A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (36 page)

A
YEAR PASSING. ANOTHER AUTUMN,
another bitter winter, the constant threat of life resolving itself into an unquiet stasis. Investment opportunities came Cage's way and he weighed liability against opportunity with the same critical eye he brought to the composition of his verse. He was neither a heedless investor nor a careless poet; if he were to succeed he must work with deliberation. He was past thirty and there was no time for abandon, for following trails that could lead him to financial ruin or to death-bound obscurity. He tried to see beyond the moment, past the statewide financial catastrophe brought on by the failure of the internal improvements projects. The building of the railroads and canals had been stalled but these things would come eventually. If a man was patient enough with his money he would benefit from holding land along a major waterway.

Veterans of the War of 1812 had been given warrants for land in the Military Tract between the Illinois and the Mississippi. Many of them had sold their warrants to speculators, and now the speculators themselves were eager to sell, often at a loss, ready to move on to more dynamic investments. Cage had been steadily investing in acreage in the Military Tract whenever he could, but now was the time, he decided, to increase his holdings, even at the risk of considerable debt. From several other disappointed speculators he bought land between the Rock River and the Mississippi, the very terrain that he had helped seize from Black Hawk and his desperate warriors. He signed the contracts and saved his troubled conscience for the pages of his book, which he was still composing and revising. There were new poems from his experiences in the Black Hawk War. They were angrier and more unsparing than those he had previously published and which brought him his earlier notice. These poems, together with those he had written after Cordelia's trial and his encounter with the slaves on board the
Lebanon,
laid the moral ballast of the manuscript. The love poem Ellie had spurned was part of the collection as well, though much changed and much harder. All the contents were harder, harder and crueler. He had not spared himself, or did not think he had. The persona of these poems was at heart an observer, a compromised one: a man who was righteously intolerant of slavery but a compliant guest at a slave plantation; who was disdainful of politics but drawn to the liveliness and tribal spirit of politicians; who was romantic-minded but infatuated with a woman determined not to love him. He had no wish to disguise the contradictions and flaws of his own character. The book was as honest a record as he could make of what it was like to be alive and grasping in a wild place beyond the notice of the world.

The Springfield poetry society had long since stopped meeting. Lincoln's mental collapse and Speed's move to Kentucky had taken the life from it. But Cage invited Lincoln over one night so that he could read some of the newer poems to him. He wanted Lincoln's judgment only, not the clamoring air of congratulation that had characterized the poetry society. Lincoln—his legs folded over the arms of Cage's desk chair—listened without ever stirring. The expression of absolute concentration on his face never changed.

“You're doing something very remarkable,” he said after a suitable moment of silence when Cage had concluded his reading. There was deep emotion in his voice, genuine appreciation but also more than a trace of envy. “While the rest of us have been scrambling all over each other to get elected to some mere earthly position, you've been sitting here transcribing the thoughts of angels. You're making yourself immortal, Cage.”

“Please don't be ridiculous.”

“You'll live beyond the grave, there's no question of it.”

He would not let go of the theme. He kept praising Cage's accomplishment with such fervor that it was clear that the chief thing on his mind was the ambivalence he felt about his own future. In Cage's unexpressed opinion, his friend was right to be worried. The elections were coming around again in August, a month from now, but this time Lincoln wasn't running. The Sangamon County Whigs had lost two seats in the General Assembly due to a reapportionment battle, and with too many candidates for too few seats Lincoln had been obliged to step aside so that Logan, his senior law partner, could make his own run. Lincoln was still a great man in waiting, but his path to greatness was growing hard to discern. A new bankruptcy law had recently gone into effect, and it provided a steady source of income for the Logan and Lincoln law firm. But every bankruptcy case they took on was a reminder to everyone of the role the Whigs had played in driving the state into ruin.

Lincoln stood up and took the pages from Cage's hand, pacing around the room as he leafed through them, reading back to Cage some of the lines he had just heard.

“ ‘The shackled hand that holds the bow, draws forth the unbound song.' You're talking about that fiddle player on the steamboat?”

“In a roundabout way.”

“ ‘The unbound song,' ” Lincoln repeated. He set the pages down on Cage's desk and then without asking started to sort through the letters that were scattered on the desk. He held up the invitation that had recently arrived for the September wedding of John Hardin's sister Martinette. “Are you going to this?”

“I am. We could go up to Jacksonville together.”

“I'd run into Molly there.”

“You've managed to avoid her somehow for a year, but I don't think you can count on doing that forever.”

“Do you see her?”

“From time to time. Of course it's not like it used to be.”

“She must loathe the thought of me.”

“I think that one day the two of you will be friends again.”

“If she can ever forgive me for what I did to her, or if I can forgive myself, perhaps we might.”

This caused him to reflect on Speed, and on how content he was now in his marriage to Fanny. “He's a happy man at last. We've all dreamed dreams of Elysium but he's found his. Do you think this book will be your Elysium?”

“I don't know if Gray and Bowen will like it. And if they do, I don't know that anyone else will.”

“You're superstitious of your own good fortune. I suppose I am too, though I don't know that any good fortune awaits me. It's growing harder and harder to spy Elysium from Sangamon County.”

That next week there was a sprawling Fourth of July celebration on the grounds of the Edwards house. Lincoln, knowing that Mary would be much in evidence, found an excuse to be out of town on legal business. Cage had seen Mary only occasionally over the last year, sometimes encountering her on the street, sometimes at parties where the remnants of the old coterie still came together. She was sobered but not shattered by her romantic misadventure with Abraham Lincoln. There was a natural assumption around Springfield that she was the one who had spurned Lincoln, not the other way around, and that this was the reason he had gone crazy. It was an assumption that she did not bother to dispute, and probably artfully encouraged. In any case she had made sure not to appear forlorn and rejected, and the sense that she had survived some mysterious crucible only increased her attractiveness to the usual swarm of unattached men.

She listened patiently as Ninian Edwards stood on a table and orated on the founding of the Republic, on the spirit of dynamic opposition that was the genius of the United States, and that made it possible for him to invite both Whig and Democrat to his house tonight, where despite their differences they dined as friends, Americans all.

“Have you ridden the cars yet?” Mary asked Cage when her brother-in-law had finished speaking. Her skin glowed in the light of the paper lanterns. She had lost a little weight since the last time he had seen her, but she still had a robust shape that seemed to enhance her natural vivacity. Beside her was Julia Jayne, who was more slender than Mary, objectively prettier, but a notch below her companion in quick-mindedness and lethal wit. Matilda Edwards, whose beauty overrode all other considerations, was absent. She had finally gone ahead and married Newton Strong and released half the men in Illinois from their hopeless daydreams.

“We rode them to Jacksonville to see the Hardins,” Mary explained. “I think the railway is the most wonderful invention in the world.”

“It's like riding in a cradle, except for all the noise and the soot and the cinders,” Julia said. “We looked like coal miners by the time we got to Jacksonville.”

She snorted charmingly through her nose as she laughed. She and Mary were both in high spirits today, arm in arm like sisters, surveying the crowd with mischievous scrutiny, eager for gossip. As Cage was standing in front of them they both broke out into laughter at once, having seen something or someone behind him that struck them as profoundly funny.

“Don't turn around!” Mary warned. “If you do he'll know who we're laughing about.”

“Who will know?”

“Jim Shields. He keeps following Julia around, trying to get her off by herself. He thinks he's irresistible to women and that she can't wait for him to lunge at her like a wolf.”

“I suppose I should be flattered, a little,” Julia said, “but, you see, I'm just not.” She collapsed in laughter again and excused herself, heading over to a group of men that included Illinois's secretary of state, Lyman Trumbull. Trumbull greeted her with a warm grin and pulled her into his protective circle like a bull musk ox.

“She's going to marry Trumbull,” Mary told Cage. “Though of course it's a secret and you mustn't tell anyone.”

“I won't.”

“She's almost my last unmarried friend. Who is an old spinster of twenty-three going to find to talk to?”

“You could be engaged to half of the men here before the year is out if you showed any real interest in them.”

“Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Most men are so uninteresting.”

She smiled glumly, knowingly, letting the thought register. She was too proud to refer to Lincoln by name, too proud to ask Cage about his whereabouts tonight. Their engagement was all in the past, in the realm of might-have-been. It could never happen now. She asked him about himself, about his book—When would it be finished? When could she read it?—and teased him about his own romantic life.

“You should definitely never get married like the rest of us mortals,” she concluded. “You should live a scandalous life. You should wear an old dressing gown and have a succession of exotic women to serve as your muse. Now please forgive me. I promised Stephen Douglas I'd have some ice cream with him.”

When she had left, Cage turned around looking for a familiar face to talk to and found himself instead in conversation with James Shields, the very man Mary and Julia had been helplessly ridiculing. Shields was a Democrat and a political enemy of most of Cage's legislative friends, but he was the state auditor and it was his signature on their pay warrants. He had been born in Ireland but had left as a boy and nothing much remained of his accent except a melodious softness that was at odds with his angry intensity.

“Have you heard any rumors that Miss Jayne is going to marry Lyman Trumbull?” he asked Cage. He was still staring at Julia across the picnic tables. He was in all regards a handsome man, but as far as Cage could tell his looks did him little good. They only supported a general aspect of seething resentment. He was obviously very much annoyed that Julia Jayne was paying no attention to him.

“No,” Cage lied, “I haven't heard anything of the sort. The only rumor going around that I've heard is that you're about to instruct the state not to accept bank currency.”

“Well, if that were true, it would only apply to the payment of taxes, and it would be the result of your friend Lincoln and his Whig associates destroying the economy in the first place. Under such conditions, it wouldn't matter who the state auditor was. He would have no choice but to rely on common sense and demand payment in specie. But of course I myself have heard no such rumor.”