"How does he know?"
"He knows. I heard him and Roger whispering about it when I was bringing them home, but when I challenged them, they clammed up."
"If Roland were here, he would beat it out of him."
"We"ll see," said Thomas. "We"ll see if it comes to that."
The next morning, everyone got into position with regard to the shooting. Jones had been taken to the Free State Hotel, and his wife and the editor Stringfellow, who was also a doctor, had been sent for. As soon as they came, things got very secretive, though Governor Robinson, also a doctor, and Mrs. Robinson tried to be very attentive. The Missourians took Jones and left the next day. Everyone who saw the tyrant Jones said that he didn"t look deathly at all, but he was plenty mad. The people of Lawrence were, of course, shocked, appalled, and astounded. Thomas went to a meeting, where they pa.s.sed a resolution that went something like: "This was the isolated act of one vicious citizen, in no way sustained by the community," though I do remember there was a phrase in there that referred to Jones as the "so-called" sheriff, or the one who "claimed" to be sheriff. The newspapers in the Missouri River towns, Leavenworth, and Kickapoo were beside themselves. Stringfellow vowed to sacrifice every abolitionist in the territory in revenge, to level Lawrence, and to destroy the Union, if need be.
Of course, the tyrant Jones was not dead, we all knew that; it turned out there had been two shots, according to the colonel of the dragoons, one through his trouser leg and one more telling, though I never understood rightly if he got hit in the leg, the hip, the shoulder, or the jaw. Alive though he was, the Missouri papers were full of memorials to him and vows to avenge his death with a war, if at all possible. These newpaper reports circulated all around Lawrence, and mostly we had a laugh at them, but it did give you cause to wonder at either the egregious lying or the egregious stupidity. Maybe that was the thing about the Missourians that made the people of Lawrence so angry in the end-they were either too stupid to credit or too outrageous in their lies. As the days went by, most people in Lawrence decided that the shooting had actually been committed by a southern sympathizer. Why not? In the first place, no Lawrence man, no New Englander, would do so rash a thing, and in the second place, Jones was unloved by even his own men-what better for them than the small sacrifice of a tyrant for the sake of blackening the character of the citizens of Lawrence? The Missourians would do anything ; we already knew that about them. Or what about this-the whole shooting was a hoax arranged among Jones and Stringfellow and Jones"s wife? As the time pa.s.sed, it was easy to forget that Lawrence people had been there, too, tending to the wounded tyrant.
Thomas and I never quizzed Frank on what he knew. But there was a segment of the town that held the opinion that a boy had done it, one of the group of boys who had been out near the camp. Almost no one agreed with this group-they could never come up with the boy, or said they couldn"t. After long thought, I decided that Frank was not the boy. But I believed Thomas when he said that Frank knew who the boy was.
A day or so after the shooting, Governor Robinson offered a five-hundred-dollar reward for the capture of the perpetrator. The captain of the dragoons thought he had something to say about the whole affair, too-he sent Governor Robinson a letter, which said that Jones"s shooting had been reported in Washington, D.C. (no doubt, said some jokers, by the ghost of Jones himself, who appeared to the President in his worst nightmare), and that it was being taken most seriously there, etc.
The congressional committee departed in haste, which seemed ominous.
And then there was further fuel for outrage: one of the men who"d testified to the committee was followed home and attacked by some very vocal southern sympathizers and left for dead. He lived, fortunately, but there was nary a peep out of any federal body about the attack on him.
Now the relative calm of the spring, made up of moneymaking and business and planning for the future, gave way to one upset after the other. Sheriff Jones"s deputy, an illiterate who was nevertheless fully armed and eager for any pretext, persisted in trying to arrest everyone involved in the Branson rescue. Sometimes he had the dragoons with him, in which case he would stop people but then let them go if he found nothing against them. Most times he didn"t have the dragoons with him but had other men, men who spoke in the accents of the deep south and looked like roughs, but not entirely like our Ruffians. We all knew they were bringing men in from the south, especially from the hot-blooded places like South Carolina. Thomas and Frank got stopped every day or so. Frank finally got a little pa.s.s from the deputy that read: "Let this man pa.s.s I no him two be a Law and abidin Sittisin." Well, these were our duly const.i.tuted officials. As New Englanders, and generally well educated, the citizens of Lawrence were especially galled to be insulted and arrested by fools and ignoramuses who couldn"t contain their glee (spitting and staggering from tobacco and drink) at getting over New Englanders.
What was the most outrageous insult? One followed right after another. Some days after the shooting, one of their judges, Lecompte, called a grand jury in Lecompton, the town they"d named after him, and Lecompte instructed the jury about exactly who would be found and indicted as a traitor. Of course, all of our leaders were to be indicted-everyone, from former Governor Reeder to Governor Robinson to Senator Lane, who was in any way responsible for keeping Lawrence moving safely forward. They all escaped, decamped, pursued our interests elsewhere. Reeder hid out in Kansas City for two weeks, then managed to find a steamer that would take him down the Missouri; Governor Robinson got detained at Lexington, Missouri, and was held under arrest. Mrs. Robinson went to plead his case in the east. Jim Lane got off to Iowa, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment, especially among the Quakers there. All the leaders who weren"t arrested were looking for money or support outside of Kansas-that seemed now to be our only hope.
And there was more-the Missourians kept stealing our horses and mules. Charles"s mules and one of his horses got taken, and he and Thomas and two other men had to go find them. It took two days, and in the end they found only the horse and one of the mules. I was terrified that Jeremiah would be taken, but we kept him in town as much as possible-it was more usual for horses to be taken on the roads outside of town, or from claims. This was one of the reasons we ended up staying in Lawrence past our departure date, then way past our departure date. Jeremiah was so appealing and so obviously of value that he would certainly call attention to himself and to us. Better, in spite of our best plans, to take refuge in the populous melee of town. Three days, Thomas and Frank and I walked out to the claim early in the morning and back in the evening, to plant our seed. But there was no tending it. If it must come up, it would; if we were to get anything from it, we would. That was our only plan at that point.
Well, a lot of things happened, I can"t list them all, and at any rate, all of them were swallowed up by what happened next. Sometime in mid-May, on the eleventh or twelfth, I think, the grand jury, so called, announced its findings. The next day, the federal marshal issued a proclamation, all toward Missouri, of course. The news proclaimed was that the marshal needed a "posse of law-abiding citizens." What they were going to do was buried in some sort of legal rigmarole, but we knew what they wanted to do-band together, get their weapons, and clear us out: hang us, shoot us, burn us, knife us, get rid of us. The only question, for Thomas and me, was where we would endure the attack-alone on our claim, with one horse, one man, one woman, and one boy, not to mention four carbines and a hundred rounds, or in Lawrence with our allies.
May can be a lovely time in Kansas, or so I was told. I only lived one May there, and it was a wet one. Heavy storms marched out of the west nearly every day, great gray curtains of water that moved across the horizon, preceded by thick wet winds. The prairies and the prairie tracks were deep in mire. The native vegetation seemed to thrive well enough, but what people planted was drowned or washed away. The rivers were full and difficult to cross, and that was what saved us for a while.
Thomas and I were concerned about our seed. Every stormy day seemed yet another burden. In the mornings, we went out of the downstairs door and gazed as well as we could toward the west, trying to spot breaks in the clouds. Every noon, when Thomas came home for dinner, we stared at the rain streaming down Louisa"s little windows and brooded over what was surely happening out on our claim, more money wasted; and every evening, we gazed up at the few stars that seemed to appear here and there through the cloud cover. Thomas wasn"t saying much. He divided his time between wondering what our future in Kansas could possibly hold and hauling goods with Charles, who remained unarrested, so simple-minded were the officials trying to arrest him. We got a letter from Susannah Jenkins. She wrote: I feel as though I am writing to the figures of a dream, so distant and impossible does K.T. seem to me now. Even though our life is sadly changed by the death of Papa, both Mama and I feel that we have made an escape and that life here in Northampton is all the more to be savored. My looks are of course ruined, and I doubt that I shall find a husband, all in all, unless it is some old man with lots of children, but things that we often complained of before we ever left here, we now hardly remark upon, so pleased are we to still have life and to be living that life in the civilized world. I have two new books from the library today, isn"t that a miracle? This is how I think, now. I think of all of you every day, and Mother and I both pray for you and your safety. The papers are full of K.T., and two editors have already called upon me to ask whether I would like to write a small article for them about our experiences. To any of you who would like to, I say, write me a good letter about events there, and I will see that it is published.
I also got a letter from my sister Harriet, who wrote: Since you have been a lifelong troublemaker, Lydia, and never in one place for more than two seconds from the time you could walk, I am sure you are in the thick of all these unnecessary ABOLITIONIST troubles. I heartily regret sending my child Frank to you, and if I could have controlled him for one minute, I would not have done so, but that"s in the past now, and his Father considers that the experience of the prairies will be good for him, I don"t know why, but it is not my way to say anything, as he IS the Father. I sincerely sympathize with the Missourians in this, as they never asked for anyone to come to Kansas Territory and tell everyone what to do there, just as we never asked sister Miriam to come sit at our tables and tell us what to do, or rather, what to think, since owning slaves is illegal in Illinois, though I"m not sure why, since n.o.body in Illinois cares one way or the other, any more than folks do in Kentuck or Missouri. But that is the way things turn out. I suppose if people do care, they could simply stay in the towns they were born in, like MEDFORD, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS, though far be it from me to condemn the activities and chosen life of a member of our family. But these discussions of slavery are getting way out of hand, and everyone wants to talk about it now, when they didn"t want to even last year, much less when I was a child, and it was considered beneath anyone"s polite notice. In my opinion, it all comes down to the age-old servant problem, and if we all lived like Quakers and had vast quant.i.ties of children to work for us, then that would be one thing, but of course not everyone wants to live like that, on a small neat little farm always and everlastingly doing your own work day after day. But you can"t get a servant girl in America. As soon as they get here from wherever, Ireland or Germany, even, well, they want to work for themselves, not you, and so what are you going to do? Will there never be any relief, though running a plantation full of n.i.g.g.e.rs is hard work, I"m told, of a sort. But anyway, and this is just between you and me, I sometimes wake up in the morning, and I think about the day ahead, and I think I would be happy enough to know that some old reliable slave-women were down in the kitchen making my breakfast, but in these days, I suppose they would be sharpening the knife for my throat, like as not. Well, these ABOLITIONISTS have stirred things up, no doubt about it, and I wonder how you are, out there in ABOLITIONIST territory and for goodness sake, don"t get hurt or send young Frank back in a coffin, I would be beside myself. We miss Frank very much, and you, too.
Love, Your sister HARRIET
In Lawrence, of course, we all knew that something was going to happen and what it was. The question for us seemed to be how we would best defend ourselves, and then it turned out to be whether we would defend ourselves at all. Committees of safety met-one was disbanded and another formed. Most of the citizens wanted there to be drilling and provisioning and manning the forts, as there had been during the Wakarusa War, but for one thing, the committees of safety were reluctant to call upon the merchants for more provisions, as they had hardly been paid a thing for what they"d given in December, and for another, the committees were reluctant to call in the farmers from around the town. Everyone knew how important it was for the fall crop to be a good one. But really, the fact was that the President"s proclamations and the congressional contretemps and the sight of Jones in the company of the captain of the dragoons, and then the findings of the grand jury, all put us so far in the wrong that everyone was of two minds what to do. We knew we were in the right, but there was moral ground that had been taken away from us. We wanted to be in the right, but also to be seen to be in the right. The ranks of the Missourians were rapidly filling up with southerners full of conviction, but our ranks weren"t filling so rapidly. For whatever reason, the north, even New England, didn"t seem to care all that much about us. Those in charge, now that Robinson and Lane were out of the picture, did what people always do when they don"t know what else to do, they decided to wait and see what would happen.
Now the twenty-first of May came around, and it was a sunny, beautiful day. The prairie ran away in every direction, lively and bright with flowers. We all woke up to the sight of men ma.s.sed on the top of Mount Oread, not far from Governor Robinson"s new house, looking down on what amounted to a town without defenses. They had plenty of weapons and ammunition, and as we found out later, they even had cannon. They also had a red flag, which read "Southern Rights," and right next to that they carried a Stars and Stripes, and there were other flags, too. From this band, a group of ten "duly const.i.tuted authorities" rode into town and started arresting people. Charles was one of the first-they came to the house and arrested him about eight o"clock, and then he rode around with them as they arrested some of the others. Charles made no resistance. It had been decided that no one would make any resistance. And the arresting party, which didn"t include Jones or any of his men, was somewhat more polite than Jones would have been. After Charles left, and Louisa and Frank followed after him, to see what might happen, I said, "Our claim probably looks lovely today."
Thomas replied, "We should be there. We should have Frank there. I wonder that we find ourselves in a town that has no wish to defend itself." And then he, too, went out-the hunger to watch, and to know what was happening, was an almost irresistible one. I was left alone to clear up the breakfast dishes. The sun poured through the small front windows, lighting up our rooms. I was careful to clean the dishes well and put them away neatly. I didn"t feel any of the fear I had felt before-on coming to K.T., on the commencement of the Wakarusa War, or any other time. Rather, I felt that cheerful peace you always seem to feel when a long dreaded event begins to happen. It is as if something about you is suspended, and while you are waiting for the worst, you get a few moments of actual joy-your room looks pleasing and comfortable, your tasks seem light and delicious, the present life, which you know is about to go away from you, seems the best possible life, and you are grateful for it. When I finished, I went out. Not much business was being done, only the business of arrests. The citizens of Lawrence looked out their windows or stood in the streets or congregated in shops. The day wore on and got a little warm, but it was a pleasant change from the recent damp, chilly weather. We each expected different things. Women and children had been told to leave town in the morning, and some did, crying and carrying off what things they could manage, not having been allowed to take horses or mules with them (the Missourians wanted all of those). I suppose those people expected the worst, burning and shooting and clearing out. But most of us wanted to stay; Thomas didn"t even ask me to leave, knowing that I would leave only when he did. I suppose we expected to see something we had never seen before in our lives.
I strolled down Ma.s.sachusetts Street, then up some other streets. I should have felt in danger, but I didn"t. Instead, I marveled at how much Lawrence had changed since September-how many more permanent buildings there were, how the streets had straightened and widened themselves, how much the place looked like a town instead of a congeries of structures. There were even flower boxes and patches of garden here and there, fenced off carefully from pigs and other marauding herbivores. It was a wonder, really.
The arresting party, or at least the leaders, went over to the Free State Hotel and enjoyed their midday dinner. Some even went into shops and came out with goods, though whether they paid for them was a point of some dispute later. Mr. Eldridge, the manager of the hotel, said for years afterward that none of the "duly const.i.tuted authorities" had so much as offered to pay for his dinner. But people went along with them, whatever they cared to do.
Another example of that was the way General Pomeroy, who had come back from the east, where he"d gone after the Wakarusa War to raise money and support for the Free-Soil cause, let the southerners have our cannon. These artillery pieces, which were smuggled into K.T. by means of various ruses in the winter, had been buried under the foundation of someone"s house-Mr. Roberts"s house, Louisa said-in early May. General Pomeroy had some men go out and dig them up, and then he handed them over as a gesture of good faith. More women and children were leaving town now, not carrying even what they could. They were all crying. Perhaps they expected to be shot and never to need anything. There was no logic to what folks did-each did what he or she thought best, and so each one might do just about anything. There was no logic to my own alternating waves of fear and curiosity, but they came one after the other.
It got to be afternoon. Thomas, Louisa, Frank, and I had done only one thing, which was to move the mules, horses, and wagons out of the center of town, We were threatened only once, and not very seriously, by two very young men. We just pushed past them and went on. Because of this, we were away from Ma.s.sachusetts Street when the arresting party under their marshal decided to disband themselves and join the men on the hill. We did see Senator Atchison (Louisa knew what he looked like) ride toward town with some men. Senator Atchison had acted as our enemy throughout the spring, agitating his const.i.tuents and promoting our conquest. I remember thinking that it wasn"t good to be seeing him right there on a downtown street. And he looked drunk, too.
Once the arrests had been made in the morning, the huge posse of Missourians that had gathered on Mount Oread began streaming into town, and who was at its head but the miraculously resurrected tyrant Jones, proclaimed as dead and memorialized by all of Missouri not two weeks before!
The first thing they did was go over to the offices of the Herald of Freedom, one of the Lawrence newspapers, which was on the second story above a shop. They threw out all the type, smashed the press with a couple of sledgehammers, and carried as much as they could in the way of supplies and equipment down to the river and threw it in. Another band was doing the same thing over at the office of the Kansas Free State, the other newspaper.
Late in the afternoon, they bombarded the Free State Hotel. They told the residents to get out, then they drew five cannon up across the street from it and started firing. We all ran from wherever we happened to be and watched as best we could, though there was a fair amount of smoke. The noise was fearsome if you"d never heard cannon before, a loud cracking roar followed by the whistle of the ball leaving the barrel of the cannon, then a great whump as the ball hit the stone wall of the hotel, a noise that was also a feeling of the hotel shaking the ground, shaking the world, shaking you, standing there. Had the hotel been built as a fortress? It withstood the cannon with hardly any sign of damage. "Got to build for the ages," Mr. Eldridge was heard to say. "If something"s worth doing, then it"s worth doing properly." Women and children were crying for a while, but as the hotel continued to stand, that seemed a little beside the point.
When the cannon had little effect, the attackers carried in kegs of powder, intending to blow the place up. After they had taken them in, they made time to carry out whatever they could find, like bits and pieces of furniture and draperies and clothing, not to give to the owners but to keep for themselves. Then they found the liquor, and they came out with bottles and kegs and cases. They opened them right there and got into it. As for the powder kegs, when they got around to lighting them, the onlookers backed away, imagining the four-story stone walls blowing outward in a great h.e.l.lish boom and light, but Eldridge kept smiling a little, and shortly we knew why. Some windows that had withstood the cannon fire shattered, but the hotel stood. Now the southerners were drunk, and angry. They started screaming, "Fire it! Fire it! D-n, it will burn!" I"d hardly been in the hotel since the winter. I remembered the rickety wooden stairs, four floors of them, and you could see all the way to the cellar if you cared to look. The roof was wood; the interior was all wood, with wooden furniture. I knew it would go up, and it did. Soon enough, flames were shooting from every window and from the roof, and smoke was driving us back toward the river. When I saw him, Mr. Eldridge still had a little smile on his face, fixed there and forgotten, perhaps. Certainly, the sight of our beautiful hotel going up in flames was a great shock to me, but I couldn"t tell what it did to him. At last, the walls began to fall. I heard later that one of the southerners was killed by a piece of falling rock, because he was too drunk to move away from the conflagration. Behold the moral stature of our conquerors!
When we were driven as far back as Louisa"s place, we ran up and checked our things. The booming and crashing had broken her windows, so we swept up the gla.s.s and gave thanks that we had put quilts over them and had wrapped the dishes and cups and set them away. Then the smoke drove us out of there. We grabbed our shawls and a few necessary belongings and ran out again, intending to take refuge with the Bushes, who were at the other end of town from the hotel, in a newer section of buildings that were built just that spring. We covered our mouths and noses and made our way around to the west-Thomas, Frank, Louisa, and myself. It was very late, almost dusk, which meant it must have been seven-thirty or eight o"clock. I was running along with my head down and my hand to my face when Thomas plucked my sleeve. "Look over there." He gestured upward, toward Mount Oread. We stopped and gaped at the sight of the Robinsons" new house, all black walnut, full of books and old writings and furniture and family treasures, we"d heard, going up in a great bonfire on the brow of the hill. And even from where we were, we could see the Ruffians dancing around the place, black figures against the yellow brightness of the fire, and we could hear them shouting and screaming drunkenly, jubilant at the destruction. Later, we heard that they hardly bothered to steal anything but burned it all, just to show Governor Robinson a thing or two. "Look at the devils," said Louisa, "howling with glee!" It was fascinating, but darkness was falling fast, the smoke was thick, and there were little bands of drunken Ruffians everywhere, so Thomas pushed us onward; we had to practically drag Frank by the ear.
The Bushes had seen nothing, as they had huddled inside all day, expecting the worst, so they were appalled and shocked by the news we had for them-all the more appalled and shocked for, of course, being totally unsurprised, according to Mrs. Bush. "Nothing you tell me can turn a hair on my head," she said, her face white as the moon. "I don"t put anything past those animals. And mark my words, they won"t stop there! They"ll burn us all out before morning! There are twenty-four thousand of them, haven"t you heard? Three thousand Missourians and twenty-one thousand real southerners, with slaves saddling their horses and making up their food in camp. I heard all about it! Five thousand from South Carolina alone, and every one of them came to K.T. with a thousand dollars in his pocket, from the sale of slaves down the river-don"t you know? A cabal of planters got together, and each of them sold ten slaves for a thousand dollars apiece, and that"s five hundred slaves! I swear you don"t know which is worse, sending that trash to burn us out and kill us, or selling those poor slaves away from their wives and husbands and children in order to send them. Oh," she said, "their souls are black indeed! Blacker than the blackest skin on the darkest African!"
Mr. and Mrs. Lacey and their boys came, saying that the Ruffians had come knocking and then thrown them out into the street and told them to go back to Ma.s.sachusetts and let them all know back there what a Kansas tea party was like! Then, as they ran off, they heard the drunkards smashing things and even saw them running out of the house. "Two low types were carrying some chairs, and the captain, or so he had styled himself, had my dishes in his hands!" exclaimed Mrs. Lacey.
Then we all got into a discussion of whether the southerners would be punished by the Lord for their iniquities, and all except Thomas agreed that they would, with only Louisa disputing the grounds of the discussion, saying that "the Lord" was actually a diffuse higher presence in the universe that manifested itself as positive or negative energy, and that of course the Missourians might find themselves afflicted by an excess of negative energy in years to come but they wouldn"t have the wit or the spiritual education to understand what was happening to them. Everyone fell silent for a bit, pondering these remarks, and I knew that Louisa felt that she had put the capstone to the discussion; but everyone else rather felt that these ideas were too embarra.s.sing to go on with, especially as we were all worried about Charles, whom Louisa had last seen in the late morning, with the arresting party, when they took him up to their camp.
We prepared for attack. Or rather, the house was as prepared as it could be, which wasn"t much-the door was locked and the window was covered and there were pails and pots of water for dousing flames, and once these measures had been taken, we sat about a single candle and drank tea and deplored the Missourians. There were four Sharps carbines and forty rounds among us. We agreed that the Laceys, unsure of what the Ruffians wanted, had been hesitant to fire, but we wouldn"t make the same mistake. In the event, our resolution wasn"t tried, for we sat up all night, and at dawn, which came before five, we realized that the Missourians had in part decamped and in part keeled over where they stood, but at any rate, they were satisfied with what they had done, and there would be no more destruction for the time being.
We should have been fatigued but were not, at all, so eager was everyone of our party to view the aftermath. We drank our tea and went out, Thomas and Mr. Bush, each armed, in the lead, and the rest in the middle, with Frank and me, also both armed, bringing up the rear. But the Missourians were gone. The only people in the streets were ones we recognized, either because we knew them or by their grieving and incredulous countenances.
The citizens of Lawrence hadn"t, in the end, been hung, shot, knifed, dismembered, or cleared out, but our houses had been robbed and damaged (the Missourians loved more than anything to shoot out a pane of gla.s.s or leave bullet holes in a wall), our furnishings had been left in the street, smashed, ripped, and broken, our crockery and dishes lay in fragments, our bedclothes and hangings and blankets and sheets, even our nightgowns and commodes, had been tossed in the street; our flowers were trampled and pulled up by the roots. Here"s something-the streets were full of papers blowing everywhere: these were not only "contraband" sheets of newspapers from the north or old copies of our local sheets, but also family letters and legal papers, diaries and cookery books and novels and schoolbooks, scattered and torn by angry hands, precious photographs sundered in two or three pieces. I saw a wreath woven of some beloved person"s hair, cut and destroyed in a way that only those who desired above all things to hurt you in your heart would think of. That was what was shocking-you could stoop down and pick up some papers out of the dirt and see that they were just letters from someone"s sister or father, and yet some stranger had taken the time and effort to tear them up and toss them. They had put real thought and real effort into their hatred.
There were those who started looking on the bright side of things at once-Thomas was one of them. No Free Stater killed or wounded, the Robinsons thankfully absent, all damage to buildings other than the hotel and the Robinsons" house superficial. Better than that, as far as we knew (and this turned out to be true), no Free Stater had perpetrated anything that might be construed as an offense. The attack on Lawrence could not be called a war but had to be called a sacking, a depredation, a crime. "You wait," said Thomas. "The men from the eastern newspapers will be here by balloon if they have to. Remember that fellow from New York, Brewer-ton? And there are plenty of others. They"ll turn Lawrence, K.T., into a woman in a white dress, lifting her pale arms and pleading for mercy! It looks worse than it is."
At Louisa"s place, the lower shop had been wrecked and my last length of rope stolen. Someone had taken our ax to the stairs and hacked three of them out, so it wasn"t easy getting to the upper story. And a fire had been set, though, lacking fuel, it had gone out-we could still smell the smoke. Upstairs, the rosewood bedstead had been shorn of its clothes and jerked about; it had one ax cut in the footboard. The bedstead we"d used was intact, but the ticking was torn, and good New England feathers lay in white bunches here and there. Our things that we had packed for going to the claim were rifled and spread around, but the only things missing were Thomas"s red flannel shirt and his shaving brush. A dress of mine had a big rent in the skirt. Louisa"s clothes, being richer, had suffered more-two of her dresses were gone, and a shawl and a pair of shoes. Her jewelry- two necklaces and two sets of earbobs-was missing, too. And odd things were gone-a candleholder, a worked pillow, one of Charles"s boots. But they hadn"t touched the books or the little guitar, and my sister"s last letter lay open on the floor, as if someone had read it and then not bothered to tear it up. We looked, but we didn"t even begin to clean things up, as it was imperative to look for Charles.
Louisa, having sensed on the spiritual waves no disruption in her connection to Charles, was not especially worried. Nevertheless, Thomas and Mr. Bush went over to the site of the burned-out hotel to see if there was news of the arrested men. Frank and I set out to find our animals. The first thing we saw was Senator Atchison, much changed from the day before. He rode at the head of his men, sober now, or possibly not, his coat b.u.t.toned up to the chin and his hat pulled down over his eyes. Did he look ashamed? I wanted to think so. His band looked dirty and rather sick, and they dragged one of their cannon with them.
"I could shoot him," said Frank.
"You left your gun at the Bushes"."
"Don"t need my own gun. Any gun would do. I could borrow one and follow along behind them and shoot him when he crosses the river."
"You are not going to shoot a man."
"I know, but I"m just saying I could. Saying I could feels better than just letting him go by."
Well, that was true. All around us, the people of Lawrence stared frankly at the Missourian. Everyone knew who he was, since he was tall and striking, and his picture had been in the papers when he was Vice President. I"m sure we weren"t the only ones talking in such strains. But the senator and his weary group trudged past unmolested, got to the river, crossed it, and vanished into the trees.
I dreaded what we would find when we came to the corral where we"d left the animals, thinking it was out of the way and safer. Clearly, from the destruction, there had been enough of the Ruffians so that they had sought out most corners of Lawrence and done damage everywhere. We knew a lot of horses and mules had been stolen, not to mention the cattle they had "pressed" into the service of their stomachs, because people we met complained of missing animals. When we got there, in fact, there was no corral, only broken rails and knocked-down posts, evidence of many trampling hooves in the dirt, and no animals to be seen. This, after everything else, caused me to burst into tears. Some men were standing nearby, and when they saw us looking at it all, they came over.
"Well, they drove "em off, don"t you know?" said one of them. "I guess there was twenty hosses and mules here for a bit, but they rode in and drove "em off in the middle of the night. There was screamin" and yellin", let me tell you." don"t you know?" said one of them. "I guess there was twenty hosses and mules here for a bit, but they rode in and drove "em off in the middle of the night. There was screamin" and yellin", let me tell you."
Another man said, "Laban, here, and myself, we come out and shot a few times into the air, but it was just for show. We couldn"t do a thing. There was ten men, anyway, and they was far gone into their cups."
Laban sighed. "I had me the best team of mules I ever had here. Just bought "em a couple of weeks ago. They shone! Cost me a hundred dollars apiece. Gone now."
I walked away. It just seemed like Jeremiah had to be somewhere, that if I looked I could find him. It had to turn out with Jeremiah as it had with our other things-a bit of damage, but nothing serious. For a few minutes, I wandered around, looking among the houses and buildings in this part of town. There was the same destruction here as elsewhere-interiors of homes broken up and turned over on the street, men, women, and children picking through things, looking for things, talking and crying. I was like one of them. I saw a woman pick up a cup and grin, then call to her husband, "Here"s one that"s not broken!" and I expected to turn a corner and find Jeremiah looking at me, his dark, large eyes in his pale face intelligently recognizing me, his ears swiveled forward. Never once had Jeremiah failed to approach me when I came for him, never once had he ducked my grasp or tried to get away or run off. But of course they would have been yelling and hooting, shooting in the air to panic the horses and mules. The animals in the pen would have been rolling their eyes and snorting, tossing their heads in that terrified equine way, and Jeremiah, who was an intelligent and responsive horse, but still a horse, would have been one of them, as terrified as the others. It hurt me to think of it, all the whinnying and b.u.mping up against one another, the flailing of hooves and the danger, and then they would have been running, and I didn"t know how to think of that, where or how they had gone, so my imagination went dark.
Well, sentiment was a cruel joke in K.T.
And practically, of course, now we had no horse, and Louisa and Charles had no animals, either, and so how would we get our things out to our claim, and how would Charles, should he return from his imprisonment, make an income, and how would we all, in Lawrence, go on from this and recover even what we had had two days before, which was little enough in any case, if you thought of Susannah Jenkins"s letter, and how she counted up the losses she"d incurred in K.T. and settled happily for any sort of life at all, if only it wasn"t in K.T?
Everyone we knew was worse off than a year before: Mr. James had lost his wife and children; the Jenkinses had lost their husband and father and, it appeared, most of their means. The Bushes lived in a tiny fragment of a house, far humbler than what they"d left in Ma.s.sachusetts, and were grate-ful for it. Louisa, for all the good face she put on it, had lost a husband and now, perhaps, another one. The Laceys? After she came, he was absent more and more, and now the rumor was that he was staying with a woman at the other end of town most of the time, but of course no one spoke of it, and all pretended that he was just very taken up with business. The Holmeses? They had barely made it through the winter on the charity of their friends, and any hopes he had had of forming a congregation had been dashed-no one in K.T seemed to cotton to his fiery brand of Christianity. The Smithsons? They were farther from their publishing project than they"d been in the fall, and old Mr. Smithson had broken his arm, to boot. Thomas and myself? We had little money, few hopes, and now had lost our most valuable possession. And who had not seen the waves of men and women who were worse off than ourselves and our friends, who"d died of fevers and other illnesses far from all friends and far from their homes, at the end of their funds and without their names being known to those caring for them? Even the Robinsons. There was the model for us all. They had risen the highest and had now fallen the lowest-he taken by the authorities, their house burned to the ground. The Kansas prairie was full of graves where people had buried everything they loved, everything they knew.
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 circ.u.mstances 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 [image]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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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, fort.i.tude, 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 a.s.sociates, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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."