A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (49 page)

Ned reached for his coffee cup, took a scalding draught, set it down with a grimace.

“I'd like to put to you a notion,” he said. “If there's going to be a war to save the Union, by God I won't stay out of it. I'll give up my Senate seat if I have to and petition the secretary of war for authority to raise a California regiment.”

“But you're not the senator from California. You represent Oregon.”

“No matter. I only went to Oregon because I could get elected there. It's California men I know best. Men like you.”

“You want me to join your regiment?”

“You'll be a captain.”

“The Black Hawk War was a long time ago, Ned.”

“No matter. You're a man of standing and a man of character. Like me, you know privation. Your paper is strong for the Union and speaks with a clear voice against the spread of slavery. If it comes to a fight, will you be there?”

He was a public man but an unknown one, even to himself. He had set out for California in defeat and penury, he had crossed the Sierra and made a new life and a new fortune, but he had arrived in the Golden Land haunted and diminished.

Jim Reed, imperious and heedless, had been the cause of their arriving too late in the winter to make it over the pass. He had talked them into taking a cutoff that in the end had cost them crucial time. Along the way, one of the men had grown enraged and attacked him with a whip, and Reed had killed him with a knife. For this he had been banished from the wagon train, but he had used his banishment well—making his way to Sutter's Fort before the snow had trapped the others on the far side of the mountains and organizing the relief expeditions that finally reached the survivors at Truckee Lake. Donner and his wife had died, but Reed and his family had made it out just in time
,
just before they too would have had to face the ultimate necessity. When the Reeds had finally come over the pass they were alive, unlike Cage, in body and spirit both.

He might have married in California, started a family of his own, but he had fallen into an isolate stillness, deeper than the hypo, distinct from it, permanent. He functioned and even flourished outwardly, but inside there was the poison of wariness. He had many acquaintances with whom he was on excellent terms, but no intimate friends. There were several women he saw professionally, in secret, of course, out of desire and habit. Ellie had written to him after she had read the newspaper accounts of the emigrants' trials and seen his name among the list of survivors, and over the years they corresponded with as much regularity as they could, given the fact that for the letters to reach their destination they had to travel by steam packet and overland through the jungles of Panama. She was no more forthcoming or revealing than she had ever been, but there was a steadiness to her letters, an eagerness to confide all the details of the growing success of her shops and investments, that suggested something unconcluded between them. Once she sent him a carte de visite. In it she was seated in a dress of striped silk with a wide collar, her head turned away from the viewer, her hair brushed into glossy wings that covered her ears. Her face was fuller than he had known it, but—if the photographic image could be trusted—still unlined. Her mouth offered a bare hint of a smile, her gaze drifted beyond the margins of the frame, as if looking for something to settle on.

The letter Cage received from Ned Baker was postmarked April 13, 1861. He had written it the day after the firing began on Fort Sumter
,
just a little over a month after he had stood on the east portico of the Capitol building as Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States.

“Will you fight in the great cause?” the letter asked. “Will you help our friend the President defend the Union? Will you accept a captaincy in the 1st California? If the answer as I hope is yes reply by mail at once, embark on the first ship headed for Panama and telegraph at the first opportunity. We are going into training at Fort Schuyler. For the country's sake join us! In haste, for I must rush to my waveless shore…”

He sat with the letter in his hands, rocking in a mahogany chair on his verandah looking out over the water. It was late afternoon. The marshes across the bay were crowded with shorebirds, and brown pelicans plummeted inelegantly from the sky, diving for fish whose passing schools riffled the surface. He saw the sunlight gleaming on the rolling backs of porpoises.

Cage's decision was already made. It was a matter only of arrangements. Ever since he had seen Baker at the City Hotel he had been thinking of his last meeting with Lincoln, the accusations they had thrown at each other, charges of dishonor, of moral cowardice, of opportunism. The anger and disappointment of two men who had once thought they were the same but who were different: one cautious in politics, the other cautious in life. Cage remembered all the times that he had tried to draw Lincoln back from some imagined precipice—a speech whose sentiments and theatrics he didn't think worthy of the man delivering it, a near-deadly duel that could have been avoided with a simple shift in rhetoric, a love affair that seemed capable of destroying his sanity. But what if in restraining his friend his greater, hidden motive had been merely to try to remain on safe ground himself? He had held himself apart from politics, he had allowed Ellie to hold herself apart from him. And what had Cage done about the great question of the age, except to spend a few thousand dollars so that he could maintain his righteous position that slavery was evil?

He was not naive enough to think that in joining Baker's California brigade he would be joining in a direct fight against slavery itself. The fight was for the Union, and in Lincoln's mind disunion and disorder had always been a greater menace than human bondage. But the confrontation between the North and the South would inevitably lead in the direction of slavery's outright defeat or eventual elimination. He could muster what was left of himself and step onto that field, or he could remain in his rocking chair, safe in the Golden Land.

T
HE BATTLE AT BALL'S BLUFF
came on unexpectedly. What was meant to have been a reconnaissance across the Potomac into Virginia had provoked a full-out attack by the rebels guarding the road to Leesburg. The company that Cage commanded, along with the rest of the Federal forces at the summit of the bluff, had been caught out in the open when the fighting commenced. They were there still, finding what cover they could in an open field bordered by trees and ravines and thick growths of mountain laurel that screened the attacking Mississippians on their front. He could no longer hear the two mountain howitzers and the James Rifle that had been helping to suppress the rebel advance. Their artillery crews were probably overrun or picked off by sharpshooters. Ned Baker was in command, somewhere to Cage's right, but there were no orders coming from that direction or from anywhere else. He could not see anything through the smoke on the field and all he could hear above the firing was the screams of the wounded and the officers in their excitement boldly exhorting their men.

The thick smoke that hung in front of Cage and his men began to sway like the hide of a moving elephant, and as it dispersed it revealed the rebels clambering out of the ravine for their next charge, bayonets fixed and lowered. Cage stood up to rally his men and direct their fire onto the Mississippians, young men whose faces he could see clearly. He heard balls whipping simultaneously past either side of his head and wondered with a strange indifference how many more particles of a second it would be before one tore neatly into his brain. He felt a fatherly tenderness toward the boys under his command and even toward the boys who were trying to kill him. He hoped that they would interpret the suicidal agitation he was exhibiting as an example of courage. It was early in the war and most of the troops on both sides were armed not with rifles but with smoothbore muskets left over from other and more ancient wars. But he knew at once, from the shattering power of the projectile that struck his arm as he lifted his Colt's revolver to fire, that he had been hit by a sharpshooter's rifle firing a minie ball. He bent down to pick up his pistol with his good hand, but the motion disoriented him and he collapsed onto the ground, watching his blood pulse over the stiff winter grass. It was late afternoon and the sun was flaring between the trees and illuminating the bright arterial blood in a way that reminded him of the early-morning prairie where he and Lincoln had found the body of Bob Zanger.

He was carried off the field in a blanket and down the steep path to the river. He was evacuated only a few minutes in advance of a general rout in which the Federal troops scrambled to the base of the bluff. Many of them were picked off by seceshers shooting down at them from the summit as they tried to escape in scows and skiffs back to the safety of the Maryland shore. There was a field hospital set up on a long island in the middle of the river, where he was given chloroform and the surgeons amputated his arm above the shattered elbow. Then he was put into a canal boat and left beside the towpath to wait for an ambulance. He lay beside a dying major whose beard was stained with black blood and who emitted great groans that fouled the air with a hellish stench.

When they finally lifted Cage's stretcher and carried it to the ambulance, they passed a dead man lying in a wagon. A half dozen officers, some in tears, stood staring down at him. It was dark but there was a fire nearby and Cage could see the dead man was Ned Baker. The dramatic fringe of hair on one side of his bald head was stiffened with blood and stood upright, following the line of his staring eyes.

For a long time he was in and out of wild fevers. Once he had a dream—though it was later proved not to be—of a middle-aged Negro woman crouched over his hospital bed, instructing him that when he was better she was going to take him on the train to Chicago. Mrs. Bicknell, Cordelia said, regretted that she could not come herself but it was getting close to Christmas and there were too many orders to fill for her absence to be tolerated. She gave him the name of a ladies' hotel where she could be found if needed and told him she would be back in a few days.

On the afternoon before she returned there was a great commotion on the ward, nurses and orderlies rushing from bed to bed straightening the sheets and changing any bandages that were stained with blood or pus. Cage was still feverish but his head was clear enough to make out from the conversation that the president and his wife were coming to pay their respects to the wounded men. Cage's bed was at the end of the long room, and he watched from a distance as they came in.

He was wearing a black suit that made him look as stark as a silhouette against the whitewashed walls of the ward. His hat was off, his hair was full, the beard that Cage had seen only in newspaper illustrations and photos looked unnatural in reality. But Cage now had a beard himself, so he supposed he would have struck Lincoln in much the same way. Overall, Lincoln looked rickety, unfit, too tall, too stooped, too old—this at a time when the war was less than a year old, when there were still so many unthinkable horrors ahead. Mary was with him, passing out apples and candy as her husband joked with the bedridden soldiers. It was an amputation ward and they were all missing limbs. Some tried to push themselves up on their beds or even to stand as he stood over them, but he gently put a hand on their shoulders and asked them to do him the honor of remaining at ease. Mary looked plumper than ever, her face pinched by the flesh it had accumulated. But her eyes were steady and bright as she stared down tearfully at the men, and any hostile stories they might have read in the papers about how demanding and self-absorbed she was instantly fled from their thoughts. She was, Cage knew, the furthest thing from an unfeeling woman. She had already endured the loss of a child back in Springfield—Eddie, named for Edward Baker, the friend she and Lincoln had just lost at Ball's Bluff—and God knew there was much for her to endure yet.

They were taking their time, not wanting any of the men to feel rushed, asking their names, asking about their families, answering questions, thanking them on behalf of the nation that they had defended. They were three-fourths of the way down the ward when Mary happened to look in Cage's direction. He doubted that she really recognized him. He was emaciated, bearded, fifteen years older than the last time she had seen him. But there was a mildly startled look in her eyes, some kind of worry, and he could sense her composing herself for an encounter she did not quite yet understand.

Cage looked away, sparing her the embarrassment of him staring at her as she tried to understand who he was. He watched Lincoln instead as he moved to the next bed, shaking hands with the soldier there whose legs were both missing. He was telling the man a story, one that Cage had heard a dozen times before in Speed's store and during the meetings of their poetical society and while crossing the spring prairies with Lincoln on the judicial circuit. It probably wasn't even Lincoln's own story
,
just something from an old jest book that he had modified over the years to fit his background and speaking cadence. But the soldier had never heard it and he was hiccoughing with laughter at the end of it as Lincoln rubbed the top of his head to try to make the fit subside. The whole ward was laughing, but not loud enough to shut out the sound of a young aide's boots echoing off the wooden floor as he ran through the ward. He whispered anxiously into Lincoln's ear, and the president nodded. He spoke to Mary for a second, then addressed the rest of the men whom he had not yet had the chance to meet.

“Gentlemen, I must leave you now to confer with the gods of war on some urgent business. May I come visit you again as soon as I'm free? I promise to do so.”

His eyes swept up and down the length of the ward, too rapidly to linger on any one man, or to recognize a much-altered face, no longer so familiar, no longer so young.

No doubt he made good on his promise to return, but by that time Cage was already on the train to Chicago.