by Norman Lock
“I’ll play Judge Solomon,” he said wryly while justly dividing that simple fare.
Afterward, he went into a back room and brought out two glasses and a jar of cider.
“A man needs little else for good digestion and the well-being of his bowels.”
He poured us each a glass. We drank to each other’s health.
“You are a New England man,” he said, quartering his apple with a pocketknife.
“That’s right,” I replied. “Born and raised in Massachusetts. I came out in ’48.”
“What did you think of the Mexican adventure?” he asked, his dark eyes piercing mine.
“I am glad it’s over,” I said evasively.
I’d heard that, when he had been in Congress, Abe denounced Polk and his ambition. Before I went to Mexico, I had believed in Manifest Destiny and thought our country and the Mexicans would be well served by annexation. I didn’t care to argue the point now. I knew of Abe’s reputation as a debater and didn’t relish being whittled like the apple whose slices he was masticating while he continued to take my measure.
I filled my mouth with peanuts, rendering speech, for the moment, impossible.
“America is not yet fully grown,” he said. “God help the world when she bestrides the continent.”
Choking on the damned peanuts, I fumbled for the glass of cider.
He leaned back in his chair and regarded me mischievously as I hemmed and hawed.
“You hold your opinions better than you do your peanuts.”
“You must come to dinner at my house and meet Ruth,” I said, attempting to change the subject.
“I will, and I’ll bring Mary along. I believe our two ladies are already acquainted.”
“They have a grocer and a draper in common,” I said, much relieved.
Abe smiled tolerantly, while I ran a finger round the rim of my glass.
“What is life like for an army chaplain?” he asked, sweeping the broken peanut shells into his hand’s rough palm—a hand that had plowed and split logs, as well as turned the pages of Blackstone’s Commentaries by the light of a greasy candle.
“It is a great thing for a man of little faith,” I replied. “He has less of it to lose.”
I studied the man’s shrewd yet kindly face for a sign of disapproval. I saw there what unnerved his adversaries in courtrooms and Congress. I also saw sadness, which would have endeared him to you, who, I think, judge us by the sorrows we cannot bear.
“You sound like a man trying too hard to be clever,” he said, smiling.
In my confusion, I felt obliged to talk about God and His grace, His divine nature and eternal bliss. Abe rebutted my arguments, adducing man’s fall from grace, his greed, and earthly misery. I lauded the just; he lamented injustice. I reminded him that the Savior promised the meek that they shall inherit the earth; he thought that, by now, they would be getting impatient for their inheritance. The antiphon went nowhere. If he’d wanted, he could have destroyed me with a word or a look. Apparently, I wasn’t worth the effort. Realizing my inconsequence, I became annoyed, like a flea that, having hopped onto a stone, discovers that there’s no blood to be drawn.
We were often together until Ruth died and I moved back onto the post. I enjoyed his company, and we didn’t spar much over serious matters. Maybe he doubted my sincerity. Maybe he foresaw the controversies and crises awaiting him. I do recall his having grown heated one evening, concerning the Mormon doctrine of plural marriage and the institution of slavery, both of which he detested.
“Polygamy and slavery are two sides of the same coin,” he said, brushing a fly from his cheek. “God may have given men dominion over their wives, but the law shouldn’t be obliged to recognize it any more than it should the ‘God-given right’ to own slaves. One wife is one too many for a man to subjugate; one slave is one human being too many for any man to own.”
“The issues of slavery and polygamy ought to be left to each sovereign state to decide,” I replied, my hands plucking my lapels, as I had seen Daniel Webster do to great effect. “I don’t approve of the latter any more than I do the former, but neither do I believe in meddling in matters of conscience.”
“Robert, it seems to me that such meddling is your purpose in life: It is what preachers are meant to do.”
Good lawyer that he was, Abe had cornered me, but I was too obstinate to recant. I was like a wagon master who, having realized he’d taken the wrong trail, was too proud to admit his mistake and ended, along with his party of emigrants, a pile of sun-scalded bones.
“Seems to me, Abe, that you put a preacher in the same basket as a gossip.”
He smiled archly, and I felt myself sink in his estimation a little lower than the insects.
“I look after the spiritual well-being of my flock!” I insisted.
“I see,” he said, swatting at the fly again. “You make an interesting distinction.”
“Seems as if that fly has got it in for you, Abe.”
“When you’ve got hold of a grizzly bear, you don’t bother much about a pest.”
I wondered whether I was the bear, the pest, or something hardly worth swatting.
–3–
I RECALL A SUMMER AFTERNOON when Abe and I took our cane poles to the river to fish for perch. Fishing always put him in a reflective mood.
“A worm doesn’t have much of a life,” he said, threading one from the can onto his hook. “When it’s not on its belly like the serpent in the Garden, it’s dangling at the end of some fool’s line.”
We heard a rustle in the undergrowth, which turned out to be that of a skunk.
“I know a parcel of frock-coated so-and-sos in Washington, passing themselves off as statesmen, with less character and conviction than that critter waddling through the creepers. If ever a man deserved to be called a skunk, it’s a Democrat.”
He spat his contempt into the water and then launched into a story.
“I once heard of a skunk that went to church on a Sunday morning and, offended by the preacher’s remarks concerning its tribe, raised its tail, a rude gesture that sent the congregation running for the creek as if they’d scorched their backsides on hell’s grate. When the skunk’s ire had cooled, it regretted its rashness and decided to make itself agreeable to humans, who could, if they had a mind to, exterminate its entire race. So it went to a veterinary and had itself deskunked. The following Sunday morning, it headed for church to proclaim itself a reformed and peaceable member of the community. Well, sir, it got about as far as the churchyard before old man Hardesty’s coonhound tore it to pieces.”
“Meaning what?” I asked wearily, having acquired a profound distaste for riddles in your company, Emily.
“Meaning that we should not be too quick to appease our adversaries.”
We watched his cork bobber trace a frantic scrawl across the water.
“Animals are the best characters for a tale,” he said. “They go down like a spoonful of treacle. Jesus knew it when He spoke about the providential sparrow, the birds and the mustard seed, and the lost sheep.”
He pulled in the line, unhooked the fish, and returned it to the river.
Ruth liked Abe’s easy way with words but lacked his subtlety, which she did not care for. She never spoke in riddles or parables, never embellished a story, and never strayed from facts. Her life’s story was a common yarn stretching from one moment to the next, with nary a tangle in between. She had no time for fancy, fragility, or talk of “infinitudes.” Unlike you, she knew what life was and how to live it without fuss. My life was peaceful in those days.
Emily, what will you do if the Mexicans descend on Amherst, or the Indians, the slaves, the poor and meek, who will have yet to inherit the earth? And when they set fire to your house, will your emperor, caesar, tsar, father and his fire brigade storm the flaming walls with pikes and buckets? Will he repel the alien invaders with a stern look and the whip with which he beats his horse, while you read them poems?
That wasn’t fair. You’ve got more pluck than I ever had. I never raised an unholy stink, never stood up to wicked men, except once outside Salt Lake City. Mostly, I’ve been afraid.
“The warrant of a good man’s character is that he does not shirk when there’s necessary work to be done,” Abe once said, reproving me for a lack of conviction.
We were sitting in a pair of rocking chairs by the window overlooking Jackson Street. He’d been poking fun at passersby. The maxim had been prompted by the appearance, in the street below, of the sheriff.
“Harley is an admirable fellow. His hand might shake, but he’ll shoot a bad man dead if there’s no other way to keep the peace. He drinks, you know.”
Abe contemplated his fingernails, which he had just pared. I clicked mine on the arms of the chair. By nature, he was a quiet man, but he would, on occasion, indulge in silences pregnant with disapproval. I would hum, clear my throat of phlegm, or make some other ordinary sound to goad him into speech.
“I won’t advise you in matters of belief, Robert, nor will I presume to tell you your duty. We are friends, and I mean to remain so.” He took my wrist and squeezed it harder than was necessary. “You’re the body politic in miniature, and your pulse is worth taking.” He let go of my wrist and returned to his rocking.
I never understood his affection for me. His heart was far greater than mine; and his uncertainty was, unlike mine, the result of a willingness to confront the worst of men and the unluckiest of destinies. He didn’t hide behind a lack of finishing, a backwoods upbringing, or a haphazard education, while I hid behind doctrines that, like a headland battered by the sea, had already begun their slow erosion.
We were, all of us, wounded: Abe, in a brooding conscience no compromise could salve; you, in a heart broken by a catastrophe not even you can understand; and I, in a faith impossible for a weak man to uphold. Only Ruth seemed whole and entire until Death unraveled the plain cloth of her life.
Did I love her? Does it matter? Most conjugal pairs are guilty of halfhearted gestures, half-understood emotions, half-glimpsed truths, and a reckoning always in arrears.
The first thing Ruth bought when we set up house on Eighth Street, two blocks from the Lincolns, was a corn broom. She swept from top to bottom, washed the windows, burnished the panes with newspaper, beat the rag rugs, and, in your words,
Spooned out Winter’s dead
From the sill inside the window—
Each shriveled corpse,
A tiny mummified Pharaoh.
That night, she dragged a galvanized tub into the kitchen, boiled water, and bid me wash. She looked on as though I were a boy dirty after playing in the fields. Then she put up a muslin screen and took her turn in the tub. I saw her strong young body in silhouette, defined by the light of an oil lamp. I felt the serpent uncoil in my loins, and their troublesome heat. I was uneasy but felt compelled to look at her. She appeared from behind the screen, wearing a plain nightdress. Her long, damp hair seemed indecent. She smiled gently, and I realized with a start that I, not she, was ashamed. Ridiculous man, I preened in my virtuousness while she led me upstairs, turned the covers down, and—always the practical partner in our marriage—lifted up her nightdress. She gave up her chastity as matter-of-factly as she’d given up her father’s name. I felt like a sacrifice made on an altar where, in nine months’ time, a child would be given to its mother’s breast. The encounter had been practical and yet not without love. Afterward, we discussed neither our feelings nor the intricacies of the body’s response to an experience that, I confess, was pleasurable. What she might have felt during our silent coupling, I couldn’t guess, because she’d put out the light in the room, as one of us would always do.
I did love her. I know I mourned her with genuine feeling; I know my grief and tears were real. I know that I was, for a time, inconsolable. I know that I missed her keenly and, if not so keenly now, I miss her still. But it is easier to miss someone dear than to rejoice in her presence. My love, if love it was, never did flame up into ecstasy.
I should have kept the child with me even if I’d had to resign my commission and live in Amherst. Ambition did not prevent it, nor my unresolved feelings for Ruth, nor did the disconcerting thought that I would see you again. My feelings for you had flowed into the quiet backwater where we keep our memories and regrets. (I wish they had remained there.) I may have stayed in the army for no other reason than the dogged refusal to leave a path once taken—for the sake of habitude, which, little by little, replaces the soul without our realizing it.
–4–
RUTH THOUGHT MARY LINCOLN FIDGETY and considered hysteria and insanity self-indulgent. If Ruth had lived longer than her allotted span of twenty-six years, life might have rattled her, but she was pragmatic and capable to the end. She left instructions for the child’s care and the house’s upkeep on the back of the calendar page of the month in which she would die. The ledger where she faithfully noted every household transaction included the cost of her coffin, interment, and, afterward, a simple meal for friends. More than anything else having to do with that painful time, the discovery of that gray bound book overwhelmed me. She had written in it, in her no-nonsense way, the biography of our married life, as significant a discovery for me as any trove of love letters, of which, for Ruth and me, there was none.
I remember vividly Ruth’s and my first supper at the Lincoln place on Seventh Street, a large clapboard house, birch-colored, with green shutters, a side-gabled roof, plain corbels and cornice, two brick chimneys, a porch at the back, and a veranda on the second story. We ate celery soup and fish. I recall a pile of small bones on Abe’s plate.
“Americans are fond of piles of bones,” said Abe. “They are monuments to progress as it is measured by annexation and slaughter.”
I knew his views on the Mexican War, the extermination of the buffalo, and the Indian Removal Act, which “Andrew Jackson and his cronies did not even bother to prettify by calling it the ‘Indian Resettlement Act’ or some other less autocratic and baldly extortive phrase.”
“You must keep gloomy thoughts for your port and cigars, Mr. Lincoln,” twittered Mary, as though she were hosting a Louisville soiree. She turned to Ruth and asked, “Mrs. Winter, is your husband dreadfully serious? I suppose he must be, having to justify the ways of men to God. Or is it the other way around? I can never remember things in their proper order. Mr. Lincoln is forever correcting me. I declare I am a flibbertigibbet!”
Amused, Abe cracked his knuckles.
Ruth stared at Mary, as she would have at one of Barnum’s oddities.
“Have you heard the one about the donkey?” asked Abe.
“Mr. Lincoln, neither I nor our guests have the slightest interest in donkeys or in your foolery!”
“I’d like to hear it, Mr. Lincoln,” said Ruth, not to gratify Abe, but to spite Mary, who was now glaring at her.
“Seems a might stuffy in here,” said Abe. “Open the window, will you, Robert?”
“Mr. Lincoln!” Mary spoke sharply to her husband, who was picking his teeth with a fish bone.
Abe returned it to his plate and stretched his long legs under the table in prelude to his tale while I did as I was bidden. Catching a glimpse of a catalpa tree in bloom, I imagined myself outside in the summer evening air. I’d have had a volume of Shelley’s or Keats’s to while away the time. “Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, / Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.”
Abe launched into his fable as I sat down again, and Mary fiddled with a spoon.
“There was a donkey so cussed and stubborn, it stopped one day in a farmer’s field and refused to budge. Fortunately for the donkey, the farmer was a kindly soul who’d rather have taken the whip to his darkies than to his livestock. When he realized that the donkey had no intention of returning to the barn, the good man built a shed for it and each morning gave it hay and water. And so the donkey lived out its days without ambition or discomfort.”
I gl
anced at Ruth, whose gaze was fixed on Abe, and at Mary, who, with her spoon, was pressing a crease into the tablecloth with a curious intensity.
“When the donkey finally died and was standing at heaven’s gate, Saint Francis put a single question to it. ‘Why do you deserve eternal bliss?’
“Without hesitation, the donkey replied, ‘Because, in life, I harmed no one.’
“‘Whom did you help?’ asked the saint.
“‘No one.’
“Saint Francis pulled an iron lever, and, before the donkey knew what had happened, it was falling through space. It didn’t stop until it landed in Washington, in the House chamber, on the Democratic side of the aisle, where it was greeted by Andy Jackson and a pack of braying jackasses.”
Ruth laughed, although I was not sure she saw the joke, having taken little interest in the politics of either the proslavery Democrats of the time or the liberal Whigs. Mary scowled at her husband, who looked at us with a poker face.
“Your stories are childish!” she scolded. “They might be all well and good around the stove in Merkel’s hardware, to amuse the shiftless idlers who chaw and play the Jew’s harp, but they are not genteel, Mr. Lincoln! You are not a gentleman, howsoever much I have tried to rid you of your backwoods ways! And will you please not crack your knuckles!”
“I beg your pardon,” said Abe, his long fingers tracing a courtly gesture in the air. “I am a fool, and one day all the world shall know it.” (In years to come, he would say, “I am Fool made to play the part of Lear.”)
Mary replied with a sound whose spelling defies transcription: a humph of regret for her Kentucky home, of impatience with her husband’s rustic manners, and of anger for the three of us who sat around her table like skeptics at a séance.
Supper at an end, Abe and I went into his study, while Mary praised her dining room’s dark red wallpaper, embellished with a William Morris design, “purchased from Galloway and Fitch.”
“I call it my ‘study’ to impress visitors, but mostly I take my after-dinner naps here,” Abe told me.
We sat and charged our pipes with tobacco.
