The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  I ascertained that he would be driving east in two days, and he agreed to come to Louisa’s early that morning to pick up my things—my box containing my dresses and boots and shawl, a few garments of Thomas’s for remembrance and perhaps to send to his mother. The carbine wouldn’t fit in my bag, and so I wondered what I should do with it. When I mentioned this to Louisa, she knew right away. She said, "Charles has just the thing for you," and brought out a pistol, a revolver in a leather holster. "This is a black dragoon." She held it up. It was more a dark gray, shiny and heavy, with a smooth wooden stock and dull brass around the trigger. At some point there had been figures worked into the cylinder, but years of use had smoothed them away. "Put this in your bag," she said. "We can use your carbine here in Lawrence." She gave me the revolver and the holster, then pushed some money into my pocket. Later, I saw that it was twenty dollars, about the price of a Sharps carbine in New England. She also gave me the powder and the .44-caliber balls I would need, and a tin of firing caps. Compared to those for a Sharps, they were tiny indeed.

  The reader may here express some skepticism at my judgment and my state of mind as I made these plans. I can only attempt to delineate both as clearly as I remember them. I seemed to myself to be thinking very clearly—as clearly and with as much focus as I had ever done. The connection between that boy in the fall and that boy in the spring seemed ironclad to me. And, I also felt, I had waited around for the citizens of Lawrence, who had been full of vengeance at the funeral, long enough. Nothing was being done. Indeed, I quickly saw that there was no one to do it: our leaders were still scattered or imprisoned, and Thomas had not been so important to our cause that avenging his death was an immediate necessity. The federal authorities, in the persons of Colonel Sumner’s dragoons, were invariably slow to press Free State claims, invariably quick to press claims against Free Staters. There was no other machinery of a policing sort in K.T. Thomas’s blood on the prairie was surely crying out for justice, but as far as I could see, it was crying out in vain. All the same, I didn’t hold these things against my friends and fellow citizens. Thomas’s death was my business. I was a good shot and a good horsewoman, a strong girl with no children and no ties that held me to my proper place. Taking care of these Missourians was my business, and I welcomed it. Frank, I thought, would have helped me, but I was eager to leave, and he couldn’t be found. I held that against him.

  As for my friends, they thought I was bearing up very well and accepting my loss with becoming strength and resolution. Those who heard about my plan to visit Thomas’s mother applauded it. But, to be sure, K.T was not the States in many ways, and in this way above all others: a woman’s activities and conversations were not overseen as carefully as they were in the States; folks didn’t take such an interest in one—they had too much to think of of their own,, so there was a lot of room for even a woman to make her private way.

  And so I visited Thomas’s grave one last time. I expected, somehow, to make contact with him, perhaps in one of Louisa’s disembodied realms, but looking down upon his grave, I felt only a simple and flat sadness, tedious and exhausting and endless. I could not say so, but I didn’t mind leaving his grave behind. I couldn’t be with him there any more than I could be with him anywhere else.

  To my dismay, Mr. Graves had other passengers with him when he came to get my things—a man and a girl of about twelve. The man was sitting on the wagon seat, smoking a seegar, and the girl had found a seat on a pile of empty sacks in the rear. The man watched me get in, and made neither any conversation nor any attempt to relinquish the wagon seat to me. Mr. Graves gave me a sheepish glance, then said, "This here, ma’am, is my cousin, also David B. Graves. And this is his daughter, Davida, or Vida. You ought to give the lady your seat, David B."

  "I seen too much of that," was all the cousin said. He was a fat man, and I would not say he was much under Mr. Graves’s influence.

  Louisa, Charles, and Mrs. Bush, who had turned out to see me off, exchanged a glance. Louisa said, "Charles would be happy to take you, Lydia."

  "I want to," said Charles. "I’ll take you right to the wharf, and stay with you there until you find a passage, and load on your things for you! You won’t have to lift a finger!"

  "I have perfect faith in Mr. Graves, Charles. We have a lot to discuss."

  "Oh, darling!" exclaimed Louisa, putting her hands first to her belly, then to her face. "I thought it was going to be different!" She reached out for my hand and squeezed it. Mrs. Bush was shaking her head. "Perhaps when you return, my dear, these—" But she didn’t go on, for fear of offending the two David Graveses, Mr. Graves clicked to his mules, said, "We’ll be off, now!" and that was my parting from Lawrence. I didn’t think a thing of it, to tell the truth, because my plans seemed to have driven everything else out of my head. My only concern was whether I would manage to speak with Mr. Graves, my Mr. Graves, or not.

  We drove southeast, and soon we were out of Lawrence, farther than I had been southeast since September, as our claim happened to be north of town. The day quickly grew hot, and I tried as best I could to withdraw into the brim of my bonnet. The two Mr. Graveses sat hunched over, their hats pulled down. The girl looked at me for a while, then out over the prairie. The wagon lurched along well enough; the rains had stopped weeks before, and the ground was hard. In places, the grasses were tall and bent over, and the prairie presented the aspect of a meadow, but either because I saw things differently now, or because they were different, the prairie looked not at all wild to me anymore. A group of three wagons on the horizon, approaching us, was merely the most visible emblem of what K.T. was now—not an empty spot under the sky but a seething human landscape that had lost every vestige of freshness and the hope that went with it. The grass and flowers were oppressed by what lay scattered about—here was a wagon wheel, broken, here a broken keg that had held whiskey, here were some bones and the skull of an ox, here was the shaft of an ax or another tool, here some rails, split, broken, left, here a piece of milled lumber, or half a one. The busyness and building that had amazed and thrilled me from time to time in Lawrence had its cost, as I well knew. Everything carried there, made there, bought and sold there, moved across the prairie; some part of it was lost or broken or destroyed and left behind, evidence of the intentions of men. And I knew from my life there that those intentions were generally far from honorable, the main intention being always to make money, as much of it in as little time as possible. Should we pass the wagons ahead of us, should I look into the faces of their owners and passengers, the primary things I would see would be greed and fear—greed for the wealth every bill promised in K.T, fear of being too late. The New Englanders, as much as they liked always to display their moral preeminence, were as greedy and fearful as folks from anywhere else. And their fears were justified. If there had been a month or two in 1855 when a man could get rich on the dreams of those coming along behind, well, that month was gone now, and there was only jostling for survival left.

  K.T. was already old with conflicts—that was the sharpest lesson. No sooner were the Indians removed (and who ever thought of them? a few missionaries here and there) than the newness of the place was used up through disputes that were as old as the United States. It was as if a bride and groom turned to one another at the altar, each expecting the other to be new and young and strong and beautiful, and found instead old age, old acquaintance, old battles, old hatreds. Where else in the whole United States had there been no honeymoon at all, no short space of good feelings? Nowhere else but K.T, as far as I had heard. The residents hadn’t even taken the time to work up their own hatreds but had instead brought along what they already had plenty of. I thought of those few nights in the fall when Thomas and I had been alone in our little cabin with the sailcloth over the hole in the roof. The prairie had seemed so wide and pathless then, its emptiness as old as it was broad. That had lasted how many nights? Fifteen? Twenty? That was the length of our honeymoon, the total accumulation of our in
nocence, K.T.’s innocence. After that, we’d been caught up in the conflict, too.

  The wagon jolted along, and the sun rose higher. Mr. Graves passed me ajar of water, and I took a drink, then passed it to the girl. We got closer to the wagons ahead of us, which were moving slowly, and I heard the two Mr. Graveses speculate that they were heading for the California road.

  In fact, when I paid attention, which I hadn’t been doing heretofore, I could make out what the two men were saying quite well, even over the humming of the girl. I set myself to listen, full of conviction that the information I needed would be forthcoming if I just listened long enough.

  "It’s a whole load," said the new Mr. Graves.

  "Men’s or women’s?"

  "Both. Mostly men’s, I think. But they an’t gonna cost you nothing. Their owners is all dead!"

  "But I got to go all the way to Saint Louis to get ’em."

  "Bailey might bring ’em up as far as Lexington."

  "And I an’t heard anyone talk about shoes. I an’t sure there’s much of a market for old shoes in K.T."

  "Lots of ’em are boots. Anyways, you got to make your own market sometimes."

  "In my opinion, David B., dead men’s shoes are a risky venture."

  "In my opinion, cousin, nothing ventured, nothing gained."

  "I’ll ponder over it."

  We went along for a ways. Other horsemen and people in wagons were about, and sometimes the two men hailed them.

  I dozed off.

  A loud and merry laugh woke me up. "They did?" exclaimed the new Mr. Graves. "Sent ’em back down the river without their rifles? Haw haw! I like that one!"

  ’Jim Lane was in a state, let me tell you," said the old Mr. Graves. "When he recruited those boys in Chicago, he had to sober them up one by one, then teach the difference between east and west, so they’d know how to get to K.T!"

  "Paddy don’t know the way, haw haw!" exclaimed the new Mr. Graves.

  "And our boys, they said, ’Now, we’ll give you two bucks apiece for your rifles, boys, but only if you don’t fuss. If you fuss, we’ll give you a kick apiece in the hind end!’ "

  "That’s what they got, haw haw!"

  By this time I was wide awake, perceiving that their conversation had turned to the political situation. I tried to be quiet, but I must have let on somehow, because they moved closer together and lowered their voices, so that I could catch only a word here and there. Two of the words I caught were "Lane’s army" and another word was "Nebraska." I had heard about this before—Jim Lane had recruited another army in Iowa, in addition to the Chicago group the men had just been discussing, and was bringing it to Lawrence through Nebraska. It was supposed to be a well-equipped northern fighting band, plenty of guns and ammunition and officers trained in military colleges in Indiana and Ohio who were disaffected by the fact that the regular U.S. Army, like every other branch of the government, was in the power of the slavocrats. Louisa and Charles had talked about the plan a few days before. It was mixed up somehow with the idea of Kansas becoming an independent republic, as Texas had been for a while. An independent Free-Soil republic with its own army and the capital at Topeka. Well, people would talk about anything.

  And suddenly Thomas was with me. Rolling over that stretch of prairie that we had rolled over in such a state of innocence only a few months before brought him to me. I remembered how I used to feel his presence as a kind of largeness pressing against me, and then I would look over, and he would just be sitting there, mild and alert, taking everything in and thinking about it. That was the distinctive thing about Thomas: he was always thinking about it. You didn’t have that feeling with most people; rather, you had a feeling that nothing was going on with them at all. Even Louisa, who was certainly an intelligent woman: if she wasn’t talking about something you didn’t have the feeling that she was thinking about it. I remembered something I hadn’t thought of since it happened — the time we’d camped on the prairie, our first night on the prairie ever, and Thomas had taken my hand between his and rubbed my thumb and asked me if I was afraid. Hadn’t I said no? Hadn’t the very grasp of his hand driven out the fear that I had felt earlier in the day? How strange that was, all things considered. And shouldn’t I learn a lesson from that, to be afraid right now? And yet I wasn’t afraid at all, even of the second Mr. Graves and all he represented. Having Thomas with me did that.

  We went along all day. We didn’t stop in Franklin, but we did stop at the store of Paschal Fish, and I got out while the two Mr. Graveses carried some kegs and chests in. In the afternoon, we stopped again, at another store. I understood without being told that these were rough places and that my best course of action was to stay with the girl in the wagon. I tried to engage her in conversation, in fact, but she was taciturn. When I pressed her, she said, "I an’t gotta talk to abolitionists like you. Abolitionists think I’m no better than a nigger."

  "Who told you that?"

  "I figured it out on my own."

  "It isn’t that, exactly...." I was ready to go into explanations, but suddenly they seemed worthless, and fruitless. And her evident aversion to me was disheartening.

  After another moment, she said, "I know what happened to you. My pa told me."

  "Most people do know what happened to me."

  "You shouldn’t have come to K.T. What happened to you was your own fault."

  "You are a hard little girl."

  "I an’t a little girl." And it was true; she was the same age as Frank, who was not a little boy.

  Mr. Graves was as kind to me as he could be. When we camped again on the prairie that night, he gave me the best bits of the prairie chicken that he caught and roasted, then he made me my bed in the wagon. I knew that he and I would have had a lot to say to one another, but his conversation with his cousin had died, and he didn’t seem to wish any conversation with me in the hearing of his cousin. After nightfall, both men, and the girl, for all I knew, fell immediately asleep. I lay awake in the relative comfort of the wagon, looking at the sliver of moon and listening to the hobbled mules crop the prairie grass. The perennial K.T breeze blew over me. I knew this was the last of these scenes for me, that once I had left, my horror of the place would grow and nothing would bring me back. That morning, I had looked on my friends with coolness, and impatience to be on my way, but right then I felt the attachment strongly, and it smote me that I wouldn’t be there to see Louisa and Charles’s child, to lift him into my arms and hold him up to my cheek. If there was any reward for living in K.T., perhaps that would be it. And I was sorry I had acted so coldly at our parting. I felt that if I were to tot up my regrets about my life in K.T, then that would be right at the top of a long list.

  CHAPTER 19

  I Go Among the Enemy

  A person of strong constitution, who takes much exercise, needs less clothing than one of delicate and sedentary habits. According to this rule, women need much thicker and warmer clothing, when they go out, than men. But how different are our customs, from what sound wisdom dictates! Women go out with thin stockings, thin shoes, and open necks, when men are protected by thick woollen hose and boots, and their whole body encased in many folds of flannel and broad-cloth. — p. 115

  IF LAWRENCE WAS BUSY with new money and new men, then Kansas City was a-boil. Just as each time I came into Lawrence from our claim, the experience of all that noise and all those people with their business was a shock and a revelation no matter how much I expected and longed for it, so the even greater level of activity and noise in Kansas City was an even greater shock. It was hardly the same town as it had been when we passed through in September. Every road or path leading from the town was jammed with wagons and men on horseback, and once you were well into town, there were no quiet sections. Everywhere, someone was building or tearing down or loading or unloading or yelling out instructions, admonishments, oaths, imprecations. And shortly I noticed that the town was all men and, as with Lawrence, all the men were armed, only they didn’t
carry just a carbine or a pistol; they carried a rifle and wore a pair of pistols, and you could see the handles of knives sticking out of their boottops and their pockets.

  Mr. Graves turned to me now and said, "I know the captain of a steamboat, the Missouri Rose, and I think the boat is leaving for Saint Louis in the next day. I’m going to buy you a ticket right now and put you on there, ma’am. She’s a safe boat with a shallow draft and an’t gonna get hung up like some of them others."

  "We got hung up on the way upriver. A woman on that boat beat her slave girl because she got her shoes wet." I glanced at the second Mr. Graves and saw the back of his neck twitch, but he didn’t turn to look at me.

  "Now, ma’am, I have to remind you that, as you are unsound on the goose question, you would be wise to maintain a womanly silence and gentleness of demeanor at all times, because though all Missourians and southerners honor the fair sex, by habit and from their earliest childhoods, no one can answer for the general irritability that I see all around me here. I am feeling that you should take your cabin on the Rose and stick to it and not say too much about your troubles in K.T."

  The other Mr. Graves shifted on the wagon seat. My Mr. Graves said, "Now here is a lesson in point." He gestured to the large print of a news-paper that had been pasted on a wall we were passing. It read: "Abolitionists’ Nest to Be Razed, Vows Atchison," then, in smaller but still blaring type: "No One Can’t Stop Us!"

  "Though I have an establishment of my own, where you yourself have visited me, I’ve been here half a dozen times this summer, ma’am, and I felt you had to see it for yourself to believe me. You can get out of this country safely, and I hope with all my heart you do, but you got to do it quick and you got to do it now, because there’s a war coming and a conflagration that is going to roll over Lawrence, K.T, like a burning log, smashing everyone in its path. We been taking their weapons and turning them back, at the same time as our allies from the southern states have been pouring in to us, with fresh horses, fresh weapons, and fresh spirits ready for a fight as only southerners can be. I have an interest in you, ma’am, and I think you’ve seen enough and suffered enough. I would hate to see what is coming to them come to you."