A Friend of Mr. Lincoln Read Online Free PDF Page B

notations and weary fragments of imagery, written out dutifully at the end of each draining day, days taken up with pointless marching and counter-marching, with desultory training and drilling, with wrestling matches and horse races and card games with the army’s Potawatomi allies. But this fraying notebook would still be the cornerstone of his career. Other men had joined the militia because they knew they would not be taken seriously in any future Illinois enterprise if they had stayed out of the war. As a literary man, or someone trying to be one, Cage felt the same. He had joined this fight purposefully, with an eye for the advantage it would give him, for the ballast it would set in his character. There were miscreants and idlers in the militia, but they were outnumbered by men with a goal in mind, a standard to live up to. Cage had come to Illinois more or less by accident, but had sensed early on that it was a place where things were brewing, a place with more than its share of serious people with hungry dreams. Bob Zanger had been one of them. He had talked to Cage of reading the law and being admitted to the bar, of marrying and fathering children and gaining some lucrative public office like state auditor, perhaps one day representing Illinois in the United States Congress. He had encouraged Cage in his own dream of poetic achievement. The world needed literary men, the former schoolteacher assured him, in proportion to its doctors and politicians and pork packers and mechanics. And a poet in war, if he survived, would have even more at account, even more to draw on. Bob had been right, though Cage had not truly understood how right until he had seen Bob’s butchered body. Now at last there was something to write about, something horrible and vivid. But when he tried to set down his memories of the last few days, his mind kept slipping off the path, wandering into a thicket of dreams.
    The face of the warrior who had been riding beside him, trying to kill him, flashed into his mind again and startled him back into something like normal consciousness. He could smell burning meat and hair from the still-smoldering pyre fifty yards from camp where the dead horses had been dragged and burned earlier in the afternoon. It was almost dark now. The men were at their fires, bacon frying in their skillets, dough coiled around their ramrods to bake in the flames. All over the camp men were pounding their parched coffee beans with their hatchets, creating a rhythmic sound like the percussive calling of a flock of birds.
    Another sound: a sudden burst of laughter, like that of an audience at a play. It shook Cage out of his half-dreaming state and woke the camp out of its evening stillness. He turned to the sound of the laughter and saw a growing circle of volunteers around a campfire twenty yards deeper into the grove. Other men were streaming in that direction.
    Cage put up his things and followed them. The source of the laughter turned out to be his new friend Lincoln, who was sitting on a rock and tossing chips of wood into the fire. He was talking about a visit he and some of the men in the company had made to the whorehouses of Galena, and how those Magdalene establishments reminded him of a story. It turned out to be a story of such byzantine length and brazen filthiness—about a widow woman who kept a trained eel in a rainwater barrel—that by the end of it Cage and the other listeners were almost as breathless from shock as they were from laughter.
    No one was laughing as hard as Stuart, who no doubt had heard the story many times but who was bent over and wheezing just the same.
    Lincoln looked up and happened to catch sight of Cage. He gave him a wink as if the two of them had not just met but were old comrades; then he gazed down into his cup and picked a bug out of his soup. The laughter around him had only just then started to die down.
    “You know,” Lincoln said, as if to himself, “this little animalcule