Part 4 (1/2)

CHAPTER 6.

I Enter Kansas Territory [image]The popular maxim, that ”dirt is healthy,” has probably arisen from the fact, that playing in the open air is very benificial to the health of children, who thus get dirt on their persons and clothes. But it is the fresh air and exercise, and not the dirt, which promotes the health. -p. 118 I DID NOT SPEAK to Thomas of my moment of fear, for surely that was what it was-the effects of a moment so short that it lasted only so long as it took for the patrons at the table to see the dishes of food and then reach for them, and yet it leaked into and colored every subsequent moment. Even now, as I recall our ride to Lawrence, the rolling golden prairie with its lines of distant trees and its distant dome of blue seem infused with shadows. The road, for the most part, was hard enough, and Mr. Graves knew where all the mirey spots were and avoided them. Nor was there solitude to oppress us-we met men, women, and children, wagons and walkers and riders, and everyone shouted out in the friendly way that westerners have on the road. The landscape was just as we expected it to be and displayed the expected open sort of beauty. Even so, the very suns.h.i.+ne looked dark to me, and the heat of the day, which was waxing moment by moment, seemed cold. I could not imagine any cabin, any town, any society, that would relieve my spirits.

Thomas, on the other hand, admired the country and was pleased as he could be to have arrived, and he spoke to Mr. Graves with thorough animation and lack of reserve. Eavesdropping, I added to my knowledge of my husband.

”I knowed you was a preacher,” said Mr. Graves.

”I was for a few months only,” said Thomas. ”After leaving Harvard College. But the work didn't suit me. When members of my flock sought my counsel, it struck me dumb.”

”That an't bad,” said Mr. Graves. ”Most folks like to talk themselves into whatever it is that they want to do, anyway. I did some work in the preaching line myself, but it didn't pay. Folks expect the word of G.o.d to be free for the asking.”

”Then I did some schoolteaching around and about Medford-”

”Well, that don't pay, neither. I done plenty of that, though I only know my tables up to six, but you know, six is half a dozen, and as soon as you know a dozen, you can sell what you got to sell. That's what I told my boys.”

”Then I went onto a merchant s.h.i.+p with my brother for a year, carrying loads of rosewood from the Amazon, and then I made sails in my father's factory.”

”You may say what you please about the sea,” said Mr. Graves. ”I an't never seen it, I don't know what's there. I an't never been to New Orleans, even.” With this, though I was eager to hear of my husband's maritime adventures, Mr. Graves declared the subject of seafaring a closed one. We jolted along in silence. The ears of the mules flicked forward and back and the wagon squeaked and creaked. Mr. Graves began to hum a tune but broke off abruptly and said, ”Got me some warts. You got any warts?”

Thomas allowed that he didn't have any warts at the moment.

”Well, I tried one cure. Worked for me years ago, but it didn't work at all here in K.T. What you got to do is give 'em away to two men riding on one gray horse. Saw a couple of men like that in the spring, so I wrapped up some one-cent pieces in a packet, as many as there are of the warts, and I had those men carry them one-cent pieces to Shawnee, but them warts didn't follow them a-tall. I was disgusted! I looked for those two men on that one gray horse for six months or more, then it didn't work! But now I found another cure, and we got to stop here and put it into effect. Whoa, back, boys!” he shouted to the mules, then jumped down off the wagon and went around to the rear, where he pulled out a neatly wrapped parcel. Thomas gave me a smile. ”Here you are,” said Mr. Graves. ”You know what this is? This is twenty-six grains of barley. That's one grain for each wart.” He grinned and set the package by the side of the road. ”See them warts?” He flourished his hand in my face. ”As soon as some unsuspecting abolitionist comes along and picks up that package, well, them warts will start fading away.” He thrust his warty palm under Thomas's nose. ”Abolitionist can't resist picking things up. Might be worth four bits! That's what an abolitionist thinks, 'cause they're all Yankees, you know. So when that abolitionist picks up my pretty little package here, he'll be picking up my warts. But he's got to do it on his own. You can't give it to him. He's got to steal it for himself That's the only way it works.”

He arranged the package on a clump of gra.s.s and climbed back into the wagon. ”I know plenty of charms and cures. Most people here in K.T, they call me Mr. Graves, because I'm so respected for my healing powers, but I don't make much of it, because it's a gift, you see, from the Lord, and I can't take the credit.”

After we'd gone forward a few yards and Mr. Graves had looked back at the package three or four times, he said, ”I'm sure sorry for you that you can't watch the healing, but it could take a day or so, and I know you want to be finding your place and setting yourselves up before then, but it would do you good to see it.”

”Perhaps it will happen more quickly than that,” said Thomas.

”You can't tell,” replied Mr. Graves. ”No, one thing about this life is true, and that is that you can't tell.”

Mr. Graves's flow of conversation remained strong throughout the day and only petered out after we'd settled on the prairie for the night. We settled on the prairie for the night because Mr. Graves said that it was a quiet night, warm and clear, and taken all in all, the open prairie would surely be more congenial to us than the nearby cabin of Paschal Fish, ”because I am an observant man, Mrs. Newton, and I have noticed that you have something of a distaste for expectorating, and between us, ma'am, Paschal Fish's clientele have a genius for expectorating, and since the man himself makes a practice of never looking down or taking off his boots, he don't know quite how it affects others.”

The sunlight seemed to evaporate off the prairie like steam off a vat of boiling water, leaving behind darkness that had already been there; on the other hand, the pale prairie flowers all around us shone against the gra.s.ses with a prolonged, dusky brilliance until the darkness simply extinguished them suddenly and at last. Night on the prairie was not like any other night I had ever seen: the blackness was below us and the light above, field upon field of stars stretched over our heads, rolling in every direction until your eyes lost the ability to see them. The bright pale road of the Milky Way beckoned toward Santa Fe in one direction and Iowa in the other, wide and smooth. After a bit of this, Mr. Graves pulled some sticks of wood from the wagon and built a fire. ”No use,” he said, ”in taking chances. Better all around that folks know we're here. I been thinking about it, and this is what we'll do. If anyone rides up, we'll put on that we're sleeping, and then when they shout out and rouse us, we'll try to discern their views on the goose question by the way they talk. Now, if they talk like they're of your party, you can speak up, and if they seem to be of my party, why, then, I'll vouch for you.”

I said, ”Mr. Graves, what is this question about geese?”

”The goose question is slavery, ma'am. If you are a proslavery man, then out here we say that you are sound on the goose.” He was smoking a pipe, and he tamped it down and put some more tobacco in it, then said, ”I'll tell you something. Anyone out here who is one hundred percent sound on the goose question wants to talk about it. You folks don't, so you see that give me the first inkling that you an't sound on the goose question. But I don't ask. And I only tell you this for your own good. And Lawrence is a den of black abolitionists, so it won't matter when you get there, but when you are away from there, then you got to talk like you're sound on the goose, or susss-p.i.s.ssshhhhuns will be aroused.”

Thomas asked, ”Why do they call it the goose question?” but Mr. Graves shook his head. ”No one knows. Anyway, I don't.”

I glanced at Thomas, wondering if he had noticed, as I had, that Mr. Graves's mode of speech had changed. He now spoke more roundly and fluently, as if his former ”Ruffian” expressions had been a trick. This gave him an air of mystery to me and made me wonder about him, but I only had a minute or two to ponder this, for as soon as he fell asleep, we unrolled ourselves from our blankets and sat close beside one another, unable to sleep. The night before, I had been afraid of shots through the floor, and the night before that, of a boiler explosion on the Independence. Each scene seemed to have pa.s.sed in an earlier lifetime, as distant from these stars and this fire as the Roman Empire. The prairie was full of sounds-the wind through the gra.s.ses, but also the yipping of what I later learned were coyotes; the whine of mosquitoes, but also the liquid call of night birds. Nor did every traveler stop with the darkness-I heard the clip-clop of horses' hooves, the calls of one man to another. They didn't molest us, though.

Thomas held my hand between his. I did not have the tiny hand you read about in books-it did not disappear between the two of his-but I was just as ready to have it held. The requirements of traveling had given us little leisure, and arrangements on the steamboats and in the hotel after Saint Louis had conspired to keep us apart. Always in the past I had accepted without much thought the flocking of men with men and women with women. It was no surprise to me that Mr. Graves presumed that my husband's conversation would be with him. Once he had made me a comfortable place to sit and helped me into it, it was clear that Mr. Graves considered me well taken care of. Once in a while, he would address some informative remark to me, as a courtesy to Thomas's manhood, as if not wis.h.i.+ng to imply ignorance on Thomas's part. Perhaps this was the key to his differing modes of expression, too: he lowered his style to a manly roughness for Thomas, elevated it for me. And if Thomas attempted to have any private conversation with me, Mr. Graves would eavesdrop and hem and haw, waiting to stick in his two cents' worth. He wasn't the first to distinguish between us; this was the way men and women behaved, were supposed to behave. I was perfectly familiar with it, but now Thomas and I seemed to be like two souls in separate lifeboats (speaking of maritime adventures-and I had never seen the sea, either; when I read about a governor of Illinois who had recently been much laughed at when he went to Baltimore and asked in all innocence, looking at the tide, if the place flooded like that twice a day every day, I hadn't gotten the joke), who could never quite reach each other, never quite get close enough to converse. Except that now that we were that close, I could not begin to think what we would say to one another. He said, ”Every time I set out on what seems very much like an adventure and imagine myself lost in some vast solitude, I discover when I get there that there are plenty of men before me, and that they are all great talkers.”

”That is certainly true of Mr. Graves,” I said. ”But I must say that I didn't mean to find vast, solitary places here in Kansas. I meant to find pleasant new towns with all manner of services that had sprouted out of the prairie like mushrooms. That's what all the bills in Horace's store promised. s.p.a.ce enough for all mankind, but no inconvenience.”

Thomas laughed.

”I've been reading Miss Beecher. I understand that my duties as a wife will include making ball fringe for our carpets and regular dishes of light egg custard.”

”Are you afraid, Mrs. Newton?”

”Of egg custard?”

But he didn't laugh this time. I dropped my eyes. I wanted to be precise, and he rubbed his thumb over mine and then looked at me soberly.

I pondered, wanting to answer truthfully, at all costs, but suddenly not knowing exactly what that meant: Are you afraid? Just at that moment, in fact, I was quite serene, possibly because Mr. Graves was so comfortably asleep that he cast a radiance of a.s.surance that covered us, too. On the other hand, I had been afraid the night before and just that morning, with a fear so new and overpowering that it was as if I had never felt fear before. That feeling seemed to be right beside me; I could find myself slipping into it if I didn't pay attention. I said, ”I should be, but I'm not. Just like on the steamboat. You know it could blow up any minute, but it just seems like it won't. This is wild country, though. The woman sleeping by me last night said she just prayed they didn't get liquored up and shoot through the floor.”

”I thought of that. Compared to Boston, or, in fact, any place I've ever been, everyone you meet is armed to the teeth.”

I coughed, but Thomas seemed oblivious to the fact that we ourselves carried an a.r.s.enal. It occurred to me that Kansas and his own activities there must have until very recently presented themselves in a rather abstract way to Thomas. I said, ”How many slaves are there in Kansas Territory?”

”I don't know.”

Mr. Graves turned over in his sleep, as if any discussion at all of the goose question concerned him. I said, ”Are you afraid? You've been on the sea. You've been to the Amazon.”

”And to the Indies. And to Cuba. And also to Haiti. And parts of New York City aren't so friendly, either. But in those places the reasons men have to kill you are simple-they want your money, most of the time, or something else you have. And the reason they have to kill each other is simpler still-family enmity. Here it seems like anything is a reason to kill you-disagreement on the slavery question is one thing, but just how you talk or how you look is another, or, maybe, just how the killer feels at that moment. Killing you might just be boasting by other means.”

The night air was undeniably soft and fragrant with some exotic but comforting scent. I said, ”My sisters would have it that my father was a handsome gentleman, and he certainly turned himself out that way, to the very last. But he had a great affinity for rough river characters who had something to sell or could be made to buy. Once, when my mother told him how much they frightened her, coming to the house, I heard him say, 'Any man who says he's killed somebody, or claims he's going to on the smallest provocation, certainly has not and absolutely will not. I'm safer with a boaster than I am with a silent man who doesn't drain off his resentment a few words at a time.' ”

”I've been thinking of that. But Kansas, here, seems like a new place entirely. We can't tell if anything we already know is true.”

I said, as if my first day in Kansas Territory hadn't been the strangest of my life, ”How bad could it be?”

Now we pulled our blankets to us and spread them as best we could on the long gra.s.s and made what seemed to be a comfortable bed, but when we lay down in them, it turned out that our heads were below our feet, a most uncomfortable position. And simply turning in the other direction somehow transformed gra.s.s that had been soft and welcoming into tufty b.u.mps. We s.h.i.+fted again, this way and that. I was sleepy, now, and sure Mr. Graves would be up and discoursing at the first light or before. I drifted off, felt a hump under my hip, turned, moved an inch or two, eased onto my back. Suddenly, the prairie made me a perfect bed, formed just for my shape and ease. I opened my eyes to better appreciate the miracle. There was the moon, rising late, and there, against it, was the box of ”harness.” I turned back to Thomas, intending to solicit a promise that he would dispose of it tomorrow in Lawrence, or the next day at the latest, but he was peacefully asleep.

The embers of our fire faded and died, the moon rose higher and diminished to the size of a small coin. Mr. Graves and Thomas slept on, Mr. Graves, it appeared, in perfect comfort, as his loud, moist snores were uninterrupted and nearly mechanical in their regularity. My husband had a worse time, often turning and jerking against the hard ground, or sighing, or groaning. But I thought he was sleeping, at least lightly, while I seemed to myself wide awake, though in retrospect, I would say, my anxious resolve to keep my eye on that box indicated that I, too, was partly dreaming. Nevertheless, I did hear the very first approach of men on horses, the only ones since early in the evening. After some minutes of only the clopping sound of shod hooves, one of them said in a low voice, ”Now what do we have here?” The tones were distinctly Tennessee, and I, who had always expected to be bold and enterprising, closed my eyes at once and played possum. The men were not drunk, or if they were, they were very quietly drunk, because another man answered as softly, ”Found us some Yankees, huh?”

”Could be.”

Then a third horse came up, and this man was drunk, because he started shouting, ”Git up, you G- d- Yankees! Sun's up early this morning! Git up! Haw haw haw! Time to greet the G- d- day!”

Thomas was on his feet in half a second, no playing possum for him, but Mr. Graves took a moment, and then only sat up in his blankets. I opened my eyes. It was nowhere near dawn. Even though I hadn't been asleep, I felt shocked and groggy-my flesh seemed to be ringing with the suddenness of the intrusion. Then I felt a hard edge like the end of a pole poking into my side. It was the barrel of a long rifle. One of the men had dismounted. He said, ”You, too. You git up, too.” I stood, and my hair fell down my back to my waist.

”G- d- if it an't a woman. A big, ugly one, but-”

”d.i.c.k, shut up! You're drunk and I'm tired of you and I might have to shoot you one of these days if you don't quit spouting off your mouth.”

Mr. Graves, still sitting in his blanket, said, ”How are you boys tonight? Is there something we can do for you?”

”Where ya headed?”

”California road,” a.s.serted Mr. Graves.

”You an't taking this wagon to any California, haw!”