A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (10 page)

W
HEN THE NEWS REACHED SPRINGFIELD
that it had been finally chosen as the site of the new capital, there was jubilation in the streets that amounted almost to rioting. Cage gave up trying to write and went down to the square, where a bonfire had been built in front of the courthouse. The old whipping post had caught fire and the drunken men pouring out of the groceries stood there and watched it burn, happy to say goodbye to this symbol of the rude frontier settlement that Springfield had been but would be no more.

It was a bitterly cold February night, snow on the ground, boys with hand sleds grabbing onto horse-drawn sleighs and sluicing wildly and dangerously down the street, the members of the Springfield Singing Society proudly lending their voices in celebration. Cage joined Mrs. Hopper and some of the residents of the Palatine in front of the bonfire. He felt the ferocious heat of it on his face, the slicing cold of the prairie wind at his back.

“The Creighton farm is going up for sale,” she told him. “Mrs. Creighton buried her husband last week and is going back to Ohio to live with her sister.”

“And you want me to buy it?”

“I want you to buy it and I want to be the agent for the sale. It's only a mile up the Pekin Road and will lie within the center of town within five years. You need to make an offer immediately, before somebody else does. The town is already overrun with speculators and now that we're the capital you can be sure there'll be twice as many tomorrow morning. For heaven's sake, Mr. Weatherby, your lethargy is maddening.”

Mrs. Hopper turned to scowl at him fondly, the brim of her tied-down bonnet rippling in the night wind. She was in her forties, strong-featured, restless, always chafing at people—like Cage—who were slow to seize opportunities that were so plain and urgent to her. She was born to run things and Cage felt fortunate to have her in charge of his house. In addition to her housekeeping and managerial skills, she was a great cook, famous in Springfield for her voluminous yeast rolls, which she served to the boarders at every meal and then sold to the populace at large on Saturday evenings.

He told her he would think about making an offer on the Creighton farm, but he had no real intention of doing so. Mrs. Hopper was a practical woman, but in an excitable moment like this he sensed that it would be too easy to make a mistake, too easy to be convinced nothing could ever go wrong. He had little enough money and he did not like to part with it except in a nimbus of deliberate calm.

He would be glad for his caution. There was a financial panic on the way that would last for years and sweep the ground away from men who had invested too wildly in the future. But on this February night, as the bonfire illuminated the old courthouse that would soon be torn down and replaced with a grand statehouse, as the wolves' howls from the still-unbroken prairie infiltrated with a weird harmony the anthems of the Springfield Singing Society, he could not help but feel that the world had shifted westward, and that he was a little closer to its center.

A few months later, in April, he went alone to a performance of
Fazio
put on by a well-known company that was touring central Illinois, another sign that the sun of civilization had begun to shine on Springfield. The play took place not in a proper theater but in the commodious upper room of a store, with board benches set up in what passed for the pit, the air smoky with burning whale oil. There was a wooden column partly obscuring Cage's view and the actors' speeches rang harshly in a space built with no particular concern for the projection of the human voice.

The play was a Florentine tragedy rendered in stiff Shakespearean language, played out against a painted backdrop that had been crated and uncrated one too many times on its journeys across the western hinterlands. None of this mattered to Cage. Even an indifferent play was an intoxicating opportunity to him, a chance to slip away for a few hours from the oppressive demands of his own imagination to bask in someone else's attempt to present another world. He watched the young actress playing the central part of a wife who mistakenly believes her husband has wronged her. She was overly trained in the teapot school of acting, striking expressive poses and attitudes as the mood of the story demanded. It was the last night of the play, the last performance of a long western tour. Though the actress moved fluidly, though she was agitatingly beautiful and spoke her lines with confidence, Cage could sense her boredom and homesickness, her longing to return to the East.

When the play was over he applauded with the rest of the audience as she took her bows and disappeared behind the heavy drop curtain with its painted Tuscan landscape. Then he remained in his seat, held in place by a provocative thought. To the actress and the rest of her company, Illinois was the last stop on the tour, the last place on earth. Why should that be so? he asked himself. Because it was a place that had not yet been made, a place that canals and railroads had yet to penetrate, where log houses were still more common than brick buildings. Other men—men like Lincoln—might create the internal improvements and banking systems and government edifices that would one day turn Illinois into a place of wealth and sophistication. But who would create its literature? Who would make it into a capital not just of commerce but of culture? In that moment, he was aware in a way he had never been of the real subject of his poetry: the hopeful towns and cities of the West and all that they were displacing, the men and women whose dreams of advancement and achievement were no less acute than those of their eastern countrymen whose lives took place in a world that was already established, already known. His work would be all about raw beginnings. He would be the poet of the unfinished, the still-to-come, of those who reached out for greatness from unlikely places.

He left the theater and walked along the darkened streets jotting thoughts and random phrases in the tiny notebook he always carried in the pocket of his waistcoat. It was eleven o'clock when he got home. In the parlor, facing each other as usual from twin wing chairs, sat Theophilous Emry and Roger Victor. Emry was a retired riverboat captain in his sixties. Victor was ten years younger and owned a struggling hat shop on Adams Street. Both men were widowers and lived at Cage's establishment; both of them were bored and boring and eager to entrap any passerby with endless questions about where he had been and what he planned to do for the rest of the day and what were his plans for the evening. Since they strategically stationed themselves in the parlor facing the front door they were impossible to avoid.

Emry looked up from his French grammar when Cage entered. For the last few months he and Victor had been occupying themselves by puzzling out together a translation of one of Balzac's stories.

“Vous avez un lettre, Monsieur Weatherby,”
he said in a barking accent.

Emry stood up and took a letter down from the mantelpiece and handed it to Cage. “Mrs. Hopper has gone to bed but she was concerned that we give it to you.”

“It's from that awkward-looking fellow,” Victor said. “The young politico. He came looking for you and when we told him you weren't here he sat down at that chair and wrote it out.”

“You mean Mr. Lincoln?”

“Yes, Mr. Lincoln indeed. And before he left he gave us a very remarkable story about a monkey who could shit bananas.”

He read the letter as soon as he reached his room. It was a brief note with a poem pinned to it. “Dear Cage,” the note read, “I am now at last an attorney and counselor at law—sworn in Vandalia last month. And today I am moved to Springfield!—in league with Stuart in his law practice. J. Speed knowing that I have no money is letting me live in the upper room of his store and giving me half his bed. We are there now. Assuming you return home and receive this at a reasonable hour, come over and talk! And read this poem on your way if you don't already know it. I have copied it out for you—tell me what you think of it.”

The poem was scrawled out in Lincoln's hand and he had failed to supply either the title or the name of the author. Cage read it hurriedly. It wasn't bad, though its iambic regularity was boring and its central idea—that everybody dies—was hardly novel. Each stanza featured one more example of things moldering or being erased or turning to dust. It built to nothing except a reaffirmation of what it had been declaring all along.

But he could see Lincoln in it. Its fatalism, its melancholic gloom, struck Cage as being as authentic to the new Springfield resident's divided personality as the raucous poetry of Burns or jokes about banana-shitting monkeys.

He could see the lamplight shining in the windows from the upper floor of Speed's store, though by now it was almost midnight. The door was open. He made his way past the stocked shelves and counters to the stairway that led up to Speed's living quarters.

It was a spacious room that took up the entire second floor of the building. Speed's big double bed was against one wall. Lincoln lay in it fully dressed and with his boots on. Speed
,
John Stuart, and Ashbel Merritt were all talking at once, standing or sitting or stretched out on the floor.

When he saw Cage, Lincoln sprang up off the bed and clomped over to him with his hand out.

“Everybody's drunk except for me,” he said. “Somebody get Cage a glass. Temperance is a terrible vice and I don't want him to fall into ruin on account of my example.”

Speed wiped out a glass with his untucked shirttail, filled it with what he proudly proclaimed was Kentucky bourbon, and handed it to Cage.

“Nobody could find you,” Speed said.

“I was at a play.”

“The Italian one?” Lincoln wanted to know. “Is it any good? I'd like to see it but first I've got to win a case for Stuart here so I can get paid.”

“It's not bad,” Cage said, unwilling to betray the restless mood the play had put him into. “So you've moved to Springfield?”

“I'm in the lion's den! It feels strange to have planted myself here at last. It feels exciting. And I haven't even been here a day and we're already trying to figure out how we can get the doctor here elected to probate justice of the peace.”

Cage turned to Merritt and raised his glass in salute. “I'm sure you'd make an exemplary probate justice of the peace, Ash. Whatever that is.”

“It's a very important and lucrative position,” Lincoln said, “and no one would serve the public better in it than our friend. Unfortunately we have an obstacle in his opponent.”

“James Adams,” Ash Merritt said to Cage. “Do you know him?”

“Only to see him on the street.”

“He's a liar, a forger, a thief, a fool, a traitor to his country, and a whining, wheedling windbag.”

Ash had only a sip of bourbon left in his glass but he gulped it down to punctuate his angry verdict.

“But he's also the incumbent,” Lincoln said. “So he's had a chance to do some favors and sew up a sack of votes. But we think we can find a few votes of our own and maybe put a hole in Mr. Adams's sack.

“John,” he said, turning to Stuart, “how many members in the Mechanics' Institute here in Springfield?”

“I'd say fifty, fifty-five active.”

“Who do I talk to?”

“Ezra Heath's the president, but Ezra's pretty far into the drink these days. Maybe Tom Tucker.”

“What about the Methodists? What do they need?”

“I've already talked to Reverend Wiley. They could use a new roof after that hailstorm last month, but we can't count on the whole congregation. Methodists tend to be independent-minded.”

On they went, Lincoln and Stuart and Merritt, factoring out who controlled the votes for the masons laying the foundation for the new state capitol building, for the draymen and teamsters and the stable owners, the Presbyterians and the temperance societies, for the stagecoach drivers and boardinghouse owners and innkeepers and militiamen and the vendors who supplied tents and chairs for camp meetings. Who had influence, and who was willing to use it for the good of the cause and who needed a couple of cured hams or a new suit of clothes or a new window frame for his house. Speed offered an opinion from time to time but mostly he just joined Cage in listening in amazement. Cage knew that Lincoln was the floor leader of the Whigs in the statehouse, but he had never seen him in action. Lincoln knew the names not just of the operatives called big little men who were counted on to deliver blocks of votes, but of seemingly each individual voter and that voter's needs and desires. He knew the men who would stand firm when they told you they were with you and the men you had to visit time and time again, shoring them up, reminding them what the stakes were.