ribs when I kicked him,” Lincoln told Cage. “I heard a bone crack.”

“Good.”

“I hate to think of an animal in pain. Even one that bites.”

Cage made himself walk on without speaking, but the pain of the dog bite was still severe, and the outrage that had been building in him since his turn on the witness stand finally broke through as they approached the Palatine. He turned to Lincoln and, to his own astonishment, knocked the sack of raisins out of his hand.

“You talked a jury into letting a murderer go free, and you used me to help you. No doubt you'd take that dog as a client and do the same for him. Before you were through you'd have everybody convinced I was the one who attacked
him
!”

Lincoln looked down at the raisins scattered on the dirt street. He gave a nervous sort of laugh, as if Cage's anger might turn out to be a performance. But Cage's anger was real, and as he limped away he had the satisfaction of seeing that fact register on Lincoln's face.

He slept not at all that night, kept awake by the pain in his leg and by a turbulent, confused anger, directed both toward the dog that had assailed him and toward the friend who had so blithely used him in court. At four thirty in the morning he heard Mrs. Hopper and her assistant, an orphan girl named Betsy who had fled to Illinois after her Mormon parents had been killed by a Missouri mob, walking out to the kitchen at the back of the house to start breakfast. He heard them setting the table in the dining room and smelled coffee and cornbread and fried ham. He heard the dinner bell softly ring and then the voices of the boarders as they walked into the dining room and greeted each other good morning and began to chat about the news of the day. He could not make out all of their conversation but he heard the words “Lincoln” and “Truett” and “Could you believe it?”

He heard Ellie's soft voice among the others. She was already a favorite among the residents of the Palatine. If they thought there was anything unusual about her circumstances they seemed perfectly willing to keep their speculations to themselves. Cage had thought at first she might hold herself apart from them, but instead she had quickly become an eager participant in the family-like conditions of the house, sharing in the parlor gossip, volunteering to mend clothes, treating Mrs. Hopper and Betsy with a professional consideration that was gratefully reciprocated. Toward Cage she was courteous and fondly teasing at times, but because so much depended on her new station there was a business-like correctness between them that could be broken only during their after-hours meetings at Ellie's dressmaking shop.

While the others were at breakfast he got up and washed and dressed and went down the back stairs to the privy, then up to his room again. His morning routine now was not to take breakfast but to go directly to his desk, with the purpose of composing poetry but more and more turning his attention at this productive time of day to his accounts. He was holding on to four town lots, thinking the ripest time to sell them would be when the statehouse was finished and the assembly was at last settled in Springfield, and he had two farm properties to manage, in addition to the Palatine and Ellie's shop. All of these matters—rent income, repairs, tenancy arrangements, town taxes, salaries, procurements—were increasingly complicated and vexing, with money always never quite where it needed to be. The work of accountancy had something in common with writing poetry, in the way the elements had to be shifted and weighted and prodded to achieve what was often an impossible effect. And it worried Cage sometimes that his own creative ambitions were neither as heroic nor as necessary as he thought, that whatever impulses he had to make a mark on the earth might be better realized by adding figures to a ledger.

He heard Ellie bidding a cheerful goodbye to Mrs. Hopper and then the front door opening and closing. He looked down at her through the window as she walked to her shop in the gusty October morning, people on the street smiling at her, nodding to her. She walked with her back straight, her gloved hands folded in front of her, her slender arms cocked outward on either side of her body with unthinking perfection, like the handles of a jar. Every day he discovered something new to arouse him. This morning it was the simple symmetry of the way she held her arms.

He watched her disappear around the corner. He was turning back to his work when he saw Lincoln striding down the street in an agitated fashion from the direction of his law office. No doubt he had slept there, since there was stubble on his hollow cheeks and his clothes—the same clothes he had been wearing yesterday—were so spectacularly wrinkled that Cage could see their condition from his second-floor window. Lincoln, he saw, was making straight for the front door of the Palatine. He heard his distracted “good morning” to Mrs. Hopper and the residents reading the newspaper in the parlor, then the sound of his hurried, loose-jointed tread on the stairs. Cage limped to the door and opened it as Lincoln was walking down the hallway with his arm upraised to knock—or perhaps to pound. He looked bad, his great Adam's apple bobbing nervously on his neck, his eyes sunken and fierce, his hair when he took his hat off greasy and uncombed and straying all over his head.

“Are you aware what you accused me of yesterday?” he demanded.

“For God's sake, Lincoln, don't berate me in the hallway. Come inside.”

Lincoln walked into the room and kept walking, pacing toward the opposite wall and back again to where Cage had just shut the door.

“If another man had said that I was without honor, I would have challenged him on the spot.”

“I didn't say you were without—”

“Then what did you say? What did you mean? I've been up all night trying to puzzle it out and that's the only conclusion I've been able to come to. Tell me this, Cage. Should I have tried any less to get Truett off? If so, how much less? Half as much? What is the proper level of effort to defend a man who is on trial for his life? Would you excuse me—would
God
excuse me—from fighting on behalf of an accused man because one of the key witnesses happens to be my friend?”

“The man he killed was your captain in the war!”

“Yes, he was, and if I had the power to bring him back to life I would, Democrat though he was.”

Lincoln leaned back against the wall and then slid dramatically down to the floor, running his big hands through his already agitated hair. “Everything you seem to be accusing me of is beside the point. Surely you understand that it's not my duty as a lawyer to judge the morality of my client. That's the judge's duty, and the jury's, and God's. I'm there to represent the poor devil with all the vigor and—”

“I think you need some breakfast,” Cage said.

“I can't live if my friends think I have no honor.”

“Stay here.” He went down to the kitchen, took several big pieces of leftover cornbread off the breakfast table that Mrs. Hopper was clearing, and brought them back to Lincoln, who was still sitting disconsolately on the floor. He accepted the cornbread and joylessly ingested the first piece in two bites. Cage handed him the second piece as if he were feeding an ape in a cage.

Lincoln was then so silent for so long that Cage went back to his desk and his accounts, letting him sulk on the floor for as long as he needed. Ten minutes passed before he spoke again.

“You rebuke me for having no principles, but I do have them, Cage. There are things I stand for. Without the law, for instance, without the full and dispassionate application of the law, there would be anarchy.”

“Anarchy—and no way for you to make your living.”

“If I didn't believe in what I do, I'd go back to rail-splitting. I'd go back to being a flatboatman.”

“Let's not talk about it anymore. Your apology is accepted.”

“I'm not apologizing! I'm challenging you to a duel!”

Cage laughed at the absurdity of that idea, and Lincoln despite his misery could not quite keep from laughing in response.

“I'm unsettled,” he said after a moment. “You unsettled me with your accusations that I'm a man without a soul.”

“You unsettled me by seeming to be one.”

“Will you, as my friend, take my word that I am not? I want always to do the right thing. A man like Truett goes free, and you may call that injustice, but there's a larger pattern of justice into which that verdict fits. There has to be that pattern. Without it our society falls apart.”

“That's ingenious. You do good by doing bad, so there's nothing left to argue about.”

Lincoln shrugged his narrow shoulders, acknowledging Cage's superior logic without somehow allowing it. He did stand for something, but as Cage would look back on that morning from a great distance in time he understood that Lincoln was still struggling, had not yet found out what that something was. That was true with Cage himself, of course, and with all of the young men of Springfield, but none of their internal struggles would prove as consequential as Lincoln's, none would demand so much sacrifice from a nation that he would not allow to be broken apart.

The question crossed Cage's mind that morning: was there really a future for Abraham Lincoln? He could descend so swiftly and completely into brooding melancholy, he was such a fatalist when it came to God and salvation and the truth of the Bible, he let himself revisit so frequently the theme of self-annihilation, that for all his great promise he seemed like a man who might not live.

He needed friends who would believe in him, to keep him from destroying himself with sorrow and self-doubt. Cage knew he had no real choice but to accept that role. But he also suspected that friends would not be enough. Lincoln, he thought, really needed a wife.