A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (7 page)

“That's how I acquired my national debt. All the money I make from postmaster work and surveying and serving in the legislature goes to paying it off.”

“Probably not all of it if you're buying land along that canal.”

“Well, you've got to rise to an opportunity every now and then, even if it's discommodious to do so.”

They arrived in New Salem before dark. Cage had last seen the place from the deck of the
Talisman
while they had been trying to get the broad side-wheeler over the mill dam. That had been during a cold winter and the branches overhanging the river were sheathed in ice, which sometimes fell loose and crashed on the deck, once almost breaking the captain's wife's foot. The town had not impressed him then and it did not now—just another river village of maybe thirty houses, most of them made of logs, strung along a main street above the banks of the narrow Sangamon. The trees on its outskirts were strangely naked, the bark stripped off by the village women to make dye. The failure of the
Talisman
to open up the river had hurt Springfield, but it had probably doomed places like New Salem, especially if they ended up being bypassed by the railroads and canals that Lincoln and his colleagues in the statehouse in Vandalia had promised to bring to Illinois.

They left their horses at the public stable. The stableman greeted Lincoln like a favored nephew and in a sly, sarcastic tone of voice demanded to know whether he had been corrupted yet by the toad-eating man grannies he had been keeping company with in the legislature.

They walked out onto the street, where Lincoln waylaid a young boy and asked him to run off to the Carman house, where he lodged and boarded, and inform Mrs. Carman he was bringing a guest for dinner. The boy took off in a sprint as if it was the most urgent errand ever conceived. It was late afternoon. Women were walking home from the shops and men were drifting into the groceries, but it seemed there wasn't a citizen of New Salem who didn't make a point of stopping what they were in the midst of doing to speak to Abe Lincoln. The men lectured him about the Little Bull Law and warned him by God sir to hold the line against Van Buren and his preposterous idea of Negro suffrage. The women fussed over him and offered to feed him themselves if Mrs. Carman couldn't seem to put any meat on his bones. They told him to please comb his hair every now and then and to make sure the next time he had a suit made to have somebody measure his arms.

Lincoln introduced Cage, and the New Salemites greeted him cordially enough, but he felt unseen beside his towering, interesting new friend. Someone named Mrs. Abell came running up to Lincoln and grabbed him by his arm and told him she'd just had a letter from her sister.

“She remembers you!”

“Well, I remember her.”

“You know what I mean. She
asked
about you!”

She turned her head briefly to Cage, curious about who he was but not curious enough to allow Lincoln to say more than “This is my friend from—” before whipping her head around again and staring up into Lincoln's face.

“I'm going to Kentucky soon. Do you want me to bring her back?”

“Bring her back?”

“Don't pretend to be stupid, Abe,” Mrs. Abell said. She had a sharp, impatient expression. “Do you want me to bring her here or not?”

“Well, I guess you better.”

“It's a long way to come for nothing. You understand that?”

Lincoln nodded in a dazed sort of way.

“I'll write her, then. I'll write her and tell her that you'll be writing her.” She looked at him sternly again. “Which means you
will
write her.”

Lincoln agreed that he would. Mrs. Abell smiled, took the liberty of brushing some dust off his sleeve, nodded politely to Cage as if she had actually been patient enough to meet him, and walked off.

“I think I just agreed to marry that woman's sister,” Lincoln said.

“You did? Did you mean to?”

“Well, I suppose so. To tell you the truth the case puzzles me a little.”

“Always reading!” Mr. Carman pronounced at the dinner table for Cage's benefit. “He reads thoroughly and never forgets it, don't you, Abe?”

“Well, it's hard to scratch something into my mind, which is about as hard to penetrate as a piece of steel. But once it's scratched in it's generally there to stay.”

“A piece of steel!” Mr. Carman repeated approvingly. He was a shoemaker, a reasonably young man still, in his thirties, but nobly bald, and he spoke with such enthusiasm and concentration it was as if the hairs had been sprung out of his head by the force of the thoughts within it.

“ ‘Here's freedom to him that wad read!' ” Mr. Carman said, quoting Burns as he raised his glass of homemade Madeira for a toast.

“ ‘Here's freedom to him that wad write,' ” Lincoln replied, in an impressive Scottish brogue that suddenly had nothing of Kentucky in it. But he was returning the toast with a glass full of water, and Cage caught the disappointment in Carman's eye.

“He needs the temperance vote, you see,” the host said to Cage.

“Leave Abe alone, Caleb,” Mrs. Carman said as she bustled nervously as a hummingbird around the table, setting down a plate of biscuits, spooning catchup sauce onto everyone's food. “The poor man can drink what he likes.”

“Well, I'm not above putting on a show for anybody who's got a vote to cast,” Lincoln admitted. “But the truth is it ain't politics that keeps me from drinking. I allowed myself to get flat drunk a time or two when I was younger and didn't care for the famous effects. When it came time to stand up, I felt like a slug trying to jump over a fence.”

Dinner was catfish soup, mutton cakes, and cold slaugh. There were three young children, all of them with their eyes on Lincoln, waiting for what he might say next to make them laugh. From time to time they cast disapproving looks at Cage. They did not like strangers at their table.

Mr. Carman asked Cage what he did in Springfield. Cage said he owned a lodging house.

“A lodging house!” Carman saluted again with his glass. “I honor you for operating such a thing—cooking, cleaning, washing bedclothes, making repairs, tossing out lodgers who can't pay their bills. I don't mean Lincoln here, of course, who's always scrupulously prompt. No doubt they attack you with their fists when that happens—maybe with knives.”

“I've never been attacked with anything. As for everything you mentioned, I have an excellent woman who manages the place.”

“Leaving you as a man of leisure, then. Well done.”

“Hardly leisure,” Lincoln said. “He's a slave to poetry.”

They demanded a recital, then and there. Cage turned to Lincoln for help, but his friend's voice was loudest. So he put down his napkin and pushed back his chair and stood, fortifying himself with a swallow of their host's overly sweet wine, which Mr. Carman had earlier bragged required twelve pounds of dissolved sugar candy to make.

Cage had worked toilsomely long for the past two months on a short lyric inspired by the meeting place of the Ohio and the Kanawha, near where he had worked in the shipping warehouse. He had watched cotton and peach brandy heading upriver from Memphis, and machinery and iron farming tools coming down from Pittsburgh, and thought he sensed in those differing goods a metaphor that could stand for the reckoning that must someday come between the hard righteous North and the evanescent South, with its perishable crops planted and harvested by slaves.

The thing was not finished really; its meter wanted slackening, and some of its rhymes were too direct and others too elusive. But he thought it good enough to satisfy a command performance at a host's table:

“There flows the broad Ohio,

As if by thought itself impelled,

As if 'twere more than moving water—

But History undreamed, nor yet beheld.

It knows its course, though in the way

the flower knows the light, or the child

In womb its mother's cryptic voice—

A summoning stir, all mute, all wild.”

There were eight stanzas, building well enough, resolving well enough in lines about unseen snags and the darkening tunnel of overhanging ice-heavy tree limbs that he had experienced himself on the journey of the
Talisman.
The children looked blank when it was over but the three adults applauded—did more than applaud. They leapt to their feet and Mr. Carman patted him on the back and congratulated Lincoln on his excellent choice of a new friend.

The Carmans lived in a teeteringly high log house of two floors, with two low-ceilinged rooms above. The children shared one of the rooms and Lincoln lodged in the other. It was a cramped space barely big enough for a narrow bed and Lincoln's surveying tools and saddlebags. There were books carefully displayed on a plank nailed to the wall—the lawbooks he had just borrowed from Stuart, along with Shakespeare, Burns, Gray,
The Revised Laws of Indiana,
volumes on grammar, on mathematics, and a collected Byron worn to tatters. Squeezed into one corner of the room were a desk and a wobbly chair, the desk covered with papers and notebooks and loose pages with his scribblings, which Lincoln gathered up and put into a drawer, explaining that they contained thoughts too raw for anyone to be allowed to see.

In their nightshirts, they crowded together on the bed beneath two fraying quilts. Besides being narrow, the bed was far too short for Lincoln, whose feet and legs overhung it almost to the knees. In the room across the hall the children were noisy and it took them a half hour and several admonitions from their mother to finally settle down and go to sleep. In the meantime Cage and Lincoln shared a candle and read quietly, each from a different book, Lincoln quickly lost in Blackstone's
Commentaries,
Cage fitfully turning the pages of an essay by Dr. Johnson on Addison in one of the anthologies on Lincoln's shelf.

When the children's room was finally silent, Lincoln closed Blackstone and stared up at the ceiling with the book resting on his chest.

“ ‘History undreamed,' ” he quoted back to Cage from the poem his guest had recited at dinner. “What did you mean by that? Is history a dream, in your figuring of things?”

“It can be, in my little poetic world.”

“So who would be the dreamer? God?”

“Now you've left poetry behind for philosophy. And anyway, it wasn't meant to be literal
,
just to sound true.”

Lincoln smiled, closed his law book and stared at its black cover. “It might be I'll make a poor lawyer, because sometimes I like the sound of truth as much as the substance of it.”

He reached across Cage and set the book on the makeshift shelf, then resumed his position on his back, staring up the ceiling, the knob of his shoulder bone pressing against his bedmate's. It felt good to Cage to feel the warmth of another human body against his own—when had that last been the case? For a short half hour in a Beardstown brothel, he reckoned, with a fleshy young woman with broken teeth who had been surprisingly kind to him and provided not only the release he was craving but a reprieve from engulfing loneliness.

Of course it was vastly different to lie in bed with a woman. With a man that sort of release was not to be contemplated. But reprieve from loneliness was still a possibility. Cage had friends, but not one like Abraham Lincoln was beginning to seem: an intimate, a confidant, a man with whom one could lie in bed while the candle flickered and discuss the dreams of God.

“Tell me about this woman in Kentucky you seem to have bound yourself to marry,” he asked Lincoln after a while.

“Her name is Mary Owens. She's very pleasant, very quick-witted, fair-sized but not Falstaffian. A handsome woman—a keener intellect than mine, properly educated. I don't know what she sees in me but we spent some time together and to the best of my recollection we fell in love.”

“To the best of your recollection?”

“Well, it was a few years ago. And something happened between-times that sort of distracted me from her. Distracted me from pretty much everything there is.”

Cage watched Lincoln scrape a thin flake of bark off the log wall with meditative absorption. Cage started to ask what had happened but decided to leave Lincoln to his solitude. It was a few minutes before he spoke again.

There had been another girl, he said, named Ann. Her family lived in New Salem. Lincoln said her brother had been one of the people he had introduced Cage to when they had been walking up the street toward the Carmans' house. She was young, slight as a bird, blue-eyed. She had been engaged to another man but he had wandered off to New York and since he had not seemed much concerned about coming back, Lincoln had told Ann maybe she should marry him instead. She said she would. The fact that he had her love was a constant startlement, like waking up out of a dream of such engulfing happiness you knew it could not possibly be true—and then discovering that it was.

But then last summer Ann had died.

“They said it was brain fever. I don't know if that's what it was or not, but it came on fast and it came on strong and it took her away. I saw her right before she died. She didn't know me. She screamed when she saw me walk into her sickroom, like I wasn't Abe Lincoln at all but some stranger who had come to do her harm.

“After she died I sort of ran off the track. I was in a low stretch, low enough that the people around here thought I was going to kill myself.”

“Were you?”

“Maybe, if I could have roused myself enough to do it. I would have liked to be dead. It would have been a mighty improvement. But I didn't have the energy to lift a razor to my throat, and there wouldn't have been much point, since my heart was buried with that girl anyway. That's what the hypo feels like to me—like you're down deep in a grave and you can hear everybody talking and going about their business way above you, and there's no way you can dig yourself out to join them.”