The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (61 page)

Time passed more slowly in the jailroom than ever it had before in either K.T. or Missouri, where time had a way of fleeing. Now there was plenty of time to sense each pain sprout, grow, blossom, and give way to another. Although I didn’t sleep, I did wake up, and each awakening was a shock. Thomas was dead. Yes, dead. The journey was over, and he wasn’t at the end of it, as somehow I’d hoped, expected, imagined he was, without even knowing I was doing so. It is wrong to say that you can watch someone closed in his coffin, put in the ground, and covered over, and not expect him to be there when you turn around. It is wrong to say that you can visit his grave, even kneel upon it and place prairie flowers upon it and have all your associates speak of it as if they know it as his grave, and believe that he is in it. I hadn’t believed that he was in it, or perhaps I wouldn’t have left him there, so far away. Had I had ten years with him, or thirty years, perhaps I would have come to the end of him and let him die, but in only ten months, I had hardly gotten through the beginning of him: the kindness, the air of amusement, the love of myself that never seemed to falter no matter how unwifely, unwomanly, I acted. And then there was his desire to act on principle. All of these things about him I had hardly begun to contemplate. And it is wrong to think, as I sensed others thinking, that a ten-month marriage is only a glancing blow in a woman’s life. With each painful moment there in that jailroom, I felt how much I wouldn’t be getting past that ten months.

I had no child. I supposed that most women I knew would say, considering my circumstances, that this was fortunate. Lorna would have said so; my sisters would have said so. And in the pantheon of dead children, mine was one of the unknowns—his or her face only a speculation, his or her name only a fancy. My child hadn’t had even the tenuous hold on life that Mrs. James’s baby had had. My mother had once told me to think of all my dead brothers and sisters as crystal spirits. The Lord poured His wine into them for a time, and that helped us to see their features, and then, for His own reasons, He poured it out again and took their transparent selves back to Him. I don’t know where she got this idea; possibly from our minister. I hadn’t thought of this image in years, but now, in the jailroom, it haunted me. My child, our child, hadn’t gotten even that far, could have held no wine. Nothing about him or her was revealed. I mourned this mystery as if it were his or her very self. Mrs. Hopewell heard me weeping and came in from time to time to give me cups of tea, apparently gratified by my remorse and my show of womanly feeling.

And Frank was no doubt dead, too, and it was such a grievous thought that thinking it through was beyond my strength.

And what about Lorna? What in the world had made me think I had anything in the way of strength or quick wits to offer Lorna? Our escape had been a fool’s errand from beginning to end. She had looked to me for aid, and I had let her do so, all the time that it was actually me counting on her. It seemed, looking back, that I couldn’t have fled without her, that the luxury and languor of Papa’s plantation would have inexorably gummed me up, immobilized me, and when Lorna claimed me and insisted I help her, she invested me with the power to move. Everyone felt Lorna’s concentrated force—Helen couldn’t do without her, Bella had had to fight her, Papa had to summon all his faculties to assert himself over her, and after acquaintance of only a week or two, I had accepted her as my reviver, felt the cool, firm sensation of her hand on my neck as a promise. It was hard to see Lorna simply, as another desperate woman powerless against the institution of servitude, against Missouri and Kansas and guns and horses and catchers and dogs and distance and lack of funds and chance, but that’s what she was in the end, wasn’t she? And the ways she would have to pay for her mistake in trusting me I would never get to know and always be tempted and terrified to imagine.

It was all very different from the bills we had pored over in Horace’s store, with their pictures of wide streets, square blocks, libraries, mills, stores, and ladies’ improvement societies everywhere. Now, even though I had been to K.T. and seen the chicanery there firsthand, I still didn’t know if those bills were simply wishes or if they were pure frauds, and if the latter, whether someone else had defrauded us or if we had simply defrauded ourselves.

What K.T. and Missouri really were was talk. People in the west made a big house of words for themselves and then lived inside it, in a small room of deeds. And now that I was silent, that didn’t mean the talk didn’t still surge and storm around me. From the other rooms in the jail, from outside, through my window, open or closed, I heard constant shouting, calling, talking (and shooting), day and night. Everyone loved to talk, to boast, to threaten, to claim, to damn, to preen, to narrate, to lie, to pile word upon word, expression upon expression. That’s how Jim Lane got so big in K.T.—he was the best talker. But after you talked for a while, it seemed, you ended up talking yourself into acting. Didn’t matter what side you were on or what your principles were; if you talked about them long enough, well, you had to act on them. Now that I was in jail, I didn’t know what I thought about principles anymore. It seemed as though the main result of having any was dislocation, injury, pain, and death. But of course, that left out Lorna.

Mrs. Hopewell asked me if I was praying enough and should she get the minister over? She knew a good one, who could make the hardest criminal pray like a child. More talk, I thought. I told her I was praying all I could.

Papa elected to drop charges and to pay my way back to Quincy. When the sheriff came to tell me this himself, relief was evident in his face and his manner. He said, "Ma’am, I booked you passage on this boat the Jack Smith.

"You mean it hasn’t left yet?" This gave me a little smile.

"Leaves tonight. But there wasn’t any ladies who wanted to be in a room with ya, so I had to pay double. That was forty-four dollars. Mr. Day, he paid for it. You got yerself any money to git from St. Louis to Quincy?"

"You took the money in my reticule."

"That shall be returned to you in due time, ma’am."

"Well, how much is there?"

" ’Bout thirty-six dollars, ma’am."

"Well, then."

"Well, then, I guess you are fixed up. One little word from me, miss."

"What’s that?"

"Don’t be comin’ back this way, now. You have used up the goodwill of this office here."

"I won’t," I said. And I meant that.

I will pass over the details of my return down the Missouri River. The boat was filled with women and children, mostly Missourians, who were fleeing the Kansas-Missouri war. At any other time, we might have been startled by the various groundings, alarms, stoppages, and rumors of boiler troubles that punctuated our five days aboard, but in fact these mundane incidents were reassuring in a way. To be delayed, to have to get off the boat in the middle of the night, even to contemplate one’s death by boiler explosion, gave one the reassurance of normality when compared to war, the war all of us were leaving our friends to fight. Although I didn’t converse with many others, I did overhear what they had to say, about Atchison’s army and Lane’s army and other armies here and there, all of them, according to rumor, plentifully supplied with weapons, rage, and drink. Under the pressure of these reports, I dreamed so often of Lawrence burning to the ground that I came to wonder if it really had burned, if Louisa was sending me some sign. It was true that after Governor Shannon departed the territory, his second in command, the temporary governor, Woodson, a proslave fellow much admired by the Missourians, immediately declared Kansas Territory in a state of insurrection, which gave license to every Missourian to burn, hang, dismember, clear out, scalp, shoot, tar and feather, and do away with, or at least plan to, anyone not thoroughly sound on the goose question. There was much fear on the boat, some weeping, continuous prayers, and many long faces. Groundings and stoppages and alarms gave us something to do.

All was different in Saint Louis. We arrived early in the morning, and I went straight across the levee and asked after the Mary Ida or the Ida Marie. The Ida Marie was going upriver that very day, and so I paid my ticket and walked about for an hour before going on board. I was unescorted and sunburned, my short hair stuck out from under my Kansas-style bonnet, my nankeen dress showed considerable wear and tear. Even so, it took me a while to realize that I was being stared at, and to recognize that I looked a strange being among the citizens of Saint Louis. For their part, they looked strange to me as well, neat, buttoned up, careful. Suspicious. Quiet. Mannerly. Men carried newspapers that talked about the war, but the business of the town showed no knowledge of it. Business, even the always booming business of the levee, went on at a deliberate, unfrenzied pace. And there was a singular absence of gunshots, of anyone even flourishing a weapon. When I asked a question, where I might find a bite to eat, it was my voice that was too loud, my manner that was too insistent, my request that seemed outlandish. Perhaps it was embarrassing, but, in fact, I was beyond embarrassment now. I suspected that I would never feel truly embarrassed again.

After Papa, Lorna, Mr. Graves, Helen, after Louisa and Charles and Frank and Thomas, after Mrs. Bush and the Jenkinses and the Jameses and all the rest of them, it was calming to travel in what seemed to be a cell of anonymity. I sat in my stateroom or in the lounge. I even strolled on the deck, first of the Jack Smith and then of the Ida Marie. I read no books, having none, and did no needlework, having none of that, either, but kept my healing hands in my lap and looked out at the river, first the Missouri, then the Mississippi. I listened to the other women gossiping and talking to their children, shushing their infants and confiding in one another, ordering their slaves about, if they had them, or deploring those who ordered their slaves about, if they did not. I thought I would never really join that world again, that I could not, nor did I want to. I was a different animal now, a horse among cows, a duck among geese.

My sisters had no knowledge of my homecoming, and so there was no one to greet me when the Ida Marie tied up at dawn on September i and I walked down the plank and onto the soil of Illinois. Quincy’s high bluff put the levee and, indeed, at this time of the day, most of the river into deep shadow. I felt the darkness. Had I gone so far, with such a struggle, and circled back to where I came from, with nothing at all to show for it? Less than nothing? I had indeed. On the other hand, that steep climb up Maine Street from the river was easy for me now.

It was surely only six-thirty or so, and I stood outside Beatrice’s familiar green door for a few minutes before knocking. In former days, I would have walked in. But I knew that this time I might appear as a ghost and give everyone a fright—they needed a knock to know that it was a person outside. I waited and knocked again, then suddenly the door opened, and there, a joy absolute and unexpected in his very person, was my nephew Frank. He had a yellow shirt on, brown trousers, and a green cap pushed back on his head. He had an apple in his hand. He stared at me. I stared at him. We stood like that until Beatrice’s voice from the back of the house called out, "Is there someone at the door? Did someone answer the door? Frank? Where are you?" Then she said, "Well, land o’ mercy! I just yesterday sent that woman in the jail money for you! How did you get here? Lydia, I swear, I am displeased with you—you are nothing but trouble in two states and one territory!" And then she threw her arms around me and burst into tears.

Well, how simple it came to seem once we put it all together! Frank’s story was this: Exactly one day after I left Lawrence with Mr. Graves and Mr. Graves and the fair songstress Davida, a letter arrived for me from Harriet, insisting that Frank return to Quincy, as they had just heard of the sack of Lawrence. This letter was dated at the end of May but had been delayed in a bundle of confiscated mail in Leavenworth for over a month. The day after that, Frank himself turned up in Louisa’s shop, shoeless, hatless, seegarless, horseless, and hungry, looking for me and Thomas; and two days after that, brother Roland himself turned up, with a team of horses, three rifles, two pistols, a knife, two kegs of cornmeal, one of flour, and one of highly rectified whiskey, all of which he had purchased in Weston as a way of financing his search for Frank: upon receiving no reply to Harriet’s letter, he had resolved to take a look for himself He now sold these in Lawrence for a tidy profit, and returned to Westport with Frank in tow. At this point, everyone felt confident that I was on my way to Quincy. Meanwhile, what had happened to Frank was strange enough, even by K.T. standards. He had gotten in with a fellow named George Lambert, who had two brothers with him. With Frank and several other boys, they made up a band of some eight young men, George at twenty-five or so the eldest. The Lamberts said at first that they were Emigrant Aid Company folks and that they knew Old Brown and meant to find him down in Osawatomie and join his army. While they rode around for six weeks, they never met up with Brown (a good thing, because Brown got into a few deadly battles). After a while, it turned out that Lambert and his brothers were really Mormons and had spent the previous winter out in Utah Territory but had been kicked out for some reason, Frank thought for stealing some money. Guerrilla conditions were of the most basic sort—none of the boys knew how to hunt except Frank, and then the horses got into some sort of poisonous plant and three of them died, including Frank’s mount. Of his companions, Frank only said, "They didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They never even looked around for anything to pick up to trade and sell. I don’t know. I was pretty disgusted, myself. When I had to walk back to Lawrence, I ate better than when we rode around takin’ stuff." He promised faithfully to attend school when he got back to Quincy. This was why he was presently with Beatrice, in town. Horace walked him to school and delivered him right into the hands of the schoolmaster every day and received him from those same hands every afternoon. Otherwise, Frank employed himself under Horace’s direction at his store. They did not talk about Kansas.