The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  Frank and the mule got even farther from town—they were right beside me. I flicked the reins and turned my face resolutely toward the buildings in the distance.

  "That filly an’t nothing compared to Jeremiah. He could eat her up. She just looked good because of that nag they put with her."

  "I’m displeased with you, Frank."

  "I was just saying. I wasn’t suggesting."

  "We were very worried. You deliberately hid your intentions from us. Thomas is still worried, and I have to find him and tell him that Jeremiah hasn’t been stolen."

  "Jeremiah runs like silk, or like some weasel or something. Like water. You an’t never seen nothing like it."

  "Haven’t ever seen anything like it."

  "Well, then, you an’t."

  "I thought you rode him."

  "Naw. One of the boys rode him. I an’t that good a rider. I paid him a dollar."

  "You let a stranger ride Jeremiah?"

  "You can’t race your own horse, Lidie. Only fools do that. It’s very poor economy, sort of like being your own lawyer."

  "What do you know about being your own lawyer?"

  "I got my eyes open, don’t I? Horace was his own lawyer once. He lost the money, too." This last Frank spit out as if he could barely let such words lie on his tongue. And it was true that Frank generally made a profit. He said, "Some folks think paying someone to do what they know how to do better than you is a waste of money, but I an’t of that opinion. You can’t do everything yourself."

  "Frank, you are trying to pull a veil over my eyes."

  "Naw, I an’t. I know you won’t punish me any, and Thomas will look at me sadly and sternly, and I’ll feel bad, but then I’ll remember how Jeremiah looked like something not of this earth when he was running along, and I won’t feel so bad anymore." He gave me a sideways look. "But you don’t even know how bad you should feel, if you never see what I saw. They was gonna give him a go against that sorrel mare, if you let him. That would of been some race."

  "I can’t let you race Jeremiah. It isn’t seemly, and Thomas and Charles are looking for you. And I shouldn’t be here among these people. You don’t know who’s here. These aren’t your usual Unitarians and Congregationalists from Massachusetts. They talk and look like Missourians, if you ask me. And what about Roger? I’m sure his mother is worried about him, too."

  He ignored this last.

  "Well, there’s all kinds of folks in Lawrence, and when the races are going, I don’t ask questions. But if you trade with me and go over there to that clump of trees, nobody’s there and you can see good. I hate this mule, anyway. He trots like he’s falling to pieces."

  "I’m determined not to reward you, Frank."

  "Come on, cousin. You an’t never seen nothing like it. And you haven’t ever seen anything like it, either. I went along with you when you wanted to swim the river."

  "The footing is snowy. What if Jeremiah hurts himself?"

  "Jeremiah is a cat, Lidie. He an’t going to hurt himself."

  My misgivings as I watched Frank ride Jeremiah back to the group of men and horses smoking and steaming in the cold air were agonizing. My mind raced to all sorts of tragic endings, but most often to the image of Jeremiah slipping in the snow and breaking a leg, the rider falling off and being killed, and myself having to relate all of these events to Thomas, who should have been after the mail by now but couldn’t be, because I had both the mule and Jeremiah with me, and Charles and Louisa’s one horse wouldn’t pull the wagon with the other mules. So to top it all off, I was letting my husband, the most responsible and judicious of men, fall more deeply into the wrong with every passing minute. I stationed myself under the rattling branches of a clump of trees as Frank and Jeremiah came up to the group of men—or rather, were joined by men who saw him approach. The race was arranged in a trice. The chestnut mare had by this time cooled out and rested—she was walking around with a blanket and someone’s coat over her back and neck. These they pulled off, while Frank jumped down and approached one of the men, who promptly took the reins and mounted Jeremiah. Jeremiah stood up alertly now, and I could see him, even from a distance, lift his head and snort. After that, he side-stepped under the new rider and arched over his bit. I might have said he did know what he was about to do.

  The air was crystal clear—K.T. clear, we always said, the sort of air that lets you see all the way to the curve of the horizon in the distance. I saw men lead the horses to the starting line. I saw the breath of the horses plume out of their nostrils in the cold. I heard the laughter of the bettors, and shouts—"This’ll be a good one!" "Go, mare!"—then the report of the starter’s pistol. The mare stood between me and Jeremiah for a moment, then Jeremiah leapt out from behind her, already stretched and flying. The mare was no laggard, though. She ran as if her nose were glued to his haunches, for many strides matching him leap for leap, bound for bound. Her ears were pinned to her head. Jeremiah, on the other hand, ran with his ears pricked forward. They came around the wide curve, and his body seemed to elongate and lower a bit, as if he had made up his mind to buckle down to his work.

  Seconds later, they swept past me, her nose still beside his haunch, her ears still pinned, but because I was now on his side, I could see his tail streaming out like smoke against the snow. He did run as if made for it, his back legs stepping well ahead of his front legs, and yet everything effortless and graceful as a breeze riffling through prairie grasses. They came to the finish line and crossed it. From my angle, it looked as if the mare had gained a foot or two. It was a close race. My heart was throbbing in my head and throat, and I was as warm as I’d been since summer. I threw off my shawl and laid it across the mule’s withers.

  As with the earlier race, I could see the men shouting, exclaiming, exchanging money. Once again, the mare was unruly and hard to handle, tired as she must have been. Jeremiah broke to a smart trot, then settled. Frank ran to him with some other men, and when they reached him, the rider jumped off. I could see his grin from where I stood. All the men clapped him on the back. Frank reached out for the horse’s reins, and the rider handed them to him. I decided to get a little closer, so I kicked the mule. I was still in a state of pleased excitement just at the sight of it, as Frank had predicted. The mule trotted toward the group of men, and I saw someone, the Reverend Moss, I realized, throw the blanket he was wearing over Jeremiah. But then the Reverend Moss looked up and around, and when he saw me, he began hurrying the horse, hurrying him a bit carefully and cautiously in my direction. Momentarily he stopped to throw Frank up onto his back, then Roger, who was grinning. They came up to me a few moments later. The reverend was smiling, but he wasn’t grinning.

  "Well, ma’am, I’d say that was exceptional, and I thank you. Best take the horse on home now. He’s bushed—that filly gave him a run. I don’t expect"—he glanced over his shoulder—"he thought he would have to try so hard, but she’s a tough one and experienced. Hiram’s raced her all over. He makes money on her, as a rule." He reached up the reins to me. "You’re a fine lady, ma’am, and words of praise for your name will be on the tongues of many this Sabbath evening. Now you’d best be getting off home, ma’am." He thrust the reins into my hand, though I was happy to take them, and then he gave the mule a little slap, and off we went. Jeremiah came along willingly enough, only a little tired from his exertions. Frank and Roger were more than pleased, until I made them dismount and walk.

  Frank exclaimed, "They gave a prize, you know. The bettors who won passed the hat and gave me fourteen dollars."

  "No!"

  "I gave the rider two fifty. He said he’d ride the horse anytime."

  "Frank!"

  He glanced at me. "You never know, Lidie! Jeremiah is a gold mine!"

  "Thomas will never allow it! I don’t know what to tell him now!"

  "It’s true he don’t understand horses. It’s like farming with him...." He shook his head.

  "Please don’t. You are in sufficient difficulties al
ready."

  We continued toward home without speaking further, but I felt the warmth of what I’d seen all the way there.

  My misgivings with regard to my husband proved well founded, and he was seriously displeased with Frank’s activities and with mine. He and Charles had looked for the horse until finally giving him up for lost or stolen. They were now a day late for the mail, and at any rate, they would have to hire another horse for that trip, since it would be far too much for Jeremiah now. Frank handed over his winnings—sixteen dollars and fifty cents—and Thomas ordered Frank to stay with the horse, making sure he was kept moving and warm. A dollar would go to Mr. Smith for extra prairie hay. All in all, horse racing certainly qualified in my husband’s eyes as a frivolous and dangerous and inconvenient enterprise that sixteen dollars and fifty cents didn’t begin to pay for.

  I agreed with him, but that didn’t make me any less culpable in his eyes. I wasn’t favored with any conversation at all. When Charles and Louisa tried to rally me about the incident, Thomas remarked that he would prefer not to hear about it.

  That I knew I was culpable, and had known the entire time that I’d allowed Frank to persuade me to race the horse that I was culpable, did not go far toward resigning me to my husband’s coldness. Try as I might, I could not help a few resentful thoughts, a swell of resistant feelings. Frank, I knew, was unrepentant. I wondered what that felt like. In everything, Frank endured his punishment without taking it personally and then went his own way. I had, I thought, once been the same—with my father, with my sisters, with those whose punishments were arbitrary and, you might say, selfish. I had cultivated my own selfishness, I thought, to protect myself against theirs. But now I had been selfish, and my husband was both hurt and angry, and all with good reason. Or so the argument within went. But then a new argument began, this one not so much between what I had done and what I ought to have done as between the two halves of what I was. As it happened, I now believed, I had devoted almost every thought and every action since August to Thomas Newton. Everything about my situation in K.T. was bound up with our marriage and his desires. This had happened without my being especially aware of it and constituted what I knew of as being married. All the advice my sisters had given me about controlling or evading one’s husband I’d laughed at and dismissed as nonsensical. This day, though, all unbeknownst at the time, I had set a little space between us when I watched the race and thrilled to it and came home half pleased with myself and wholly pleased with Jeremiah. I resented my husband for not allowing me to communicate what I saw— that was the root of my resentment—but then I knew also that I could not have communicated what I saw to him, however eloquent I might be, because he hadn’t the interest or capacity or phrenological bump to be thrilled by such a thing. And part of me found him wanting for this. Thus I sat across from my husband in Louisa’s pleasant room, listening to Charles sing, watching Louisa smile at him, and glancing at my own husband, wondering whether he was the closed, dull, stiffly upright, and self-righteous person part of me seemed to see, or the pained, lonely, and worried person another part of me seemed to see. This was a breach. In the past, I had rather favored breaches between myself and others, but this breach confused and frightened me. It was a side of marriage I had forgotten I might need to endure.

  Well, these feelings passed off, but Thomas was not one to discuss Frank’s and my bad conduct. He left our consciences to deal with us, and they did, in their own ways. But the loneliness of his disapproval passed off more slowly than the disapproval itself. And I wasn’t sure if I had learned my lesson.

  I have to say that the next day, Jeremiah was none the worse for his adventure.

  I put aside my letter to my sisters, not quite knowing what to write about Frank’s behavior. There seemed to be less and less news from K.T. that a person could tell in a way that would make it understandable.

  Some days later, we in Lawrence received a reply to the letters General Lane and Governor Robinson had sent to President Pierce. It was in the form of a proclamation. Of course most people said that they weren’t a bit surprised, but of course people were, otherwise they wouldn’t have stopped to discuss and deplore so often and at such length what the President had to say. The gist of it was this: We were in the wrong and had set ourselves in defiance of the territorial laws (for example, incurring the death penalty for aiding a.slave to escape, incurring ten years of hard labor for subscribing to The Liberator) and of the territorial government (the tyrant Jones and his friends the Kickapoo Rangers). It was true that the President spoke against armed incursions from outside, but true also that he spoke against insurrections within the state and promised to protect only law-abiding citizens. It was as hard, Mrs. Bush said, to know what a law-abiding citizen was as it was to be one.

  The language of the President’s proclamation was general and high-minded, saying one thing as if saying another. But it could be read by those who had the eyes to read it.

  And then there was another piece of news. We heard that the Slavocrat, as Pierce got to be called, had sent along a message to the other slavocrats in the Senate describing the Free State government we’d just formed as "treason" and asking Congress to authorize the formation of a state government by the slavocrats in K.T. The President, it appeared, was resolved that Kansas would be a slave state no matter what. To think about it gave you a hot and cold and stiff feeling, all at the same time. Now everyone echoed Mrs. Bush—what happened in K.T only revealed the larger plan of the slavocrats, to bring slavery to every state and territory, every town and street, every family. That’s what slavery was, said Mrs. Holmes, and others, too: an uncontainable contagion. It wasn’t some marbles or stones you kept in ajar, but a miasma that would get in everywhere, tainting and destroying everything. All us ladies nodded over our sewing. We agreed that the low sort of life people followed in Missouri—ignorant, dirty, bloody, and slothful—would follow slavery everywhere, like a fever in the wake of a cough, part and parcel of the same disease. "I will die first," said each of the New England ladies, one right after the other, and I said so, too, though I’d lived next to slavery all my life in Illinois. We were all different now, weren’t we?

  Now an interesting thing happened. The course that our party followed was one Louisa presented to us late one night. "We should act," she said, "as though we haven’t even seen such a proclamation, have never heard of such a letter. This is what you do with these sorts of men we have in the Washington slavocracy—you keep smiling and going forward and requiring them to show themselves, and when they show themselves sufficiently, others of proper Christian principles eventually recoil from them."

  "What do you mean?" said Charles.

  "Simply this. General Lane is going to Washington with the constitution for the state of Kansas in April."

  "We haven’t enough people for statehood," said Thomas.

  Louisa shrugged, her face set in a complacent smile.

  "And we haven’t a state constitution," said Charles.

  "We will in a few weeks," said Louisa. "As a piece of strategy, this is an act of genius. General Lane was here today, and he told me all about it."

  CHAPTER 15

  I Warm Up

  The number of young women whose health is crushed, ere the first few years of married life are past, would seem incredible to one who has not investigated the subject, and it would be vain to attempt to depict the sorrow, discouragement, and distress experienced in most families where the wife and mother is a perpetual invalid. —p. 5

  PRESIDENT PIERCE’S BETRAYAL of everything he was for the sake of southern friendships and southern votes (those few in Lawrence who were themselves from his home state of New Hampshire were the loudest in their indignation toward him) was the primary topic of discussion at the party we went to on Washington’s Birthday, given by Company A of the Kansas Militia. The weather, I must say, was terrible—snow, snow, more snow, and then ice—but Louisa would not be denied. Since it would be cruel to pull the h
orses out, we walked, wearing our heaviest boots and swathed in shawls and blankets. Thomas and Charles complained the whole way, but once we got there, we saw another of the joys of town life—light and company and food and drink and good fellowship, all together in one room. It looked to me as though most of Lawrence was there, but perhaps that was only because I saw Governor and Mrs. Robinson in the midst of a merry group, and wherever they were, they seemed to outnumber themselves. Louisa kept looking for General Lane, but later we heard two stories—either he liked to avoid gatherings where the Robinsons held sway, or else he was visiting the wife of one of the officers of the company, who was too ill at home to go out in such weather. No doubt both of these stories were true. In K.T., it was often the case that every version of every story was equally true and equally false, owing to the complexity of every set of circumstances. At any rate, in the rivalry that was quickly developing between the two generals—now, since our Free State elections, widely called the "governor" (Robinson) and the "senator" (Lane), to uphold the view that our government was the legitimate one—the Robinsons were much favored by family men and their wives, for they were a pleasing couple and sought to move K.T. forward judiciously, in a manner that would preserve as much as possible of what we all had already. She was, if anything, more talkative and opinionated than he was, a quality Louisa disapproved of. ("She is so public," exclaimed Louisa. "A woman’s influence should be a private one!") I liked her, though, and was pleased when she came up to me and introduced herself. She said, "And so you must be Lydia Newton, the wife of the man who risks himself every week going among the Border Ruffians and attempting to wrest our mail from them."