The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (53 page)

I had just about regained my composure when she said, "Oh, unless you mean Samson Perkins. His nephew is named Samson, too, though they call him Sam. And Chaney Smith is their friend. He’s rather a rough character, and Papa doesn’t really like him, but he’s never done anything to require Papa denying him the house. We’ve heard things— What’s the matter?"

By now I was lying back on the bed, as weak and faint as ever I’d felt in my life. The shock of knowing that Samson and Chaney were at hand, and had been in the house a few nights before, was more than I could stand. The fact is that ahead of time, you always think you are going to approach something gradually, with plenty of time and foresight to prepare yourself, but really everything is sudden, even those things you expect.

I saw that I might miss my chance if I didn’t improve upon the evening’s opportunity. To Helen, I said, "I think the heat must be affecting me. I didn’t nap at all this afternoon."

"Oh, you must, then. Now that you have that green gown to wear, you’ll be having supper with us, and it will be so lively! You certainly should rest beforehand. I had a lovely nap, and I feel so fresh! The heat isn’t bothering me at all!"

Thus dismissed, I went to my room and closed the door. After sitting on my bed for a minute, I leaned down and dragged my case out and opened it. There wasn’t much in it except the pistol, a tin of percussion caps, and some cartridges I had made weeks before and wrapped in a square of cloth. Here is what I did: I loaded the cartridges, six of them, into the cylinder. Then I loaded six percussion caps onto the cones. Then I laid the weapon on the neatly made bed and gazed at it for a long time. Everything about the black dragoon proclaimed something new, something entirely different from what had gone before. Thought had gone into its engineering, but no flourishes had gone into its decoration. It was not to be, as many guns I had seen over the years were, picked up and admired, even fondled. Men, I knew, named their rifles, cleaned and oiled them with pleasure, took as much pride in their workmanship as they might in a fine dog or a graceful picture. The black dragoon didn’t invite that: it was so manufactured, so purely an object designed for a particular use—killing men—that it was impossible to feel affection for it. But with all that, here it was, and across the hall or across the best parlor, it was certainly capable of doing the required damage to Samson Perkins, his nephew Sam, and their friend Chaney Smith, especially if I took them by surprise, which I intended to do. How I imagined it was this: Their faces, the very ones I had seen on the Lawrence road, would turn and look at me just as they had that day, but this time I would raise my black dragoon and fire right into their laughter.

I turned my gaze from the gun on the bed and looked around the room. The windows looked outward; from where I was sitting, I could see only the tops of a few trees and the sky, which was hazy with heat. Even though I had made my own bed and hung up my clothes, Lorna had filled my pitcher, taken away the chamber pot, and pushed the net bed curtains back, not forgetting to arrange them in a graceful drape. The bureau was polished, and its small mirror shone. The pictures on the walls, of flowers and girls in white dresses standing in gardens, were pleasing enough, if a tad over-English and silly.

I looked at the gun again, dark against the white counterpane. The afternoon was drawing on, and soon enough I would hear the clatter of men and horses coming in. My plan was simple enough; if you were intending to commit what those around you considered a crime, but were not intending to get away with it, then that reduced the number of contingencies that you were required to foresee. I went around the bed to the lit- tle table where Thomas’s watch lay, and picked it up. It was warm because the long rays of the sun had been shining on it, but the warmth seemed to come from somewhere else. I let myself think that it came from Thomas himself. I held it in my hand, stared out the window at the sky, and waited.

CHAPTER 24

I Am Doubly Surprised

Those, only, who are free from care and anxiety, and whose minds are mainly occupied by cheerful emotions, are at full liberty to unveil their feelings. —p. 137-38

I DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT LONG, but as I was caught in a dreamlike state somewhere between panic and anticipation, it seemed both all too long and all too short. Only four of the men and their horses came up to the house; the rest went directly to the stables. While these four men stood with their animals and waited for Ike or someone else to come receive them, they blustered among themselves about their prowess and their intentions. Their voices were deep and carried through the open window, and all spoke in those half-belligerent, half-joking tones that Missourians seemed to specialize in.

"Them d— black abolitionists an’t seen nothin’ till they try to get our niggers. We’ll turn their heads around and show’em their own backs, haw haw!"

"H—, back when I was in Ohio a year ago, if only I’d known they was coming our way! I woulda forestalled a few, I’ll tell ya!"

"I hate goin’ back there! They always look at ya like you’re gonna eat with your knife and an’t never seen a winder before! And then, when ya go to write something, their d— eyebrows go up with every word you write."

"I jes’ stick my tongue between my lips like I ken barely form the letters, then I laugh!"

"Time for laughin’ is past, boys! I say, let ’em come!"

I looked at the pistol on the bed and reflected upon the contrast between these men, among them Thomas’s killers, and Thomas himself. That is the worst agony of a murder: that the worthy man has died and unworthy ones continue to live. The crude boasting and bragging of these four affected me like blows and left me breathless. Someone came and took away their horses, and then they came into the house. I could hear them laughing and stomping below, then I heard Helen’s voice, and then I heard Papa’s. I went over to the chest and picked up the towel Lorna had placed there for me and wiped my face with it, then I wrapped it around the pistol, leaving only the tip of the barrel showing and two inches or so of the stock. It was hard to keep in place, and I looked around the room for something to tie it, but there was nothing, unless I should elect to tear a strip off the bed curtains—but there was Helen’s knock. I sat down on the bed and arranged my skirt over the wrapped gun. Helen entered with a smile. "Are you feeling any better? They’re a little exuberant today. As Papa would say, they haven’t gone without refreshment. But Delia made a lovely supper. Lots of cucumbers!"

I pulled the pistol close to myself and stood up as gracefully as possible. Actually, it wasn’t heavy, and once I was standing, I had no trouble concealing it. I said, "Are they all here, then?"

"I think so. Lorna had to set another place for Mr. Lafayette. He’s very old! I can’t believe he’s still drilling, but Papa says he won’t give up! Oh, my, he hates the abolitionists. He came from Mississippi, you know. One of the best families in Tupelo, I’m told, but he’s ever so old. Shh. He’s right there!" We came down to the landing and looked over the banister at a tall, thin man with a hatchet face and a mane of white hair. A broadsword in a scabbard hung at his side, and he affected extremely large spurs. Another man joined him, clapped him on the back, and shouted in his ear: "That’s quite a mount you’ve got, Lafayette. Want to sell ’im to someone who can actually ride ’im?"

"I’ll shoot the beast first, Chesbrough! Do ’im a kindness that way!" They laughed. Others crowded in, jangling and clanking. Almost everyone, it appeared, was wearing a sword, and now I saw the rifles jumbled against the wall by the front door with their ramrods. Some of them looked seventy-five or a hundred years old, designed to go with knee britches and pigtails. I expected, of course, that the Samsons and Chaney would present themselves, perhaps that they would light up on their own, like paper lanterns with candles in them, but all the men were alike— equally strange to me, equally familiar with one another. The only one I recognized was Papa, who hopped among the others like a robin among crows, herding them with little pokes and prods toward the dining room. I felt the pistol through my dress and pulled back the hammer with my thumb. Then I said to Helen, "Where are Mr. Perkins and Mr. Smith?"

She whispered, "Mr. Smith is the one in the blue vest just coming out of the parlor, and Perkins is looking right at us. Hello, Mr. Perkins," she caroled. I looked at Perkins with a bright, deflective smile firmly fixed to my face. I looked at him straight, and I looked at him for a very long, careful moment. My finger eased around the trigger of the pistol. Samson Perkins saw Helen, then me, and smiled at us. I noticed that his teeth were white, and that he had all of them. I had never seen him before in my life.

Then I looked at Chaney Smith. For someone reputed to be a rough character, he looked benign enough—rather fat and soft, almost good-humored about the eyes. He wore a pince-nez, which he took off and polished while he waited for the other men to get through the doorway into the dining room.

The boy came closest. He had a round white face with a disgruntled look on it, and a shock of dirty blond hair. No mustaches or whiskers of any kind. Had I been pressed, I would have said that he looked rather like I had as a boy. He was not prepossessing in any way, but was he the boy who had shot Jeremiah in the neck and then laughed about it? In a hundred years, I could not have said for sure. I felt the pistol begin to slip out of my grasp and grabbed it, but my finger missed the trigger, and it did not go off. Helen gave me a startled look and said, "What on earth?" and I said, "I’ll be right down," then spun on my heel and ran up the stairs to my room, where I closed the door, removed the cartridges from their chambers, and thrust the pistol under the bed. Then I ran out of the room and down the stairs.

I hardly remember this supper. I do not know how many men ate with us, or what we ate. I do know that Helen sat far away from me, at the other end of the table, which had been pulled out to its full length. Papa seemed in high spirits. There was a great deal of talk about what the abolitionists had done, would do, couldn’t do, should be obliged to suffer, and would find out about. I don’t remember any of it. There were many men at the table, perhaps a dozen. I scrutinized each of their faces with a rudeness allowed only to a woman. Maybe, I thought, if Chaney Smith and Samson Perkins weren’t the culprits, I would recognize someone else. Stranger things had happened, had they not? And then there was this—the bartender in Kansas City had told me that "Chaney and Samson" were boasting about killing someone. If not Thomas, then whom? But in fact, I didn’t care about that unknown whom. I cared about Thomas. Revenge was too frightening to be abstract; it had to be most particular and careful. I attempted to construe every face into one I had seen, but it was simply impossible, and of course, very soon, I lost the moment, as we ate our supper and each face became familiar. I thought of shooting them anyway, or some of them, those who talked in the most boasting, hateful way: "Oughta burn ’em out now!" "Shoulda done it months ago, when we had the chance!" "Some folks wouldn’t hear of it, but they was dead wrong!" "I say, and I always did say, jest shoot the d— black abolitionists as they come up the river. You kin tell who they are at a hundred yards, and pick ’em off at that distance, too, if you’re any kind o’ shot!" (Much laughter.) It went round and round as they worked themselves up to ever higher degrees of indignation, with Helen and me exchanging a glance every so often. The company got rowdier and rowdier, and finally Papa gave Helen the signal that she could escape, and we smiled and curtseyed our way out of the room.

"Now," she whispered at the bottom of the stairs, "we go up and lock ourselves in my room, as you never know what might happen, and although, of course, everyone respects Papa more than anyone, and listens to him, and he and Mr. Harris wouldn’t let anything get out of hand, still, you never know. Papa and Mr. Harris aren’t as young as some of the others, and maybe you’ve noticed that Papa is rather on the small side."

I thought of the pistol under my bed and said, "Get your work, and we’ll go into my room. It isn’t directly over either the dining room or the parlor. And bring your nightdress and wrapper, too."

We went up.

We went to bed.

Helen fell asleep, always sure in her heart that she was safe.

Papa got the men off in a clatter of hoofbeats and threats against the north.

Papa mounted the stairs and went into his own room.

I reflected upon the failure of my project.

It was easy now to follow the thread of failure back through the last weeks and months, as easy as following a red thread through a blue weave. It was easy to see that all the circumstances that had seemed to point me here, to this house, tonight, to this fateful act of justice, had been nothing at all, just a jumble of chance encounters, wishful steps, ignorant certainties. It was easy to see that the world I saw bearing down on me and directing me had in fact issued out of me. I had been the light that, shining upward upon the random branches in the forest canopy, transformed them into a net. It was so easy to see this that I lay there lost in astonishment that I had been so foolish, but also lost in astonishment, fresh astonishment, that it had all happened, even that Thomas was dead, even that I had ever married, left Quincy, gone to Kansas. I had a sensation of waking up from everything in my life and finding it chimerical, the only reality being my fleshly person, my skin against my nightdress, my hand on my forehead. Where was I? What was I doing? The only answers I had were ones I couldn’t believe: I was in Missouri, which was at war with Kansas; I, who had cared little about the slavery question, had become an abolitionist; the girl sleeping in bed beside me was someone I had not known the existence of a short time before; I had had a love, and he was dead; the dearest companion of my youth, my nephew Frank, had been lost, and I’d hardly even noticed. Such things had no existence within the realm of possibility. Only if Samson and Chaney had proved to be Samson and Chaney would it have all held together in a sensible fashion, but they had not and it had not.

Furthermore, I would not be shot or carried off to jail, but would have to find my own way out of this ... whatever you might call it, into someplace more recognizable.

I lay awake all night, and at dawn was still awake when Helen stirred beside me, sat up, and said, "My goodness, I don’t know which is worse, the attackers or the defenders. But you must never tell Papa I said such a thing! I expect he would think that I’m full of such rebellious thoughts! Well, perhaps I am."

She turned and looked at me. "You know," she said, "I’m not going to let you keep all your thoughts to yourself forever. I’m much too inquisitive for that. And as I get to like you more and more, it gets harder and harder not to know you!"

I said, "I’ll tell you one thing right now, Helen. But only one. You may ask any question."

Now the look on her pretty, fresh face grew positively impish, and she took the tip of her blond braid in her fingers, bit it speculatively, then threw it over her shoulder. She said, "How did you meet your husband?"

I laughed out loud and said, "He was visiting a neighbor, and the neighbor came by to show him off to my brother-in-law, to try to start a fight, but my brother-in-law wasn’t home, so they sat with my sister and me for a while. I thought he was plain-looking and a little gawky, but then I got to know him better."

"May I ask any more questions?"

"Not now."

"Tonight?"

I shook my head.

"Tomorrow?"

I nodded.

"First thing in the morning?"

"I suppose so."

"Lorna thinks she knows you."

"Why do you say that?"

"I heard her telling Delia."

"Has she ever been to Kansas"— I stumbled—"City?"

"Goodness, no."

Well, of course not. I had seen only one or two Negroes in K.T., had I not? "I must look like someone else she knows."

"I reckon. But I may ask another question tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"I have a whole day to think of one, then."

But her thoughts were still running on the same subject, because as we rose for the day and went about our morning ablutions, she broke out in a wail. "Louisa! Now you see my difficulty, don’t you? Those men who were here last night, those are the best men we know! All of them have property, some of them have a great deal of property, and they truly think like we do about all the great issues. Not everyone does! There are quite a few around here who aren’t strictly abolitionists, you know, or who don’t care one way or another about the institution, but they can’t afford slaves or don’t have them. You should see how they live! The wives and children work right alongside the men, dawn to dusk every day. And they live all jumbled together in little houses or even cabins, and they don’t have any nice dresses to wear, and no occasion to wear them, because they have no amusements! They just go to dirty little churches every Sunday, all day, and bring along dishes that they’ve made, and eat together sitting on a blanket, and how amusing is that? And they have ever so many children, because they need lots of people to work, and you know that when you keep having ever so many children, some of them die, and that’s horrible, and then the mother dies from having so many, and then the father marries again, and it starts all over. Did you know that that devil John Brown has twenty-seven children? That’s a very low way of doing things, like an animal! And then they try to tell us that God prefers that sort of life to this!" She swept her hand toward the windows and the front lawn. "How could He possibly prefer such a life for us, if He loves us?"