A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (6 page)

“Oh, I do my best to throw my weight around when the assembly's in session. I have a few weeks every year to accustom myself to being a big man and then it's back to scratching for my living as a postmaster and surveyor. What do you think about Reed? Would you ride off with him to Texas?”

“I'm content here.”

“Content? I don't know anybody who's content. Why would you be an exception?”

“Because you and your colleagues have promised to bring the capital to Springfield.”

“Ah,” Lincoln replied, “you're a speculator, like everybody else.”

True enough. The scheme for moving the seat of government from Vandalia was much in the air. A boom was coming to Springfield, and Cage had scraped to get in on it, eager to set himself up as a man of business so that he could have the resources to become a man of letters.

“I'm a speculator of a very low order. I have a city lot or two.”

“Which is it? A city lot—or two?”

“One in possession, my eye on another.”

Lincoln bent one of his long legs and shoved his foot gently at a hog that was blocking his way. The hog squealed in annoyance, then trotted off on its spindly legs to root a few yards away. The hog had not taken the insult personally, but Lincoln stopped and contemplated the beast with a sad cast to his face, as if he had regretted discommoding it.

“What's the worst thing you've ever done?” he said to Cage, his eyes still on the hog.

“Shot a starving Indian out of a tree. You?”

“We were trying to get some pigs onto a flatboat. They didn't like what they saw and wouldn't agree to the proposition, so some of the boys sewed their eyelids together. I wouldn't take part in it myself, but I didn't stop it either. I reckon if the Creator exists, those poor pigs are in my accounting book.”

Cage noted the “if,” was quietly heartened by it. He had heard Lincoln was an infidel, and he liked the thought of having someone to talk to whose mind, like his own, actively wrestled with the idea that there was either no God at all or perhaps a very indifferent one.

“I might have a better investment for you than a city lot,” Lincoln abruptly said. They were standing in front of a brand-new two-story brick row that had replaced the log buildings that had been torn down after Cage moved to Springfield. Hoffman's Row was the latest encouraging sign that the town was destined to grow into something more thriving than the prairie settlements that surrounded it. “You might want to go over there to the land office and buy along the river over by Huron. Don't buy in Huron itself—the price is already too high—but just find you something nearby that you can get at the government rate. Then you can sell it for four times that.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I'm the one who surveyed Huron with my own eyes and between there and Beardstown is where the canal's going to be dug. I just entered forty-seven acres myself at a dollar and twenty-five apiece. Between us, a lot of these internal improvements might not amount to anything. To get the capital moved to Springfield we had to trade a few votes here and there and say yes to some things we might better have said no to. But I think the Beardstown canal is a good prospect.”

Cage thanked him and said he would consider it, wondering at the same time if Lincoln was any different than all the other speculators wandering around Illinois, urging everyone to buy now before it was too late and the canals and railroads were already built and the rivers already opened up to navigation and the capital moved here or moved there.

But he
was
different, different in ways Cage couldn't disregard. Most of the men who were going around promoting themselves and their schemes were smoother than Lincoln, not as raw, not as striking in appearance, not as obviously self-invented. During the war, when everyone had been clothed in rags and shriven by scant rations, he had not seemed so remarkable. Now that he was more or less respectably dressed, something in his appearance betrayed him. He looked like a man who did not quite fit in, whom nature had made too tall and loose-jointed, with an unpleasant squeaky voice and some taint of deep, lingering poverty. He seemed to Cage like a man who desperately wanted to be better than the world would ever possibly let him be. But in Lincoln's case that hunger did not seem underlaid with anger, as with other men it might, but with a strange seeping kindness.

“I once met Byron's gondolier,” Cage declared without thinking.

“What!”

“I remember you quoting Byron at Kellogg's Grove. I once met the man who paddled him through the canals of Venice.”

“But where? How can that be? By jings, you haven't been to—Venice?”

When Cage nodded, he thought he saw tears forming in Lincoln's eyes—but tears of what? Astonishment? Jealousy? Possibility?

“What are you doing now?” Lincoln asked.

“I've already thrown away half the day. I have to go back to work.”

“Throw it all away, and tomorrow with it. Do you have a horse?”

When Cage nodded, Lincoln pointed to one of the upper windows of Hoffman's Row.

“I've got to go meet John Stuart. You remember him—he was with us that day. It won't take a minute. I'm going to borrow some law books from him and go back to New Salem. Come with me and we'll talk about Byron on the way. And Burns too. You must like Burns!”

“New Salem is twenty miles from here.”

“Yes, you couldn't get back by dark, of course. You'd spend the night with me. We can talk about politics if you want but I'd much rather hear about Byron's gondolier.”

Cage had been at his writing desk, forcing his hexameters onto a long poem that did not seem to want them, when the news about the Alamo arrived. Since all the ensuing gossip was so distracting, since his concentration was thoroughly broken, he knew the rest of the day would be idle. Why not put the time to use by riding to New Salem with Abraham Lincoln?

He went home and saddled the six-year-old mare he had acquired from the estate of a circuit-riding Methodist preacher who had lodged for a month while laid up with gout in the rooming house that Cage owned, and then abruptly died before paying his bill. The preacher had never really liked or trusted the horse and had named her Potiphar's Wife, after the Egyptian queen who had tried to seduce Joseph. Cage had no problem with her and just called her Mrs. P.

Lincoln was waiting for him in front of the stable on Jefferson Street, mounted on a sizable bay gelding with a star in his forehead. He had lengthened the stirrups as far as they would go, but his long legs were still considerably bent, and in his city clothes he looked less comfortable on horseback than he had when Cage had met him in the field four years earlier. He was holding two big law books in his left hand and cradled them as preciously as if they were infants. Though he had commodious-looking saddlebags, he held on tight to the books all the long way to New Salem.

They rode west on Jefferson and in only a few minutes had left the town behind them and followed a branch that turned into a brook that led them into a picturesque grove of ancient trees on the fringe of the heaving prairie. They veered onto the road following the Sangamon, catching sight of the river every now and then through the wintry trees lining its steep banks. The air was still and the afternoon was warming, but it was cold enough for them to button the collars of their coats around their necks and for Lincoln to note the vapor belching from their horses' nostrils and to remark that the eruption of steam from locomotives might soon be as common a sight on these prairies as horses' breath if he and his colleagues in the statehouse managed to find a way to pay for all the internal improvements.

But he did not really want to talk about internal improvements, not this afternoon. He pressed Cage for details about Byron's gondolier, and how he had met him, and how he had managed it to travel as far away as Europe, and how having once reached that interesting land he had decided to remove himself to the forsaken wilderness of Illinois.

“ ‘ 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,' ” Cage said by way of answering him. Lincoln recognized the line immediately and grinned in delight.

“A child of
Childe Harold
!”

“I took it too far, I suppose, but isn't that what you're supposed to do if you're under the sway of Byron?”

He told Lincoln how his father, a prosperous manufacturer of pencils, had sent him off for a year in Europe so he could get a leaping start on French and Italian and write some travel sketches in the style of Washington Irving to sell to the newspapers. Cage's father had believed his son to be a literary genius ever since he had written, at twelve years of age, an elegy in rhymed couplets on the death of his mother. It had been a precocious child's strategy of holding death apart, of examining it in verse in a futile attempt to disperse its impact. Grief had soon crashed through his bulwark anyway and flooded his bewildered soul, but poetry had remained, and over time it became an instrument for probing experience, rather than a means of holding it at bay. He eagerly took advantage of his father's generosity because he felt the need to get Europe into his bones, to invent some new kind of American poetry that he believed had to be birthed in the Old World before being liberated in the new. Such was his thinking. He had only been eighteen. But on his tour he struggled with the suspicion that his talent might not be as deep nor his nature as tempestuous as Byron's. Standing beneath the Arch of Titus in the summer rain as he stared at the Colosseum, entering the Grand Canal of Venice in a felucca, traveling by diligence along the perilous gorge of the Strettura: everything that made his heart swell with wonder also made it shrink with homesickness in equal measure. He was too young, too alone.

On his way back to Paris from Rome he had stopped off in Marseille at the offices of Dodge and Oxnard, where a letter of credit was supposed to be waiting for him that would finance the rest of his tour. It was not a letter of credit he found, however, but a cryptic and frightening note from his father begging his son's forgiveness for some unstated crime. The letter had been forwarded by his Paris banker. The banker supplied a letter of his own, informing Cage of his father's presumed suicide, the body having been found washed ashore in a sheltered cove on the Massachusetts seacoast, the pockets of its coat and waistcoat filled with rocks and then painstakingly sewn shut. The banker expressed his condolences at Cage's loss, and regretted the absence of the expected letter of credit, as the financial affairs of Mr. Weatherby had for some time been irregular and his pencil factory, house, dependencies, livestock, land, and other assets would necessarily be portioned out among his creditors. Recognizing Cage's predicament and finding his own heart welling with sympathy for one so bereft in a foreign land, the banker had taken it upon himself to authorize funds out of his own pocket sufficient to bring Cage home.

Cage's mother had been dead for six years. His two sisters had not survived past infancy. Now his loneliness was total. He walked along the Marseille port, through the crowded lanes of Le Panier, feeling as if the people he saw in their throbbing masses had actively conspired to exclude him from all human activity and understanding. He could speak passable French by then, but in his shock and isolation the language was suddenly alien to him. Even his native tongue felt distant and useless.

He had given much thought as a young man about what he would do with his life, but never what he would do for a living. His father had been very well off, if not exactly rich, and Cage was no more accustomed to fretting about his future material welfare than he was to worrying about whether he would have breakfast.

But when he returned home it was to a new world. The house in Lowell where he had grown up was occupied by a new family, its shutters painted a garish new color. His father's friends might have helped set him up, but most of them, he now understood, were his creditors, and he was too ashamed to apply to them. He found a job in a hat maker's shop and saved enough money to repay the surprised banker who had financed his passage back to the States, and then he drifted west, romantically unmoored, vaguely intending to work his way to Spanish California and the Sandwich Islands and live and write in obscurity so that his greatness as a poet could be discovered after his death. His funds ran out in Gallipolis, Ohio, where he took a job in a shipping warehouse, staying for a year until he was offered work as a deckhand on a steamboat that was leaving from Cincinnati with the intention of unloading its cargo in Springfield and proving the navigability of the Sangamon River.

“Do you mean to say you were on the
Talisman
?” Lincoln asked. “Why, there I was out in front of you, clearing your way with an axe!”

He told Cage how he had been one of the New Salem youths dispatched to cut through the snags and drifts and overhanging tree limbs, and to dismantle the mill dam that the vessel had not been able to float over when, having finally given up on reaching Springfield, it had retreated back to the expansive waters of the Illinois.

“I probably saw you,” Cage said. “But I didn't notice much. The river was so narrow and there was so much timber on the banks it was like trying to sail through a canebrake. It took all our attention to make sure the pilot's house didn't get scraped off.”

“Yes, it turns out that the Sangamon is a fine navigable river for an Indian canoe,” Lincoln said.

Cage asked Lincoln about his own history and Lincoln quoted poetry in response just as he had, saying that he guessed Thomas Gray had it about right when he wrote that the annals of the poor were short and simple.

His own annals: restless father, moving his family from one hard-luck situation to the next, from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois. Mother dead of the milk-sick, sister dead giving birth. A kind stepmother, a few months in a blab school here and there, but mostly whatever he knew besides planting and rail-splitting and farmwork he had taught himself. His father had given him no encouragement when it came to reading or anything else and it wouldn't much bother him if he never saw the man again. He said he'd been all the way to New Orleans twice on a flatboat. He'd seen a slave auction there and was troubled at heart about it still. He'd run for the General Assembly once before and lost. He had a store in New Salem for a time but it had failed, miserably so.