Read Online A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Stephen Harrigan
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chair, the desk covered with papers and notebooks and loose pages with his scribblings, which Lincoln gathered up and put into a drawer, explaining that they contained thoughts too raw for anyone to be allowed to see.
In their nightshirts, they crowded together on the bed beneath two fraying quilts. Besides being narrow, the bed was far too short for Lincoln, whose feet and legs overhung it almost to the knees. In the room across the hall the children were noisy and it took them a half hour and several admonitions from their mother to finally settle down and go to sleep. In the meantime Cage and Lincoln shared a candle and read quietly, each from a different book, Lincoln quickly lost in Blackstone’s
Commentaries,
Cage fitfully turning the pages of an essay by Dr. Johnson on Addison in one of the anthologies on Lincoln’s shelf.
When the children’s room was finally silent, Lincoln closed Blackstone and stared up at the ceiling with the book resting on his chest.
“ ‘History undreamed,’ ” he quoted back to Cage from the poem his guest had recited at dinner. “What did you mean by that? Is history a dream, in your figuring of things?”
“It can be, in my little poetic world.”
“So who would be the dreamer? God?”
“Now you’ve left poetry behind for philosophy. And anyway, it wasn’t meant to be literal , just to sound true.”
Lincoln smiled, closed his law book and stared at its black cover. “It might be I’ll make a poor lawyer, because sometimes I like the sound of truth as much as the substance of it.”
He reached across Cage and set the book on the makeshift shelf, then resumed his position on his back, staring up the ceiling, the knob of his shoulder bone pressing against his bedmate’s. It felt good to Cage to feel the warmth of another human body against his own—when had that last been the case? For a short half hour in a Beardstown brothel, he reckoned, with a fleshy young woman with broken teeth who had been surprisingly kind to him and provided not only the release he was craving but a reprieve from engulfing loneliness.
Of course it was vastly different to lie in bed with a woman. With a man that sort of release was not to be contemplated. But reprieve from loneliness was still a possibility. Cage had friends, but not one like Abraham Lincoln was beginning to seem: an intimate, a confidant, a man with whom one could lie in bed while the candle flickered and discuss the dreams of God.
“Tell me about this woman in Kentucky you seem to have bound yourself to marry,” he asked Lincoln after a while.
“Her name is Mary Owens. She’s very pleasant, very quick-witted, fair-sized but not Falstaffian. A handsome woman—a keener intellect than mine, properly educated. I don’t know what she sees in me but we spent some time together and to the best of my recollection we fell in love.”
“To the best of your recollection?”
“Well, it was a few years ago. And something happened between-times that sort of distracted me from her. Distracted me from pretty much everything there is.”
Cage watched Lincoln scrape a thin flake of bark off the log wall with meditative absorption. Cage started to ask what had happened but decided to leave Lincoln to his solitude. It was a few minutes before he spoke again.
There had been another girl, he said, named Ann. Her family lived in New Salem. Lincoln said her brother had been one of the people he had introduced Cage to when they had been walking up the street toward the Carmans’ house. She was young, slight as a bird, blue-eyed. She had been engaged to another man but he had wandered off to New York and since he had not seemed much concerned about coming back, Lincoln had told Ann maybe she should marry him instead. She said she would. The fact that he had her love was a constant startlement, like waking up out of a dream of such engulfing happiness you knew it could not possibly be true—and then discovering that it was.
But
In their nightshirts, they crowded together on the bed beneath two fraying quilts. Besides being narrow, the bed was far too short for Lincoln, whose feet and legs overhung it almost to the knees. In the room across the hall the children were noisy and it took them a half hour and several admonitions from their mother to finally settle down and go to sleep. In the meantime Cage and Lincoln shared a candle and read quietly, each from a different book, Lincoln quickly lost in Blackstone’s
Commentaries,
Cage fitfully turning the pages of an essay by Dr. Johnson on Addison in one of the anthologies on Lincoln’s shelf.
When the children’s room was finally silent, Lincoln closed Blackstone and stared up at the ceiling with the book resting on his chest.
“ ‘History undreamed,’ ” he quoted back to Cage from the poem his guest had recited at dinner. “What did you mean by that? Is history a dream, in your figuring of things?”
“It can be, in my little poetic world.”
“So who would be the dreamer? God?”
“Now you’ve left poetry behind for philosophy. And anyway, it wasn’t meant to be literal , just to sound true.”
Lincoln smiled, closed his law book and stared at its black cover. “It might be I’ll make a poor lawyer, because sometimes I like the sound of truth as much as the substance of it.”
He reached across Cage and set the book on the makeshift shelf, then resumed his position on his back, staring up the ceiling, the knob of his shoulder bone pressing against his bedmate’s. It felt good to Cage to feel the warmth of another human body against his own—when had that last been the case? For a short half hour in a Beardstown brothel, he reckoned, with a fleshy young woman with broken teeth who had been surprisingly kind to him and provided not only the release he was craving but a reprieve from engulfing loneliness.
Of course it was vastly different to lie in bed with a woman. With a man that sort of release was not to be contemplated. But reprieve from loneliness was still a possibility. Cage had friends, but not one like Abraham Lincoln was beginning to seem: an intimate, a confidant, a man with whom one could lie in bed while the candle flickered and discuss the dreams of God.
“Tell me about this woman in Kentucky you seem to have bound yourself to marry,” he asked Lincoln after a while.
“Her name is Mary Owens. She’s very pleasant, very quick-witted, fair-sized but not Falstaffian. A handsome woman—a keener intellect than mine, properly educated. I don’t know what she sees in me but we spent some time together and to the best of my recollection we fell in love.”
“To the best of your recollection?”
“Well, it was a few years ago. And something happened between-times that sort of distracted me from her. Distracted me from pretty much everything there is.”
Cage watched Lincoln scrape a thin flake of bark off the log wall with meditative absorption. Cage started to ask what had happened but decided to leave Lincoln to his solitude. It was a few minutes before he spoke again.
There had been another girl, he said, named Ann. Her family lived in New Salem. Lincoln said her brother had been one of the people he had introduced Cage to when they had been walking up the street toward the Carmans’ house. She was young, slight as a bird, blue-eyed. She had been engaged to another man but he had wandered off to New York and since he had not seemed much concerned about coming back, Lincoln had told Ann maybe she should marry him instead. She said she would. The fact that he had her love was a constant startlement, like waking up out of a dream of such engulfing happiness you knew it could not possibly be true—and then discovering that it was.
But
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