The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  "What you might say is that we are buying him off." The two chuckled together. "At any rate, my dear," continued Dorothea, "we have no family, so we are always tempted to spend too much on our own amusement, so say no more!"

  Mrs. Evelyn said no more but did pat her pocket in a wondering fashion. Not long after that, Mr. Newton appeared at the door of the ladies’ cabin and declared that we were passing the mouth of the great Missouri River and that I should come to the railing and see what those waters had brought from the west. We all hastily put away our work and went to the door. I saw Miss Annabelle look Mr. Newton up and down. He helped her over the threshold, then held out his hand for Miss Dorothea. She thanked him. I was pleased to observe that the two Misses Tonkin seemed favorably impressed with my new husband.

  It was close to dusk, but I could see that my familiar Mississippi had changed considerably and now ran much faster and browner. Had I imagined some sort of turbulent rush, a wall of water pouring over our river as over a floor, I was mistaken. The river only widened into a broader sheet, rimmed by a low fringe of trees. Mr. Newton stared as if he had never seen such a thing, and finally said, "My dear, I’ve read many an account of these rivers, and I’ve talked to many men who’ve made this journey, but I confess I am unprepared for the somberness of it. I expected to feel gratified and enlarged by the knowledge of the distance these waters have come. I find it oppressive." The dull red glare off the flat expanse had the same effect on me, and I realized only with difficulty that the glare was just the reflection of the setting sun. It passed in moments, but then the darkness seemed to filter up from the water into the trees. The lights of our boat, including the better-to-be-forgotten lurid reflection of the firing of the boiler, lay dimly over the opaque water. We weren’t alone in being subdued by the sights. Only a couple of drunk men continued to laugh and shout. Finally, they flung their empty bottle in a wide arc over the railing and cursed the fact that they had drunk everything they had with them. Mr. Newton walked all of the ladies back to the door of the ladies’ cabin. It was disturbing to hear the two lonely voices of those men cursing and braying against the noise of the boat and the splash of the water.

  Back in the ladies’ cabin, the lamps had been lit, and they cast a dim but pleasant glow over the papered wall and the few curtained cubicles that functioned as staterooms on this small packet. It was too dim for me to work, but the two sisters needed little light, as they didn’t watch their knitting anyway, only counted the stitches and turned their work. Mrs. Evelyn seemed subdued by the gloom. Her daughter leaned against her. Sometime later, we heard a great shouting, and the clamor of feet upon the deck told us that we had arrived in Saint Louis.

  Miss Annabelle put her hand on my wrist as I moved to rise from my chair. She said, "If you’ll pardon me for making a personal observation, my dear, I must say that you seem a young woman of uncommon self-possession and fortitude. So many of these young wives we see, well..." Her voice faded as if ruefully. "The adventure is for the men, my dear; that’s the way of it here in the west."

  I said that this was surely true. But I didn’t mean it.

  CHAPTER 5

  I Am Much Daunted by New Experiences

  But, as society gradually shakes off the remnants of barbarism, and the intellectual and moral interests of man rise, in estimation, above the merely sensual, a truer estimate is formed of woman’s duties, and of the measure of intellect reguisite for the proper discharge of them. —p. 156

  THE TUMULT OF THE LEVEE at Saint Louis burst upon my sight, unlike anything I had ever seen before. Our boat was undeniably moving toward the land, but the water was so dark and so crowded with other boats that it seemed to be magically pressing itself through a tangle of decks and railings and chimneys and freight. Above the waterline, all was alight with great lamps on poles and torches and fires, and there were as many people about as if it were broad day. We made our way through a thick field of boats, large and small, glorious and humble, empty and full, busy and quiet, among them the most famous Saint Louis—Pittsburgh packet, the Allegheny Queen, which just that summer had won a race from Cincinnati to New Orleans, jostling with the most famous Saint Louis-New Orleans packet, the Paul Revere, whose railings on the passenger deck gleamed with gold in the flickering light. Their names were clearly painted in ornate script on the wheel housings, and I told Mr. Newton what I had heard of each one in Horace Silk’s store, where talk of the best steamboats and their pilots and captains and owners came second only to talk of Kansas. We passed two steam-wreck salvage boats that lay side by side among the others, giant flat platforms on two hulls with a great complex framework like a metal forest that rose into the dark night. Mr. Newton stared at them in perplexity. I said, "That’s what they use to raise exploded hulks from the bottom. Otherwise, the river would fill up end to end and bank to bank with wrecks." One of these, or a vessel just like it, had raised a wreck upstream from Quincy earlier in the summer. My cousin Frank had been the first boy at the scene, pushing himself forward to see, he said, what crinolines and combs and corpses he might be able to catch a glimpse of.

  Where the river ended and the land began, the boats gave way to horses and drays and piles of freight, but there was as little room amongst all of these as there was between the boats. Everywhere, every human, animal, and machine was making as much noise as possible—the blowing of horns and ringing of bells and belching of steam formed the background to the shouts of the mates and the draymen to stand aside, or hand it over, or move it this way, or coming through, or watch the lines, or careful of the horses! The horses stamped and jingled their harness and whinnied and snorted; their carts and wagons and carriages and drays creaked under the thumps of the boxes and bales and people loaded onto them. Always there was shouting. Boys younger than Frank, black and white, looked as full of business as the white-haired men: "Planter’s House! Baggage wagon here!" (The Misses Tonkin solicited the attention of that well-dressed porter, and he recognized them with a happy smile.) "The George M. Hardy! Leaving at first light for the Falls of Saint Anthony! One of the foremost sights of the known world! Embark tonight for a convenience!" "New Orleans in five short days! The Arkansas Hopeful is the fastest boat in the west! Sixteen dollars!" "Newspaper! The Missouri Democrat! Tomorrow’s news tonight!"

  We were hardly out of our cabin and had only begun pushing our way through the mob trying to get onto the Mary Ida, when I saw that they had begun unloading the freight. Seeing this, too, Mr. Newton began urging me through the crowd with some insistence, his one hand grasping my elbow tightly and his other arm outstretched. A few men scowled at us as they gave way, and one muttered, "Boat must be about to explode! Save yourself, brother!" as I was hurried past, but then all we did on the levee was stand there as the boxes came off the boat. Almost the very last was the one Mr. Newton was waiting for, and when he saw it, he relaxed.

  This box, with our two small bags, he directed to accompany us to the Vandeventer House. The others were to be loaded onto the Independence for passage to Kansas. I must say that what had seemed a vast pile of baggage when we left Quincy now seemed but a paltry collection of trinkets easily dragged away by the (no doubt) sneering draymen. Kansas! Kansas! If busy Saint Louis was so vast and frightening, how much more so the solitudes of Kansas!

  I WILL PASS OVER our ride through the busy streets and my impression of the Vandeventer House. If I were to linger over everything new, I would prolong my story far past the reader’s patience. Suffice it to say that all things were fresh to me, and the moments, which passed slowly, were full of shock, interest, and some fear. I sensed that Mr. Newton, too, felt more strange than he expected to, and more tempted by dread and low spirits. From time to time, we exchanged a glance. I could hardly see his face in the darkness, yet I knew he was full of wonder at how little we had foreseen, he had foreseen, the consequences of our impulses. I said to him in a low voice, "We are true Americans now, husband. We don’t know where we are going or what for, nor do we know a
nyone we’re traveling with. But we’re perfectly certain it will all turn out best in the end."

  He took my fingers in his and spread them apart, staring at my hand as at a strange and wonderful object. At last, he said, "Better than Quincy?"

  "Already better than Quincy."

  The conviction of my reply perked him up, and I saw for the first time that I wasn’t merely to follow him to Kansas but was sometimes to lead him. My husband was less sure of himself than my suitor had been.

  In our room at the Vandeventer House, he set our little carpet bags by the door and the large, heavy box, which he’d carried up the stairs with the heaving and groaning help of the porter, between the bed and the window.

  There were two chairs beside the window, and after I took off my bonnet, Mr. Newton led me to one of them and sat himself in the other. We rocked back and forth without speaking. We had the bridal room, which meant that no one else was sleeping in our room with us, though should our departure be delayed, we would have to move the next day. The bridal rooms in Saint Louis were in such demand that you could have one to yourself only for one night, or so they told us at the Vandeventer House.

  After some minutes, Mr. Newton said, "Did your sisters speak to you about marriage?"

  "They told me what they knew."

  "What was that?"

  "Harriet said if at all possible not to allow you to fire guns in the house, but if I had to give way on this point, to draw the line at pistols, but absolutely not to allow horses into the better rooms, because sometimes they panic and damage your good furniture. She learned her lesson the hard way with a two-year-old colt Roland had—"

  Mr. Newton began laughing.

  "Well, he did kick to pieces a very nice lowboy she had, with a shell design on the drawer fronts ..." I cleared my throat. "And Alice told me that my husband would figure very significantly in the conception of children, but she couldn’t bring herself to describe exactly how. She just said that I would be better off if I kept a table between us at all times, especially early on in the marriage. Another tactic was to always have a cup of hot tea in my hands, day and night. Those were her words exactly. Day and night."

  I laughed, too.

  "And Beatrice said that every town in America had lots of clubs and public betterment organizations, so that if you played your cards right, you could spend an evening with your husband maybe once or twice a year and have the rest of your time to yourself ...."

  "You’re making these things up!"

  "Do you have anything to add, Mr. Newton?"

  "My dear, I am as ignorant as you."

  "Then," I said, "I suppose we’d better not worry about it."

  "Miss Dorothea Tonkin gave me some advice."

  "What was that?"

  "To always let you do as you please and to never require you to ask for money."

  "I didn’t see you two speaking."

  "I vowed to do as she suggested."

  Now I fell silent, a bit startled.

  "She said, ’Your wife is the sort of young woman who will always be thoughtful and prudent, and so you need not prove your authority over her by means of undesirable constraints.’ "

  "I hope that she knows me better with our short acquaintance than my sisters do after twenty years, because they would hardly agree." I didn’t know that I agreed with this kind assessment, either, but I held my tongue. Of course, later events tested my prudence considerably.

  He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that my sisters were so long gone as to be of very little import. And it was true. In all the time from that day to this, my sisters have never seemed so far behind me as they did that night in the Vandeventer House.

  I found Mr. Newton a remarkably pleasant and agreeable man, more so with every passing hour.

  The next morning, after we had dressed and taken our first marital breakfast and been informed by the porter that we would have to vacate our room before ten, Mr. Newton led me by the hand over to the heavy box, and as I stood there, he pried off the lid. I can’t say that I understood at first what I was seeing, so unexpected was it. I looked at Thomas, then back into the box. They were still there, gleaming as darkly as before in the rays of morning sunlight. Impulsively, I stepped to the window and drew the shade. I said, "Have you had these with you all these weeks? Since before we met?"

  "I have."

  "Does anyone know about them?"

  "My friends in Kansas have been waiting for them these four weeks."

  "How many are there?"

  "Twelve."

  I looked at them again. They of course didn’t move, but they seemed alive. He said, "Sharps rifles. Twelve Sharps rifles."

  I said, "Their barrels are very short."

  "They’re carbines." Then: "Can you really shoot? Frank said you can."

  "Will I be required to?"

  He didn’t answer that. "I haven’t heard from my friends, but the newspapers I’ve seen around here today run pretty hot. Of course, you never know what they’re putting in just to work people up."

  "I can shoot a bottle or a pumpkin. Frank and I did that."

  We were silent for a moment, looking at the short black barrels of the weapons, then he slipped his arm about my waist. He said, "When I set out from Massachusetts, I knew these might put me in danger once I got near Kansas. The danger isn’t going to be any less just because I found a wife on the way."

  "Oh, it might be," I said, "if I look sufficiently girlish and you seem sufficiently callow. My goodness me, just what are those ugly things? How did they get mixed up with my quilts and feather beds? I thought we’d ordered a stove!"

  "I calculated in the night that we can still go back up the river and cross through Iowa and Nebraska and then turn south."

  "I thought we were in a tremendous hurry. September first is in three days."

  "It’s a dilemma. In Quincy, I estimated the danger as rather small, but here in slave country, with what the Missouri papers are saying—"

  "You’re too used to looking and acting like an abolitionist. Do what Roland Brereton does: smile at the Negro children and frown severely at the men and women, as if you are ruminating over some soon-to-be-deserved punishment, and you’ll fit in perfectly. You mustn’t be eager to befriend the porters and the draymen and the serving maids, or to make it up to them that they live in bondage. It’s one thing to be an abolitionist passing through Missouri, and it’s quite another to be an abolitionist passing through Missouri with twelve Sharps rifles."

  He nodded, then pulled me more tightly against him. My tone of course was light, but I wasn’t happy by any means about our baggage.

  He nailed the lid back on the box. An hour later, I watched it being carried aboard the Independence with as much apparent indifference as if it contained the "harness" that was written on the side.

  Travel up the Missouri was slower and more distressing than travel down the Mississippi. I had plenty of time to ponder the rifles Thomas was transporting to his friends in Kansas, people I had not met but whom I’d imagined as a small group of aspiring farmers whose ambitions ran to a few head of cattle and horses, a few acres of corn and flax. That they shared his abolitionist feelings I’d taken as evidence of benignity and charitableness—my sister Miriam, after all, though peppery and uncommonly plainspoken, was the kindest person I’d ever met, the only truly kind person in our family, if kindness could be defined as eagerness to do good in things large and small whether that goodness accrued to one’s own benefit or not. When Roland Brereton made of abolitionists great demons of aggression whose first delights were stealing Negroes and killing their owners, and, if that wasn’t possible, forcing the Congress and the states to pass laws that would do the same thing with less fun about it, I thought of Miriam and of Roger Howell or of "poor Dr. Eels," who suffered so for his beliefs. I’d thought Roland saw the dark shadow of his own self in those supposed abolitionists. It was Roland, after all, who said from time to time that folks were going to bring slavery back
to Illinois, mark his words, and everybody would be the better for it, not only the poor niggers. After one of these speeches, Harriet would roll her eyes and whisper, "He doesn’t mean that! He’s harmless as a baby!"

  But now I’d seen those rifles, rifles I had heard of, that were made in New England and coveted by everyone for their pinhole accuracy. It’s a fact that no bride knows what layers are in her groom, that every wedding is a lottery, too. All weddings are alike in that. But it was also true that with my money from the sale of my father’s house in my pocket, I’d seen what I wanted to see in Mr. Thomas Newton. Those rifles that I didn’t like to think of were part of my bridal portion, and I dared not speak about it, even to Thomas.

  Thomas, himself, continued agreeable and affectionate. We shared a tiny stateroom off the ladies’cabin, and each evening he came to me about ten o’clock. We also made it a point to take our meals together, but the customs of travel made it difficult for us to begin experiencing any prolonged marital intimacy. I did see that apart from me, Thomas seemed not to be establishing much acquaintance on the boat. When I asked him about it, he smiled and said that at one end of the men’s saloon, the gamblers were fleecing the emigrants, and at the other end, there was much praying going on, and it was interesting to observe, he said, which of the prospective settlers regularly made their way between the two enterprises. But apart from these observations, he had some books to read, and spending his daylight hours sitting beside the aft rail of the hurricane deck improving his time in this quiet fashion would prepare him best for the weeks and months of hard work to come.

  There were a dozen or so ladies taking passage in the ladies’ cabin, and many more taking deck passage below. We were a widely assorted bunch, and there were a few I might have spoken to more readily if I hadn’t been so mindful of those rifles. Four of the women were going to Kansas, and two of these had small children. Each of the four was from a different place: One woman and her husband and two sons were coming from Pennsylvania; another was traveling from Louisville, Kentucky. A very small young woman, whose baby looked sickly, had come all the way from Nova Scotia, in Canada, to meet her husband, who was an American and waiting for her in Leavenworth. A girl of about my age had lived four years in Saint Louis with cousins but had come originally from Bavaria. She had more cousins in Kansas, including one young man whom it was expected that she would marry. She tatted without ceasing, the lace rolling out from between her fingers as if from a machine. She smiled all the time, too, the way foreigners do, but when she spoke, it was almost without accent. Under different circumstances, I thought, I could have made a friend of her.