A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (47 page)

“I don't know. I suppose in one sense the reason is very simple. Wilford approached him and offered him a fee. If he were a simple man, that reason might suffice. But he's an unknowable man, and there the problem of our understanding lies. I owe very much to Mr. Lincoln. Without him I would never have been at the bar, I wouldn't be his partner in his firm. But I told him I wouldn't take part in this, and so I won't. He speaks well enough of slavery as evil, but where is the proof he believes that in his core? What will he ever dare to do about it?”

Billy asked this last question imploringly, as if Cage had it in his power to provide an answer. But Cage had no insight to offer, especially since his mind was stunned with the realization he had been betrayed by Abraham Lincoln twice in the same day.

As they drank together in puzzled, angry fellowship for another hour, Cage felt the smoky atmosphere of the tavern as a crushing force, a relentless deep-ocean squeeze. He felt there was no air to breathe in his world anymore, no path of escape anywhere. He had not thought at all of his father today, but now all at once he was standing with him on the shoreline, watching him walk out into the water not with the grief and confusion of a child but with the clinical understanding of a man who shared the same dilemma and was perhaps destined to share the same fate.

He was rescued from his suicidal reverie by an eruption of laughter from the other end of the room, where a group of three men had just entered, belching more cigar smoke into the hazy tavern and intruding upon the scattered, murmuring conversations of the clients already there. The loudest offender of his solitude, Cage saw at once, was Nimmo Rhodes.

He hadn't seen him since that encounter at the City Hotel. He had not confronted him after he had written the pseudonymous newspaper letter that had driven Ellie out of town, knowing that if he did so it would only add to his enemy's pleasure in having agitated him, and would accomplish nothing. But clarity and dispassion were the tools of an untroubled mind, and Cage's mind tonight was a cyclonic brew of fear and outrage. He was delighted to discover he was filled with hate, with a heedless impulse to settle the nearest account.

“Wait here,” he told Billy. He stood, paused to steady himself, and walked over to Nimmo Rhodes.

“I accept your challenge,” he said.

“All right. I assume you're referring to our previous disagreement? Please have your friends communicate at their convenience the—”

Cage aimed squarely for his open mouth, relishing the prospect of shutting him up.

B
ILLY HERNDON KEPT REPEATING
he had given a good accounting of himself, but for long minutes Cage had no idea what he was talking about. He was lying on his bed in his room at the Palatine, Billy and Ash Merritt grinning encouragingly at him, Mrs. Hopper hovering solicitously at his open door.

“You gave him at the least a split lip,” Billy said. “And I don't doubt he'll awaken tomorrow with two black eyes. Until he slammed your head against the bar you were Leonidas himself.”

“Do you remember being in a fight with Nimmo Rhodes?” Ash asked him.

Cage nodded, the simple motion causing all sorts of turmoil inside his head, which felt like it was filled with something as thick and static as swamp water.

“Lie still and let your brain recover itself,” Ash said. “It may take a few days. There's a tremendous knot on your forehead and the right side of your face is greatly bruised and swollen.”

He held up a looking glass as if these deformities were marvels he ought to see. The lump protruding from his head was indeed a thing of wonder. It looked like the first knobby growth of a deer's antler. Below it his face was unrecognizable, a ballooning mass of purple and black skin.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Midnight,” Billy said. He turned to Ash. “If he's going to be all right, I ought to get home to my wife and children.”

“Oh, he'll be all right,” Ash said. “We've bound his hero's wounds and now all he needs to do is sleep and take the juice of lemons, which Mrs. Hopper here has agreed to administer.”

His head had cleared enough by the next day for him to remember most of the details of his encounter with Nimmo Rhodes and the events of the day leading up to it. He had been beaten into unconsciousness in the fight, but even if he had knocked Rhodes out he doubted he would have felt any particular sense of triumph, or even the clarifying benefits of finally having taken action. All he had done was get drunk and lose control of himself, and the result was that his spirits and prospects were lower than ever.

He drank the astringent, barely sweetened lemonade that Ash had prescribed and that Mrs. Hopper delivered to him every few hours. He dragged himself from his bed to his chair and tried to read a book on the fall of Constantinople, but it was strangely laborious work trying to follow a simple narrative and he surrendered and picked up the newspaper instead. There was a long report about the activities of Zachary Taylor's army on the Mexican border, and the Mormon exodus that Brigham Young was leading out of Illinois beyond the Missouri. But the densely packed columns of print assaulted his brain with information, and for relief he turned to the advertisements, which had the virtue of being short and relieved by white space—notices of new city ordinances on hogs and wild dogs, advertisements from dentists and bootmakers, stage schedules and announcements for lectures and musical performances and alerts for runaway slaves. There was another circus coming into town, a “mammoth menagerie” that promised to fill the streets of Springfield with another caravan of shuffling elephants. Yet it was a reference not to something coming but to something leaving that caught his eye.

“Westward Ho! Who wants to go to California without costing them anything? As many as eight young men, of good character, who can drive an ox team, will be accommodated by gentlemen who will leave this vicinity about the first of April. You can have as much land as you want without costing you anything. The government of California gives large tracts of land to persons who move there.”

It was signed George Donner and James Reed. Even in Cage's foggy state of mind, there was a bright beacon of skepticism. Wasn't the “government of California” Mexico, with whom the United States was surely about to go to war? Wouldn't they be having second thoughts about giving away “large tracts of land” to the same American adventurers who had populated Texas before revolting against Mexico and seizing the province for themselves?

But for a penniless man such as he was about to become, for a restless spirit with nothing to hold him in place, the idea of going to California with Reed and Donner and their expedition carried with it a surging sense of purpose. He sat at his desk with his pencil, account books, lists of soon-to-be-former assets. He was ruined, yes, but perhaps if he acted quickly and decisively in appealing to Jacob Bunn to agree to appoint a trustee who would sell off his holdings, he could negotiate the retention of, say, a thousand dollars, enough to buy a new horse and outfit, to lease space for his few goods in one of the wagons leaving for California, to have something left over for living expenses once he got there and provide him with the means to make some kind of a living.

He thought the knock on the door was just Mrs. Hopper bringing him more lemonade and as he stared down at his figuring he called out distractedly for her to come in. But in the window glass he caught a glancing reflection of someone filling up the doorway and turned his chair around to face Lincoln.

“You're a horrible-looking sight, Cage,” he said.

“You wouldn't have liked to see me yesterday, then. The swelling has come down a good amount.”

Lincoln hesitated about taking a seat, until Cage nodded in the direction of a chair. His visitor took off his hat and sat down and stretched out his legs. Cage was in no particular mood to speak to him and was happy to say nothing as Lincoln searched for the right words.

“Billy told me about the fight. You wouldn't have made an enemy like that if you hadn't acted as my friend in that ridiculous duel. I look back on that event and a few others like it and don't exactly recognize myself.

“On the other hand,” he said, gesturing toward Cage's misshapen face, “I'm not sure I recognize you either.”

It was an invitation for Cage to respond with a grudging laugh, but his silence drove Lincoln back into awkward self-reflection.

“Billy also said he told you about the Wilford case.”

“He did.”

“The duty of a lawyer—”

“Oh, shut the hell up, Lincoln.”

“Are we not to be friends anymore?”

“I suppose not, since it seems there are things I hold sacred that you care very little about.”

“I think that it's very easy to hold a thing sacred,” Lincoln said, revealing a full anger that Cage had rarely seen. “To stand back and write poetry and be a private man.”

“Whereas a public man like you, who flatters himself for his effectiveness in the material world, is sending a family back into slavery.”

“The case is weak, so probably not. But I'll do my best for my client.”

“Can't you see the case is not just weak, it's wrong?”

“It's not wrong for me to take it. If a man comes to me for help, no matter how despised or degraded he is, it's my duty to help him. In that respect I have the same duty as a physician.”

“That's fatuous.”

“It may be so to you, but I happen to believe it. I believed that when I represented Truett, and I hold to the principle even more today. What if I and other lawyers only represented clients we agreed with? The law wouldn't be the law, it would just be theater, a spectacle of shifting passions. The whole edifice of society would crumble, you can bet on that. We have a republic, but what is our republic if it can't function? If it can't hold itself together? You argue that me taking this case is a great wrong. I argue back that it's a small right.”

Cage shook his head in annoyance—a mistake, since his head was still thick and concussed and the movement brought on a swirling headache. He looked at the prosperous lawyer and lawmaker sitting across the room from him. Lincoln's narrow face had been taut with worry and defiance, but now he was relaxing a bit, relieved to think that maybe this meeting wasn't going to turn out to be a grave reckoning but just a case of two old friends having a vigorous argument about the meaning of a civil society, the sort of argument they had had before Lincoln's speech to the Young Men's Lyceum on—what was it?—the nature of democratic institutions.

“Now listen, Cage,” Lincoln said. “I'm going to beat Peter Cartwright and I'm going to go to Washington. And when I'm there you can judge me on my works. I reckon you won't find me as a member of Congress to be a particular friend of the Slave Power. But for now, my duty as a private man is to—”

“I'm going to California.”

“What?”

He tossed the newspaper across the room with an aggressive flourish. It landed in Lincoln's lap. He held it out away from his face—maybe he was growing farsighted—and scanned it until he found the advertisement.

“With Reed and Donner?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm broke, and because I'm mortally tired.”

“Of what?” Lincoln asked, and then, “Of who?”

Cage waved the question away, satisfying his pride by not answering it.

“I'd be tempted to go along with you,” Lincoln said, “if I wasn't married to Molly, if I didn't already have a child and another one about to be born. But I don't expect you'd want to invite me.”

He grasped his knees with his hands, looked around the room, trying to think of an excuse to stay. Cage refused to help him find one. Lincoln stood. He put on his hat and the top of it almost brushed the ceiling.

“You may not think it,” he said, “but in everything I do, I listen for the voice of honor.”

It was true, or at least true enough to give Cage a reason not to say what he said next. But he was too angry and desolate and disappointed to hold back the words that he knew, even as he spoke them, he could never repeal.

“If there's honor in you, I no longer see it.”

Lincoln reacted to this declaration with shattering impassivity. He was already standing, his hat was already on his head, there was no gesture he could make except this final one: to turn from Cage and walk out the door, and walk down the street to the house on the corner of Eighth and Jackson where his pregnant wife—as unforgiving to Cage as Cage now was to Lincoln—waited for his return.