The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  "Maybe."

  "My boy will get me into heaven, I know. Even though I’ve been vain and giddy and selfish, and thought too much over the years about dresses and shoes and petticoats. Lidie, I was so spoiled! It astonishes me now to think of it! I fancied myself altogether too much!" She laughed, and it had a merry sound. "But I had my boy with me for four years and two months, and he was such a good boy, and he taught me to think of someone other than myself."

  I gave her some more corncake, and she chewed it deliberately, then swallowed.

  "May I talk of a womanly thing, even though you haven’t a child yet?"

  "You may talk of anything you please."

  "When my boy was born, and they brought him to suck, I was so sore that I wanted to scream. I shudder to think it, but I hated the sight of him! That’s how frivolous I was, and shallow. He would cry and cry, and it didn’t matter what they said to try and help me; I was mean and sour inside, and I turned away from him for weeks. Daniel didn’t say a word to me, but I was very bad and asked him to find me a wet nurse. But my mama finally talked to me one day. She had never said a cross word to me in all my life, no matter how many cross words I said to her, but she came to me, and she said, ’Ivy, I am ashamed of you and of myself, for I have made you the way you are, and now my heart is sick, because I can see you turn away from your own child, who is the sweetest child in the world!’ "

  She took some water from a cup.

  "That day, I made up my mind to be his mama, and things got easier after a bit. But mostly I was sorry I’d lost all those years thinking of myself." Now her voice fell into a whisper. "You don’t think that I know what they say about Daniel, that he’s cruel and hard. He’s not so cruel and hard, but he is scared of K.T., more scared than Thomas seems, or some of the others. When Daniel is scared he bares his teeth and attacks, just like a wolf or some wild animal. He would like to attack death itself now." She sighed. "But all of this is very far away, too."

  I offered her a bit more corncake, but she shook her head. The baby’s eyes were open. I said, "I hate to leave you like this. Maybe Thomas should go back to Lawrence, and I should stay with you."

  "When Daniel returns, we’ll be fine. This is a good day."

  Now Thomas came in, and Ivy held out her hand to him and let him give it a squeeze, but she didn’t talk anymore. After a moment, Thomas said, "I found James. He’s had some luck. He should be back before long." He sat down in the other chair, and we stayed there quietly, me holding one of Ivy’s hands, until Daniel James opened the door sometime later and came into the cabin. He was, in my estimation, in a towering rage, but he was polite to us and kind to his wife. She opened her eyes and said, "Daniel, Lidie made us some corncakes. There’s plenty left," Then she closed her eyes again. He nodded his thanks, and shortly after that we left.

  We’d mounted and ridden a good distance, when Thomas said, "When I found him, he was beating his head against a tree. He said over and over that he had a good farm in Ohio, and now he’d killed his children and his wife, and he would never forgive himself, and his wife’s parents would never forgive him, as they’d begged him not to take her west."

  "Oh, Thomas."

  "We are all fools, Lydia, every man in K.T."

  "You leave the women out?"

  "We men—"

  "Don’t leave the women out. We have lessons to learn of our own."

  We rode back to Lawrence, much subdued. We heard that Ivy James’s baby died two days later and herself a day after that. And then Mr. Jenkins died, too, and he wasn’t the only one. Some had had the will to make it through the cold, cold weather, it seemed, but when the pressure let up, the will to live abandoned them, too. In fact, in many ways it seemed as though fate or luck was separating all of our acquaintances into layers. Here were Mrs. James and Mr. Jenkins, dead, and the other Jenkinses, and many besides them, ready to backtrack as soon as the weather would permit, their Kansas adventures failures and worse. Then, here was Louisa with her shop and her two rooms, seemingly set on a course for comfort and prosperity; and beyond that, here were the Robinsons, we heard. Their house on Mount Oread was going up fast, a wooden house, all of black walnut, it was said, with oilcloths and papered walls and furniture in every room, a regular house that would be rich, folks said, even for the States. This house was the subject of a great deal of talk. Some, of course, said, Why not, he has the money, and K.T. needs this sort of thing to show the way, or to make us look respectable enough for statehood, or just for the good of the work (you can’t bring good workmen into the territory and expect them to split logs for the rest of their lives); but others said, Where’d he get the money? Who does he think he is? He an’t got to be governor yet, according to Washington, D.C., and she an’t, either. The joke about it was that once the house was built, Jim Lane would be moving right in. But I thought, Well, Americans always sort themselves out one way or another into rich and poor, and then everybody gets blamed for however he ends up. Lawrence was the biggest town for gossip I ever saw, and it was only during a war that what folks said about each other was either respectful or kind.

  K.T.’s march toward statehood, and free statehood, went forward. Charles and Thomas went over to Topeka, some fifty or so miles away, in early March. Thomas went to see what was doing, but Charles went as an avowed supporter of Jim Lane. They all drafted a memorial to the U.S. Congress and signed it. Thomas signed it, too, and Charles. They said so, and we knew it. That got to be important later on, after what happened. When they’d written up the memorial, Jim Lane and some others went off to Washington, D.C., to find someone to present it to Congress. Louisa was sure that would show the Missourians a thing or two.

  Underneath her sympathy about the devastation we’d found on our claim, I could see that Louisa was both annoyed and anxious. For the first time all winter, she seemed ready to be rid of us, and I couldn’t blame her. Thomas and I had two bolts of sailcloth and not much money—and we agreed not to apply to his father for more, since any forthcoming funds would be accompanied by urgings to return to Boston and go back to work in the sailcloth factory. We continued to live at Louisa’s for a time, but now we two couples kept to our respective rooms and hung a quilt in the doorway for privacy. I went out each day and got the wood for the fire in our room, and I did most of our cooking. From time to time, visitors traipsed through our room, which was next to the stairs, to get to theirs, for evening gatherings that we weren’t always invited to. It was an arrangement that looked a bit like an estrangement but wasn’t, really. It was just some people finding their true levels with one another. It seemed as though it could not go on, but it did, day after day. While the men were gone to Topeka, Louisa and I resumed our old friendship and even slept together in her rosewood bed a couple of nights, so I saw that the problem was only our two families drawing into themselves, the way families do. One of these nights, Louisa said that she was pregnant. That was her word, right out, as if she were a cow or a dog. And she said she intended to be out and about all the way to the end—the most advanced authorities were very much against restricting women to their beds and their houses in such a condition, and she herself was very much against pretending to be ill when she wasn’t ill at all. And so forth. I was envious.

  In the meantime, the Missourians continued to gather at the border, preparing their assault. It was the same rumor every day, and we ceased paying any attention to it. People who talked about it got to be known as newcomers or panicked. We all knew what the Missourians were really capable of, with all their big talk, and it was only an occasional brutal act, nothing concerted. Even so, I began to think that every circumstance was pushing us back toward our claim—the warming weather, the situation with Louisa, the dangers of living in Lawrence. Things would look different out there when the sun was shining and the ground was dry and ready to be planted. Frank was so alarmed by these signs that he began trying to soften me up to the idea of his staying in town.

  Building in Lawrence and round
about was like a pot that is boiling, its lid held down. The winter put the lid on it, but at the very first signs of spring, the lid popped off. New houses made new streets, new settlers had new money, everyone with anything to sell was busy selling it. Charles and Thomas raised their hauling prices, then raised them again. I was glad I’d saved my two bolts of sailcloth—I could get the same for two lengths, enough to sew up one bed tick, as I had gotten in the winter for a whole bolt. Frank brought in nails he found in the streets, hammered them out straight, and sold them for a penny apiece. The dullest man in the world could make some money if he was willing to split shakes. Anytime we worried about Missourians massing on the border, we looked around us at all the activity, all the new faces. They could mass all they wanted, but they could never put a stop to this, could they?

  March turned into April much faster than December had ever turned into January or January into February. Thomas and I got behind in our plans to return to our claim, but we told ourselves that there was so much business to do every day—when things slackened, we would get out there.

  NOW I WILL TELL in proper sequence what happened to the congressional memorial for statehood, even though it took a while longer for us to hear about it. And it was very Jim Lane, very Jim Lane, indeed.

  When he first got to Washington, "Senator" Lane had a hard time finding someone to present the memorial to Congress, but he managed to find General Cass. The oldest man still working, General Cass must have been quite dim of sight, because after he presented the memorial, the other members of Congress told him that it was full of crossings-out and interlineations. And all the signatures were in one person’s handwriting! General Cass was embarrassed, of course, but Jim Lane wasn’t. He told them in an affidavit that he’d been given the authority by the Topeka convention to revise some of the phraseology, and then, well, he had lost the signatures, so he and his assistant had put their heads together and tried to remember who had signed and just appended those names.

  The southern congressmen were incensed, of course. On the one hand, they declared the whole thing a forgery, and on the other, they said that the names appended were all names of "fugitives from justice."

  "Senator" Lane continued unembarrassed. He now turned in another document, and this time he got the attention of Senator Douglas himself, who saw that he had crossed out some bits about the exclusion of free Negroes from the state, something Thomas, of course, was glad he crossed out, even if he had done so just to win some northern senators’ votes and not out of principle. But Senator Douglas’s views were different from Thomas’s, and he pronounced the whole procedure a fraud and roundly chastised "Senator" Lane, and the whole effort made the Free State party in K.T. look both wrong and foolish. The Robinsons and their friends were said to be royally upset, but there was nothing for it. Jim Lane was Jim Lane, as Louisa and Charles and everyone else said. If the Robinsons wanted it done their way, they should have left off building their house and gone to Washington, D.C., themselves.

  Jim Lane would never admit that he’d done a thing wrong. He did what he had to do, he told everyone, and in the end, he did get Congress to vote for admission, because the northern states were more populous and had more congressmen than the southern states. "But," he said when he came back, "no one can get around the ’Little Giant,’ or, as I prefer to call him, the ’Little Tyrant,’ or the weight of the slave power in the Senate and in the cabinet." Everyone knew this was true, even the Robinsons and their supporters. We all ended up agreeing that no doubt we looked somewhat foolish, after all, but "Senator" Lane had gotten as far with his memorial as anyone else would have, given what he was trying to do and where. The result was that Jim Lane went on as before, and so did everyone else. You couldn’t get rid of Jim Lane. What some senators and congressmen said of us began to trickle back, through newspapers, letters, and talk. More than one thought the Free Staters were moving toward treason, were acting outside the law, were criminals, but this was so patently untrue that we looked to the source—always a voice from the southern side—and laughed. Mr. Thayer, in Boston, and the other men back in Massachusetts thought sentiment was flowing, even surging, our way in the north, especially the northeast. We just had to sit tight and wait, they said. Do this, don’t do that. And there was a lot of discussion in Lawrence, especially once the Free State Hotel was completed and everyone had a place to gather.

  Could things have gone another way? I’ve often wondered that since. What if Jim Lane had not been a factor, or if he’d been a quieter, less flamboyant man, never carried into bungling by his own rhetoric? What if instead of Lane and Robinson there had been two like Robinson—two conservative, thoughtful, and cautious men, content to wait, build, and do business? But then, when I think this, I realize that there could never be two like Robinson; there always has to be a Lane, because there’s a position open for a Lane in any controversy. As for doing this and not doing that, not everyone is equally well instructed in what they should do, or equally willing to do or not do. I have since thought that five Robinsons could not have directed the people of Lawrence in a course of action wise in every particular, because the people of Lawrence could not be directed. That was why most of them had come to K.T. in the first place, because they expected less direction here than elsewhere. And anyway, some people just wanted a fight. Some people always want a fight, and they aren’t always the men. There were times when I just wanted a fight myself. Thomas, though, Thomas never just wanted a fight. What he wanted most was time to think things through.

  CHAPTER 16

  I Am Hopeful, and Receive a Surprise

  Women, European contempt for, 30. American esteem for, 30. Influence if, on individuals and nations, 37. Exercise taken by English, 45. Responsibleness of, 53. Eating without being hungry, 98. Responsibility of, as to intemperance, 106. Precedence given to, in America, 141. Importance and difficulty of their duties, 155. General principles for, 158 ; frequent inversion of them, 160. Men engaged in their work, 164, 165. On their keeping accounts of expenditures, 173, 174. Imagining themselves domestics, 205. See American women. —Index

  IN APRIL, Thomas got into the habit of taking Jeremiah out to the claim every so often and thinking things through out there. He cleared away the destruction bit by bit, put things away, assessed what was left and what it would take to put it back together. He built some more fence and cleared a few acres of prairie. We talked about what we might plant there: some flax? some vegetables for local consumption? oats? rye? buckwheat? Different men had different advice, and we listened to it all. The fact was, we were doing so much business in town that the claim seemed as remote as California. I took my profits from my two bolts of sailcloth and sent them back to Thomas’s brothers, who sent me eight more bolts as well as a lot of good rope. Even though we knew lots of things were being confiscated in Missouri, these managed to get through—there was no rhyme or reason to what got through and what didn’t, though there were always rumors of Sharps rifles not getting through. I found it amazing how many uses men could find for good rope, and my rope was in high demand. Charles bought another wagon and another team of mules and let Frank drive them. On the days when Charles and Thomas were out of town, Frank went around from job to job in his wagon, with his mules, shouting things like, "Watch the mules, there! Careful, now! Wagon coming through!" He continued to sleep in the shop downstairs, but with the mild weather and the sunshine, I couldn’t say how much he was actually there. The school started up again, over on Vermont Street, but Frank wasn’t in attendance.

  One thing that happened was that three congressmen came to town to look into things. There was a man from the north, Howard, of Michigan, another man from the north, Sherman, of Ohio, and this man Oliver, from Missouri, who was said to be one of the worst of them. They set up in the Free State Hotel, and all kinds of people went over to testify, and even more went over just to have a look. It seemed like while they were there, they surely would end up seeing our side. Even Oliver was friendly enough
in his official capacity, and none of them ever turned down one iota of Lawrence hospitality.

  And so everything in Lawrence was business and making money, until Sam Wood came back to town. Sam Wood was the husband of Mrs. Wood, who had made the celebrated dash for powder and balls, and he had been away most of the winter after the killing of Dow and the freeing of Branson, which started the Wakarusa War. Mrs. Wood and I maintained a cordial acquaintance, as I always admired her enterprise in substituting that shot and powder for the wadding of her dress, and she always admired my willingness to outrun any and all pursuers in the same endeavor. She was much older than I was and spent a lot of time in her sewing circle, so our paths didn’t often cross, but I knew, as did everyone, that Sam was coming back, and why shouldn’t he?

  Except that in the eyes of the tyrant Jones, the so-called sheriff, Sam Wood was a fugitive.

  Frank happened to be on the scene with his wagon, as some furniture was being moved from the house across the street to a house at the other end of town. But Frank had a knack for being on any scene, so I was hardly surprised to hear all about it only an hour or so after it occurred.

  Jones hadn’t been around much, and whatever official functions he performed away from Lawrence were performed by our own authorities in and around Lawrence. Mostly this would have amounted to keeping the peace and limiting the brawls and fights that accompanied arms and drink wherever you were (though the New Englanders, of course, always maintained that brawls and fights were something visited upon them by settlers from other parts of the country, never their own folks). Anyway, Jones and some men he had with him came up to Sam Wood on the street and laid hold of him, saying, "I’m taking you prisoner."