On the evening of the thirteenth of August, however, two fellows came galloping over the lawn up to the house just at suppertime, and Papa ran out to meet them, while Helen, who had been telling us a story of some biscuits she had been learning to make that afternoon, sat staring at me, her mouth open, her eyes wide, and her hand pressed to her throat. We couldn"t help it-we sat there still as rocks, listening for the voices on the lawn to rise above a rumble. They did not. Soon enough, the hors.e.m.e.n galloped away and Papa returned to the table, a smile of rea.s.surance so fixed on his face that it didn"t rea.s.sure at all. He was clearly alarmed and could hardly prevent himself from hopping about. Nevertheless, he made for his seat, sat down in it, and darted his fork at his baked apple. But it was no use, and he threw down the utensil and stared at Helen for a second before saying, "Jim Lane has raised an army in Lawrence and attacked Fort Franklin. There was a great deal of shooting, and then they set the place afire! Our gallant men managed to defend themselves without a loss, but then the devil Lane rounded up the postmaster and threatened to hang him, until his wife begged for his life. I understand that it was only her great beauty and the devil Lane"s susceptibility to the fair s.e.x that preserved the man, if you"ll pardon my referring to such things, my dear."
This had the ring of truth about it, but I said nothing, only stared at my plate. I thought all at once of Frank, who could easily have joined up with Lane, and was filled with dread.
Papa went on. "Only property has been lost, but the Kansas criminals have made a serious vow. I hesitate to mention it to you, my dear. We shall see."
"They"re coming here!" cried Helen.
"Now, Helen-"
"They are! I can see it in your face!"
"Not right here, darling, not to Day"s End-"
"What"s to stop them?"
Jim Lane"s foolishness, I thought, but of course I didn"t open my mouth.
"It"s seventy miles or more between here and there. We"re back from the border a good ways. Senator Atchison won"t allow it. The President-"
"Oh, they are demons! I wish they were dead. I-"
"Helen, my dear, calm yourself. Of course I am rattled a bit by the news, but I don"t expect to be personally affected. Fort Franklin is right beside Lawrence, and Lawrence is days away. This is merely an example of the growing lawlessness of-"
"Oh, Papa! Oh, Papa!"
Now Papa"s voice developed some steel, and he said, "Helen! I must insist that you calm yourself!" He leaned toward her and spoke almost in a whisper. "Don"t you realize what a temptation this presents to the servants? If they were to think, however wrongly, that these abolitionist types are nearby, they would give in to temptation and try to get to them! They would think that they could leave us and find support and ease for the rest of their lives. They have childlike fantasies that will lead some of them astray. You, my dear, must fortify yourself and dissemble your fear, because they a.s.sume that you know something and that the more afraid you are, the closer the abolitionists are to the house. Helen! Do you understand me?"
"Yes, Papa." But her voice trembled.
"Now look at Louisa, here. She is far calmer and more realistic about this news. My dear, I wish you would strive to emulate Louisa. If you are going to have your own establishment, your husband will rely on you to always remain collected and even in your responses to daily trials. You cannot live otherwise!" In fact, I was far from composed but instead besieged with thoughts of Frank. I was stiff with anxiety.
Helen cast me a look, took some deep breaths, and made herself eat two bites of her baked apple. I smiled at Papa as best I could, more insensible than imperturbable, and attempted to keep on eating, too. But Papa was more agitated than he let on, and was soon galloping away on his horse to find out more. I spent the rest of the evening trying to avoid imagining Frank and Louisa and Charles and the others and trying to present Helen with an example of composure, reading, sewing, listening to her play the piano, until I finally took her into my bed once again and brushed her hair until we were, if not calm, then tired enough to sleep. After that, I lay awake myself, thinking of the pistol under the bed, until Papa and some of his friends rode up. I fell asleep to the drumming of their earnest voices. Helen thought I was her protector, but I knew that she was mine.
I held no affection for Franklin-Franklin was a wretched Ruffian town that Papa and Helen would deplore if ever they saw it-but the next day I said nothing at all as they mourned its (miserable) post office and its (crude) hotel, as well as its (regrettably unshot) citizenry. I even asked Papa where Franklin was and tried to maintain a demeanor of ignorant but well-meaning concern. What, I said, had Papa heard about this fellow Jim Lane?
He had begun, Papa said, as merely a scamp, but the influence of the abolitionists had transformed him into a bloodthirsty charlatan and brute.
Had Papa ever seen the fellow?
Certainly not-he was not curious about such men-but others had seen him. He affected wild clothes, and his eyes blazed with iniquity, more so every day. The senators and congressmen who had seen him in Washington had told Atchison that if this was a fair type of "Free-Soiler," then by all means should the Union be preserved from them!
"Helen mentioned this man Robinson?"
"Ahh. Now, Robinson is a smooth one. Looks normal, respectable, even. Works carefully and slowly, said to be in thrall to his wife, who is even more calculating than he is himself." Papa shook his head. "These are the rumors, of course. I don"t put much stock in rumor myself."
I nodded at the wisdom of this course.
The next day, there were even more alarms. It began in midmorning- the first cool morning we"d had. Helen had made up her mind that she was going to make an oilcloth for the back parlor, and Papa had brought her a sheet of canvas from town. This she had unrolled in the hallway, and she was laying lavender iris blossoms around the borders by means of a stencil. She had also made a stencil for the leaves, and she had a pot of green paint, too. She was just explaining to me how neat and colorful this oilcloth would make the back parlor look after she had impregnated it with enough coats of sh.e.l.lac, when a horse, once again, galloped up the front lawn to the porch. Papa nipped out of his library, where he had been working at some papers, scooted around us where we were kneeling over the canvas, and hurried out the front door, being careful to close it even in his rush. Helen sat up and looked out, then rose up and went over to the window, which was open, and listened. I began to admonish her about eavesdropping, but she suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, they"re at it again!" and ran into the kitchen. Moments later, the messenger galloped away, and Papa entered, opening and closing the door with considerable care. He looked at me where I was kneeling between the two pots of paint, and he said, "Where"s Helen?"
"She went into the kitchen."
"Good. She"s not been raised in a manner that has prepared her for the sorts of perils we now have to fear. I regret that, but who was to know? Until last year, we lived in peace here, all of a like mind, expecting only to go on in perpetuity, like the yearly round of the seasons and the daily round of the sun." He sighed. "Ah, well. My dear Mrs. Bisket, I regret to inform you that there is another attack being perpetrated by the devil Lane even as we speak. Rather more in our direction, though still in Kansas."
"Mercy me! Where?" I exclaimed. I thought of Frank at once, with dread.
"They are marching. Or, they were marching as of last night. No one is quite sure to where, but we haven"t the forces to turn them. They may sweep all before them! One thing is clear: Lane proposes to force a military solution to a political conflict, and we will have to answer him in kind."
We stared at one another, and then I slowly stood up, wiping my hands on a rag. Papa took my large hand between his two small ones and said in a dramatic voice, "Much might be asked of me, Mrs. Bisket. My older daughters are far away, and I have only my Helen, the most delicate flower of the three. I dare not commend her to servants, but I feel that I may commend her to you. Your coming here in this time of uncertainty has a fortuity to it that I cannot ignore, though I"m not a superst.i.tious man. At the very least, I shall be away some of the time for the next period. Delia and Lorna know perfectly well how to run the house, and Malachi and Ike can take care of the farm. They love us and depend on us, and we upon them; that is the virtue of our inst.i.tution. But to you I surrender my fairest and most precious possession, my Helen. I ask you to keep her safe and occupied! Should something untoward happen to me, then I ask you to take her into the custody of Bella, in Saint Louis, who has a fine establishment there. I feel that I may depend upon you!"
"Why?" I said, thinking distractedly of Frank still.
"Because you have a plain, honest look about you, which is more pleasing to a loving father than all the beauty in the world."
In short, I looked like a governess or a schoolmistress, and so could be relied upon to act like one.
Papa said, "Go to her, please!" And then he turned and went out.
I found Helen in the kitchen, crying by the stove, where Delia was brining some pickles, and not long after, Papa and one of the Negroes, whom I didn"t recognize, galloped away. From time to time, Delia stroked Helen on her yellow hair, and then Lorna came in, carrying a large basket of white washing that she"d been doing over a fire in the yard. Her face was dark and steamy, and clearly her temper was short. She glanced at Helen and said, "De trouble of de world ain" touched you yet, so why you bawlin"?"
"I-" But remembering, I think, what her father had said to her two nights before, Helen simply wiped her tears away and sat up.
Now Delia spoke in a low voice. "Men is rushin" "round wid guns and thangs. n.o.body knows what gone happen, Lorna. You done got ta be a hard woman."
"Let"s see what dey is to carry on about before we carries on, dat"s what I say."
"You kin be a hard woman in good times, and you kin be a hard woman in bad times, and you always got a reason to be a hard woman, but it don" do you no good in the end. Dat"s what I say," said Delia. Then she turned to Helen and said, "You eat some biscuit wid b.u.t.ter and honey on it, child, and you be better prepared fo" what"s ta come." Then she made us places at the deal table where she had been working on the pickles and gave us each a plate. Lorna sniffed and went out.
Well, Jim Lane and his army got to Fort Saunders, sure enough, and they mounted an attack and went in shooting, but as everyone knows, they discovered rather soon (not right away, though) that the fort was undefended, unoccupied by a single soul. They then left a skeleton force to maintain Free State control of the place, and then Lane took some of the men and went off to Nebraska. Thus he was not even present when an actual engagement happened to take place the next day. Of course, I heard nothing of Frank, but the intelligence seemed to be that there were no casualties. I took solace in that.
There was a man, Sam Walker, who had a claim right outside Lawrence, and also a ruffian named t.i.tus, who was a great bully, much hated by the Free Staters, because he was always bragging and making threats. As I was able to piece the story together in the days to follow, from what I heard from Papa and some of his friends (who considered t.i.tus a rough enough fellow, but right-thinking, and who spoke of Sam Walker as one of the criminal leaders whose traitorous perfidy to the Const.i.tution put him outside the pale of civilization), Sam Walker and his men were heading north toward Topeka, looking for a fight, and t.i.tus and his men were heading east, likewise looking for a fight, when they happened upon one another in the dark and skirmished in some woods. After the skirmish, in which no one was badly hurt, Sam Walker went to his claim, which wasn"t far off. He woke up later in the morning to the sound of pounding on his cabin door, and when he opened it, a man he had never seen before declared that he had t.i.tus"s wife and two children with him on the Lecompton- Westport stage ("Oh, the cruelty of it," harangued Papa. "So typical of them!") and that if Sam Walker wanted t.i.tus, he"d better do something about it now. So Walker and his men took over the prisoners and held them until a runner could get to Lawrence and summon the six-pound cannon they had there. Fifty hors.e.m.e.n then gathered near t.i.tus"s place (which Papa insisted upon calling "Fort t.i.tus") and attacked at dawn on the morning of August 16. A Free-Soiler was killed, then the cannon leveled a wall of one of the buildings, and then t.i.tus surrendered. When Walker went in, he saw a printed handbill hanging on the wall, advertising a five-hundred-dollar reward for his own head, to be paid by t.i.tus! Then, according to Papa"s reports, there was a great deal of fighting among the Free-Soilers about whether to kill the gallant t.i.tus, but they hadn"t the manhood to do it, and so he and some of his cronies ("gallant allies," said Papa) were carted off to Lawrence and imprisoned. A mob of Lawrenceites tried to get to him and hang him, but Walker or someone managed to preserve him, saying that war must be carried out by rule, and what we had here was a war. Papa agreed. All of Papa"s friends agreed. What had been, on the one hand, a problem of governing and, on the other, a fight was now clearly rising up the scale and would soon be, if it wasn"t already, an actual war. The hardest piece of all this intelligence, for me, was when Papa declared that the prisoners in Lecompton-that is, Governor Robinson and his a.s.sociates-were to be summarily hung in retaliation for all of this. I will say that I felt my face go white and my body go cold when he said it, but I was so used to dissembling by now that I only smiled and said, "Surely that couldn"t be according to the law," and then Papa said, "What law is there in Kansas?" and then it turned out not to be true. Those prisoners remained where they were, and other prisoners, taken in all of these skirmishes, were exchanged, and so hostilities, at least around Lawrence, ceased for the time being. Soon there were other rumors: Proslave households around Tec.u.mseh were attacked and all their goods stolen and taken to Topeka, where the Free Staters divided them up and took them home. (Papa believed this one, but I didn"t.) A man in Leavenworth made a bet that he could scalp an abolitionist before sundown, and won it. (I believed this, but Papa said he didn"t think any southerner could do such a thing. I kept my beliefs to myself; Papa did not. Helen believed every bad thing she heard.) Many names came up, but Frank"s wasn"t among them, nor Charles"s nor any other that I knew. That was my only comfort.
I summarize these events because at the time they were extraordinarily hard to understand, what with the comings and goings of Papa and his friends, the dislocations of the housekeeping and farming at Day"s End Plantation, and my own confusions and frights, not to mention Helen"s. I could not help worrying about Louisa and Charles and the Bushes and my other friends in Lawrence, especially as Louisa was approaching her time, and there was no telling what the Missourians were planning to do to Lawrence should Lane be unable to defend the town (and he was surely unable to defend the town). In Papa"s normally neat and orderly house, the unfinished canvas lay on the hall floor for three days before Lorna and I rolled it up and set it off to the side. The pots of paint and brushes somehow got out onto the porch railing, where they were still sitting, untouched, when I left Day"s End Plantation for good, some time later. For me, these things were the emblem of all the order that ended then and all the disorder that began.
One of these days, toward supper, Helen and I were up in her room, sorting through her gowns, as she had decided that she would make do with what she had for the winter and not ask Papa for anything luxurious until, should it happen, she was ready to put together her wedding clothes. Minna"s wedding, to take place in October, had come in for much discussion, also, and Helen was trying to be sweet and judicious at the same time. "I don"t think," she said, "that Minna really understands what we are having to put up with."
"Have you written to her?"
"Not in a week."
"Then how could she understand? The letter you read me about the linens was written two weeks ago or more."
"Is nothing going on in Lexington? They"re right on the river. They must know more than we do, even."
"Has your papa written anything to her?"
"Papa is very indulgent of Minna, far more than of me, if you must know the truth. It"s because she"s, well, plain. He feels sorry for her."
"Does he?"
"No one speaks of it, of course. But I guarantee you Minna is not planning to make do with all her old dresses."
"She is getting married."
"Yes, she is." She said this with decided sharpness, not at all the tone she had used about the subject before. I smiled and we were silent for a moment. Then she said, "I suppose Papa will bring all those men home tonight. It"s terrible for Delia to have to make such a large supper, but I feel better when they"re here, I must say. I always think, Go ahead, let them attack tonight, and they"ll see what they get!"
"What men?"
"Oh, let"s see. I guess Mr. Perkins and his nephew and Mr. Harris, of course, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Chesbrough. He has a brother, I think, but I don"t know if he"s coming. Possibly Mr. Long and a friend of his who lives over there whose wife died-what"s his name? oh, Mr. Oleander Jackson; isn"t that an amusing name? But he"s ever so sad and serious. Mrs. Harris says he"s looking for a new wife, and I surely hope he doesn"t look in my direction! Some others have recently come into the neighborhood and are drilling with Papa. I surely hope he brings a few of them home; I surely do."
"Have you ever heard of any men named Mr. Samson and Mr. Chaney, from Blue Springs?" To tell the truth, my heart was suddenly pounding, though whether my fright came from antic.i.p.ating how she might answer or simply from p.r.o.nouncing the names of these devils aloud, I couldn"t have said.
"No," said Helen, shaking out a particularly lovely pink silk gown and then inspecting some loose st.i.tching at the waist. "I suppose Isabelle will have to look at this. It"s always been one of my favorites, and I"m happy to keep wearing it, but I went to a dance in it, and don"t you know, one of my partners stepped right on the skirt! Ugh! That"s just the sort of suitor that"s all around here. And then, of course, he was terribly sorry and went all red in the face. And his ears were nearly purple! That put me off even more than his clumsiness did, I swear!"
I had just about regained my composure when she said, "Oh, unless you mean Samson Perkins. His nephew is named Samson, too, though they call him Sam. And Chaney Smith is their friend. He"s rather a rough character, and Papa doesn"t really like him, but he"s never done anything to require Papa denying him the house. We"ve heard things- What"s the matter?"
By now I was lying back on the bed, as weak and faint as ever I"d felt in my life. The shock of knowing that Samson and Chaney were at hand, and had been in the house a few nights before, was more than I could stand. The fact is that ahead of time, you always think you are going to approach something gradually, with plenty of time and foresight to prepare yourself, but really everything is sudden, even those things you expect.
I saw that I might miss my chance if I didn"t improve upon the evening"s opportunity. To Helen, I said, "I think the heat must be affecting me. I didn"t nap at all this afternoon."
"Oh, you must, then. Now that you have that green gown to wear, you"ll be having supper with us, and it will be so lively! You certainly should rest beforehand. I had a lovely nap, and I feel so fresh! The heat isn"t bothering me at all!"
Thus dismissed, I went to my room and closed the door. After sitting on my bed for a minute, I leaned down and dragged my case out and opened it. There wasn"t much in it except the pistol, a tin of percussion caps, and some cartridges I had made weeks before and wrapped in a square of cloth. Here is what I did: I loaded the cartridges, six of them, into the cylinder. Then I loaded six percussion caps onto the cones. Then I laid the weapon on the neatly made bed and gazed at it for a long time. Everything about the black dragoon proclaimed something new, something entirely different from what had gone before. Thought had gone into its engineering, but no flourishes had gone into its decoration. It was not to be, as many guns I had seen over the years were, picked up and admired, even fondled. Men, I knew, named their rifles, cleaned and oiled them with pleasure, took as much pride in their workmanship as they might in a fine dog or a graceful picture. The black dragoon didn"t invite that: it was so manufactured, so purely an object designed for a particular use-killing men-that it was impossible to feel affection for it. But with all that, here it was, and across the hall or across the best parlor, it was certainly capable of doing the required damage to Samson Perkins, his nephew Sam, and their friend Chaney Smith, especially if I took them by surprise, which I intended to do. How I imagined it was this: Their faces, the very ones I had seen on the Lawrence road, would turn and look at me just as they had that day, but this time I would raise my black dragoon and fire right into their laughter.
I turned my gaze from the gun on the bed and looked around the room. The windows looked outward; from where I was sitting, I could see only the tops of a few trees and the sky, which was hazy with heat. Even though I had made my own bed and hung up my clothes, Lorna had filled my pitcher, taken away the chamber pot, and pushed the net bed curtains back, not forgetting to arrange them in a graceful drape. The bureau was polished, and its small mirror shone. The pictures on the walls, of flowers and girls in white dresses standing in gardens, were pleasing enough, if a tad over-English and silly.
I looked at the gun again, dark against the white counterpane. The afternoon was drawing on, and soon enough I would hear the clatter of men and horses coming in. My plan was simple enough; if you were intending to commit what those around you considered a crime, but were not intending to get away with it, then that reduced the number of contingencies that you were required to foresee. I went around the bed to the lit- tle table where Thomas"s watch lay, and picked it up. It was warm because the long rays of the sun had been shining on it, but the warmth seemed to come from somewhere else. I let myself think that it came from Thomas himself. I held it in my hand, stared out the window at the sky, and waited.
CHAPTER 24.
I Am Doubly Surprised [image]Those, only, who are free from care and anxiety, and whose minds are mainly occupied by cheerful emotions, are at full liberty to unveil their feelings. -p. 137-38 I DIDN"T HAVE TO WAIT LONG, but as I was caught in a dreamlike state somewhere between panic and antic.i.p.ation, it seemed both all too long and all too short. Only four of the men and their horses came up to the house; the rest went directly to the stables. While these four men stood with their animals and waited for Ike or someone else to come receive them, they bl.u.s.tered among themselves about their prowess and their intentions. Their voices were deep and carried through the open window, and all spoke in those half-belligerent, half-joking tones that Missourians seemed to specialize in.
"Them d- black abolitionists an"t seen nothin" till they try to get our n.i.g.g.e.rs. We"ll turn their heads around and show"em their own backs, haw haw!"
"H-, back when I was in Ohio a year ago, if only I"d known they was coming our way! I woulda forestalled a few, I"ll tell ya!"
"I hate goin" back there! They always look at ya like you"re gonna eat with your knife and an"t never seen a winder before! And then, when ya go to write something, their d- eyebrows go up with every word you write."
"I jes" stick my tongue between my lips like I ken barely form the letters, then I laugh!"
"Time for laughin" is past, boys! I say, let "em come!"
I looked at the pistol on the bed and reflected upon the contrast between these men, among them Thomas"s killers, and Thomas himself. That is the worst agony of a murder: that the worthy man has died and unworthy ones continue to live. The crude boasting and bragging of these four affected me like blows and left me breathless. Someone came and took away their horses, and then they came into the house. I could hear them laughing and stomping below, then I heard Helen"s voice, and then I heard Papa"s. I went over to the chest and picked up the towel Lorna had placed there for me and wiped my face with it, then I wrapped it around the pistol, leaving only the tip of the barrel showing and two inches or so of the stock. It was hard to keep in place, and I looked around the room for something to tie it, but there was nothing, unless I should elect to tear a strip off the bed curtains-but there was Helen"s knock. I sat down on the bed and arranged my skirt over the wrapped gun. Helen entered with a smile. "Are you feeling any better? They"re a little exuberant today. As Papa would say, they haven"t gone without refreshment. But Delia made a lovely supper. Lots of cuc.u.mbers!"
I pulled the pistol close to myself and stood up as gracefully as possible. Actually, it wasn"t heavy, and once I was standing, I had no trouble concealing it. I said, "Are they all here, then?"
"I think so. Lorna had to set another place for Mr. Lafayette. He"s very old! I can"t believe he"s still drilling, but Papa says he won"t give up! Oh, my, he hates the abolitionists. He came from Mississippi, you know. One of the best families in Tupelo, I"m told, but he"s ever so old. Shh. He"s right there!" We came down to the landing and looked over the banister at a tall, thin man with a hatchet face and a mane of white hair. A broadsword in a scabbard hung at his side, and he affected extremely large spurs. Another man joined him, clapped him on the back, and shouted in his ear: "That"s quite a mount you"ve got, Lafayette. Want to sell "im to someone who can actually ride "im?"
"I"ll shoot the beast first, Chesbrough! Do "im a kindness that way!" They laughed. Others crowded in, jangling and clanking. Almost everyone, it appeared, was wearing a sword, and now I saw the rifles jumbled against the wall by the front door with their ramrods. Some of them looked seventy-five or a hundred years old, designed to go with knee britches and pigtails. I expected, of course, that the Samsons and Chaney would present themselves, perhaps that they would light up on their own, like paper lanterns with candles in them, but all the men were alike- equally strange to me, equally familiar with one another. The only one I recognized was Papa, who hopped among the others like a robin among crows, herding them with little pokes and prods toward the dining room. I felt the pistol through my dress and pulled back the hammer with my thumb. Then I said to Helen, "Where are Mr. Perkins and Mr. Smith?"
She whispered, "Mr. Smith is the one in the blue vest just coming out of the parlor, and Perkins is looking right at us. h.e.l.lo, 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 circ.u.mstances 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?"