A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (39 page)

“While he's doing his best to kill you.”

Lincoln seemed to concede the truth of this point as he stared down at his feet. In the center of the creek, there was a splash as a big fish of some kind slapped the surface and disappeared below. Then the creek was so silent again, and once more so still, that it seemed it had been a thousand years since it was disturbed.

“If I'm killed,” he said, “you keep Ash from jumping into the fight and making things worse. I don't want the two of you drawn into my troubles any deeper than you already have been. My father will be annoyed to hear how I died and my poor stepmother'll be torn in two. Old Tom Lincoln never thought I'd amount to much but his wife believed in me like I was somebody special.

“You know what agitates my soul just now? The thought of dying without ever accomplishing a fucking thing. If anybody remembers me at all, I'll be that tall fellow whose clothes didn't fit right, the one who helped bankrupt the state of Illinois and got a sword through his gut for making fun of some conceited ass that nobody took seriously anyway.”

He withdrew his feet from the water and wiped them dry with one of his socks.

“Your hands are shaking,” Cage said.

“That's all right. They'll steady up when I need them to.”

There was a strange sound—gasping, gurgling. If it hadn't come directly from Lincoln, Cage would have supposed it was the noise of some great fish rising from the water of the creek. It was not weeping
,
just a sudden strangled eruption of fear and loneliness. Lincoln hid his face behind his hand and waited for it to pass.

“Maybe at least you'll remember me,” he said in a quaking voice to Cage. “Maybe you'll find room for a mention of some sad, pathetic mortal named Abraham Lincoln in one of your lesser poems.”

T
HEY STOOD WATCHING THE BOAT
approach across the Mississippi. Shields sat in the stern, staring straight ahead at the muddy shoreline, while two men labored at the oars. Although they were facing in the other direction, Cage recognized one of them as Whiteside.

“You'd better stand over there by yourself a ways,” Ash said to Lincoln. “You and Shields should not see each other or talk to each other.”

“Like the bride and groom before a wedding,” Lincoln replied in a grim voice. He picked up his sword and walked downstream twenty yards or so, whacking at willow branches overhead, maybe consciously trying to impress Shields and his party with his great height and reach. As soon as the boat pulled up at the sagging dock Shields himself stepped off and walked in the other direction without looking at either Cage or Ash or the several dozen spectators scattered along the shore. Some of the onlookers were Negroes, slaves of the Missouri man who owned this island and who was apparently giving them a holiday to watch the duel. Others were curious citizens who had come over in boats from Alton, including a couple of newspaper writers. And across the river there were even more people gathered on the high bluffs of the city, from which they had an excellent view of the dueling ground.

Whiteside and the other man who had rowed Shields across the river stepped out of the boat. The other man, much to Cage's annoyance, was Nimmo Rhodes, whom Cage had not seen since the scuffle in front of the church where Reverend Porter had dared to speak about abolition. The two of them walked up to Cage and Ash and shook hands.

“I remember you,” Rhodes said to Cage, his eyes burning with agitation in his round face. His hair was cut close in a way that showcased his protruding ears.

“I remember you as well.”

“What are all these people doing here?” he demanded to know. “Who owns these gawking niggers?”

“Let's not worry about that right now, Nimmo,” Whiteside said. He was breathing heavily, winded from rowing the boat across the river. “Let's have a look at the arrangements and make sure they're satisfactory.”

The four men walked past hardwood stumps and a screen of brush to a clearing exposed to the punishing noonday sun. There stood a ten-foot-long plank, set on end, with a confining box traced in the soil on either side. Whiteside stared down at it with surly intensity.

“You may measure it,” Ash said. “The dimensions are exact, as laid out in Mr. Lincoln's letter.”

“There's no need. It's a lethal space your friend has specified.”

“Dueling's a lethal business.”

“Let's not make the mistake of thinking this can't be prevented,” Cage said. “In fact, as you well know we're honor-bound as seconds to attempt a reconciliation before the duel starts.”

“What do you propose?”

“The same as yesterday and the day before,” Ash said. “Have Shields withdraw the accusatory note and Lincoln will then be free to offer an explanation concerning the article that offended him in the first place.”

“An apology is required, not an explanation.”

“That's a semantic difference we can surely overcome. Shall we speak to our friends and try one last time to prevent them from splitting each other's head open?”

Whiteside gave an annoyed sigh, but agreed with Cage that the dueling code required at least one more attempt. He said he would speak to Mr. Shields once more if Dr. Merritt agreed to speak to Mr. Lincoln.

Cage and Rhodes remained in place while their associates went to confer with their principals. Rhodes was stonily silent, and Cage saw no reason to initiate a conversation with him. Instead he kept his eyes trained on Whiteside, who was speaking now to Shields. But Shields clearly wasn't listening. He had taken his coat off and was standing in his shirtsleeves and green silk waistcoat, swiping at the air with the broadsword he had brought. He had a savage, concentrated aspect, but waving the great sword made him look alarmingly small. And when he moved he had a detectable limp from his youthful fall on a ship. He was lithe and trim and might be quick even with the limp. His lack of height put him at a significant disadvantage but the murderous concentration in his eyes did not settle Cage's mind.

“Shame on your friend,” Rhodes said to Cage, breaking the silence. He was staring at the dueling box that had been sketched into the ground.

“What?”

“This is a death trap for Shields and you all know it. If Lincoln had any sense of honor—”

“You just got here and I'm already tired of your righteous histrionics,” Cage said. “Please shut up.”

Rhodes reared his spherical head like an actor in a comic play who has just been insulted.

“ ‘Shut up'? Don't use such intolerable language with me, sir, or you'll have a challenge of your own.”

“If my language is intolerable to you, you opened the door to it by accusing my friend of having no honor.”

“Well, he has no honor, sir, and you don't either!”

Rhodes stiffened, bracing himself for the challenge this charge must surely bring. But Cage was too incredulous at the man's blustery behavior to do anything other than laugh in his face.

“What are you laughing at? Didn't you hear me? Didn't you hear what I said to you?”

“Mr. Rhodes, I think we should have one duel at a time.”

“Fine. When the business here is settled, I'll expect to hear from you.”

“Expect all you want. Your insults mean nothing to me, and I have no interest in discussing your behavior further, and certainly no interest in fighting you over it.”

He walked back to the ground where Lincoln and Ash were standing, leaving the aggrieved and sputtering Rhodes behind. He was aware of how enraged he was, how in fact he would very much enjoy somehow grinding this ill-tempered associate of Shields into atoms. But he knew he had to hold his flaring temper in check, both because it would endanger Lincoln even further if war broke out between men who were supposed to be supporting players and because Cage had no wish to be killed in a duel with Nimmo Rhodes.

“What do you think, Cage?” Lincoln asked. He had his own coat off now, his sleeves rolled up, exposing his forearms—the tensile and powerful forearms of the rail-splitter he had been. He had the same taut look in his face as when he played fives, but there was an aspect of danger that Cage had never seen before. “If Shields agrees to withdraw his note, what's my next step?”

“You should admit to the truth, that you wrote the letter he found so insulting.”

“It's not a matter of ‘admitting,' ” Ash said. “To admit implies culpability, which implies—”

“Well, then just
proclaim
it!” Cage said. “Style it any way you want. State it any way you want. This whole matter is becoming so obscure I can't even remember what the issue between the two of you is.”

“I remember it very well,” Ash said. “And it's not an obscure matter at all, it's…Christ on the mountain, here comes Hardin!”

Before the boat he was riding in could reach the dock
,
John Hardin leapt out and strode impatiently through the water to the muddy shoreline. Cage's message had evidently gotten through.

“Where's Lincoln?” Hardin demanded of the onlookers gathered there. “Where's Shields? I mean to put a stop to this insanity right now!”

“Is this your doing?” Lincoln asked Cage.

“It is.”

“Well, it might be a good lick. I can't talk to him myself, though. You two go and see if maybe John can help us negotiate our way out of this.”

They left Lincoln to practice slicing off more willow branches and walked over to the dock to talk to Hardin. Whiteside and Rhodes did the same from their position. The two potential duelists were now alone, separated by a hundred yards and by the fighting space that had been sketched into the earth. They didn't look at each other and did not suffer anyone to approach them. The gawkers on the island looked even more nervous than the principals, starting to worry that the duel they had come to see might very well not come off.

“Gentlemen,” Hardin said to the four men in the voice of a man who was used to assuming he was in charge, “Let us do our duty and find a way to extract these two men from this situation with their honor and careers intact.”

“It's too late for that
,
John,” Whiteside said.

“I reject that statement, I reject it thoroughly.” Hardin locked his dark brown eyes on Whiteside with the fury and fixity of a bird of prey. “It won't be too late until one of these men is lying dead.”

He demanded to be led, step by step, over the perilous rhetorical ground that had brought Lincoln and Shields to the present situation. It took twenty minutes, and many demands for clarification from Hardin, for the byzantine matter to finally be explained. He then suggested a commission of four or more fair-minded men to look into the matter and make a recommendation for resolving the misunderstanding. This was declined by Whiteside, who said he had been given clear instructions by Shields that only his friends on the field and no outsiders had the power to negotiate any sort of agreement on his behalf. From that impasse the conversation grew ever more knotty and tedious, the men moving from the shoreline in the full glare of the sun to the shade of the trees a little farther inland.

“Let me see if I have this,” Hardin finally said. There was a sheen of sweat on his face which reappeared almost as soon as he wiped it away with his monogrammed handkerchief. “Lincoln must retract the article that offended Shields, but Lincoln will not answer Shields's question about whether or not he wrote it unless Shields retracts the question and asks it in a different tone.”

“What goddam difference does the tone make if the offense is the same in either case?” Rhodes said.

“The goddam difference is this,” Hardin replied with a smile, putting his hand on Rhodes's shoulder as if he was a comrade. “We don't know for sure if any offense was committed by Lincoln, since by the nature of Shields's inquiry Lincoln feels himself prevented from responding. Don't you think it would be a good idea to find that out before these two men try to kill each other?”

For another half hour they argued over potential fine calibrations of phrasing. They were aided in their negotiations by the fact that the heat was growing more unbearable each minute closer to noon, by swarms of biting horseflies, and by an awareness that Lincoln had managed to distort Shields's original vivid grievance into something totally abstract. Hardin was patient; he wanted to forge a compromise that would hold, that these volatile men could accept.

Cage's memories of John Hardin would always center on this moment, on his dramaturgical intervention in the hoary old chivalric play they had all convinced themselves they must helplessly enact. They were standing on a sun-ravaged spit of land across the Mississippi from Alton, the same city from which four years later Hardin would embark at the head of his Illinois regiment for the war in Mexico. Though he would die in a surge of wanton heroism, killed by Mexican lancers at Buena Vista, he was on this day the embodiment of calm judgment, slowly diluting the tension between the warring parties by proposing exquisite legalistic remedies. All standing papers and letters between the principals would be regarded as not having existed. Lincoln would acknowledge his authorship of the September 2 article and, while not apologizing for it, state that he had had no intention of injuring the personal or private character or standing of Mr. Shields as a gentleman or a man; that if he had thought the article could produce such an effect, he would have forborne to write it.

“Those terms will suit me well enough,” Lincoln said when Cage and Ash left the consultation to relay Hardin's proposal. “Let's write out the statement right now, though it ought not to come directly from me.”