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

then last summer Ann had died.
    “They said it was brain fever. I don’t know if that’s what it was or not, but it came on fast and it came on strong and it took her away. I saw her right before she died. She didn’t know me. She screamed when she saw me walk into her sickroom, like I wasn’t Abe Lincoln at all but some stranger who had come to do her harm.
    “After she died I sort of ran off the track. I was in a low stretch, low enough that the people around here thought I was going to kill myself.”
    “Were you?”
    “Maybe, if I could have roused myself enough to do it. I would have liked to be dead. It would have been a mighty improvement. But I didn’t have the energy to lift a razor to my throat, and there wouldn’t have been much point, since my heart was buried with that girl anyway. That’s what the hypo feels like to me—like you’re down deep in a grave and you can hear everybody talking and going about their business way above you, and there’s no way you can dig yourself out to join them.”
    “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.”

FOUR

    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