by Jane Smiley
And it was all the more frustrating that I didn’t know what I wanted, what I had wanted all the time we knew each other, before and after we were married. Whatever it was, no other women around me seemed to want it. Charles came and went, working and traveling many hours every day; Louisa was taken up with her own affairs. Mr. and Mrs. Bush were comfortable with one another, and she talked freely about him, but on the other hand, she seemed to have all the pepper in her, leaving him bland and agreeable. Even his political opinions were paler versions of hers. And he was more often than not out at their claim while she was in town. What about the others? The Holmeses seemed not to see each other at all, in their focus on Satan, the Lord, and the missing congregation. The Robinsons? Though they were now in Lecompton, where he had been incarcerated, what was their home now? A tent or a cabin, or some such thing? Everything about K.T. seemed to conspire to keep couples apart: him in a man’s world of riding here and there, going to meetings and conventions, taking up arms and drilling, working with other men at building or hauling or farming or clearing land or hunting; her in a woman’s world of knitting and sewing, talking and cooking, cleaning and mending, making cartridges. But what had I wanted instead, while Thomas was alive? I had never been able to express it, had hardly tried to express it in a way that he would understand, and now I had to get it on my own or forget it. But in spite of the prudence of what Louisa silently urged upon me, it seemed far too early to begin with another what I seemed hardly to have begun with Thomas.
Of course, there were plenty of mourners in K.T. It was a school for mourning, in some ways. In the manner that you do, I began noticing all the other bereft souls, as I hadn’t noticed them before my own bereavement. There was Mr. James, of course, who, it was said, had taken greatly to drink, but he differed from me in the fact that his grief was for his sons as well as his wife, and additionally compounded by remorse. He was an angry man, and most folks stayed away from him. There were plenty of others, whose wives or husbands or children had died of illness in the winter. I would see people on the street: There was a Mrs. Harrison; all three of her children had gone down with a fever and died, one right after another, and they’d had to wait three months to bury them, owing to the frozen ground. Mrs. Harrison was upright but languid and white, and seemed hardly able to lift her head. Here was Mrs. McChesney, whose husband had been hit by a falling tree and died with a corncake in his mouth. She was cool and businesslike, with plenty of energy (she had four daughters), but hard, they said. Some were languishing: a Mrs. Dalton hadn’t left her bed since March, when her husband’s horse fell on him one night and he died of exposure before the morning. Others had lost brothers, fathers, sisters; one man, hardly my age, had had a letter from neighbors in Indiana informing him that his parents and two sisters had died in a house fire three weeks after he came to K.T. to look for a claim for them. I came to see K.T. as a gathering of present and future survivors, differing only in when they came into survivorship.
As I was looking at others, so others were looking at me. Each bereaved person had a story; some of the stories were exquisitely strange and the subject of much fascinated and regretful gossip. My story, too, had a couple of features of interest—the suddenness, the ruthlessness of the southern-rights killers, my search for help, the briefness of our marriage. I knew I was the subject of gossip and speculation, that folks gauged my manner, that I was a martyr to the cause almost as much as Thomas was. But I had lost all interest in the cause for the time being. I didn’t even want to cast my laments in political terms. I tried to stay quiet and hide out a little bit from my new fame.
And then there was Frank. Without any effort on my part, my anger at Frank grew, for Frank, too, had become famous, even though no one had seen him since days before Thomas was killed—he didn’t come to Louisa’s, he didn’t come to the funeral, there was no evidence at the claim that he had been there. By July, though we hadn’t heard from him, we had heard of him. He was a guerrilla, and he and his friends were known to have raided at least three farms of southern-rights families and stolen a horse, four cows, two oxen, a ham, and a chair. It was thought that Roger Lacey was with them, too, as his mother and father hadn’t seen him, but as far as they knew, he didn’t have a horse or any money. Much about these boys and their activities was unknown. A rumor would spread through town, and then there would be nothing for a week. One rumor was that Frank had come to see me on the night of Thomas’s funeral and that I had charged him with revenge. He was rumored to be eighteen, sixteen, fourteen, and eight years old (by then he was thirteen, young enough). He was said to be riding Jeremiah, the horse he had raced over the snow. He was said to be himself from Kentucky and to have turned against his first friends because coming to K.T. taught him the iniquities of slavery. All these rumors enraged me, as they portrayed a boy so callous and careless of my grief that I hardly knew how he had become that way. Louisa tried to reason with me—clearly few or none of these stories was true. Charles would find Frank; others were on the lookout for him, too. Then we would know why he hadn’t appeared. Was he, too, dead or injured somewhere? Tentatively, and then more firmly, Louisa made me ponder that possibility. But I preferred to feel misused by him. I just kept it to myself more. I kept many things to myself more. In my new state of supreme discomfort, I felt just a jot more comfortable that way.
Some political news pressed itself upon me in the midst of everything else. In the first place, money was rolling in, just as everyone had predicted. The New Englanders had raised thousands and, it was said, intended to raise more thousands. There were groups in Chicago, Buffalo, New York, Boston, and I don’t know where else, all of which sent cash for Kansas relief. "We’ll never know how much might be coming," said Louisa, "the way they are holding our things on the river and raiding our mail." But most of the money came through Iowa and Nebraska, carried by men known to be both loyal to the Free State cause and capable of protecting themselves. Once the cash got to Lawrence, the committee of safety oversaw it. I don’t know what was done with it, except that some merchants who had provisioned the town for the Wakarusa War laid claim to payments, while others simply forgave those earlier debts in exchange for cash on the barrelhead in the town’s present drive to provision itself for another such war. In many ways, it didn’t matter, for the moment, how they disposed of the cash. It was more than anything a symbol of the support we had gained through the sacking of Lawrence and, in my opinion, a vindication of Thomas’s view that the sacking had been all for the best. I told him that when I took my morning walk out to his grave. I was sorry he couldn’t be there to see it. And then the slave of the slavocrats, President Pierce, issued another of his proclamations—that the Free State legislators were not to meet on the Fourth of July in Topeka, as planned.
On the July 3, Lawrence emptied out.
On the Fourth, and a hot day, a hundred K.T. degrees, which means sunny and windy, parades commenced in Topeka right after breakfast and went on till noon, with a band and a banner and fireworks and all the usual speeches. Right at noon, a man came in who’d been posted on the road, and said that the troops were on their way, and then the legislature went into the "hall" and took their seats. Pretty soon the dragoons, some three squadrons (including cannon!), came up to the "hall" and arrayed themselves. They even set up and loaded the cannon, and had the cannoneers light their lucifers! The surgeon laid out his medical kit, which the Free State citizens didn’t fail to notice, and then Colonel Sumner went into the hall.
There was some confusion with the roll; or, as Louisa said—she was there with Charles in spite of her condition and reported all this to me, saying that Thomas’s death would be meaningless if I didn’t begin to rededicate myself to the cause—"Many of the men were confused about whether they wanted to declare themselves present or not, in the teeth of the enemy, but of course, Charles spoke right up!"
Then Colonel Sumner stood up and announced, "Gentlemen, I am called upon this day to perform the most painful duty o
f my whole life. Under the authority of the President’s proclamation, I am here to disperse this legislature and inform you that you cannot meet. I therefore order you to disperse."
"He’s really on our side," said Louisa. "It was painful to watch a man so torn between duty and right sentiment."
And then he vowed to do anything to disperse the group.
"We knew," said Louisa, "that that meant everything up to and including firing on women and children with those cannon."
But Colonel Sumner got a cheer, anyway. His heart was in the right place.
"I tell you, Lidie," said Louisa, when she came home that night, "the tide is turning in our direction. It’s a shame and a crime that your dear husband is not with us to see it."
I agreed with that.
I had become convinced that the boy who shot Jeremiah was the same boy we had driven off from the Jenkins claim in the fall, which meant that his companions were those men, or two of those men. This conviction had come over me bit by bit. The boy’s face was the only one I’d seen, and I thought I remembered it looking familiar. I surmised that that was the reason the Missourians hadn’t bothered to steal such an excellent horse as Jeremiah—that boy had recognized him, and therefore us, and decided to exact his revenge. My secret, all the time that my future was being discussed by my friends and relations, was that I was going to kill that boy. I didn’t even think of him as a boy. He would have been sixteen, old enough to take mercy on a horse. He was a young man, only a few years younger than myself and perfectly capable of paying the full penalty for his actions.
A few days after she returned from the meeting of the legislature, and some three or four weeks after Thomas’s killing, Louisa sat down with me in my room. I sat in a chair and she sat on the bed, which was more comfortable for her in her condition. She had her bodice unbuttoned and her sleeves rolled up, and her face was red from the heat. We fanned ourselves and drank tea, which Louisa said was known to be cooling—the British in India drank tea all through the hottest part of the day. What you couldn’t do in such weather was drink intoxicating liquors: every sane person knew that, which was just further evidence that the Missourians, who drank intoxicating liquors day and night, all the year round, were both venal and stupid.
We knitted.
After we talked about the weather and the British and the Missourians, she said, "Please don’t misunderstand me, Lydia, but I would like to know how much money you have. I want to know as one who will always be your friend and only wants the best for you."
As it happened, I had just been counting my money that afternoon, and so I came right out with it. "I have fifteen dollars."
She shook her head. This was clearly worse than she had thought. She said, "Oh, my dear. And K.T. is such a costly place."
"Mr. Bush said he would pay me for my crop in August."
She nodded and turned her work, then said, "You know, Lydia, although I am only a few years older than you, very few, I do feel that I must take you in hand just now. How well I know what is the customary duty of the wife to the memory of her husband back in the States, and it was certainly a source of grievous pain to me that I could not give Mr. Wheelwright his due upon his unfortunate passing. Everything taken all in all, Mr. Wheelwright was a good man and as kind to me in every way as a man of his temperament was capable of being. If he was a little curt, at times, and invariably taciturn, and remarkably unsociable, then these things were not of his own making, and it was up to me as his wife to accept them, which I did, and Charles and I have agreed to give our son his name as a second name, to honor him."
"You have?"
"Why, yes. Isaac Ruben Bisket." She smiled fondly. "Elizabeth Rubena Bisket, if a girl. But I’m wandering off the track. You should keep me to the subject, my dear, which is you, not me."
"I don’t want to talk about me, Louisa."
"Now, that is very feckless of you, Lydia. You simply cannot be feckless in K.T. and expect even to live! K.T. demands boldness and energy. We have chosen an unforgiving home."
"Well, Louisa, I don’t know what to do, and I don’t have the money to do it."
"Charles owed Thomas some money when he—when he was murdered by those criminal slavocrats."
"He did?"
"Yes. A hundred and twenty-five dollars."
I stared at her, then said, "Louisa, I just do not believe you. Thomas hadn’t worked for Charles in a month by then, and he never said a word about it to me, all the time we were worrying about the summer."
"Well, it’s true."
"It’s not true. Look at me."
She looked at me. It wasn’t true. My heart sank, and I hadn’t even felt it lift. After a moment, she turned her work again (she had been knitting quickly this whole time) and said, "Lydia, my dear, I have the money. It’s no loss to me to loan it to you, or give it to you, or buy your claim with it."
"Then what? I can’t stay in K.T."
"Oh, my dear, you can’t backtrack! You won’t be able to live back there after here! In my estimation, even with the dangers, K.T. is the only place for a woman, especially a woman of verve and imagination."
"Louisa, I don’t think I am a woman of verve and imagination. Thomas had the verve and imagination. I was just curious."
"Now, my dear, we all become disconsolate; you’d have a heart the size of a walnut if you didn’t feel these sorts of things—"
"I want to go back."
But I didn’t, really. There was nothing in the States for me. I did feel, though, that if I could get over to Missouri, to Westport or Lexington, I could find that boy who had shot my horse, whose friends had shot my husband. All the same, I wasn’t being entirely deceptive with Louisa. I was simply believing two contradictory things to be true at the same time, a fine K.T. tradition.
"To Quincy?"
"Maybe, or even to Medford."
"I know Helen Bush has been talking to you, Lydia, but you mustn’t listen to her. Once you’ve been to K.T., my dear, then you are simply the wrong size for the Bay State box. I lived there all my life; I know what I am talking about. You would feel things very tight there, and very small. We’re western women now."
"But I’ve never been there at all, Louisa." I turned to my own knitting, and an inspiration came to me. "I owe it to Thomas to visit his mother. I told you what his father reported of her. And he was her favorite of the boys."
"I’m sure he was, Lidie. He was a favorite with everyone." She sighed. Finally, she said, "Well, I suppose there’s no hope for it."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I see that you should go back there, but I’m selfish. I fear if you go back there, you’ll never return to K.T."
I didn’t reply, because I feared, or hoped, the same thing.
What transpired was that Louisa loaned me forty dollars, which I added to my fifteen, on the understanding that Mr. Bush would pay her for my crop in August. She had offered to buy my claim, but she took that offer back; my Claim, she was sure, would bring me back to K.T., but if I broke that tie, she would never see me again. Now she became quite sanguine about travel back and forth to the east. Look at Sam Wood, look at Mrs. Robinson, look at Jim Lane. These folks were running to Washington and Boston all the time. It seemed like you were halfway to California once you crossed the Missouri River, but that wasn’t true, in fact. K.T. was practically the east, anymore, with railroads and steamboats. I would have no trouble at all. Charles could take me to Leavenworth with the mail and buy my ticket on a boat going downstream....
She rattled on, but I had a slightly different plan, and it didn’t include being chaperoned by Charles until I was able to get on the steamship. It included asking around for Mr. Graves, until one morning I found him at the Stearns store, bringing in some whiskey and some cherries from Missouri. As soon as he saw me, he pulled off his hat and became most solicitous.
"I have often animadverted to that tragic day, ma’am, and rued the evil motives that fired up those boys. Your husband was a
peaceable man, though unsound on the goose question."
I dipped my head, thinking he had changed his mode of talking again. I suppose I always thought of Mr. Graves as my friend, but this element of his character perplexed me and put me off.
"It’s a tangled skein of loyalties and aversions that we in K.T. find ourselves caught in. Men such as myself, whose instincts are purely commercial, sometimes don’t know which way to turn."
"Yes, sir," I said.
"But you seem to be holding up well, ma’am."
"I didn’t get to thank you. I want to thank you. I feel that you are my true friend, Mr. Graves."
"I am, ma’am, and no thanks needed. When a fellow human being is in such distress as your late lamented husband, ma’am, the greatest heroism is but the simplest decency, as the Bard himself once said."
"I need to go to Westport and then on to Saint Louis. I am taking Thomas’s last words to his dear mother."
What I really needed was to get Mr. Graves to talk about Thomas’s killers. There would certainly have been much bragging about the killing, and the names of the killers would be known among the Missourians. Mr. Graves might even know those names now, as he was talking to me and looking at me. But I needed some time to draw him out. Fifty or sixty miles over the prairie, a day and a half, might well be enough.
"I consider that a lovely gesture, ma’am, and I and my animals are at your service."