A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (44 page)

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“No thanks are required. You paid me handsomely enough, and now you have your shop.”

In answer she squeezed the inside of his arm. They passed the statehouse, where the Lone Star flag was being erected behind a speaking platform in preparation for a big pro-annexation rally the Democrats were planning the next day.

“The thought of Texas is making me ill,” he said.

“I know what's making you ill, and it's not Texas. It's Lincoln.”

“What about him?”

“He's no longer your particular friend. How can he be, with that wife of his? Is he afraid of her, do you think?”

“Wouldn't you be?”

“Poor Cage. You're very lonely.”

He made a chuffing sound, pretending that she was joking.

“That's one thing we've accomplished,” Ellie said. “We're not married, and we're not afraid of each other.”

They were walking down Washington Street, passing the City Hotel. Still aware of the odd companionable pressure of her hand on his arm, Cage turned to her.

“Let's celebrate your new status as an independent businesswoman. I'll buy you a dinner.”

“Here? Out in the open?”

“Out in the open.”

The hotel's dining room had recently been refurbished, with a new maitre d' stand of polished wood, and chandeliers and booths set between ornamental colonnades topped with heroic plaster busts representing the vanquished Indian tribes of Illinois. Cage and Ellie were shown to one of these private alcoves. They ordered a Hungarian wine recommended by the waiter, macaroni soup, and wild duck pie. The place had pretensions of formality but Ellie appeared at ease, smiling and unguarded for once, tapping the side of her foot against his beneath the table. She was a beautiful woman in a beautifully fitted dress, her lush hair pulled back into a chignon and fixed with an almost transparent tortoiseshell comb rising like the rays of the sun from the crown of her head.

The dining room was populated mostly by men. They slurped down their soup or puffed away on after-dinner cigars, laughing and lobbing bombastic observations back and forth. The City Hotel was not one of Cage's normal watering holes and most of the men were strangers to him, though with their thumbs tucked into their waistcoats and their hair puffed out at the sides from the constant squeeze of their hats he felt like he knew them all, since they looked like the opinion-spouting denizens of every tavern and dining room everywhere.

As Ellie talked about her plans for the shop—a new location, with more retail space, another clerk, another seamstress or two, an expanded inventory of accessories—Cage was aware of these male diners looking in her direction with lingering glances or outright stares. She lived mostly outside the normal currents of Springfield society, seldom venturing out from her residence and place of business. So to them she must have seemed an intoxicating stranger—new to town, unaccounted for and unexpected.

“Of course Texas belongs in the United States!” somebody was declaring across the room in a loud, familiar voice. “It's absurd to think otherwise, after all the American blood that's been spilled prying it away from Mexico.”

Cage shifted his eyes in the direction of the pontificator. It was Nimmo Rhodes, leaning forward in his chair as he lectured his companion on the opposite side of the table, slapping the back of one hand into his open palm for emphasis. “And if we don't take Texas, don't you think England would like to have it? Or Mexico would like to have it back? Why Mexico would be delighted for the chance to—”

Rhodes sensed something, swiveled his head with the fluidity of an owl. Suddenly he and Cage were staring at each other across the dining room. There was movement at the corners of Rhodes's mouth, an instinctive half smile of sarcastic pleasure, then an adversarial tilt of his head that was not a greeting but some kind of statement about where the two of them stood. Cage held the man's stare, saw him move his eyes toward Ellie. He regarded her with such curious scrutiny that Cage was nearly at the point of rising and confronting him. But by then Rhodes had turned back to his own companion and was finishing his observation about Mexico and Texas as if he had never interrupted himself.

Cage saw him again the next day, standing with his fellow Democrats at the edge of the speaker's platform during the annexation rally at the statehouse. A doom-ridden sense of curiosity led Cage to attend the rally. He could almost see the train of events that the admission of Texas into the Union would bring about—slavery's vast expansion, an idiotic conflict with Mexico, a growing ideological gulf between North and South that might very easily culminate in a civil war and the end of the United States of America. He took no satisfaction in his prognosticating, or at least didn't think he did. One by one the Democratic speakers brought out their arguments. One man said that if we did not receive Texas into our national bosom, then England—aided by the abolitionists—would take it into hers. Another made a hard-to-follow argument, something to do with where the explorer La Salle had landed, that the Texas country had been part of the territory that conveyed to the United States when it purchased Louisiana from France. After him someone else declared that it would be an unconscionable waste not to annex Texas, since it was the fairest, fondest, most Edenic land on earth.

“Now that is horseshit,” Cage heard someone muttering. He turned and found that he was standing next to Jim Reed, though it had not been Reed who had offered his opinion but the older man on the other side of him, who stood with his arms crossed on his chest, his sunburned, blunt-fingered farmer's hands protruding from the white cuffs of his special-occasion shirt. Cage shook hands with Reed, who introduced him to George Donner.

“I only say it's horseshit because that's the truth,” Donner explained with a friendly smile, keeping his voice low out of courtesy to the speaker, who was still droning on about the Texas paradise. He was a man almost sixty but with no slackening in his lined face and little gray yet in his black hair.

“George has tried his luck in Texas already,” Reed explained.

“Tried my luck in '38 on the Brazos,” Donner said. “And one year was enough, sir. A land of gallinippers and alligators and skulking Kronk Indians—that's what I would say if I were up there giving a speech about it.”

“Yes, forget about Texas,” Reed agreed. “Poor Davy Crockett died liberating the wrong part of Mexico. He should have gone to California instead. We should all go to California.”

“I would not mind a peaceful Pacific breeze in place of an Illinois blizzard,” Donner said.

Reed was dressed in an expensive-looking suit and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a sumptuously tight weave. He looked more prosperous and less agitated than he had that night in the Globe when they had witnessed Jacob Early shot and killed. He had not gotten into the tallow business after all, he told Cage, but had had some good fortune in the furniture manufacturing line and had won a contract to supply seats for the railways, which had been gratifyingly lucrative.

“My wife tells me I should be content and stay in place,” he said, “but I'm like George here. Cursed with itchy feet.”

Donner admitted that he was the sort of man for whom far horizons beckoned, even though he was of an age at which a man should sit on his gallery playing checkers with his grandchildren.

The three men stood at the edge of the rally, talking about the allure of distant unknown places, the speakers on the platform nattering on about the bounty of Texas in the background. Cage nodded his head as Reed and Donner spoke. He recalled the youthful wanderlust that had taken him to Europe, commiserated with them on feeling marooned in the center of the continent. Then the conversation flagged and they shook hands and went off on their separate errands. It was an encounter he might have vaguely recalled in later life, or more likely completely forgotten, had the future not seared it into his memory instead.

When the presidential election came that October, Cage was tempted to vote for James Birney, the candidate of the forthrightly abolitionist Liberty Party. But he knew it would mean throwing his vote away. The Democrats had the advantage of a bold, clear message: annex Texas, Mexico be damned if it interfered; let slavery take root where it will as the United States filled out the continent. Clay's stance on every issue was muted, murky, sophisticated. But Cage marked his ballot for the distinguished old candidate anyway, doing his part to shore up a frail barricade against the Slave Power.

He was not surprised when Polk and the Democrats won, nor as downcast as he felt he should be. Though the question of slavery loomed over everything, the election had also been about whether the country should be big or small, whether it should be restless or content. Maybe in his heart he was more of a Polk man than a Clay man, beginning to feel confined and frustrated, aware of an expansive need in his own nature that mirrored the mood of the nation.

What was holding him in Springfield, after all? The certainty that he once felt that Illinois would provide the foundation of a great personal accomplishment had degraded into a wistful dream. His work had come to nothing. He could send his book out to other publishers, but he held out no hope that they would be any more intrigued by a voice from the West than Gray and Bowen had been. Whatever it was he had with Ellie was something he had allowed her to define and control, a settled fondness beyond the risk of love. As for his friendship with Lincoln, that too was a diminished thing.

Or so he thought, until Lincoln hailed him in the street one afternoon a week or so after the elections.

“Thank God,” Lincoln said. “There you are. I have something in my pocket you have to read. I haven't shown it to anybody else. I don't trust anybody's judgment but yours. It's the best thing I've ever written, Cage. Can we go to your place?”

They walked to the Palatine. All the way there, Cage couldn't stifle an instinct to keep a watchful eye out for Mary.

“Don't worry about her,” Lincoln said, reading his mind.

“Why? Has she gotten over me being her enemy?”

“No, she never gets over anything. But the wrathier a wife a man has, the more he needs a friend.”

The parlor was empty, and Mrs. Hopper was out on errands. They helped themselves from a tray of doughnuts left over from that morning's breakfast, and then walked upstairs to Cage's room. Lincoln sat on the bed and drew his feet up without taking off his muddy boots. Some of the domestic polish had worn off. He was still well-clothed but haggard and underfed, weary from months of futile campaigning for Henry Clay.

“The shadows will be gathering now,” he said. “Did you know that Molly's stepmother was with Clay when he got the news he'd been defeated? She wrote Molly that he turned blue—the actual color blue—when he read the letter. Then he raised his wineglass and said, ‘I drink to the health and happiness of all assembled here.' As fine a man as exists, and the country casts him off in favor of that humorless entity Polk.”

He shoved a whole doughnut into his mouth. At least Baker had won his election, he said while he masticated it. He would be going to Congress next year, and after his term was up—assuming the agreement between Lincoln and Baker and Hardin held up—it would be Lincoln's turn to run for the seat.

“You see how I plot and plan even as I mourn Clay's loss,” he said. “I'm like a character from Shakespeare. Richard the Third, or maybe Iago.”

“You said you wanted me to read something.”

“Yes!” Lincoln sprang out of the bed, picked up his hat from the floor where he had carelessly tossed it, and pulled a folded piece of paper out of the interior band. He thrust the paper at Cage and indicated with a swipe of his hand that he was to read it then and there. As Cage read, Lincoln stood with his arms folded and his face lowered in suspense.

It was a new poem, titled “My Childhood Home I See Again,” so fluidly and feelingly written that Cage read it through with disconcerting ease, registering its emotion before its meaning. It ought to have been nothing very special, a nostalgic poem about a man revisiting the scene of his boyhood, but like everything Lincoln wrote it was so death-haunted—“Every sound appears a knell,” it declared, “and every spot a grave”—that by the time Cage had read it through silently a second time he was almost shivering with gloomy admiration.

“I know there's too much of Wordsworth in it,” Lincoln said.

“You're right.”

“But am I right in thinking it's any good? It's not nearly what you could have pulled off with the subject, but—”

“Oh, stop it. It's good, and you know very well it is. For what it's worth, it's better than anything I've ever done.”

Lincoln made a show of dismissing this idea as preposterous, but Cage hadn't meant it as flattery. The poem was to him alarmingly effective, with more gravity, more control, more heart than anything Lincoln had written before. It was steeped in fatalism, like most of his poetry, but the dark tone was honestly encountered and had nothing to do with literary effect.

“It needs work, I know. I'm not in any hurry with it, but it landed on me like a fever. I heard the first lines in my head and there was no way to keep the others from coming.”

Inspiration had arrived, he explained, when he had crossed into Indiana toward the end of the campaign to rouse the people for Clay. While there, he had driven to the place they had lived when his father moved them from Kentucky.

“I was seven years old when we came to Indiana. For the first few weeks we were living in a half-faced camp. When you're seven years old and you hear panthers screaming at night and you see wolf eyes shining at you through the chinks in the logs your imagination can turn on you pretty quick. You've got your mother to calm your fears but then along comes the milk sick and it's time to help your father build her coffin, him yelling at you to stop daydreaming and get to work. I wasn't daydreaming, Cage. I was just stupefied. She died pretty wild, you see, thrashing on her bed, her tongue all swollen up and…”