The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  Frank, who was walking beside me, said, "I don’t know when I been this mad before."

  I gave a little bark of bitter laughter.

  "It an’t a laughing matter."

  "Isn’t a laughing matter."

  "Well, you are laughing. That just makes me madder."

  I looked at him. His eyebrows were low over his eyes, and he was frowning mightily. He didn’t look especially boyish. He said, "My feeling is, they shouldn’t have done it."

  "Well, of course not. Look at the suffering...

  He caught my gaze, as if the suffering were beside the point. Transgression was the point for Frank.

  "Men do what they think they need to do. I hate to say it, but the Missourians think they have right on their side, also. They think—"

  "I an’t going to try and know what they think. I am going to fix my thoughts on what they did." He walked a little ahead of me, and I caught up.

  "Frank—" But I didn’t have anything to say. You could look at it both ways. We were fools to have come to K.T. in the first place, or they were knaves to have destroyed us (hastened our destruction, perhaps a realist would say). Or both were true. As I’ve said elsewhere in this narrative, in K.T. most things were both true and false, and it depended on your circumstances how you chose among them.

  Finally, I said, "Well, now we can say that maybe we shouldn’t have come here. When I look back to how I felt in Quincy, it seems like some kind of idle whim, the fruit of thoughtless ignorance. But back then, it seemed like everyone wanted to come to Kansas."

  "It don’t matter how we got here or whether we regret that, and I don’t. I would have got here without you as well as with you, Lidie. But what matters is whether they should have done this, and they shouldn’t have, and I an’t going to think any more about it than that." He turned off abruptly as we came to Fourth Street, and I watched him go for a moment before I recollected myself and called out to him, but he waved me off without turning around, and I thought right then that I would never get him into school again in his life, and here was another loss, Frank’s future, for he was making himself a K.T man, a ruffian of a sort, no matter what side he was on in this controversy, and I didn’t have a word of influence over him.

  CHAPTER 17

  I See the Bottom of the Well

  If an artery be cut, it must be immediately tied up, or the person will bleed to death. The blood from an artery is of a bright red color, and spirts out, in regular jets, at each beat of the heart. —p. 240

  THE BEST BIT OF NEWS WAS THIS, that when I got back to Louisa’s place, there was Charles, smiling, dirty, and tired. When his captors had fallen into the stupor that was the natural end of their revelry, he had simply walked away, pausing only to select two of their better rifles and some hundred rounds of ammunition. He showed us the weapons and was much pleased with his escape. But he had bruises, one on his cheek and one on his neck, and a cut above the eye. When he afterward went out for a moment, I asked Louisa about them. "Well," she said, "they had their usual fun with him, knocked him down and kicked him once or twice, and of course some offered to hang him right there, but others restrained them. That’s the sort of people we have to deal with."

  I said, "I suppose they know that when they start anything they’ll be too drunk later to finish it." We exchanged a sour laugh. It was galling to be at the mercy of such low characters.

  Now everyone in Lawrence commenced to do as he or she thought best. There were those, hard to understand, who decided to ignore the sacking of the town and get on with their business of farming or keeping a shop or milling or whatever, and, it’s true, there are always these sorts of cold stones who look like men and have wisdom on their side. Others, perhaps those who hadn’t liked K.T much in the first place, hastened their plans to backtrack and shortly left for Ohio and New York State, or decided that Nebraska was, perhaps, a colder Kansas, but one without conflict. Hotter-blooded ones were even harder to understand. We all agreed that stay we must, simply because the Missourians wanted us out, but there agreement stopped. Charles was all for carrying the war to the Missourians, somehow, or at least to their fellows in Franklin and in Leavenworth and in Kickapoo. What they had done to us should be done to them, summarily and with even greater force, and not only because such were the measures men like that could understand, but also because now that they had done it once, with success, they would be all the more likely to try again, with even less restraint, and for even more slender reasons. Hadn’t they vowed to hang, shoot, knife, dismember, and clear us out? If we expected them to stop now, we were sadly mistaken, Charles thought. Louisa was, by contrast, all for defending the town. We should conserve our weapons and our provisions, rebuild the fortresses and earthworks, commence the drilling. If another attack was to come, and it was, according to both Charles and Louisa, then those with weapons should be at home, using them to protect, rather than running around the countryside, where they were likely to get in trouble, for one thing, and likely to do no good, for another. Thomas declared that in all the fighting, sight of the main goal had been lost, and that was making Kansas a free state, as a first step to abolishing slavery everywhere, which Thomas thought would take a generation or two but was inevitable if K.T could be won. "This is the summit of the mountain," he said. "The water will fall one way or the other. If it falls to the south, then in a generation or two there will be slaves in Massachusetts, and free labor will be everywhere driven out. If it falls to the north, then, the south will be free in the same period of time. But it all depends on Kansas." Thomas, who was not a fighting man, wanted to renew our applications to Congress and work for the election of a good Republican, and free any slave that he should happen across on the side.

  As for me, I held many incompatible views in a kind of seething soup or stew, and I wondered at the consistency of the others. I thought that in a place like K.T, you could easily act one way one minute and another way the next minute, and smile or laugh or cry all in the same minute. I wanted to kill something, preferably a Missourian, preferably the man who had driven off Jeremiah, preferably more than one. Before they died, I wanted them to give back Jeremiah, apologize to me, and know what brutes and liars they were. At the same time, I wanted no more violence of any kind, no disturbances to my system, to the town, or to the spring that was shaping up before us. I wanted no more burnings or screaming, no more of those revelations of loss such as I had had when I saw the broken and empty corral, which made you feel suddenly drenched with grief. I wanted no more fear such as we all felt right then, fear of the Missourians, yes, but a greater fear of something else, which hadn’t yet happened but had certainly been set in motion.

  I wanted Frank to stick right with me and show me at every moment that he was safely himself, a thirteen-year-old boy interested in money and business; but he wasn’t, and I simultaneously wanted him out there, where I knew he was, banding together with other boys who had their weapons with them and righteousness on their minds. My brain held many contradictory thoughts, but I knew Frank’s didn’t. Frank’s brain held a simple thought, and I wished for his sake that he knew the many complexities, but also I wished for my sake that I believed in the simple.

  Ah, well, I was agitated. All over Lawrence, citizens were praying for various things—revenge, peace, war, fortitude, wisdom, safety, the death of enemies, the elevation of the bondman. Had I been the praying sort, I would have prayed only for a quiet mind.

  We went to bed that night, Thursday, and the next. By Saturday, the cold ones were getting on with business, and Lawrence seemed calmer. Charles had bought a new mule of a backtracker, and Thomas and I had agreed to borrow the mule on Sunday to take our things out to the claim.

  There was an old man in K.T. who afterward became famous, by the name of Old Brown, old John Brown. He came from Ohio or New York somewhere, and wasn’t related to any of the other Browns—there were lots of Browns in K.T. I can’t say that I ever saw him, though Louisa said that she did. Perhaps we
saw some of his sons or associates, as there were quite a few of them, riding through the town or buying something here or there. They had a place south of town, down on the Marais des Cygnes, where my brother-in-law Horace always talked about settling. Free Staters and proslavery people were all mixed up down there—it wasn’t pure enclaves, as it was in the north. Later Mr. Holmes said that he saw Old Brown with his famous weapon, some kind of thing like an adze or a pike, odd-looking. But afterward, as with everything else, all sorts of people wanted to get next to it, and that is why I want to stress that I never saw Old Brown or his sons or friends, nor did I know at the time that what Old Brown did would become the most famous thing about K.T. in some quarters and utterly unknown in others. The fact was, what Old Brown did, and to whom, and why, was a common story around the time that it happened, and it showed us all the new world we had gotten into and what that meant, and so most people didn’t say much about it, because that was a world that most people in their right mind didn’t enter willingly.

  We went to bed Saturday night. Sunday morning, we got up and Thomas went to hitch the mule to Charles’s smaller wagon. I made breakfast for Louisa, Charles, and myself. Frank was out early. I had let our insistence that he come with us to the claim slip by. Charles said he could use him, and so, officially, he was to stay with Charles and Louisa and be a help to them. Louisa was still up and around most days, but she was a bit ill that morning. I gave her dry wheaten cakes, which settled her. All we were thinking of was that now the parting had come and that we all would miss our intimacies. I liked Charles Bisket enormously now—he was so cheerful and agreeable and tall and languid-looking and ready to help anyone at any time. Charles made you think about good luck, which he always seemed to have. Was there such a thing as luck, really, or was it just Charles’s good nature reflecting back onto himself? As for Louisa, for all her faults and pretensions (and I felt that I could catalogue these with perfect clarity), there was a solidity in the bond we shared that seemed unshakable by things as trivial as annoyance, let’s say, or foolishness, or vanity, on one side or the other.

  I wrapped up a stack of cakes in a cloth for later in the day, and Louisa rose from her bed to present me with some other things—tea and honey and the last of her dried apples. Then, through the broken window, we heard the wagon and the mule pull up outside, and Charles trotted down the stairs. I embraced Louisa and gave her a kiss and drew her wrapper more closely around her shoulders. I saw Thomas and Charles and a man I didn’t recognize in confabulation where Thomas was holding the mule. I didn’t see their faces until I got down there, though. Their faces, when I saw them, were pale in the spring sunshine, and I said, thinking nothing, "What’s the news?"

  "It’s a terrible thing," said Thomas. He opened his mouth and closed it, then said, "I can’t say it."

  "Some men were killed," said Charles. "Some proslavery men down south about thirty miles."

  I saw by their looks that there was more to it than this, but I restrained my curiosity. The stranger shook his head and walked off. Charles and Thomas continued to load the wagon, though we hadn’t very many things, and they were shortly done. As we drove north out of Lawrence, we saw knots of citizens gathered in the streets. I looked deeply into Thomas’s face, but he was looking steadily at the mule’s haunches, and everything about his demeanor warned me off. We went along in silence. The ride to the claim normally took about an hour on horseback, somewhat longer in a wagon. This time, the prairies were wet from the spring rains and we had to pick our way rather carefully and circuitously. After about an hour, we were still but halfway there. I didn’t mind. This drive, I thought, was our last respite before the beginning of seriously hard work and heavy solitude. Finally, Thomas cleared his throat and spit off to the side, which was odd for him, as he didn’t chew tobacco. But he was spitting out what he had to say.

  "A man and his two sons, and two other men, also, were killed last night down around the Pottawatomie area. They were killed by Free Staters in sight of their wives, who were begging that their lives be spared."

  "Who were they?"

  "Do you know that fellow Allen Wilkinson, who’s a delegate to the bogus legislature?"

  I nodded. This Wilkinson was something of a loudmouth.

  "He was one. The man and his sons were named Doyle, and then there was another man, whose name I don’t know. He was visiting, and they called him out in the sight of three other men."

  "Who did the shooting?"

  "It wasn’t just shooting."

  "What was it?"

  "I don’t want to tell you."

  "Don’t, then."

  "It was hacking."

  "You mean like up in Leavenworth? With axes?"

  "Something of the sort."

  We pondered this in silence.

  I said, "Tell me who did it," fearing that it would be someone we knew. Daniel James was angry enough for that.

  "Brown."

  "Brown the newspaper editor?"

  ’Another Brown. They call him Old Brown. I think I’ve seen him. He’s one of those that make you want to cross the street with one look. He had his sons and some others with him."

  That was Sunday, the day we borrowed Charles’s new mule and went to our claim. I remember it clearly, and so that’s how I know what folks knew about that, and how quickly. My first reaction was a hardhearted one, I admit. I said, "If the southerners kept their mouths shut a little more, they might fare a little better."

  "These were unarmed men, whose wives were begging for their lives."

  "How many times do they vow to hang us or shoot us or clear us out? How many times do they call for our destruction in the bloodiest terms? It seems to me that if people talk all about these sorts of things long enough, they can’t be surprised when these things happen."

  Well, Thomas was not pleased with my less than womanly response, but he didn’t condemn me. We rode along. The mule went easily enough. The plan was that we would unpack our cases and belongings, and then Thomas would drive the wagon into town and walk out again. He didn’t expect to be back with me until after dark. I estimated that that was enough time for us to digest each other’s views on the subject of the killings, or, as it later came to be called by some, the massacre. Of course, in Lawrence, folks always referred to it as "those killings." As for a mule or another horse, well, it was possible that something would turn up, but our funds were exceedingly low, and we were pondering what we had that we might sell. What with the "sacking" and our poverty, our future seemed to have gotten rather short, and we didn’t try to look far into it. Over the years, I’ve noticed that about impoverishment and danger—both make the present moment seem full and almost agreeable, but with the sense that you must keep your head down and your eyes on your feet, for fear.

  We came to our cabin and drew up the mule in front of the door. It didn’t look too bad—it looked familiar, easy to claim as our own. In spite of the wet weather, the stands of wheat and barley looked good enough, to our untutored eyes. They were green and tallish. Thomas had broadcast the seed more thickly than thinly, and the wet earth was hidden in the green. These green bits were only patches in the larger sweep of the flowery prairie, and there was just a light breeze—none of that heavy K.T. wind. In one of his previous trips, Thomas had set the door on its leather hinges again, and that did wonders for the look of the place. We carried in our belongings. The spaces between the logs that I would soon be chinking with mud let in some light, and things seemed cheerful enough. By noon, we had eaten some of our wheat cakes from the morning, and Thomas and the mule had rattled away again. I watched them go for a long time, until they had disappeared over the rim of the prairie. My husband’s back pleased me, for how straight it was, how strange and yet how characteristic of him. I still couldn’t say that I felt about him as other women seemed to feel about their husbands, that they were essentially familiar and without mystery. But I wasn’t thinking these thoughts at the time; I was just watching the prairie fill
up with loneliness around his receding figure and persuading myself that his return would effect the opposite.

  The first thing I did was build a fire in the stove—a good stove, and worth the money I had paid for it, since it went through the winter unused and emerged as if still new—with some of the wood we had chopped and set inside the cabin to dry on earlier visits. Then I poured off some river water I’d set out on my last visit and put the kettle on the stove to heat. After that, I swept out bits of dirt and debris that had sifted through the walls. My plan was to start digging out the well again as soon as we could; The river was pretty high now. That reassured me that you could drink a bit of it, anyway. I had to carry river water up to the cabin for the endless mudding that had to be done, but I was putting that off, as the slope to the river might be a bit slippery, there might be snakes at this time of year, and at any rate, the walk back with the heavy pails was not a pleasant one. But soon I had done all the little tasks I could in good conscience do, and I picked up two other pails we had and settled them on the yoke I laid across my shoulders. It was easy when they were empty, and I rather skipped down the slope, not thinking of much and taking no care to be quiet.