The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  "You hear what some boys did up in Atchison?" I couldn’t see the speaker, who pronounced the name of the town "Atchinson." He laughed. "They got this black abolitionist who was trying to sneak out of the territory, back to that Boston hellhole he come from, and he was going around town saying some things, you know, black abolitionist buncombe, and they lashed him to a couple of cottonwood poles and pushed him out into the river and told him if he lived he’d be sorry, and if he lived and come back there, they’d kill him some other way!" A lot of laughter greeted this tale.

  "Kill every one o’ them treasonous scoundrels, you ask me. What are they doing coming out here? They got no business out here!"

  "Well, one more of ’em knows that now. Just shoot ’em as they get off the boat, I say. Bam bam bam, like ducks on a pond. We’d be better off, and them too!"

  "Kill’em for their own good!" This was followed by considerable hilarity, as every man in the lower story appreciated the witticism. Thomas’s optimism had not prepared me to hear the expression of such sentiments, and I was much dismayed by them. I turned my face into the pillow I had made of my petticoat. After a moment, the woman next to me, who I’d thought was asleep, said in a whisper, "The only real danger is if they get drunk and start shooting through the floor and all, but Laster, that’s the owner, he can generally push ’em out before they get that far." She spoke with a decided Kentucky or Arkansas pronunciation, so I didn’t answer her for fear of identifying myself with my first word. She smiled. I smiled. I thought I would never go to sleep, but the next thing I knew was a mighty rustling and stamping, as everyone got up with the sun pouring through the walls and started pulling on boots. There was a small basin for washing, and beside it a large pitcher with a little brown water in the bottom. Above these, a mirror hung on the wall and beside it a single comb and a single cloth. Long dirty hairs hung from the comb. I went downstairs and outside. Thomas, whom I hadn’t seen anywhere in the sleeping area, was talking to a man in a large slouch hat at the foot of the ramp. When I came up to them, he said to me, "David Graves, here, has a wagon and has agreed to carry our boxes as far as Lawrence."

  "If you’re going to Lawrence," said Mr. Graves, "you’ll be wanting to go on to Big Spring I’ll bet."

  "Why is that?" said Thomas.

  "Well, they got doings up there in a day or two. Now, I may be one hundred percent sound on the goose question, but I been around, and I know that not everyone can be like me. You know, there’s two types of folks around here. One wants to have things go their way, and the other just wants to see what happens. My guess is that you are a man of the first type, while I am a man of the second type. I can get along with you." Mr. Graves gave a huge laugh, a huge expectoration, and a huge belch, then he walked off to find his mules and his wagon.

  Thomas took my arm as we walked a little ways down the "street."

  "In Lawrence, we’ll find where my friends have gone and what sort of claim they’ve got for me."

  "What are the doings in Big Spring? Where’s that?"

  "I suppose it’s farther up the territory. I heard a lot of talk last night."

  "I did, too, about lashing some abolitionist to a log and—"

  "Tarring and feathering, too. And killings."

  We thought simultaneously of the "harness."

  He said, "I’ve checked our boxes at the steamboat landing. Untouched."

  "The harness stays in Lawrence, then?"

  I could have sworn that Thomas nodded frankly in answer to this question, because it was my fixed impression that soon, very soon, we would be relieved of its burden and confirmed in our simple identity as a newly married couple intending to settle in Kansas, drawn by the salubrious climate and the numerous improvements to towns and homesteads already achieved by the hard work and enterprise of settlers whose only goal in life was to welcome the rest of us and smooth our paths. But perhaps my impression was wrong, because as we turned back to the Humphry House to find our breakfast, I was shocked by the sight of some men coming out of the door carrying a long plank covered with a blanket, under which I could easily make out the form of a man, and whatever feelings of mystery I felt were at once dispelled by the sight of the dark-haired woman I had seen the day before, picking her way down the ramp behind the bearers. She looked as pale and exhausted as she had at her nursing, but more resolute and less confused. We stepped aside, and they passed us. I heard her say to the bearer nearest her, "I heard that the Independence goes downriver tomorrow, and I mean to be on her. In a week I mean to be in New York State, and a few days after that in Connecticut, where we started out when we got married five years ago and more. I’ve been in five states and I’ve buried one of my babies in every one of them, and after I bury him over in Kansas, that will be six, and I can be done with it."

  "You can find a husband around here, no trouble."

  "Any husband around here is already looking west, no matter what he says. One husband looking west is enough for a lifetime."

  "Well, you’re right," said her interlocutor.

  I put my hand through Thomas’s arm a little more firmly, and we made our way up the ramp. I had been hungry, as we’d had nothing to eat since before disembarking from the Independence the day before, but as we sat down, I found that my appetite had vanished, or, perhaps, had been displaced by the starkest terror. I looked at the food before me—a dish of pork, a dish of corn bread, a dish of pickles, and other dishes, too—and I looked at the strange faces around me, Thomas’s being not the least strange, but perhaps the most. I looked at the flimsy walls of the Humphry House and the soft floor filmed with cottony grit. I looked at the Negro boy who was bringing in more dishes and listened to the sound of the proprietor’s wife yelling at him to get back there, into the kitchen. The very brightness of the sunlight streaming in the door and the warmth of the breezes eddying about the room and the casual indifference of the men spitting and yelling and gobbling their food caused a wave of dread to run down me like a swell in the current of the river, and then another and another. These sensations seemed to fix me in my seat, to fix my stare upon the table and my hands in my lap. It was as if all the impressions of the last day, or perhaps the last week, since leaving Quincy, had finally convinced me that my life literally could not be lived, at least by me.

  And then the Negro boy set a small dish of hot corncakes near my plate, and the fragrance that rose off them reminded me that I was hungry, and so I took a couple and began to eat one, and the food in my mouth started me up again. After that, I ate and smiled and spoke to Thomas, and went on as if nothing had happened. By noon, we were jolting along in Mr. Graves’s wagon, our boxes tied behind us.

  CHAPTER 6

  I Enter Kansas Territory

  The popular maxim, that "dirt is healthy," has probably arisen from the fact, that playing in the open air is very benificial to the health of children, who thus get dirt on their persons and clothes. But it is the fresh air and exercise, and not the dirt, which promotes the health. —p. 118

  I DID NOT SPEAK to Thomas of my moment of fear, for surely that was what it was—the effects of a moment so short that it lasted only so long as it took for the patrons at the table to see the dishes of food and then reach for them, and yet it leaked into and colored every subsequent moment. Even now, as I recall our ride to Lawrence, the rolling golden prairie with its lines of distant trees and its distant dome of blue seem infused with shadows. The road, for the most part, was hard enough, and Mr. Graves knew where all the mirey spots were and avoided them. Nor was there solitude to oppress us—we met men, women, and children, wagons and walkers and riders, and everyone shouted out in the friendly way that westerners have on the road. The landscape was just as we expected it to be and displayed the expected open sort of beauty. Even so, the very sunshine looked dark to me, and the heat of the day, which was waxing moment by moment, seemed cold. I could not imagine any cabin, any town, any society, that would relieve my spirits.

  Thomas, on the other han
d, admired the country and was pleased as he could be to have arrived, and he spoke to Mr. Graves with thorough animation and lack of reserve. Eavesdropping, I added to my knowledge of my husband.

  "I knowed you was a preacher," said Mr. Graves.

  "I was for a few months only," said Thomas. "After leaving Harvard College. But the work didn’t suit me. When members of my flock sought my counsel, it struck me dumb."

  "That an’t bad," said Mr. Graves. "Most folks like to talk themselves into whatever it is that they want to do, anyway. I did some work in the preaching line myself, but it didn’t pay. Folks expect the word of God to be free for the asking."

  "Then I did some schoolteaching around and about Medford—"

  "Well, that don’t pay, neither. I done plenty of that, though I only know my tables up to six, but you know, six is half a dozen, and as soon as you know a dozen, you can sell what you got to sell. That’s what I told my boys."

  "Then I went onto a merchant ship with my brother for a year, carrying loads of rosewood from the Amazon, and then I made sails in my father’s factory."

  "You may say what you please about the sea," said Mr. Graves. "I an’t never seen it, I don’t know what’s there. I an’t never been to New Orleans, even." With this, though I was eager to hear of my husband’s maritime adventures, Mr. Graves declared the subject of seafaring a closed one. We jolted along in silence. The ears of the mules flicked forward and back and the wagon squeaked and creaked. Mr. Graves began to hum a tune but broke off abruptly and said, "Got me some warts. You got any warts?"

  Thomas allowed that he didn’t have any warts at the moment.

  "Well, I tried one cure. Worked for me years ago, but it didn’t work at all here in K.T. What you got to do is give ’em away to two men riding on one gray horse. Saw a couple of men like that in the spring, so I wrapped up some one-cent pieces in a packet, as many as there are of the warts, and I had those men carry them one-cent pieces to Shawnee, but them warts didn’t follow them a-tall. I was disgusted! I looked for those two men on that one gray horse for six months or more, then it didn’t work! But now I found another cure, and we got to stop here and put it into effect. Whoa, back, boys!" he shouted to the mules, then jumped down off the wagon and went around to the rear, where he pulled out a neatly wrapped parcel. Thomas gave me a smile. "Here you are," said Mr. Graves. "You know what this is? This is twenty-six grains of barley. That’s one grain for each wart." He grinned and set the package by the side of the road. "See them warts?" He flourished his hand in my face. "As soon as some unsuspecting abolitionist comes along and picks up that package, well, them warts will start fading away." He thrust his warty palm under Thomas’s nose. "Abolitionist can’t resist picking things up. Might be worth four bits! That’s what an abolitionist thinks, ’cause they’re all Yankees, you know. So when that abolitionist picks up my pretty little package here, he’ll be picking up my warts. But he’s got to do it on his own. You can’t give it to him. He’s got to steal it for himself That’s the only way it works."

  He arranged the package on a clump of grass and climbed back into the wagon. "I know plenty of charms and cures. Most people here in K.T, they call me Mr. Graves, because I’m so respected for my healing powers, but I don’t make much of it, because it’s a gift, you see, from the Lord, and I can’t take the credit."

  After we’d gone forward a few yards and Mr. Graves had looked back at the package three or four times, he said, "I’m sure sorry for you that you can’t watch the healing, but it could take a day or so, and I know you want to be finding your place and setting yourselves up before then, but it would do you good to see it."

  "Perhaps it will happen more quickly than that," said Thomas.

  "You can’t tell," replied Mr. Graves. "No, one thing about this life is true, and that is that you can’t tell."

  Mr. Graves’s flow of conversation remained strong throughout the day and only petered out after we’d settled on the prairie for the night. We settled on the prairie for the night because Mr. Graves said that it was a quiet night, warm and clear, and taken all in all, the open prairie would surely be more congenial to us than the nearby cabin of Paschal Fish, "because I am an observant man, Mrs. Newton, and I have noticed that you have something of a distaste for expectorating, and between us, ma’am, Paschal Fish’s clientele have a genius for expectorating, and since the man himself makes a practice of never looking down or taking off his boots, he don’t know quite how it affects others."

  The sunlight seemed to evaporate off the prairie like steam off a vat of boiling water, leaving behind darkness that had already been there; on the other hand, the pale prairie flowers all around us shone against the grasses with a prolonged, dusky brilliance until the darkness simply extinguished them suddenly and at last. Night on the prairie was not like any other night I had ever seen: the blackness was below us and the light above, field upon field of stars stretched over our heads, rolling in every direction until your eyes lost the ability to see them. The bright pale road of the Milky Way beckoned toward Santa Fe in one direction and Iowa in the other, wide and smooth. After a bit of this, Mr. Graves pulled some sticks of wood from the wagon and built a fire. "No use," he said, "in taking chances. Better all around that folks know we’re here. I been thinking about it, and this is what we’ll do. If anyone rides up, we’ll put on that we’re sleeping, and then when they shout out and rouse us, we’ll try to discern their views on the goose question by the way they talk. Now, if they talk like they’re of your party, you can speak up, and if they seem to be of my party, why, then, I’ll vouch for you."

  I said, "Mr. Graves, what is this question about geese?"

  "The goose question is slavery, ma’am. If you are a proslavery man, then out here we say that you are sound on the goose." He was smoking a pipe, and he tamped it down and put some more tobacco in it, then said, "I’ll tell you something. Anyone out here who is one hundred percent sound on the goose question wants to talk about it. You folks don’t, so you see that give me the first inkling that you an’t sound on the goose question. But I don’t ask. And I only tell you this for your own good. And Lawrence is a den of black abolitionists, so it won’t matter when you get there, but when you are away from there, then you got to talk like you’re sound on the goose, or susss-pisssshhhhuns will be aroused."

  Thomas asked, "Why do they call it the goose question?" but Mr. Graves shook his head. "No one knows. Anyway, I don’t."

  I glanced at Thomas, wondering if he had noticed, as I had, that Mr. Graves’s mode of speech had changed. He now spoke more roundly and fluently, as if his former "Ruffian" expressions had been a trick. This gave him an air of mystery to me and made me wonder about him, but I only had a minute or two to ponder this, for as soon as he fell asleep, we unrolled ourselves from our blankets and sat close beside one another, unable to sleep. The night before, I had been afraid of shots through the floor, and the night before that, of a boiler explosion on the Independence. Each scene seemed to have passed in an earlier lifetime, as distant from these stars and this fire as the Roman Empire. The prairie was full of sounds—the wind through the grasses, but also the yipping of what I later learned were coyotes; the whine of mosquitoes, but also the liquid call of night birds. Nor did every traveler stop with the darkness—I heard the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the calls of one man to another. They didn’t molest us, though.

  Thomas held my hand between his. I did not have the tiny hand you read about in books—it did not disappear between the two of his—but I was just as ready to have it held. The requirements of traveling had given us little leisure, and arrangements on the steamboats and in the hotel after Saint Louis had conspired to keep us apart. Always in the past I had accepted without much thought the flocking of men with men and women with women. It was no surprise to me that Mr. Graves presumed that my husband’s conversation would be with him. Once he had made me a comfortable place to sit and helped me into it, it was clear that Mr. Graves considered me well ta
ken care of. Once in a while, he would address some informative remark to me, as a courtesy to Thomas’s manhood, as if not wishing to imply ignorance on Thomas’s part. Perhaps this was the key to his differing modes of expression, too: he lowered his style to a manly roughness for Thomas, elevated it for me. And if Thomas attempted to have any private conversation with me, Mr. Graves would eavesdrop and hem and haw, waiting to stick in his two cents’ worth. He wasn’t the first to distinguish between us; this was the way men and women behaved, were supposed to behave. I was perfectly familiar with it, but now Thomas and I seemed to be like two souls in separate lifeboats (speaking of maritime adventures—and I had never seen the sea, either; when I read about a governor of Illinois who had recently been much laughed at when he went to Baltimore and asked in all innocence, looking at the tide, if the place flooded like that twice a day every day, I hadn’t gotten the joke), who could never quite reach each other, never quite get close enough to converse. Except that now that we were that close, I could not begin to think what we would say to one another. He said, "Every time I set out on what seems very much like an adventure and imagine myself lost in some vast solitude, I discover when I get there that there are plenty of men before me, and that they are all great talkers."