The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  "He and Charles do their best, but they aren’t always successful."

  "And where are you from, my dear? You are far more blooming than many of these young ladies I see around here."

  "I came from Illinois. Quincy."

  "You’re used to the west, then. So many aren’t." She shook her head. "I’m of course glad to see that spring is at hand, but when the ice breaks up, I fear the fevers will set in. Yet it’s lovely country all the same."

  I nodded. That was our whole conversation, but she had a lively manner and a pleasing smile. I wanted to tell her how the image of her face had carried me through my own fever, but I was too shy to do so.

  She moved on to another group, and I found Susannah Jenkins, who was so thin from the privations of the winter that I was shocked, though I didn’t say anything. She told me her parents were thinking of returning to Massachusetts. Winter in the hay house had been dauntingly arduous. All their relatives back there were urging them in every letter. "But we can’t go now," said Susannah. "The rivers are frozen, and the Missouri roads would simply kill Papa. Something is going to. We aren’t so pleased with K.T. as we were." She gave me a rueful smile. Had I heard about Mrs. James? Her little boy had died in the cold weather, and now she had a new baby that didn’t look very ready for K.T., either. "Mama says grief will carry her off if this one dies, too. That man made her stay out there by herself all winter, even after everyone else had come into town."

  "All the cruel ones aren’t on the other side, are they?"

  "Well, Papa says he’s a spy. At any rate, he seems just the sort of man who does everything he pleases. But he’s such a fine-looking man. It makes you wonder."

  "What does it make you wonder?"

  "Oh, my dear, don’t you always give fine-looking men all the credit in the world? I do. It’s a weakness of character, I suppose."

  "I would say it’s only a weakness of judgment. But sometimes those are worse, aren’t they?"

  "I wonder what Mrs. James would say if she were here. No doubt she still loves him." Susannah looked around the room. "At least you can tell why she chose him. I do so wonder sometimes why this one goes with that one. And then, after you’re married, you always have to make it look satisfactory, don’t you?"

  I regarded Susannah with some interest, not sure how general, or personal, she meant these remarks to be. Gossip was Lawrence’s main recreation, so I wondered how carefully I should reply. And then I thought, what difference would it make? I said, "Each marriage works in its own way, is what I think. No one looking in ever knows how those looking out are feeling."

  "Well, poor Mrs. James."

  "We’re going out to our claim in a day or so. I’ll take her some tea and some other things."

  Poor Mrs. James, indeed. The very thought of her troubles made me feel low. And she was so pretty, or had been. I was as bad as Susannah in my way—even though Mr. James’s good looks didn’t move me, Mrs. James’s good looks did.

  Some of the singers of Company A now got together and put on a program of songs, including one that had all the New Englanders nodding but made me laugh. It was to the tune of "Old Hundred" and went:

  We ask not that the slave should lie As lies his master at his ease Beneath a silken canopy Or in the shade of blooming trees.

  We ask not eye for eye that all Who forge the chain and ply the whip Should feel their torture, while the thrall Should wield the scourge of mastership.

  We mourn not that the man should toil: ’Tis nature’s need, ’tis God’s decree; But let the hand that tills the soil Be, like the wind that fans it, free.

  As Roland Brereton would have said, this song was those New Englanders all over. And they all knew the words, even Thomas, though I had never heard it. They joined in lustily, as if actually singing a hymn. Did they really not pray that the slavocrats be punished for their sins? Why not? I did.

  A few days later, with the weather calm but the party still fresh in our memories, Thomas and I took the mule and Jeremiah out to our claim to plan our return there, as we couldn’t live with Charles and Louisa forever. The weather had moderated but was still freezing—the ice on the river was solid, and the prairie was covered with snow. Even so, we rode hatless; Thomas had his coat thrown open, and I laid my shawl across the mule’s withers. We thought it must be in the twenties—a bona fide heat wave.

  Perhaps because we remembered our contented moments of the fall, we were happy and eager on the way out there. Thomas grinned at every sign of the coming spring, and I did, too. Soon it would be my birthday. I would turn twenty-one in K.T., and it seemed like a fine thing, and who knew what my twenty-second year would bring? With luck, a child, the end of the war, and everything else that was good, as well. At any rate, all the signs looked hopeful to us—the black shapes of crows and hawks wheeling in the blue sky, the moisture on the dark branches of the trees along the river, the tracks of animals in the snow, revealing the lives that were starting up again all over the prairie. There were even hoofprints and the tracks of sleigh runners, suggesting the eagerness of settlers who refused to wait for the spring to make their entrance into K.T.

  Thomas thought the war would end. "I’m telling you, Lidie," he said, "this winter goes to prove that slaves can’t live here, and that news will get back to South Carolina by the time the snow melts here. There’s a man they talk about, over to the west somewhere, who had his six slaves with him, and they were so cold they couldn’t work, so he had to take care of them all winter, and his wife had to cook for them! They’re leaving as soon as the thaw sets in."

  We had a laugh over that.

  "No," he said, "people eventually see the truth of their situation. Right now, the slave power is mad because they think someone is trying to tell them what to do. They hate that more than anything. But that’s the reaction of a hothead. I think cooler heads will learn from our experiences here. This was surely a winter for New Englanders!"

  I didn’t disagree; I was ready to go him one better. "What about the Missourians? They’ve felt this winter, too, so they must see the writing on the wall. Once folks in K.T. show them what can be done in such a place, well, maybe they’ll stop and think."

  Nor did we hesitate to speculate on more personal matters. We planned for them to go all our way, as well. For a girl, I had always liked the name Emma, and for a boy, Thomas favored the name of his father, Abel. Why not twins? I thought, though it seemed like tempting fate to say such a thing aloud. But I gave that mule a good kick, just for the joy of the thought, and we trotted out over the prairie snow, laughing and calling out to one another.

  I should say that because Thomas was ten years older than I, I always assumed that he knew more than I did. His experience was wider, and he had seen parts of the world I could barely imagine, not least of these Boston itself. A wider experience, I have found, generally gives one a larger expectation of evil. No one can foresee the future, but those who have lived longer can foresee a little bit of it a little better than others. Nevertheless, when we came to our cabin and saw what had become of it in the winter weather, it seemed to me that Thomas was more surprised and more shaken than I was. For both of us, though, all giddiness evaporated. The place looked demolished, dreary, and desolate.

  First of all, the fence was broken down almost completely, the fence posts knocked over and the rails scattered and broken. Animals had come along and gnawed at them, too, attesting to the scarcity of forage for the prairie beasts. All the outdoor arrangements we had made were scattered and destroyed—foxes, deer, wolves perhaps, raccoons, skunks, all had passed through and rooted among our things in their separate ways, leaving our kegs and boxes, few as they were, broken and tossed about. You could say there was even evidence of frustrated anger in the way the work of human hands had been smashed and destroyed by animal feet and mouths.

  As for the cabin, the roof had caved in from the snow, and all the chinking had fallen out from between the logs. The door, which had come unsecured, had been
taken by the wind and was somewhere else now. Inside, our treasonous sheets from The Liberator were ripped to shreds and faded to unreadability. Animals had gotten in here, too, and searched for food everywhere, gnawing holes in the sailcloth bed tick to get to the prairie hay that I had stuffed into it. The bed tick was nearly flat—mice and rats and other animals had carried almost every stalk away. I had left a flocked wool quilt on the bed; something had eaten away great patches of the wool. The bedstead itself was broken down, our two chairs were tipped over, the candle holder had been opened and the tallow candles removed, my kitchen utensils had rolled everywhere. Shakes from the roof lay everywhere in the cabin, and sunlight shone in, revealing rather than cheering the devastation. Everything was covered with wet snow, and creeping moisture darkened every stick. It was a most inhospitable place.

  Thomas came in with the news that the well had collapsed and would need to be dug again. He looked around the cabin.

  I said, "I forgot it was so small."

  "Twelve by twelve."

  Indeed, more than the destruction, the true sight of what we had had was the discouraging thing. I had remembered lying in my bed on those early warm nights, looking up at the blue shine of the moonlight through the sailcloth and feeling satisfied with my kingdom. My bed had seemed spacious, my hearth had seemed roomy, my little house had seemed an abundance of privacy. Over the winter, I’d remembered thinking of the passersby—be they Indians or animals or settlers heading west under the moon, and imagining them envious of our dark and snug little dwelling, so neatly set beside the trees, between the openness of the prairie and the convenience of the river. But really, I saw, it was as tight as a shoe, as lonely as a star, as ramshackle as a pile of leaves, hardly a dwelling for humans. Thomas’s face mirrored my thoughts, and our exhilaration of what seemed like just a few minutes before might as well have never happened.

  We had discussed our finances a few days earlier, and I knew that the winter had been expensive. Even though Louisa let us live with her without paying rent, we had paid out more over the winter than we had taken in, especially during the weeks we’d stayed at the Free State Hotel. Charles and Thomas had not made much, and because we were not paying rent, almost all of what they’d made had gone to Charles. The bolts of sailcloth Thomas’s father had sent I had sold for a total of thirty-two fifty. We had two bolts left. Sewn into my dress was three hundred dollars. Thomas had about eighty of what he had brought with him. That was our fortune. And we were looking right now at the remains of about two hundred and seventy-five, or so we estimated we had spent on our claim before the winter.

  I must say that it came as a shock. I thought to remark that Jeremiah had won about sixteen dollars in his two races (and for that matter, there was no telling what Frank had in his pocket), but I kept my lips tightly closed. I saw that in his mind, my husband was compounding bad luck and personal failure. He looked again toward the broken bedstead, and his eyebrows lowered. He said, "We should have stayed out here."

  "We might have died."

  I was given to know through his lack of response that such an outcome seemed, momentarily at least, appealing.

  "The James boy died of the cold. Mr. James forced them all to stay out here by themselves. Now Susannah says the woman and the baby are very poorly, as well."

  He turned and walked out of the cabin, down the little step we had placed, which still defined our stoop.

  What we had longed for so—the coming of spring, sunshine and relative warmth, survival, friends, and, in fact, each other, now seemed like nothing. Soon I would be twenty-one, but the future seemed like a block of stone a mile high, a mile wide, a mile deep, that I had to but could not get into.

  Now we sat together on the stoop, gazing out over our snowy field, where we hoped to plant flax or oats. We sat together until I shivered, at which point Thomas circled my waist with his arm. "I saved my books, at least."

  "And we have our clothes and most of our cooking things."

  "The tools will be wet and maybe a little rusted, but they’ll be fine."

  "I’m sure it looks worse than it is, with all this snow."

  We sighed, hardly hearing our own hopeful words. I thought what an ugly place Kansas was. Folks in Lawrence generally took another line—that Kansas was not only fertile and clement but beautiful. I thought that perhaps I had never really seen a beautiful place. At the moment, I couldn’t think of one.

  Thomas said, "This is how you feel after a shipwreck."

  I looked at him. "Have you been shipwrecked?"

  "No hands were lost. But yes, our ship broke up in a freak storm off Martha’s Vineyard, and we lost the cargo. That’s when I decided that maybe the sailor’s life wasn’t for me. The seas were twenty foot, they said, not so high. Men have lived through forty footers, but I didn’t want to."

  When my brother-in-law Roland got discouraged, he would load his gun and go shoot something. That’s what I wanted to do right then. I suddenly hungered for the fresh meat—Louisa could roast it in town and serve it up, sizzling and delicious. That would be good. But mostly I just wanted to shoot something. I smiled. I said, "I think I’m turning into a wild Indian."

  "I wonder what I’ve made of my life. My brothers do a good business with my father. Their wives and children are well taken care of. They all live in brick houses. If any of them are restless, I’ve never heard them say so. I always considered them dull. None of my three brothers opens a book from one year’s end to the next, and neither does my father, except for the Bible, and then he only looks at the bits he already knows. They make up sails for all sorts of ships from all over the world, but they never ask the owners or the captains what they’ve seen or done, and they never long to see or do it. They do their duty and are pleased with that. But me, I don’t know what life I’m fitted for. K.T. has sorted me out, my dear."

  I said, "Thomas, you ride Jeremiah and I’ll ride the mule. We’ve got to go to the Jameses’—I promised Susannah—and it’s getting late."

  We let the dread of what we might find at the Jameses’ enliven us a bit by removing our thoughts from our own situation.

  And then Mrs. James was so glad to see us, though she couldn’t rise from her bed and had to call out to us to come in, that we rode upward a little bit on that, too.

  They had fashioned a latch of the sort that came through the door, so I lifted that and walked in, while Thomas looked about the place for Mr. James. Mrs. James, Ivy, was as tiny as could be, hardly making any shape at all under her quilts. Her cheeks were pinched and yellow, but her eyes were huge and formed the bright centers of two dark hollows in her face. She had been very pretty once; now she was wondrous-looking, her beauty enhanced but rendered frightening by her illness. Beside her lay an extremely tiny, quiet baby, who looked, even to my unaccustomed eye, very close to his own end. Only his little face showed. His eyes were open. He, too, had regular, lovely features, but not of this world. She said, "Well, I’m waiting for him. Thanks for waiting with me."

  "Waiting for whom, Ivy, dear?"

  "Waiting for my boy, here, to pass on. Then I’ll go with him." Her voice was striking, neither weak nor strong, but penetrating. She ran her hand over the child’s face in a tender gesture.

  "Are you alone? Where’s Mr. James?"

  "He went out on his trapline for a bit. He thought there might be some meat this morning. I told him to. He’s very distraught."

  "My dear, you should have come into town for the cold weather. There was room! Folks were all jumbled together, but it was warmer that way!"

  "Daniel said the cabin would fall down and we would lose everything. It was me who wanted to stick it out. It really was. And then, when, uh, my older boy went on, well, I didn’t want to leave him out here by himself. Daniel is exceedingly angry at me for being so stubborn, but I just couldn’t do it."

  "Oh, Ivy! I wish I’d been a better friend to you!" It hurt me to think of my days passed so easily with Louisa, when I had hardly given a tho
ught to the Jameses. None of us had, what with the war and the cold and the murder in Leavenworth and this and that. Well, there was always an excuse, wasn’t there?

  She said, "Is the war still on?"

  "The war?"

  "From before Christmas. Isn’t it almost spring?"

  "Yes, it is, and the Missourians are quiet for the time being. Thomas thinks they’re going to go their way now and give in to reason. But it’s much warmer today. Can’t you feel that? If you hold on for a week, you’ll be warm as toast."

  She shook her head. "He can’t suck. He’s too weak. He came before his time, weeks and weeks. Daniel tried giving him some pap, and I squeeze out the milk when I can and put it in his mouth, but it isn’t enough. K.T. isn’t for him, I’m afraid. But that’s okay. Daniel can take care of himself, and the rest of us need each other. I’m happy to go after my boy. He never thrived in K.T., either. I would hate to be one of those women who leave all their children behind." She smiled, and I have to say that she did look at peace.

  "Are you hungry? Can I make you some corncakes? There’s a bit of a fire." I wondered where Thomas was, but I didn’t necessarily want him to come in.

  She said, "Oh, my, it’s been so long since I had corncakes! That sounds heavenly."

  "Corncakes are not heavenly, Ivy; they are of this earth and meant to keep you here."

  She shook her head, smiling. I went away from the bedstead and began rummaging about for the griddle and a pot. The kitchen area was neat and orderly. Daniel, I suspected, could indeed take care of himself.

  Still the baby made no sound. Sometimes he had his eyes open and sometimes he had them closed. That was the only way I knew he was alive. While I mixed up the cakes, Ivy fell into a doze, rousing from time to time to stroke the baby’s face and give him a kiss. I stoked the fire and added some wood. When the cakes were done, nice and light from the limey water and fragrant, too, she managed to sit up. I forked pieces between her lips. She chewed slowly and with concentration. Finally, she said, "When I woke up this morning, I told Daniel it was going to be a good day. Maybe today we shall be released."