A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (32 page)

“We get rained on pretty regular,” Lincoln explained, “and these men do their share of snoring and farting when you stop for the night and share a bed with them, but I believe the circuit works better on my spirits than one of Ash Merritt's mustard rubs.”

Cage was glad to see his friend so revived. Lincoln wore his battered wide-brimmed straw hat. It shaded his eyes and made his face look less gaunt than his usual tall lawyer's hat. His duster and umbrella were strapped behind his cantle and his saddlebags were bulging with law books and legal papers. He rose high in his stirrups to take in the landscape and breathe in the air that was so fragrant with wildflowers. He was no longer stooped and slouchy. He sat his horse with the same confident bearing of the young man he had been at Kellogg's Grove almost ten years ago.

“How will you argue Cordelia's case?” Cage pressed him. Now that they were riding ahead of the others, he decided he had better try to steer the conversation toward strategy.

“Well, there's some law I can cite, though thorns have grown up around it here and there. We've got Article Six of the Northwest Ordinance on our side for a start, which says that Illinois is supposed to be a free state, though everyone knows you can keep a slave here and just call him an indentured servant. There was a case that came up a few months ago that will be pretty handy for us, since the court decided that for any person living in Illinois there's a presumption of freedom. The thorn there is that if she's a slave and they can prove it, there goes our presumption. The onus probandi as they call it lies with us.”

“The onus what?”

“Burden of proof. If this Richard Etheridge Esquire shows up at the hearing to claim his property, or sends somebody to do it for him more likely, it'll make my job proving she's not a slave a little harder than I'd like it to be.”

They rode all day, along a road Lincoln said he had helped lay out when he was a surveyor, across a toll bridge over Salt Creek that he had introduced a bill in the legislature to build. The very landscape seemed to belong to him, to be part of the constituency that fed his reviving sense of destiny. Beyond Salt Creek there were no groves or trees
,
just pure prairie and then a faint road leading through waving grass so tall it brushed against the necks of their horses. It was a road that seemed almost arbitrary in this featureless immensity, as if someone had tried to carve a route through the curving vault of heaven.

It was nearing dark when they pulled up at an inn in Delavan with fifteen miles still to go to Tremont. There were seven circuit riders, plus Cage, and they all shared the same room, dumping their baggage on the floor and then trudging into the dining room to eat greasy fried pork and stale cornbread. Cage was sore after the long ride, and when a cramp struck his leg during dinner he had to stand up to walk it off while the legal men remained at the table laughing and telling him welcome to the circuit. After dinner they played rolley-hole by torchlight, drinking and declaiming until the patient innkeeper suggested they retire to their beds. Cage shared a bed with Lincoln and Judge Treat, three others crowded together on the only other bed in the room, and the two remaining men slept on the floor on threadbare quilts. But no one really slept, partly because of the bedbugs, partly because they were all deliriously happy to be away from wives and offices and could not stop themselves from telling stories of last season's court cases, colorful suits involving marauding hogs and castration by pocketknife, bastardy and fornication and bestiality.

“This poor ignorant old farmer,” Sam Treat said. “He truly believed that human beings can impregnate livestock. ‘Your Honor, that man there fucked my sow and now she's gonna have some young bills on account of it, and by gum they won't be fit to sell.' ”

Treat was by nature quiet and thoughtful, but after telling his story he laughed so hard he fell off the bed. Even though he was the circuit judge he was a year or two junior to most of the men in the room, who were still in their earlier thirties. They were young men in command of other people's lives, inasmuch as they were routinely charged with saving men from bankruptcy or driving them into it, arguing for their imprisonment or for their release. Cage laughed along with them, taken up by their convivial spirit. Lincoln had vouched for him when they set out from Springfield as the finest fellow in Illinois, a great poet whose book, when finished, would cause him to be recognized as the presiding genius of the prairie land. Now, at one in the morning, David Campbell declared they must drink a toast to the one true scholar in their midst, the one man not corrupted by legal arcana, who would never have to argue over whose sow got fucked by whom. Since there were no glasses to raise the toast, they passed a bottle of whiskey around. When it reached Lincoln he passed it fluidly to the next man without comment.

Why did he not drink? Surely no sense of refinement or decorum prevented it, since he was neither refined nor decorous and kept in his head an extensive archive of the filthiest stories and jests human beings had ever uttered. For all of Lincoln's instinct for hearty comradeship, his was a private mind. He was a tightly held, unrevealing man, and perhaps he was afraid of what spirituous liquors might reveal of himself, afraid of the places within himself they might lead him.

The drinking men and the lone abstainer all fell asleep within an hour of the bottle being passed around, and woke to the assault of a brilliant beam of April sun through the streaked window. Cage had slept between Lincoln and Treat on the double bed, and when he woke his head was flanked by both men's smelly stocking feet and his forehead was covered with the red scabrous bumps of bedbug bites. The men yawned and pulled on their clothes and gathered up their gear and stumbled outside to the jakes. They took turns shaving and then ate a breakfast that was as dreary and unappetizing as their supper had been the night before. None of them complained. They appeared to take a certain communal pride in enduring the hardships of the accommodations and the grimness of the food.

They set out again across the open prairie, following the road as it led to a wide gravel ford across the Mackinaw River, and in another hour they were riding through the main street of Tremont, the seat of Tazewell County. Around the county courthouse, a colonnaded building of red brick with a towering cupola, there was already a crowd of prospective litigants waiting to meet the traveling lawyers, eager to enlist them in their legal causes now that the prescribed day of judgment had arrived. Cage saw Ellie among them. The fast-moving stage had delivered her in Tremont the night before, and now she stood, patient and solitary at the edge of the crowd, wearing a striped dress of blue and white, the tight sleeves showing off the contours of her arms, the plain lace collar closed enticingly at the base of her throat, where a shell cameo was placed as if by the hand of nature. She stood with geometric composure, her hands neatly in front of her, holding the corners of the zebra shawl that framed her bodice. She nodded at Cage as he reined up beside her, but there was no smile
,
just a look that communicated she was glad he had arrived and that now it was time to get down to business.

Grooms were waiting to take their horses to the stable, and Lincoln and the other lawyers had hardly dismounted before they began interviewing witnesses for their upcoming cases or going over pleadings with the local attorneys. Cage realized that if he didn't pull Lincoln away at once he would be subsumed in other cases, so he and Ellie each grabbed one of his arms and walked off with him in the direction of the jail.

“I'll be back in half an hour,” he called over his shoulder to his clamoring clients. “But right now I'm taken hostage and there's nothing I can do about it.”

“Well, it's Mr. Lincoln!” the delighted jail keeper exclaimed as he sprung up from his chair and pumped Lincoln's hand. “We heard you were a sick man down there in Springfield for a while.”

“Touch of the gravel, Bob. But I'm better now, and the circuit's always a tonic. Reckon my friends and I could talk to the Negro woman you got in here?”

The jail keeper led them upstairs, to a cell at the far end of the corridor. The jail smelled of mildew and urine and cabbage, and prisoners along the way, peering through the slots of their corroded iron doors, called out friendly greetings to the visitors. The door to Cordelia's cell shrieked on its unlubricated hinges when the jail keeper unlocked and opened it. Cordelia had heard them coming and was standing in front of her narrow cot, wearing a dress whose sleeves were torn and whose hem was caked in dried mud. She tried to suppress her tears but could not. She started to shiver—from fear, or from hope. Ellie gripped her shoulders and sat down with her on the cot, upon the single ragged blanket that Cordelia had made taut and square across the thin straw mattress in a forlorn attempt at housekeeping. She wept for a while. Ellie embraced her with a warmth that Cage did not think she would have cared to display. Watching the terrified girl, Cage rebuked himself for the exuberant comradely pleasures he had enjoyed in riding from Springfield while she had sat here in fright and isolation in this stinking cell.

“Mr. Lincoln here is your lawyer,” Ellie told Cordelia. “He's here to help you.”

Lincoln sat down next to them on the cot to hear her story while Cage remained standing with his back to the cell wall, upon which previous generations of male prisoners had recorded their obscene musings, either in words or in striking illustrations.

“Will you please tell me,” Lincoln asked, “whether your given name is Cordelia, or Louisa, as it says in the sheriff's handbill?”

“It's Louisa. Cordelia is what I rechristened myself on my own. That's my free name.”

“Well, let's continue calling you that, since our hope is that your freedom won't be interrupted for long. How did you come to find yourself in this jail, Cordelia?”

She looked at Lincoln, at his hauntingly plain face, the sad gray eyes leveled at her own. She looked only for an instant to Ellie, as if to confirm her impression that this man could be trusted, and then began telling him her story.

She was born a slave in Crittenden County, Kentucky, she said, the property of a long-widowed woman named Mrs. Etheridge. Mrs. Etheridge was a tolerant and kindly Christian woman who believed that Negroes had been made in the image of God just the same as white people had, but that the race had been degraded due to exposure to the tropical heat of Africa. She believed, however, that there were many individuals, like Louisa, in whom the spark of enterprise and intelligence had not been extinguished, and that it was her duty to improve them by giving them not just a living trade but an education sufficient to allow them to read the Bible and even suitable works of literature, such as the sonnets of Shakespeare and Milton's
Paradise Lost.

But Mrs. Etheridge, who in her prime had been a powerful matriarch, started to become senile at a young age and before she was even fifty years old suffered from great imbecility of mind. Her son—Robert—took over her affairs. He was less kindhearted than his mother and thought that Louisa would make a better investment if he hired her out. She was highly skilled at sewing and lacework, so he contacted an agent who sent her off to Frankfort to work for a milliner. The milliner abused her with the whip and in other ways she did not want to talk about. She ran off and made her way back to the Etheridge place, where she begged Robert to take her back into the home. But he would not hear of it and told her she would go back to Frankfort or he would put her up for auction on the open market and she would see how she liked her situation then. That night she managed to go through the demented woman's desk and find the bill of sale relating to her bondage, and also a contract that her son had made with the hiring agent to send her off to Frankfort. She stole some of Mrs. Etheridge's clothes and a map of the United States and managed to talk her way into a maid's job on a steamboat that brought her down the Ohio to the Mississippi, then up the Mississippi to the Illinois, where she disembarked at Pekin in the middle of the night and made her way overland to Springfield. She had assumed that Springfield, as the capital of a free state, would be the safest place for her to settle.

“Well,” Lincoln said, “going to Illinois was a bold stroke on your part. But as a general matter the top part of the state is a little freer for you Negroes than the bottom part. It's a good thing you didn't go as far south as Egypt. Springfield is where you met the gentlemen who introduced you to Mr. Weatherby here?”

“Yes sir.”

“Why didn't you tell me when you saw that handbill,” Ellie said, “instead of just running away?”

“A panic took hold of me, Mrs. Bicknell. That's the only reason I can say. I felt like a hunted slave and I had to run.”

She cut her eyes quickly back to Lincoln.

“But I hold that I'm not a slave, sir, since I'm in Illinois.”

“That's what I'll argue in court. Who seized you on the road the other day?”

“Three men. They asked me if I had a certificate of freedom and when I couldn't produce one they grabbed me and took me to the sheriff.”

“Did you say anything to them about your being a runaway slave?”

“No, I kept that to myself.”

“Good. What about the papers you stole?”

“I tore them up into a thousand little pieces the night I left and scattered them in the creek.”

“That was well done. What do you say when people ask you how you got this scar on your cheek?”

“That it was made by an accident with a pair of shears. I don't let on that it was a stray blow from the whip.”

“Are there other scars?”

“There are these.” She unbuttoned her dress without shame, though she was in the presence of two men. She turned her back and lowered it six or eight inches so that they could see the scars all across her back, carved there in an irregular ladder-like pattern. Though they were not recent, they were still raised and livid and always would be so. Lincoln examined the scars with the cold scrutiny of a physician, but Cage looked away, angry at what he was seeing, ashamed at himself for thinking that because he had done a good deed in hiring Cordelia his conscience had any right to be clear.