The Emancipator's Wife (36 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SEVEN

T
O
M
ARY
'
S INTENSE GRATITUDE, THE
C
ONGRESSIONAL TERM TO
which Lincoln was elected wouldn't start until December of 1847. She couldn't imagine trying to travel with an infant and a boy of three. “Are you sure you want to come?” asked Lincoln, once Mary's first spate of triumph, plans, and delight had run itself down. The current hired girl, Bridget, had joined them in the kitchen, leaning on her broom and beaming in vicarious delight. Bobby sat on Lincoln's knee, Mary being in occupation of most of his lap.

“Are you ashamed to be seen with a wife in tow, Mr.
Congressman
?”

“One so pretty, and dressed so fine as you? Never.” He kissed her, something that always made Mary blush, for she had seldom seen Ninian kiss Elizabeth or her father kiss Betsey. It was one of the things Elizabeth considered ill-bred about her gangly, unwanted brother-in-law. “But we'll be living in a boardinghouse. Most Congressmen do.”

“And what of that?” asked Mary. And, seeing a world of remembrances about Mrs. Beck in the lift of his brows, she added, “Pish, I was just a girl then, and didn't know how to go on. I hope I've learned a little more about the world by this time.” She tousled Bobby's blond hair and kissed him, and leaned up to kiss her husband's hollow cheek. “To be able to attend Washington parties, to mingle with the makers of our country's law and policies, I daresay I could be happy living in a tent.”

“And that's one in the eye for Mrs. Edwards,” added Bridget—which of course had been the first thing Mary had thought, though she hadn't said it.

It seemed like there was so much to do, in the next year! Winter and spring, and a blazing-hot summer that seemed never-ending . . . She went shopping at Irwin's with Julia Trumbull and tall Cousin Lizzie—now Lizzie Grimsley, where
did
the time go?—and the three of them spent happy weeks studying
Godey's
and sewing and furbishing up dresses that would be fit for Washington parties.

That spring of 1847 the newspapers were filled with the war with Mexico, whose bellicose President Santa Anna had begun arming the moment the Republic of Texas applied for inclusion in the United States. Fighting broke out in April across the whole northern segment of
Mexico that Congress had been trying to acquire by negotiation for years. The United States claimed the Mexicans had crossed the border to attack. Torchlight rallies were held. Militia companies formed overnight and rushed toward the Rio Grande. Southern slaveholders and land speculators pricked their ears at the prospect of new cotton lands to replace the worn-out soil of Alabama and the Carolinas.

One minute it seemed like forever until the Lincolns' projected departure, and the next, they were packing to leave. Lincoln found a renter for the house, and spent all of one October day moving their furniture up into the northernmost of the little slant-roofed attic rooms while Bobby did his best to get underfoot on the narrow attic stair and kill them both.

Then they were all getting on the stagecoach, under gray autumn skies.

Despite the proud dome of the sandstone State House, Springfield looked very small across the golden swell of the prairie.

At Scott's Hotel in St. Louis they were met by Joshua Speed, plumper now with the first flecks of gray in his beard, but with the same cheerful sparkle in his eye. “What's this I hear about you naming
my
namesake after some pettifogging politico, Lincoln?” The two men embraced, and Mary shook hands with the sweet-faced, dark-haired lady introduced to her as Fanny Speed.

“Now, I won't have you raking poor Mr. Lincoln down,” said Mrs. Speed. “Your husband is a brave man, Mrs. Lincoln. When Joshua was courting me, Mr. Lincoln pretended to be a Democrat, so that my father could lecture him on the evils of his party while Joshua spoke to me on the gallery. I doubt that even David did that for Jonathan in Bible times.”

“David would have thought King Saul heaving spears at him was a good trade, after ten minutes with your pa,” grinned Lincoln, and Mrs. Speed tapped him on the elbow with her fan.

“Oh, the little darling!” Mrs. Speed added, tiptoeing to look at Eddie, whom Lincoln was carrying on one hip. The boy was, at nineteen months, solemn and long-faced and worrisomely thin, and looked for all the world like a miniature version of Granny Parker, except for his gray Lincoln eyes. Bobby, with his round face and watchful blue gaze, cock-eyed as it was, was all Todd. And for that matter, thought Mary suddenly, panic clutching her, where was Bobby . . . ?

She caught him just before he got out the hotel door and into the street. The traffic and bustle in St. Louis made Springfield look like a country village. The town was a river port, and the jumping-off point for the trading caravans that crossed the prairies and the Great American Desert to the Spanish colonies around Santa Fe.

Now with the Army to be supplied and militia companies streaming south, St. Louis jostled with merchants, bullwhackers, boatmen, and traders, in spite of the hardship of winter travel. In the crowded hotel dining-room Mary could barely make herself heard above the din as she gossiped with Fanny Speed over mutual acquaintances and kin all over Kentucky and Virginia. As for Lincoln and Joshua, immersed in discussion of the war, it was as if neither of their wives existed.

For some years, Mary knew, the two men's friendship had cooled—because of Joshua's management of his mother's plantation, she guessed, which put him in the position of owning and working slaves.

For all that Lincoln upheld the law of the land that permitted slavery to exist, on a personal level he both hated and feared it. She felt a pang of jealousy, watching them together now. Seeing there a past that she could never share.

From St. Louis all six of them took the steamboat to Louisville, and from there the Lincolns proceeded on to Frankfort. It required the efforts of all four adults to keep Bobby from coming to some kind of grief on the boat. The four-year-old proved just as prone to wandering on a boat of two hundred feet by forty as he had with all of Springfield to choose from, and Mary lived in constant terror of seeing him pitch himself over the rail of the high hurricane deck into the deadly swift currents of the river. Just above Cairo Bobby did disappear, and while Mary and Fanny Speed searched frantically among the boxes, bales, and crates of New Orleans merchandise on the fore-part of the lowest deck, Lincoln walked to the back along the promenades that ran along the sides of the boat, where coffles of slaves were chained, to be sold in Louisville.

Mary came hurrying aft with the news that she hadn't found a trace of Bobby, she was certain he'd gone overboard, to find her husband sitting on a keg of nails, their errant son at his side, talking to one of the chained blacks: “. . . couldn't take my eyes off the boat engines, even when we was flatboatin' and these things was the enemy an' the invention of the Devil.”

“They still is, sir,” agreed the slave equably. “We crunched up a flatboat in the fog not ten miles below Vicksburg—why don't they never hang lights on them things? Fog was so thick the pilot couldn't see the river below him....”

“Ain't that just like a pilot, to keep goin' in a blind fog?”

“You ever get crunched by a steamboat, Pa? Father,” Bobby corrected himself hastily, seeing Mary approach.

“Lord, yes! I thought I'd drown, stayin' under till the paddle went by overhead....Mother,” Lincoln added, turning to her with a smile. “I found the rascal just where I thought he'd be.”

“I just wanted to see the wheel,” explained Bobby.

“You just wanted to get yourself killed leanin' over that rail, li'l Marse,” corrected the slave. “
And
give your poor Ma a conniption-fit. He's fine, ma'am,” he added. Bobby was covered head to foot with splashed-up river-water and the soot of engine-smuts. “We kept him back off the rail.”

Mary gave each member of the coffle a quarter, for whatever small luxuries might be bought in Louisville, and hauled the protesting Bobby back to the higher decks of the boat. But that night when she waked in their little stateroom in the rear of the boiler-deck to hear the muffled singing of the men chained below, she saw the moonlight shining in her husband's open, listening eyes.

T
HEY WERE FIVE DAYS TRAVELING UP THE
O
HIO
R
IVER TO
C
ARROLLTON
, where the Kentucky River flowed down from the dense green forest, and another day and a half going up the Kentucky to Frankfort. From the upper deck of the smaller stern-wheeler on that leg of the journey Mary watched the scenery transform itself into home: the gray rock of the banks becoming more jagged and fantastic, the trees darker and thicker than any Illinois woodland. This was The Dark and Bloody Ground, the violent land that the Todds had settled in the wake of the Revolution in the East, worlds distant from the clean-smelling grassy spaces of Illinois.

The land where she had flirted, and danced, and been hailed as the belle of Lexington.

The land she had fled eight years ago.

The land in which she still walked, most nights when she dreamed.

When Pendleton opened the door to the front hall of the big house on Main Street, Mary cried, “Pendleton!” and clasped the servant's hands, almost before she saw the rest of the family. She led Lincoln in, keeping a firm grip on Bobby's hand while Lincoln carried Eddie: The boys had nearly exhausted themselves running up and down the corridor of the train from Frankfort, and Mary, her head aching from the jolting and the noise of the train, was a little surprised that several of the passengers hadn't hurled the two obstreperous children out the windows.

And there they all were on the stairs, looking so changed. Her father coming down toward her, grayer even than he'd been four years ago. “Molly,” he smiled, and bent gravely to take Bobby's hand. Mary braced herself, cringing, lest her father or Betsey draw back from Bobby's defective eye, but Robert Todd said only, “Well, now, sir, you've grown some since last I saw you. And got yourself a brother now, too, I see.”

The others on the stair pushed forward. Betsey, so thin she looked like she'd break if she tripped, but still with that chill precise air: “What filthy things trains are, to be sure.” She scrubbed at a smut of soot on
Eddie's cheek, as if Mary should have been able to keep the boys clean on a conveyance that belched coal-smoke and churned dust with every yard it traveled.

Granny Parker, blue eyes still sharp though her hair was snow-white now: “Let the girl be, Betsey! You should have seen yourself last month when you came home on that thing from Frankfort!” Good heavens, was that stocky man with the receding hairline and red-veined nose
Levi
? And the shifty-eyed sallow malcontent beside him—smelling faintly of corn liquor—that couldn't be
George
?

They had to be, because the two young gentlemen of the ages Levi and George
ought
to have been
—were
still, in Mary's recollections—must be Sam and David, David, whose crying had nearly driven Mary crazy that horrible cholera summer of 1833. And the others were children she felt she'd never seen before: a coolly self-possessed girl of fifteen (not
Margaret,
surely!), a plump, vivacious girl a few years younger
(Mattie?!?),
a beautiful blond boy of nine who couldn't be anyone but Alec, Alec who'd been born while Mary was teaching at Ward's. . . .

“So you're my little sister?” asked Lincoln, looking down at the pretty golden-haired eleven-year-old who was the only one of them to come to him instead of hanging back.

Mary cried in delight, “Emilie!” and seized the little girl's hand as
Lincoln picked Emilie up as easily as he'd have picked up a kitten, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. For years now Emilie had written to Mary—not often, but frequently and candidly enough to let Mary know that the child she'd taught her first samplers still remembered her with love.

The littler ones—Alec, Elodie, and Katherine—crowded around their tall new relative, clamoring to be picked up also and making the
acquaintance of their rather overwhelmed small cousins, both of whom clung to their father's legs.

“That's going to be your President of the United States, is it?” Granny Parker folded her skinny arms beneath her shawl and stood beside Mary.

“He is,” agreed Mary, a little defensively: Granny Parker had always been unpredictable.

“Not much to look at.”

“On the contrary,” replied Mary, “I think he's grand.”

A door opened behind her. Warmth and familiar scents from the big kitchen enveloped Mary in a tide of the past so powerful that it brought tears. Even before she turned she knew who stood there, her smiling face more wrinkled than ever but her eyes as wise. “Mammy Sally!” Mary cried, and flung herself into the old woman's arms. “Oh, Mammy, I missed you! I missed you all!”

“Well, don't weep about it, child,” said Granny Parker, both amusement and impatience in her voice.