Another one called out, "We know they pay you a hundred dollars a head to come out here and vote the black abolitionist ticket! Should of stayed in your own d- part of the country! You never cared about this country till you found out there was gonna be slaves here. What I think is, you don"t want this country-you jest don"t want us to have it!"
Now Thomas spoke up. "If you live here, you"ll be surrounded on every side by people who hold views that are opposed to yours. How can you expect us to be neighborly after you stole our friend"s land? And what will it be like for you if you have no neighbors you can befriend?"
"Sir," shouted the old man, "look on these four boys! These are all the friends I need, and they are all the friends they themselves need!" He now fell silent, as if attributing to them the desire for neighborly relations was the reddest insult of all.
"I repeat," said Mr. Bush, "we are willing to buy you out, with as much over as we can afford to repay your labor and your trouble-"
"There are settlements not far from here that you would find more congen-"
The old man shot his rifle into the air. Frank reached around and picked up his. The other horses spooked, but not Jeremiah, and everyone stood absolutely still in antic.i.p.ation of the shooting to come. The old man said, "We"re talkin" too much here. When I say no, it makes me mad to keep talkin". You men keep talkin", and now I am mad."
There was a long silence. Once again, it appeared, all parties were finally reluctant to level at one another the weapons they all had with them. The leaves on the trees, which were still green but had begun to dry, rattled suggestively in the breeze. Finally Mr. Jenkins said, bravely, I thought, "Well, we aren"t finished talking. I"ve got more to say, but perhaps it is best said another day."
I was being quiet, but I was not being quiet enough, because the next moment, two of the Missourians looked in our direction, and then our men turned around to look, too. Not wishing to seem furtive, I urged Jeremiah out of the copse he was standing in and walked him toward the others. I was conscious that I was strangely dressed, and surely Thomas and all the others recognized me, but no one laughed or even betrayed amus.e.m.e.nt. Jeremiah"s hooves made the only sound, of snapping underbrush. Frank stayed where he was. I noticed that the Missouri boy was whispering to his brother, and then he suddenly called out, "Whooie! Lazarus!" Jeremiah"s ears swiveled forward inquisitively. Then the boy said, "That"s Lazarus! I know that gray horse!" I came up to our men and reined Jeremiah in. I tried to act as if I had heard nothing.
The old man said, "Henry White had some horses stolen a month ago, that"s true, and one was a gray horse with a white tail." They peered at Jeremiah suspiciously, and I made up my mind to back away if they tried to come any closer. Jeremiah betrayed no knowledge of them, but then he wasn"t a dog, and they weren"t claiming to be his owners, either. The old man called, "Son, you better get down from there and bring that horse over here so we can have a better look at him!"
It took me a moment to realize that they were talking to me. Thomas now spoke up and said, "I don"t believe that our two parties are on such terms as would permit my friend here"-he slightly emphasized the word "friend," and I felt that thing we shared, an enjoyment of oddities, pa.s.s between us-"to believe that you really do recognize this animal, especially since he has no particular distinguishing marks. Let"s allow that issue to rest for now."
"Those are fine words for a horse thief, is what I think," said the old man.
"Lazarus!" shouted the boy again. Once again, Jeremiah"s ears swiveled toward the sound. But Jeremiah was a remarkably alert horse in every way. His ears always swiveled toward interesting sounds.
"Now," said the old man, "you got nine men here and a boy lying in wait back there." He gestured toward Frank. Thomas glanced in that direction and rolled his eyes heavenward. "We got the five of us. You may drive us off if you dare, but we an"t gonna go quick and we an"t gonna go easy."
"We"d prefer to buy you out," said Mr. Bush, evenly. In answer, the boy who had shouted stooped down suddenly and picked up a stone, which he flung at Mr. Bush, knocking off his hat. With all the quick movements of our men in response to this, our horses jumped and snorted. Thomas bent down and picked up Mr. Bush"s hat and handed it to him. I was afraid of what might happen, but then Mr. James said in a loud, compelling voice, "We"ll be back," and he turned and rode off. Momentarily, we all followed him. Reaching Frank, I pulled him up behind me, then followed the others. When we came to the spot where we were to turn off to our claim, Thomas slipped down from the Smithsons" mule and I slipped off Jeremiah. We walked along at his head, and Frank sat on his back. There was so much now to be said that I kept my mouth shut and waited to see what Thomas would want to say.
We struck out over the prairie gra.s.ses, following a pale track. The gra.s.s, like the leaves, was green but dry, and it rustled with our steps. Buzzards and hawks floated in the blue sky above us. Thomas was wearing a bleached muslin shirt, and it glowed in the early-afternoon sunlight. He said nothing. Behind us, Frank called out, "There"re some prairie chickens over there-you want me to shoot "em?" He didn"t care much; when we didn"t answer, he started to whistle. My trousers, or rather, Thomas"s trousers that I was wearing, were easier to ride in than to walk in, but I found myself getting used to them. They didn"t need to be held up, and they didn"t snag on upthrusting weeds and burrs.
The Missourians had seemed obdurate and threatening. I didn"t see how we could either accommodate them in our midst or remove them. Their evident sentiment that they were tougher and manlier than we were seemed true-our men made a picture of frustration and ineffectuality. The southerners" bragging and posing had had an effect on me, and it looked to me as though it had had an effect on the men, too. I wondered why they didn"t simply shoot us. Clearly they were tempted. Of course, we had our Sharps rifles, designed for something other than killing game. It was as if a veil hung between the two parties that prevented calculated attack. Just then, the veil seemed to me wispy and easily rent, as if shooting would be as easy as not shooting, but really, I didn"t know what the veil was made of or what pa.s.sions it could resist.
Thomas said, "I don"t want to have to shoot them." His voice was calm.
"I don"t want them to have to shoot us."
"It"s better all around if there is no shooting at all."
"Our men look so ... helpless!"
"Do they?"
"Yes. I-"
"Then you needn"t watch, my dear, because spectators always increase the possibility that someone will shoot just to raise himself in the spectators" estimation. I a.s.sure you that those men took one look at our weapons and revised any notions they might have had about our helplessness." He smiled. "Even before reinforcements arrived."
Frank called out, "It was my idea, Tom Newton. I got her to wear them clothes and take me over there. Next time, I"ll just go along with you."
"Are you angry that we came?"
"Well, now, I don"t know. Your coming into danger, our coming into danger, Frank"s coming into danger-the causes of all this are so compounded together that I don"t khow who to blame and I don"t know who should be restricted or why. I don"t want my wife to get hurt, but I think your firsthand knowledge of the course of events will benefit us in the end. And you shoot better than I."
"No doubt Frank shoots better than the both of us, but that doesn"t mean we want to train him as a murderer."
Thomas lowered his voice and leaned his head toward me. "He should go back."
Frank sang out, "I an"t going back. I might go on to California."
We walked on in silence, until Thomas said, "We have to discuss the Jeremiah problem."
"I bought him in good faith! I won"t give him up to them just on their say-so!"
"Nor would I, but we have to recognize that he might be a stolen horse."
"They were just saying that to get at us. How would they prove it?" My voice rose with challenge, as if he were trying to take the horse away from me right there.
"We"ll find out, I suppose."
Now we came into our own yard. All was quiet at our cabin. The plank door was closed and tied with a string, just as I had left it. Thomas and Frank put away the horse, while I went inside and changed into my own clothes. On the whole, I was not pleased with my adventure. I felt as Pandora must have: there was an undeniable thrill to opening the box-the thrill of action, perhaps, which was much opposed to the customary routines of a woman"s life-but the consequent evil was plentifully mixed with chagrin. I was not sure there would be any benefit to my knowing the course of events firsthand, especially if the course of events took an ugly turn.
It was midafternoon; the episode at the cabin had taken surprisingly little time. Thomas, Frank, and I settled back to what we had been doing in the morning, which was splitting supports for a lean-to room for Frank off the end of the cabin. In the evening, after our supper, I sat beside the stove sewing a bed tick for him, while Thomas read aloud an essay or two by Mr. Emerson. Frank, apparently, did not find this to his liking, as he fell asleep in our bed nearly as soon as Thomas began to read. After a while, the candle Thomas was reading by got too low to burn steadily and began to flicker in its holder, but when I opened the candle box for another, he said, "We"ll save that for another night." He moved Frank to some quilts on the floor and wrapped him against the vermin. I went out to check on Jeremiah and saw that his saddle was hanging over the fence, and the bridle, too. When I came back inside, Thomas was cleaning his Sharps carbine in the unsteady light of the piece of candle, and he still had his boots on. I sat down across from him. He had grown more handsome to me, but no less enigmatic. He consistently showed a pleasant strength of character and mildness of temper that won me and intrigued me at the same time. Something, perhaps the presence of his friends or settling onto our claim, had driven off whatever evidence I had once seen of fear or weakness. He seemed to draw strength from his very capacity for amus.e.m.e.nt. On the other hand, he was hardly one of those handy New Englanders you heard so much about, who could build a schoolhouse with one hand and a ship with the other, while running a loom with his foot. Our cabin was full of the deformed results of our attempts to do for ourselves. Were we to prove better farmers than house builders, my first plan was to procure more manufactured goods. And there were any number of things I could do better than he could, starting with riding a horse and shooting a turkey and running right through splitting firewood and building a fire. Come spring, I suspected, I would be doing my share and more of the plowing, which was, indeed, more to my taste than nursing, making ball fringe, or tatting. I knew he had a skill that I didn"t-New England sailors often knew how to knit, and Thomas did have a garment in his boxes that he had knitted for himself. I wondered if all the other men in our party were as interesting to their wives as Thomas was to me. For the most part, it didn"t seem so, though at our Sunday service I had discovered all the Smithsons to be possessed of lovely voices, many skills on the instruments they had brought along with them to K.T. (in preference to pots and pans), and a deep knowledge of songs, both religious and secular. I pondered Thomas.
He said, "Would you care to go along tonight?"
This surprised me. "Do you wish me to?"
"Remember the Misses Tonkin? They said never to restrict you or tell you what to do."
"I think they were talking about finances, not violence."
"I don"t know that I"m talking about violence."
But I knew that he was. Having lived all his life among New Englanders, he thought that the talking could go on forever and arrive finally at reason. Having lived all my life along the river, I knew the more likely outcome. It scared me, and I shook my head. A bit later, he got up, took his hat and jacket and gun, and went out the door. Shortly after that, I heard Jeremiah trot away.
Now, of course, there was no sleeping. I didn"t bother to change into my nightdress but merely rolled up in my favorite quilt and lay down on the bed. Over the weeks, I had c.h.i.n.ked the cabin, not well, but well enough. The chill air crept in, rattling the newspapers pasted to the logs, but the pale light of the moon and stars was excluded; the inside of the cabin was as dark as a cistern. Already our peace of a few weeks before, when the weather was warm and the moon shone upon us through our sail, seemed long past and much to be yearned for. I feared for my husband. His quiet resolve could easily, I thought, press him toward a fight. On this slavery question, he didn"t know or understand how to take a realistic position. Southerners were well known to argue and bl.u.s.ter about slavery, but they would fight to the death about one thing only, and that was what they called honor and what my sister Miriam had called p.r.i.c.kly pride. They didn"t like to be injured, but they hated to be insulted. And you couldn"t always guess in advance which was which-partly that depended on the level of whiskey intake that had been achieved. I remembered an incident from long before, sometime when I was a child. I was at Horace"s store with my mother. It was deep winter, and Horace was putting on his boots to go out into the snow, when a man pushed through the door, his pistols drawn, shouting, "Horace Silk, you will cheat me no more! Those mules I sold you for a hundred dollars you turned around and sold to Jed Bindle for two fifty, and you an"t given me none of the profits!"
Horace took a moment to stamp his feet into his boots and then shouted, "Kite, you are lying to blacken my reputation in front of my family!" And then Kite leveled the pistols at him and said, "I wasn"t going to shoot you before, Horace, I just wanted my share of the profits, but now you have insulted my honor, and if I don"t shoot you, then I will never speak to you again!" He was serious, too, but then Horace"s father, Jonas, interposed and explained to the man Kite the role of the middleman in every mercantile transaction, and my mother stepped forward and persuaded him to come farther into the store and get warm, knowing that he was less likely to shoot Horace right in front of her. We had always told this as a funny story, but now it seemed only frightening.
A northerner, insensitive in some ways and full of self-righteousness, could gravely offend a southerner in a second. The northerner would be giving his general opinion, more than likely unasked for, and all unknowingly challenging the southerner"s every deeply held belief, not to mention, with sundry looks and expressions, suggesting that the southerner was possessed of numerous flaws of character and person. The southerner was bound to see offense in every suggestion, insult in every difference of opinion, and to act upon his stung pride. Better a man were dead than that he thought ill of you. The northerner, the Yankee, didn"t seem to care about differences of opinion. He had the blithe and unsociable conviction, which poured out with every utterance, that he was so completely in the right that what other men thought didn"t bother him. I thought these Missourians, or Louisianans, whatever they were, would get fed up at last and shoot everyone of our party, and then- And then they would come over to this cabin, and they would see what we had plastered on our walls, and they would burn it to the ground. And if my husband hadn"t been shot but was just their prisoner, they would shoot him for treason to the Territory of Kansas, under the new laws, and possibly me, too (I didn"t know how the laws applied to women). And perhaps Frank would get himself in trouble, though it was obvious that he was only a boy, but what did they care about that?
I began to shiver in the chill night air, convinced I was already a widow. Below me, on the floor, Frank stirred. I shivered harder and pondered the thought of my burying my husband in Kansas. It was unbearable....
Then I heard Jeremiah trot into the yard again. Thomas dismounted. The horse trotted into his pen. A few minutes later, the door opened and closed, and I knew Thomas was in the room.
Suddenly ashamed of my fears, I tried to make my voice sound sleepy. "Are you-"
"We threw them into the river," whispered Thomas. "We tied them to a couple of logs and sent them down the river."
"All five of them?"
"There were only two, the old man and one of the sons. The others had gone for reinforcements, because they didn"t think we"d come back till tomorrow. Daniel James thought that would happen. That"s why we went back tonight."
"Where are they now?"
"James and Holmes fished them out of the river about a mile down. They"re keeping them in the woods for the rest of the night, then marching them back to Missouri in the morning. Bisket and I are to stay here and watch out if anyone else comes. Jenkins decided to sell the hay house and his town lots and move out here for the winter, just to be on the scene." I couldn"t help shivering inside my quilt. It was a cold night. Thomas, when he came into the cabin and subsequently got into our bed, carried an extra dimension of cold with him, and I didn"t envy the men who"d gone into the river. But I was elated to see my husband and to know that our side had suffered no losses. And the Missourians with their slave woman had been run off. Some festering that had promised to disturb us was now averted. Thomas, himself elated and chilled with his adventure, matched my gladness at his return with his own.
CHAPTER 12.
I Am Swept Up by Events [image]A third method, is, for a woman deliberately to calculate on having her best-arranged plans interfered with, very often; and to be in such a state of preparation, that the evil will not come unawares.-p. 151 IN THE FEW DAY AFTER the Missourians were driven off, there was plenty of talk about what should be done with their property. What had been done with one item of it was a mystery, though- no one knew what had become of the bondwoman who"d run out of the cabin when the Smithson boy fired through the window. Thomas said that she had not been in evidence; though he had privately planned as they rode through the darkness to offer her her freedom, events had driven the thought out of his mind, and he"d not sought after her in the night. Each of the men had a theory-either she"d already been taken back to Missouri before they arrived, or she sensed what was in the wind after they came, and she went off on her own account, or she"d hidden out in the woods and was possibly still there. Whether they should have liberated her had they found her was a matter of rather hot debate-more tempers flared over this question than over any other element of the encounter. Thomas, Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Smithson were all for giving her her freedom and doing so openly-"challenging Satan," said Mr. Holmes; "acting according to principle," said Thomas; "showing the bunch of them," said Mr. Smithson. Mr. Bisket came down much on the other side and got quite exercised over it, saying, "Freeing that woman would be adding in something extra to the whole business! We an"t disputing them having a slave woman right this minute. Right this minute we"re disputing their claim. My view is, you follow out your disputes one at a time-"
Mr. Smithson exclaimed, "You sound just like a lawyer, Bisket, drumming up business. If you got "em on the run, then you make "em run as fast as they can. You don"t make "em trot for one thing and run for the other!"
Everyone laughed. Mr. Bisket got red in the face. "They can"t live with us if they think we"re going to steal their slaves every time they turn their backs."
"They can"t live with us," said Mr. Holmes. "We can"t live with them. We can"t look upon them holding bondmen without going blind to the will of the Lord, nor can we live beside them undirtied by their filth. We have our souls to think of as well as theirs and the souls of their slaves."
"There an"t one person in ten here in K.T.," said Mr. Bisket, "who thinks like you do, Holmes, and eight of the nine who don"t would like to kill you for that sort of talk. I think if we keep our mouths shut, those slaves"ll disappear from here soon enough. Can"t do anything with them in K.T. They don"t grow cotton here."
"But," said Thomas, "they grow hemp right over in Missouri, and tobacco, too. Slaves do that work."
Mr. Bush said, "I give way to no man in my aversion to slavery and the slave power. Eli Thayer is a personal friend of mine, and I feel no less strongly than he does about it. But even so, I hesitate to free a bondman I"ve never met from an owner I don"t know, and send him or her off to a life she may not understand or want. Do we come upon a woman in the night, wrench her from sleep, tell her she"s free, and send her packing? Where does she go? Who are her friends? What funds does she have? I ask myself if I"m prepared to guarantee her for a week or two, to send her to friends. If I"m not, then I"d better not meddle."
I said, "You might have asked the woman what she wanted to do."
All the men turned and looked at me. This remark put a stop to the conversation. All in all, I thought, it was no doubt better that the woman had been gone. Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew about what to do with its sour fruit.
There was less discussion, let me say none, about what should be done with the Missourians" cabin. The Jenkinses moved into it within a few days and did just as we had, though with a degree more satisfaction-they papered over the log-and-mud walls with sheets of the treasonous Liberator. I was pleased to have Mrs. Jenkins and Susannah in the neighborhood, and they immediately became friends with Mrs. James, who was a sweet lady and, Susannah said, not at all like her husband. That the Jenkinses" new cabin was a considerable improvement over their old one seemed to render them extremely forgiving. Now there was a woman or two every half mile, or even closer. It made the country seem settled and gave our windy cabins a cozy feel.
I think we all thought we were settled now, that we had pa.s.sed through a few trials, done some unpleasant but necessary deeds, and established ourselves. Certainly, Thomas and Frank and I felt that way. In the course of our labors, there was much visiting back and forth, sharing tasks, and discussing every little thing.
Susannah, who now went four or five days between shaking, told me that she liked to come to our cabin above all, and tried to do so every day or two, always bringing along her own bit of tea and a few corncakes, and her own cup and spoon. "You know," she said, "I do like being out here with Mama and Papa, and the cabin is ever so much nicer than the hay house is, but I wonder how my husband is to find me out here. Mama and Papa discussed it the whole night before we came, standing outside the hay house and trying to keep me from hearing." It was true that their place was a little more out of the way than ours, and they had fewer pa.s.sing visitors.
I said, "The whole night?"
"Well, long enough for the subject to become tedious even to me. But they never disagree, you know. When they talk about something, first Papa says one thing, then Mama says another, then Papa says what Mama just said, and Mama says what Papa just said. In this case, Papa said that we couldn"t very well leave the cabin empty, and Mama said that a young, well-grown girl had to be in the way of traffic, not out on the prairie, and then they each said what the other said, and then Papa said, "Well, what about Mr. Bisket?" and Mama told him the story about Mr. Bisket."
"What is the story about Mr. Bisket?"
"Mr. Bisket courted me for two days some weeks ago."
"He did?"
"I suppose so, or maybe he thought so. He came to the hay house and sat beside me, and he asked if I would like to hear a song, and I said that I would, and so he sang "Camptown Races," and then he asked if I would like to hear another, and I said I would, and he sang one I didn"t know, and then some men came in and wanted to talk about Jim Lane, and I suppose that it wasn"t very nice talk, because Papa said they should take their talk elsewhere, and so they did, and Mr. Bisket went with them. But he came back the next day and he sang three more songs-one of them was "Camp town Races" again. But you know, I didn"t have a thing to say to him. I"ve just known Mr. Bisket for such a long time, since I was ten and he was fourteen, and I thought it very hard that I should come all this way and after all settle for Charles Bisket, when Mama says there must be four men for every woman in K.T. Mr. Bisket wasn"t considered very enterprising back in Ma.s.sachusetts. Not nearly so respectable as Mr. Newton."
Just then, Thomas and Frank came in for their own tea, and our conversation turned to other topics, namely the Jameses. Susannah had stopped there the day before and discovered that Mrs. James"s cow had disappeared. "And you know," she said, "she couldn"t go after it as she might have, because she is in such a condition, and she would have had to carry the boy, and even though he"s not very large, well, he is four, and she isn"t very large herself I told her she might have left the boy off with us, but of course she feels uncomfortable, and so they lost their little cow. She was utterly dejected, and nothing I could do would cheer her up."
"Cow ken git to Missouri from here," put in Frank, "if it keeps runnin"." This was true. I heard of two or three lost cows being found in Missouri, or so it was said. After Frank and Thomas went out, and Susannah and I were clearing up the cups, she said, "I didn"t want to say this in front of the others, but Mr. James was fit to be tied when he found out the cow was gone. It made me want to leave right there, but I didn"t dare look like I was running away. He has the devil of a temper."
"Did he abuse her in front of you?"
"Why, no, and she"s so pretty that you wonder how he ever could, but when he came in, the boy exclaimed, "Don"t tell Papa about our little cow, don"t tell him!" and ran and hid in the bed! And then Mrs. James did tell, and he flew out of the house in a rage and didn"t come back while I was there, but she said to me in a low voice, "He would never hurt us. He has terrible pa.s.sions, but he would never hurt us. Don"t think that he would!" Well, after that I left."
I shook my head, not knowing what to say, then changed the subject. I was torn, for while I didn"t care to be seen as gossiping about my own husband, I knew that Susannah had known him longer than I had, perhaps considerably longer. I hazarded, "Well, if you"ve known Charles Bisket since you were ten, when did you meet Thomas?"
"Oh, well. Mr. Newton." She glanced out the open door, then looked into my face, then settled her hands on her hips. "He"s not an old friend of ours, like Mr. Bisket. Papa and old Mr. Bisket were schoolboys together, you know. But old Mr. Newton has tremendous means. He makes sails for all the ships, and his father did it before him. They are just the sort of people who would consider someone like Mr. Newton a disappointment to them."
"They do?"
"Well, I shouldn"t speak so openly to his own wife, but they are deathly proud, those Newtons. And the brothers are worse than the father, Mama says, but I don"t know about that. The oldest brother is as old as Papa, and the father has run that factory since 1800, if that"s possible." She gave me a look, half sheepish and half impish. "Mrs. Bush said, before we left Ma.s.sachusetts, "Thomas Newton is only going with us because he knows his papa will never pa.s.s on." Though they are great abolitionists, too. Old Mr. Newton is very tall, you know. A head taller than your Mr. Newton."
And Thomas was a bit taller than I, so his father was possibly the tallest man I had ever heard of. I said, "A head taller?"
"At least. He"s well known for it. Mama always said it was a blessing they had no sisters-" But then she looked at me and blushed.
I said, "Thomas hardly ever speaks of his relations. It makes me wonder if there"s ill feeling."
"I don"t think so. You could ask Mama. But everyone is always wondering what Mr. Newton thinks. It"s quite a feature of our group. They chose him to bring over those rifles because they thought he was the least likely to divulge the information. Or any information of any kind."
We couldn"t gossip away the afternoon, because Susannah had duties at home. I saw, though, that there was much to be learned, and I was eager to learn it.
Thomas, Frank, and I made pleasant companions, and I didn"t at all mind Frank"s presence-for you had to call it that, even though the boy was perennially off doing something. Once he and Thomas had built him a lean-to on the side of the cabin and a little bed to put in it, we weren"t always sure where he was. He thought nothing of running off to Lawrence, for example. Literally running. Thomas and I could walk to Lawrence, if the ground was hard, in half a morning. On Jeremiah it was an easy hour. Some days, Frank would go off to Lawrence before breakfast and come back before supper, his pockets full of bits of things he had found and was keeping to trade, or of pennies and dimes he had gotten through his trades. One night, he said, "I an"t never seen such a place for folks dropping stuff."
"Haven"t ever seen," said Thomas.
"I"ll be goin" along, an"t n.o.body around anywhere, and here I see a saucer buried in the gra.s.s. I picked one up yesterday, all painted with violets and all, gold rim, and it said "Hampton" on the bottom. Not a single chip, but no cup, neither. And this morning I got me a perfectly good boot, almost new, hardly even broken in yet. Just sittin" there. Folks in town is just as bad."
"Are just as bad," I said.
"You just got to keep your eyes on the ground. I got me a dollar between today and yesterday. Mr. Stearns give me two bits for that boot, "cause he said, "Someday a one-legged fella"s gonna walk into this store looking for a boot, and if it"s the left leg he"s lost, well, then, I"ll fix him right up." "
But for Thomas and me, Lawrence seemed a long way off. We didn"t leave the claim twice in a week, except to go to a neighbor cabin. And it wasn"t only that our work at home filled our days; it was also that we were disinclined to be swept up in the talk and upsets of town. It was easier to deepen our well with a shovel and a bucket and a rope and a pulley, wet and shivering, than it was to know what to think with every new bit about the depredations of the Missourians. Frankly, we considered the Missourians less important to our future well-being than the well. Now that our little area was more thickly settled by our friends, I had to go farther afield for game, and I had to bring more home, too, because I knew that what we weren"t sharing now (and we were sharing some) we would be sharing later. It was a source of wonder to the New Englanders that Frank and I were such successful meat gatherers, and they put this down to our western nature. Mrs. Holmes, for example, asked me if Quincy was in Kentucky, and when I said no, it was in Illinois, she guessed that such places were all the same in the end, weren"t they, and did we have animal skins stretched over the outer walls of our house in Quincy, and did my brother-in-law the farmer have to carry his rifle into the fields with him to frighten off the red Indians? But she thanked me anyway for the meat and told me I would be repaid in heaven, as if she had a personal account there. Well, I didn"t like her, I admit it.
Every night, Thomas read us something from his store of books. Before Frank, we had been having Mr. Emerson every night, but Frank yawned and sighed and fidgeted so much under Mr. Emerson that Thomas had to try something else. It wasn"t much better with Mr. Th.o.r.eau, nor even with Mr. Lowell, but when we got onto Mrs. Stowe, Frank sat quietly with his chin in his hand. I did, too. Those were our best evenings, and even though candles were an expense, we would have given up tea or maybe even corncakes before giving up candles.
Some nights, we visited others, and the talk wasn"t always of politics and the hardships of our present lives. Now that we were settled, it seemed, for a while, as if we might talk about home a bit. K.T. may have exerted a leveling influence on my friends, but back in Ma.s.sachusetts, it appeared, they hailed from many different strata of society and knew each other mostly because of the Emigrant Aid Company and their common beliefs in the abolition of the inst.i.tution of slavery. Mr. Bush, who knew Mr. Thayer and was on an equal footing with many of the rest of them back in the east, had sold his prosperous ship-outfitting business to come to K.T. "You know," he claimed, "I was tired of it. It was all bookkeeping and close work and noting this and writing that, and I barely got off my seat of a morning to look out at the water. My bones were aching for something to do."
I don"t think Mrs. Bush"s bones had felt the same ache, but Mr. Thayer himself worked on her, for she was the more fiery of the two on the subject of Negro bondage. "After living in comfort all my life," she told me, "it seemed the least I could do. And it is. When I think of all the years that Isaac toiled in the wilderness, I do not consider Lawrence, K.T., a hardship."
Mr. Jenkins, on the other hand, was one of those being aided by the company, as his farm had failed some years before and he had tried his hand at two or three enterprises, such as buying and selling cattle, picking apples, and teaching school, before coming to K.T Mr. Holmes had just begun his life as a preacher, and as there were few enough churches to be had in New England, there being an abundance of preachers there, Mrs. Holmes"s father, himself a preacher, had financed their journey to K.T, with some help from his members and some help from Mr. Thayer, who liked there to be one minister of good New England stock for every twenty emigrant families (or so Mrs. Holmes said, but I never heard anyone else say this of Mr. Thayer, who was the subject of a good deal of talk).
The Smithsons had printed books and intended to get into the book-printing trade once again, but upon arrival in K.T., they had lost the money they"d saved for presses and type through being cheated by a gambler. In a year, they thought, they would have replaced their funds through trading town lots or something of the sort, and the older Mr. Smithson said, "Printing is a dangerous business out here, anyway, more so than I care for. My thought was a ladies" book, with receipts and lace patterns and a few stories. I don"t yet see a spot for that out here, but no doubt the time will come." They intended to while away the time farming or speculating. I thought their interests were peculiar, as there were no Smithson ladies, but Susannah said yes, it was true: Mr. Smithson had told them all the way out from Ma.s.sachusetts that there was a fortune to be made from reading ladies. He"d kept counting the ladies on every boat and in every town between there and here, alternately pleased and downcast, depending upon how many there were. He even had a stack of bills, which he now used to paper up the walls of his cabin, that advertised "The Western Ladies" Journal, A Monthly, Published in Lawrence, K.T, for the Entertainment and Edification of All." Another time, Mr. Smithson confided to me that he was disappointed in the Missouri ladies he had seen, many of them barefoot and clearly ignorant. He said, "Lawrence is all very well, but Missouri isn"t Lawrence, and Lawrence is hardly a pockmark on the face of the prairie. I didn"t think it would be that way, from the bills we saw." He was thinking, of course, of his project, but I subsequently found this observation appropriate to every feature of our situation. And once, when Susannah was going on again about whom she might marry and when he might appear, I mentioned the Smithsons, as there were three of them. She stared at me as if I were out of my mind. Finally she said, "In the end, I do think it"s ill advised to know your affianced very well before the wedding." But it was hard to see what she was looking for in the men we saw outside of our group.
At any rate, we visited and gossiped among ourselves as if we would be friends for the rest of our lives. That was K.T. all over. You had to be acting every day as if your life would go on from that moment, full tilt, because if you held back, you would settle on nothing-make no claim, dig no well, have no friends. All the same, you could embrace something with all your might and have it turn to empty air only so many times. But I wasn"t thinking about that then.