The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (49 page)

"I cut the skirt off my dress to make a shirt out of it."

"You ain’ got nothin’ else beside dese thangs?"

"No."

"Well," said Helen, "I’m going to go over to The Poplars and talk to Mrs. Harris. I’m a pet of hers, and Maria and Dorothea have ever so many frocks that they didn’t take with them to Saint Louis, and I know for sure they were planning to have ever so many more made when they got there. Dorothea is taller than you, Lorna."

"You ken try. Dey don’ know what dey got in dat house, anyways. Dey don’ open de cupboards from one yeah to de nex’. Ifn dey lose somethin’, dey go get a new one, instead of jes’ lookin’ for de old."

"Lorna, that’s such a slander!"

"It ain’! Dey servants talk! Dey servants is almost rich offa dem!"

"Well, then! That will give me something to do before Papa gets home!" And she marched out, full of purpose.

Lorna shook out my dress, and we both wrinkled our noses at the stink of mildew. I saw that the books were considerably damaged, too, with black spots on their covers and their pages all swollen. I touched them and gave out a sigh. Lorna said, "I seen dresses worse off den dis dat come back for yeahs’ more good weahin’. I reckon Missy Helen gon’ tek caeh of you. You her projec’ now, so you get back into you bed and you’ll see!" She gave one of her rare small smiles. The pistol had been with us the whole time, lying there at the bottom of my case. I could see Lorna not looking at it, and surely she could see me not looking at it. Now I bent down and closed the case, snapping the hasp with a sharp click. She said, "Dat case needs airin’, too. It have quite a stink on its own." But she didn’t reach for it, and presently she went out of the room, carrying the dress and the shoes. I got back into the bed. I was a bit tired, and anyway, until there was something decent for me to wear, I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

I have to say that I was strangely calm, considering my situation. No doubt there was some lingering weakness owing to my collapse, a weakness of the soul as well as of the body. Perhaps that was the reason that I seemed to have changed utterly. Had I spent my girlhood exploring the forests and fields around Quincy? Had I swum the great river? Had I journeyed to Kansas, helped build a claim there, hunted prairie chickens and turkeys, ridden my horse all about? Had I walked up and down the streets of Lawrence, fled the Missouri Rose, gone about as a boy, and a restless one at that? Had I walked from Kansas City to Independence and from Independence to here? Had I endured the discomforts of bitter cold and blazing heat, high winds, pouring rain, jolting wagons, steamers run aground? Had I continued doing and doing and everlastingly doing? It seemed that I had, but now I couldn’t understand it. Another person had done all of that. It exhausted and oppressed me just to ponder it. The only good thing I could think of was to give way entirely to the languor I felt. I was hardly enterprising enough to get to the windows of my room. Simply to lie upon the bed was preferable, not even thinking any thoughts or making any plans; plans implied future activity, which seemed impossible, not to mention unappealing. What a luxury it was, knowing that Helen and Lorna and the unknown Delia were seeing to everything and that all I needed to do was close my eyes!

I thought of Mrs. Bush, who had said more than once that southerners in general and Missourians in particular were simply shiftless and lazy. "Of course, that’s the greatest evil of all," she would say. "It robs you of knowing the pleasure of activity. We who came up in a cold climate must work to live! I can’t claim it as a virtue; if you sit still, you’ll freeze to death. If you ask me, that’s the Lord’s greatest gift to every right-thinking person!" But she did claim it as a virtue, they all did, though indeed, it was hardly so simple as she thought. There was much to be said for activity, and all the active ones actively said it. But I saw now, or rather felt in my bones and sinews, that there was much to be said for ease, as well. Look at Helen! Whom did I know who was as appealing as Helen? She was artless and charming and generous and kind, as well as pretty and lively. Possibly she had never done a lick of work in her life, besides needlework, but then her needlework was exquisite. And the room I was in. I had never been in such a room, so well proportioned and fine, with these two windows. Windows were expensive, and you almost never saw two, especially two side by side, put there not because a room needed that much light or air but because the two looked pleasing. Someone, probably the papa, had said, not, "I need a window," but, "I want two windows, just here and here." Well, that was the essence of luxury, wasn’t it? Wanting something that you didn’t need, and then having it. I closed my eyes. It seemed that this was all the thinking I could manage for the morning.

In the afternoon, Helen, who was as good as her word, returned from The Poplars with two dresses that had been discarded by Dorothea the previous summer. One was a green lawn with a broad white collar, and the other was a light nankeen, almost buff-colored, with brown braid trim. They were very pretty, especially the nankeen, but both had to be let out in the waist and have their hems let down all the way and faced. "Isabelle can do that in no time," said Helen. "Old Mr. LaFrance had her sent down to New Orleans when she was ten, to be trained, and he sends her out to work now. She’s a wonder. All the ladies and girls around fight to have Isabelle come and stay. You know, Lorna can’t stand her. But I’ll send Ike over on one of the mules to fetch her tonight, and she can walk over in the morning and get started. She’s very quick! She earns Mr. LaFrance ever so much money. Papa always talks about it."

"Why can’t Lorna stand her?"

"You’ll have to ask her. Lorna is a deep one, I keep telling you. I go along for months, thinking Lorna is happy and content, and she never says a word, and then! Well, Papa said one more outburst and he wasn’t going to be responsible for what would happen! So I beg Lorna to just let things go sometimes. I couldn’t live without Lorna! When she went with Bella to Saint Louis, I was so envious! I had to pray every day to be a better person. Aren’t these lovely dresses? I loved the nankeen last summer, but they have ever so much money at The Poplars, because Mrs. Harris’s father had the sacking factory, and Mrs. Harris was his only child, she was Miss Darling-ton, and so when she married Mr. Harris, who has a very good farm there, they got it both coming and going, Papa says. So however much Dorothea or Maria likes a dress, well, they still only wear it half a dozen times, if that...."

And so on. Helen was in and out all afternoon, prattling about this and that. She had on a very pretty dress herself, pale-blue sprigged muslin, very light and summery, but neatly made. She had a fine waist, a slender wrist, and a lovely neck. It made me happy to look at her.

Just before dark, there was a to-do on the lawn outside my windows, which I surmised was Papa returning from his journey. I was apprehensive about Papa. Surely he would be more suspicious of a strange woman masquerading as a boy and less moved by my condition than his daughter had been. My room was dark—Lorna had not yet brought a candle—so I moved to the window and looked out. There were seven horses out there, and three Negro boys holding them while the men dismounted. There was talking and laughter and shouting, and then the door below opened and the men disappeared from my sight, coming up the stairs and going underneath the porch roof The three boys and two of the men, who must have been house slaves traveling with the party, led the horses off to the stables. Now I could hear the cheerful noises of the group rising up the stairwell. They tromped about in their boots, called to one another, laughed, smoked strong seegars. Helen’s delighted voice wove itself among their deeper tones, and then everything grew muffled as, I suppose, they went in to their supper. Sometime later, when it was entirely dark, Lorna hastened in with a tray and a candle, but she only put the things down, then scurried out. I was happy enough at that; Delia had certainly done herself proud, for I had a dish of chicken stew with three feathery dumplings and plenty of carrots and peas from the garden, as well as a dish of new blackberries and cream. Everything was hot and utterly savory, and I relished each bite.

Nevertheless, with each passing moment, I grew more apprehensive. The big house rang with the sounds of men who, I suspected, had never restrained themselves. At any rate, I imagined five Roland Breretons below, fully armed, and their behavior circumscribed only by the slenderest thread of good manners. The west was full of men who flashed from raucous merriment to violent anger in a step, a moment, a breath. The signs of one— hilarity, loud talk, grins, knee and back slapping, jocular challenges—were always to be dreaded as signs of the other: anger, resentment, pugnacity. Should they pour up the stairs, knowing by instinct that an abolitionist, a Lawrenceite, a Bay Stater by marriage, was in the house, I thought, I could go out one of the windows and drop to the roof of the porch, and after that, well, there was no telling. I got out of bed and pulled my case closer to me and unclasped the hasps, so that my pistol was within easy reach. I got back under the coverlet.

On the other hand, I was Lyman Arquette no longer. I was a woman in a nightdress in a bed, more than defenseless, as entirely within a protected category as if I sat within a glass dome. Perhaps. It was a nice question— was an abolitionist lady still a lady? As far as I knew, this question remained untested, even in K.T.

It didn’t take long for these musings to transform themselves into others. What if Samson and Chaney were down there? A pistol wasn’t designed only for self-defense, wasn’t designed primarily for self-defense, as everyone in K.T. knew but did not admit. A nightdress billowing about could easily hide a pistol. Men filing out of the dining room, seegars in hand, would hardly be bothered to glance up the staircase, which was half in darkness, anyway. I could scrutinize each one at my leisure as he crossed the hall (would they cross the hall?) from dining room to parlor. There was no knowing the layout, as I hadn’t yet been in the lower story of the house. It gave me a hot chill to imagine such things, and once I had imagined them, I felt a breathless compulsion to act, and yet I did not move. I stayed still, quite rigid, in my bed, staring straight ahead out the window into the dark, with the candle flame curling about its wick at the edge of my gaze.

The noise from below continued, stamping and yelling sometimes, laughter other times, the clanking of crockery, steps from here to there. I would say now that it was the very mysteriousness of it all that kept me in my bed. The idea of Samson and Chaney carousing down below seemed to flash, in my mind, from reality to absurdity, back and forth. I hadn’t the courage to find out, though. I made up my mind that there would be a more opportune moment. I made up my mind that it would be a poor return for Helen’s hospitality to shoot her friends as they were getting up from their supper in her house. I made up my mind that revenge was more complicated than I had thought it would be, but then so was everything else one looks forward to with confidence. Lorna returned for my tray, saying only, "I sure ’nuf hope dat Massa Richard gets rid of dese cronies of his ’fore too late, ’cause I is ready for mah own bed tonight."

I shook off my rigidity. "Thank you for staying up with me these last two nights."

"Well, it waren’t gone to be Missy Helen. Dat’s for sure. But you is all right now. You got you color back. I reckon it didn’t hurt you so much."

"I suppose I’ll know that later."

"Spose so." And she went out.

Some time after that, Helen ran in. She had an evening frock on, of pale-yellow silk, and her hair was elaborately done up in a braided weave. She was smiling but agitated. She exclaimed, "Oh, Louisa, Papa is terrifically eager to meet you, so he sent Ike off right away, and now Ike’s back, and Mr. LaFrance has promised to send Isabelle over in the wagon first thing! Isn’t that splendid? But the other news is so frightening, I hardly dare tell you about it, in your condition, but I am bursting! Papa says not to worry, they won’t get near us, he will hold them off, but—" She began gasping, then sat down on the bed, folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and composed herself. "Papa says Lane’s army in Nebraska, the one he ran away from, was just a ruse, and now he has a whole other one, three or four hundred or more, and he’s been seen in Olathe! Mr. Perkins, who’s down below, knew a man whose cousin saw him himself! You can’t mistake Jim Lane—oh, he is a cruel-looking man, and they say his eyes are dead black until he decides to kill someone, and then they get a strange red light in them! And a man saw him and identified him positively and overheard him say that he was going to move on Missouri now! Oh, my!" She put her hands to her throat. "And Papa and Mr. Harris, he’s down below as well, both say that that’s been the plan all along, that the abolitionist criminals have all along meant to run us off our farms and steal our factories and bring in a lot of Irishmen to work in them for no wages at all, and you know, they never take care of their workers, but when they can’t work, no matter how old they are, they just throw them out on the street to fend for themselves, and Chicago is full of those people, and Saint Louis, too. Bella told me about it in a letter—such a tragedy! But at the same time, it’s so dangerous! And they’ll do anything to a woman, they have no respect for women, beatings and everything unspeakable, and their best men don’t care a pin for it but just step over the bodies in the street and walk right past crying children as if they weren’t Christians at all!"

I dared not laugh at this torrent. I said, "I haven’t heard such things myself. I—"

"But Papa says that we have him, and Ike and Jess and Malachi, and Mr. Harris has twenty or thirty, both at the factory and on the farm, and of course there’s Morgan at home, though he’s only sixteen, and Stephen up at the college, and he would certainly come home, if danger threatened. Mr. Harris’s brothers were in the Texas war and are very bold fellows—but oh, I don’t know how I shall go to sleep! Just imagine, you are sleeping ever so peacefully, and you suddenly awaken in the middle of the night, to find an abolitionist in your room, staring down at you, some Old John Brown sort of person, who isn’t even human, really, but a terrible demon—oh, and you know he’s going to hack you to pieces right there!"