by Jane Smiley
"Oh, my land o’ mercy. I will!" she exclaimed. "Have you seen these drops? I got them from a wonderful man, three-quarters pure Indian, knows all the Indian secrets! Everyone here in Kansas City swears by him. His name is John Red Dog. I can’t do without these drops!" And she put a bit on her tongue, then climbed into the upper berth. Sure enough, by the time it was fully dark, she was snoring, long, deep, ruffling snores, as regular as the ticking of a clock.
I sat up and removed my shawl from my bag, at the same time making sure that the curtain of our cabin was completely closed. Then I stood up and looked, smiling in case she awakened, at Miss Carter. She was far gone in slumber, undoubtedly thanks to the drops. Her workbasket sat at the foot of her bed, and I opened it and took out her scissors, which were of only moderate size but large enough. Then I laid out my shawl and, kneeling, bent my head over it and cut off my hair. It fell in dark hanks, rather surprising me with its length and weight. But I felt no grief at cutting off my only beauty, merely a lightness and relief. Somehow, my hair had become Thomas’s, and now he was requiring me to cut it. It would grow back. I wrapped it in my shawl and laid the shawl aside.
The next part was more difficult. What I was engaged in now I had not planned, though I had brought along a few of Thomas’s things for remembrance—two or three books, a pair of trousers, and a coat, but, of course, no hat, no shoes. I think that I had vaguely thought that if I should end up in Boston, I would give these articles to Thomas’s mother, or father, or a brother. The trousers and the coat would now come in handy, but I had given his hat to Charles, and I had given his boots and other effects to a dealer in secondhand clothing, not three days after the killing. This man had offered me some money, but at the time I was simply horrified at taking money for them, and so I’d turned it down. Well, there was nothing for it, then, but to make the best of what I had. I cut the skirt off my cream-colored dress, below the waist, so there would be a tail, then I put Thomas’s trousers on over the bodice as if it were a shirt, with his braces holding them up as best as I could fix it. Finally, I shrugged into the jacket, which fit much more loosely than the trousers. One thing I had saved and used, which now came in very handy, was his pocket watch. I opened the crystal and felt the hands in the darkness—ten—thirty—and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. I pushed my rolled-up shawl out of the way and slipped into my berth to wait for a favorable hour.
There was no going to sleep. I neither wanted to nor could afford to. I had no idea, for one thing, of how long Miss Carter’s drops would remain effective. And I judged midnight or shortly thereafter to be the best time for departing the Missouri Rose. I knew that if I fell asleep, I would sleep through until morning and lose my chance. Lying in my berth in Thomas’s clothes made me very sad. They had been folded tightly away for many weeks—they were not what he’d been wearing upon being shot, but I had retrieved them from the cabin—and beneath their woolly, musty scent was another, fleeting and almost undetectable, which I recognized as familiar. I was eager to think that it was Thomas’s scent, that something of him still lingered around me, but when I focused my attention on it, it seemed to disappear, so that I could not say that it was really there. When I thought of Thomas, though, the pictures and the memories were striking: Thomas reading aloud by candlelight, his expressive voice bodying forth each story so that the characters seemed to be in the room, just outside the circle of the candlelight. Thomas coming in from working at the end of the day, his shoulders filling the doorway, his affectionate greeting, even though we might have seen each other only twenty minutes before. Thomas and Charles at the breakfast table, when we were living in town, laughing and regaling Louisa and me with stories of their journeys to Leavenworth to get the mail. Thomas, my husband, after the candle was blown out at night, so large a presence that I seemed to disappear into it; not something that memoirists customarily write about but, in truth, the very thing that I could not stop thinking of as I lay curled in my berth that night on the Missouri Rose.
The anguish of these thoughts eventually propelled me out of the berth at eleven forty-five or so. Miss Carter was still heavily asleep. I closed the hasp of my bag as softly as I could and peeked around the curtain into the ladies’ saloon. If the Missouri Rose was anything like the boat that had brought us upstream, male passengers would be allowed to sleep on the floor of the saloon after all the ladies had gone to their cabins, but now, before the journey, the big room was empty. I crept around the curtain and across the floor to the big double doors, which were locked. Trying not to be disappointed or daunted, I then carried my bag along the row of ladies’ cabins, looking for another way out. I didn’t find one, but I found something better, a pair of men’s boots, the toes sticking out underneath the curtain, and, when I listened, hearty snores behind it. I knelt, set down my bag, and slowly extracted the boots. They were unattached to their owner’s feet and came easily. They were not new and did not smell sweet, but I hurriedly pulled off my own shoes and put the boots on, anyway. Though a trifle too large, they were certainly good enough.
This acquisition whetted my appetite for more, especially for a hat or a cap, and I grew bolder. I began to peek behind curtains, but only if I heard evidence of sleep, such as groans or snores. Behind the third curtain, hung on a nail, was the perfect hat—soft-brimmed and slouchy, good for hiding within. I took it. It was a good hat, of a southern style rather than a northern—no doubt made in Kentucky or somewhere like that. It fit, too. I walked my bag down the length of the saloon and found a window, which I opened and climbed out of, onto the deck. I didn’t see anyone around. I closed the window behind me and adopted a nonchalant demeanor, leaning my elbows on the rail, cocking one foot across the other, and pulling down my hat, as I had seen so many men do in my twenty-one years. And it was well that I did, because just then someone rounded the end of the deck and touched the brim of his own hat politely in my direction. I cleared my throat and nodded, but didn’t alter my position. He said, "Pleasant evening," and walked on.
I stood still as he passed.
I saw at once that as long as I was a man, I would be able to do whatever I wanted, and that I would have a taste of freedom such as no woman I had known, even Louisa, had ever had. I stood up and strolled—ambled, really—down the length of the deck, looking for the gangplank, not quite sure where I was on the boat but thrusting one hand in my pocket and carrying my bag with the other, kicking out my feet as I walked, and altogether impersonating, I realized, my nephew Frank. The trousers hung around me, and their inseams rubbed together as I walked. But there was a lovely feeling to it of big strides and nothing in your way, that I remembered from the last time I’d worn trousers, the day our party had tried to parley with the Missourians at the Jenkins claim.
Some Negroes were pulling up the gangplank as I got to it.
"Hey, boys, wait for me," I said, as if I’d been saying such things all my life, and the two men looked at each other, then tipped their caps, and one of them said, "All right, boss," and down it went. I strolled off the boat, idling, to all appearances (I knew I would have to get a seegar somewhere very soon). Down on the dock, I turned, watched them pull up the gangplank as if I didn’t have anything better to do, then waved. One of them waved back.
Of course, I had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do for the rest of the night, but it seemed as though all I had to do was remain in character as a man, or rather as a boy of, say, sixteen, old enough but still plausibly beardless, and every opportunity would present itself to me. My name would be Lyman. Mr. Lyman Arquette, close enough to my maiden name, Harkness, so that when men—other men, that is—addressed me by my last name, which was the custom in the west, the name would ring a bell. I would at least look up, giving myself a single precious moment to remember who I was.
My state of mind, which was both exhilarated and fearful of discovery, belied my real condition, which was more in danger of eventual starvation than of anything else. Even though, having eat
en well during the day, I reckoned I wouldn’t have to eat again until suppertime the next evening (eighteen hours thence, but I didn’t let myself think of that), what then? I had but forty dollars, and everything in Kansas City was dear. Signs outside of hotels I had seen as we were riding through town read "Rooms, three dollars," or even "five dollars," and that was only for one night! My limited funds put a time limit on my vengeance; my masquerade, as good as I could make it by aping the ways of men I knew, would stand up to neither doing manual work nor engaging in another common western practice—sleeping two or three to a bed to save on lodging costs. Lyman Arquette would have to be a rather solitary, self-effacing fellow, always ready with a laugh, and ready to take a drink, too—Missourians required both—but keeping himself as much in the background as possible. I strolled away from the riverside and into manhood, trying to look alert and be alert. Every woman knew that men were rough and violent among themselves, and that anything could happen.
CHAPTER 20
Lyman Arquette Investigates
It may be set down as the unchangeable rule of physiology, that stimulating drinks (except in cases of disease) deduct from the powers of the constitution, in exactly the proportion in which they operate to produce temporary invigoration. —p. 107
AS SOON AS the sun was up, I roused myself from behind the wagon where I had taken refuge and began looking for a newspaper office. It had come to me in the night, as I was almost drowsing, that that was where gossip on every subject was to be discovered. As I walked about, I made up my own story—a boy from Palmyra, Missouri, a town across the river from Quincy that I had visited several times, my father a man like Horace Silk, but as for myself, no taste for retailing, Mother dead. My ambition was to learn print setting and newspaper writing, so that I could go west, out to California, say, and start up my own newspaper. I was a good Democrat, a follower of Senator Douglas and Senator Atchison, though of course too young to vote, and a believer in popular sovereignty. I practiced saying "them G— d— black abolitionists" to myself. But I planned on taking a great deal of refuge in silence and shyness.
Kansas City was both more and less than Lawrence—more in the sense that there were more people, animals, vehicles, buildings a-building, activity, and business; less in the sense that as quick as everything went in Lawrence, it had gone all the quicker in Kansas City and was therefore all the more ramshackle and make-do. In Lawrence there were women, which meant families, homes, farms, gardens, teacups, and a lending library (or plans for one). In Kansas City it didn’t look like there were women, which meant a lack of all these same things. Kansas City was half business, half politics, all money. Kansas City was in Missouri, and so there were slaves, too, doing a considerable amount of the work and none of the idling. As an idler interested in politics, I was unremarkable among the other citizens.
I found a newspaper, the Missouri Freeman, shortly after seven—I know the time because I made a practice of ostentatiously pulling "my" watch from my pocket and looking at it, so as to get in the habit—and men were already going up and down the stairs of that office as if great things were stirring. One group of three men ran up the stairs, and I joined them. The door to the pressroom (the only room) was wide open. As we burst in, one of our number exclaimed, ’Jack Morton! Wake up!" A man stooping over a table at the other end of the room turned around, as did all the other men in the room, who numbered six or eight. "Shannon’s called in General Smith and ordered him to go and attack Lane’s army before they get out of Nebraska, and Smith’s refused to do it!" Now there were cries of "Traitor!" "Treachery!" and "Where’s Sumner?" from all about the room, and the man Morton, who must have been the editor of the paper, stepped forward and said, "Now, Joe, where’d you get this story?"
"These boys," he said. "They’re just in from Lecompton, and they had it from one of Shannon’s own men!"
"They’re going over! The soldiers are going over to the northern side, d— ’em! I could of told you they would," exclaimed one man as he pushed his way to the front of the group.
"We got to do everything ourselves," said another.
"That’s right!" exclaimed a third. "It’s all very well what they say about keeping order and makin’ them G— d— abolitionists obey the laws of the territory, but when it comes right down to it, them black abolitionists do what they want without so much as a by-your-leave, and the army jest sets there!"
"Okay, boys," said Morton. "Let’s write this up. You come over here and sit down, and you talk and I’ll write."
I was tempted to ooze along with them. No one had yet looked at me with much scrutiny, so excited were they by this news, but the editor’s desk was far back in the room, and I decided it would be more prudent to stay by the door. I set my bag down next to the wall and stood looking at some papers from the previous week ("Paupers and Thieves Pouring into Lawrence; Backers in Mass. Say Prisons Will Be Emptied! Investigations by our correspondents have turned up a plot on the part of Amos Lawrence and his cronies to transport the thieves and criminals of the northeast wholesale to Kansas Territory. Prison officials are overjoyed at the prospect; most of the money for the transportation has already been raised from the usual backers. One man, who refused to be identified for our readers, declared, ’Everyone knows this will solve two problems at one time. Kansas will be populated by men who owe us something, at least a vote, and we will be freed of these misfits and foreigners. The backers have agreed to buy every man a claim, free and clear. I hope the claims run all the way to the western mountains!’ ") or out the window at the wagons, horses, oxen, and men rushing up and down the street below.
I rehearsed my name, Lyman Arquette, and my story. By the light of day, I wasn’t quite sure what sort of figure I cut. Thomas’s jacket flapped around me, and of course my dress bodice had to be hidden, so I was buttoned up to the collar, with my hat pulled far down on my head. I seemed to have put on the braces holding up my trousers improperly, as they kept slipping uncomfortably off my shoulders, and I had to surreptitiously adjust them every few minutes. The trousers themselves and the shoes worked well enough, though, as my stockings were quite thin, I couldn’t help wondering about the grooming habits of the man whose boots I’d stolen. All in all, I was both comfortable and uncomfortable in my new clothes, which made it rather difficult to attain the sort of slouching nonchalance that I hoped would keep me unnoticed and unremarked upon. I definitely needed a shirt. How much would that cost ? The men I knew, including Thomas, had had their shirts made by their wives or daughters. In fact, I had made Thomas two shirts over the winter, but dissatisfied with my own workmanship, I had given them away with the other things. I glanced down again at the article I’d been reading ("Of course, the Free Staters, as they call themselves, will present their new citizens as bona fide homesteaders and family men, which makes us ask ourselves, ’Why is it they don’t know the difference between criminals and homesteaders?’ Our readers may hazard a guess. But the real outcome of these transportations may redound to our side in the end—law-abiding Missouri citizens and their sympathizers in Kansas Territory will be all the moré justified in acting on our own behalf in clearing out the nests of malefactors"). The article, which would have had me and all my friends in K.T spitting with rage, left me strangely unaffected, no doubt because I could hardly risk being or acting affected, but also because I couldn’t quite take in such a ridiculous set of ideas. Best, however, not to read any further.
Morton now appeared beside me, startling me. He wore a friendly smile; his face was smudged with black, as were his fingers, and he had a pencil over his ear. He said, "Well, now, son, you’re a stranger here. Are you lookin’ for something?"
Without my even planning it, a low, breaking, breathy voice came out of me, almost a whisper. I said, "I’m looking for a job."
"Speak up, son."
"Well, sir, I can’t, sir. As a child, I was the victim of an accident. This is the best I can do." Morton looked instantly sympathetic, so I embroidered a
bit by putting my hand on my throat. "Drank something caustic, sir. I was two. Back in Palmyra."
"What are you doing in Kansas City, son?"
"Making my way, sir," I whispered. "Got to do the best I can, you know."
"What’s your name, son?"
"Lyman Arquette, sir."
"Well, why don’t you sit yourself down over there, out of the way, and I’ll talk to you later, after the place clears out a bit."
I picked up my bag and strolled over to the designated chair, which was next to a cold stove. There I sat down, leaned back, and put my feet up on the stove, as I’d seen western men do all my life. It was a remarkably comfortable posture.
It was also a good spot for eavesdropping, and my hearing was all the keener for the danger I felt myself to be in. It was more exciting than anything else, and one thing I discovered about myself was that as a man, or boy, I was bolder and more reckless than I’d been as a woman. What might have paralyzed me in the past now stimulated me. Not three feet away, one armed man (rifle, two pistols, two long knives) was saying to another armed man (two rifles, no pistols, one knife), "An’t begun to do this right, and that’s a fact. You got to treat these G— d— abolitionists the way they done them Cherokee Indians down where I come from. One day, you just go in and rout ’em out of there, and you make ’em move on, and you kill the ones that lag behind. It an’t purty, but lots o’ necessary doin’s an’t purty at all. What truly an’t purty is the way all this stuff lingers until you lose in the end."
"Shoulda struck when the strikin’ was good, you ask me. We had ’em out here, far from everywhere, before all them scribblers got out here, and we coulda done what we wanted to ’em, but of course them cooler heads prevailed. Now lookit us!"