I Am Abraham (17 page)

“How can you be so certain?” Big Hank asked with a growl, pretending to attack his own witness. It was an old trick, and it always worked on a jury.

“The moon was in my eye,” said the house painter.

Big Hank turned on his heels and said, “Your witness, Congressman Lincoln.”

He was clever as a snake, since
everybody
in the courthouse knew how lamentable I’d been as a Congressman. But Big Hank couldn’t rile me. I kept that house painter in the chair. And I walked among the jurors—I was familiar with most of their kin. I took out my knife and examined the slung shot that the house painter swore he had found after Duff delivered that fatal blow—it couldn’t have stunned a rabbit. It was a mockery of a slung shot, sewn with pathetic string.

I asked the house painter to twirl that weapon for me. He did, and it fell apart in his own fist.

“Mr. Charles Allen,” I asked the witness in his chair, “is this Duff Armstrong’s slung shot, or is it your own?”

“Duff’s,” he said, with a squint in his eye. “Swear to
Gawd
.”

Then I asked the court attendant to bring me an almanac. I flipped through it and stopped at the day Metzker died.

“Mr. Charles Allen, will you repeat the time you
supposedly
saw the accused strike Mr. Metzker in the eye?”

“
Gawd
, it was on the near side of midnight by at least an hour.”

“And the moon was still on the rise?”

“It was like staring at a big fat cat in the sky,” the house painter drawled.

I let him
poison
himself with his own words. And then I pounced.

“That’s awful peculiar, sir, since the almanac remarks that the moon had set long before the fracas at Virgin’s Grove—that big fat cat of yours had dropped right out of the sky. You couldn’t have seen Duff Armstrong or anybody else in the light of the moon.”

The jurors themselves started to gasp. I dismissed the house painter, but I wasn’t really done with him and the prosecutor. And so, during the summary, I looked into the jurors’ eyes and said, “The prosecutor likes to call me Congressman, but I was once dirt poor, and without a home. Duff’s Pa took me in, fed me, sheltered me, and fixed me up with clothes.” And my own knees started to buckle at the mention of Jack—and Mrs. Jack. I’d stunned myself, and I started to cry in front of jury and judge.

“I first met the accused when he was a babe—I rocked him in my arms, sang him to sleep. His Pa was the prince of fellows. Jack Armstrong may have caroused a little, but he helped the poor. And there wasn’t a widow in the county who lost her home while Jack Armstrong was around.”

It didn’t matter what Big Hank did or said after that. The jurors were sobbing as hard as I was. They didn’t have to deliberate more than half an hour. The charge of manslaughter—and every other charge—was dropped against my client. I hugged Mrs. Jack, smiled at Duff in his polka-dot bandanna, and lit out of there. I couldn’t run fast enough from the residue of Clary’s Grove and New Salem. However far I went, or where I landed, seems I was always a second away from drowning in the Sangamon River. I didn’t have that raw power to settle in. I was like a man with a price on his head. No one has to chase you hard when you’re so busy at chasing yourself.

14.

Long Lincoln & the Senatorial Ball

I
T
WAS
M
ARY
’
S
fault. She kept muttering to herself like a musical refrain, “President Lincoln, President Lincoln.” It was at such moments that she stopped talking about Eddie, our little Angel Boy, and planned to revive my defunct career like some master carpenter with a plumb line and an awl. She swept away all the sad accumulations of dust on my clothes. “Mr. Lincoln, you are the most
unparlorable
man I have ever met. But I will teach you manners, sir. You will require some at the White House. And don’t you spoil my chances, hear? Or I might not feed you again.”

It was good to see her laugh, to catch Molly’s old crinkles. She was a pure strategist. My path to the White House, she surmised, was through her old suitor, Senator Douglas. Dug was a wreck of a man after his first wife died; he went across the capital in tattered cuffs, drunk as a despot, stumbled around the Senate chambers, moved to the shoddiest boardinghouse. And then that slumbering shadow met and married Adèle Cutts, the grandniece of Dolley Madison. Adèle was half Dug’s age. Some people called her a divine beauty, but her neck was overlong in my estimation. Yet I wasn’t allowed to criticize her. Dolley Madison was the one woman in all of Washington who was kind to Mrs. Lincoln when I was a Congressman. Her first husband had been a Todd, and belonged to Mary’s own kin.

Even so, I did have a legitimate gripe against Dug, who had changed his politics
overnight
, in 1854. He pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress, shoved it down the throats of Northern Whigs. He offered the miracle of
popular sovereignty
, which wasn’t much more than a smoke cloud. It was the Little Giant’s way of extending slavery into the Territories—Kansans could vote on slavery and bleed to death over it. The Whigs couldn’t fight Senator Douglas. So I
unwhigged
myself and joined the Abolitionists—and their new Republican Party.

Dug was up for reelection in ’58, and Molly insisted I grab his Senate seat. “Win or lose, you have
aspirations.
You’ll ride Dug’s coattails right to the District.”

That damn District! It had one cobbled street—Pennsylvania Avenue, with the glow of some eerie stars, because no other street in the capital was lit up by oil lamps, and the lamps sputtered and stayed dead whenever Congress wasn’t in session. I didn’t want to live at a boardinghouse on East Fourth Street again, where the slave catchers would descend upon us in the middle of a meal and shackle some negro waiter in front of my eyes. The biggest slave market in the land was five or six blocks from the White House. But Molly said I had a certain
prominence
now as a Republican. That’s because all the nabobs were either from the East or in the Democratic Party. I gave speeches up and down Illinois for every other candidate—except myself. I’d stand with my back slumped against a wall, give myself a good long scratch, and then slowly rise up and stare into the audience’s eyes. A woman fainted once, in Alton. They had to carry her out in an ambulance. Other folks pawed at me, said I could tantalize a whole population.

So I tossed my hat in as a challenger to Dug, even though Republicans
outside
Illinois favored his reelection, figurin’ he couldn’t be beat. Meantime, I geared up for our State Convention in Springfield that June. I worked for a month on my convention speech. I delivered it in my parlor again and again, while Mary clung to every word. She’d shut her eyes and say, “I want that speech to end in a perfect rapture.”

The evening before the convention, I gathered
all
my generals—barely a dozen—and read my speech aloud. Most of my generals weren’t pleased. My speech was too far in advance, they said, and would ruin Republicans in Illinois. But these were ruinous times. That vile skunk and piss-pot, Chief Justice Taney, had
dynamited
us all with the Dred Scott Decision—negroes weren’t included in the Constitution, he declared. Scott couldn’t fight for his freedom in federal court. It didn’t matter if he talked like a duke and read the Bible better than white folks. He wasn’t a human being. I couldn’t pirouette around Dred Scott and palaver about the virtues of the Republican Party. I couldn’t pussyfoot. Or we’d all be pissing in the wind. I had to declare war on Douglas and the Democrats. And declare war I did.

Delegates stared at me with a kind of timid wonder in their eyes. I was the savior of the Republican Party. Seems we had no other candidate to run against Dug. The Chicago delegation carried a banner, held aloft by fifteen men.
Cook County is for Abraham Lincoln
. Yet I heard an undertow of fear that the Little Giant would crush us all and prance away from Illinois with my own head on a plate.

And that evening I delivered my speech in front of all the Republican delegates. Long Lincoln stood there on the platform—all alone. My knees were knocking behind the lectern, but luckily, no one saw. I hadn’t come to rally us—I’d come to warn.

“We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.”

I talked of Dug and how the nation had breathed hot air on him and puffed him up into a tremendous man, while the rest of us were small. But Dug couldn’t lead us now, not during this strife.

I quoted from the Book. “
A house divided against itself cannot stand.

“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half
slave
and half
free
.

“I do not expect the Union to be
dissolved
—I do not expect the house to
fall
—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

“It will become
all
one thing, or
all
the other.”

There was silence for a second—stone silence. And I figured I had made a failure. Then the whooping started up. Hats were tossed into the air. Delegates stamped their feet. The Cook County boys paraded their banner across the hall. And I was
apostrophized
like some damn little god—or lunatic—who would run against the Little Giant . . .

Mother sold a piece of land her father had given her, and she raised up our house on Eighth and Jackson a notch or two. She hired workmen to rip into our attic and add another storey to the rear of the house. “Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “I just enlarged our
borders
a little.” Our humble cottage now had a Greek Revival look, like her Pa’s old Kentucky mansion on Small Street. The outer walls were painted a light brown, and we had dark green shutters to match the brown. There was a whole
infection
of bedrooms with false fireplaces and Franklin stoves. You were swept right into the mansion through a wide stair hall. I had my own library. And Mary’s front parlor and family room could have accommodated a hundred generals, at least. It was in here, with its floral carpeting and refined furniture, that Mary meant to have her Senatorial ball—it wasn’t a proper ball, with musicians and dancing partners, but a
victory
soiree with all the Republican grandees my wife could round up. I hadn’t even run against Dug yet, but I was still Senator Lincoln in her eyes. I couldn’t stop Mary’s mania, her deep desire that welled through her like some black tornado that could knock down fences and kill a cow. And we had a singular celebration, since half the politicians in Illinois were suspicious of my nomination speech. But that would never have perturbed Mrs. Lincoln.

“I’m blind with pleasure,” Mary sang, as the guests arrived. She wore a taffeta gown with a plunging neckline; she had three flowers in her hair, just like Lola Montez, the
danseuse
who’d come from London to give a lecture on the latest women’s Fashion. My wife sipped champagne with every kingmaker she could find. She never mentioned Dug or the Abolitionists. It was as if my little victory was outside the
murmur
of politics.

She hired an extra Irish maid for the shindig. Our big table was heaped with condiments and wild strawberries, prairie chicken and quail, piled with peaches and cream. Mary flirted with all the rascals, even with me. And now, with the roar of voices around us, she put her arm in mine, and said with an exaggerated sigh, “Mr. Lincoln, I’m determined that my
next
husband shall be rich. You know how much I long to go to Europe. But poverty is our portion.”

“And it will be,” I said, “if we have to send Bob to Harvard.”

All the flair went out of Mary’s eyes. And she began to sob at her own soiree.

“Mother,” I whispered, “control yourself.”

“I cannot,” she said. “I will not. Bob promised to come to the party. He swore on his life he would come.”

I pleaded with her. “Bob wouldn’t forget. He’s still at school, studying for his entrance exams. Not every candidate’s son can get into Harvard so easy.”

I couldn’t console her. She was having one of her fits. She tossed her fan at a general of mine who failed to tip his hat. I could feel the anger course through her, like a bundle of worms. A body might have thought she was possessed with demons—Mother did have a demon in her eye. She shouted at the Irish maids, snarled at her own sister. We all had to wait until her brush fire burned out. Billy called it the queen’s
seizures
. But that was unkind. She was without a husband half the year. She bore it much better while Bob was around—he was her anchor after Eddie died.

And finally, after ten minutes or so, while she picked at errant strawberries, that demon in her eye disappeared.

“Bob would have come if he could,” she muttered and recommenced to flirt—like Lola Montez.

One of my other generals asked Mary about her discarded beaux, including Dug.

“Oh, it was only the littlest flirtation, but we did have a
penchant
that way,” she said with a touch of mystery. She couldn’t invite him here, she told the general, because Dug would never stand in the same room with
her
Tall Kentuckian. People gathered around once that wild wind of hers flew in another direction. She had seized hold of the soiree again, lived at the center of it, and I felt more and more alone. Dug was Mary’s age, a Senator in his prime. He ruled the District with his eloquence, had a much deeper voice than mine, and would inherit the White House one day soon. And I would inherit nothing. Champagne and wild strawberries wouldn’t change that.

I was glad Mary was flitting about—the storm inside her hadn’t completely gone away. The champagne shivered in her hand. And then the doorbell rang. I could see her neck curl up like a captured swan—as Bob entered the parlor wearing kid gloves and a swallowtail coat, like the Prince of Wales. He was fifteen years old, and he had much more swagger and natural handsomeness than his Pa.