A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (4 page)

“You can wander into the trees if you like
,
Jim,” Stuart said. “But I'm more comfortable out here where I can see if somebody wants to split my head with a tomahawk.”

Lincoln reined his horse to a stop as if he hadn't been listening to this conversation and was lost in his private thoughts. They all stopped with him. He took off his fraying straw hat and wiped his forehead with what might once have been a silk neckerchief but was now a colorless rag full of holes. It was only an hour past daybreak, though it was already hot enough for sweat to be running into his eyes. His black hair was thick but shorn close to his head, no doubt by some messmate with no claim to the barbering arts. He put his hat back on and balanced his musket across his knees as he tied the neckerchief back in place with a square knot.

Then he nosed his horse ahead and they all moved forward again. Cage decided he must be the leader after all, if not by formal designation then by practical effect. The still-rising sun cast a glowing light on the field before them. The grass barely stirred. New Fred jerked his head up and down, arguing with his rider's control of the reins. The muscles in the horse's neck were still taut and his mane was sodden with sweat. They were getting closer. Cage could feel it as well, the memory of their horrible, humiliating flight across this ground infesting him like a poison. And Black Hawk's warriors might still be hiding in the trees as Reed said, or they might be concealed in some slight draw or dip in the land ahead. His hands were trembling; he worked to keep his breathing steady.

“I see something,” Stuart said, though almost in a whisper. He was pointing to the west at what seemed to be a tiny red disk, blazing with the brightness of a mirror in the light of the sun. When they got to where Bob Zanger was lying, they saw that the red disk was a half-dollar-sized hole in his severed head where the Indians had taken his scalp. The better portion of his body lay about twenty feet away, and the grass there had a coppery sheen of blood. They had taken away Bob's clothes and chopped off his arms and opened him up and pulled out all the soft parts and strewn them across the prairie.

Cage stared without comprehension at this heap of glistening human rubbish throbbing with green-headed flies. The world around him shone and shimmered with unreal precision. What was left of his working mind told him to dismount before he fainted and fell to the ground.

He watched Lincoln walk around Bob's dismembered and disemboweled body, staring at all the pieces as if wondering where they were all supposed to go.

“That's a hell of a mess,” Reed said. “Maybe we should just bury him where he lies.”

“No,” Lincoln said. “I expect we better not. Him and his fellows ought to be gathered up and buried together. That's the proper way to do it.”

He turned to Cage. “You know him?”

Cage responded with a vacuous nod and got down on his hands and knees and vomited. There was nothing much in his stomach to purge but it seemed there would be no end to his retching anyway.

“You don't have to help us with this part,” Lincoln said as Cage cast up a final string of bile and spittle. Stuart had untied a moldy piece of canvas from one of the mules and spread it out on the ground. Lincoln reached down and gently picked up Bob Zanger's head with his big hands, holding its staring face away from him as he carried it over and set it down on the canvas. Stuart and Reed each took hold of a foot and dragged the torso and its mass of trailing guts over to join the other oddments of the body.

Bob had been a schoolteacher from Danville who tired of the classroom and sold his collected works of Cicero for a Kentucky rifle. Like most of the other young men who had enlisted in the volunteer army, he had been eager to join in the frolic, to earn the gratitude and good faith of their fellow citizens, which would be the capital they would use to advance themselves in Illinois.

“Got your needle and thread?” Lincoln asked Reed. “We need to sew him up in there pretty good so none of his pieces come tumbling out on us.”

As Reed sewed what was left of Bob Zanger into his stiff canvas shroud, Lincoln squatted down next to Cage in the grass. With his long legs bent that way, he looked like a giant insect about to spring into the sky.

“Not the first time we had this job,” Lincoln said. He had a creaky voice but there was a gentle tone to it. “That's why we might seem practical-minded about it. We haven't seen any real fighting like you have, but we sure have learned to do this kind of work.”

Cage nodded in a distant way. He wanted to appear more grateful to this angular stranger, who had more than once gone out of his way to express his sympathy. But the idea that his schoolteacher friend was dead and butchered while he himself was more vibrantly alive than ever had not just seized his thoughts but seized them up. The experiences of this day were too vast, his mind too small an instrument to capture and make sense of them.

After they hoisted the shroud with its shifting, bulging contents onto the back of one of the mules and tied it down, they set off reconnoitering again, and after a few minutes spotted four more bodies lying in the grass, all of them with the same bright bloody circle on their heads where the British Band had taken their scalps.

“ ‘That host on the morrow lay withered and strown,' ” Lincoln said in an awe-filled murmur. Cage had not expected to hear a gangly backwoodsman reciting Byron, but it was only a small detail to be added to the ledger of this searingly unreal day. Cage knew these dead men also, though not as well as he had known Bob Zanger, and the cauterizing shock of seeing that first defiled body made the horror of encountering the others less acute. He made a point of taking a hand in the work and pretended to himself that he was as accustomed to it as Lincoln and the other men of the spy company were.

They worked hurriedly, eager for the gruesome job to be over and still anxious about being alone and exposed so close to the concealing timber and to still-uncontrolled trails along which Black Hawk's warriors might be gathering for another attack. It was a relief finally to have the bodies in their blood-soaked blankets tied across the backs of the mules, and to be mounted and riding away again toward the safety of Kellogg's Grove.

The dead volunteers were buried later that afternoon. The men of Dement's battalion and of the spy company that had ridden all night to relieve them stood over the graves as Dement praised the sacrifice of the fallen, committed their souls to God's keeping, and stepped aside as the ceremonial volleys were fired. After the funeral, Cage was light-headed, so lacking in sleep and so weak with hunger that he felt the air trembling with the eerie atmospheric foretaste of a tornado.

He opened his wallet and gnawed on a piece of hardtack as the men of his mess began to build their cooking fires. He walked away from them to be alone for a while and sat with his back against a hickory trunk and looked down from the height of the broad ridgeline to the open grassland and distant groves and wooded ravines, a landscape that in the fading light of a summer afternoon would have lifted his heart a day or two previous. Now he saw it almost as an enemy in itself, a staging ground and hiding place for the Indians who had nearly succeeded in killing him.

From an oilskin pouch he took out his notebook and pencil and resolved to write, though he was so tired he could barely hold his head up or hold a thought in it. He had bought the notebook at a stationer's in Beardstown just before he took the militia oath. He had filled all the pages once and now he was halfway through again, holding the book horizontally and writing against the grain of his previous entries. It had been a rainy campaign and the pouch had not always been effective in keeping the notebook dry, so its cover was half-disintegrated and its pages swollen and stiff.

The grand and naive words he had written on the first leaf stared back at him now: “Sketches of the War Against Black Hawk and the British Band.” He had envisioned—two months ago, two lifetimes ago—that these would be poetical sketches, but there had been time only for prose notations and weary fragments of imagery, written out dutifully at the end of each draining day, days taken up with pointless marching and counter-marching, with desultory training and drilling, with wrestling matches and horse races and card games with the army's Potawatomi allies. But this fraying notebook would still be the cornerstone of his career. Other men had joined the militia because they knew they would not be taken seriously in any future Illinois enterprise if they had stayed out of the war. As a literary man, or someone trying to be one, Cage felt the same. He had joined this fight purposefully, with an eye for the advantage it would give him, for the ballast it would set in his character. There were miscreants and idlers in the militia, but they were outnumbered by men with a goal in mind, a standard to live up to. Cage had come to Illinois more or less by accident, but had sensed early on that it was a place where things were brewing, a place with more than its share of serious people with hungry dreams. Bob Zanger had been one of them. He had talked to Cage of reading the law and being admitted to the bar, of marrying and fathering children and gaining some lucrative public office like state auditor, perhaps one day representing Illinois in the United States Congress. He had encouraged Cage in his own dream of poetic achievement. The world needed literary men, the former schoolteacher assured him, in proportion to its doctors and politicians and pork packers and mechanics. And a poet in war, if he survived, would have even more at account, even more to draw on. Bob had been right, though Cage had not truly understood how right until he had seen Bob's butchered body. Now at last there was something to write about, something horrible and vivid. But when he tried to set down his memories of the last few days, his mind kept slipping off the path, wandering into a thicket of dreams.

The face of the warrior who had been riding beside him, trying to kill him, flashed into his mind again and startled him back into something like normal consciousness. He could smell burning meat and hair from the still-smoldering pyre fifty yards from camp where the dead horses had been dragged and burned earlier in the afternoon. It was almost dark now. The men were at their fires, bacon frying in their skillets, dough coiled around their ramrods to bake in the flames. All over the camp men were pounding their parched coffee beans with their hatchets, creating a rhythmic sound like the percussive calling of a flock of birds.

Another sound: a sudden burst of laughter, like that of an audience at a play. It shook Cage out of his half-dreaming state and woke the camp out of its evening stillness. He turned to the sound of the laughter and saw a growing circle of volunteers around a campfire twenty yards deeper into the grove. Other men were streaming in that direction.

Cage put up his things and followed them. The source of the laughter turned out to be his new friend Lincoln, who was sitting on a rock and tossing chips of wood into the fire. He was talking about a visit he and some of the men in the company had made to the whorehouses of Galena, and how those Magdalene establishments reminded him of a story. It turned out to be a story of such byzantine length and brazen filthiness—about a widow woman who kept a trained eel in a rainwater barrel—that by the end of it Cage and the other listeners were almost as breathless from shock as they were from laughter.

No one was laughing as hard as Stuart, who no doubt had heard the story many times but who was bent over and wheezing just the same.

Lincoln looked up and happened to catch sight of Cage. He gave him a wink as if the two of them had not just met but were old comrades; then he gazed down into his cup and picked a bug out of his soup. The laughter around him had only just then started to die down.

“You know,” Lincoln said, as if to himself, “this little animalcule here reminds me of another story.”

It should not have been a particularly funny story: an old farmer, his fussy educated son, a piece of cheese full of wrigglers. But the look on Lincoln's face as he impersonated the unconcerned farmer pondering an imaginary cheese teeming with worms, or the haughty and embarrassed son pleading with him not to eat it, had the men around the fire wiping tears of hilarity out of their eyes even before he had finished.

“Let 'em wriggle. I can stand it if they can!”

Lincoln himself was so amused that he could scarcely get these concluding words out before doubling over in a laughing cramp. It was as if he had never heard the story himself, as if he were encountering it for the first time even though he was the one telling it.

“Let 'em wriggle. I can stand it if they can,” he repeated, in a softer key. It was fully dark now, a soft July night, dead friends buried nearby, dead horses settling down to bone and ash, a growing suspicion in Cage's mind that the conflict they were engaged in was a sordid and pathetic thing.

The conversation around the fire switched from storytelling to political talk: the problems besetting Illinois that would have to be taken up again once this war was over, the urgent need for internal improvements—canals, navigable rivers, and railroads. He did not know then that both Lincoln and Stuart were already public men, both impatient for the war to be over so they could get back to the canvass, but both needing the war, since service in it would be the foundation of their political capital.

Cage himself was a private man by nature; he had become more private today, driven inward by all he had seen and felt and feared. But as the other men drifted away from the fire when the storytelling ended, he stayed. His interest in Lincoln only grew as the raucous attention receded.

Stuart was speaking now—the perfidy of the Democrats, the disaster that would come to pass if Jackson vetoed the bank charter. Captain Early, the leader of the spy company, was apparently a Democrat, because he took exception to everything Stuart said, saying the National Bank was and always would be a pestilence against the common man. Lincoln listened, nodded his head in agreement with Stuart, patiently absorbing Early's angry rebuttals. But he had somehow removed himself. A moment earlier he had been the consummate outward man, now he had sunk so deep into his own private musings that it seemed he might never come out again.