The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  Sure enough, I heard rustling and cracking in the woods ahead of me, no violent sounds, but neither the sounds of scurrying prairie rodents. I startled, and the yoke fell off my shoulders, and the pails went rolling down the slope, making something of a clatter. Now the other creature startled, too, and cracking and rustling turned into crashing and then snorting. I stood where I was and wished for my rifle. No man would make such noises, and yet weren’t the Missourians everywhere? I thought at once of Old Brown and the men who had been killed, and my observations about them, and revenge. Then there was a flash of paleness, and Jeremiah burst into the clearing next to the river, his ears swiveling and his nostrils wide. He snorted at me, and then we stared at each other, and then he bent his head to snort at one of the pails, which was not far from him, and then we stared at one another again.

  Even so, I thought that he had expected to see me far more than I had expected to see him. I said, "Hello, Jeremiah," in a low and soothing voice. A horse isn’t like a dog, who likes to be greeted enthusiastically. A horse, especially a spirited animal like Jeremiah, is always weighing the option of flight. I laid down the yoke and held out my hands, low and wide. Jeremiah continued to snort. I took a step or two toward him, still murmuring his name and any reassurances that came to my lips. My skirt caught on some brush, but I stopped and smoothly released it, then stepped forward again. I had no bridle, no piece of rope to throw around his neck, and, of course, no guarantee that I could get him the three hundred yards or so back to the cabin without them. Jeremiah stood still, looking at me, and then, at last, put his head down and moved toward me, pausing only to shy a bit at the other fallen pail. When he came to me, first he nuzzled at my hands, looking, I suppose, for a bit of dried apple, then he put his velvety, whiskery lips against my neck and blew out. I put my arm around his neck from below and said, "I have some bits of apples and sugar back at the cabin. Want some?" Then I turned and walked away, leaving the yoke and the pails where they lay. Jeremiah waited a moment, then walked after me, not steadily—I had to stop and let him make up his mind over and over—but willingly enough. When we got back to the cabin, I rewarded him at once with the promised treats. After that, I found a rope and tied him to the railing of his corral, which Thomas had repaired during the spring. He was sufficiently fat—there was plenty of prairie forage in the spring—but he was covered with scratches and had a large cut on his left haunch, crusted over with dark blood and bits of vegetable matter. The area around it was hot to the touch, and he switched his tail and stamped his hoof when my hand got near it. I felt his legs; they were cool and tight. His eyes were clear, and he walked with a steady step. I got some of our well water and washed his wound with a rag, then found some comfrey leaves and made a poultice, which I held on the wound for a few minutes to cool it, then I untied him and gave him the freedom of his corral, which was rich with prairie grasses.

  Only then did I allow myself to marvel and to swell with delight. Jeremiah, who I had thought was certainly lost, certainly in Missouri somewhere, certainly as far from me as the moon! Jeremiah! Here he was! Our diminished future expanded again! And in addition to that, well, he had come of his own accord. He had followed the road between Lawrence and our claim, a road he knew well, of course; he had acted on some intention, some expectation, had he not? Was this possible for a horse? Perhaps, if only because every old horseman had some such story, and yet to see it happen, to be the object of his intention, was intensely gratifying. I stood by the rail and stared at him where he grazed, until the shadows were long and the evening wind had picked up strongly. Then I recollected my pails and more or less ran to the river. By the time I got back with the heavy water (as Miss Beecher always said, "A pint’s a pound, the world around"), it was nearly dark, but I could still see Jeremiah’s luminous shape in the blue light. Only after darkness had enveloped him did I go in and light a candle.

  Thomas, who had had second thoughts about a trek over the prairie when there was no moon, waited to leave Lawrence until daybreak. He could not believe his eyes at the sight of Jeremiah standing by the fence, and me poulticing his cut again, and our good fortune right there, big as life. After I put down the poultice and untied the horse, Thomas grabbed me about the waist and kissed me and spun me around. He kept saying, "I can’t tell you how sure I was we’d have to backtrack! I didn’t see any future here, I was as low as I’ve ever been, but now ... !"

  Well, how were we to know? At any rate, it was a splendid thing to feel my husband’s arms and hands press against me and to lean into his chest and to hear his joyful voice in my ear, and to look into his face and have him put his fingers into my hair and take all the pins out, one by one, and then pause to put them carefully in the pocket of his shirt. Then I shook my hair out, and it fell to almost the middle of my skirt, and we went inside the cabin.

  I caught a catfish in the river and fried that up with some corncakes for supper, and over supper it came out that we still were not in agreement over Old Brown. Those killings had taken place Saturday night, and it was now Monday. As always in Lawrence, Sunday had seen no lack of talk. Some were saying that the five men were having a meeting when they were surprised by a group that may have included Brown and may not have. The killings were intended to preempt plans the men were making to attack Free Staters in their beds that very night. The men had been armed and had returned fire, had even begun firing. Another story was that Old Brown, or someone, had indeed killed four of the men, just shot them fair and square, the way you shoot people in K.T.—a shooting was a shooting, which was different by far from a hacking—but that the fifth man had died on a hunting expedition that strayed among the Indians, and the Indians had done the hacking. The proslave forces had only made it look like Old Brown, or someone, had hacked him up in order to reflect against the Free Staters. Others said that it was the same with these five as it had been with Jones—their own sympathizers, some men from South Carolina, in fact, had done the killings in a drunken fight and then decided to make it look as though Free Staters had done the deed. Old Brown was a bona fide character and hated by many because he invoked the Lord on his side all the time, so he was ripe to be slandered. And still others said it was just like Jones in another way, too: No one was dead, all were alive and only slightly injured. The whole "massacre" was trumped up by the Missouri papers to incite another attack on Lawrence, this time with "justified" executions. Old Brown and his sons hadn’t been anywhere near the spot. I liked this last story myself—it fit in so neatly with what we had experienced from the Missourians before—but Thomas shook his head.

  "I think the story we heard Sunday, the first one, has the ring of truth to it. When they told it, people were horrified and didn’t want to utter such words. Now they’re all talking fast, with eager looks. They’re making up stories, and all the stories are going to bury the truth of what really happened."

  "I think the stories show that nobody knows what really happened. What’s Old Brown himself say?"

  "Nowhere to be found."

  "Well, K.T. is a big country. That doesn’t mean anything." What I really wanted to say was that the killings didn’t seem like our business, as we hadn’t known about them or done them, of course. But they agitated Thomas, and he was eager to tell me all the news, so I kept quiet. He said, "In my opinion, this has broken new ground, ground we shouldn’t be on."

  "There were killings before."

  "But they were more incidental. Folks weren’t going out to look for people to kill, with lists in their hands."

  "He had a list?"

  "They say he did. The ones who say he did it, at any rate."

  Here was the question, to me: In a place where everything was true, could it be true that Old Brown and his men had done the killings and that they had been five miles away from the killings, both at the same time? In the United States, these things couldn’t be true at the same time, but in K.T. it seemed as if they could.

  We were alone for the next two days, and we d
idn’t have any visitors or news, but Thomas couldn’t leave the subject of Old Brown alone. I would say, "Don’t you think Jeremiah seems to have less heat around that cut now?" and he would say, "That man Wilkinson was one of the worst of them, but..." Or I would say, "We need to find some papers for the walls," and he would say, "If they would just come forward and tell the story, then maybe we’d know it wasn’t so bad. But this running off and disappearing, well, that doesn’t look good. Of course, in K.T., just traveling to and fro can look like running off...."

  On Wednesday, a week after the sacking of Lawrence, we had another great rain, and though we set ourselves things to do inside, it was monotonous and uncomfortable to hear the rain on the roof and to have it coming in everywhere—we hadn’t enough pots and pans and dishes and receptacles to catch any but the worst streams. The mudding I had done was still wet, and I could see it crumble and trickle away. We had dry wood and made a fire in the stove and boiled up some tea, but the tea reminded me of Louisa and her two bedsteads and four chairs and little guitar and cups and saucers and warm, dry apartment, and I felt sick with longing all the time that I tried to make myself happy by renewing my gratitude at Jeremiah’s return. We had been sitting silently for a long time, the afternoon so dark with rain that we had a candle lit, and I was sewing up holes in our bed tick and Thomas was cleaning the guns, and he broke the silence by saying, "Why couldn’t they leave well enough alone? This is another mistake. Rash acts are always mistakes, because from a distance they look more than rash, they look evil, and that drives—"

  I flared up. "I’m glad they did it! Well, I’m not glad they did it, because I’m sorry for their wives and children, but for land’s sake, Thomas, don’t you understand the need for action? Even if it’s just one’s own need? Things build up! You can only take so much after a while! A person can’t be cautious, cautious, cautious every minute of every day. I don’t condone what they did, but I understand it, don’t you?"

  "No, I don’t."

  "Then how in the world can you call yourself an abolitionist? You know, I’d hardly ever met an abolitionist before you, but I feel I’m more passionate about it all than you are. Your plan is to wait and wait until slavery goes away. Well, generations could die before then, including our own generation, here in K.T. Time as you live it is much longer than time as you look forward to it. It’s all very easy to say, Well, in fifty years this and in fifty years that, but they could kill us tomorrow. Don’t you ever want to say, Well, bring it on, let’s have it out?"

  "That’s the way they think. Fighting it out."

  "Well, perhaps I’m one of them. We aren’t from New England where I come from, and I don’t always understand New Englanders! You seem ready to talk all about it and tell everyone what to do, but then when they talk back to you, you just keep talking! A westerner doesn’t understand that. Talking has to come to fighting, one way or another, and if it comes to fighting on their side and not on ours, then we suffer."

  "You make no sense."

  Well, that stung, because perhaps it was true. I said, "It seems perfectly clear to me!"

  "I don’t see how you can doubt my commitment to abolition! My opinions are open; I haven’t hidden them."

  "Opinions are common as salt!"

  But you know, I can’t say I meant all of this. I knew he was sincere and true in his opinions and that given the chance to make a telling gesture in favor of freeing a slave or two, he would do it. We westerners have always been willing to make a dare and take a dare; I don’t know why that is. That’s what I felt like then, with that dispute. I was daring him, just for effect, because I was in an ill humor and tired of hearing about Old Brown.

  Thomas looked struck, or stricken. He stared at me for a moment, then lowered his eyes. I didn’t know what to think about this look, so nakedly surprised and doubtful was it. It interested me as a failure, one of the few, of his natural reserve, and I felt that by it I had lost something as a wife but also, in a way, gained something. When one’s husband is a man of such self-control as Thomas usually was, then any failure of that is interesting, at least.

  I knew right then that I should have confessed my insincerity in this argument. I wanted not for him to go out and fight someone but for the rain to stop and the cabin to be dry and tight. But my blood was up, and I made no confession. I continued making my repairs as if I were utterly serious, and after a bit, Thomas put the guns carefully away and went outside. That was Wednesday. We didn’t talk anymore about Old Brown. I sourly told myself that that, at least, was a relief.

  In that first week, we saw a few of our neighbors. Daniel James came by, hunting, but stayed outside and talked only to Thomas. Mrs. Holmes walked over for tea, bringing some corncakes. We drank our tea, but I couldn’t like her, as the half of her conversation that wasn’t bitter and critical was all about the vengeance of the Lord. I induced her to talk about her life in the east, which usually softened up women in K.T. with fond memories of warmth and a modicum of comfort, but Mrs. Holmes could only recall those members of her father’s congregation who had done her family ill turns, or, as she said, returned evil for good. I had been pleased to see her, but I was even more pleased to see her go. With the Jenkinses gone and the Bushes still in town, our little group seemed to have no center. One day, out hunting, I passed the Jenkins claim, which our men had defended against the Missourians. One wall of the house had broken in, and the roof was gone, but the window still glinted there, intact except for the hole the shot had made. I pondered the ironies of this for the rest of the afternoon, and it wasn’t until I was home again, plucking my two prairie chickens, that I thought perhaps we could have that window. When I proposed it to Thomas in the evening, we looked right at each other for a long moment, and then he said, "Well, let’s go over there first thing and have a look around."

  There were a few things there—a store-made chair and a stool, a half-dozen milled boards, a stack of flowered plates, five of them, but no other crockery or utensils, a hammer, a half keg of black powder, a newspaper from Saint Louis, which would have belonged not to the Jenkinses but to the old man who built the cabin. Nor would the Jenkinses have gotten rid of it—whatever its sentiments, it was valuable for insulation against the wind, and I took it without hesitation, for my walls. Other than that, we didn’t at first touch anything but went outside again and sat down on the stoop in front of the closed door. We could, I knew, take the door, too.

  Thomas said, "We can write the Jenkinses, but I don’t honestly think these are their things. I think they themselves left them behind, because they had no associations with them."

  "They surely would have taken those plates with them."

  In front of the cabin was the same rail fence that had divided our men from the Missourians. The rails, for the most part, were unbroken. Jeremiah was tied to one. I watched him for a moment. He was a young, vital animal. It had taken him little time to heal. After a bit, and with no further discussion, we gathered up what we could carry, including the plates, which were nicer than anything I had, though too small to be really useful, and we took it home. The next day, we went back and made a travois by lashing together some of the rails from the fence, and we dragged home as many of those as we could. The day after that, Thomas brought home the door and the window. I was so happy to have that window! I stuffed the bullet hole with a piece of cloth. That was one chink the wind would not get through. At first, of course, we pondered the ironies of the situation: Were we prospering from someone else’s loss, either the Jenkinses’ or those Missourians’? But shortly we stopped cutting it so fine, and not only did we make good use of what there was; we half hoped to come upon another such cache. I thought of Susannah Jenkins’s own observation that K.T. had coarsened her. But that made it seem as though how K.T. changed you was all bad. In my opinion, K.T. made you see the world as it was. Your actions followed that.

  We lived quietly until mid-June. The rains tapered off, and our crop seemed to be doing well enough. Th
e hunting was good, though not so good as the autumn before, and we ate well. I got used to the loneliness, even started to like it. Sometimes Thomas and I went a whole day without saying much and then didn’t read in the evening, either, but sat on our step and stared out over the prairie at the lengthening shadows and the golden sunshine and the wide, busy sky. We didn’t share what we were fancying, but I wondered about Louisa’s condition, and how it would be if I should find myself in the same condition, and what our claim would be like a year thence if there was a child upon it. I made up rules—I would go into town for the winter again, so as to avoid Mrs. James’s fate; I would keep hunting all summer and fall, to have good meat every day; I would forage for some plants I knew were good in such times; I would go into Lawrence and stay for a few days, so that Louisa could teach me to knit; I would get Charles to build me a real cradle, a rocking one, so that I wouldn’t have to run the danger of having the child in the bed with us. I knew all about how I would do it, down to the last detail. But I didn’t tell Thomas a word.

  Now the eighteenth of June rolled around, exactly four weeks after the sacking of Lawrence. We had borrowed a little wagon from Mr. James— four wheels and a platform was what it was, really, a handmade, K.T.-type wagon, and our plan was to go into Lawrence. We had some business, I forget what it was, but really, I think, we felt that we both desired and deserved to go into town, see our friends, and find out the news. I also had conceived a terrible apprehension about Frank, who had been out to see us but twice since our departure from Lawrence. When I’d left him in Louisa’s charge, it seemed a good solution to his reluctance to go out to the claim (a reluctance I sympathized with), and I hadn’t thought about it much for the first week or two. But then I’d awakened one night with the certain knowledge that Louisa was simply letting the boy run wild and Charles, his nominal employer, would have better intentions but fewer opportunities for overseeing him, as he was still traveling to Leavenworth, now twice a week, to carry the mail. And so we hitched up the little wagon and left the claim without a backward glance. It was already a heavy, windy day, even early in the morning, and there wasn’t much freshness anywhere.