The Lincoln Highway

Duchess explains that in vaudeville, “it was all about the setup” (481), relating a story about a magician, his assistant, and his cockatoo. Duchess and Woolly awoke early, carefully sneaking out of the house. Duchess is aware of the emotional toll that Dennis’s talk has taken on Woolly, who was “looking as low as I’d ever seen him” (483), and he is pleased when Woolly seems to perk up when they find another Howard Johnson’s and stop for breakfast.

When they reach Woolly’s family camp, Duchess is stunned by the enormity of the lodge, a palatial log cabin structure set deep in the woods beside a sizeable lake. Woolly confirms that the caretaker has not yet arrived to open the house for the summer. They bring their bags into the house, but Duchess leaves the Louisville Slugger he brought from Woolly’s room in the car. They enter through the mudroom, passing the glass rifle case and a green sign posted overhead. Escorting Duchess through the house, Woolly points out the various rooms in their path until they reach the study that belonged to Woolly’s great-grandfather. Duchess acknowledges that he had once had his doubts from Woolly’s description that the amount of money Woolly claimed was in the safe could have been stored in one house, but having seen the scope, scale, and luxury of the family camp Duchess has high hopes for the contents of the safe. Duchess does not recognize one of the two prominently featured paintings on the wall, but Woolly identifies it as the presentation of the Declaration of Independence. Thinking himself clever, Duchess asks which of them is the Wolcott, and Woolly immediately points out his ancestor Oliver. Pulling the painting away from the wall, opening it like a door, Woolly reveals the safe behind it. Duchess invites Woolly to open the safe, and Woolly defers to Duchess, which Duchess has no qualms about doing, but when he asks Woolly for the safe’s combination, Woolly simply asks, “Combination?” Duchess begins to laugh uncontrollably, coming back to his initial assertion that “when it comes to vaudeville, it’s all about the setup” (489).

Emmett finds Sarah preparing to finish painting the three remaining walls in her baby’s room. Emmett volunteers to do it instead, enjoying the methodical, relaxing process. Over lunch, Sarah informs Emmett that she needs to go back into Manhattan to join her husband, but she invites Emmett, Billy, and Sally to stay. On the table, Emmett notices a folded note Woolly had left propped between the salt and pepper shakers. She offers it to Emmett to read, and he finds it filled with his apologies for his transgressions since arriving at the house. Woolly closes his letter with the assurance that “all would be well” (493) and the instruction that Sarah shouldn’t worry about him.

Sarah tells Emmett that Woolly’s behavior changed dramatically when their father went off to serve in the Navy, observing “somehow […] it was Woolly who ended up at sea” (493). Sarah asks if Emmett knows the details of why Woolly had been sent to Salina. Sarah clarifies: While at St. George’s school in Newport, Rhode Island, Woolly had decided he wanted an ice cream cone and wandered off campus and into town. When he happened upon a fire truck parked at a shopping center, “he became convinced—in a way that only my brother can become convinced” (494) that the firefighters had forgotten it and that it was his responsibility to return it to them. He drove the fire truck around town, making a bit of a spectacle in his enjoyment of his errand, eventually returning the truck to a station house and walking back to school. Meanwhile, a fire had broken out at a nearby horse farm, burning a stable to the ground and killing four horses. The local firefighters were unable to respond because the truck had been in Woolly’s possession when the call came in. Emmett realizes that Sarah is in tears and turns to leave, but she catches his attention and relates how tragic she thinks it is that, while society raises children to tamper their vices, people can be similarly ruined by having too many virtues. She tells him, “if you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit […] and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness” (495), and Emmett realizes that she feels it is Woolly’s goodness that has so invariably harmed him most profoundly. 

Woolly wanders through his family’s home, immersing himself in memories of the holidays he spent there in their company. He tucks his second note, written at his great-grandfather’s desk, between the salt and pepper shakers in the kitchen, just as he had the note he left in Sarah’s kitchen. With each part of the house he passes through, he recalls and assigns a flood of memories to every room. When he climbs to the top of the stairs, he admires the photographs of generations of his family members hung throughout the hallway, grown to a gallery wall with each year as new photos were added. He finds his favorite photograph, one taken of himself, his father, and his mother sitting in a canoe. Taking the photo off the wall, he proceeds to the bedroom he most frequently occupied, along with his cousin Freddy, when present for family gatherings. Methodically, Woolly places the photo on the bedside table, fills a glass and pitcher with water, and begins arranging his things. He carefully arranges his radio, his dictionary, and his cigar box around him. Finally, he places his spare bottle of medicine and Sarah’s brown prescription bottle, lifted from her spice rack, with his other belongings.

Downstairs, he can hear Duchess returning from the store and the associated sounds of Duchess attempting to break into the safe. Settling into bed, Woolly finishes off the entirety of his spare bottle of medicine. He thinks to himself, “Wouldn’t it have been wonderful […] if everybody’s life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no person’s life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else’s. It would just fit snugly into its very own, specially designed spot, and in so doing, would enable the whole intricate picture to become complete” (500). At 5 o’clock, when a mystery show begins on the radio, Woolly empties the pink pills in Sarah’s prescription bottle into his hands and swallows them, taking a drink of water to wash them down. Woolly has decided in advance what he would turn his mind to in this moment, and he begins to relive his one-of-a-kind day in his mind, embracing his memories as the pharmaceuticals begin to take effect.

Having immersed himself in a multitude of stories of the lives of heroes throughout his academic career, Professor Abacus Abernathe has developed a theory that the trajectory of the life of each great hero takes the shape of a diamond on its side:

Beginning at a fine point, the life of the hero expands outward through his youth […] but at some untold moment the two rays that define the outer limits of this widening world […] simultaneously turn a corner and begin to converge. The terrain our hero travels […] the sense of purpose that has long propelled him forward all begin to narrow […] toward that fixed and inexorable point that defines his fate (502).

He cites Achilles as an example of this concept. Recently, Professor Abernathe has concluded that it is not only heroes’ lives that follow this path but the lives of each and every single person. Sailing the seas as a young man, accompanying his father, a maritime insurance adjuster, around the world, his interest was sparked in the lives of seafaring voyagers from history. This passion for scholarship on this subject brought him to Harvard and to New York. He had lived a fulfilling life, pursuing his academic passions, marrying, having children, and enjoying wonderful friendships. Now, his wife deceased, his children on their own, Professor Abernathe has begun to sense that his moment of convergence was imminent. When Billy appeared, it occurred to Professor Abernathe that his moment had come to embrace his fate. When he heard the story of Ulysses, Professor Abernathe realized he had encountered “A tale not from a leather-bound tome, […] not from an epic poem written in an unspoken language […] but from life itself” (506), and he was called to participate the journey of a true hero, Ulysses. At the close of the only chapter dedicated to Professor Abernathe, the Professor follows Ulysses’s lead as they climb into a boxcar west of Kansas City, destination unknown.

In a spare bedroom at the Whitney home, while his brother sleeps, Billy makes the decision to begin filling the empty pages of Professor Abernathe’s Compendium. Billy had considered multiple starting points to the hero’s story he intends to put to paper. As Billy’s chapter unfolds, it becomes clear that Billy has no intention of writing his own story. For Billy, Emmett is the hero, and it is his brother’s journey Billy will record in the Compendium. He thought about beginning the story with Emmett’s birth in 1935 or on the 4th of July in 1946, the day before their mother left them. He even considered beginning the story on October 4, 1952, when Emmett struck Jimmy Snyder and set in motion the chain of events leading to his incarceration in Salina. If he is going to truly begin in medias res, however, as he intended, Billy decides that where he must begin is on Emmett’s drive home from Salina in Warden Williams’s car.