I Am Abraham (18 page)

I sort of liked having a rival. I wanted him to go to Harvard as much as Mary did, and I would have used every trick I knew to help him get in. I thought of my own Pa, and how he had held me down, burning my books in the fire. I prayed I wouldn’t repeat that.

Mary rushed over to Bob. The back of her neck was on fire. He hugged her, and then my oldest boy came over to me. There was a silver pin in his cravat, placed perfectly, but he had a look of alarm. He’d never been around such a rush of grandees, men who wanted a
piece
of his Pa. His lazy eye was acting up. It drifted around in his head. He’d inherited that eye from my own Pa and me. It was the Lincoln curse.

“Gracious,” Mary said. She pounced between father and son and rescued Bob like some village sorcerer. She cupped a hand over his errant eye and held it there until the dizziness was gone. Then she grabbed our arms and propelled us into a crush of people. She was Lola Montez in the middle of a soiree.

“Mr. Martindale,” she sang in that Lexington lilt of hers, “have you met the Senator’s son? Our Bob has joined us to speed along his father’s victory.”

“Mother,” I whispered, “I can’t lick the Little Giant. No one can.”

She was purring now, at her own party. Standing close to her and Bob, I could almost feel her heart beat under that taffeta gown like a solitary engine that would smash whatever was in her way—Republicans, Democrats, and the Little Giant.

15.

Dogging Dug

E
VEN
I
HAD
to admire that damn flibbertigibbet on wheels. It was fiery red, with a silver caboose, and raucous railroad boys rode shotgun on the roof. Somebody would have thought they were guarding a sultan rather than a Senator. Dug had his very own
line
, supplied by the Illinois Central, with a sleeping coach, a cannon, a butler, and a brass band. His greatest ornament wasn’t that caboose or the cannon, but Adèle, who accompanied him. He wouldn’t spend a minute without
that
ornament
.
Mary had assembled her own little treasure of hoop skirts and gowns, but I had no private car. I had to campaign as the country lawyer with a red handkerchief and a rumpled shirt. Dug had already
condemned
my wife as a Southern aristocrat, so her silky bearing would have rubbed my image as a backwoods lawyer raw.

I had to leave her behind. I traveled with no one. I had a single seat in the cars, without the littlest reward from the Illinois Central. My only lodgment was a stovepipe hat. Mary raged against her own fate as a female general who was banished from the field.

“I’m nothing but a worthless cow.”

“Fiddlesticks. Ain’t a belle in Springfield who’s worth the flowers in your hair.”

She was silent for a moment. I couldn’t tell if she was building up a tornado, or figuring out an answer to my strategy. My talk of flowers had confused her. She didn’t sulk. She simply realigned whatever troops she had and pretended to laugh.

“Gracious, you’re a wicked man, Mr. Lincoln. Tomfooling with your wife, while you intend to gallivant across Illinois like Sir Galahad.”

“Galahad? With prairie dust in my pocket?”

She perused me up and down, my own Puss, the warrior cat I had to leave behind.

“Mr. Lincoln, that’s not a proper handkerchief—flaming red. What will all the voters think?”

“That I’m devilin’ Dug.”

She perused me again; there wasn’t an ounce of self-pity in my Puss. “That might not be enough,” she said. “Dug’s a fighter, always was. And you’re a pestilential fly abuzz in his ear. He’s running for President from his own stage in Illinois. He can’t anger the cotton men or the mechanics in New England. So he has to walk a tightrope. And you have to pluck him off that rope and let him crash to the ground.”

“How?”

She smiled like some angel of mercy with raucous red-brown hair. And then her eyes tightened a bit. “Why, you have to contradict his contradictions and give him a very hard push.”

I had to find him first. If he was in Cairo, with its ragged crop of farmers and merchants and rivermen, I landed there a few hours after he did. Dug was hoping to tar and feather me as a friend of the negro and to scarify every voter in the nation,
and
in Illinois. “Mr. Lincoln and his Black Republicans want to vote, eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes.” He said that if we allowed such a
colored invasion
, the prairies would turn black as coal at noon. Illinois would suffer an eternal midnight. That’s how he milked the crowd and mortified them.

And after Dug went off with that fancy wife of his, I would catch the tail end of the crowd, and say, “Oh, the Senator is much too fine to debate with a sucker like me.”

Country folk liked that and they listened. “All the powers on earth seem rapidly combining against the colored man. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and they have him bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys.”

I challenged Dug to a series of debates—fifty of them. The Democrats mocked my little proposal, said I ought to latch onto a circus or menagerie if I wanted to find my own audience. Still, Dug was much shrewder than the Democratic Party. Half the nation knew Dug would be the next President, but if he protested too much, folks might fear he was afraid of the man from Springfield. So he decided to carry me along right on that tightrope of his, turn me into his accomplice, whom he could whip whenever he wanted and mollify with a pat on the head. But he whittled me down to seven debates—that’s all the time a Senator like him could spare. Some of my generals wanted to bargain with Dug. But Mary said, “Don’t you bargain. Seven is more than enough.”

H
E
HAD
A
DARK
pompadour over one of his blue eyes, and a fine blue suit with silver buttons. Half of Ottawa wanted to shake his hand. It was a town of nine or ten thousand souls, eighty miles southwest of Chicago, and the site of our first debate. There wasn’t a bed to be had in all of Ottawa—folks who arrived a day early slept on cots in some parlor or on the pews of a nearby church. And the line of those who arrived on foot or by wagon train stretched for miles—children, farmers, mechanics, old men, and women with babes in their arms. The town was deluged with dust; it clung to your mouth like sand or sea salt, but with a much more bitter taste, and a dust cloud sat right over the platform where Dug and I were meant to have our
mix
that twenty-first of August.

There wasn’t a single chair or bench. Everybody in this little nation had to stand. The crowd must have swelled to twelve thousand or so. Dug had the advantage of speaking first—and last. He could refute whatever it was I had to say in the final half hour of the debate. It was like a jury trial, where the Senator was his own judge and jury box, and I was the plaintiff who appeared at his own lynching party.

His advocates in the audience kept shouting, “Hit him again, Dug, hit him hard.”

I could sense how excited he was, rearing to rip at me, though I could hardly catch his eyes or his blue velvet coat in all that dust. He would come out of that dust storm just in time to pull Democrats right into his speech. He was building up the lather until all the faces around him were red with hate. He strutted on that platform, and said that my remarks about the colored man were like whispers that would fan a dark and endless fire.

He held the audience in the flat of his hand—he was like the shrewdest minstrel without the bother of black paint. Dug left me enough room to hang myself and not an inch more. I tried to tell folks that when Dug invited
anyone
willing to have slavery—he was blowing out the moral lights around us. But no one listened. I couldn’t even hear my own knees knock in front of those red faces. Dug had demolished me in that first debate.

And six days later, at Freeport, while his cannon roared, a curious memory stuck in my head. We were just south of the Wisconsin line, where I had once chased Black Hawk and his phantom braves, a quarter century ago. I recollected all the little settlements on fire, the charred faces of white women, and all the ripped calico and shattered crockery, like celestial signs in the dead grass. And the Little Giant was slippery as Black Hawk—he’d whistle into the wind whenever you tried to pin him down. This canvass was just an excuse to hone him up for his cavalcade to the White House. He tested all his skills against the Tall Sucker, as the journalists commenced to call me. Freeport had swelled to fifteen thousand under a gray sky. There wasn’t much place to stand or sit. I saw fathers with a child on each shoulder, like
saltimbanques
at a circus.

Dug attacked from the moment he climbed onto the platform with a flower in his lapel, peering at this crowd of Abolitionists in
Lincoln
country. He kept snarling and calling them
Black Republicans
. And they snarled back and serenaded Dug with a song of their own.

—
White Republicans, white, white, white.

He strode across the platform and knocked on the boards with the nails of his boots. It was his own silent thunder, since you couldn’t hear a sound in that hullabaloo—except that same chorus.

—
White, white, white.

I saw one of his eyes twitch. He wasn’t used to all that mudslinging. He’d never been vilified in his home State. He rose up like a rooster and said, “I have seen your mobs before, and defy your wrath.”

There were stenographers in the crowd, hunching over and trying to copy our words; I was startled by their tight little fists that moved like squirrels across the page; they couldn’t capture every word, but it didn’t seem to matter. The Democrats picked up whatever they wanted to hear. They barked at us in their papers, called our canvass a conspiracy arranged by Lincoln and his rude band of “nigger lovers.” Republicans barked back. But it was all part of the same circus. We’d become a monster show, a perennial match between the Tall Sucker and the Little Giant. And if you disagreed with Dug, he’d call you an
ulta
and crucify you. It hurt like hell, because Dug was always civil whenever we’d meet away from the battlefield.

D
UG
AND
A
DÈLE
were the royal couple here at Jonesboro, the southernmost portion of Illinois, and the site of our third debate. “Little Egypt” was a Democratic arsenal, with dirt-poor farmers who despised all blacks. And Dug was hoping to skin me alive in this narrow neck of land that was further south than Richmond on the map. He wouldn’t have to snarl at Jonesboro, where no Abolitionist had ever reared his head. The farmers cackled behind my back, called my little band of constituents “the Springfield Freaks.”

But Mrs. Dug wouldn’t subscribe to all their cackling. “Mr. Lincoln,” Adèle said, sipping her afternoon tea like some Londoner. “We’ll pay no mind to this pestilence. It’s beneath us. And I’m just
tortured
your wife couldn’t come. We’d have gladly given Mrs. Lincoln a berth on our train. I so enjoy her company. Are Tad and Willie still wild Indians?”

“Yes’m,” I muttered, just like Pa. That’s how he would have addressed a woman of such high Quality. And for a moment I kind of wished I had brought Molly along. I’d misjudged Adèle. She was as fine a general as the Little Giant. She talked to the wives of every farmer and merchant at the Union House, had a little tea party while she sold them on Dug. And then I imagined what Molly would have done in Little Egypt—she’d have fought the farmers with her fists, and the stenographers would have scribbled about the massacre at Jonesboro . . .

I sat with Dug and Adèle and gobbled some cranberry cakes. We laughed and reminisced for over an hour, but that didn’t stop him from crucifying me in Little Egypt, and that damn town conspired with him. There were posters all over the place that said niggers and their allies weren’t welcome. I found an effigy hanging from my doorknob at the hotel—a paper doll in a stovepipe hat, with both hands gone and half his neck missing. I didn’t complain; the manager himself might have made that doll. So I went downstairs and climbed onto a speakers’ platform that could have been a trapdoor. I had no friends in Jonesboro; the farmers had ripped up our Republican banners and took our tubas away. Dug figured he could
et
me alive. He performed for these farmers like some fanciful player, stroking his cravat, and shouting as if I were a phantasm on
his
private stage. He never once looked at me, acknowledged who I was or what right I had to be there. Dug danced to the edge of the platform, grabbed at the farmers’ filthy paws, and kept harping on the Declaration of Independence, said that its signers did not mention negroes once “when they declared all men to be created equal.”