Final Resting Place

by Jonathan F. Putnam

  “We should be off this island at once,” said Prickett. “Best if no one sees us gathered here, even with this happy outcome. Why don’t you come with us, Truett? You and Douglas can discuss the terms of your posting to Oregon.” Turning to Lincoln, he added, “Once we four have rowed across, I’ll come back to pick up you and Speed.”

  “Very well,” said Lincoln, as Truett and Douglas followed Prickett across the field to where the rowboat was tied up.

  I stared at Preacher Crews, who had remained at the far end of the field during the entire proceeding. I expected him to make a move toward Lincoln, or at least to say something. Instead, he headed over to join the other three at the rowboat.

  “Maybe it’s not him,” I said under my breath.

  “Who’s not who?” asked Lincoln, standing next to me now.

  “Preacher Crews, who turns out to be your long-lost McNamar. For a moment, I thought he meant to do violence to you.”

  “To me? Whatever for?” The other four men had just disappeared through the willow trees at the edge of the river.

  “I’d made him for Salem’s Ghost.”

  Lincoln opened his mouth to respond but closed it and stood silently for a minute, his brows clenched in concentration and his jaw muscles pulsating. Then he said, “I don’t think so. McNamar and I were on friendly enough terms the last time we parted.”

  “He left New Salem before you?”

  Lincoln nodded. “He’d brought his family from back East, but he didn’t want to stay around once he learned Ann was gone. Can’t say I blame him.” It occurred to me that Lincoln, too, had been chased from New Salem by the lingering memory of the departed Ann Rutledge. “So one day he packed up his family and was gone again.”

  “Had he shown any interest in the ministry during the time you knew him?”

  “None. And I doubt he has a true interest today. But then I suspect it’s like that for many of these traveling preachers. They show up from nowhere and set up shop and then, once they’ve converted their share—and been rewarded handsomely by the grateful converts for illuminating the supposed path to heaven—they disappear to nowhere. I don’t think anyone’s got the time to check their bona fides, to say nothing of the inclination. When eternal salvation is on offer, it makes people forget themselves.

  “McNamar always had a talent for making people believe whatever he said. Confidence men and traveling preachers sing from nearby pews—at least they do in my book.”

  I looked up and saw the sun was high in the sky. “I wonder what’s taking Prickett so long. He should have been back with the boat by now.” I turned to face Lincoln. “And what’s funny about Oregon? You and Douglas seemed to be sharing a laugh about something back as you reached your compromise.”

  “Do you know who owns the Oregon Country?” he asked.

  “It’s shared between us and Great Britain, right?”

  “It’s disputed between us and Great Britain. Even the name is disputed. They call it the Columbia District. Do you suppose our former overlords permit the United States Post Office Department to operate in territory they still claim for themselves?”

  “You mean…”

  “Douglas’s suggestion was a boodle. Douglas and Stuart can both agree to appoint Truett to oversee the Department’s operations in Oregon, but when he gets there he’ll discover he’s in charge of precisely nothing. Course, it’s about a nine-month journey, even with the best conditions. With the snows coming to the Rockies before long, I imagine he won’t leave for the Pacific Coast until next spring, and he couldn’t possibly get back to confront Douglas until two or three years after that. Or, better still, Truett’ll decide to stay in the Far West and make a go of things. I’ve no doubt there are opportunities to get rich out there—just not the ones Douglas sold him on.”

  I gave a shout of laughter and Lincoln grinned. It was nice to be on Douglas’s side of the joke for once.

  We heard the clunk of the wooden rowboat arriving back at the landing.

  “At last,” I said, taking a few steps toward the shore and calling out, “What took you so long, Prickett?”

  A few seconds later, John McNamar walked through the gap in the willow trees. He held a dueling pistol in each hand.

  CHAPTER 38

  “Do not take a single step, either of you,” said McNamar in his booming voice, as if he were commanding Moses at Sinai. “I convinced Prickett to give me the powder and balls for safekeeping, along with the pistols themselves. I assure you, these are very much loaded and primed.”

  We were about forty feet away, too far to make a run at him without testing his accuracy. Instead, I cupped my hands to my mouth and called out toward the shoreline: “Prickett? Douglas? Truett?”

  There was no reply.

  “Come back to the island!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “We need help!”

  Silence.

  McNamar smiled. “Prickett was in a hurry to get back to town, as were Douglas and Truett—the new best friends—so I told them to go ahead and I’d take care of the two of you. And I waited to make sure they were far clear before rowing back across the river.”

  “I’m surprised to see you back in Sangamon County, John,” said Lincoln. His facial muscles were relaxed, as if he’d been overtaken by a sudden calm.

  “You only see what matters to you, Lincoln.” McNamar spat onto the ground. “I’ve never mattered to you. Besides, I never left.”

  “But I saw you ride off with your family.”

  “We rode off all right, but I never left. My heart never did. It was always with Ann. It will always be with Ann. And my head never left, either. It’s always been fixed on the man who destroyed my life.”

  He crouched into a shooting stance and aimed one of his pistols directly at Lincoln. Lincoln flinched and I threw myself in front of him and started to pull him to the ground. But then McNamar loosed a vicious laugh and let the pistol dangle from his hand once again.

  “There was nothing more I could have done for her,” said Lincoln, shaking loose of me. There was no fear in his voice but rather a kind of softness.

  “You killed her,” said McNamar. “I know you did. Her brother told me so. He told me you visited her bedside when the doctor had prescribed absolute quietude. You didn’t care about what was best for her, Lincoln. You only cared for yourself.”

  “That’s not true,” said Lincoln. “I cared for her. I loved—”

  “Don’t say it!” screamed McNamar, raising his pistol again. “Or I’ll shoot you right now.”

  “I cared for her,” Lincoln repeated, more quietly now. “I called to look in on her. And it’s a good thing I did, because she was in the middle of a seizure when I arrived, and I was able to keep her from harming herself.”

  “John Rutledge told me about how your visit caused Ann to have her seizure,” replied McNamar. “He told me everything. From that moment, I knew I’d have my revenge someday. I just didn’t expect it to come this way.”

  “Why did you kill Early?” I asked. We needed to play for more time.

  “I had a good thing going at the land office, using false names and surveys to keep on selling the same property, and Early was going to ruin it. When I found Truett to put in his place, I thought I had a solution. I knew I could control Truett. Douglas was all but guaranteed to win and I did everything I could to help him. But then Early kept digging into the records and asking around and I realized I couldn’t wait for the election. I needed to make sure there was a new registrar right away. Or, at least, to do away with the old one. So I attended that party, in disguise, and when the fireworks ended I had my shot. And I took it.”

  “What did that have to do with Lincoln?”

  “It had everything to do with Lincoln. Early was Lincoln’s man. My land office scheme used his father’s signatures on the surveys—I’d always particularly liked that touch. And when Lincoln was appointed to represent Truett, I saw in the papers that he was looking into the land office dealings as
a possible explanation for Early’s death.” McNamar glared at Lincoln again. “You ruined my life once. I wasn’t about to let you do it again.”

  “John, I—”

  “I’ve never forgotten the way you moped around New Salem after Ann’s death. It was pathetic. You were indulging in a grief you weren’t entitled to.”

  Lincoln flushed.

  “But the memory of it gave me an idea. I know you’re weak, Lincoln. I know you have a weak mind. So I decided to prey on that mind. I wanted you to feel the discomfort of being watched by loathing eyes. And to suffer public humiliation, the way I’d questioned my sanity and been humiliated when I returned to New Salem to discover Ann wasn’t mine anymore and that she was gone.

  “I know all about you, Lincoln. And I wanted to make sure you knew you were being watched by someone who knew all about you. Someone who knew everything.”

  “And you followed us when Lincoln and I went for an evening stroll with Miss Margaret Owens,” I said. “And fired a shot over our heads. And dropped one of Ann Rutledge’s gloves in the process.”

  “Margaret!” cried Lincoln, and he clutched at his heart.

  McNamar smirked. “Ann gave me those gloves when I rode off to New York to get my family. They were a token to remember her by, she said. I’ve done it. I’ve never forgotten her. But you’re wrong, Lincoln, if you think I was responsible for what happened to Miss Owens. You were responsible for her fate, with what you did to Ann. I was only the agent of her death.”

  “You bastard!” Lincoln’s face was contorted by a mixture of grief and rage.

  “Once I started tormenting him,” McNamar said, speaking to me, “I realized how thrilling revenge could be. And when I saw him squiring his Miss Owens around town, it hit me in an instant. He’d taken my love from me. I would take his from him. It’s just like Lincoln said here on the field earlier—mutual satisfaction.”

  “How did you kill her?” asked Lincoln, his face white, through clenched teeth.

  “The same way you killed Ann. I sat at her bedside and watched her squirm. Watched her whole body shake and convulse until the very life was wrung out of her. Only I enjoyed it. Thoroughly.

  “It was much easier than I thought. I knew from the tent meeting she hadn’t been feeling well. So I slipped into the apothecary shop when Owens headed out on a call, took a few grains of strychnine, and went up to her room. She was coming in and out of sleep. I put the grains in the mixture her brother had made and told her to drink up. I told her it was God’s will. As it was.”

  Lincoln fell to one knee, sobbing. I bent down, my arms around his shoulders, and tried to comfort him. McNamar was looking on with a gleeful expression.

  As Lincoln shook with sorrow beneath my touch, I considered the situation. Each of McNamar’s pistols would be loaded with a single ball. He’d boasted about being a good shot, and there was no reason to doubt him. Two balls and the two of us, alone in the middle of an isolated island. Where no one else knew we were; we’d made sure of that ourselves. There were no good options.

  At length, Lincoln stood and carefully straightened the stovepipe hat on his head. His face was dry and his countenance clear, as if he’d managed to reach some internal resolution from the depths of his grief.

  “Good speed, Speed,” he whispered.

  And he started walking directly toward McNamar. He had both hands raised in the air, defenseless.

  Lincoln had taken two or three steps forward when McNamar saw him coming and yelled out, “Stop! Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  “I want you to shoot,” said Lincoln, continuing his steady advance. He was thirty-five feet from McNamar, then thirty, then twenty-five. “I want you to rescue me from this woeful existence. I didn’t have the courage to do it myself, two weeks ago, when I found out about Miss Owens. But I don’t need courage now. I don’t need anything. Because I have you.

  “You’ll get your revenge, John. And I’ll get my peace.”

  I wanted to shout out for Lincoln to stop. To race forward and tackle him before he could get too close to McNamar, before he forced McNamar to use his weapon. Or to dive in front of Lincoln and take the bullet myself. But my shout was frozen in my throat and my feet were glued to the ground.

  Lincoln kept up his slow advance. Fifteen feet. Twelve. McNamar had dropped one of his pistols and held the other with both hands. I saw that they were shaking slightly. He was crouched into a shooting position.

  Ten feet separated the two men from their destiny. Nine. Eight.

  “Stop!” screamed a voice.

  At first I thought I’d managed to speak, but as both Lincoln and McNamar turned I realized the command had come from the side of the field, from the direction of the boat landing. John Johnston was striding forward. He was dripping wet, and he held a long-barreled hunting rifle against his shoulder.

  A belated sign of recognition flashed across McNamar’s face. His finger reached for the trigger.

  There was a giant explosion of gunpowder.

  CHAPTER 39

  On the middle weekend of September, we engaged a large carriage pulled by a double team. I drove from atop the high box, while Lincoln, Martha, Thomas Lincoln, and John Johnston sat in back, facing each other two by two. The package was wrapped in brown paper and resting against the side of the carriage compartment next to Lincoln. He had not let it out of his possession since it had been delivered the previous day. The oppressively hot summer had finally broken, and a tart crispness in the air portended the coming arrival of fall.

  “Everyone keeps telling me you saved my Abraham, Missy,” Thomas Lincoln was saying to Martha, “but I don’t understand how it could be.”

  “John did it,” she replied, blushing.

  “But you gave me the chance,” said Johnston. “And you, too, Abe.” He punched Lincoln good-naturedly in the shoulder. For once Lincoln did not recoil or frown but rather reached out and returned a friendly slap on Johnston’s knee.

  “I don’t understand,” repeated Thomas Lincoln. Looking up at me, he called, “I don’t understand these young folks, Mr. Fry Speed. Maybe you do, but I don’t.”

  “Tell Mr. Lincoln the story, Martha,” I directed. I knew she’d already done so on several occasions, but there was no harm in letting her repeat it.

  “When I woke up that Sunday morning,” said Martha with a smile, for I knew she was justly proud of her role in the affair, “I found a note slipped under my door. Written by Mr. Douglas.”

  “That goddamned midget!” roared Thomas Lincoln. “I knew he’d cause no end of trouble for my Abraham. What’d the note say, Missy?”

  “Yeah, what did it say?” I called down from the high box. I’d never gotten a full answer from Martha on this question.

  Martha blushed again. “The only part that’s relevant to my story, Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “is that it ended by Mr. Douglas saying ‘good-bye’ to me. I didn’t know what he meant at first, but it alarmed me, enough that I ran over to the store to ask Joshua. And when I got there and saw he and Abraham were gone from their bed already, well, suddenly I knew exactly what he meant.

  “I went back out on the street and I was frantic, because I didn’t know how I was going to stop them. How I was going to save his life, because I knew Mr. Douglas’s life was very much in danger. I’d just about decided I’d have to wake up the sheriff and send him, even though I knew that might cause trouble for Stephen, as well as Joshua and Abraham and the others.”

  “She was willing to sacrifice our well-being, Lincoln, just like that,” I called down. “All for the sake of her Little Giant.”

  Lincoln chortled, but Martha said, seriously, “I certainly was. I didn’t want anyone getting shot at. Everything else could get worked out, I figured. But not gunshot wounds. So, I was striding back and forth next to the capitol walls, trying to figure whether there was any alternative to going to get Humble, when I bumped into John.”

  Thomas Lincoln squinted at his stepson through his rheumy eyes. “Wha
t was you doing out at the early hour, Johnnie?”

  “Don’t you remember, Papa?” said Johnston. “You sent me to scavenge up some breakfast.”

  “And it’s a good thing you did, Mr. Lincoln,” said Martha. “John saw the look on my face and asked me what was wrong, and I told him what was happening and where I thought he could find Abraham and Stephen and the rest.”

  “Now you’re just part of ‘the rest,’ Speed,” said Lincoln, reaching up and poking me in the back.

  “I used to be her favorite brother,” I said with a sigh.

  Martha kicked Lincoln in the shin. “Stop making trouble! That’s my part of the story. The rest is John’s.”

  “So I grabbed my hunting rifle,” said Johnston, turning to his stepfather, “from the place we’d stashed it in the stables when we first got to town. And I, er, borrowed a horse from the stables. Ain’t nobody around to ask, not at that time of morning. And I rode as fast as I could towards where Miss Martha directed me. And when I got to the shoreline, there was no boat, and then I saw a rowboat tied up across the way, on the edge of the island.

  “I might have left it at that and turned ’round to come back home, but Miss Martha’d been so insistent I get over to the island. I tested the waters and realized they was low enough, from being late summer, that I could walk all the way across the river to the island if I kept my rifle held up above my head. Which is what I did.”

  “Most bravely,” said Abraham, and Johnston gave him a heartfelt smile.

  “And when I got ashore,” continued Johnston, “I came into a field and saw a man holding a pistol on Abraham in close range. About to shoot. There wasn’t no time to think. All I could do was aim and pull. That was my brother he was threatening.”

  Thomas Lincoln grinned and reached out both arms, patting Johnston’s knee with one hand and Abraham’s with the other. Neither man fled from his father’s touch.

  “It’s just like I always told you boys,” said the elder Lincoln, “when you was growing up. Ain’t nothing stronger than family.”