The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (18 page)

Every night, Thomas read us something from his store of books. Before Frank, we had been having Mr. Emerson every night, but Frank yawned and sighed and fidgeted so much under Mr. Emerson that Thomas had to try something else. It wasn’t much better with Mr. Thoreau, nor even with Mr. Lowell, but when we got onto Mrs. Stowe, Frank sat quietly with his chin in his hand. I did, too. Those were our best evenings, and even though candles were an expense, we would have given up tea or maybe even corncakes before giving up candles.

Some nights, we visited others, and the talk wasn’t always of politics and the hardships of our present lives. Now that we were settled, it seemed, for a while, as if we might talk about home a bit. K.T. may have exerted a leveling influence on my friends, but back in Massachusetts, it appeared, they hailed from many different strata of society and knew each other mostly because of the Emigrant Aid Company and their common beliefs in the abolition of the institution of slavery. Mr. Bush, who knew Mr. Thayer and was on an equal footing with many of the rest of them back in the east, had sold his prosperous ship-outfitting business to come to K.T. "You know," he claimed, "I was tired of it. It was all bookkeeping and close work and noting this and writing that, and I barely got off my seat of a morning to look out at the water. My bones were aching for something to do."

I don’t think Mrs. Bush’s bones had felt the same ache, but Mr. Thayer himself worked on her, for she was the more fiery of the two on the subject of Negro bondage. "After living in comfort all my life," she told me, "it seemed the least I could do. And it is. When I think of all the years that Isaac toiled in the wilderness, I do not consider Lawrence, K.T., a hardship."

Mr. Jenkins, on the other hand, was one of those being aided by the company, as his farm had failed some years before and he had tried his hand at two or three enterprises, such as buying and selling cattle, picking apples, and teaching school, before coming to K.T Mr. Holmes had just begun his life as a preacher, and as there were few enough churches to be had in New England, there being an abundance of preachers there, Mrs. Holmes’s father, himself a preacher, had financed their journey to K.T, with some help from his members and some help from Mr. Thayer, who liked there to be one minister of good New England stock for every twenty emigrant families (or so Mrs. Holmes said, but I never heard anyone else say this of Mr. Thayer, who was the subject of a good deal of talk).

The Smithsons had printed books and intended to get into the book-printing trade once again, but upon arrival in K.T., they had lost the money they’d saved for presses and type through being cheated by a gambler. In a year, they thought, they would have replaced their funds through trading town lots or something of the sort, and the older Mr. Smithson said, "Printing is a dangerous business out here, anyway, more so than I care for. My thought was a ladies’ book, with receipts and lace patterns and a few stories. I don’t yet see a spot for that out here, but no doubt the time will come." They intended to while away the time farming or speculating. I thought their interests were peculiar, as there were no Smithson ladies, but Susannah said yes, it was true: Mr. Smithson had told them all the way out from Massachusetts that there was a fortune to be made from reading ladies. He’d kept counting the ladies on every boat and in every town between there and here, alternately pleased and downcast, depending upon how many there were. He even had a stack of bills, which he now used to paper up the walls of his cabin, that advertised "The Western Ladies’ Journal, A Monthly, Published in Lawrence, K.T, for the Entertainment and Edification of All." Another time, Mr. Smithson confided to me that he was disappointed in the Missouri ladies he had seen, many of them barefoot and clearly ignorant. He said, "Lawrence is all very well, but Missouri isn’t Lawrence, and Lawrence is hardly a pockmark on the face of the prairie. I didn’t think it would be that way, from the bills we saw." He was thinking, of course, of his project, but I subsequently found this observation appropriate to every feature of our situation. And once, when Susannah was going on again about whom she might marry and when he might appear, I mentioned the Smithsons, as there were three of them. She stared at me as if I were out of my mind. Finally she said, "In the end, I do think it’s ill advised to know your affianced very well before the wedding." But it was hard to see what she was looking for in the men we saw outside of our group.

At any rate, we visited and gossiped among ourselves as if we would be friends for the rest of our lives. That was K.T. all over. You had to be acting every day as if your life would go on from that moment, full tilt, because if you held back, you would settle on nothing—make no claim, dig no well, have no friends. All the same, you could embrace something with all your might and have it turn to empty air only so many times. But I wasn’t thinking about that then.

At the end of October, the weather turned a bit brisk. On the other hand, Thomas, Frank, and I were well equipped with sturdy clothing and boots we’d brought along, and plenty of quilts and blankets. We had a woodpile stacked as large as the cabin, and the cabin was thoroughly papered and chinked. Jeremiah had a bushy, full coat, with furry ears and fetlocks. The prairie hay was snowless and nourishing, and he trotted around in fine fettle, keeping himself warm and fit. He was a good lookout—a lone horse always is, especially for the approach of any other horse.

All in all, I could stand at my door and feel satisfied enough with my situation, or I could glance about my little cabin and feel satisfied enough with my situation. Along about then, I received a letter from Harriet, acknowledging the tidings I had sent her of Frank’s safe arrival, which had slightly elided its actual date. She wrote:

My Dear Sister, and Frank, too:

I write to assure you that my fears are largely set at rest by yours rec’d today. To be perfectly candid, I will say that on the very day after Frank’s departure, we had news of the Kansas rebels and their so-called constitutional convention at Tomara or someplace like that, Roland knows the name, and I had tremendous fears of the battles that might ensue, because I am here to tell you that the southerners are not going to give anything up without a fight, for you know they are Scotch-Irish, and you know how they are, they invented the terrier dog, Roland says, and it wasn’t without a reason. Now that Frank is gone, Alice’s boys are all clamoring to go as well, and I might as well take to my bed. Alice has had animals in the house for four months, as the two boys found an injured crow, and now they have taught it to talk. It is an ugly black thing and hops all around and even though she leaves the door open as often as you can stand with this cold, it WILL NOT fly away, and Roland says why should it, it has found a home. It is a great storer of provisions, and Alice and Annie are always coming across its caches of trashy things. But that won’t interest you. Lydia, I insist that you protect my child from danger and do not lead him astray as you have so often in the past. I can’t feature what persuaded me to allow this. But now you are a married woman, and you must come to your senses, and keep out of trouble, especially as, though you have not said anything about it, you are no doubt in a condition. I will say that it makes considerable changes in your state of mind, which you yourself will find in no time. Well, just that thought makes me miss you a bit, and so write again right away and let me know how everyone is. We miss you, though I will say that our life is quieter here, esp. as we do not have a crow in the house, that is Alice.

Your loving sister,
HARRIET

Well, I was not in a condition, but I thought that was just as well, with the winter to look forward to. Mrs. James, who was in a condition, looked as though she sorely missed her little cow, and so did the boy.

I wish I could say that I savored and appreciated each of those quiet days in the fall, but I cannot. When the wind ripped my papers and the cold air crept into the cabin, when the stove went out and refused to light again, when my hunting was poor or my husband preoccupied, I felt prickles of dissatisfaction. My own ineptitude annoyed me: our bed tick was misshapen; when I sewed Thomas a shirt, I had to rip out and refashion the second left sleeve I set in; I was vexed with the mice and moles and other vermin who found their way into the house and against which we had to be ever vigilant.

But in the midst of it all, I did have some valuable moments with my husband. One rainy afternoon, our conversation turned to the Missourians who had been driven off, whom we hadn’t mentioned in the intervening weeks. I had been over with the Jenkinses that morning, making soap, and I commented upon what a comfortable cabin I found it, and Thomas said, "I didn’t think we should have sent those men down the river. It was a miserable thing for them."

"I’m sure it was."

"We couldn’t find one of them for a bit. The rope tied to the log came loose, and he drifted off in the dark."

"What did you mean to do—"

"I thought sure the log had turned over and drowned the fellow, but it just drifted into some snags and hung there. He was deadly quiet, but Bisket saw him when the moon came out."

"But what—"

"We had the guns. Bush was all for shooting them and getting it over with, and maybe they deserved it, because they shot at us when we rode up, but I said I hadn’t brought all those Sharps rifles out here for that—"

"Well, what did you bring them out here for?"

"Defending our claims. But we were all hot to do something to them, and a dose of the river didn’t seem so bad in prospect. Afterward, I saw that we didn’t know what we were doing, and those men were just fortunate."

"But you wanted to run them off, didn’t you?"

"Yes, Lidie, I did." He sighed, then smiled a bit and said, "I generally want to do things, but often I don’t want to have done them."

He must have seen alarm in my face, for I had been wondering that very day whether his quiet manner hid regrets about his choice of a wife, but he put his arm around my waist and drew me to him, then he murmured, "Small things only," and kissed me.

A day or two later, we were alone again. Frank had gone to the Holmeses’, carrying a pot he had bought for them in Lawrence and brought home—he got a penny for running these errands. That evening, Thomas was in a more jovial mood, and he said, "Well, wife, we’ve been married three months now. Has your experience borne out your sisters’ advice?"

"I think that must be United States advice, not K.T. advice."

"That you’ll have to write up yourself."

"Perhaps I can have an article in The Western Ladies’ Journal, or even make a regular appearance: ’How to keep your skirts from rustling when you are shooting turkeys.’ "

"How do you?"

"I tie them up about my waist. It’s a scandal."

"What else?"

" ’Prairie Mud: Would you be better off on stilts?’ "

He laughed.

I said, "The ladies’ boots have not been invented that can handle prairie mud, that is for sure."

"You seem content enough. I’ve been watching you."

"Have you? I’ve been watching you, too, and I hadn’t noticed."

"Do I seem content enough?"

"On balance, yes." I felt myself flush.

"And you? Are you amazed and displeased to find yourself here?"

"Amazed, yes. Displeased, no."

"You’ve been watching me?" he said, softly.

"Of course. Everyone does."

"What do you see?"

"Oh, well. I suppose I see the promise of a prolonged investigation."

"Lifelong?"

"Lifelong, indeed."

"You are a mysterious woman, Lidie."

I considered this high praise.

I was always astonished at the speed with which news traveled in K.T. The solitudes of the prairies came later than my time—while I was there, the place was alive with travelers, messengers, and plain old gossips, galloping here and there to keep us all abreast of the latest events. So it was that on the very day it happened—it being the murder of a Free State man by a Missourian—we knew about it in our little cabin: Thomas had been over building fence at the Jenkinses’, and Mr. Bisket rode in from Lawrence and told them. Mr. Bisket being a single man, and not all that certain about his vocation, whether speculator, farmer, or merchant, he spent a lot of time riding from place to place and pursuing his avocation, which was talking politics. It didn’t hurt that he was helpful; he had never built much on his own claim, only split a few logs, but his friends’ places were full of his contrivances. While he worked, he talked. Over the subsequent days, he was like our own private newspaper.

The story was that a Free State man named Dow had been shot "forty times" in the back by a Missourian, his neighbor, named Coleman. In the morning, Dow and a friend of his, named Branson, had driven Coleman off the land they were disputing about, and then in the afternoon, some friends of Dow’s found his body by the side of a road down near Hickory Point, some ten or twelve miles south of Lawrence, and so about fifteen south of us. It looked as though Coleman had pursued Dow and shot him down. This murder provided the perfect occasion for the officials of the state government to demonstrate that holding office rendered them responsible to all the citizens of the territory. But of course, no one expected such an outcome.

Free Staters thought nothing of the so-called sheriff, just as they thought nothing of all the other "state officials." These "duly constituted" authorities, from the governor on down, were creatures of the slave power that had stolen the original elections, instituted the gag law, and rammed through a proslave constitution modeled on Missouri’s. There were no laws in Kansas that didn’t contaminate the very word "law," and no officials that weren’t partisans. The sheriff was a proslave partisan who used such authority as he had to harass and oppress Free Staters. As a southerner, his philosophy was that he wanted to do it, he ought to do it, and therefore he was going to do it—and what couldn’t be done by persuasion could more easily and amusingly be done by force. Coleman was a rich man from Missouri, and Dow and Branson were typical Free Staters—men of moderate means and independent habits. The sheriff knew what side his bread was buttered on without even thinking about it. No one knew Dow—he was new in the country—but he was a Free Stater, and his death quickly became an example of what they would do to all of us, under the guise of authority, if we didn’t stop them.