A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (8 page)

“Well,” Cage observed, “you're well above ground now, it seems to me. And you're on the way to becoming the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois, if all these canals and things go through.”

Lincoln laughed. He sat up and turned around and drew his long legs up so that he was sitting at the opposite end of the bed, looking down at Cage. In the darkness, in the candlelight, his lowering, observing presence was almost fearsome—as if it was a golem and not a rising Illinois politician perched at Cage's feet.

“And you're already on your way to being the Lord Byron of Illinois.” Lincoln smiled, but he grew solemn again. “I need to make a mark somehow. I don't think I can stand it if I don't. Do you think that's a peculiar thing to feel? Don't you feel it too?”

“Yes, I do. It's an intolerable thought, to be forgotten as if you'd never lived.”

“I wish I had the gift of poetry like you do. That would settle the matter.”

“The matter is hardly settled. Not that many people have read my book, and I've just had a manuscript sent back unread from Hilliard and Gray.”

“But your success is inevitable, and you know it. You have a great gift, and all I have is my national debt and a ridiculous talent for ingratiating myself. Why do I think Mrs. Abell's sister would even want to marry me?”

“Do you even want to marry her?”

“Well, I've got to marry somebody, Cage! And so do you. Aren't you tired of being alone?”

“I suppose so.”

Lincoln ruffled his hair as if he had lice and then stood up and walked over to the desk and blew out the candle. He sat down in the chair. One of its legs was a bit shorter than the others and he lurched rhythmically back and forth, seeming to think it was a rocking chair.

“They say Davy Crockett came from nothing. A bear hunter from West Tennessee, and there he was in the Congress of the United States. And a Whig into the bargain
,
just like me.”

“Crockett is dead,” Cage reminded him.

“Well, that's a bothersome sort of thing, I admit. But maybe being dead won't bother you so much if you can just get people to remember your name.”

A
FTER AN EARLY BREAKFAST
at the Carmans' table and a warm handshake from Lincoln, Cage rode home to Springfield. It was not long after daybreak and the sun shone luminously on the icy dew covering the prairie. There were swans overhead, and prairie chickens unseen in the stirring grass—he could hear the booming and moaning notes of their courtship songs. It was cold yet but steadily warming, and he encountered no traffic except for a few of Illinois's omnipresent hogs, released from their owners' pens at the close of the winter to graze on the woodland mast at the edge of the prairie.

The road between New Salem and Springfield was not much more than a trace, but it was still reasonably smooth and defined, and it seemed to Cage that Mrs. P plodded along with satisfaction, her mood uplifted as was his by the birdsong breaking through the stillness, and by the silent suspirating rhythms of a prairie morning.

His mind was fastened on the new friendship he had forged with Abraham Lincoln. Cage's life up until now had been a mostly solitary one. He had not sought out this solitude, though in his youthful confusion he had formed the idea somewhere that to commit oneself to the written arts required forsaking common varieties of human fellowship.

It was his fault, he knew. He held himself apart, perhaps held himself too high. He was twenty-seven, no longer such a young man, already two years older than Keats had been when he died. If Cage were to die now he would leave only his privately printed
Sketches of the Black Hawk War
and a scattering of poems published in the
Sangamo Journal
and a few other Illinois newspapers. There were also prose fragments and extensive notes, their context now largely forgotten, written during his travels in Europe. Whatever dreams he had once had to make a book of those travels had been cauterized by the shock of his father's suicide. There were as yet only the beginnings of a body of work. His book had impressed the few people who had bought and read it, but he shared Lincoln's nervousness—his terror almost—that he might live out his life without making any case that it had been a life worthy of remembering.

He had been successful so far, in a minor way, as a man of business. After the war, the pay that was due the volunteers had been held up for months until the federal paymasters arrived to give cash for their claims. Cage had managed to resist the temptation to sell out beforehand to speculators, as so many of the volunteers had. So he was paid in full for his service, and by living thriftily was able to invest in some land near Jacksonville, paying as little as $1.25 an acre near the center of one of the many Illinois towns that had been laid out but did not yet exist. Thanks to all the talk of the internal improvements that were on the way, the town took root, the bet paid off, and he was able to sell the land for five times what he had paid for it, enough to buy the Palatine, a failing boardinghouse of six rooms just off the square on Adams Street, betting that as more and more of the state's business became centered in Springfield he would have a reliable clientele of legislators and influence peddlers.

He lived at his own establishment but took most of his meals in taverns, feeling conspicuous in the company of his lodgers and not inclined to play the gregarious host. He left the running of the place to Mrs. Hopper, the formidable cook and housekeeper he had had the good fortune to engage after her husband, a lawyer on the circuit, had drowned near Metamora while crossing a ford of the Mackinaw River in high water.

The income from the house was steady, his tastes were far from extravagant, and he lacked the drive for financial aggrandizement. He was not caught up in the frenzy of speculation that went on all around him. It was enough to be in funds, to seize opportunities as they came along but not to spend his days plotting and searching them out. Cage preferred to suffer at his desk in his room, a bust of Shakespeare gloating at him as he worked himself deeper and deeper into thickets of verbiage from which there was, as often as not, no release. After his work he would take long walks through Springfield, stopping inevitably in its one bookshop, going to the theater at night if there was a company in town, or to a lecture on colonization, or on Napoleon, or on the natural history of volcanoes.

As often as not he went out on his own, unless in the company of Joshua Speed or Ashbel Merritt or one of the other restless single young men of Springfield. He was on the outside ring of their buzzing circle, good for recruiting at a game of town ball, a listener and not an arguer, thoughtful, steady, helping to soothe tempers when somebody drunkenly challenged somebody else to a duel. Though his life's work was poetry, not politics, he kept finding himself among political men, drawn to their circle by his own kindred yearning to live a life of consequence. Their talk was feverish and recondite, their personal aspirations and the salvation of the nation urgently entwined. There were set times for elections, but it seemed to Cage that everything was always happening at once, one all-consuming never-ending canvass. It was hard to know the difference between the legal and political professions since so many of the office seekers were lawyers and were often suing each other and running against each other at the same time. Everything and everyone was enmeshed
,
jostling elbow-to-elbow and nose-to-nose in a scrummaging for advancement that never paused.

One way to gain advantage, of course, was to marry, and as Springfield began to be the coming place there were more young women with lighted candles in their windows, more cotillions, more sisters and cousins coming to visit from Kentucky or Ohio or Virginia in hopes of meeting a rising man on the western frontier. In that enterprise too Cage stood outside the circle. His mother's early death and his father's fatal disgrace had prevented him from learning the hidden rules of social navigation. He did not know how to court a woman. He did not know any women to court. On his nighttime meanderings he would often stop and stare up at the lighted candles, the signal that the lady was at home and willing to receive company, and wish he had the courage to walk up to the front door and present himself.

This morning he had a hopeful sense that his isolation, his hesitation, were just the artifacts of a stalled existence. Perhaps a vibrant, consequential friend such as Lincoln promised to be would change all that. What he had needed most in life, Cage now realized, what had been missing up until now, was just someone to talk to.

But it would be a while before their conversation could resume. Lincoln was not often in Springfield during that spring and summer. He was busy with his surveying work, with his solitary law studies, and above all with the need to get himself reelected to the legislature. The 1836 campaign in Illinois was a traveling entertainment that moved from town to town and grove to grove, its cast of characters giving their speeches at every stop, debating their opponents, insulting their honor, sometimes leaping at them and wrestling them down into the dirt. The show came to Springfield in July
,
just a few weeks before the election.

The event was planned as a sort of debate, with a revolving cast of Whig and Democratic candidates denouncing each other in turn. It promised excitement and was the sort of thing that even a politically wary man like Cage would not think of missing. He arrived at the courthouse at nine in the morning, an hour before the speeches were to begin, and even so he barely made it into the building before it filled up and the doors were shut. The rest of the crowd would have to stand on the courthouse lawn listening to the debates through open windows.

Even with the windows open, it was stuffy and hot inside as the midmorning July sun bore down upon the city. All the seats were taken, and Cage stood in the back in a tight press of onlookers, among them Joshua Speed, who was already wiping sweat from his neck with a silk handkerchief. He greeted Cage with his usual openhearted, self-assured delight.

“Look at Edwards,” Speed whispered. “Somebody should tell him he's never going to be reelected if he can't get that scowl off his face.”

Ninian Wirt Edwards, who had the same name as his father, the former Illinois governor, spoke first for the Whigs. It could be argued that he was Springfield's leading citizen—he would certainly argue it himself—but from what Cage could gather people only liked him for his money and for the parties he and his wife put on at their house. The house stood in a part of Springfield known—proudly to Edwards, cheekily to most everyone else—as Aristocracy Hill.

Edwards was tall and elegant, but unfortunately his sour superiority was on full display and quickly turned the day against him. He started out at the rostrum attacking his Democratic opponent, who was none other than Jacob Early, the captain of the spy company that had ridden to the rescue of the men at Kellogg's Grove. As far as Cage knew, Lincoln and Early were still on good terms, even though they were opposite each other politically.

Edwards, however, appeared to quiver with outrage at Early's very existence. He promised his fellow citizens that once they understood the full extent of his opponent's greed and mendacity they could not but be appalled and would determine to drive the reptile from his shell. But Edwards had no sense of rhythm or timing, no understanding that you had to gather the audience slowly along with you if you were going to call an opponent a reptile. As it was, the way he blurted it out without preamble created a chorus of gasps and boos and only a few thin cheers. It had taken no more than a minute or two for Ninian Edwards to rally most of the listeners to the defense of the man he meant to pillory.

Cage noticed Lincoln in the crowded room as Edwards's screed continued. He was standing behind the other Whig candidates, his long neck protruding from his collar like a cork in a bottle, his dark hair fuller than when Cage had seen him last and combed forward in the manner of the times but without much devotion to the effort, so that it ended up in a haphazard tangle. The rest of the Whigs were doing their best to huzzah Edwards on, but Lincoln was clearly having trouble pretending that his speech was anything but a disaster.

When Early stood up to reply, he had the sentiment of the room behind him. He looked much the same as he had in the war, though his face looked blank as a baby's without its stubble, and the hair he had worn close-shorn on the campaign against Black Hawk was now swept up into a pomaded crest. What right, he demanded, did a toad such as Edwards have to call another man a reptile? No, upon reflection a toad ranked too high on the chain of being to bear comparison to Ninian Wirt Edwards. And so did a slug, and so did a worm. Ninian “Wart” Edwards stood alone among all creation, a veritable carbuncle of a man, a pustule, nothing but a fur-collared human abscess.

Early searched for a lower epithet, but before he could come up with one Edwards had leapt up on a table, frothing with invective as the crowd surged forward, eager to see some sort of fight. Edwards was on the verge of challenging Early to a duel, which was illegal and would have disqualified him from office, when Lincoln reached up to grab him gently by his wrists and slowly pry him off the tabletop and back onto the floor. Edwards's face was red and swollen with anger, though still handsome in its princely way, and it was interesting to see him slowly and silently deferring to Lincoln. In his dress and deportment Lincoln was clearly Edwards's social inferior, but none of that mattered, and everyone could see it: his self-possessed bearing placed him in his own category.

Lincoln was next to speak, and as he took the rostrum the room was still agitated. The Whig and Democrat partisans crowded together in the courthouse sweatbox were jeering at and jostling each other.

Lincoln's reedy, twangy voice was a poor instrument, or at least it seemed to be when he first opened his mouth and said “My friends,” and one of the Democrats on the other side of the room shot back that he'd just as soon have a rattlesnake for a friend as a goddam Whig who looked like a goddam ape.