A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan Page A

was occupied by a new family, its shutters painted a garish new color. His father’s friends might have helped set him up, but most of them, he now understood, were his creditors, and he was too ashamed to apply to them. He found a job in a hat maker’s shop and saved enough money to repay the surprised banker who had financed his passage back to the States, and then he drifted west, romantically unmoored, vaguely intending to work his way to Spanish California and the Sandwich Islands and live and write in obscurity so that his greatness as a poet could be discovered after his death. His funds ran out in Gallipolis, Ohio, where he took a job in a shipping warehouse, staying for a year until he was offered work as a deckhand on a steamboat that was leaving from Cincinnati with the intention of unloading its cargo in Springfield and proving the navigability of the Sangamon River.
    “Do you mean to say you were on the
Talisman
?” Lincoln asked. “Why, there I was out in front of you, clearing your way with an axe!”
    He told Cage how he had been one of the New Salem youths dispatched to cut through the snags and drifts and overhanging tree limbs, and to dismantle the mill dam that the vessel had not been able to float over when, having finally given up on reaching Springfield, it had retreated back to the expansive waters of the Illinois.
    “I probably saw you,” Cage said. “But I didn’t notice much. The river was so narrow and there was so much timber on the banks it was like trying to sail through a canebrake. It took all our attention to make sure the pilot’s house didn’t get scraped off.”
    “Yes, it turns out that the Sangamon is a fine navigable river for an Indian canoe,” Lincoln said.
    Cage asked Lincoln about his own history and Lincoln quoted poetry in response just as he had, saying that he guessed Thomas Gray had it about right when he wrote that the annals of the poor were short and simple.
    His own annals: restless father, moving his family from one hard-luck situation to the next, from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois. Mother dead of the milk-sick, sister dead giving birth. A kind stepmother, a few months in a blab school here and there, but mostly whatever he knew besides planting and rail-splitting and farmwork he had taught himself. His father had given him no encouragement when it came to reading or anything else and it wouldn’t much bother him if he never saw the man again. He said he’d been all the way to New Orleans twice on a flatboat. He’d seen a slave auction there and was troubled at heart about it still. He’d run for the General Assembly once before and lost. He had a store in New Salem for a time but it had failed, miserably so.
    “That’s how I acquired my national debt. All the money I make from postmaster work and surveying and serving in the legislature goes to paying it off.”
    “Probably not all of it if you’re buying land along that canal.”
    “Well, you’ve got to rise to an opportunity every now and then, even if it’s discommodious to do so.”
    They arrived in New Salem before dark. Cage had last seen the place from the deck of the
Talisman
while they had been trying to get the broad side-wheeler over the mill dam. That had been during a cold winter and the branches overhanging the river were sheathed in ice, which sometimes fell loose and crashed on the deck, once almost breaking the captain’s wife’s foot. The town had not impressed him then and it did not now—just another river village of maybe thirty houses, most of them made of logs, strung along a main street above the banks of the narrow Sangamon. The trees on its outskirts were strangely naked, the bark stripped off by the village women to make dye. The failure of the
Talisman
to open up the river had hurt Springfield, but it had probably doomed places like New Salem, especially if they ended up being bypassed by the railroads and canals that Lincoln and his colleagues in the statehouse in