The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  When we got to Lawrence, there was talk of Old Brown, indeed, but not of "those killings"; rather of a battle that had taken place ten days after them in the Black Jack ravine, down south and east somewhere. It appeared that a few southerners had set out from Lecompton to look for Old Brown, "thinking," said Mrs. Bush, "that those events down near Pottawatomie might be traceable to him or his sons. And they captured two of his sons, and burned the one boy’s house down, and made him and his brother march in chains under the hot sun back to Lecompton, and he went mad! It was a crime! Well, Brown found them, and they had taken a couple of prisoners, can you imagine, just men who were standing around in the street! They had a pitched battle, and Brown drove them off, and of course there were casualties!" The dragoons had then entered in, somehow, and made the peace, and there was much sympathy for Brown because of what happened to his sons—it was said that the oldest would never be the same and that a third one had been shot and killed. I leaned toward Mrs. Bush and said in a low voice (for that was what seemed appropriate), "What did he ever say about the Pottawatomie business?"

  "Oh, nothing. No one knows what really happened down there. The Missouri press says massacre, of course, but you can’t believe them—they lie routinely. My own feeling is that it was a local dispute, and whiskey and Indians got into it somehow. You can’t pay attention to every act of violence that happens among the southerners, as they are prone to that sort of thing."

  Louisa didn’t even think it was interesting enough to talk about anymore, and it was true, we had other things that were more pressing than what the Pottawatomie affair had become, a bit of unpleasant gossip that folks preferred to keep mum about. Frank, it turned out, had bought himself a horse. He was keeping it in the yard where Charles kept his animals. "He had the money," said Louisa. "It must have been fifty dollars. Anyway, I must say, he’s been around hardly at all since then."

  "Can’t you keep him around? I worry about him."

  "Lidie, dear, you couldn’t keep him around when he was on foot! I certainly can’t keep track of a young man who owns his own horse and has his own money, especially in my condition. I hardly get out of our rooms."

  She said this to me as we were walking briskly down Massachusetts Street, but I took it as it was meant, an acknowledgment not that she couldn’t watch over Frank but that she wouldn’t. I said nothing, as I did not feel I was in a position to press her. Perhaps, indeed, she could not. I said, "I’ll have to send him back to Quincy, then."

  "How foolish of you to think so! Open your eyes, Lydia! The boy is grown up and out of your control. He was the same last fall, and you were making the same noises you’re making now. No doubt he’s running about with one of those little bands that are raiding the Missourians from time to time. It’s all boys that are doing that."

  "What bands?"

  "Well, you know. Since the attack, the boys have been wild! You can’t control them at all. They all have horses and guns, Sharps carbines if they can get them. They live in camps and ride around here and there. I’m sure it’s ninety percent a game, but if they come into something good, then they take advantage of it." Her tone was light, and I let myself be lulled by that. It was summer. I imagined a kind of elaborate freedom—hunting, camping, doing a bit of mischief. When I thought about it, I decided that Frank could probably take care of himself—he was a good shot. But I decided I wouldn’t write to Harriet about it just yet. Anyway, Frank had turned up at Louisa’s just two nights before, in the company of Roger Lacey. The boys had bedded down in the shop, slept for a long time, and woken up hungry. They looked healthy and happy. Louisa said, "He knows where to come if he gets in trouble—he’s got friends all over town, and he can go to your claim, too. He’s far better off than some of these boys, not a year or two older than he is, who come here as strangers and have to make their way. He’s an enterprising boy, and he helps Charles, too."

  Well, I was uneasy, but I put that away. Louisa gave me some wool and a knitting lesson, but I didn’t say why I sought one. She looked blooming and pink of cheek. We drank tea and knitted all afternoon, while Thomas went around with Charles and saw the rebuilding and repairs.

  Of course, there was other news. Governor Robinson was still detained, and his life had been threatened more than once; we Kansas rebels were still in bad odor with the proslave administration in Washington; but on the other hand, more eastern newpapers than ever had sent their correspondents to Lawrence—there was even a man from the London Times, in England. Because of these men, it was now generally felt in Lawrence that the sacking had been a good thing—a way that the southerners had revealed themselves to the world. Sentiment was shifting to our side, or at least it would soon. Any number of these eastern correspondents were writing books about our trials in K.T., and some of these books, it was said, would be out as early as the fall, in time for the election. And at the election, there would be a Republican candidate, too, black as black, of course, the proslave faction said. "But," said Louisa, "Senator Lane is wonderfully hopeful. They may condemn what comes from Free State Kansas all they like, but if it grows all around them, like daisies in the grass, then that’s another story. The other states are watching now. They have to ask themselves whether they will allow the southern plot to succeed."

  This seemed to be true.

  As it was almost midsummer, the days were long, and we stayed through the late afternoon. There was still plenty of light for driving home, and the night would undoubtedly be light, too, should we be delayed. We were happy going home. The wagon bumped along, and we elected to walk beside it for the first mile. We had got a few things, only some flour and some corn meal and some salt, but it seemed rich to have those, and rich to know that when we tired of walking, if we did, we could bump along on the wagon. It seemed certain that another wagon would turn up that we might be able to purchase.

  As we walked along, Thomas said, "You know, they don’t feel in any danger at all in that town. I thought somehow that everyone would huddle in their houses with their weapons by the door, but—"

  "But they just laugh at the southerners and go out with their weapons in their hands!" I shook my head in disbelief and just then noticed Jeremiah’s ears flick forward and his head come up. With the rustling of my skirt through the grass, and the creaking of the wagon, which rattled like it was going to come apart any minute, I didn’t hear anything, but a horse has sharper senses than a person. Thomas was saying, "And there looks to have been hardly a pause in the building—" when three men, or rather, a boy of sixteen or so and two men, rode up out of a copse of trees that was just ahead of us. Jeremiah stopped dead in his tracks, and the sack of cornmeal fell off the wagon. Thomas went around to pick it up, and one man, without greeting us, as was usual in K.T., called out, "Don’t bother to do that!" in almost incomprehensible southern tones. I went rigid at once, but Thomas only smiled and turned to look at the men, putting his hand on the Sharps carbine we had brought along with us and saying, "Is there something you men would like?"

  And the other man grinned and shouted, "Sure! We’d like to shoot us a G— d— abolitionist!" and he raised his pistol and let off two shots. Then Thomas fell on the other side of the wagon, out of my sight, and at the same time Jeremiah reared between the shafts, and the boy raised his weapon, a long rifle, and shot the horse in the neck. Jeremiah gave out a deep groan and went down on his side. I climbed over the wagon to Thomas, and I heard the three horses gallop away.

  Thomas was lying chest-down, with his face turned away from me. I was certain as a rock that he was dead, but when I went around and knelt down, I saw that his eyes were open and that he blinked them. I was kneeling in his blood. Jeremiah wasn’t far away, and his blood, a surge of it, bright red in the late sunlight, flowed toward us in a way that seemed to stun and paralyze me. The horse continued to grunt, but Thomas didn’t make a sound. I put my face close to his and felt his breath, then I sat up. I remember that I could still hear galloping, and then, after a bit, that soun
d was gone, and there were no sounds at all.

  I did not begin to know what to do, but I did something, anyway. I turned my husband over on his back to have a look. I didn’t know what I was seeing, and then I did, I was seeing his black coat, and so I unbuttoned that and opened it, and against his blue shirt the red blood coming from his stomach and shoulder stood out more tellingly. It was warm, so I opened his shirt, and after that I saw the wounds. I looked at them for a moment, then stood up and stepped out of my petticoat, the cleanest thing I had about me, and started ripping it into bandages. Here’s what I did—I rolled up some strips into two thick wads, then bound them tightly against the wounds, not actually thinking that would stop their bleeding but more because I couldn’t stand to look at them any longer, they were so frightening. Then I closed Thomas’s shirt over his chest and covered him with my shawl. I thought I might get him onto the wagon, somehow, but I was afraid of the pain that would give him, and anyway, then what? I crawled over to Jeremiah. The horse was just then still barely alive. His visible eye was open, and I am sure he looked at me. I put my hand on his ear and stroked it, then bent down and blew gently into his nostril, something my brother-in-law Roland had always told me horses did to greet one another. After that, Jeremiah passed on. I crawled back to Thomas, who at last gave a groan, his first sound since they shot him. Now, all of a sudden, I started talking and couldn’t stop. I said, "Someone will come along. They always do. Remember last year? The prairie was a regular highway. Folks came by every day. Remember, we saw those people early this morning. Someone will come along. It’s a warm night, we’ll be fine." I didn’t tell him about Jeremiah. Then he started swinging his head back and forth, and after that he opened his eyes and whispered, "Go get someone. Go get Charles."

  "I can’t. They shot Jeremiah. I want to stay with you."

  "Go get Charles."

  "I want—"

  "Go get Charles." Then he let out an exhausted and painful groan and closed his eyes again.

  Now, of course, I couldn’t sit there with any conviction but must be thinking that I should go for Charles, or someone, especially as dusk was at last beginning to fall. And yet leave my husband stretched out on the prairie, with only a shawl to cover him? And yet sit there helplessly with him, not even trying to find aid? I stared at him, but his eyes were closed. I put my hand on his forehead, but no wisdom came into me. At last, I made up my mind, and this was what I thought—that if he was dying, the right thing would be to stay, but if he was to live, then the right thing was to get help; and that if I had resolution, the resolution that he would live, then I should act on it by finding someone who would know how to save him. Now staying seemed a way of accepting defeat, so I prepared to leave, but then leaving seemed impossible, so I sat down again and made up my mind to stay, but then I saw that night was really upon us, and so I kissed Thomas on his lips and eyes, and said, "I’m going to Charles," and then he nodded slightly, and so I stood up, and yet actually walking away was almost more than my strength would allow. The upshot of that was that instead of walking, I ran. I ran toward Lawrence as fast as I could.

  My skirt kept tripping me up, getting caught on burrs and bushes, until I stooped and tore the bottom tier with my teeth and ripped it off. Then I heard noises, and realized that I had left the carbine on the wagon bed, and had nothing with me in case those men were around, or other men, or animals, or just in case I wanted to shoot something, to do what had been done to me, which seemed an attractive possibility right then. I ran, and it got darker. The prairie wasn’t as trackless as people said it was, at least around Lawrence, but I did sense at one point that I was getting lost and veering to the left of Lawrence, wherever that was. So I veered back to the right and slowed down, but then I couldn’t bear to be slow, and I started running again, but then I couldn’t breathe, so I slowed down again. I knelt on the prairie grass and put my face in my lap to try and keep from fainting and to catch my breath, then I got up again and saw a small cabin, but when I ran to it, it was empty and deserted, the fences were broken down, the door was out of its frame. I thought for a second, in fact, that it was my own cabin, but I was able to remember that we had fixed our cabin. Was it the Jenkinses’ cabin? I made myself think and observe, even in the near darkness, because that would mean that I knew where I was, even though where I would be was farther from Lawrence than where I had started, but no, it wasn’t the Jenkinses’ cabin. There was no blank spot where our window had been. I ran on, thinking all of a sudden that if I didn’t know where I was then, I certainly wouldn’t know how to get back to Thomas, even if I found something, and then, at that thought, I started moaning and wailing, because every step I took was leading me deeper and deeper into confusion. I stopped running and stood still, with my hands in my hair, trying to think where I was, where Thomas was, where Lawrence was, but all I could think was of blood ebbing away, of the men who raised their guns, who had hated us enough, just by the sound of Thomas’s voice, to kill him, had hated Jeremiah enough to not even bother to steal him but to kill him, too. The wailing must have increased. It seemed to increase all around me, and then I heard the creak of harness and of wheels and wood, and then a voice said, "Now, ma’am, you are in a powerful state. You need a drink of highly rectified whiskey to bring you around."

  I spun in my tracks. A horse and a wagon loomed out of the darkness, and then a lantern was lit, and a figure that I could only dimly make out climbed down from the wagon and walked toward me. I stood there dumbly and then saw the face of David Graves. And he saw my face. He said, "Why, Mrs. Newton, I am astonished to find you here!" Then he handed me the southern cure, and following instruction, I took a drink. It was such a shock that I was able to talk again, which I suppose was the point.

  "They shot my husband, and I don’t know where he is, and they shot our horse, too! I’ve been running, but I can’t find Lawrence, and I’m sure he’s lost. We have to get there before morning."

  "They shot Thomas Newton?"

  "He said one word! He asked what they wanted! They shot him!"

  He bundled me into the wagon on top of the goods, then he made me sit quietly and gather my thoughts, and then he started asking questions, one by one, and I’ll always be grateful to Mr. Graves because he did so. He said, "Is Mr. Newton still alive?"

  "Yes, in the road."

  "What road?"

  "We were traveling from Lawrence to our claim."

  And so on and so forth, all the while driving slowly here and there over the moonless prairie in a fashion that seemed random until I saw Mr. James’s little flat wagon, and Jeremiah a dark mass in front of it. I leapt out of Mr. Graves’s wagon and ran to Thomas. He was awake, and looking up, and when I knelt beside him and he saw me, he smiled.

  Mr. Graves drove his wagon in a big circle around Jeremiah, but his mule snorted and shied, anyway. Meanwhile, I was talking to Thomas and wrapping the shawl more closely around him. "Mr. Graves came along. I was at my wit’s end, but he found you. Oh, your cheeks are cold."

  And then I lifted his head and Mr. Graves put the cup of whiskey between his lips, and Thomas groaned and winced and smiled again, and I was as happy as if the shooting had never happened or as if by dawn we would all be the same as we had been.

  Mr. Graves had some milled boards with him, and we held two of these together and got Thomas onto them, and then we half heaved and half slid him onto the top of Mr. Graves’s goods. I sat on a keg and held my husband’s hand in my two hands and tried to judge by how cold he was how much blood he had lost; as for that blood, I hated leaving it out there on the prairie, uselessly soaking into the ground, lost forever. And Jeremiah, too. He who had not abandoned me, I had now abandoned. But that was K.T. Sentiment was a deadly thing in K.T. Folks back in the U.S. didn’t know that about K.T, did they?

  And the whole time, Mr. Graves continued to croon at us. "Now, I know all about what to do with a gunshot. All we need is some light on the subject. First thing, after you stop the blood com
ing out, is you take a magnet, and you hold it over the wound, and it draws out the shot. Why, my brother had such a strong magnet when we were boys that once he shot himself in the foot by mistake and that shot just popped out of there, flew to the magnet, though he held it a couple of inches from the wound. It didn’t hurt him any, so we tried a few things out, like how far from the wound could you hold it so it would pop the shot out, and would the magnet stick to his foot through the skin and flesh and bone, from the other side, you see, if the shot was in there? Well, he said it did, but I myself didn’t see that, but I thought if he had left the shot in there and tried that magnet from the other side before he took any out, it might have, but we didn’t think of that first thing. I always wished we had."

  Wasn’t shot made of lead? But his talk was like a lullaby, or a work song, and I focused on it to ease my passage to Lawrence.

  "I knew another man who got shot, some years ago, and if you’ll pardon my language, ma’am, he said that the thing to do was to make water on the wound, to clean it out without touching it, and so me and some other men, two of them, we stood there and made water on the wound—it was in his hip—and then he left it open to the air. And after four hours, he had us make water on it again, and so on, for two days. Well, I mean to tell you, this was in Arkansas, and you can never tell why they do some things in Arkansas, and no doctor would approve of such a procedure, I am sure, but after two days, the man got up and walked, naked from the hip down on one side, of course, walked right into town like that, easy as you please, but he did get over that wound in no time at all. Said the Indians told him about that. But that’s what everyone says. If the Indians always said what they are supposed to have said, then they would be talking all the time, but as you know, Indians are by and large a taciturn folk...."