by Jane Smiley
Mr. Holmes, fresh from Boston and the same age as myself, though with two children already, said the same conviction was rampant in New England. "Every man of sense says so. They made up their grand plan in ’48, when they couldn’t get Texas in as six states but only one."
Mr. Bush responded, "First there was the Fugitive Slave Act, then they repealed the Missouri Compromise. Then they stole the elections here, made up a government as quickly as they could, and recognized themselves. Here we are. Our sentiments are against the law now, and our officials are preparing to subdue us. We may wonder if Shambling Shannon ignored us out of enmity or shame or policy, but it all amounts to the same thing. It doesn’t take a genius to know what they’re doing."
"And there’re more of them than us in every office in Washington, D.C.," said Thomas.
There was a long pause while everyone considered this.
"We’ll have our own territorial government in a day or two," said Mr. Bisket, who planned to attend the convention in Topeka that was to take place three days later.
"Evil people must spread their evil everywhere," said Mrs. Holmes, who was considerably older than her husband. "Scripture is absolutely clear on that. That is the nature of Satan. I’ve seen it already, and I’ve been in the west only a few days. Evil is all around us."
Mr. Jenkins said, "All I say is that it’s a plan concocted by men. I won’t say what motivates them to do it. Pure greed, most likely."
Susannah Jenkins looked at me and lifted her eyebrows slightly. I knew she was thinking of Mr. Stringfellow’s remarks about the real purpose of slavery, but I ventured to say, "My brother-in-law Roland back in Quincy always says, ’No man’s going to roll over on his back and let eight hundred dollars’ worth of property walk off, or eight thousand, or eighty thousand.’ "
Mrs. Holmes glared at me. "They have trafficked in human souls!"
I said, "Well, he said it, only. He didn’t own any slaves himself." I defended him, but really, to these citizens of Lawrence, Roland Brereton looked, walked, and talked just like the Missourians. I knew he was a kindly man himself, covering generosity with bluster, but nevertheless, two things happened at one time—I defended him in front of the Holmeses, but I felt my affection for him shrink and harden.
Thomas cleared his throat. "My wife’s brother-in-law is a down-to-earth and practical man." He made this remark without giving away his own sentiments. At least to me. Mrs. Holmes sniffed.
I felt that the Holmeses brought tension into what had previously been a congenial and welcoming group. When Mrs. Holmes then turned away from me, I sensed that I had been found morally wanting. I felt torn between trying to please her with some conciliatory remark and trying to return the insult. Mrs. Jenkins served tea, and Mr. Jenkins returned to his favorite theme of the slave power’s step-by-step plan for making slavery legal everywhere in the United States, but our pleasant group felt chilled and uncongenial, and when Thomas and Mr. Bisket and I left in the morning, Jeremiah and Mr. Bisket’s horse together pulling Mr. Bisket’s wagon, I was happy enough to go.
Mr. Bisket was to spend the night with us on our new homestead, then ride his horse to Topeka, returning after the convention to work around his own claim, which was about half a mile from ours. As he was to be riding his horse, I didn’t understand how he would be able to take along the box of "harness" that I saw had been loaded into the wagon. When Thomas went with me to get water for the horses, I said, "We’re not leaving all of the ’harness’ in Lawrence, then? I thought they were divided up."
He shook his head, and I waited for more, but nothing was forthcoming. My husband’s intentions continued to be a mystery to me that I dared not plumb. I would have said then that I loved him as a wife should do, that he was kind to me, and that I felt no desire to be secretive myself. Indeed, whenever I felt that I was revealing something about myself to him that others, for example my sisters, might have disapproved of, it was clear to me that he did not disapprove at all but was, in fact, approving, pleased, and even amused. But he afforded me no answering self-revelation. In Illinois, this had seemed to be simply his nature—not secretive but laconic. In K.T, it seemed to be his design—not merely laconic but conspiratorial. I estimated that of the twelve Sharps rifles, we still had six with us.
CHAPTER 9
I Begin Life on Our Claim
Unless a parlor is in constant use, it is best to sweep it only once a week, and at other times use a whisk-broom and dust-pan. When a parlor with handsome furniture is to be swept, cover the sofas, centre table, piano, books, and mantelpiece, with old cottons, kept for the purpose. Remove the rugs, and shake them, and clean the jambs, hearth, and fire-furniture. Then sweep the room, moving every article. Dust the furniture, with a dust-brush and a piece of old silk. A painter’s brush should be kept, to remove dust from ledges and crevices. The dust-cloths should be often shaken and washed, or else they will soil the walls and furniture when they are used. Dust ornaments, and fine books, with feather brushes, kept for the purpose. —p. 306
WHAT NEEDS TO BE SAID about our cabin? Thomas and his friends were neither builders nor joiners. It was a western cabin, neither so primitive as some nor so comfortable as others, twelve by twelve, built of green logs, chinked with twigs and mud that it would be my job to maintain, no window glass yet, not much floor, but a good chimney, a large hearth, an actual door in the doorway. The roof was not quite finished—the ridgepoles were laid and about a third of the shakes were laid across it. Over the rest was, Thomas explained to me, a sail, or rather, a large piece of sailcloth from Thomas’s father’s factory in Massachusetts. As we approached from the south, we saw the sail roof shining like a white pearl on the sunlit prairie. And inside the cabin, the sun through the sail lit everything up.
Since we had left the Jenkinses’ house before dawn, we arrived at our claim well before noon. After unloading the wagon, Thomas and Mr. Bisket set about splitting shakes for the roof. Mr. Bisket said that we couldn’t count on this weather for long, as weather in Kansas was both changeable and dramatic. The sail would have to be replaced as soon as possible. One of my best memories of K.T. is of those few early days in our cabin, with the high prairie sun shining through the white sail roof as I arranged our belongings and set up our household.
The two men split shakes until deep twilight. The plan was that Thomas would climb upon the roof the next day and begin setting them between the ridgepoles and the weight poles that were presently holding the sailcloth in place. I spent the afternoon getting water from the river, which was low and sluggish but not actually green as yet, and fetching firewood from Mr. Jenkins’s woodlot, which was about a quarter mile distant. I used Mr. Bisket’s wagon for this, hitching up Jeremiah by himself and then walking alongside him so that he wouldn’t have to pull my weight in addition to the weight of the wagon and the firewood. I stopped frequently to sit down or to at least lean my head against Jeremiah’s neck... I was still weak from my fever, but of course, illness was the normal condition of many people in K.T, and those who had lived there four or six months were strong on the theme that weaklings may complain that they have no silver forks or silken coverlets, but real settlers "make do, do without, and do it anyway."
For supper, we ate a pile of cold corncakes that Mrs. Bush had sent along with us, some cold bacon, and apples and peaches from Stearns’s store that Mrs. Jenkins had purchased as a special gift for us. We also had tea, which was well boiled over the first fire I built in our new hearth, and the flavor of the tea nearly masked the flavor of the river water. We were too tired to talk, and as Mr. Bisket would be leaving before dawn, we lay down early on the blankets and quilts we had spread over the floor. Mr. Bisket offered to sleep outside in his wagon, as it was a clear night, but Thomas wouldn’t hear of such a thing. The two men fell asleep at once—I could hear them snoring. Above me, the white sail was blue with moonlight and rippling and snapping in the perennial Kansas breeze, as a sail should do. Our cabin smelled new, both woodsy and ea
rthy. There were plenty of chinks where the mud and twigs had fallen away, and the moonlight was visible between the logs, but on a mild night like this one, such a thing was more pleasant than not. Here I was, weak and possibly a little feverish from the day’s work, lying on a rough floor, my quilt wrapped tightly about me to fend off the mice and other vermin that would be abroad as soon as I fell asleep. And my enemies were out there, men who would like to "clear out" my cabin and its Massachusetts sail. Had my sisters known that this would be my destination when they sent me off, they might have had a second thought or two (maybe not). But as I fell asleep, I thought that my home was good enough for me.
We now entered upon a period of relative solitude, the first of our month-old marriage. I say relative, because there was no real solitude in K.T. So many families were coming into the territory, or leaving, or setting up house, or building, or doing business, or trying to make a small trade or a large one, or developing a claim, or challenging a claim, or, for that matter, making and breaking political alliances, that someone was at your door every day, or even spending the night. Even so, we ate many meals by ourselves and spent many nights alone. There was, of course, no planting to be done so late in the season, but once we had completed the roof, then Thomas commenced splitting rails for a fence and building Jeremiah a pen. The cow, if it came, would graze the prairie at will, and one of my jobs would be to pen her in with Jeremiah at night and let her out in the morning. After that, we began digging a well. In all of these endeavors, once I had more or less recovered from my fever, I worked as well as my husband. The other thing I did was to hunt game with one of the Sharps carbines from the box in the cabin. It was a breech loader—I had always used an old muzzle loader of Roland’s. I have to say that there was nothing in Miss Beecher about hunting game over the prairie. Nor had I ever shot anything myself except a jar or a large vegetable propped on the fence behind Roland Brereton’s cow pasture. And the Sharps carbine was rather different from my brother-in-law’s long hunting rifles. It was soon apparent to me, for example, that the rapid-loading feature of the rifle had no use in bird hunting—one shot had to kill the feathered creature, or it was gone. A slower or more numerous quarry was what the Sharps carbine was intended for. But I got a few turkeys. What I would do was scout about during the day, looking for the spots in the trees where the turkeys were roosting, then I would come back at night, if there was a little moonlight, and find the turkeys and shoot one. Prairie chickens, which were hard to shoot and easy to snare, formed the main meat in our diet. We soon learned from our neighbors to eat the legs and wings and dry the breasts for winter. I would say to my own credit that we ate meat almost every day, and to the credit of Miss Beecher that it was cooked in a palatable fashion most of the time. Of course there were corncakes and mush and corn pudding and corn on the cob and then more mush and corncakes and corn pudding and corn on the cob. But I also found walnuts in Mr. Jenkins’s woodlot, and hickory nuts and hazelnuts, along with some sour grapes and wild plums. A man on his way west paid for a night with us with two pumpkins. We dried the flesh and saved the seeds.
We chopped wood "just to be safe," though we were confident the winter ahead would be mild and sunny, with only enough snow for a picturesque effect.
We built ourselves a bed, strung with ropes. Once the roof was up and the sail came down, I used part of it to make a bed tick stuffed with prairie grass that I gathered. I stuffed pillows with the feathers of the birds I killed and plucked. I wouldn’t say that any of these efforts were easy for a woman of my limited skills, but throughout the end of September and into October, the one thing that we seemed to have a supply of was time. There were no errands, no engagements. Our tasks were right at hand, and we did them. Many times it seemed that just when I was perplexed about how to do something, a knock would come, and someone making his way over the prairie, or eager to talk or trade, would be standing there, and that person would know just what to do to spit a chicken or keep off the ants or preserve wild plums or paste newspapers over the walls. And of course, Miss Beecher’s book was always at my elbow. Thomas knew someone who knew a cousin of the Beechers. We marveled at the coincidence. I congratulated myself on my choice of a husband.
The only other male I had been alone with for any time at all in the course of my life was my cousin Frank, who was twelve years old and whom I had known since his babyhood. Once in a while, my father or one of my sisters’ husbands and I found ourselves in a room together for a few moments, but in general, in Quincy and, as far as I knew, everywhere else in the world, men and women avoided one another’s company except in groups. It was thus a novelty and a surprising pleasure to find myself alone with Thomas morning, noon, and night. I could not help covertly watching him, trying to discover his ways and attitudes. I drew a few conclusions. One was that he was not like most men I knew—he never put his feet up or tipped backwards in his chair. He neither wore his hat in the house nor threw it down when he came in, but always hung it neatly beside the door; nor did he smoke or chew tobacco and expectorate. He enjoyed reading. When I asked to look at his books, I saw volumes by Charles Dickens and William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope, as well as new books he’d brought from the east—a book by Mr. Thoreau, a book called Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There, Mrs. Stowe’s book (which many people owned and I had read parts of), and a poem by Mr. Longfellow called "The Song of Hiawatha." Some evenings, when no one was visiting, we would read parts of these and other books aloud. Thomas had a flat New England voice. I never read any of those authors later without hearing his voice in the telling of the story. Something I at first found disconcerting in Thomas was that he never offered an opinion until asked, and then his opinion flowed forth quickly and fluently, as if, I thought, he had been waiting for me to ask and that I had even been tardy in my asking. This sense that a life was being lived in my presence that was partly, or largely, unrevealed to me seemed eerie—the very hallmark of marriage. My sisters seemed to have learned to live with this other life by either ignoring it or dismissing it, which I attributed to their common lack of imagination. My aim was different—not a place to live with some children and a man you ignored as much as you could, but some sort of apprehension of him, out of which the other things would grow. That was what I called love. The mysteries of Thomas, who was awkward with tools but strong and persistent, who seemed never out of temper, who was less at ease with a rifle than I was and yet had brought along a large case of them, seemed like a treasure that it was my God-given task to explore. I watched for signs and clues. I wasn’t sure what my reward would be, but I was sure that it would be a delightful one.
Of course, we were eager to hear the news when Mr. Bisket returned from the Topeka convention, where the Free Staters were to frame a proper constitution that would stand as a model against the "abomination," as Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Jenkins had called it, of the proslave constitution. Much of interest had occurred, and one thing in particular that interested Thomas very much. I began to notice the name of a man called James, or Jim, Lane. Folks in Lawrence had talked about him, though not in the same way that they talked about Dr. Robinson, with respect and care. Mr. Lane later became a power in Kansas and, it was said, in the United States, for he was, or reported himself to be, a great friend of Mr. Lincoln. At any rate, people always talked about Jim Lane in the same way, from beginning to end: with some approval, some deploring, plenty of amazement, and a good deal of fascination. The fact was that he was born to be famous and was eager to assume his birthright. I had heard Mrs. Bush mention him in Lawrence. She didn’t like him and said that he had only gone Free State because he saw that that was where the future of Kansas was.
"But he saw that when few others did," said Mr. Jenkins. "Either it speaks well of him that he had the perspicacity, or it speaks well of us that we look like the coming party."
"Well," Mrs. Bush had said, "I won’t speak well of him no matter what."
This Mr. Lane figured in two interesting incident
s at the Topeka convention. One was that he offered to fight a duel with Mr. Lowry when Mr. Lowry told some gossip about Mr. Lane and Mrs. Lindsay that had been going all around town already, anyway. The other was that Mr. Lane pressed and finally won the inclusion of a Black Law in the convention, for the purpose of excluding all Negroes, free or slave, from Kansas.
Thomas was astonished, but Mr. Bisket was not. He said, "You know, Tom, most folks think that if you look at it one way, well, they bring all sorts of problems with them, even when they don’t mean to. The problems just flock along after them, like Missourians. And then, well, a lot of folks were making one pretty good argument, I thought, and that was that you can’t make a party of abolitionists. Most people in the United States, at least outside of Massachusetts and New York, they hate abolitionists. You see, they can’t call us abolitionists now, can they? Everybody was for it, for just that reason. Whatever we may think ourselves, we got to appeal to ones who don’t care all that much about slaves and slavery."
I thought this was a good, or at least a practial, argument myself I said, "And who’s to keep them out? There are all kinds of laws in Illinois that try to do this and that, amounting to the same thing. But no one enforces them. They just reassure people that they aren’t turning into New Englanders." I gave Thomas a sidelong glance and a smile. He smiled back at me, getting the joke in spite of himself.
"Anyway, Tom, when you hear Lane speak, he’ll draw you in just the same as everybody. Jenkins said he talked like the very devil, and it’s true, he does. Folks just stand there with their mouths hanging open."
Thomas didn’t smile at this, though, nor was he very friendly to Mr. Bisket for the rest of the evening, which meant, in consequence, that Mr. Bisket followed him around, trying to get him to laugh at his sketches of the men he met in Topeka, but finally he fell back on saying, "Well, you should have been there. I wanted you to go. There weren’t enough there who spoke out against this Black Law. You haven’t seen Jim Lane go like we did. When he goes, he goes like thunder." Finally, Mr. Bisket offered to sleep in his wagon, and Thomas, this time, didn’t stop him.