A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (46 page)

“You have the property I signed over as security, the—”

“Joint and several,” Bunn repeated, the words coming out now in a threatening hiss. “Joint and several. Your security is good as far as it goes, but you have assumed the liability of these other two men and I want to know, can you pay me, and when?”

He could not pay him, of course. Most of his ready cash had gone to buy certificates of freedom. Even if he could find an immediate buyer for the Palatine, his last unencumbered asset, it would not be nearly enough for the whole note. The hole into which he had just plummeted was very deep. If he was to have a chance of climbing out, he needed a lawyer.

L
INCOLN WAS IN A DISTRACTED
good temper and did not notice Cage's distress when he walked into the office.

“Sit down by the stove and warm yourself,” he said. “Let me just scrawl a line or two at the bottom of this letter.”

He scrawled more than a line or two, sitting at his table wearing his somehow still-extant buffalo robe, a garment from which Cage could actually see the dust rising whenever Lincoln shifted in his seat. It was just the two of them in the office. Herndon, Lincoln explained, had gone to take the deposition of a defrauded widow whose case they had just taken on.

“Done!” he said, blotting the letter and sealing it. “That was to the editor of the Athens paper. They took my part against Hardin, came out for me early and strong. You have no idea how many thank-you letters I have to write, including one to you, for the kind note you slipped under my door. Of course, it's just the nomination. I still have to beat Peter Cartwright in the election. That aged gentleman has preached to every Methodist congregation between here and Cairo and he's sure to come after me for being an infidel. I'm going to have to be careful to appear as if I really believe in God and don't just like the sound of the Bible.”

He stood and walked around the table to lie down on the sofa across the room from where Cage was sitting. He was in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat. He contemplatively stretched out his arms like a man getting ready for a nap. But energy was coursing through him. He suddenly leapt up again and paced around the room, oblivious to Cage except as an audience for his racing thoughts.

“Yes, of course, there's a lot of hard work ahead. Nothing is guaranteed. I have to get hold of that preacher by the balls and not let go. But it feels like things are moving at last. It's like when I was young, chopping ice on the Sangamon. Chop, chop, chop, and at long last a little channel starts to open up and your boat's under way. It's not just me alone in my little vessel now, though. There's Mrs. Lincoln and Bobbie and another baby almost to term. Let me tell you this, Cage, because I know you of all people will understand. Mary Lincoln has a temper, and when her feet are swollen to the size of—”

Finally happening to glance in Cage's direction he suddenly broke off his monologue.

“For God's sake, what's wrong? You look very pale.”

“It seems I might be ruined.”

“Ruined? What are you talking about?”

“I signed a note with two other men. One has fled to Texas, the other's assets have turned out to be largely fictitious.”

“Joint and several?”

Cage nodded.

“You would have done well,” Lincoln said, “to have consulted me before signing your name to any note at all. But don't look so defeated. There are things I can do. We're old friends and I won't let a friend fall on his sword. I haven't forgotten everything you've done for me, Cage. I might have very well killed myself over that confusion with Mary. I wanted to, you know. I might have been killed by Jim Shields, or killed him instead, in a foolish duel. Instead I'm alive, and about to fight a preacher, and have another baby coming.”

He sat down at his desk again, and began scribbling a memorandum on a sheet of paper. “Bunn holds the note, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“First thing I'll do is pay him a visit. He can be reasonable if you find him in a good temper. Who are your erstwhile partners?”

“Joseph Dillon and Walter Rascoe.”

Lincoln abruptly stopped writing.

“Rascoe?”

“Do you know him? Well, of course you know everybody. As it turns out, he has a forged title to—”

Lincoln held up both his hands, the gesture of a man trying to ward off unwelcome knowledge.

“Cage, I represent Walter Rascoe.”

“You do? In this matter?”

“In this matter.”

“Are you sure?”

“He stopped me on the street yesterday and asked for my help in resolving a financial issue. I agreed at once, though I haven't yet heard the details. We were going to meet this afternoon. Surely his matter and yours are one and the same.”

“Surely they are. But
I
need your help.”

“Cage, I can't give it, not under the circumstances. Rascoe contacted me first, and as a result I now represent him.”

“You'll represent a stranger against a friend?”

“He's not a stranger, for one thing. He's a Whig stalwart who helped pass a resolution in Athens endorsing me against Hardin. But that's beside the point. I
would
represent a stranger against a friend—I'd
have
to—if I'd agreed to take his case first. It's a matter of professional ethics.”

He stared in disbelief at Lincoln, angered by the impassive reasonableness in his lawyerly expression. Here was a man who would happily fill every newspaper in Illinois with anonymous attacks upon political enemies, who had nimbly avoided time and again taking any sort of meaningful stand on slavery, whose moral self-evidence made his endless partisan fights over internal improvements and specie payments and tariffs nothing but puzzling distractions.

Cage had been in a hollow, doom-ridden frame of mind ever since his interview with Jacob Bunn. Once again he felt as he had that night long ago at Kellogg's Grove, crowded into a dark cabin with no air to breathe, aware of a silent, besieging presence drawing closer every moment. He managed to suppress a display of open panic, but could not keep himself from sputtering in anger.

“Your idea of ethics is confounding to me,” he said. “You won't reach out your hand to a drowning friend because you already have some sort of polite professional understanding with the man who threw him into the river?”

“There are other lawyers in Springfield.”

“There are nothing
but
lawyers in Springfield!”

He had risen so angrily, so abruptly from his chair that he was momentarily dizzy and had to set a hand on the corner of Lincoln's table to steady himself until his blood was properly distributed again. He heard himself speaking to Lincoln in a cold-blooded tone.

“I'm sure you'll represent your client ably, and the more ably you represent him the deeper the pit you'll dig for me.”

Lincoln's head drooped in sadness—or impatience. He stared for a moment at his gnarled workingman's fingers spread out root-like upon the grass-colored baize cloth covering his working space. When he looked up at Cage again, his face was composed and his voice infuriatingly even.

“I'm sorry, Cage. I can't talk to you about this any further.”

He walked for hours, trying to settle himself, past the city center and outlying neighborhoods along Town Branch, past tanyards and horse treading mills, wandering through knolls and ravines that had once held groves of mature timber and were now tangles of brush and grapevines. A lightless February afternoon, a cold wind singing through the cracks of an open quarry from which the stones for wells and hearths had been dug and hewn. Springfield seemed to him now a tawdry and impure dream of a place, an impermanent human monument made from sawn-down ancient trees and from stones stolen from the ripped-open, clawed-apart earth.

He was not someone habituated to solitary drinking. Perhaps Lincoln's temperance influence had played a role in that, but to hell with Lincoln. He walked back into town holding down his hat in the freezing wind and walked through the door of a quiet hideaway off Jefferson Street called Zimri's Tavern. He took a seat at a table beneath a painting of a lovely drowned woman floating in greenish water, the sea surge gently separating her from her garments and a blunt-nosed shark swimming implacably toward her. The colors in the painting had been queasily muted over the years by the smoke-filled, lightless atmosphere of the tavern, and its sense of grimy hopelessness matched his mood exactly. He was cold from his walk and was glad for the raging fire, with its glowing loggerheads for making rum flips. He ordered a flip and drummed his numb fingers on the tabletop to bring back the circulation. There was conversation going on all around him but he heard none of it
,
just sat there making an inventory of all the things he thought had been within his grasp but that he saw were only baseless aspirations. He knew he could add them up in any configuration he wanted—love, friendship, security, fame, self-respect—and the sum would still be the same, a zero at the base of his soul.

He glanced up when his drink came and through a shifting veil of smoke he saw Billy Herndon sitting alone two tables over, a glass of beer between his hands, staring just as glumly as he himself was at the play of flames in the fireplace. Billy saw Cage at almost the same moment and picked up his beer and his hat and walked over to join him.

“I don't recall ever seeing you here before, and certainly not looking so alone and downcast. May I be your companion in misery tonight?”

He pulled out the heavy wooden chair with a great squeaking noise and sat down and drained half his beer.

“I will just finish this fine strong beer,” he declared, “and then go home to my wife and children. I belong there, and I'm ashamed not to be there. The winds of temperance don't blow in me and there's nothing I can do about it. What has come over you, Cage?”

“Some unexpected financial difficulties.”

“Well, go see Mr. Lincoln at once!”

“I did. But I seem to be on the opposite side of the case from the esteemed and professionally very ethical Mr. Lincoln.”

Billy nodded along with grave sympathy as Cage told him about the conversation he had that afternoon with Lincoln.

“I'm very sorry for your trouble, Cage. Very sorry indeed. Even if your debt is as great as you say, there are things you can do. The goddam Democrats have unraveled the bankruptcy statute in an unholy manner, but the common law remedy still applies. It would require you to turn over your assets to a trustee and—”

“It's all right, Billy,” Cage said. “I don't want to think about it right now anyway.” He ordered himself another flip and Billy another beer. Billy protested that he ought to go home, but did not protest with much force, arguing with conviction that he could not let a despairing friend drink alone.

“Mr. Lincoln hews to a strict legal sense of things,” Billy said. “I would not say this to another soul, but yours is not the only case in which it could be said his duty to the law blinds him to the right.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's why I'm sitting here wrestling with my poor beleaguered conscience. He's agreed to defend a slave owner.”

“He's what?”

Billy said he shouldn't talk about it, but didn't bother to wait for Cage to press him for more information before disclosing the particulars. A man named Wilford had a big farm in Illinois and an even bigger plantation in the slave state of Kentucky. He had imported one of his slaves to serve as overseer for his Illinois operation, and allowed the man to bring his wife and children along. Abolitionists had gotten wind of the arrangement, arguing that because the slave family were residing in Illinois they were now free. But Wilford still considered them his property and they had been detained in the sheriff's jail until pending the outcome of a
habeas corpus
hearing, in which Lincoln had agreed to represent Wilford.

Cage stared at Billy Herndon as he tried to comprehend what he had just been told. His mind raced back to Cordelia, trembling in that Tazewell County courtroom, slipping down her dress to reveal the whipping scars on her back. He remembered her heedlessly throwing her arms around Lincoln in gratitude when he had freed her. Could it be that Lincoln had been so untouched, so unmoved, that he was now ready to take the other side in a strikingly similar case and send a family back to bondage in Kentucky?

“I don't believe it,” he told Herndon. “Why would he do that?”