The All-True Travels And Adventures Of Lidie Newton

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.

BY JANE SMILEY.

Acknowledgments.

THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE to thank Professor David Dary of the University of Oklahoma and Professor Theodore Nostwich of Iowa State University for their invaluable a.s.sistance with this project. Whatever mistakes have slipped into the text have done so in spite of Professor Dary and Professor Nostwich"s best efforts, and are entirely the responsibility of the author.

BOOK ONE.

CHAPTER I.

I Eavesdrop, and Hear III of Myself [image]Let every woman, then, bear in mind, that, just so long as her dress and position oppose any resistance to the motion of her chest, in just such proportion her blood is unpurified, and her vital organs are debilitated.

-MISS CATHERINE E. BEECHER, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, p. 117 I HAVE MADE UP my mind to begin my account upon the first occasion when I truly knew where things stood with me, that is, that afternoon of the day my father, Arthur Harkness, was taken to the Quincy graveyard and buried between my mother, Cora Mary Harkness, and his first wife, Ella Harkness. My father"s death was not unexpected, and perhaps not even unwelcome, for he was eighty-two years old and had for some years been lost in a second childhood.

I could easily sit beside the floor grate in my small former room above the front parlor of my father"s house and hear what my sisters were saying below. The little bed I had slept in as a child was pushed back against the wall to make room for discarded sticks of furniture and some old cases. I sat on a rolled-up piece of carpet.

Ella Harkness"s daughters numbered six. Of those, two had gone back to New York State with their husbands. Our three, Harriet, Alice, and Beatrice, were all considerably older than I, the only living child of the seven my mother had borne. Miriam, my favorite of the sisters, a schoolmistress in Ohio, had died, too, of a sudden fever just before Christmas. Some twenty years separated me from Harriet, and all the others were even older than she was. I had many nephews and nieces who were my own age or older and, it must be said (was often said), better tempered and better behaved. Some of my nephews and nieces had children of their own. I was what you might call an odd lot, not very salable and ready to be marked down.

"I don"t want to be the first to say ..." I could see Harriet from above. She squirmed in her seat and smoothed her black mourning dress for the hundredth time. She wore the same dress to every funeral, and the only way we"d gotten her into it this time was to lace her as tight as a sausage. The others let her be the first to say it. I leaned back, so my shadow wouldn"t fall through the grating. "It don"t repay what you feed her, since she don"t do a lick of work."

"She an"t been properly taught"s the truth," said Beatrice, "but that"s her misfortune." No doubt here she threw a look at Alice.

"I"ve had my own to worry about," complained Alice. Since Cora Mary"s death, I"d been seven years with Alice. The easiest thing in the world for Alice was to lose things-her thimble, her flour dredger, her dog. If you wanted to stick by Alice, then it was up to you. She was a church-going woman, too, but whenever she forgot her prayers, she would say, "If the Lord wants me, he knows where to find me." That was Alice all over Needless to say, I generally found myself elsewhere, and I would wager that was fine with her. Her own brood numbered six, mostly boys, so they were more often than not busy losing themselves, too. It was my niece Annie who kept the engine running at Alice"s. Right then, in fact, Annie was out in the kitchen, getting our tea. It wouldn"t have occurred to Harriet, Beatrice, or Alice to lift a finger to help her. It occurred to me, of course, but that hole of kitchen work was one I didn"t care to fall into, because it was easy to see how those women would pull up the ladder, and there you"d be, hauling wood and water, making fires and tea, for the rest of your life.

"We could have sent her on the cars to Miriam. Young people her age seem to go on the cars without a speck of fear. Or Miriam could have come got her." This was Harriet.

They pondered my sister Miriam, a spinster who"d taught reading to little Negro children in Yellow Springs. Harriet"s tone revealed some sense of injury that Miriam was no longer capable of being of use in this way. But Miriam had been a strict woman, the sweetest but the strictest of them all. Her fondness for me had been mostly the result of the distance between us and our lively correspondence. I knew that even if Miriam were still living and I had gone to her on the cars and tried to stay with her, the sweetness would bit by bit have gone out and the strictness bit by bit come in. But I missed her.

"Miriam was genuinely fond of her." Beatrice expressed this as a great marvel.

"Where is Lydia?" The sofa emitted a heavy groan. Harriet must have leaned forward and looked around for me.

"Outdoors," said Alice, and I would have been, too, but my heavy mourning dress, wool serge and b.u.t.toned to the throat, gave the sunny summer hillside that was my usual resort all the attractions of the Great Sahara Desert. I had crept upstairs and undressed down to my shift. The black armor I would soon need to don again seemed to hold my shape where it lay over the back of a chair. I lifted the hem of my shift and fanned myself with it. "Out in the barn, most likely." Alice amplified her speculation with all the a.s.surance of someone who never knew what she was talking about.

"Oh, the poor orphaned child," exclaimed Beatrice, and for a moment I didn"t realize she was speaking of me. "Alone in the world!"

"She"s twenty years old, sister." Harriet"s tone was decidedly cool. "I was safely married at twenty, I must say. If she"s without suitors, who"s to blame for that?"

"And she has us," said Alice.

Oh, the poor orphaned child, I thought.

It was true as they said that I was useless, that I had perversely cultivated uselessness over the years and had reached, as I then thought, a pitch of uselessness that was truly rare, or even unique, among the women of Quincy, Illinois. I could neither ply a needle nor play an instrument. I knew nothing of baking or cookery, could not be relied upon to wash the clothes on washing day nor lay a fire in the kitchen stove. My predilections ran in other directions, but they were useless, too. I could ride a horse astride, saddle or no saddle. I could walk for miles without tiring. I could swim and had swum the width of the river. I could bait a hook and catch a fish. I could write a good letter in a clear hand. I had been able to carry on a lively dispute with my sister Miriam, who"d been especially fond of a lively dispute.

Worse, I was plain. Worse than that, I had refused the three elderly widowers who had made me offers and expected that I would be happy to raise their packs of motherless children. Worst of all, I had refused them without any show of grat.i.tude or regret. So, I freely concede, there was nothing to be done with me. My sisters were entirely correct and thoroughly justified in their concern for me. It was likely that I would end up on their hands forever, useless and ungrateful.

I stood up and moved away from the vent, suddenly weary of the certain outcome of their speculations. Back to Alice, back to the strange languor of that life. It vexed me, too, that though their afternoon of complaint and self-justification would result in nothing new, they would make their way through it, anyway, like cows following the same old meandering track through their all too familiar pasture and coming upon the same old over-grazed corner as if it were fresh and unexpected.

I looked out my window upon the slope in front of my father"s house. There had been no funeral supper, none but the quietest and most subdued gathering of the few around town who"d known my father. Each of my sisters" husbands had returned to his business or farm directly from the graveyard. All of us, I knew, would find a way to put off our mourning clothes as soon as possible. Even before my father lost himself, he was a silent and vain man. Just the sort of man who would approach a plain woman like my mother without the least pretense or compunction and invite her to leave her own parents and come over to him, to care for his six daughters and bear him a son. He had been fine to look at, with glossy curling hair and full whiskers. Perhaps she was gratified at being chosen at last for the very usefulness she had cultivated so long.

My hair, as usual, was falling about my face. I unpinned it, set the pins in a row beside my small looking gla.s.s, and picked up my brush. My hair was long and thick. As I lifted it off my neck and pulled the brush up underneath it, I couldn"t help feeling that in spite of every iota of evidence to the contrary, something was about to happen.

My sister Beatrice"s husband, Mr. Horace Silk, sold dry goods on Maine, at Lorton and Silk. Mr. Jonas Silk, the old man and Horace"s father, held the reins of the business in a tight grip. Lorton was long dead. As a result, Horace was as little consumed by his interest in calico and muslin as he was much consumed by his interest in western land. Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas-the walls of Land S Co. were papered with bills that offered, for a fair and reasonable sum, city lots in lovely, tree-shaded towns, country farms watered by sweet flowing streams, gristmills, sawmills, ironworks, every sort of business. Brother Horace and his cronies pored over the bills, comparing and contrasting the virtues of every region, every town, every named river and stream. They were forever putting together their investments, forever outlining schemes, forever scouring their relatives for funds, but in truth Mr. Jonas Silk was as n.i.g.g.ardly as he was jealous, and my sister Beatrice had as much interest in Kansas as she did in the czar of all the Russias, and so my brother Mr. Horace Silk worked out his plans in a white heat of frustrated eagerness.

Of all the women, it was only I who listened to the men, though I made no show of doing so. The towns I favored numbered three: One was Salley Fork, Nebraska, where the grid of streets ran down a gentle southern slope to the sandy, oak-shaded banks of the cool, meandering Salley River and where the ladies" aid society had already received numerous subscriptions for the town library, which was to be built that very summer. Town the second was Morrison"s Landing, Iowa, on the Missouri, where the soil was of such legendary fertility and so easy to plow that the farmers were already reaping untold wealth from their very first plantings. The third was Walnut Grove, Kansas, where the sawmill, the gristmill, and the largest dry goods emporium west of Independence, Missouri, were already in full operation. Horace himself had a fancy for a farm on the Marais des Cygnes River in Kansas, which was the finest farming land in the world and, according to the bill, located in the best, most healthful climate-just warm enough in the summer to ripen crops, always refreshed by a cool breeze, and never colder in the winter than a salubrious forty degrees. Fruit and nut trees of all varieties, bramble fruits, and even peaches were guaranteed to grow there.

For many months, one of my main pleasures in life had been to linger in L and S, prolonging my errands there for Alice and gazing upon the delightful bills, with their neat street maps and architectural drawings. Quincy, which had been a mere handful of buildings when my father arrived, seemed old and run-down by comparison. Even so, my chances of getting to any of these places seemed at least as remote as Horace Silk"s, and as often as I gazed upon my favorite bills, I also vowed to put away the thoughts that agitated me. My sisters were as fixed in their various homes as stones, and as difficult to lift. I had no money of my own and no companion. Even my father"s old horse had died some three years before, never to be replaced, since my father had no use for a horse. That horse was the last familiar creature that he remembered the name of. As recently as six months before his death, sister Beatrice found him in the barn, looking at the horse"s empty stall and muttering, "Wellington." That was the horse"s name, after the duke himself.

I turned from the glare of the window and crept back to the carpet roll. There I squatted and peered down. Harriet was fanning herself. Her face was bright red. Beatrice was saying, "... a nice chicken business."

"And where," said Alice, "would we set her up with this nice chicken business? And ..." She paused and caught her breath indignantly. "If Horace is going to set anyone up in a nice chicken business, then in my opinion Annie is far more deserving and would certainly do well at it. Annie gets very little consideration, I must say. You have more room on your farm, Harriet, for any sort of nice chicken business than we have on our town lot, a double one though it may be and as big as any."

"I know the end of that," complained Harriet. "More work for me when she lets her chickens run wild. I have my own chickens, as many as I can handle."

I wanted to shout down through the grating that every woman in Quincy had a nice chicken business, that the chicken trade was oversubscribed, but I held my tongue.

"I still think," continued Harriet, "Beatrice ..." There was a portentous pause while Harriet made sure to stake her claim to Beatrice"s full attention. "Bonnets! She can trim bonnets for Horace and Jonas. She"s all thumbs with a needle, but-"

"Lydia is all thumbs!"

"Annie, on the other hand, has a tremendous gift for tr.i.m.m.i.n.g bonnets! She-"

I let out a single stifled bark of merriment. Harriet looked around, startled, but didn"t guess where the noise was coming from. I have to say, though, that my sisters" ventures into the question of what was to become of me had taken an unexpectedly creative and comic turn. It was clear that I would have to make an effort, or I would soon find myself gainfully employed.

Below me I saw the top of Annie"s head glide into view, neatly juxtaposed to a large round tray covered with tea things. The severe white parting that ran from the front of that crown to the back was so fine and straight it might have been done with a knife point.

"Shh," said Harriet. "Thank, you my dear. Lovely."

It was a principle of the family that no business was discussed in front of Annie, who was generally considered too innocent to withstand the shock of most topics, though of course not too fragile to be worked to death. They did not invite her to take tea with them, so she set down the things and once again removed herself.

"This whole question," said Alice, "is too much for such a day as this. We"ve just buried our dear pa, after all."

"He was a fine-looking man," said Harriet. "The very picture of a patriarch."

"Mrs. Rowan said he was the fairest creature of either s.e.x she ever saw. She told me that yesterday when she was in buying sugar," said Beatrice. " "He cut a wonderful figure." Those were her very words."

They all sighed.

CHAPTER 2.

I Become Acquainted with Mr. Thomas Newton [image]Wash the fine clothes in one tub of suds; and throw them, when wrung, into another. Then wash them, in the second suds, turning them wrong side out. Put them in the boiling-bag, and boil them in strong suds, for half an hour, and not much more. Move them, while boiling, with the clothes-stick. Take them out of the boiling-bag, and put them into a tub of water, and rub the dirtiest places, again, if need be. Throw them into the rinsing-water, and then wring them out, and put them into the blueing-water. Put the articles to be stiffened, into a clothes-basket, by themselves, and, just before hanging out, dip them in starch, clapping it in, so as to have them equally stiff, in all parts. Hang white clothes in the sun, and colored ones, (wrong side out,) in the shade. Fasten them with clothes-pins. Then wash the coa.r.s.er white articles, in the same manner. -p. 286 THOMAS NEWTON WAS WHAT Harriet"s husband, Roland Brereton, called a "d- abolitionist." So was our sister Miriam. Roland Brereton called her "your d- abolitionist sister Miriam." Roland was forever d-ing everything, even those things he was fond of, like his dogs and his horses. Roland was from Kentucky; he and his three brothers had moved across the Ohio River into Illinois when Roland was a small boy. Roland"s family had gotten entangled in an Illinois legend almost as soon as they set foot in the state, and all the old settlers knew who the Breretons were.

The story runs as follows. There once was a family of killers who lived down near the Ohio: an old man, his four sons, and the women who might have been their "wives." They lived in the woods in a primitive fashion, making camps at night and taking shelter as best they could. It was said by reliable authorities that the women took the babies away from the camp every night to sleep, because they knew that if a baby cried, the old man would kill it. To meet up with these men was almost certain death. Many men of that day were lost and never heard of again until their bodies were found. One man was caught and tied to his horse. The horse and the man were blindfolded, and then the horse was driven over a high bluff. Another time, a group of pioneers got separated from two of their children, as it was easy to do in those days, and when they found the children, a day later, it was only to discover that they had been run down and brutally murdered for the sake of stealing what little clothing they were wearing. This father and sons were said to have killed over a hundred men, women, and children in two years or so, and heaven knows how many before they came to Illinois.

Roland Brereton"s father, Lyman, came into Illinois from Kentucky right at the time when all of these killings were taking place, and sure enough, one evening, when they were pushing their way along a woodland track down in Edwards County, three men, one old and two young, jumped up in front of them, far gone in drink but deadly. Lyman was walking along at the horse"s head, Roland and his two brothers were in the wagon. The mother was behind the wagon, and their dog, some sort of Kentucky hound dog, was walking next to her. As soon as the three men approached, the dog slunk away.

The brutes were greedy, and they paused to rummage through the Breretons" belongings, though they didn"t pause long. Any object was good enough for them to kill for. But the dog had made good use of this moment to seek out Burton Brereton, Lyman"s brother, who was some yards ahead of the group. Burton was one of those Kentuckians who seemed to take after red Indians rather than his white ancestors, and he was there before they even heard him coming. The only one of all of them who saw him was the mother, and what she saw was Burton setting the muzzle of his long rifle against the back of one of the sons" heads and pulling the trigger. At the very moment of the shot, she called out, "Praise the Lord!" at the top of her lungs. The old man and the other son got away and lived to kill other pioneers, but the Breretons got famous all the same for at least reducing their number.

For all that, Lyman and Burton Brereton didn"t make much of a success in Illinois. According to Roland, they didn"t have any use for good prairie soil and stuck to little patches here and there in the woods. Like most Kentuckians, they were satisfied to shoot something for supper and have some greens with it. But Roland had made himself a nice prairie farm out east of Quincy, and the only Kentucky left in him was the everlasting d-ing of this and that, and the dogs that over-ran the place, all said to be descendants of the famous hound that saved the family. Roland wouldn"t have a slave, not even in the kitchen, but he"d die for the right of all his second and third cousins that he"d never met to own as many slaves as they wanted. I doubted he"d be called upon to offer his life, unless he died as a result of an apoplectic fit after a dispute with some d- abolitionist. But abolitionists weren"t all that common in Quincy, though there were some who sympathized with "poor Dr. Eels," as Beatrice called him, who"d tried to rescue an escaped slave who"d swum from the Missouri side, back when I was a little girl, and had been convicted on account of the wet clothes that were discovered in his buggy. Most people in Quincy didn"t go out of their way to help the swimmers from Missouri, but they didn"t go out of their way to return them across the river, either. My brother-in-law Horace once said, "My opinion is, it"s a pretty short swim over but a pretty long row back, and I just don"t want to make the effort." That was Quincy all over.

I found Thomas Newton much milder and quieter than you"d think a "d- abolitionist" would be. He was so mild and quiet, in fact, that the first time I met him, when he came over to Harriet"s in the company of the neighbor Howell, who was also a d- abolitionist, I didn"t find out a thing about him. I was out at Harriet"s helping her boil bed linens about two weeks after my father"s funeral. I was trying to be as little use as I could be, but I could hardly fail to stir the boiling clothes, my a.s.signed labor. It was a hot day, and I had tied up my skirts to keep them out of the fire and rolled up my sleeves to keep them out of my way. My hair was so heavy with damp from the work that it hung around my shoulders. Harriet"s boy Frank was tending the fire. Howell drove up in his wagon, and he and a tall fellow with pale hair and fair skin got out and went into the house. I can"t say that I made much of him. There was a creek down behind Roland Brereton"s farm, and I was thinking mostly about taking a swim back there if I could slip away from Harriet after the clothes were washed.

But Harriet was thinking about something else, and not three minutes after Howell and this pale fellow went into the house, they came out again, with Harriet right behind them, and she had a tray in her hand and on that a jug of cold spring water. Pretty soon, she set them up on a cloth in the shade of a big hickory tree, went back in for gla.s.ses and a plate of cakes, and then she sang out to me, "Lidie! Surely those linens are clean by now. You better fix yourself up and come over here and have a gla.s.s of water in this heat! Isn"t it sweltering!" And the two men made themselves comfortable, all smiles.

This neighbor, Roger Howell, hadn"t owned his farm long. He"d come down from Wisconsin, along the bluffs of the Mississippi, and was said to be consumptive, which was why he found the winters up there too much to bear. He had gingery whiskers and a bald head with a gingery fringe around the sides, and he was always taking his hat off and putting it on. Harriet told me that every night he smeared on his pate a mixture of hartshorn and oil, which Jonas Silk swore would grow hair on a stone, but no new shoots were as yet in evidence. The only thing I"d ever heard him talk about was his mare, which he was very proud of-he"d won her in a poker game from a Missouri man, and she was a long-legged, haughty-looking thing with a white circle around her left eye and a wide blaze.

"Well, Tom," he was saying as I came up, "you were impressed. I saw you holding your hat, but that mare wasn"t even stretching out. On the one piece, that straightaway before you get to the gate here, she whipped Solomon Johnson"s colt, hardly even breathing. Broke that colt"s heart-"

Thomas Newton started to stand up, but I sat down so quickly on the cloth that he didn"t have a chance. Harriet pushed a gla.s.s of water over to me and beamed on me as if I were her dearest child, while at the same time shooing away Frank, who was twelve at the time. "Yes, Mr. Newton, here is my sister, my baby sister Lydia, the last of us girls. Do you know, my father had thirteen daughters altogether?" She motioned to me to straighten my bodice and otherwise surrept.i.tiously rearrange myself, but it was too hot for that. I sat down as I was. "Good land," Harriet went on. "It"s miserable weather for boiling clothes, but Lidie simply would do it. There was nothing I could do to stop her."

Howell remarked, "My mare don"t notice the heat. She hardly turns a hair in this heat. Tom Newton, you ever seen a mare like this one? I swear!"

Frank stood opposite us, under the hickory tree, with his thumbs notched in his braces.

Now Thomas Newton spoke for the first time. His voice was low and agreeable. "You know I"m not a horseman, Howell. And you weren"t, either, the last time I saw you. You"ve been transformed by this Missouri mare!"

Howell grinned at this as if it were praise. Harriet grinned to be agreeable. Howell said, "Now look at her just stand there. She-"

"Miss Harkness, are you fond of horses?"

"When there"s one to be fond of I am."

"Lidie"s just a miracle worker with dumb creatures," said Harriet. "More of our delicious spring water, Mr. Newton? Will you be with us long?"

Very slowly and with much aplomb, Frank pulled the stub of a seegar from his pocket and put it between his lips. A moment later, he pulled out a lucifer and lit it. He sucked through it and then let the smoke pillow out of his mouth. Harriet, I could see, was trying to ignore him. Mr. Howell seemed to be ignoring him, too, except that he turned suddenly and spat a thin brown stream toward the woods. Thomas Newton, it appeared, neither smoked nor chewed.

I came to realize that this is what my sisters had decided on, marrying me off to the first stranger to pa.s.s through Quincy, or the second, or the third.

He said, "Only as long as I can help it ..."

"Tom Newton"s on his way to Kansas," said Howell. "He"s with the Ma.s.sachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. Roland around?" Now Howell grinned again. "I do want to make sure that Roland meets Tom. I know he"ll want to."

"My goodness me," said Harriet. "You mean you want to give him a fit! Are you an argumentative man, Mr. Newton?"

"He"s from Boston, an"t he?" said Howell, laughing aloud.

"Let me suggest, sir," said Harriet soberly, "that you refrain from engaging Mr. Brereton in discussion if you find him armed."

"He"s always armed," said Howell.

Harriet nodded at this, as if to say, There, you see.

Howell roared, "He"s itching to kill some d- abolitionist!"

Thomas Newton paled and quickly took a sip of his water. Howell shouted, "Here he comes now!" and Harriet started and looked around, and Thomas Newton kind of hunched into himself, but Howell was laughing to beat the band, pleased to have made fools of us. I finished my gla.s.s and stood up, ready enough to get back to stirring the clothes, but Harriet said immediately, "Lidie, pa.s.s Mr. Newton one of these cakes you made yesterday," and what could I do? I pa.s.sed the cakes, which I had never seen before, and they began to slide off the plate, and he didn"t have the sense to catch them, so they all fell in his lap. A hapless young man, that much was clear.

Frank fell over laughing.

Harriet seemed to place the blame on me. She exclaimed, "Oh, Lidie, for goodness" sake!" Howell was laughing, too, but I got up without glancing at Mr. Newton and went back to stirring my clothes, which heaved and billowed in the steaming waters. It seemed the most harmless thing I could do.

Soon enough the bald-pated older man and the pale young man got into the gig and went off, and not long after that, Harriet, with a distinct air of disappointment married to long-suffering resignation, declared that she was going to her room-"because, Frank, you have given me a headache with that infernal cheroot"-and after we were finished with the rinsing, would we leave the clothes to sit in the bluing tub, and so we did, Frank pausing twice to relight his seegar, because, taken all in all, he wasn"t nearly as experienced with it as he liked us to think.

The stream below Roland Brereton"s farm cut down its banks in muddy steps, and in spots you could stand in the middle of the stream and see only the sky and tufts of thick gra.s.s edging the banks high above your head. By late afternoon, there were two shady spots, cool under the giant cotton-woods, and at one of these Frank had dammed a little pool that in mid-August ran about a foot deep, deep enough for bullheads, sunfish, a c.r.a.ppie or two, and, of course, numerous scuttling crawdads. The small terraces that defined the height of the waters in earlier periods of the year were dried and cracked into angular shapes. Frank liked to pluck the little squares out of the mud and spin them into the pool, or follow the crawdads with a stick and poke after them into their hiding places. A few late rays of sunshine through the cottonwood leaves fell on the muddy water and sparkled, but without disturbing the sense of cool shade and privacy that I always felt in this spot. I could hear Roland"s cows lowing in the pasture above us, but the banks of the creek were too steep for them until some quarter of a mile downstream. Often, we saw turtles in the water, snakes, which held no fear for me, and the tracks of c.o.o.ns and skunks in the mud. The banks had a number of otter holes, and a ways upstream the otters had made a slide, but we didn"t often see the otters themselves, unless it was the flash of a rounded little head accompanied by the sense of being looked at with sharp, black little eyes, and then, as soon as you turned toward them, they were gone. The creek had a different, more solitary and less appalling, feeling than the big river, which I also frequented. The high banks and tall trees gave it the almost domestic air of a dwelling place. Of course, I resorted to it far more often than Harriet thought proper for a young woman of my station.

But in fact, my station was clearly low and dipping lower.

Though he died owning a house, my father hadn"t made much of himself either in Ohio, where he"d gone after marrying Ella and where he"d met my mother, or in Quincy, where he had brought his many daughters to marry them off around the time I was born. He had no knack for farming- preferred a more convivial life than that, with theatricals and clubs and levees and daily social intercourse. Some years, he would broker some grain down the river or some cotton up; other years, he would have an interest in some dry goods or some horses to sell. The lot where he built his house came to him through a trade-a German man owned the lot but needed a quant.i.ty of barley to make beer, and my father happened to have an interest in a quant.i.ty of barley. The house itself got built in the same way, and it was a house with a pleasant air about it, because my father liked to make a good appearance above all things. But he was sixty-two when I was born, and the novelty of daughters had worn away long before.

My mother doted upon me-perhaps not so much at first, but more as I lived longer and longer and proved myself healthier and less likely to follow my mother"s other babies to the grave week by week and month by month. By the time I was four and had outlived them all, I could do no wrong in her eyes, nor could she do any wrong in mine. I was a good-tempered child, for I had my own way in everything, and she poured out on me all the love and attention she had stopped up over the years. I knew my letters at two, could read a newspaper and do sums at four, tell stories from the family Bible at five. She found me other books, with no discrimination of judgment or taste. It so pleased her to hear me read that she would listen to me read anything, thinking, perhaps, that the matter of the reading simply ran through me like water through a spigot. She sewed for me and tatted for me and cooked me special dishes, persuaded my father to procure me a pony, and altogether we lived like a potentate and her adoring servant, and it was a fine life for me, my delight and my due. But she was a shy woman and had few friends. Perhaps we were such friends to each other that she felt she needed no one else. And then there were Miriam, Beatrice, Alice, and Harriet, making their usual noise. That might have been enough for her. When I was thirteen, the cholera came up the river, and of all of us, only my mother took ill. She died within three days. She was forty-seven.

This time, my father, who was seventy-six, didn"t look around for a new wife, only for some place to put me, and that is how I went to Alice"s, where I was hardly a potentate but only one of many, and there I discovered my taste for that sort of freedom, the freedom of not being attended to. To my old bad habits of indiscriminate reading and stating my opinion whenever I desired to, I added new ones of wandering about, spending time at the river, avoiding housework, and improving my fishing and hunting skills with the help of Alice"s many sons. But I cannot say that Alice or her husband, Frederick, who had a small lumbering mill, or any of their sons was blessed with connections, either, so Harriet"s notion of my station was largely a fiction.

Frank said, "I got some money."

This was hardly unusual, as Frank was an enterprising young man, who, moreover, was as much master of his own time as any boy twice his age. I said, "How much do you have?"

"Four dollars."

Four dollars, on the other hand, was a considerable sum, suspicious in a boy.

"How"d you get that?"

"I only get to keep four bits. But I got it here in my pocket."

"How"d you get it, I asked you."

"Mr. Thomas Newton gave it to me. He told me to take it. You want to come with me?"

I didn"t answer anything, but he started walking down the creek, keeping in the middle and careful, I quickly saw, to refrain from stepping in any muddy spots. Frank pulled out the last of his seegar and stuck it between his lips, but he didn"t light it. We didn"t say anything. We pa.s.sed the lower banks of the cow pasture, but the cows couldn"t be seen from the creek. Everything was quiet. We kept going until we came to a small cave, a spot that I knew Frank had explored extensively. We stopped, and Frank looked eagerly in. I did not. I could hear well enough: movements of some large body, audible only when they suddenly were stilled. I knew there would be a dark face in there. I didn"t have to see it. Frank picked up some stones by the creekside and heaved them idly into the water, the way a boy would do, aiming at this snag or that one. Then we walked on until we got to the next cow pasture, where we came up out of the creek and paused to pick mulberries. I said, "Well?"