The Lincoln Highway

Duchess seeks out Townhouse, Emmett’s former bunkmate, in order to continue his “balancing of accounts” (295). Duchess accepts responsibility for the beating Townhouse took at the hands of Warden Ackerly, and Duchess feels he owes Townhouse a debt. Duchess also adds to his calculations an incident with another inmate named Tommy Ladue. Tommy believed that Townhouse, who is Black, should not share living quarters with white inmates. Tommy demanded Townhouse relegate himself to the use of only certain parts of the bunkhouse, and Emmett immediately intervened. Duchess happened to observe an exchange between Tommy and a guard in which Tommy was passed two boxes of Oreos. Duchess watched Tommy sneak over to Townhouse’s footlocker and hide the Oreos inside.

The following morning Warden Ackerly, Bo, and additional guards entered the bunkhouse and declared that someone had been stealing from the kitchen. They proceeded to search Townhouse’s footlocker but found nothing. Duchess suggested they search everyone’s footlocker to find the thief. In Tommy’s footlocker is found a box of Oreos. With Tommy in the penalty shed that night, Duchess explains the entire situation to the other young men of the bunkhouse, and they all share the remaining package of Oreos. Townhouse asks Duchess why he would take such a risk for him. Duchess claims it wasn’t a risk, simply an opportunity that presented itself, reciting the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, likening them all to a united group. Afterward, Townhouse approached Duchess, telling Duchess that he owed him for Duchess’s protection.

On 126th street in Harlem, Duchess finds Townhouse sitting on a stoop with a group of four young men surrounding him. Throughout the exchange, Duchess is aware of the power dynamics between the young men on the stoop, Townhouse clearly being the authority among them. Duchess invites Townhouse to meet up with them at the circus the following night for the 6pm show. When Townhouse asks why Duchess has come so far to see him, Duchess explains that to settle his accounts, he needs to take a beating in return for the one Townhouse took after the escape to see Hondo. If Townhouse hits Duchess three times, Duchess feels that they will be even. Townhouse finds the entire proposition bizarre, but Duchess is delighted to accept the three blows once Townhouse consents to delivering them. As he is leaving, Duchess tosses the keys to the Studebaker to Townhouse’s associate Maurice, telling him the car is his.

Emmett finds himself at the very same bar Duchess had visited the day before, waiting in the Anchor at quarter to eight for Harrison Hewett to arrive. Emmett had made the long trek to the subway, unsuccessfully navigating the transportation system. Correcting his mistakes, he finally found himself at the Statler Building in Times Square in Manhattan, home to the offices of Tristar Talent Agency. Emmett asks the receptionist if she can help, telling her that all he needs is the information of a performer. Summarily dismissed, Emmett leaves the office and heads for the elevator. Though the elevator car is just about to close, the occupant props his umbrella between the doors so the doors reopen and Emmett can step inside. The man explains that the receptionists are constantly visited by people anxious to address grievances and as a result the receptionists are notoriously unwilling to share performers’ personal information. Mr. Winslow advises that instead of asking after a specific performer’s whereabouts, Emmett should present himself as looking to hire the actor he is looking for by name. Arriving at the offices of McGinley & Co. Emmett, playing the role of a producer, is quickly escorted past those in the waiting room and into McGinley’s office, where he requests Harrison Hewett by name.

When Emmett makes inquiries of Bernie at The Sunshine Hotel, Bernie confirms that while Harrison Hewett has checked out, Duchess and Woolly are staying there as guests. Emmett is directed to the Anchor bar and informed that Fitzy is the one to ask about Harrison Hewett’s whereabouts. When Fitzy enters the bar as his schedule predicts, Emmett introduces himself as a friend of Duchess, and Fitzy admits that he told Duchess that Harrison Hewett would be at the Olympic Hotel in Syracuse. Since Emmett introduced himself as a friend of the family, Fitzy asks him to stay and have a drink with him. Fitzy asks if Emmett knows where Duchess got his nickname. Duchess’s mother had once kept his hair long and dressed him fancily, and on nights when Duchess had been sent to collect his father from the bar, Harrison used to refer to his son as “the Duchess,” and the nickname stuck. Fitzy asks if Emmett knows how Duchess ended up incarcerated at Salina, and when Emmett admits that he doesn’t, Fitzy proceeds to tell Emmett the story. 

In the camp at the abandoned train tracks, Ulysses and Billy have spent their day together, the hour having just passed 10 o’clock. When Billy offers to read the story of Ishmael to Ulysses, Ulysses asks that Billy read the story of Ulysses once again instead. When he is finished, Billy asks if Ulysses will tell him a story. Ulysses tells Billy a story about what he calls “my own encounter with the king of the winds,” (325). At the time, Ulysses was walking to the train junction in Des Moines to catch another train. Ulysses began to observe certain anomalies in his environment, which suggested to him that something was not right. Then, a long line of 15 cars sped past him, all heading in the same direction. Looking to the sky, he noticed it was beginning to take on the tell-tale green hue indicative of a pending tornado. Spying a farmhouse in the distance, Ulysses rushed in its direction as a farmer was ushering his children into his storm cellar.

Though the man does not outright refuse him, he tells Ulysses “I don’t know you,” and Ulysses acknowledges that were he in the man’s shoes he would not permit an unknown man, particularly one of Ulysses’s stature and of another race, into his family’s storm cellar. The farmer explains that a church is less than a mile away, and Ulysses should be able to reach it in time to seek shelter in the basement. When he is only halfway to the church, the tornado materializes, touching down and throwing up detritus in its wake, obscuring Ulysses’s vision and hindering his ability to push forward. Ulysses finds himself among the tombstones of the church cemetery. Thinking himself abandoned by God to face the onslaught of the tornado alone, Ulysses falls to the ground, tripping over a gravestone. When he pulls himself up, he realizes he is standing before a still open grave not yet covered up with dirt. Ulysses surmises that the long caravan of cars had been coming from the funeral of the person within the casket, only to rush off at the approach of the tornado. Ulysses opens the casket and pulls the body of the man out, tucking his own body inside and drawing the lid closed. Ulysses’s chapter is interrupted by redacted space to indicate the blow being delivered to his head by Pastor John back in the present.

Convinced of his own righteousness and in a thought pattern through which the path of his vengeance mirrored that of a tornado, Pastor John raises his walking staff, bringing it down on Ulysses’s head. Wounded in his ejection from the train, from the moment he was able to continue on Pastor John’s singular purpose had been to find Ulysses and exact his revenge upon him. Believing he is being led by God, Pastor John followed the rail lines, stowing away in boxcars until he happens upon Ulysses and Billy in the camp at the abandoned tracks, arriving in time to hear Ulysses tell the story of the tornado, lying in wait until the perfect moment to strike. With Ulysses knocked out, Pastor John asks if he can join Billy by the fire with a wicked laugh. Pastor John grabs Billy by his shirt collar, and Billy begins to speak the name of his brother over and over, as he had in the train car. Pastor John grabs his broken staff in his other hand, raising it over his head to hit Billy the same way he had delivered the blow to Ulysses.

When Billy opens his eyes and says, “I am truly forsaken” (335), Pastor John is surprised, allowing Billy the opportunity to deliver a kick to Pastor John’s injured knee, which causes him to drop the boy in response to the excruciating pain. When Billy runs off, Pastor John picks up a shovel to use as a crutch and begins to pursue him, calling out to him in menacing taunts. Passing by a tent, Pastor John hears the voice of another man, who, thinking it is Ulysses, steps outside only to be hit in the head by Pastor John’s shovel. When more voices begin to sound, Pastor John decides to forego locating Billy, instead going to search for Billy’s backpack. When he finds it by the fireside, he empties the contents until he finds the coins in their tin and shoulders the backpack. Looking for his shovel crutch, he realizes it is gone. Pastor John’s chapter is interrupted by redacted space to indicate the blow of the shovel delivered to his head by Ulysses.

Coming to out of the unconsciousness caused by the blow of Pastor John’s walking staff, Ulysses, in his disorientation, believes himself to be still in the coffin of the dead man, where he left off in his recollection of the tornado. He struggles to free himself, aware of the sensations of his incapacitation but not remembering that it was Pastor John who rendered him injured. Thinking he has finally managed to push the lid of the coffin open, Ulysses realizes where he is. Knowing that he needs to find Billy, Ulysses retreats into the darkness so he can assess the situation around the campfire and determine where the boy is in relation to their attacker without alerting their assailant that he has come to and now poses a threat. He overhears the sound of Stew calling his name and being struck by the shovel, then follows the sounds of Pastor John talking to himself and the contents of Billy’s backpack being rifled through until he is able to sneak up on Pastor John and use the shovel his attacker discarded to strike Pastor John on the side of his head.

After determining that Stew and Billy are all right and seeing to their injuries, Ulysses sets about “seeing to the preacher” (342), replying to Billy’s query as to what that means by explaining that Pastor John will be furiously angry when he awakens and that it’s best for him to be far away from them when he does. Ulysses tells Billy that he’s going to take him down a set of stairs leading away from the elevated tracks when Billy interrupts with his presumption that Ulysses will then bring him to the police station. Agreeing that this is indeed his plan, Ulysses takes the stairs to Gansevoort, as recommended by Stew for its ease of access, and proceeds to descend to the river, into which he will plunge Pastor John’s unconscious body. 

Duchess is sitting in the dark in the kitchen in the middle of the night when Sarah comes in and begins to make tea. Duchess takes note of a little brown bottle of pills in her possession. She isn’t startled by Duchess’s voice in the darkness when he announces himself, hiding the pill bottle in her robe pocket when she comes to sit at the table with him. Over her tea Sarah asks about Duchess and how it was that he came to be at Salina.

Duchess had been living with his father at the Sunshine Hotel. Left alone much of the time, Duchess befriended another resident of the hotel, a clown named Marceline Maupassant. Celebrated throughout Europe, Marceline had a contract to perform in the United States. While he was traveling there by boat, the stock market crash of 1929 occurred, and when Marceline arrived in New York he discovered that his contract had been cancelled and that his own finances in Paris had also been summarily decimated in the stock market crash. Like Duchess’s father, Marceline had also turned to alcohol, but he rose early to cook crepes for Duchess and himself. One morning Duchess arrived at Marceline’s room to find that Marceline’s door, typically left ajar, was closed. When Duchess entered, he found that Marceline had hung himself. Duchess went to his father, and Harrison told Duchess to alert the police.

As the officers searched the room, it was discovered that Marceline’s prized watch was missing. Harrison turned on Duchess, suggesting with his arm over Duchess’s shoulder that perhaps Duchess had taken it for safekeeping. When father and son are searched, Duchess is shocked when the detectives locate the watch in his own pocket. Duchess realized that his father had placed the watch in his pocket, fearing that the watch would be discovered. Charged with grand larceny, Duchess’s fate is sealed when Fitzy claimed that he had seen Duchess coming out of Marceline’s room. Harrison asks to address his son at Duchess’s sentencing. In a performance meant to command the attention of the entire courtroom, Harrison bloviated on about integrity and honesty, reciting a speech by Polonius from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Duchess senses Sarah’s genuine sympathy for him at the close of his story. When Sarah departs, Duchess reaches into her pocket and takes out the bottle of pills, telling her she doesn’t need them, leaving the bottle in the bottom of her spice rack.