Lincoln's Briefs

by Wayne, Michael

  By the time of our final meeting he was weakening rapidly and confined to his bed. His voice cracked frequently, and scarcely rose above a whisper. “Seth, I’m afraid I must impose on your kindness one last time,” he said.

  “Please,” I murmured, my voice cracking itself.

  “I have been privileged to witness in the forests of Northern Ontario ‘a new birth of freedom,’ to borrow a phrase I once used in a very different place and with a very different intended meaning. Someday it will be necessary for Americans to learn the truth about me, about the choices I have made and why. When that time comes, I want you to serve as my spokesman.”

  “But no one will believe me,” I protested.

  “No,” he said. “Perhaps not. But they will believe me. Did you save my legal briefs, as I asked?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “In those briefs I have revealed everything I told you here and much more.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If you arrange the briefs in chronological order and read every sixteenth word …” (“Sixteenth because I was the sixteenth president,” he added, making an effort to smile.) “… then you will find a complete description of how the assassination was staged, with directions indicating where to obtain corroborating evidence. You will also find a full account of my time in Northern Ontario up to the month I ceased practicing law, very candid reflections on the past, present, and future of the United States, and a statement of the insight I have gained into the true nature of human freedom and equality.”

  He began to cough softly. Clement lifted a cup of water to his lips. After a few moments he was able to go on.

  “Concealing a record in the briefs … it all began just as one of my practical jokes. A way to amuse myself. But later, after I moved to Chapleau and came to know the remarkable men and women you have met here, I realized that telling my story would be a way to help promote their cause, which, of course, is my cause as well.”

  “But you said I should come forward when ‘the time comes.’ How will I know when the time has come?”

  “I’m afraid that’s something beyond my powers to predict. But I am not engaging in false flattery when I say that I have complete confidence in your judgment.”

  We spoke no more words. I took his hand in mine and sat beside him for some minutes. Then, when he closed his eyes and Clement came and tapped me on the shoulder, I kissed him on the forehead, straightened his nightdress, and with an immense heaviness of heart left the cabin.

  About the many interesting conversations I had with Clement on our sad journey back to Chapleau, I will not write. I will only say that through those conversations, I learned much about the Negroes who fled to Canada from the United States before the Civil War. It sparked an interest that led me to publish an article on the subject in a professional historical journal.

  I never saw Clement again. Nor did I hear any more of Abraham Lincoln. However, as soon as I got home, I examined the legal briefs. The testimony he wished me to reveal was laid out exactly in the cryptic form he had described. I had the briefs stored in the bank, where they have remained until my death. Now they come into your hands.

  During the Great War, when the revolution broke out in Russia, I thought perhaps that the moment had arrived to reveal what I knew. I even began to prepare an announcement to send to newspapers in New York and Washington. Then, however, came the violent reaction to the Bolsheviks in the United States, and I delayed. Later, during the 1920s, when I had the chance to read some of the writings of the Russian leader Lenin, I came to doubt whether he shared the truly radical vision of human imagination and possibility embraced by my former partner. I continued to wait and watch.

  Now the responsibility I undertook must become yours. The three boxes the lawyers have given you contain the briefs. Store them in a secure place. One day you will see a sign indicating that the time has come to make their existence known. What that sign will be, I am unable to say. Of this much I am certain, however. Its meaning will be unmistakable. It is up to you to ensure that the world learns the message to be found in Abraham Lincoln’s briefs. Do as I ask and you will not only honour the grandfather who loves you dearly; more than that, you will provide a service of untold value to all of mankind.

  XIII

  “And so you see,” said Slinger, after draining the last swallow of whiskey from his bottle, “your arrival in town today must be the sign my grandfather foretold.”

  “It is difficult to think of any other explanation,” Yale Templeton had to admit.

  The two of them talked for some time longer. Slinger described how, after he came into possession of the legal briefs, he took them to his home, a cave deep in the Chapleau Crown Game Preserve, and stored them in a cedar chest he constructed specifically for that purpose. “They’ve been there for over fifty years.” He lifted the bottle of whiskey to his lips, discovered it was empty, and cursed under his breath. Yale Templeton politely pretended not to hear.

  “What I propose,” Slinger went on, “is that you come out to my place to examine them for yourself. Then we can decide what to do next.”

  That made sense, Yale Templeton agreed. And they arranged to meet the following day just before noon in the hotel lobby.

  “How long will the trip to your cave take?” Yale Templeton asked.

  “I can usually manage it in five days,” Slinger replied. “But with you along, I suppose it will be seven, maybe eight.”

  “And will we see any moose?”

  “Bound to. You fancy a moose steak, do you?”

  “No. Not necessarily. But did you happen to see a white moose on your way down here?”

  “White moose? Course not. There’s no such thing.”

  “How remarkable,” Yale Templeton reflected. “Here’s a man who has spent his entire adult life in the bush, yet he’s never heard of the Great White Moose.” Still, he resolved to pack his orange balaclava. Just in case.

  In the morning he rose early and went to the diner for breakfast. There was a different waitress from the night before, but it was the same cook at the grill. “Hey, Curly,” the cook shouted to a man seated right across the counter from him. “Didjya see our Mad Trapper is back in town?”

  The question reverberated across the diner. “That Curly person must be very hard of hearing,” Yale Templeton thought.

  “No!” shouted Curly. “Old Slinger? Back so soon?”

  “Yep.”

  “But those boy scouts only disappeared, what, four, five months ago?”

  “Less.”

  “He couldn’t have finished them off that fast, could he?”

  “I dunno. They were a scrawny bunch.”

  “Maybe so. But there were at least ten of them, weren’t there? And the scout leader. He was carrying a lot of meat on ’im.”

  “I hear he got away. A coupla the boys as well.”

  “That right?”

  The cook cleared his throat and spit into the sink. “So they say.”

  “Hell, Slinger really must be slowing down. No one ever got away back in the old days.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “Who was it before the scouts?”

  “Don’t ya remember? That documentary producer from the National Film Board.”

  “Ah, our latest Robert Flaherty,” Curly said. “More than an hors d’oeuvres or two there. He musta weighed three hundred pounds. How’d Slinger ever lure him out into the woods?”

  “Fed him some story about a white moose, I think.”

  “‘Fed him.’ That’s good. Naw. The white moose, that was those guys up on Wabatongushi. Just last month, eh.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Used car salesmen. From somewhere in the States. C’lumbus, maybe.”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah.”

  “White moose,” said Curly, shaking his head.

  “Yeah, white moose,” repeated the cook. They laughed.

  “Oh, wait. I remember,” said the cook. “S
linger told him he’d found the remains of the Hudson crew.”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah. Showed him an arm bone. Said it belonged to Henry Hudson himself. I reckon it came off that Danish anthropologist he promised to take to the Native burial grounds.”

  “When was that?”

  “A year and a half ago. Maybe two.”

  “I don’t think I heard about him.”

  “Her.”

  “Really? I thought he made it a rule. Only males.”

  “Cut her up for bait, didn’t he. Decided to try a diet of fish for a while. But he put on lots of weight with all that lard, so he had to give it up, eh.”

  “And he’s back in town, you say?”

  “Yep, had dinner here last night.”

  “I wonder who he’s set his sights on this time.”

  “Don’t know. But I feel sorry for the poor bugger, whoever he is.” Then he cleared his throat, spit in the sink, and laughed again. Curly laughed again, too.

  XIV

  At just before noon, when Slinger the Trapper arrived for their scheduled meeting in the hotel lobby, Yale Templeton was seated twenty kilometres away, on a bench at the bus depot in Wawa. He was wearing his orange balaclava, but not because he expected to see the Great White Moose.

  Three hours later, by the time Slinger decided there was no sense in waiting around any longer, Yale Templeton had made his way as far as the bus depot in Sault Ste. Marie. And that night, just as Slinger struck a match to start a campfire in the woods outside Hawk Junction, Yale Templeton stepped into his apartment in Rosedale, turned on the lights, and finally removed his balaclava.

  And there matters might have ended had it not been for that unflagging curiosity that had placed Yale Templeton inexorably on the path to a career in history, curiosity that in someone with more than an iron filing’s width of personal magnetism would have been taken as a virtue. Over the Christmas break, by which time he had more or less stopped trembling, the thought crossed his mind that maybe, just maybe, Curly and the cook had been mistaken about the culinary preferences of the trapper. Maybe the incredible story Slinger had told him was true. Maybe Abraham Lincoln did come to Canada, and maybe he did take on the identity of a lawyer named Lincoln Abrahams.

  And so, drawing on his training as a historian, he went to the university library to do some research. He began with a microfilm copy of the enumerators’ schedules for the Canadian census of 1871. An index exists for household heads, but he found no listing for anyone with the last name Abrahams in the Algoma District. “He could have been living with someone else,” he reasoned. And so he decided to look through the original schedules for himself. He did a thorough job—he always did a thorough job—but turned up nothing.

  Still, it often happens that research leads historians down cul-de-sacs. Not the least bit discouraged, he turned to the census schedules for 1881. No index had yet been produced, so he went directly to the records for the town of Thessalon. There, to his satisfaction, he found an entry for a lawyer named L. Abrahams. The information provided was scant. L. Abrahams was listed as a male, seventy years old, but the boxes for “married” or “widowed,” “country or province of birth,” “place of birth of father,” and “place of birth of mother” were all left blank.

  And so he continued on, with heightened expectation, to the census of 1891. He found L. Abrahams again, in Chapleau, although this time with the name written in full as “Lincoln Abrahams.” Yale Templeton smiled. Lincoln Abraham’s age was recorded as eighty-two. Yale Templeton smiled again. Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809. The columns left blank in the 1881 schedules were now filled in. Place of birth: Kentucky. Place of birth of father: Virginia. Place of birth of mother: Also Virginia. Widower. (As Yale Templeton was well aware, Mary Todd had died July 16, 1882.) Potentially most revealing of all—or was it, perhaps, just a slip of the pen by the enumerator?—in the column for sex was written an “F” meaning female.

  There was no record of Lincoln Abrahams in the census of 1901, but then, that was to be expected. According to the letter left by Slinger’s grandfather, he must have died during the first administration of William McKinley.

  Although that was all Yale Templeton was able to uncover in the university library, he did learn that several issues of a short-lived Chapleau newspaper from the 1880s had found their way to the National Archives in Ottawa. He placed an order for a microfilm copy through interlibrary loan. When it arrived a month later, he discovered two additional clues. The first was a riddle, included in a humour column that ran weekly in the paper:

  Question: How long should a bat’s legs be?

  Answer: Just long enough to reach the ceiling.

  The joke, the columnist noted, had been submitted by the well-known lawyer Lincoln Abrahams. The second clue was a photograph of the Chapleau Players, an amateur theatrical society, in their costumes for a production of Macbeth. There in the back row, in a wig and dress (russet flecked with gold, according to the caption), looking just a little bit like Ellen Terry, stood Lincoln Abrahams as Lady Macbeth. An accompanying story noted that he had been “wholeheartedly convincing in both his coldly calculating ambition and descent into madness.”

  A trip to the Archives of Ontario on Grenville Street in downtown Toronto provided the final piece of evidence. While rummaging through some boxes containing miscellaneous private papers and documents from the Algoma District, Yale Templeton came across a diary kept by the wife of a Presbyterian minister in Chapleau during the 1890s. There were two entries of interest:

  Friday, September 16, 1892 — When John was passing Fitzgerald’s Boarding House last night, he noticed several boys standing on tiptoes at one of the windows around back. He went to run them off, then happened to glance in the window himself. He saw perhaps twenty people gathered together in a sitting room. All the women were wearing men’s clothing, and the men were in dresses. Among those present, in a rose-coloured gown, was Lincoln Abrahams, the elderly lawyer and one of our most respected citizens. He often appears as a woman in Shakespearian productions, but this was a meeting of some sort, not a rehearsal for a play. John plans to write to the synod for guidance.

  Saturday, October 14, 1893 — Lincoln Abrahams has recently left Chapleau with a Negro man and some others. Beatrice says they have gone to live in the wilderness.

  Yale Templeton devoted several more months to research, but was unable to turn up anything else. Still, he had found enough to convince him that the story Slinger had told him was true. The question he faced now was, what to do next? It would never have occurred to him to take his conclusions to the press. But he knew that the evidence he had collected was too thin to pass the approval of referees at a scholarly journal. What he really needed was the legal briefs. But how would he ever find Slinger again? And if he did find him, what about the conversation he had overheard at the diner between Curly and the cook?

  And so he hesitated. Until that day when he was lecturing to his class on the Civil War and, in response to the question Joel asked, revealed that Lincoln had faked his own assassination. After which, as we have seen, the story found its way into the National Enquirer, and events quickly spiralled out of his control.

  She was drenched in a dress of blue satin.

  XV

  She was drenched in a dress of blue satin. Think Marilyn Monroe only better looking. As she glided across the floor of the Faculty Club, her body swayed to some erotic rhythm that only she could hear. All eyes were on her. All eyes but two.

  Yale Templeton was sitting at the bar, staring into his cup of tea. He had been there for five days now, ever since Felicia Butterworth had summoned him to her office. He had explained everything: his search for the Great White Moose, his meeting with Slinger the Trapper, the letter by Slinger’s grandfather, Lincoln Abrahams, the little community in the wilderness, his own research at the archives. She had listened to it all impatiently. And then, in tones that sent the same kind of chill down his back he felt when listen
ing to Curly and the cook, she informed him that his suspension would continue indefinitely, and that if he ever—EVER!!—repeated to another person what he had just told her, she would see to it that he never obtained another university position anywhere. “Except perhaps as a subject for a vivisection experiment!”

  He had been devastated, only managing to cheer himself up with the thought that at least now he could spend all his days in the library. But the story of his lecture and suspension had attracted so much attention that he was hunted down in the stacks by journalists and besieged with questions Felicia Butterworth had forbidden him to answer. And so he had retreated to the restricted privacy of the Faculty Club for refuge. Lost in his thoughts, he did not hear the woman in blue sit down next to him and purr in tones as sultry as her dress, “Hi, big boy.”

  When she got no response she lifted her hand to his shoulder and repeated the phrase. Startled, he glanced at her, then looked around. At five feet, five-and-three-quarters inches and 137 pounds, he had reason to assume she was speaking to someone else.

  “Hey,” she persisted, giving his shoulder a playful squeeze. “What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?”

  There could be little doubt. She was speaking to him. As wary as he always was around women, it was in his nature to be polite. “Well,” he answered, “first you have to fill in one of the bar chits. You get them from Reg over there,” and he gestured toward the bartender, who was watching them with incredulity as he wiped a glass at the end of the counter. “Make sure you tell him it’s for a beverage. There are different chits for food. Now you write in your name and faculty number on top here”—he showed her his own chit—“and just below, I always put in the name of my department, just in case someone …” Then he suddenly stopped and peered intently into her face. “Say,” he said, “are you that new astrophysicist I read about in the faculty newsletter? I have to say, we chaps over in history were quite surprised when Physics finally agreed to hire a woman.”