I should have realized that the Little Giant had too much at stake. He couldn’t disappear from this rumpus just like that. He’d have lost his standing in the nation, so he rallied a little, came to Quincy, a river town right on the Mississip, with all his regalia—a brass band that filled up a railroad car, sentinels and marchers, and a float of sixteen maidens in the buckskin garb of prairie huntresses. This regalia made so much noise it covered up the arrival of Dug and Adèle at the meeting hall. Dug wore a winter cloak in October and a scarf around his neck that couldn’t mask his viscous, yellow eyes. A pair of his own marshals had to escort him to the platform, for our sixth debate, else he would have toppled into the crowd. He swayed while he was up there, like a man caught in a dizzy spell. But I wasn’t watching him or his wife. I was watching our live raccoon that crouched on top of a pole—the raccoon was a symbol of the old Whig Party, and we were hoping for a resurrection in Quincy, that all the “raccoons” in the audience would remain alive and vote Republican. But the Democrats had brought their own raccoon, a dead one, with its tail bound with strips of wire to a boatman’s oar, so that the dead coon swung like a pendulum with pointy ears and prickly gray fur with a lone streak of red.
While Dug stumbled across the platform, our live raccoon kept staring at that streak of red fur. Dug had a pendulum of his own, as he kept saying over and over again that our Republic could exist forever divided into free and slave States. He saw a path to the Presidency and he took it—never mind that it was also a formula for a broken Union, an invitation to civil strife. Oh, he would cure every ill once he rode to the White House in the President’s barouche.
I didn’t even have the time to answer Dug. That live raccoon let out an electric wail that pierced the hall—it was somewhere between a growl and a long, relentless hiss—and he leapt off his perch on the pole, sailed over our heads like a furry ball with magnetic teeth and decapitated the dead raccoon with one rip of his jaws.
Several ladies in the Republican part of the arena swooned. Dug himself wandered in a daze, as if he’d been driven off a battlefield. And I wasn’t immune to that wild leap. I shivered some, and wondered how a single raccoon could overwhelm our rumpus . . .
We stayed in Quincy overnight, but I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t Dug’s palliations—and lullabies—all the untruths he told—that kept me awake. I expected that, and even more, from him. I remembered Dug from the old days in Springfield, that essential swagger he had along with his fine linen, how he discovered the latest dance steps and scrutinized all the belles on Quality Hill, and considered every other beau in the room unworthy of him. His arrogance and self-aggrandizement had boosted his fortune and near crippled him blind. And it didn’t seem to matter much that the nation would plunge into the ether, like that maddened raccoon on the pole.
We boarded the City of Louisiana, Dug, Adèle, and I, and sailed down the Mississip a hundred and fifteen miles to Alton, presiding over a panorama of cliffs. Not a word passed between us. Dug had to guard whatever little was left of his voice, but Adèle did invite me to dinner. We sat in the captain’s cabin. The river had a yellow gleam. We hadn’t come near Alton, and it felt as if we’d stumbled upon a landless universe—I squinted hard, but I couldn’t uncover the shoreline. I was lonely all of a sudden. I missed my wife. Mother had remade me, even if I still had a hard time manipulating a proper knife and fork. Adèle pretended not to notice, while Dug pulled me right out of my reverie.
“Lincoln, we are moving toward an abyss. And the negro will not help us climb out. But I’d disappoint Illinois if I canceled the seventh debate.”
Dug, you’re the abyss. That’s what I wanted to say. But I juggled with him.
“Well, if you’re too ill, Senator. I wouldn’t want to chase you.”
He coughed, and poor Adèle had to wipe the spittle from his chin.
“This canvass has turned into a pugilistic contest,” he suddenly said, gulping on all that spittle. And he left the captain’s table, muttering to himself. I sat there with his wife. We ate in silence. She wouldn’t utter a sound until she finished her compote. And then Adèle said how much her husband admired me—admired me with a knife in his hand. He was mortally tired, she said. “Every gesture he makes, every move, is a little run for the Presidency.”
We’d have another Buchanan, a President who compromised with every spoon he took into his mouth . . .
And Adèle, too, left the table, with the bustle of her gown wandering like a deep ripple in the water. I sat there a spell, watching the implacable pull of the Mississip.
THE SUN SAT in my eyes when we arrived at the piers—could have been a half-blind beggar coming from the holy wars. And then there was the dazzle of Molly’s own blue eyes, as if I’d come out of the deep, and had never once sighted land or sky and a red-brown crop of hair. I’d been bound up with other men’s needs too long, and had shut in my own desires.
Molly wore a cape like some marine; I still had a rainbow in my eyes. I didn’t give a hoot that Bob was with her on the pier, in the blue coat and white pants of a Springfield cadet. I picked her up in my arms and whirled her over the edge of the water until her dress flared out and her crinoline seemed to crash in the wind like soft glass.
“Mr. Lincoln,” she said with a breathy growl, “I’m not a sailboat—I’m only your wife.” But she laughed as I waltzed her across the pier. I forgot the canvass. I forgot Illinois.
She didn’t gloat at Dug when he came down the gangplank with Adèle, a huge handkerchief wrapped around his throat. She curtsied to the Senator and took Adèle’s hand—the wives of the two warriors. Adèle couldn’t linger. She had to get Dug away from all the wind off the river. He looked saturnine at the beginning of the debate. His silver buttons weren’t so clean. In a voice that trembled and could hardly be heard a few feet away, he went on the attack. “I hold that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race.”
His legions had arrived with their banners and floats, but Alton didn’t belong to Dug—the Sangamon–Alton railroad had brought Molly and Bob at a special half-price Republican fare. Even with all our own bustle, I still had a bitter taste in my mouth. The crowds had dwindled; most of the stenographers were gone; this match couldn’t have been much news in Manhattan—or London—or Philadelphia. A world-renowned Senator waging war against a local man for the privilege of his own seat, a seat I’d never win. But I couldn’t let Dug go on lying—and lying—and lying, even if my words went into the wind.
We were at the courthouse square right on the river. Dug did his usual prowling, preened in pure silk.
And so I dueled with him for the seventh time. All the dust of the canvass had come to an end, with the fizzle-gigs and fireworks. Still, I wasn’t finished, wasn’t finished at all. It wasn’t about Lincoln vs. Douglas—it was Lincoln vs. himself, the storming in my own heart. I had to unravel his lies, for my own sake, a stitch at a time. And the greatest lie of all was that the colored man was not included in the Declaration of Independence.
I told that audience of diehards and stragglers, the last remnants of our debate, that I had to combat this damn lie. “I combat it as having a tendency to dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man. I combat it as being one of the thousand things constantly done in these days to prepare the public mind to make property, and nothing but property, of the negro in all the States of the Union.”
There were only two stripes, I said. “The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. . . . It is the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the s
ame tyrannical principle. . . .”
My throat was dry. I was all done. The bands had stopped playing, the crowds dispersed, and I could hear the river roil. I hadn’t helped a soul. Black men would remain in their prison house—that house of a hundred keys—separated from their own kin. And the Republic was perilously close to some cliff.
I watched Dug step into his silver carriage with Adèle, that handkerchief still around his throat. His partisans grabbed the horses’ gear and wouldn’t let the carriage move until Dug smiled at them. It was a sinister smile—Dug looked deranged, as if the canvass had killed some essential part of him, had unmasked the horror of his own lies. But it wouldn’t hurt him none. The Democrats controlled the Legislature—and the Statehouse would pick the next Senator from Illinois.
I stood around as the workmen commenced to tear up the platform and pile the planks of wood into wheelbarrows; they wore leather mittens and cotton masks to guard them from the dust and debris. They were reckless with the wheelbarrows, bumping into stanchions like wanton angels with their own mad abandon. They left deep tracks on the courthouse lawn. But they had their own miraculous rhythm; the platform vanished in front of my eyes, with all the banners and balloons. And in less than an hour there wasn’t a single sign that Dug and I had ever come down the Mississippi to have a debate in Alton—except for those rifts in the grass from all the wheelbarrows.
16.
The Giant Killer
THE RAIN POUNDED our roof on Election Day, like pellets from Satan’s own scattergun. Our cellar flooded, and if Mother and I hadn’t found her bailing pails, we would have had our own Mississippi under Jackson Street. The fence tore right down in the wind and left a deep curl of wood. My captains had been correct—we took the popular vote, but the Democrats held on to their precincts, and the new Legislature, like the old one, would belong to Dug; come January, that Legislature would vote him in for another term as United States Senator. I told my captains, and told my wife, “I expect everyone to desert me except Billy.”
I was out on the road half the time, trying to outrun death and destruction while I paid off some of our debts. Folks would stare at me, whisper to their wives, and I couldn’t tell if I was a pariah or some little god who’d come off the plains. I was fifty years old, with layers of dust in my wild black hair and only one odd shirt in my carpetbag. The waitresses along the route were dustier than I; they wouldn’t let me alone until I signed my autograph. The inns often ran out of bread and meat, but folks kept staring, even while they were famished. “That’s Lincoln,” they said. “That’s him—Sir, can we tech your hand?” And I would ride off into the dust again, month after month.
Mary was chagrined that I wouldn’t come home. She’d flail me in her letters. “The boys miss their father. They cannot recollect his face. They wonder now if Mr. Lincoln is tall or short. Or maybe there are two Lincolns—first the husband and then the Far Rider, who spreads himself across the counties. We all wish the Far Rider would come home.”
The Far Rider was forlorn. Canvassing had nearly cost me my home and my practice. Lincoln & Herndon might have petered out if I hadn’t ridden through dust storms like a desert creature in search of new clients. And when I did get back to Springfield, we had another blow. Bob failed his entrance exams to Harvard—he couldn’t solve the enigma of geometry, or rhetoric, or natural history. Mary locked herself away in her room—no one could draw her out, neither Willie nor Tad.
I was stunned when Bob arrived at my office. He had never been fond of visiting Billy and me in our unruly quarters. His linen was so fine, and he had that silver pin in his cravat—a gift from his mother, an heirloom her own father had once worn. His lower lip was trembling.
“Father,” he said, “I’ve come to work.”
“I don’t understand you, Son.”
“I decided to apprentice myself to you and Billy.”
I was as suspicious as an old fox about to raid a barnyard. “Is that what you want to do—tie yourself to Lincoln & Herndon?”
“No,” he said. “But I’m a failure, and failures don’t have much choice.”
“Billy,” I said, “lock the door.” And we barred every other client from the premises. Then I sat Bob down in my own rocking chair.
“You’re no failure,” I said, in Bob’s own schoolboy English. “It’s your highfalutin academy that failed you. It didn’t learn you a thing, and I paid that tuition with my blood. Now tell your Pa straight out what it is you want.”
“To go to Harvard, sir.”
“Then Harvard it will be.”
It was Mary who had given him those Eastern airs—my wife believed in all the privileges Harvard could bestow upon a boy from the West. Springfield was a dusty barn she had to tolerate on my account. If she’d had her druthers, she’d have gone up to Harvard with Bob as its first female scholar . . .
Billy caught me shivering, and it was the worst case of trembles he had ever seen. I wasn’t much of a magic maker. I neither had the money nor the prestige to get my boy into Harvard. And while we pondered, there was a knock on the door. Billy had pulled the curtain down and we couldn’t see through the glass. And then I heard that delicious hauteur of Mary’s voice.
“Mr. Lincoln, I don’t want to repeat myself. Open that damnable door.”
Billy opened up, and Mother came marching in. She had a cape covering her nightdress. And she’d ventured downtown in her slippers. But Mother didn’t storm at Billy and me. She smiled like a half-crazed mountain cat.
“Mr. Lincoln, did you really promise to get your son into Harvard?”
Before we could utter a word, Mother informed us that we had to send Bob to Phillips Exeter Academy to polish up for his entrance exams. And then she was gone. That damn academy was where all the little Eastern dukes went once they had their hearts and minds set on Harvard . . .
Billy went off to run an errand, and I sat alone in the dark. Suddenly there was a noise coming from the street—like the whisper of a huge animal. I peeked through the blinds. A bunch of citizens had collected outside to serenade me. I was Long Lincoln, the Giant Killer.
Strangers continued to come by and gawk at the house. Dug had returned to the Senate, but I was the Giant Killer. Who could have imagined that seven debates—in wind and rain—had become a slice of Illinois? It didn’t seem to matter who had won. I had to ride the rails; folks wanted me to relive my particular calvary with Senator Douglas—the clatter in the cars, the dust storms, the effigies, the bonfires that blazed in my eyes, the dead squirrel that near ruined our sixth debate.
Then a letter arrived at my office. I had to stare twice at the envelope. It was from Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn—that Church was practically a shrine. Senators and governors communed there with Ward Beecher, and now the Church was inviting the Hon. A. Lincoln to speak there on any topic and was willing to pay two hundred dollars—I was stupefied. How could I hope to palaver in Mr. Beecher’s pulpit? I’d heard about his wild hair and even wilder Abolition ways. Women swooned in the aisles after one of his sermons.
I waved the letter in front of Billy. “I can’t lecture there. They’ll laugh at such a yokel. I don’t have Beecher’s gifts.”
“Mr. Lincoln, you’ve been offered two hundred dollars. That’s more than most mechanics make in a year.”
Plymouth Church wanted me in November—but I decided on next February. Meantime, Molly scoffed at my campaign clothes.
“Father, you can’t walk into Plymouth Church with prairie dust. It’s the pinnacle of culture. We’ll have to find a tailor for you.”
I couldn’t argue once Mary looked at me with her sharpshooter’s eyes. I went to Woods & Heckle, the tailor on the square. It took Mr. Woods ten days to measure me up for a suit. I groaned at the bill. Suddenly Plymouth Church might become a losing proposition. I’d come back with ten more bills to pay.
I had the trembles for three whole months. I was frightened of Ward Beecher and his Church—scarified of that
man with the wild hair who had sent rifles to John Brown and wrote sermons about him and his bloody border raids. Brown was a lunatic with a long beard, and Beecher had called him a prophet in the wilderness. He startled the whole congregation at Plymouth Church when he produced the very chains that had bound the prophet at Harper’s Ferry, and he stomped on them like a rattlesnake. I kept having nightmares, and in all of them I was waylaid by strangers in clerical collars and couldn’t find the right road to Plymouth Church. Mary found me in the parlor, pale as a ghost in my nightshirt. She must have heard my nocturnal screams. We had our own bedrooms with a door in the middle after Mary had the house remodeled in one of her mad schemes. It was the latest fashion—the lord and mistress of the manor with connecting rooms, only I wasn’t much of a lord, and we didn’t live in a manor. Yet I’d crawl into her room in the middle of the night, and at other times I’d wake with Mary in my arms, scented flowers in her hair or between her bosoms, like Lola Montez.
But I could have sworn I’d been seared by lightning. I hopped like a wild Injun—had to clear my head—and strode outside in my slippers. And that’s when I saw them under a dark moon, men and boys doffed in apparel as ill fitting as my own. None of them had been measured by Woods & Heckle, I’d imagine. Their shins poked freely from their pantaloons, and their ragged cuffs didn’t reach much past their elbows; they outgrew whatever they wore, the way I had done. They’d walked fifty miles from Beardstown, with nothing but sips of well water and a few crusts that some farmer must have left for the crows.
“Are you Abe the Giant Killer?” their spokesman asked, a boy with a baritone as deep as Dug’s.
“I’m Abraham Lincoln,” I said, reveling in the aroma of rich earth on the boy’s shoes.
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