Chapter 5: The Farewell

Scene 1

The trunk at the head of the stairs had been corded twice and still did not sit level. Lincoln knelt beside it, worked the cord loose with his fingernails, and retied the knot, pulling it taut enough that the hemp bit into his palms. The brass fitting still caught the lamplight at a wrong angle. He left it. The hallway smelled of cedar shavings and rooms stripped of half their furnishings — a house remembering its own proportions and finding them strange.

He carried the carpetbag into the bedroom and set it on the bare mattress ticking. Mary stood at the window with her back to him, her wrapper drawn close at the shoulders, looking out at the street below where nothing moved in the February dark. From the next room came Willie's breathing through the plaster, slow and regular. It was not yet seven.

'The smaller trunk is not labelled,' she said, without turning. 'I told Harriet to label it and she did not.'

'I will see to it.'

'You will not.' She turned then. Her hair was not yet dressed, her face in the lamplight unguarded — all the careful arrangements dissolved. She had been crying, or near enough. 'You will say you will see to it and then you will stand in the hallway with that expression and Nicolay will arrive and the trunk will go onto the car unlabelled and we will not find our things until Cincinnati.'

Lincoln opened the carpetbag and pressed his hand flat against its contents. Shirts, the shaving kit, the small Testament Mary had placed there the evening before without comment. He pressed down until he felt the spine of the book against the heel of his palm.

'I will label the trunk.' He drew the ink pencil from his coat pocket and held it up between two fingers so she could see it. 'Before Nicolay arrives. Before I leave this house.'

She looked at the pencil. Something shifted behind her eyes — not softening, exactly, but a recalculation.

'Tad's coat —' she began.

From the next room, Tad cried out — sharp, brief, a child startled by his own dream. Lincoln turned toward the wall. The sound rose and diminished, the boy muttering himself back into sleep. A moment's quiet. Then Willie's breathing resumed its slow measure.

He turned back.

Mary had not moved. Her hands were folded at her waist. The complaint about the coat died where it had begun.

'Abraham.'

'Do you believe,' she said, 'that we will ever come back to this house.'

He set the bag on the floor. He crossed to her and took both her hands in his — cold at the fingers, cold at the wrists — and felt her grip tighten by degrees until she was holding him as fiercely as he was holding her.

'I do not know.'

Her breath caught, once, and steadied.

'The task before me is one I cannot refuse. You know that. I have known it since November and I believe you have known it longer.' He paused. The lamp on the dresser threw their shadows against the bare wall, elongated and still. 'If I do not go, there will be no one between the secessionists and the dissolution of everything this government was made to protect. No one. That is not vanity — it is arithmetic. I need you to help me bear it. Not to make it lighter. Only to bear it alongside me.'

She withdrew one hand and pressed her knuckles against her mouth. Then she lowered the hand and straightened.

'The trunk at the head of the stairs wants a label.'

'Yes.'

He took the ink pencil to the hallway, crouched beside the trunk, and wrote A. Lincoln — Executive Mansion, Washington City on the tag in his angular hand. The letters were uneven; the cord pressed grooves into the pasteboard. He tied the tag through the brass fitting and rose, and as he did his fingers trailed along the doorframe — the grain rough where the paint had thinned, smooth where years of her hand had worn it — and below in the street a horse went by at a walk, its iron shoes distinct and unhurried on the frozen mud.

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The Chenery House lobby had the quality of a courtroom gallery in the minutes before the judge enters — men pressed together who would not ordinarily share a room, the air thickened by their competing purposes and the sharp smell of wet overcoats steaming near the stove. Lincoln came through the door at half past seven and the noise swelled, then fractured into a dozen separate approaches.

Lamon was already moving, broad-shouldered and watchful, steering the worst of the crowd into a horseshoe around Lincoln rather than a press. Lincoln turned his stovepipe hat in his hands, settled it back onto his head, and stepped forward into the current — a congressman from Tazewell County who needed a word about the collectorship, a minister from the Second Presbyterian who offered a blessing Lincoln accepted with a bow, two women who pressed forward to touch his coat sleeve as though he were already a figure cast in bronze.

He shook hands. He said the names he knew and invented warm generalities for those he did not. Nicolay moved at the edge of the room with a leather satchel, managing documents that would not be examined until the train was rolling.

Near the staircase, where the wallpaper had begun to separate at the seam, a man in a grey coat was writing in a small notebook. The Chicago Tribune, Lincoln judged, or possibly the Herald.

The question, when it came, was not subtle.

'Mr. Lincoln.' The voice cut across the room with the practised projection of a man accustomed to being ignored. 'Will you reinforce the Southern forts once you take your office?'

The conversations nearest Lincoln ceased, and the cessation spread outward like a stone dropped in still water. The correspondent had positioned himself where Lincoln could not pretend not to hear. If Lincoln answered plainly — yes — the telegraph would carry the word to Montgomery before nightfall, and every border-state Unionist who had staked his reputation on the new President's moderation would find the ground cut from beneath him. If he answered no, he would surrender the constitutional position before he had taken the oath. Either answer was a weapon placed in his enemies' hands.

Lincoln looked at the man. Not at his notebook. At the man.

'Well, now,' Lincoln began, and the room heard him because he had spent thirty years making himself heard in courthouses where the acoustics were worse. 'That puts me in mind of a fellow I knew down in Sangamon County — farmer by trade, though he was not what you would call an industrious one. A neighbour came by one morning and found him sitting on his porch, and the neighbour said, "I hear you have been offered a position on the county road commission." And the farmer said, "That is so." And the neighbour said, "And do you intend to accept it?" And the farmer studied on this for a considerable while, and finally he said, "I intend to find out what it pays before I decide what I intend."'

The laughter assembled itself in stages — a sound from the back first, then the men closest who had caught the pivot before the others, and then the room gave way to it. The correspondent wrote something in his notebook without looking up.

Lincoln was already moving. He had not waited for the laughter to finish — he was through the horseshoe, one hand briefly on the Tazewell congressman's shoulder, a word exchanged with the minister, Lamon materialising ahead of him and opening a channel toward the street door. Behind him, the lobby reassembled itself into the noise of men who had witnessed nothing consequential and would report accordingly — except for the correspondent near the staircase, who was still writing, and who would report exactly what had happened: that the President-elect had been asked a direct question about the disposition of federal garrisons in a seceded republic and had replied with a story about a lazy farmer.

Lincoln pushed open the street door and the February cold struck his face, sharp and tasting of coal smoke.

The train was waiting.

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Scene 3

A thousand people stood in the rain.

Lincoln saw them from the edge of the depot platform and stopped walking. Lamon nearly collided with his back. The crowd pressed against the wooden fencing and spilled toward the freight house, their breath rising in separate clouds that merged overhead into a common vapour, and the sound they made was not cheering but a low, sustained murmur — the sound of a congregation before the service begins, expectant and afraid.

The locomotive stood at the head of the track, its boiler ticking with heat, coal smoke rolling low across the platform in the drizzle. Lincoln felt the warmth of it against his left side. From his right came the raw smell of wet wool and cold skin.

He was privately pleased by the numbers — more than he would have admitted to Nicolay, more perhaps than he would have admitted to himself under honest scrutiny. He had seen the crowd that gathered when Douglas passed through Springfield the previous autumn and had counted those faces with the careful, involuntary arithmetic of a man who cannot help measuring himself against his rivals. The present assembly was larger. Considerably larger. He noted the fact, filed it in some interior recess where small satisfactions are stored against harder days, and put his attention where it was required — on the faces before him, on what he owed them, on the words he had not yet found.

Nicolay stood at the platform's edge, notebook open, pencil ready.

Lincoln removed his hat.

He did not decide to. His right hand rose and took the hat from his head and held it against his chest, and the drizzle began at once to wet his hair, and he did not replace it.

The murmur died.

Children still moved at the edges. Somewhere a horse shifted against its traces. But the thousand faces before him went still, and in that stillness Lincoln understood that the gesture had committed him to something — that to bare one's head in the rain before a crowd is to make a promise the words must now honour.

He looked at them. He had known many of these faces for twenty-four years. A man near the front had argued a case against him in Tazewell County in 1847, and had argued it well, and Lincoln had told him so afterward. A woman in a grey bonnet had brought her husband's will to the office on Fifth Street the spring before last, and had wept without apology, and Lincoln had drafted the document with care and charged her nothing. He did not know the names of nine in ten. What he knew, looking at them now, was that he had moved through their streets and eaten at their tables and pleaded before their juries and borrowed their umbrellas, and that the life he had made here was as real and rooted a thing as he had ever possessed — and that if he failed in what lay ahead, these people would pay for his failure in blood and treasure and the destruction of the republic they had entrusted to him.

He gripped the brim of the hat until the knuckles of his right hand whitened. Then he began to speak.

He told them he did not know how soon he should see them again. He told them they had given him all that he had and all that he was. He told them the task before him was greater than had rested upon any man since the time of Washington — and he heard himself say it, felt the full weight of the claim settle across his shoulders, and did not retract it, because it was the truth as he understood it, and he had not come to this platform to manage the truth.

The cold rain found the gap between his collar and his neck and ran down between his shoulder blades.

I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return.

The silence came down like a hand laid flat upon the crowd. He saw it move through them — a slight shift, a settling, faces going still in a way that faces do not go still when they are merely listening. A woman in the second row pressed her hand over her mouth. A man beside her removed his own hat and held it against his chest, mirroring the gesture, and then another man did the same, and another, the movement passing through the crowd like a wind through standing grain until half the men before him stood bareheaded in the February rain.

They were not waiting for the next sentence. They understood there was no promise equal to the moment. He had told them he did not know if he was coming back, and they believed him, and some of them were men who would enlist before summer and not come back either.

He would not give them policy. He would not give them reassurance that tasted of falsehood.

He commended himself to the Divine Providence that had guided the nation from its founding. He asked for their prayers — not as a formula but with the gravity of one who had reckoned, in the hours before dawn, the distance between what was required of him and what he was able to supply from his own resources, and had found the gap vast.

Affectionately, he said. Farewell.

He replaced the hat on his head. The brim was wet and cold against his forehead. He turned toward the train, and the crowd's silence held — held as he crossed the platform, held as Lamon opened the car door, held as Lincoln climbed the iron steps and did not look back — and then, as the door closed behind him, a single voice from somewhere deep in the crowd called out, God bless you, Mr. Lincoln, and the silence broke, and the sound that replaced it was not cheering but something rawer, something that had no name, and Lincoln stood inside the car with his palm flat against the door and listened to it until the locomotive's wheels began to turn.

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Scene 4

The car rocked. Springfield was gone.

Rain streaked the glass. Beyond it, the town's last buildings had dissolved into flat, colourless fields — bare ground, bare sky, stands of timber dark against the horizon like script in a language he could not read. Lincoln sat at the small desk fitted into the forward end of the private car. His carpetbag on the floor. His hat, still damp, on the rack above. Nicolay opposite, notebook on his knee, pen charged and waiting. Lamon on the rear bench, arms folded, eyes closed, though Lincoln doubted the man was sleeping.

The wheels found a rhythm beneath them. Coal smoke pressed back through every gap in the window frames, acrid at the back of the throat.

'Begin,' Lincoln said.

He took up the pen from the desk's surface. My friends — Two words, and his hand failed him. Not the small tremor of cold or fatigue but something that came from deeper in the machinery of him — some delayed reckoning with the thousand faces in the rain, the silence that had followed his words, the sound that had followed the silence. The pen would not hold steady.

He set it down and slid it across the desk.

'You write. I will speak it.'

Nicolay took the pen without comment. He was twenty-eight years old and had learned, these past months, that Lincoln's silences were not invitations to fill.

Lincoln folded his hands on the desk and looked out at the passing fields. He began to dictate. The words came back with the fidelity of a thing spoken from the deepest part of understanding — not memorised but remembered, the way a prayer is different from a recitation. He spoke them into the rocking car and Nicolay's pen moved and the miles accumulated beneath them.

The train lurched over a rough joint in the rails. Lincoln's elbow struck the desk's edge, the inkwell jumped, and a dark spray scattered across the top of the page. Nicolay reached for the blotting cloth, pressed it to the damage, turned the page, smoothed a fresh sheet beneath his hand.

Lincoln had not stopped dictating. He continued, his voice level, his eyes on the middle distance where the Illinois plain ran toward a horizon that offered nothing.

When he finished, the car was quiet except for the wheel-sound and the creak of the couplings. Nicolay read back the last several lines. Lincoln nodded once.

Then Nicolay set down the pen and produced, from the inside breast pocket of his coat, a folded telegram. He extended it across the desk without a word.

Lincoln took it. He read it once, quickly — confirming what he suspected rather than discovering what he feared. He read it a second time, slowly, his thumb pressing a crease into the paper's edge.

Jefferson Davis had been elected provisional President of the Confederate States of America by the Congress assembled at Montgomery, Alabama. The ninth of February. Two days past.

Lincoln placed the telegram flat on the desk beside Nicolay's transcription and looked at the two documents lying side by side — one the record of what he had spoken to a thousand citizens standing in the February rain, the other the announcement that at Montgomery a man had been elevated to a rival sovereignty before Lincoln had yet taken his own oath. The juxtaposition was not lost on him. It had the quality of a legal exhibit: evidence that the republic now c

ontained two men who believed themselves charged with its fate, and that only one of them could be correct.

'There are two of us now,' Lincoln said. His voice was entirely even. 'And only one Constitution.'

Lamon's eyes opened on the rear bench.

Lincoln folded the telegram once along its original crease. He did not place it beneath the farewell transcription. He placed it on top.

Then he rose, steadying himself against the car's sway, and moved to the window. The glass was cold against his fingertips. Outside, the fields unreeled — furrow and fence line and the dark seam of a creek bed, all of it sliding away behind him at the speed of iron and steam.

The train took a long curve and the wheels shrieked against the rails, and then the track straightened and the car steadied and the fields resumed their passage.

He was still at the window when the connecting door at the rear of the car opened. Not Lamon — Lamon had not moved. The man who entered was young, travel-worn, his coat dark with rain at the shoulders, a leather dispatch case held against his chest with both arms as though it were a thing that might be taken from him. He stopped inside the door and looked at Lincoln with the fixed expression of a man who has rehearsed the moment and finds the reality of it larger than the rehearsal.

'Mr. Lincoln.' He did not say sir. He said the name as though confirming an identification. 'I have ridden from Springfield since before first light. Mr. Judd sent me.'

Lamon was on his feet.

The young man held out the dispatch case. His hands, Lincoln saw, were not entirely steady.

'There is a letter inside from Colonel Pinkerton. Mr. Judd says you must read it before Indianapolis. He says —' the young man drew a breath — 'he says the route must be changed, and that it cannot wait for the depot.'