A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (31 page)

“Ah. So she found poor Lincoln's fatal spot. You'd better leave him with me for a while. He needs watching. The hypo can destroy a man, especially a man who wants to be destroyed. Impede the circulation of the fluids, stagnate the bile, that sort of thing. When did he last move his bowels?”

Cage turned to Speed, who said he had no idea.

“I'll give him something to loosen him up. He probably needs it, and constipation does nothing to stimulate the will to live.”

Ash Merritt kept Lincoln at his house for a few days, forcing wine into his temperance-minded patient, giving him vinegar baths and mustard rubs and stroking his limbs hard with a flesh brush to move the blood along. He recovered enough to speak and to eat some bread soaked in milk and to decide that he wanted to go home, back to his room in Speed's store. The legislative session was still under way, but he did not have the strength of mind or body to return to his duties at the statehouse.

“I'm the most miserable man living,” he volunteered in a faint voice when Cage stopped by with a pan of barley soup that Mrs. Hopper had made. It was still very cold and bleak and the soup had frozen on the short walk from the Palatine to Speed's store. Lincoln was out of bed, at least, warming his feet along with the soup by the stove, a blanket thrown over his shoulders and over his head, so that he looked like a medieval carving of a wizened monk in a cowl. Maybe it was a good sign that he had passed from a condition of almost utter passivity to a groaning state of self-pity. There were customers in the store below, and Cage and Lincoln could hear Speed's voice as he waited on them, his heartiness and friendliness reaching Lincoln almost as a taunt.

“What are they saying about me?” he asked. “I don't have the will to read a paper. Are they mocking me?”

“No. Everyone thinks you have gravel, and that you'll return to the assembly in a few days.”

“I would rather pass a shovel-load of gravel through my pecker than feel one-tenth of what I'm feeling, Cage. Oh God, it's so horrible.”

He began to cry. Maybe that was another good thing: his emotions seeping from their encapsulated gloom, like the pus from a lanced boil.

“Have you heard anything about her?” he asked. “Is she back in Springfield?”

“Yes, but it will do you no good to think about her.”

“How can I not? I destroyed her life. Maybe I should write to her, beg her to marry me after all. But she wouldn't have me now, would she, after I've dishonored myself so completely?”

“You haven't dishonored yourself, and why in the world could you ever think it would be a good idea for you to take up with Mary Todd again? You're well out of it. Put that woman out of your mind, put your past with her out of your mind, and find a way to live.”

“There's no way,” Lincoln said. “No way for me to live.”

His spoken catalog of shame and self-disgust was a painful thing to witness, but Cage thought it best to keep him speaking so that he didn't sink back into catatonic despair.

“I think the weather is having an effect on you,” Cage said. “But it won't be cold forever, it won't be dark forever, and your mood will change with the weather if you give yourself a chance to let it.”

Lincoln refused to acknowledge this useless bromide. He shifted the blanket so that it no longer covered his head and gave Cage a look that suggested any further comments of that sort would be painful. In the light from the stove, his forehead glistened with sweat, his eyes were still frighteningly blank. It was hard to believe there had ever been any life in them at all.

“Would you like to go to Bogotá, Colombia?” Cage asked him.

“What?”

“A diplomatic posting. Hardin said to run the idea past you, if you were up to hearing about it. The post will go to a Whig after Harrison is inaugurated. Stuart might be able to get it for you.”

“I don't speak the Spanish.”

“You taught yourself the law. You can learn another language.”

“Is that what all my friends are arranging? To get rid of me by sending me to South America?”

“A change of scene is supposed to help in these cases.”

“ ‘These cases!' ” There was energy at last in Lincoln's voice. “I suppose by that you mean that there's nothing unusual about what I'm feeling.”

“The blues are not—”

“This is not blue, Cage! This is black! Utter black! It's the blackness of a wasted life. A life that has done no one any good and that no one will ever remember, nor should. So yes, send me to Colombia! Better yet, Patagonia! Whatever remote crevice of the earth anybody wants to stuff me into will be just fine with me.”

This eruption of anger lasted no longer than a powder flash, and then there was lethargy again, and intolerably morose silence. Cage gave up trying to talk Lincoln out of his malaise. His presence was only aggravating it. He went home, feeling the press of the deep gray winter sky upon his own mood, fighting against his own sense of futility. When he was in a spirited frame of mind, Abraham Lincoln was the most contagious man Cage had ever known. But now he found that his friend's inner darkness could be transmitted as well. In a less remarkable and magnetic individual the hypo would have been a private trial, but Lincoln's character was so public and powerful that it seemed capable of operating in reverse, siphoning back all the life and laughter it had once sent flooding into the world.

But over the next week he grew stronger, able to tolerate himself a little better each day, able to accept the fact that he had friends left and even to show flickering signs of gratitude for their steadfast company. He went back to the statehouse to take part in the session, back to his legal work in his and Stuart's office. He recovered his appetite to some degree, but he was still emaciated and moved with haunting slowness, as if with every step the question of whether his existence had any value was being posed anew.

On the night before Joshua Speed moved to Kentucky, there was a farewell party in the Edwards home. Lincoln could not be talked into going, though no one tried very hard, since they all knew Mary Todd and the rest of the coterie would be there. He bid a private farewell to Speed that afternoon instead.

“He sobbed like a child to see me go,” Speed told Cage as they walked together up the hill toward the Edwards house. “And I'll admit I was in tears myself. It's a hard thing to part with such a good friend. You'll look out for him, of course.”

“Of course.”

Speed had sold his store and he could probably have insisted that Lincoln-as-resident convey to the new owner, but Lincoln himself had decided it was time to move on. There were no vacancies at the Palatine. Cage had offered to let Lincoln share his own rooms, but to his relief Lincoln said no and made arrangements to move into Butler's rooming house, where he was well known and liked and where he already took his meals.

“The best thing I can think of would be to get him to a good whorehouse,” Speed said, “though I don't know that there's enough blood left in his veins to operate the pump. Maybe you should try to just keep him away from women entirely until he can string himself back together. And the two of you are required to visit me. I'll treat you both to a summer idyll in Kentucky and maybe we'll all forget about this hideous Illinois winter he's just been through.”

Speed had made many friends in Springfield and the Edwards house was crowded that evening with Whigs and Democrats both. Mary was in the center of things as usual, looking perfectly intact. Stephen Douglas, who had recently been appointed a state supreme court justice after some artful judiciary packing on the part of the Democrats, seemed to have a renewed interest in her now that Lincoln was out of the race. He was in the midst of telling her a windy story. Mary kept trying to look in Cage's direction, but Douglas was standing eye to eye with her and commanding her attention. When the story was finally over she managed to break off, only to be waylaid by Bat Webb, a widowed Whig representative with two children who could always be seen hovering somewhere nervously about her at any ball or hop. He was unambiguously in love with her, though it was obvious to everyone that she found him too dull and too old. But she had done nothing that Cage knew to discourage him. Bat's transparent longing had helped to buoy her pride.

Finally she made her way over to Cage and drew him into Ninian Edwards's library just as the servants were passing out glasses of sparkling champagne for a farewell toast to Speed. They were alone in the room, the oxblood bindings of Edwards's law books arrayed behind Mary like a palisade wall.

“Is it true? Is he insane now?”

“Not insane, but your letter was a blow.”

“How was it a blow? I released him! That's what he wanted, wasn't it?…Should I go to him?”

“No, definitely not. That would be the last thing he—”

“But does he still love me?”

“He's in torment, Mary. He's not in control of his emotions. For his sake, please don't shake him up again.”

She fixed him with a skeptical look that was not far from hostility, and was about to speak again when they heard Ned Baker's booming voice calling everyone together for the toast.

“I'll stay away from him, then, if that's what you want,” she said. “If you think love is the cause of torment and not its cure.”

She swept past him into the parlor. They listened as Baker orated upon Speed's virtues—his steady friendship, his integrity as a man of business. Hardin raised his glass in Speed's honor next, and then a half dozen others, including Cage, who read a few humorous and heartfelt verses he had composed for the occasion.

“It was in Springfield,” Speed said in reply, “that I encountered the truest friends, the warmest hearts I have ever known. It seems almost impossible that I could leave such a—”

But his emotions wouldn't let him finish. Ned Baker stood forward and patted him on the back as he gave in to teary hiccoughs. Next to Cage, Billy Herndon—ever emotional—was red-faced as he led the huzzahs that followed. Across the room Matilda Edwards stood with Mercy Levering, tears flowing like everyone else, but her face otherwise unrevealing and composed. She was unaware of all the hearts she had broken, of how her beauty had been the innocent agent of so much instability in their little Springfield circle.

Mary had found her way to Cage again now. She was clutching his arm and wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, wanting to share with him this moment of warm fellowship, and to remind him perhaps that her connection with Abraham Lincoln was not so completely severed after all.

O
NE MORNING THREE MONTHS AFTER
Lincoln's collapse, Ellie knocked loudly on Cage's door and walked unhesitatingly inside once he had opened it, a contradiction of all the arrangements they had put into place for propriety's sake when she moved into the Palatine. Something was wrong. Her lips were pressed tight and her fair skin had an angry flush.

“Read this!” she commanded, thrusting a public notice in his general direction.

“Notice is hereby given,” the sheriff's handbill read, “that on the 10th day of April 1841 a Negro woman was taken up and committed to the Tazewell County jail in Tremont there to be dealt with as a Runaway Negro. She calls her name Cordelia and is about 25 years of age, of medium brown Color, slender built. Interested parties in the matter shall apply to the sheriff. She will be dealt with according to the law.”

“I don't understand,” Cage said. “How did she end up in jail in Tazewell County? That's sixty miles away.”

“I know exactly how.” Ellie snatched the public notice out of Cage's hand and replaced it with a folded-up copy of last week's
Sangamo Journal.
She pointed to one of the many advertisements for runaway slaves.

“Two hundred dollar reward!” the notice read. “Ran away from the subscriber at Frankfort June last a gingerbread complected young Negro woman named Louisa. Of tolerable good looks and build. Intelligent and well-spoken and was taught to read. Trained in the art and mystery of domestic life. Extremely skillful with her Needle. Birthmark on left shoulder in the shape of Madagascar. Some scarring on the left cheek and on the back from light application of the cowhide. Will likely be well-dressed as she Stole women's clothing including a blue calico frock and a pair of red morocco-eyed slippers tied with a yellow ribbon. Signed Robert Etheridge.”

Ellie sat on Cage's hard wooden chair, tapping her finger on the scattered papers on his desk. “She wasn't at work on Thursday. Her things were gone. I thought she had just decided to quit me for no reason, but she must have seen the notice in the paper and left in a panic. But she didn't get far. What will happen to her, Cage?”

“I don't know. I suppose the sheriff means to keep her in jail until her owner or his agent comes to retrieve her. She can't prove her freedom. She has no certificate.”

“I need her in the shop. She's very skilled and she's not dull-witted in the least. I don't want her sent back to Kentucky to be a slave.”

“We can talk to Lincoln.”

“Is he back in his right mind? I don't want to waste time and money with someone who can't help us.”

Cage assured her that Lincoln had managed to pull himself back into the realm of sanity, though he still had a rueful, self-punishing look and had to be reminded about mealtimes, during which he chewed his food like a man who had been talked into taking exercise. He and John Stuart had dissolved their partnership—amicably enough, one supposed, though Stuart's chronic absence in Washington and Lincoln's weeks of instability might have added to each man's thinking that it was time to move on. Lincoln was now Stephen Logan's junior partner, and the office they shared was on Fifth Street, across from Hoffman's Row.

Logan himself was on the way out when Cage and Ellie entered the office. He was, if possible, even more of a shabby dresser than Lincoln, wearing a fifty-cent hat that appeared to be made out of rat fur and a pair of brogans so cracked and peeling they might have been passed down by his great-grandfather.

“A terrible thing about Mr. Harrison,” he said to Cage. “An unthinkable thing. Everyone was so excited, and now…Good Lord, does John Tyler think he has the right to just become the president now?”

He left the question hanging in the air as he held the door open for Cage and Ellie and then walked out onto the square. The office was much the same as Lincoln and Stuart's office had been, though even messier, with a long table for a desk and a not-long-enough settee on which they found Lincoln reclining, reading through a pile of documents. He was wearing his usual black coat, with a black mourning badge pinned to the breast. The startling news of Harrison's death had arrived only a few days earlier, and people were still trying to come to terms with the reality of it. “The President of the United States is no more!” the headline in the
Sangamo Journal
had read, but this had made no sense, because the hero of Tippecanoe had barely been inaugurated. In fact, though, they were saying it was his inauguration that had killed him, since he had spoken for two hours without a hat or overcoat in foul weather and died a month later of pneumonia.

The shock to the public was strong. There were crepe banners in the streets, salutes from minute guns and memorial addresses. A dress rehearsal, Cage would later reflect, of the national paroxysm that would follow upon the death of the man who rose to greet him and Ellie that April day in 1841.

He bid both to sit, clearing one chair of books and lifting another from the far side of the desk and setting it before Ellie. Lincoln was shy and unsettled in her presence and didn't seem able to meet her eyes. This was a legacy, Cage jealously concluded, of that night he had visited her in her room.

They talked for a moment about Harrison, the almost comically mundane manner of his death. Cage had worried that he might find Lincoln in another deep well of melancholy, after all the effort that he had gone to on Harrison's behalf, all the traveling and stumping he had done to get him elected. It was the canvass, after all, that had left him so physically and mentally fatigued and vulnerable to the confused entanglement with Mary that had almost killed him. But Harrison's death, though it was a shock and a disappointment, was nothing like the character assault that Lincoln had directed at himself from within. It seemed like something he could bear.

“My gravest concern about this whole Harrison tragedy,” Lincoln was saying now, “is that John Tyler is now the president and he's the farthest thing from a true Whig.”

He was starting to count off a list of Tyler's deficiencies when Ellie interrupted him. “I don't care who's a Whig and who's not. My girl has been stolen away from me and thrown in jail in Tazewell County and I want her back.”

She handed Lincoln the sheriff's notice and the advertisement in the
Journal
and shifted impatiently in her chair while Lincoln read them.

“Are you sure your girl and this Louisa woman are one and the same?”

“I'm very sure,” Ellie said.

“You hired a runaway slave?”

He addressed this question to Cage, who thought it might be best not to answer it directly. He just tilted his head in an ambiguous fashion.

Lincoln studied the floor for a moment in irritation or consternation, then set the documents on his desk. “Well, the timing's good,” he said. “The circuit starts up in Tazewell in a few days. I'll be going there anyway. They've filed their writs of capias ad respondendum and capias ad satisfaciendum, so it remains for us to do some latinizing of our own and petition for habeas corpus. If we can get Sam Treat—he's the circuit judge—to grant the petition we can get the poor woman freed. Figure about twenty dollars ought to do it for my fee.”

“It's an outrage,” Ellie said.

“Well, it's the going rate, you won't find—”

“I don't mean your fee. I mean the fact that somebody could just grab Cordelia off the road. She hasn't committed a crime.”

“It's crime enough to be a runaway slave.”

“Isn't the point of a slave running away to Illinois the fact that when she's in a free state she's no longer a slave?”

“It's more complicated than that, Miss—”

He didn't know what to call her and she offered no lifeline. Beneath his raw complexion he was blushing. But he recovered himself and declared there was no reason to address the complexities now, as they would be adequately aired at the hearing. He would file the petition right away.

“I'll do my best to get your Negress free,” he said to Ellie.

“Thank you, Abraham.”

The act of her speaking his name caused the blush that had subsided to erupt again. She stood to go, and the two men rose with her.

“Would you mind,” Lincoln asked Ellie, as Cage was opening the door for her, “if I detained your Mr. Weatherby here for a few minutes?”

“Why would there be any reason in the world you would have to have my permission to speak to your friend?” she asked. “Will there be a trial? Will you need me to testify?”

“Very likely.”

“Then I'll be there.”

When she left, Lincoln sat back down on the settee. His legs were so long that when he sat straight down his knees rose almost to his eye level. A moment of uncertain silence passed before he spoke.

“It occurred to me while you were sitting here just now that I never said much of a thank-you. One reason the hypo is so unendurable is it makes me so selfish. It cuts you off from the comfort of accepting that there are other people in the world, and that they care about your welfare. So anyway, thank you.”

“From the outside, it looked like a very terrible thing to suffer through.”

“I tell you, Cage, if what I felt had been equally distributed to the whole human family, there wouldn't have been a single cheerful face on earth. I didn't think I could ever get better, but I did, and I propose to stay that way.”

“I'm very glad.”

It seemed he should go, but Lincoln sank into a renewed silence that held Cage there a moment more.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Lincoln asked.

“Tell you what?”

“That you'd hired this girl. That you'd joined the abolitionist crusade.”

“I thought it best to keep it a secret.”

“Yes, but from me? Do you think I'm an enemy of Negro freedom?”

“I didn't see how it would have done you any good to know. You have some very narrow political gaps to run.”

“That's true, but I hate to think that such an important friend to me as Micajah Weatherby wouldn't trust me with knowledge of any sort.”

“I trust you,” Cage said.

“Good. I admire what you've done to help this woman, and I'll do my best on her behalf. Were you planning to go to Tremont to hold me to account?”

“I suppose that if Ellie is going I'll go as well.”

“I have an idea. Why not let her take the stage and you ride up with me? Wouldn't you like to see the marvelous workings of the circuit?”

Cage was indeed curious about the marvelous workings of the circuit, so two days later he departed with Lincoln and the rest of the judicial circuit riders to Tremont, the seat of Tazewell County where Cordelia was incarcerated and where her case would be heard.

“Now you see my real life at last,” Lincoln said as he and Cage rode together on horseback across the radiant spring prairie, the smells of new grass and flowers and raw rich sod so powerfully present in the air around them that they seemed like physical bands of matter that could be reached for and touched. Lincoln had a new buggy but he had left it behind in Springfield, declaring to Cage that since the weather promised to be so fine they should travel like primitives in full unvehicularized glory. They listened to a tapestry of birdsong, the piercing notes of a bobwhite breaking through the calls of the multitudes of other species as if concluding an argument. Grouse whickered away in the distance from their approaching horses. The dark imprisoning winter that had helped to shatter Lincoln's morale was as remote from their memories now as if it had occurred in a prehistoric epoch.

By his “real life,” Lincoln meant the circuit, the twice-yearly legal caravan that set out from Springfield—from Sangamon County to Tazewell County, on to McLean and Logan and half a dozen other counties before arriving again three months later where it had started. They had barely left the suburbs of Springfield this morning when Cage immediately understood the appeal: open country forever ahead, a traveling band of legal minds and raconteurs and singing companions who, upon arrival in some forsaken county seat, would partition themselves into judges and adversaries for a few days, and then when it came time for the circuit to move on they would come together again in circus fellowship. Lincoln and Cage were riding in the vanguard today, fifty yards or so ahead of the carriage bearing Judge Treat and State's Attorney David Campbell, alongside which rode a cluster of other lawyers to whom he had been given only a hasty introduction before the group set out on the Pekin Road. Treat and Campbell were Democrats—Cage didn't know about the others—but party loyalty out on the great ocean of grass was, it seemed, too puny a thought.