The Emancipator's Wife (24 page)

Elizabeth referred to him as a “cracker from the canebrakes”' but he had, despite deficiencies in table manners, an inherent dignity that went far beyond which fork to use, and a genuine kindly consideration for others. Moreover, Mary knew perfectly well that a man couldn't become a lawyer, much less a member of the State Legislature, without being able to read and write. “No, it's perfectly true,” Josh Speed told her, one freezing January afternoon when Mary came into Speed and Bell's to buy ribbons. “Most of what Lincoln knows he taught himself. I don't think he's had more than a year of schooling in his life. He really did grow up in a log cabin, in the Indiana woods. His father used to hire him out to the neighbors to cut wood and husk corn, and keep the money he made—which is legal,” he added, as Mary opened her mouth in indignant protest. “Up until a boy's twenty-one. It's just most fathers don't do that kind of thing anymore.”

“So that's what they mean when they speak of a ‘gentleman of the old school,'” sniffed Mary, and Speed laughed, and came around the end of the counter to hold out his hands to the iron heating-stove.

“Well, Lincoln left Indiana the minute he could, and I haven't seen him in any tearing hurry to get back. He told me once his pa used to thrash him for reading. When he was living in New Salem, about a day's ride from here up the Sangamon River, he used to walk ten or twelve miles to borrow books, if he heard of people who had them.”

Speed and Bell, Mary knew, generally had a small stock of books, whatever could be brought in from the East. These were mostly almanacs and volumes of sermons, though once they did get in a volume of
Shakespeare's sonnets, which Mary bought. The store was built of sawn lumber and whitewashed inside and out. It smelled of wood and soap, and now the heavy scent of smoke and burnt coffee. Barrels and bins ranged the center of the room near the stove, where men would sit through the winter evenings talking politics and spitting tobacco. Shelves occupied every foot of wall with bright bolts of calico and sheeting, pots of white-and-blue enamel, caddies of tea and coffee and dishes to whose edges packing-straw still clung. They didn't stock the variety of fancy goods and ribbons that Birchell and Irwin did, but Mary liked Josh Speed.

“Is he in?” she asked impulsively, because she knew Lincoln lived upstairs with Speed, in the big loft. Speed shook his head.

“He'll be at your cousin's law offices if he isn't in the Legislature—
Stuart left him in charge of the whole practice when he went to take his seat in Congress. Lincoln's a devil for work: between riding the circuit courts all summer, and now working to organize the Whig Party the way the Democrats are organized, my guess is once the snow melts I won't see much of him.”

“That must be what happens,” remarked Mary lightly, “when you're allowed to keep some of the money you make.”

Speed laughed, then glanced at the empty wooden chairs around the stove with a reminiscent grin. “He'll be here tonight—the whole bunch of them, Baker and Conkling and Douglas...” He shook his head, with a kind of wonder and delight in his eyes. “I've never heard arguing the way it is when Lincoln and Douglas get after each other over the State Bank or divorce or Indian lands or anything that's on their minds. It's amazing, like watching two gods throwing lightning-bolts at each other. One night Douglas wasn't here and Lincoln did an imitation of him, and argued with himself. That's the closest I've come in my life to dying laughing.”

Mary chuckled at just the thought of it—by this time she'd seen
Lincoln do imitations of people. But as Joshua escorted her across the muddy plank sidewalk to Ninian's carriage she felt a pang of bitterest jealousy, that this world of politics and power and informal alliances around the stove was something she would never be permitted to join. For a moment she was a child again, seeing the shoulders of her father's guests close in a rank against her.

Hearing Betsey say,
Really, Mary. . . .

And being relegated to conversation about earbobs and beaux.

The next time she saw Lincoln, at a Washington's Birthday ball given by the Leverings, Mary caught his eye and edged from the group of her admirers to stand with him in the corner by the stairway. “Mr. Speed tells me you're an admirer of Robert Burns, sir,” she said, glancing up at the tall man who towered over her. “I have a book of his poems, if you'd ever care to borrow it. Mr. Speed says come spring you'll be riding all over the state to the circuit courts—that has to be unbelievably dreary.”

The lined gargoyle face lit up first with surprise, then with pleasure, and the uncertainty he always had around women vanished from his eyes. “Why, thank you, Miss Todd. You're right, it's tiresome and lonely, riding the circuit courts, and Burns would be the best companion I could ask for, aside from Mr. Shakespeare. It's kind of you to think of me, Miss Todd.”

Any other man of her acquaintance would have spoken the words as a formula: It's-kind-of-you-to-think-of-me-Miss-Todd, with a bow and a knowing smile. But the way Lincoln said them, Mary knew that it was not only kind, but almost unheard-of in the lawyer's experience.

“I promise I won't let it come to harm.”

“Good heavens, I never thought you would!” She smiled. “I can tell you're a man who knows how to take care of books. God knows I've spent enough of my time here in Springfield trying to find things to read to have sympathy for someone cast ashore in places like Petersburg and Postville!”

He laughed at that, his nose wrinkling up and his big horselike teeth flashing. “And in some of those places I feel cast ashore, like Mr.
Crusoe—and wasn't it just lucky for him that ship of his didn't sink under him at the outset, and leave him without any of those guns and axes and ropes and the rest of his plunder.”

“Which I think was just a
little
providential on Mr. Defoe's part,” remarked Mary consideringly. “On the other hand, if he hadn't provided him with all that ‘plunder,' as you say, poor Mr. Crusoe would probably have starved in the first week, and Mr. Defoe couldn't have made much of a story out of that.”

Lincoln laughed again, and scratched his head, augmenting the crazy ruin of his hair. Seeing the way his whole frame relaxed, Mary understood that this sad-eyed man truly loved to laugh. “Though I will say, you'd be surprised what you can do with just an ax. Still, there should have been an almanac someplace on that boat, and if you're real desperate you can get some good reading out of an almanac.”

After that Mary would lend Lincoln books, which he consumed like a child devouring candy. He usually returned them on Sunday afternoons, when Elizabeth held open house for the Coterie at the House on the Hill. Frances would act as co-hostess for these gatherings, for she and Dr. Wallace were still living in a rented room at the Globe Tavern. Mary—who was becoming quite a notable cook under Eppy's tutelage—would assist with the refreshments, but for the most part she was free to mingle with her guests, and many of those freezing winter afternoons ended with her and Lincoln lingering in the darkening parlor, long after the others had departed.

They talked of the books she lent him, and Mary was surprised at the scope of his reading, and the depth and acuteness of his mind. Her other suitors—Douglas and Shields, Trumbull and Webb—were educated men, familiar as a matter of course with Shakespeare and Homer.
Lincoln, uneducated, had discovered the stories for himself, and had read them as Mary read Gothic novels, with an almost sensuous pleasure. On one occasion he recited to her “John Anderson, My Jo,” which he had memorized as he casually and easily memorized entire speeches and scenes from Shakespeare, and she thought she heard a catch in his voice on the ending line,
“We'll sleep together at its foot, John Anderson, my jo.”

“I got to memorizing poetry for when I travel,” he said. “It's three days' ride down to Carthage, and four days to someplace like Belleville, and most days you don't meet a soul on the roads. Back when I didn't have a horse I'd walk, sometimes two and three days, if I'd delivered a load of goods by raft and had to get back home.”

On other evenings they spoke of the issues in the Legislative committees he was on, or of the suits he had before the courts. “Yes, the state needs a strong central bank, but if it has one, who's going to run it?” pointed out Mary, one lamp-lit evening when they sat, half-forgotten by the other guests, in the dim rear parlor. “What if you get a scoundrel in charge, like Biddle in the National Bank, who spent his time buying influence and manipulating credit to favor his own supporters? Wouldn't that discredit the bank and cause more ruin than it amends?”

“Oh, I would love to see some politician go to the polls sayin' he's gonna tell the banks what to do,” sighed Lincoln, with a comical shake of his head. “He'd be the first man in the country's history to not only get
no
votes, but to have 'em taken away from him, so he'd be a vote-debtor and have liens against him for the next six times he runs....But this whole mess the state's in now, with no money for canals or railroads or anythin' else we need, is because there's nuthin' sayin' what money is and what it ain't, which is all banks really do, when you think of it....”

When she spoke of her father's slaves, he asked if she were an abolitionist: “I hate slavery—one trip to New Orleans was enough to do that for me—but the way the abolitionists are goin' about their business will surely tear this country apart. When I see the violence that's come about in the last few years, that printer Lovejoy murdered over in Alton, and the mob in St. Louis that burned that poor Negro sailor to death—when I hear that some state governments have put bounties on the heads of abolitionist publishers—all I see is that
both
sides are turnin' their backs on reason, turnin' into a mob.”

“It's easy enough for us to say,” replied Mary softly, “because we're white. For us it
is
a matter of reason. People like the slaves of that horrible Mrs. Turner who lived back in Lexington, who would beat them literally to death over things like a broken teapot, don't really care about what the Founding Fathers intended. They just want to be able to leave a place where they're being mistreated, and not have their husbands and wives taken away from them to pay for someone's gambling debts.”

If he spoke easily and earnestly of how the state could raise money for internal improvements through the sale of federal lands, or at what point Macbeth could have turned aside from his disastrous course, he did not speak of his family, or the Kentucky canebrakes where he'd been born. The stories he told were of people he'd met on the road, or folks he'd known in New Salem or Cairo or points between. And Mary remembered what Josh Speed had said of Lincoln's father on that winter afternoon in the store, and of Lincoln himself on the night of the Legislature's cotillion: that he was an exile from the world he'd grown up in, who had found no place yet in the world for which his starved mind yearned.

And Lincoln was ambitious. That was one of the first things Mary learned about him, and one of the most surprising: that behind his diffidence in polite company, his razor-sharp wit and his deep, gentle love for animals and children, he had his eyes on political power and studied how to achieve it the way he had once, he told her, studied to become a surveyor.

“Which you don't expect, when you speak to him in company,” said Mary to Speed, on a rainy day in early March. She'd heard the rumor that there was a new shipment of Irish lace—the first of the spring—and because Elizabeth was out paying calls with the carriage, she had convinced Merce to walk downtown through the slushy muck of the streets, hopping from plank to plank of building material dropped off the construction drays and carrying a bundle of shingles they'd found to bridge the gaps. Speed was astonished to see her—the weather had been foul all morning and promised worse—but, as she'd calculated, Mary had first pick of the lace, and put money down on the two best pieces for herself, plus gifts for Elizabeth, Frances, Merce (who was thumbing through the books), and Julia.

“He appears so humble—like Duncan,
he hath borne his faculties so meek—
but I notice he doesn't put a foot wrong when he's negotiating with delegates from the other districts for Legislative votes, and at Court Days I don't think there's a man he doesn't speak to.” Mary dimpled, and shook her head. “Yet he likes to present himself as a bumpkin who couldn't tell a wooden nutmeg from a barleycorn.”

“Only when it suits him.” Speed leaned on the counter and scratched the ears of the fat marmalade tomcat who shared the building with
Lincoln and himself. “People like to hear that, when he makes a speech—Lincoln's figured that out. It lets him slip his point across when their minds aren't closed to argument by highfalutin' words. I think his ambition springs from a different root than, for instance, our little Stephen's—though they're both poor boys who want to end up richer than their fathers were. But Lincoln's ambition goes beyond that. He wants power so that he can do the job right, while other men want it only so they can collect the job's pay.”

He glanced at the windows, gray with dreary afternoon light. The brown puddles in the street lay still as glass, but the sky lowered sullenly above the wet board buildings of the town. Work had resumed on the State House the week before and the downtown streets were rivers of half-frozen slush. “You two had best get home, if you're going to do it without getting wet. Would you like to wait here where it's warm, and I'll see if I can find someone to take word to Ninian's house to get the carriage here?” And after one look at the ocean of goo beyond the plank sidewalk's edge, he added, “I'd take you home myself but the canoe's got a hole in it.”

“We'll manage,” laughed Mary. “We got here, didn't we?” But when she and Mercy reached the edge of the sidewalk Mary saw, to her alarm, that most of the dropped planks and shingles that they'd used for stepping-stones had already sunk in the mud.

A few wagons creaked past, hauling roof-slates to the State House before the rain should start again.

Mercy looked around her anxiously as they retreated toward the shop's door again where Joshua waited. “I promised my sister-in-law I'd be home. Jamie's coming to dinner....”