A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan Read Free Book Online

mockery was contagious, the men doing their best to top one another in servile diction and darkie jokes. Cage laughed along—the jokes were funny, especially Lincoln’s—though the sheer weight of ridicule directed toward their fellow human beings troubled him. He was a Massachusetts man, or at least had been a Massachusetts boy, a state where the word “abolition” could be breathed aloud. Not so in the supposedly free state of Illinois, where the papers were full of advertisements for the return of runaway slaves and household indenture was impossible to distinguish from outright Southern captivity. But he had wandered the world and scrabbled hard for purchase somewhere, and this was where he now was, among these ambitious young men of his own age. It was in their society that his fortune and reputation had to be secured, where his dreams could advance, and so there were opinions he knew he ought best keep to himself.
    When the gathering finally broke up and the men were filing out of the store, Cage felt a hand on his elbow.
    “Can’t you spare an old friend a minute’s conversation?” Lincoln asked. They fell into step beside the plank fence surrounding the courthouse, picking their way carefully through the muddy slough that was Springfield’s main street.
    “I was greatly agitated by your book,” Lincoln said. “I should have written you a letter about it. I’m convinced there won’t be a finer thing ever written about the war.”
    “Thank you,” Cage said. “My own opinion is that I brought it out too hastily. Some of the poems I can’t bear to look at anymore. I should have had the patience to look for a proper publisher rather than just print it on my own.”
    “No, it benefits from that very impatience. It has the feel of a book that was forged in the fire and brought out blazing hot. I’ve read it six times. I could recite it to you, if there’s any part you’ve forgotten. How far did the war take you before it turned you loose?”
    “I was at Bad Axe.”
    “Were you so? All the way to Bad Axe? You were in the way of some real fighting then.”
    He said this with a glum undertone that suggested envy, though Cage by now wished he had seen none of it, that he had not been part of the force trailing Black Hawk and the starving remnants of his people through the Trembling Lands. He wished that his own musket had not added to the fusillades that shot Indians out of the trees in the wooded islands between the Mississippi channels. He had watched them tumble branch from branch like squirrels. He had seen women and children gunned down in the muddy sloughs as they tried to escape across the river. By the time his fellow volunteers were carving strips of flesh from dead warriors to cure and use as souvenir razor strops he was thoroughly estranged in his mind from the war. In his
Sketches,
he had written about such things only obliquely, in lines infused with a shame and anger that he worried might seem unaccountable to a casual reader. But to write the literal truth of the obscenities he had witnessed would have meant disgracing poetry itself.
    “Our little spy company got mustered out up there on the Bark River,” Lincoln said. “We got close to finding Black Hawk’s trail a time or two, but those were lean days and they didn’t have anything to feed us so they told us just to forget about Black Hawk and to go on home. How we got home was a wonderment in itself. Another man and me got our horses stolen, so we had to walk back through those miserable bogs taking turns on John Stuart’s horse all the way to Peoria. I was a wretched creature when I got home to New Salem.”
    “Not so wretched now, it seems,” Cage said.
    “Oh, I do my best to throw my weight around when the assembly’s in session. I have a few weeks every year to accustom myself to being a big man and then it’s back to scratching for my living as a postmaster and surveyor. What do you think about Reed? Would you ride off