The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  She whispered, "Mr. Smith is the one in the blue vest just coming out of the parlor, and Perkins is looking right at us. Hello, Mr. Perkins," she caroled. I looked at Perkins with a bright, deflective smile firmly fixed to my face. I looked at him straight, and I looked at him for a very long, careful moment. My finger eased around the trigger of the pistol. Samson Perkins saw Helen, then me, and smiled at us. I noticed that his teeth were white, and that he had all of them. I had never seen him before in my life.

  Then I looked at Chaney Smith. For someone reputed to be a rough character, he looked benign enough—rather fat and soft, almost good-humored about the eyes. He wore a pince-nez, which he took off and polished while he waited for the other men to get through the doorway into the dining room.

  The boy came closest. He had a round white face with a disgruntled look on it, and a shock of dirty blond hair. No mustaches or whiskers of any kind. Had I been pressed, I would have said that he looked rather like I had as a boy. He was not prepossessing in any way, but was he the boy who had shot Jeremiah in the neck and then laughed about it? In a hundred years, I could not have said for sure. I felt the pistol begin to slip out of my grasp and grabbed it, but my finger missed the trigger, and it did not go off. Helen gave me a startled look and said, "What on earth?" and I said, "I’ll be right down," then spun on my heel and ran up the stairs to my room, where I closed the door, removed the cartridges from their chambers, and thrust the pistol under the bed. Then I ran out of the room and down the stairs.

  I hardly remember this supper. I do not know how many men ate with us, or what we ate. I do know that Helen sat far away from me, at the other end of the table, which had been pulled out to its full length. Papa seemed in high spirits. There was a great deal of talk about what the abolitionists had done, would do, couldn’t do, should be obliged to suffer, and would find out about. I don’t remember any of it. There were many men at the table, perhaps a dozen. I scrutinized each of their faces with a rudeness allowed only to a woman. Maybe, I thought, if Chaney Smith and Samson Perkins weren’t the culprits, I would recognize someone else. Stranger things had happened, had they not? And then there was this—the bartender in Kansas City had told me that "Chaney and Samson" were boasting about killing someone. If not Thomas, then whom? But in fact, I didn’t care about that unknown whom. I cared about Thomas. Revenge was too frightening to be abstract; it had to be most particular and careful. I attempted to construe every face into one I had seen, but it was simply impossible, and of course, very soon, I lost the moment, as we ate our supper and each face became familiar. I thought of shooting them anyway, or some of them, those who talked in the most boasting, hateful way: "Oughta burn ’em out now!" "Shoulda done it months ago, when we had the chance!" "Some folks wouldn’t hear of it, but they was dead wrong!" "I say, and I always did say, jest shoot the d— black abolitionists as they come up the river. You kin tell who they are at a hundred yards, and pick ’em off at that distance, too, if you’re any kind o’ shot!" (Much laughter.) It went round and round as they worked themselves up to ever higher degrees of indignation, with Helen and me exchanging a glance every so often. The company got rowdier and rowdier, and finally Papa gave Helen the signal that she could escape, and we smiled and curtseyed our way out of the room.

  "Now," she whispered at the bottom of the stairs, "we go up and lock ourselves in my room, as you never know what might happen, and although, of course, everyone respects Papa more than anyone, and listens to him, and he and Mr. Harris wouldn’t let anything get out of hand, still, you never know. Papa and Mr. Harris aren’t as young as some of the others, and maybe you’ve noticed that Papa is rather on the small side."

  I thought of the pistol under my bed and said, "Get your work, and we’ll go into my room. It isn’t directly over either the dining room or the parlor. And bring your nightdress and wrapper, too."

  We went up.

  We went to bed.

  Helen fell asleep, always sure in her heart that she was safe.

  Papa got the men off in a clatter of hoofbeats and threats against the north.

  Papa mounted the stairs and went into his own room.

  I reflected upon the failure of my project.

  It was easy now to follow the thread of failure back through the last weeks and months, as easy as following a red thread through a blue weave. It was easy to see that all the circumstances that had seemed to point me here, to this house, tonight, to this fateful act of justice, had been nothing at all, just a jumble of chance encounters, wishful steps, ignorant certainties. It was easy to see that the world I saw bearing down on me and directing me had in fact issued out of me. I had been the light that, shining upward upon the random branches in the forest canopy, transformed them into a net. It was so easy to see this that I lay there lost in astonishment that I had been so foolish, but also lost in astonishment, fresh astonishment, that it had all happened, even that Thomas was dead, even that I had ever married, left Quincy, gone to Kansas. I had a sensation of waking up from everything in my life and finding it chimerical, the only reality being my fleshly person, my skin against my nightdress, my hand on my forehead. Where was I? What was I doing? The only answers I had were ones I couldn’t believe: I was in Missouri, which was at war with Kansas; I, who had cared little about the slavery question, had become an abolitionist; the girl sleeping in bed beside me was someone I had not known the existence of a short time before; I had had a love, and he was dead; the dearest companion of my youth, my nephew Frank, had been lost, and I’d hardly even noticed. Such things had no existence within the realm of possibility. Only if Samson and Chaney had proved to be Samson and Chaney would it have all held together in a sensible fashion, but they had not and it had not.

  Furthermore, I would not be shot or carried off to jail, but would have to find my own way out of this ... whatever you might call it, into someplace more recognizable.

  I lay awake all night, and at dawn was still awake when Helen stirred beside me, sat up, and said, "My goodness, I don’t know which is worse, the attackers or the defenders. But you must never tell Papa I said such a thing! I expect he would think that I’m full of such rebellious thoughts! Well, perhaps I am."

  She turned and looked at me. "You know," she said, "I’m not going to let you keep all your thoughts to yourself forever. I’m much too inquisitive for that. And as I get to like you more and more, it gets harder and harder not to know you!"

  I said, "I’ll tell you one thing right now, Helen. But only one. You may ask any question."

  Now the look on her pretty, fresh face grew positively impish, and she took the tip of her blond braid in her fingers, bit it speculatively, then threw it over her shoulder. She said, "How did you meet your husband?"

  I laughed out loud and said, "He was visiting a neighbor, and the neighbor came by to show him off to my brother-in-law, to try to start a fight, but my brother-in-law wasn’t home, so they sat with my sister and me for a while. I thought he was plain-looking and a little gawky, but then I got to know him better."

  "May I ask any more questions?"

  "Not now."

  "Tonight?"

  I shook my head.

  "Tomorrow?"

  I nodded.

  "First thing in the morning?"

  "I suppose so."

  "Lorna thinks she knows you."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "I heard her telling Delia."

  "Has she ever been to Kansas"— I stumbled—"City?"

  "Goodness, no."

  Well, of course not. I had seen only one or two Negroes in K.T., had I not? "I must look like someone else she knows."

  "I reckon. But I may ask another question tomorrow?"

  "Yes."

  "I have a whole day to think of one, then."

  But her thoughts were still running on the same subject, because as we rose for the day and went about our morning ablutions, she broke out in a wail. "Louisa! Now you see my difficulty, don’t you? Those men who were
here last night, those are the best men we know! All of them have property, some of them have a great deal of property, and they truly think like we do about all the great issues. Not everyone does! There are quite a few around here who aren’t strictly abolitionists, you know, or who don’t care one way or another about the institution, but they can’t afford slaves or don’t have them. You should see how they live! The wives and children work right alongside the men, dawn to dusk every day. And they live all jumbled together in little houses or even cabins, and they don’t have any nice dresses to wear, and no occasion to wear them, because they have no amusements! They just go to dirty little churches every Sunday, all day, and bring along dishes that they’ve made, and eat together sitting on a blanket, and how amusing is that? And they have ever so many children, because they need lots of people to work, and you know that when you keep having ever so many children, some of them die, and that’s horrible, and then the mother dies from having so many, and then the father marries again, and it starts all over. Did you know that that devil John Brown has twenty-seven children? That’s a very low way of doing things, like an animal! And then they try to tell us that God prefers that sort of life to this!" She swept her hand toward the windows and the front lawn. "How could He possibly prefer such a life for us, if He loves us?"

  "But, Helen," I remonstrated, "when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden, He condemned them to labor for their own bread."

  "Don’t you think that’s a terribly hard religion? I know it comes from that, but Papa said none of our family were Puritans like that, that the Puritans were hateful people, and even the Dutch couldn’t stand them, and so that’s why they had to go to the New World, not because they were persecuted, but because they were hateful. And I don’t think it’s fair that they should come to New England and that our people should come to Virginia, an utterly different sort of place, and that in the end, they should put their hatefulness and hard religion over on the rest of us, after all! And you know what? It was those very people that started the slave trade, just to get rich. They treated those slaves much more horribly on those ships than ever Papa or Mr. Harris would treat even a dog, even a rat! Papa said they used to have more slaves in Newport, Rhode Island, than anywhere else in the United States, until the Irishmen came in, and it was cheaper to pay the poor benighted Irishmen, who don’t know any better because of their religion, nothing and get rid of having to care for your slaves as a proper master does!"

  "Helen ..." But I paused, wanting to be careful of what I said. I dared not openly argue with her.

  "So I can’t go to one of those men who lives like that, with a wife and seventeen children. I don’t want to be the first wife, who dies, and I don’t want to be the second wife, who raises the first wife’s brats, and I don’t want my husband to be talking to me about my duty all the time! Isn’t it better to have two or three children, like Bella and Minna and me, and teach us to sing and play the piano and sew and draw and write a fine hand and even make a pudding if we have to—but my goodness, what if I had to slaughter a hog and watch the blood run out, and chop the head off a chicken?"

  I almost admitted that I, too, had found these activities distasteful and that I had avoided them whenever I could, so that my niece, Annie, had been forced to take my place. But I hadn’t minded hunting, and dressing game, in K.T. I said, "When you are married, you’ll find yourself doing what you have to do and not minding it so much. You’ll love your husband, and you’ll love your children even more."

  "But I was not reared to work every day, all day, and to have my looks go by the time I’m twenty-five, and if I have to live that way, I will certainly die first!" She said it petulantly, almost as a childish threat, but in fact, it was probably true. I said, "Surely your papa will find you a husband to your taste."

  "Where? You saw the gallery last night. And if I were to go off, like Bella or Minna, I would have to leave Papa all alone. Don’t you love Papa? He’s so lively and dear! How could I leave him and go to Georgia or South Carolina or somewhere?" She lowered her voice. "You know, Papa’s always going on about land being good and money being evil, but if we were rich in money rather than in land, Papa and I could be together anywhere we chose. I think about this day and night, but I don’t see a solution! I suppose it’s better not to think about it at all, but just to let yourself be led about by the nose and to accept what happens to you, but my goodness, that seems an awfully spineless way to live!"

  I finally laughed.

  "Well, it is," said Helen.

  There was a knock on the door, and I opened it. Outside it stood Lorna, with two trays. She said, "Well, at leas’ I done foun’ Missy. Two seconds later, and I woulda got worried. My land, you should see de dining room and de parlor. It look like dey had a war down dere! An’ de girl and I, we got to clean dat up before Massa Richard come down!"

  I saw that she was annoyed with us for wasting her time. I said, "I’m sorry," and she said, "Ain’ your fault, unless you been throwin’ de dining room chaiahs about. Done broke a winder! I sweah!" She set the trays down, one on the bed and one on the chest, and we ate our toast. Helen said, "I know Papa will give me Lorna for my wedding, at least. I couldn’t stir a step without Lorna, and he knows that. She wouldn’t leave me like she did Bella, either, because she likes me, and she never did like Bella."

  "Did Lorna try to escape?"

  She went over and closed the door, then lowered her voice. "It was Bella’s fault. Bella has a miserable temper, you know. She can’t help it. But she hit Lorna with a rolling pin, right over the head, and raised a terrible bruise, even though you never hit a house servant like that, but she was the same with me when we were children, she always hit me with anything that she had in her hand, and so Lorna got her mad, and she happened to have the rolling pin in her hand, and so she hit her and knocked her down! Oh, Papa was furious with Bella, and Ralph—that’s Bella’s husband—was, too. But then Lorna made it worse by running off, and they had to advertise, and the catchers caught her, and they beat her worse than Bella did. Papa says sometimes you can’t control the catchers, because they are of a very low sort. Well, Bella was all set to sell her south, but Papa wouldn’t let her and brought her back here and made her promise never to run off, because that’s like stealing, you know, and so she has another chance, but it was such a to-do that if it happens again, Papa will surely just sell her south, because if the others see one run off and then go unpunished, well, it makes them restless."

  We finished our breakfast and went out of the room. I felt well enough, in spite of my wakeful night, but everything about me had the quality of seeming magnified—larger, brighter, louder than usual—and I felt as though I were stretching myself to accommodate this, and that sometime the stretch might be too great, and I would snap.

  Two days passed after the failure of my plan, and I told myself that I had to take things slowly and think carefully about what to do. I thought that I might write a letter to my sisters, asking them for money to get back to Quincy, but I had no way to post a letter, and secrecy was still such a habit with me that I couldn’t quite bring myself to entrust my letter to Papa. But in addition to that, posting such a letter amounted to giving up on finding Thomas’s killers, and I was so used to planning revenge that even without a plan, I couldn’t give up the revenge. I thought it would be easier to come up with a plan than settle for nothing, so I solaced myself by carefully thinking the same thoughts over and over. And indeed, this was a time of great news and perturbation. Very soon, we all knew, the invisible boundary between fighting and war would be crossed, and so, many times every day, my carefully thought thoughts were scattered by some rumor or fear. The prevailing belief was that if Lane could not be stopped, he would be killed, and if he was killed, the northern newspapers would raise such a fuss that someplace like Leavenworth or Westport would be attacked by the federals, and then war would roll from there eastward, widening and inexorably speeding up, until the whole nation was drawn in. Pap
a said that in the days when it took weeks to get to the east by boat or coach, there might not have been such a danger, but now, with trains and telegraphs, there would be no stopping it. Or sometimes, instead of rolling east, it was said, the war would suck everything west, as if Leavenworth were an ever-widening sinkhole that would soon enough engulf Boston, on the one hand, and Charleston, on the other. Under the influence of these thoughts, Papa wondered aloud what it might be like to go off to California, but really, he was too old for that, wasn’t he? And so all of us in the house— Helen, Papa, myself, Lorna, I suppose, and even Delia, who counted her stores over and over—were in our separate ways disheartened and perturbed. I wondered about my sisters, whether they were going along in their usual fashion, all unaware of the world outside Quincy and likely to be ever so piqued should it impose itself upon them.

  I had been at Day’s End Plantation for about two weeks now, and every day had been hot, when suddenly there was a great summer storm, with thunder and lightning and hail, and the late-afternoon sky turned green, and we all had to go down into the cellar and wait it out, master, mistress, guest, and slaves. We had a couple of candles, and everyone was rather fearful, and so Papa said that we must sing songs, and began himself, by singing a song from an opera called Figaro’s Marriage, by Mozart, who also wrote some pieces that some of the girls had played in school, when I was with Miss Beecher. Helen sang a Scottish song about getting up early one morning and seeing a fair maiden in the valley below. I then sang "Hard Times, Hard Times, Come Around No More." I sang this with feeling, in my plain voice, keeping the tune as well as I could. After that, each of the slaves sang a song, none of them songs I had ever heard before. Not everyone sang well—Lorna, for example, seemed unwilling to actually produce a melody, and instead almost talked her song. But Malachi liked to sing and had a wonderful clear voice, and he sang first a song about calling the water boy, and second a hymn called "Deep River." Papa said it was one of his favorite hymns, and he smiled broadly the whole time Malachi was singing it. After all of the singing, we came up out of the cellar and saw that the weather had cleared and that the storm had taken down only a few tree limbs. It wasn’t even suppertime yet, but the air was cool and the haze had cleared off, and the fields that ran away from the house looked fresh and fruitful. Helen went up to her room, and I went into the day parlor, where I had the third volume of Miss Austen’s novel to finish. Just before supper, Papa came into the parlor.