Read Online A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen Harrigan
Ads: Link
a hummingbird around the table, setting down a plate of biscuits, spooning catchup sauce onto everyone’s food. “The poor man can drink what he likes.”
“Well, I’m not above putting on a show for anybody who’s got a vote to cast,” Lincoln admitted. “But the truth is it ain’t politics that keeps me from drinking. I allowed myself to get flat drunk a time or two when I was younger and didn’t care for the famous effects. When it came time to stand up, I felt like a slug trying to jump over a fence.”
Dinner was catfish soup, mutton cakes, and cold slaugh. There were three young children, all of them with their eyes on Lincoln, waiting for what he might say next to make them laugh. From time to time they cast disapproving looks at Cage. They did not like strangers at their table.
Mr. Carman asked Cage what he did in Springfield. Cage said he owned a lodging house.
“A lodging house!” Carman saluted again with his glass. “I honor you for operating such a thing—cooking, cleaning, washing bedclothes, making repairs, tossing out lodgers who can’t pay their bills. I don’t mean Lincoln here, of course, who’s always scrupulously prompt. No doubt they attack you with their fists when that happens—maybe with knives.”
“I’ve never been attacked with anything. As for everything you mentioned, I have an excellent woman who manages the place.”
“Leaving you as a man of leisure, then. Well done.”
“Hardly leisure,” Lincoln said. “He’s a slave to poetry.”
They demanded a recital, then and there. Cage turned to Lincoln for help, but his friend’s voice was loudest. So he put down his napkin and pushed back his chair and stood, fortifying himself with a swallow of their host’s overly sweet wine, which Mr. Carman had earlier bragged required twelve pounds of dissolved sugar candy to make.
Cage had worked toilsomely long for the past two months on a short lyric inspired by the meeting place of the Ohio and the Kanawha, near where he had worked in the shipping warehouse. He had watched cotton and peach brandy heading upriver from Memphis, and machinery and iron farming tools coming down from Pittsburgh, and thought he sensed in those differing goods a metaphor that could stand for the reckoning that must someday come between the hard righteous North and the evanescent South, with its perishable crops planted and harvested by slaves.
The thing was not finished really; its meter wanted slackening, and some of its rhymes were too direct and others too elusive. But he thought it good enough to satisfy a command performance at a host’s table:
“There flows the broad Ohio,
As if by thought itself impelled,
As if ’twere more than moving water—
But History undreamed, nor yet beheld.
It knows its course, though in the way
the flower knows the light, or the child
In womb its mother’s cryptic voice—
A summoning stir, all mute, all wild.”
There were eight stanzas, building well enough, resolving well enough in lines about unseen snags and the darkening tunnel of overhanging ice-heavy tree limbs that he had experienced himself on the journey of the
Talisman.
The children looked blank when it was over but the three adults applauded—did more than applaud. They leapt to their feet and Mr. Carman patted him on the back and congratulated Lincoln on his excellent choice of a new friend.
—
The Carmans lived in a teeteringly high log house of two floors, with two low-ceilinged rooms above. The children shared one of the rooms and Lincoln lodged in the other. It was a cramped space barely big enough for a narrow bed and Lincoln’s surveying tools and saddlebags. There were books carefully displayed on a plank nailed to the wall—the lawbooks he had just borrowed from Stuart, along with Shakespeare, Burns, Gray,
The Revised Laws of Indiana,
volumes on grammar, on mathematics, and a collected Byron worn to tatters. Squeezed into one corner of the room were a desk and a wobbly
“Well, I’m not above putting on a show for anybody who’s got a vote to cast,” Lincoln admitted. “But the truth is it ain’t politics that keeps me from drinking. I allowed myself to get flat drunk a time or two when I was younger and didn’t care for the famous effects. When it came time to stand up, I felt like a slug trying to jump over a fence.”
Dinner was catfish soup, mutton cakes, and cold slaugh. There were three young children, all of them with their eyes on Lincoln, waiting for what he might say next to make them laugh. From time to time they cast disapproving looks at Cage. They did not like strangers at their table.
Mr. Carman asked Cage what he did in Springfield. Cage said he owned a lodging house.
“A lodging house!” Carman saluted again with his glass. “I honor you for operating such a thing—cooking, cleaning, washing bedclothes, making repairs, tossing out lodgers who can’t pay their bills. I don’t mean Lincoln here, of course, who’s always scrupulously prompt. No doubt they attack you with their fists when that happens—maybe with knives.”
“I’ve never been attacked with anything. As for everything you mentioned, I have an excellent woman who manages the place.”
“Leaving you as a man of leisure, then. Well done.”
“Hardly leisure,” Lincoln said. “He’s a slave to poetry.”
They demanded a recital, then and there. Cage turned to Lincoln for help, but his friend’s voice was loudest. So he put down his napkin and pushed back his chair and stood, fortifying himself with a swallow of their host’s overly sweet wine, which Mr. Carman had earlier bragged required twelve pounds of dissolved sugar candy to make.
Cage had worked toilsomely long for the past two months on a short lyric inspired by the meeting place of the Ohio and the Kanawha, near where he had worked in the shipping warehouse. He had watched cotton and peach brandy heading upriver from Memphis, and machinery and iron farming tools coming down from Pittsburgh, and thought he sensed in those differing goods a metaphor that could stand for the reckoning that must someday come between the hard righteous North and the evanescent South, with its perishable crops planted and harvested by slaves.
The thing was not finished really; its meter wanted slackening, and some of its rhymes were too direct and others too elusive. But he thought it good enough to satisfy a command performance at a host’s table:
“There flows the broad Ohio,
As if by thought itself impelled,
As if ’twere more than moving water—
But History undreamed, nor yet beheld.
It knows its course, though in the way
the flower knows the light, or the child
In womb its mother’s cryptic voice—
A summoning stir, all mute, all wild.”
There were eight stanzas, building well enough, resolving well enough in lines about unseen snags and the darkening tunnel of overhanging ice-heavy tree limbs that he had experienced himself on the journey of the
Talisman.
The children looked blank when it was over but the three adults applauded—did more than applaud. They leapt to their feet and Mr. Carman patted him on the back and congratulated Lincoln on his excellent choice of a new friend.
—
The Carmans lived in a teeteringly high log house of two floors, with two low-ceilinged rooms above. The children shared one of the rooms and Lincoln lodged in the other. It was a cramped space barely big enough for a narrow bed and Lincoln’s surveying tools and saddlebags. There were books carefully displayed on a plank nailed to the wall—the lawbooks he had just borrowed from Stuart, along with Shakespeare, Burns, Gray,
The Revised Laws of Indiana,
volumes on grammar, on mathematics, and a collected Byron worn to tatters. Squeezed into one corner of the room were a desk and a wobbly
Similar Books
