These Honored Dead (3 page)

L
incoln commenced his law practice with another protégé of Logan’s, John Todd Stuart. From what I could glean, their practice consisted of routine matters: stolen livestock, land disputes, a divorce petition or two. My circle of unmarried fellows, long used to accommodating new arrivals, gladly opened to admit the voluble newcomer. If anything, our evenings were even more filled with great good humor than they had been.

But there was unease beneath the surface. The business of A. Y. Ellis & Co. was unexpectedly lower in the spring season—typically our busiest—and off by a third by the time summer arrived. All around the square, my fellow merchants were reporting similar declines.

To make tempers even shorter, the summer of 1837 dawned dry and hot and stayed that way. We hadn’t felt a drop of rain in weeks. The owner of every wooden structure in town—which was to say virtually every structure in town—worried his building might fire any day. Preoccupied by my immediate concerns, I thought of Rebecca less and less.

Everything changed one day in late July. Lincoln and I were crowded together on a row of rickety chairs in the front room of a two-room shack. The little hovel was owned by a free Negro with the grand given name of William de Fleurville but known to all as Billy the Barber.

In addition to myself and Lincoln, David Prickett, the state’s attorney, was there, as was Lincoln’s patron Logan and the rotund newspaperman Simeon Francis, publisher of the
Sangamo Journal
. Young Hay sat hunched over in the dim far corner, knobby knees hugged close to his chest.

Prickett, raw-boned and supremely self-confident, had been sprawled in the reclined barbering chair that stood alone in the center of the room. When Prickett’s turn was done, Lincoln rose, stretched, and switched places with him.

“The usual, Billy,” Lincoln said, slapping the Negro good-naturedly on the back. “And make sure you take off all this fuzz that’s suddenly sprouted on my jaw.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Lincoln,” he replied. His singsong voice still contained an echo of the native island where he’d been raised. Billy dipped his hand, the color of burnt copper, into the tin pot sitting on a table beside the barbering chair, and it came up dripping with a greasy, soapy mixture. The barber proceeded to spread the froth over Lincoln’s prominent chin and cheekbones. Then he unfolded a long, curved razor, wiped it on his apron, and set to scraping Lincoln’s face. While he worked, Billy whistled softly to himself.

Beside me, Logan turned to Francis and said, “Did I read in your pages this week another bank in Philadelphia has failed?”

“Two more,” Francis replied in a low growl. “Makes five from that city alone—five we know about. I told you all back in May, when the New York banks first stopped redeeming paper money for gold and silver, that the Panic would be heading our way.”

“Surely we’re insulated here in the West,” I said, thinking of my own soft sales figures and hoping they would not suffer further. “It’s land that gives people wealth out on the frontier, not gold and silver coins.”

Francis gave a derogatory “Hrrumph!” and hoisted himself to his feet. The publisher was an immense man, shaped like an egg, bulging in the middle and with a small, bald head. His weak
chin was covered, as usual, by about five days’ irregular growth of whiskers.

“Land’s creating wealth only if acreage prices keep appreciating,” he said with an impatient wave of his short arms. “But that’s not happening anymore. If there’s less gold and silver in circulation, there’s nothing to support the land prices. And the moment they stop rising, they’ll fall as if lashed to a paving stone.”

Logan nodded next to me and said, “That’s what’s at the root of your Dr. Patterson’s problem, Lincoln.”

From the barber’s chair, Lincoln turned and grunted his assent. Billy yelped.

I saw a spot of red start to blossom on Lincoln’s cheek, where Billy’s blade had been held a moment earlier.

“Lie still if you please, Mr. Lincoln,” the barber said, resting his long fingers on Lincoln’s shoulders.

“I thought you said Patterson was trying to sell some property, not buy it,” I said. Allan Patterson, one of the handful of doctors in town, had become Lincoln’s first substantial client. Like most men with a profession these days, the doctor turned out to be an avid speculator in real estate.

“Patterson’s trying to get out of an agreement he made,” said Logan. “It’s a bold play by Lincoln. We’ll see if the judge lets him get away with it.”

“I’d like to make a play for his daughter,” sniggered Hay from the back corner.

“It’d be an awfully short one, boy,” Lincoln returned. “The doctor wouldn’t let you near enough to his precious Jane to touch her with a ten-foot barge pole.” The men laughed, and Hay drew himself up tighter.

Billy shoved his razor into a pocket of his pantaloons and said, “That takes care of you, Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Logan, you’re next I reckon.”

Lincoln stood up from the reclining chair and stretched. His forearms grazed one of the wooden beams running the length of
the low ceiling. He moved aside and Logan settled into Billy’s chair. The barber took out his shears and resumed his low whistling.

“So how’s the crime business, Prickett?” Lincoln asked. As state’s attorney, Prickett was the prosecutor for Sangamon County, responsible for bringing all criminal proceedings.

“Well in hand.”

“I heard that—”

At that instant there was a great crash and the door to Billy’s shack was flung open. A thick-chested man barged into the room, his broad-set shoulders barely clearing the narrow doorframe. The shoulders unmistakably belonged to Humble Hutchason, the sheriff of Sangamon County. Hutchason had led a column of local volunteers into the Winnebago War a decade earlier, and the legend of his successful leadership, as well as his unsurpassed bulk, ensured his subsequent election as sheriff.

Hutchason was heaving for breath and perspiring heavily. “Prickett—at last I’ve found you,” he shouted, his booming voice much too loud for the small chamber.

“What’s happened?” asked the prosecutor. He was at attention at once, looking at the sheriff with interest.

“A girl’s been killed.” A great outcry greeted this pronouncement. “Stabbed in the neck from the sound of it. She was found by her aunt.”

“Who?” demanded Prickett.

“Where?” called Francis, who had pulled a pencil out from behind his ear and was scribbling away in a small notebook.

“I’m not sure of the girl’s name,” the sheriff said. “She’s new to the county—at least I think she is. She recently moved in with her aunt up in Menard. The aunt’s the widow storekeeper there.”

I gasped, although in the general hubbub it seemed only Billy noticed, as he inclined his head toward me slightly while he continued to whittle away at Logan’s whiskers. My heart raced. Rebecca had never mentioned having a niece, or any other living family for that matter, but I knew for certain there was only one widow storekeeper in Menard.

“The aunt sent a messenger boy to alert me,” the sheriff continued. He was leaning against the doorframe now, his breathing slowly returning to normal. “Her note says she found the girl yesterday morning, out in the hay barn.”

“Why’d she wait so long to summon you?” asked Prickett.

“Don’t know. You can ask her yourself. I’m on my way right now to have a look. Thought you’d want to be there.”

“I’ll accompany you,” barked Francis, on his feet and halfway to the door. “We can ride in my double-team victoria.”

“What’s the aunt’s name, Humble?” asked Lincoln.

“The Widow Harriman,” I said before the sheriff could answer. All the men turned to me in surprise.

“You know her?” asked Prickett.

“The widow, not the girl,” I replied.

“How?”

“Through the trade, of course. Fellow storekeeper.” I hoped mightily the dim light coming through Billy’s dirt-streaked windows was insufficient to show my reddening complexion.

“Let’s be off,” Prickett said, taking Hutchason’s beefy arm.

“I’ll come along too,” I said, rising from my chair. “And why don’t you attend as well, Lincoln. I think Simeon’s carriage should have room for us all.” My room-mate gave me an inquiring look, which I ignored and instead added, to the group, “As I said, I’m acquainted with the widow, and she with me. Perhaps I can add something to your investigations.”

W
hen the group of us arrived at the familiar one-story cabin by the stream, Rebecca was waiting at her front door. She was dressed in black from head to toe. I had rehearsed to myself various forms of salutation on the ride up, but as it turned out, none of them was necessary. Rebecca greeted me with a polite nod and a look in her eyes making it clear she wanted to maintain the notion we had never been anything more than business acquaintances. I nodded blandly in return.

She led the sheriff to the barn at the rear of the house, as the rest of us trailed behind. A dingy blanket was draped atop an inert form in the center of the barn. Rebecca took a deep breath and pulled back the blanket. I stared with revulsion.

The mortal remains of a young woman reclined in horrible repose against a large bale of hay. Her legs splayed outward; her hands rested helplessly at her side, palms up. The corpse was stiff and liverish in color. Lifeless, wide-open eyes stared impotently toward the raftered roof. In life, the girl had possessed attractive, prominent cheekbones, but the corpse’s skin was already shrinking away, like wax exposed to the flame, making the cheekbones protrude unnaturally. Her pallid face was framed by curly auburn hair, the vibrant color of which was the only aspect of her appearance that was in any way life-like.

The bone handle of a “Bowie” knife jutted out of the girl’s neck just above the collarbone. Only about an inch of the dull silver blade was visible before it disappeared into her skin. A dried wash of dark blood stained her neck and the bodice of her housedress and had pooled by the side of her figure.

Next to me, Prickett swore quietly. Simeon Francis, whom I had never known to have a religious impulse, made the sign of the Cross. Lincoln sucked in his breath. Sheriff Hutchason bent down beside the body and gently prodded at it. Rebecca watched us all impassively. The lines around her eyes seemed deeper than I remembered, and her black mourning bonnet seemed more faded.

I recognized the victim at once as the young woman whom Rebecca and I had observed at the village fair the prior summer. And Rebecca’s interest that day immediately came into new focus.

“What was her name?” asked the sheriff.

“Lilly,” said Rebecca.

“When did you find her?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“When yesterday afternoon?”

“Midafternoon, perhaps later. The sun was getting low.”

The sheriff looked up from the side of the prostrate figure. “You didn’t have reason to come out to your barn before then?”

“Not on a Sunday.”

“And you hadn’t had any reason to go looking for your niece before then?”

“I figured she was off on her own somewhere,” Rebecca replied, after a slight pause. “Girls her age are hard to confine.”

The sheriff grunted and continued his close examination.

“You hadn’t heard any type of disturbance out here the prior night?” the sheriff asked a minute later.

“No.”

The sheriff carefully moved the corpse to the side, and her head flopped from one shoulder to the other. I saw he was examining the pool of dried blood. “She must have been right here when
she was stabbed,” he said, talking mostly to himself, “because the blood flowed straight down. There’s none anywhere else. Why didn’t she fight back? Only—what’s this?” He leaned down, his nose only inches above the dirt floor of the barn, then looked up at Rebecca. “Is it possible someone lay their head in the blood? A portion of the stain looks like it was matted by hair.”

For the first time, emotion showed on Rebecca’s face. “Jesse was lying there when I found her,” she said. She blinked.

“And Jesse would be whom?”

“Lilly’s younger brother. My nephew. They both came to live with me a few months ago. He’s inside the cabin just now.” She nodded toward the house. When the sheriff opened his mouth again she added, “If you have more questions, can we move outside? I’d like to leave Lilly’s memory in peace.”

“I think that’s a wise course,” I said, hoping to give Rebecca a respite. “Are you finished with your examination, Sheriff?”

Hutchason straightened up from the corpse, clearing his throat as he did. “For the time being,” he said. He took a deep sniff of the still air inside the barn, which was about ten feet square and lit only by small openings high up on each wall. “Do any of you smell anything unusual?” he asked.

Each of us breathed in. “Hay . . . manure . . . sawdust,” said Francis, ticking off on his stubby fingers. “And . . .” He sniffed again.

“Whiskey,” said Prickett emphatically, staring down the beak of his sharp nose. Francis pointed at him and said, “Exactly.” And he made a note in his book.

As we began to file out of the barn, Rebecca gestured toward her niece’s body and asked, “Do you mind?” I understood her meaning at once and grabbed Lincoln’s arm. Together we gently arranged the blanket to cover the corpse once more.

As we followed the others back into the bright sunlight, I turned to Lincoln and said quietly, “Look out for her if you can. I don’t want her to be tripped up by the sheriff’s questioning. Or Prickett’s.” He nodded.

When we rejoined the group, congregated in the side yard between the house and barn, Prickett was stepping forward. The prosecutor was wearing a high-collared, stiff-necked white shirt beneath his frockcoat, rather in the manner of an English lord—which, behind his back, many citizens of Springfield whispered he had pretensions to be. His eyes glinted and his tongue darted out to moisten his lips. Both actions, I knew at once, boded ill for Rebecca.

“Widow Harriman,” he began in a dangerous voice, “perhaps you can enlighten us about how long your nephew was out in the barn, lying in his sister’s blood, before you noticed your two wards were missing.”

“I was away on Saturday night,” she said, her face ashen. “I returned yesterday afternoon. Sunday afternoon. When I got home, I couldn’t find either of the children. Eventually I looked out here. Jesse was lying beside Lilly’s body, holding her tight.” She put her hand to her mouth.

“Why didn’t you tell us that in the first place?” demanded Prickett.

“You didn’t ask,” said Rebecca. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest, which was rising and falling faster than normal.

Prickett gave a glare and said, “In that event, Widow Harriman, let me ask unmistakably now—where were you Saturday evening, at the time someone was evidently putting a knife through your niece’s neck?”

“You needn’t be hostile, Prickett,” Lincoln said, putting a hand on his arm. “I imagine she wants, more than anyone, to find out who committed this terrible crime.”

Prickett shook free and said, “This doesn’t concern you, Lincoln. Don’t interfere.” To Rebecca, he added, “Well?”

“I left early Saturday morning to attend a market fair at Buffalo Heart,” she said. “I’m trying to make sales wherever I can these days. That’s the last time I saw Lilly alive. She was asleep in her bed when I rode off. After the market I—I slept that night
on the trail, on the seat of the carriage I’d hired, then made the journey the rest of the way back home on Sunday.”

“Slept in your coach along the trail,” Prickett repeated skeptically. “Why didn’t you stay at an inn?”

“I’m not sure that’s any of your concern,” Rebecca said. Her eyes were alive with anger now. “I imagine you don’t have the first idea of what it’s like to lodge as a woman, by yourself, at a public house. Besides, I’d already paid for the carriage. There was no need for additional expense.”

“You don’t happen to recognize the knife, do you, Widow Harriman?” asked the sheriff.

Rebecca looked at the sheriff without blinking. “Never seen one like it,” she said. Prickett scowled.

Hoping it would put her in a better light than the questions thus far, I asked, “Where did your niece and nephew come from?”

“Lilly and Jesse Walker are my older sister’s children. The ones that survived infancy. My sister and her husband lived over near Decatur, trying to grow enough food to survive on a scrap of farmland. I didn’t see much of them. My brother-in-law was a brute. I couldn’t stand to be in his company, and I’m quite sure the feeling was reciprocated.”

“How did they come to live with you?” asked Lincoln.

Rebecca reached up with a calloused hand and settled her mourning bonnet. “A long string of misfortunes brought them to my door,” she said. “My sister passed on at the end of her next confinement, the one after Jesse. The baby was stillborn. Later that same year, my brother-in-law was trampled by an ox in the field and had his leg mangled. Then, a few years ago, he got ejected from the land he was farming. He’d never managed to scrape together any cash to buy it for himself, and a new landlord came along and had other uses in mind for the plot. They had no place to go, and even if I’d wanted to help him, I couldn’t very well take all of them in, not the whole family. They ended up—” Rebecca paused, evidently weighing whether to admit the truth—“in the county poorhouse.”

I understood at once why Rebecca had never mentioned these poor relations to me. There was, unavoidably, much shame attached to a man who depended on the public’s charity for his family’s sustenance.

“What became of your brother-in-law?” Francis asked. He had been scribbling notes constantly since we’d arrived.

“Worked to death by a blacksmith without a conscience,” Rebecca said. “The poorhouse warden had hired him out to the lowest bidder.”

“The lowest bidder?”

“Since the county pays for the indigent, whoever offers to charge the county the least for superintending them wins the right to their labor. My brother-in-law’s labor was purchased by a smithy near Elkhart Grove. Lilly and Jesse were confined to the poorhouse. They saw their father one Sunday a month. Lilly told me Jesse ended up in bed beside her every night, whimpering into her shoulder until he finally fell asleep. Earlier this year, my brother-in-law dropped dead of exhaustion.” She paused.

“He
was
a brute, but he didn’t deserve that fate. And the children certainly didn’t. Lilly wrote to me this spring, after their father passed, asking if I could take them on. I felt I hadn’t any other choice, under the circumstances.”

“It’s a great credit to you that you did,” I said. I glanced at Prickett, but from the sour expression on his face, it did not appear he’d been swayed by Rebecca’s story.

“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm your niece?” asked Lincoln.

Rebecca frowned. “I suspect there are any number of young men about who think she promised them her heart. Or something else even more desirable. She hadn’t had a mother for a very long time, and that became obvious the more I came to know her. I expect one of them came to take and she wouldn’t give.”

“You expect us to believe some common boy, a frustrated suitor, did
that
?” Prickett said, nodding toward the now-closed barn door.

“I don’t much care what you believe,” Rebecca said. “It won’t do anything to bring Lilly back.”

“Can you give us the names of these young men?” asked Prickett.

“Let me ask you—do you have a daughter who’s reached that age?” Rebecca said. When the prosecutor shook his head, she continued, “I didn’t think so. If you did, you’d know the last thing a young woman wants to do is to share such intimacies with their parent, or aunt for that matter.”

Both Prickett and the sheriff looked unsatisfied with Rebecca’s answers. Standing beside them, I couldn’t say I blamed them. Her independent character had always been one of her most attractive qualities to me. But in the present situation, it was plain her lack of interest in pleasing others did her no favors.

“We need to talk to the boy,” Prickett said. “Now,” he added, when he saw Rebecca frowning.

“Surely not,” I protested. “Not after what he’s gone through. Wouldn’t it be better to wait—”

Sheriff Hutchason held up his hand. “We’ve a job to do, Speed. Can you bring him out, please, Widow Harriman? I’ll be gentle.”

She nodded, her lips pursed, and went inside her cabin. A minute later she returned, her hand on the narrow shoulder of a small boy with straight dark hair. He appeared to be somewhere shy of eight years of age. As Rebecca guided him toward us, I saw his pinched face was covered with freckles and his little teeth were unusually crooked.

The sheriff lowered himself to one knee and gestured toward the boy. “Come here, son,” he said quietly. Rebecca embraced Jesse and gave him a little push. He wandered hesitantly toward the sheriff.

“My name’s Humble,” Hutchason said. “What’s yours?”

“Jesse.” Even standing five feet away, I had to strain to hear the boy’s voice.

“I need to ask you some questions about your sister.”

“My sister’s sleeping,” Jesse whispered. “She’s gone to visit the doctor.”

“Has she now. Who told you that?”

“Auntie. Auntie says the doctor’s gonna help Lill wake up.” The sheriff looked up at Rebecca, who nodded.

“Do you know who made your sister tired?” the sheriff asked.

Jesse shook his head.

“Two nights ago, when your Auntie had gone to the fair, did you see anyone, any stranger?” The boy shook his head again. “Or hear anything unusual?” Another shake.

“When’s the last time you saw your sister on the night your Auntie was gone?”

Jesse wrinkled his nose. “When she touched out my candle,” he said.

“And the next day . . .”

“The next day I was protecting her, waiting for Auntie to come home.” Jesse squinted at the sheriff. “When’s Lill gonna wake up, Mister?”

The sheriff sighed and got to his feet. “I’m not too sure, young fellow,” he said. “I’m not too sure.”

The boy looked on the brink of tears, and this time Lincoln knelt down beside him. He rested his hands on either side of the boy’s shoulders. Lincoln’s large hands and long frame almost seemed to swallow up the slight boy.

“Can you do us all a favor, son, and take good care of your Auntie in the meantime?” Lincoln said with a kindly smile. “She’s going to need all the help you can give her.”

Jesse nodded solemnly. Prickett looked as if he wanted to continue the interrogation, but the sheriff said to him, as an aside, “It’s best to leave it there for now. We can always come back later if we have more questions.”