The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  "Frank Brereton! We might very well have got through without you giving those Ruffians Mrs. Lacey’s earbobs!"

  "Might of, but then she would of been awfully disappointed, I think."

  Back at the Woods’ cabin, Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Brown had themselves just returned. They’d been more successful than we had, having gotten both powder and lead, and they had also had more adventures evading the enemy. They made quite a picture, for they had torn the wadding out of their dresses and petticoats and inserted the powder and lead. They had gone out thin and come back fat, and the Missourians had smiled, tipped their hats at the ladies, and waved them on! We spent the whole evening making more cartridges, or rather, the women did. Frank was much happier prowling around the town. That night, Thomas and I slept downstairs at the Free State Hotel. In spite of the death of Barbour, whom everyone considered to be the unarmed victim of the Missouri Ruffians, and who later was buried with a soldier’s funeral, the "war" seemed to wind inexorably down. Our readiness to defend ourselves was not met by equivalent eagerness on the other side to attack us, and so when Governor Shannon served as peacemaker, the proslave faction was happy enough to go home. Of course, there was also a blizzard, and they were living out in tents. Mrs. Bush said that the real reason the Missourians went home was that they ran out of whiskey and it grew too cold to play cards. It was true that Mr. Bisket, who had been captured and held by the Missourians after leaving Frank and me on the road, was required each of his five nights as a prisoner to help hold up a blanket against the wind so that his captors could play euchre beside the fire.

  CHAPTER 13

  I Discover Something About Advertising

  Every mistress of a family should see, not only that all sleeping-rooms in her house can be well ventilated at night, but that they actually are so. Where there is no open fireplace to admit the pure air from the exterior, a door should be left open into an entry, or room where fresh air is admitted; or else a small opening should be made in a window, taking care not to allow a draught of air to cross the bed. The debility of childhood, the lassitude of domestics, and the ill-health of families, are often caused by neglecting to provide a supply of pure air. — p. 311

  AFTER THE WAKARUSA WAR (as it came to be known) was over, Thomas and I were once again faced with the question of where to live and what to do. Our joy at the war’s end was soon driven out by what ended it — the snow and the cold. Each night seemed colder, and in fact, each night was colder. The stove at the hay house soon failed to warm that interior at all, and a mug of water placed next to it froze as quickly as though it were standing out of doors. We all retired to our quilts early in the evening, shortly after sunset, and it was the rankest cruelty to be called out of them for any reason. As the nights progressed, however, it quickly became apparent that the largest stack of quilts wasn’t insulation enough for sleeping on the ground, outdoors or in, and Thomas and I began looking around for another place to stay. We discussed returning to our claim, but as the snow continued to fall, that got farther and farther away. Soon there was no question of such a thing; it was cold in Lawrence, but there was plenty of food to be had: not only pork and beef and venison, prairie chicken, turkey, rabbits, and squirrels, but apples of two or three different varieties, both green and red, pumpkins, other squashes, and sweet potatoes. Mr. Stearns had stacks of sealed cans of oysters from far away, and there was, of course, corn flour and meal, wheat flour, lard, salt, sugar, honey, and maple sugar, almost everything, for a price, except eggs, which froze in the cold, and butter. But in Lawrence we really didn’t need eggs—the water was so full of lime that it leavened any cakes and made them light and delicious.

  We moved for a time into the Free State Hotel, right beside the Woods’ cabin, where we ladies had made cartridges. The Free State Hotel was famous, and meant to be so. Not only did it stand four stories of stone, but it had round, fortress-like windows in the fourth story, which the Missourians viewed as designed for defense, if not, indeed, for aggression. Governor Robinson, General Lane, and the others had made the Free State Hotel their headquarters during the "war." It was a large, imposing building, and the Missourians considered it just another way that the people of Lawrence were attempting to lord it over everyone else. In spite of its importance, though, and the money that had been spent on its building, winter had obstructed the completion of its interior—one reached all four stories by way of a staircase made of rickety boards, through which you could see all the way to the cellar, if you dared to look down. I did not, but climbed as close to the wall as I could, holding on to the carved banister that had been installed before the stairs and planning how I would catch myself if the steps gave way. But they never did so, even under the burden of the sickly and feverish men and women who were carried up and down on pallets.

  While we were installed at the hotel, the constitution that had been written at the Topeka convention came up for a vote. What with the "war" and the weather, I don’t suppose that as many people in K.T. had a chance to read it as the Free Staters had hoped, but the voting in Lawrence was heavy, and all our friends cast their ballots. Elsewhere, the Missourians got up to their usual tricks. One man told us, and he a reporter for some eastern newspaper, that at Leavenworth he had witnessed the Missourians coming in boatloads to our Kansas election. Kansas elections had been overrun by Missourians every time before, and so, I suppose, this was what the elections officials expected, but the Missourians had other ideas: once enough of them got there, they stole the ballot box! One man tried to hide the box under a table and then run away; he was caught outside the store where they were voting and beaten with clubs! A Missourian with an ax raised it over his head to strike, and only was prevented by being unable to get in a clear blow! After that, the Missourians got the ballot box and took it away, and the Free Staters, who weren’t as well armed as we are in Lawrence, didn’t dare to go after it. There was tremendous gloating on the part of the Missourians, especially as the evening progressed and they got deeper into whatever barrels of highly rectified whiskey they could find to warm themselves up. They also threatened, loudly and clearly, to destroy the presses and the office of the Free State paper there, the Register, but these threats apparently were met with promises of reprisals against the slave-power paper, called the Herald, the one that so savagely and so frequently called for the death of all abolitionists.

  It wasn’t much different in any river town, and in Lawrence we fumed, our hatred, and I might also say our fear, of the Missourians sharply renewed. But the weather and the season cooled us rather quickly. According to the election, Governor Robinson now became the governor, and after it, we all were careful to call him that.

  What drove us away from the hotel was the illness. There was fever everywhere, and as the weather got colder, more and more of the sick were brought to the only really sturdy building, which was the Free State Hotel. At least the thick stone walls, thicker by far than the thickness of an ax-hewn shake, kept the wind out. But there came to be feverish and delirious men and women in every room, and anyone who was healthy was obliged by charity to help care for them, especially in the nights, when the cold grew to be more than any man-made thing—be that trousers or shirts, socks or boots, quilt or cloak or shawl or hot drink or fire—could stave off. The more you craved to be huddling in your quilts with your head muffled by pillows, the more you were obliged, it seemed, to stir up fires, hunt for wood, boil some ice into water. After two weeks, Thomas and I were both hollow-eyed and exhausted, more or less resigned to succumbing to the fever ourselves, as most of the nurses did sooner or later.

  Just then, though, Mr. Bisket found us a place to stay, through himself getting suddenly married to a widow that he met at the beginning of the war, a few days before he was captured. Mrs. Bisket was not so tall as Mr. Bisket but twice as big around, and Thomas and I thought he must have married her for the warmth: her cheeks were always red, and she never wore more than a light shawl over her shoulders in the coldest weather.
She and her first husband had brought a great carved rosewood bedstead all the way from Connecticut at huge expense, and a second bedstead as well, though a humbler one, of maple. She kept all her feather beds and quilts fluffed up and inviting. Her name was Louisa. Her property amounted to a brick storefront with two rooms above on Massachusetts Street, two blocks down from the Free State Hotel. Louisa had a stove in each room and checkered oilcloths on the floors. She showed us around with pride. "I said to my first husband, Mr. Wheelwright—isn’t it funny that Mr. Wheelwright was a wheelwright?—that I would not be traveling to Kansas Territory as a wretch, but as a woman of property. We shipped our goods from Boston to New Orleans, then up the river. We brought three wagons from Independence. We sold the extra two and the mules, at a tidy profit, I must say." She smiled beatifically, as so many New Englanders did when proclaiming similar sentiments. Thomas and I moved in that same day. Since Mr. Bisket now had two wagons, three mules, and a horse, as well as a ready-made home to live in and a ready-made inclination toward prowling around and contriving this and that, he set himself up in a sort of business. Hauling was what he called it, but hauling was only its excuse. He might haul a barrel of apples and, say, a load of wooden shakes to a man on Pinckney Street, and stay there awhile to help nail up some shakes, then be offered the job of clearing some brush or chopping some wood or, as December progressed, clearing snow. Sometimes both wagons would be required, and on those occasions, Thomas would drive the second. So it was that we supplemented our diminishing funds after we moved into Lawrence. And then Thomas’s father sent him a quantity of sailcloth, and this we sold by the piece from the old wheelwright shop below. Needless to say, this life suited my nephew Frank right down to the ground; he slept in the shop below and came and went as he pleased.

  We and our friends weren’t the only ones to come in from the prairie. Every house had two or more families living there, and each of the hotels had half a dozen strangers living cheek by jowl in each room. The streets were full of Delawares, too, and Indians of other tribes, all of whom declared that even the oldest of their number hadn’t seen such cold in their lifetimes.

  It had to be as cold in Missouri, which of course was only a few dozen miles distant, but it seemed to many of us that the cold was an especial mockery of our ambitions, for of course, many had come on the promise of the sunny, warm, dry prairie winter. Since only September I, Thomas Newton and I had found blistering heat, relentless winds, cracking tempests, cold wet misery, and cold frozen misery. And during the month of October, we’d seen fires everywhere, snaking over the prairie and dimming the blue sky with smoke. The fires, like much of the weather, had a grand and powerful beauty of their own, if you could lift your mind out of fear and discomfort long enough to appreciate it, but anyone who had hoped that Kansas Territory would gently embrace men and their civilization was quickly and repeatedly disabused of these notions. In Lawrence, there was considerable talk of California, more as the winter deepened. The New England women—Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Jenkins, Mrs. Lacey, Mrs. Bisket—began to talk more frequently of the neat villages and towns that they’d left behind. These Yankees weren’t the impoverished emigrants that most westerners were or derived from. They had emigrated on principle rather than out of need, and many had left houses and farms and thriving businesses behind, though, as Mrs. Bush reminded us, and perhaps herself, "Prospering in New England takes plenty of contrivance, too. I won’t hide from you that I was looking for things to be a bit easier here than there."

  I didn’t say what I had been looking for in K.T.—something I myself didn’t know, something alien and unexpected, perhaps. If that had been it, then I had certainly found it.

  On the day before Christmas, it was said by those who knew that it was seventeen degrees below zero. On Christmas morning, it was thirty below. I reckoned that we were colder by fifty or more degrees than we’d been on our last days on our claim, when we’d felt ourselves so unbearably cold. But cold as it was, the people of Lawrence, and we with them, kept up the flow of commercial and political activity. It went the same as with everything else: The first time your fingers or nose or toes got a touch of the frostbite, you were shocked and terrified. The fourth time, or the fifth, you were hardly impressed at all.

  Louisa Bisket, ensconced in our stone building, kept the stoves burning hot with big chunks of black walnut that Mr. Bisket hauled in from the banks of the Kaw, as behooved a woman of property. She was a good cook, too, especially at concocting soups and stews. Her appetite for conversation was a grand one, and she couldn’t hear enough, or say enough, about Mr. Bisket.

  "I love the way he talks," she said. "He’s delightfully expressive. Now, Thomas is a quiet sort—he barely says a word, though he reads beautifully and has such a deep, powerful voice, but Mr. Bisket! Well, he has a way with words, and a flow of talk! When I first met Mr. Bisket, well, my head turned right around. I knew..." She lowered her voice. "Everyone is quite aware that it’s been a mere six weeks since Mr. Wheelwright suffered his unfortunate accident, and I was heartsick, as you can imagine...."

  "I thought," I said, "that Mr. Wheelwright died of a fever...."

  "Well, he did, but you know, it came on as a result of ... well, he was trying to get our wagon across the river, and he fell in, and he couldn’t swim! He just about drowned then, and he never recovered. When he went down with a fever three days later, I said right then to myself that he wasn’t to live."

  She looked genuinely stricken. She was ironing tiny pleats into one of her petticoats, while I sewed a shirt of a sort for Frank, who had grown in K.T. by an inch or two. She had the ironing board pulled as close as possible to the stove, but even so, it was so cold that the iron chilled in the air as soon as she lifted it, and the work went slowly. My sewing was twice as awkward as usual, and every five stitches or so I nearly had to put my fingers right on the stove to thaw them.

  "But I must say, though it sounds hard, that it’s for the best that Mr. Wheelwright and I had no children. Mr. Wheelwright was not sympathetic to imperfection. A very learned doctor in Massachusetts, who was familiar with all the latest systems, said that it was clear to him that this daily working with circles, this daily seeking after what you might call rolling perfection, well, it made the man a bit inflexible." She lowered her voice. "I made myself clear to Mr. Wheelwright. I was not going to be brought to compromising my own standards. I was an older bride, twenty-five, you know, and we, as a rule, are a stiff-necked bunch. And so Mr. Wheelwright and I had made our peace."

  "Mr. Bisket is younger than Mr. Wheelwright, then?"

  "Oh, yes. Mr. Wheelwright was nearly sixty. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Mr. Bisket looks to me for guidance. That is not the ideal most people hold, the husband looking to the wife for guidance, but I can’t see why it shouldn’t work, can you?"

  I thought of my sisters and my mother, and their husbands. It had been a long time since any of them had looked to her spouse for guidance. I said, "I don’t feel I know much about marriage. I’ve only been married since the summer."

  "My dear," she said, "as far as I’m concerned, you can be married for twenty or thirty years in our day and not know a single thing about marriage if you don’t strive to learn. We live in fallen times. My learned doctor friend in Massachusetts felt that relations between men and women were certainly different in former times, to the benefit of all. Woman should not be subject to male whim, as we are, but should live in full exercise of her capacities. I, for example, was never ill another day in my life after I made my position clear to Mr. Wheelwright."

  It was more difficult to live as two couples than as one. Since there were two rooms, the question always arose of where we would sit in the evenings. Thomas and I didn’t feel comfortable sitting in our room, which we might have preferred once in a while, because to do so seemed unsociable. And yet Louisa and Charles, as I now began addressing Mr. Bisket, must have craved some time alone, too. If Louisa had been thrifty and warmed only their room, the
larger of the two, we wouldn’t have felt the waste of leaving our room empty while we sat with them, but she was prodigal in all things, one of her significant attractions in a world where frugality was the norm and the frugality of others always worthy of remark. It seemed as though to live smoothly, we needed one room or three. Two was just the wrong number. But I dared not complain, even to Thomas, or, indeed, to myself. Every day, I saw others who were sick and shivering.

  Louisa had strong opinions about slavery, too, which she did not hesitate to detail. She was more radical than her husband and more outspoken by nature than Thomas, so she often held the floor on the subject when we sat about the stove in the evenings. In her mind, and according to her learned doctor friend and many of the best people, she said, back in Boston, the lives of women and those of slaves were not so much different. When Charles and my husband smiled or squirmed at this (and glanced about at Louisa’s grand furnishings), she caught them up short. "Now," she said, "you are looking at my things and judging the general estate of woman by a very particular, and I might even say peculiar, gauge. A slave may wear beautiful clothes, read and write, and do his master’s business with perspicacity and care, and he may even have some appreciation of and gratitude for his lot in life, and he may certainly be attached to his master, but his circumstances do not therefore reflect or mitigate the circumstances of millions of others who live under the thumb of someone else, who have no freedom and no money and no say in their own fate. Just because one person has made a separate peace with one other person, the whole institution is not thereby redeemed.... How do you regard your corset, Lydia?"