A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (48 page)

T
HE AMERICAN THEATER
held four thousand people. Every seat was occupied. There had not been even a thousand people in the whole of San Francisco when Cage had arrived here, starved and shattered, thirteen years before. It had been an overgrown pueblo of adobes and shanties and billiard saloons, its harbor crowded with swaying masts. A place where the air was still fragrant with the smell of wild mint, and where the calls of gulls could still be heard above the noise of construction.

There was no chance of a gull or any other creature being heard tonight. There was only the commotion of four thousand souls simultaneously chanting the name of Edward Baker, who had moved briefly to Oregon to get himself elected senator from that state, and now had come home to San Francisco in triumph. Cage had chosen not to sit in the dress circle with John and Jesse Frémont, with Bret Harte and the other luminaries who had come to hear Ned give what the Republican audience had apparently decided would be the greatest speech in all of human history.

It was not that, but it was pretty good. When Ned finally took the stage, everything that could be waved—hands, arms, hats, handkerchiefs—was in frenzied motion, and it took almost twenty minutes for the preliminary acclaim to die down while Ned stood there holding out his hand from time to time in a grave appeal for calm. He looked older, of course—fleshier, balder, grayer. He still combed his remaining hair forward in a bird-wing style, which no doubt contributed to his latest nickname, the Old Gray Eagle.

When he finally was allowed to speak, his voice filled the theater with no evident strain and he stood there sweeping his eyes over the audience while remaining magnetically still, holding back his arm-waving theatrics until it was time for a strategic crescendo.

“The old man is talking like a god!” proclaimed the breathless reporter from
The Morning Call
halfway through the speech. He was sitting in the row in front of Cage's more seasoned man from his own paper, the
Yerba Buena Discoverer.
The old man: he supposed that was true, though Ned couldn't yet be fifty. Listening to him speak, Cage felt himself hurled back to those poetical society days in Springfield, when Ned Baker had seemed the man among them all who would reach the furthest. And he had, in a way—congressman, hero of the war with Mexico, a man who had built a railroad across Panama and helped create an empire in California while almost incidentally becoming one of the greatest orators and legal minds in the country. Now he was a United States senator, about to embark for Washington where he would throw himself into the effort of saving the Republic at its most crucial hour.

But the god that Ned Baker had become was not speaking about himself. He was speaking about Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for president of the United States. (The Whigs now just a wistful memory, having broken apart over the question of slavery.)

“We don't propose to dissolve the Union,” he said, his voice swelling with melodious force, “and don't propose to let anybody else dissolve it. And if Abraham Lincoln gets your vote—the vote of the people!—you can rest in the assurance that our beloved Union will be safe!”

He spoke for an hour and a half, and must have spent three hours afterwards greeting his admirers before finally being allowed to go off to bed. But when Cage met him for breakfast the next morning in Ned's suite at the City Hotel his voice was still strong, his mood ebullient. He flung open the door himself to greet Cage, grabbed him by the shoulder and drew him in and sat down at a window overlooking the bay, a shimmering satiny blue in the early-morning light.

“Thank you for your generous donation to my candidacy,” he said as he poured syrup over a stack of six pancakes. “More important, thank you for seeing me. How many times have we met in the past ten years or so? Three?”

“Not more than that.”

“Entirely my fault,” Ned said.

“No, of course the fault is mine.”

Ned looked up from his pancakes, caught Cage's eye for a moment in acknowledgment of this truth, then veered off onto another subject.

“I saw the
Discoverer
this morning. Your man did a good job of covering the speech.”

“There'll be a full transcription in Wednesday's edition.”

“I read it steadfastly, you know, as much for your poems as for flattering mentions of me. Your point of view, your tone, your metaphors—all first rate. You could publish that work anywhere, not just in a paper you happen to own.”

“I don't think of it as anything more than a pastime.”

Ned started to chastise him with a compliment, but mercifully decided to leave the topic alone. And anyway it was true. Cage was a newspaper publisher, a businessman. Like many others in San Francisco he had had the luck to be here early enough to ride the astounding wave of prosperity that had come with the discovery of gold in Coloma. His newspaper verse was expertly rendered and fairly popular. He was particularly adept at verbal seascapes that seemed to—but didn't really, he knew—create striking insights about the transient flaring of human life against the infinitude of nature. But he no longer had the soul of a poet, or any particular sort of soul at all. Every now and then he thought of the manuscript of
The Prairie Road,
accidentally thrown out with his writing desk when they had had to lighten the wagons during the Donner Party's harrowing crossing of the Great Salt Desert. He remembered that book, all of the labor it had taken to create, all the hopes he had thrown onto it, with the tolerant understanding of a man looking back upon an extinguished passion.

“I still put my hand to it, now and then,” Baker was saying.

“I liked your tribute to the Fourth Illinois.”

“Yes, that was good, wasn't it?” He set down his fork and recited the poem. It was about all the men under his command during the Mexican War who had died of fever or dysentery or measles beside “the rushing Rio Grande” before they had a chance to see action.

“Th' archangel's shade was slowly cast

Upon each polished brow:

But, calm and fearless to the last,

They sleep securely now.”

He spoke the final lines with the unembarrassed dramatic emphasis of an actor, which was to some degree what he had become. He sniffed back tears when he was through. Just above the collar of his shirt Cage could see a raised scar on his neck from a bayonet thrust.

“Such a strange, deadly war,” Ned mused. “Who would have supposed that so many of our old crowd would have found themselves fighting in Mexico, of all places? Poor Hardin dead on the field at Buena Vista, along with Henry Clay's son. And it's a miracle Jim Shields didn't die of his wounds at Cerro Gordo. Hit right through the chest and lungs with grape. I saw him in the hospital afterwards. The poor general was suffering so much I could almost forgive him for wanting to kill our friend in that duel. And I almost had to hold my nose when it came time to pin a medal on Nimmo Rhodes. I hate it when villains behave with gallantry.”

Baker himself had been the great hero of Cerro Gordo, taking over the brigade from Shields after he had been wounded, seizing a Mexican battery and turning the guns upon the retreating enemy. Had he not been born in England, it could easily have been him running for president today instead of his less Mars-like friend.

“Lincoln asks about you,” Ned said. “He wonders why you so rarely reply to his letters. There's no reason a falling-out has to be final. For God's sake, do you know who the regimental surgeon was in Mexico who saved Shields's life? It was Ash Merritt! Ran a silk handkerchief through his chest wound with a ramrod right there on the battlefield. There was a time when he would have very much liked to see Shields dead, as I remember.”

“I never wanted to see anybody dead,” Cage said, “and certainly not Lincoln. It was just all a very long time ago and things are different now.”

“Different? Do you mean because of that business in the Sierra? I assure you, Cage, I've passed through some terrible trials in my life—Chagres fever in Panama, as an instance; I would not wish any man to suffer through that. I think I know what desperation is, and it is God alone and not man who holds the right of judgment in such cases.”

It was true. Most people had not been as immediately condemning as he might have expected. There had been looks of pity, and horror, and eventual admiration, since a theme of heroism had gradually attached itself to the effort he and some of the others of the Donner Party had made to get over the pass in the heart of winter and find help for the snowbound and starving emigrants left behind at Truckee Lake. But to stay alive and reach Johnson's Ranch had demanded not just the crossing of a pass but of another barrier from which there was no return. At the time, Cage's spirit had been even more winnowed than his body. They had started out already nearly dead with hunger. They staggered uphill on snowshoes they had fashioned themselves out of rawhide strips and the oxbows from their wagons, the brilliant mirror lake receding below them, the drifts of snow on which they traveled so deep their heads grazed the highest branches of the trees. Cage's conscious mind flared intermittently like heat lightning on the margins of a dark void. They had done their best at first to hold true to the protocols of human decency, though starvation had already made them as apathetic and remorseless as the wolves they imagined watching from the trees. They had prayed over the dead, and closed their eyes and covered their faces before they began to strip the flesh from their limbs. But these sacramental instincts soon subsided, and there was just the urgent question of who would die next, and how soon. There were murders. Two Indians from Sutter's Fort that had been sent to help the trapped emigrants but had starved along with them had been shot by one of the members of the snowshoe party. Cage had tried to stop it, if speaking a hoarse word of protest meant trying. His ineffectual outrage had been only a thin disguise for his own murderous rapacity.

“In any case,” Ned Baker said, “that is the past, and you and I are men of the future. Lincoln men.”

“Will he win?”

“Assuredly. Who else could it be? The Democrats are split between Douglas and Breckinridge. Bell may win a few states but he won't be a factor in the end. Lincoln will become president. It'll be a triumph for our nation but hell is sure to follow. If South Carolina pulls out of the Union as she threatens to do, and other states take her example, there'll be a war.”

He had never stopped eating as he talked and had managed to finish off most of his pancakes. He pushed the plate with its syrup-sodden remnants away from him and poured them both more coffee. They talked for a while about Lincoln's improbable but somehow inevitable rise to his present circumstances. He had served only one term in the United States Congress and had come home in disfavor, having stood up in the House to denounce the war against Mexico at a moment when patriotic fervor was at its highest, and when martyrs like John Hardin were lying dead on Mexican battlefields.

“But I suppose you can no more separate Abraham Lincoln from politics,” Ned said, “than you can separate a poet such as yourself from his pen. He was very fine in those debates with Douglas when they were running for the Senate, very firm against that goddam Kansas act. So what if he lost? He lost splendidly. ‘A House Divided,' did you read that speech? And it was better for him to lose a Senate race and gain the moral advantage to win the presidency. Let no one doubt now where the man stands on slavery. He's not an abolitionist and may never be—it's not his temperament—but slavery will be abolished all the same and his hand will be on the machine. You don't doubt that he's a man of high honor and principle?”

“No. Maybe I did once, but not anymore.”

“Then answer his letters, won't you? He needs his friends.”