Legends

Lincoln drank off the glass of water in one long swallow and then ran his finger around the rim as he picked up the thread of his tale. “I was closely questioned by a stubby, hunch-shouldered officer with a shock of hair turned silver from age and battle fatigue, so I supposed because he walked with the aid of two wooden crutches. And when he didn’t esteem my answers—I admitted to having been born and raised in Pennsylvania but claimed I’d gone south to defend state’s rights and slavery, for who in his right mind wanted millions of freed slaves invading the north to take away our jobs—he had me stripped to the skin and began examining each item of clothing. Which is how he came across the watch fob decorated with the symbol of Alan Pinkerton’s detective agency—an unblinking eye—that Alan himself had given me back in the days when we were chasing train robbers and cattle thieves. The old officer recognized it immediately and my efforts to make out that I had got it off one of the crazed women in the asylum fell short of convincing him. You are a Federal spy, he said, caught behind our lines. Make your peace with your Maker for you will be executed at dawn.”

Lincoln, reliving the episode, wiped perspiration from his forehead with the back of a wrist. “I was allowed to dress, after which they tied my ankles loosely so I could walk but not run and took me to a circle of hospital wagons and sat me down at a wooden crate inside one of them to write my last testament and any letters that I deemed necessary to deliver to friends or family. Night fell quickly at this time of the year. The aurora borealis, a rare sight in these latitudes, flickered like soundless cannon fire in the north; it didn’t take much imagination to suppose a great war was being fought beyond the horizon. I was brought an oil lamp and a tin plate of hard crackers and water, but try as I might I was unable to swallow even the spittle in my mouth, the lump in my throat, which I identified as fear, being too big. I attempted to write my mother and father, and a girl I had been sweet on back in Pennsylvania, I wanted to tell them what had befallen me and so began: I take the present opportunity of penning you a few lines, my health is good but it will not be so for long I was obliged to discontinue the letter because my brain, befuddled with chemicals released by fear, could not locate the words to describe my condition. I became convinced that it was all a terrible dream, that any moment I would become too frightened to continue dreaming; that I would force myself through the membrane that separated sleep from wakefulness and wipe the sweat from my brow and, still under the spell of the nightmare, have trouble falling back to sleep. But the wooden crate felt damp and cold under my palm and a whiff of sulfurous air—in the next wagon the surgeons, amputating the leg of a boy who had been pinned under an overturned cannon, were dousing the stump with sulfur—stung my lungs and the pain brought home to me that what had happened, and what was about to happen, were no dream.”