Part 5 (1/2)

”Bisket, here's my wife! Do we have a place to live?”

”Well, I'm staying at the Jenkinses' house in town tonight, and you can stay there with me, and then we'll see about tomorrow when the others come back. It an't far-just a little ways up here on Vermont Street.”

He led us off the road we were traveling, and in a few minutes we found ourselves in front of one of those leaning buildings. He said, ”It an't bad here in this weather. Hot and dry makes the hay smell kind of sweet. It's something in one of them Kansas storms, though. There was one just after we got here that wasn't like anything I ever saw before in my life for thunder and lightning. Two houses got struck-it come right down the roof beam-and two children got stunned practically to death. They were just sitting there for the longest time, then they got up and started staggering around, and one of them thought she was back in Ma.s.sachusetts for two days. Lucky they weren't killed, everybody said. Here's Mrs. Bush. You remember Mrs. Bush, Newton.”

He dismounted as a handsome, full-figured woman with a youthful face but pure-white hair came through a piece of cloth-a tablecloth, maybe- that had been hung for a door. ”Mrs. Bus.h.!.+ Look who turned up! Tom Newton an't dead, after all! And he's got himself a wife from Illinois, to boot!”

Then some other women and another man came out of the building with lamps and candles, and pretty soon we were unloading everything, including the box of ”harness,” and not long after that I saw Thomas give Mr. Graves four dollars for carrying all of our things, and then he was gone, and I wondered for just a moment if we would see him again-but that was a lesson I learned about K.T.: for all the thousands of folks who came in and pa.s.sed through and went back to the States, for all the strangers that you looked on every day, there were plenty you thought you would never see again who turned up time after time.

Mrs. Bush and two of the other women, Mrs. Jenkins and her daughter, Susannah, made much of Thomas, for it appeared that everyone really did think that he had been killed by the Missourians, because no evil deed seemed to be beyond those devils. ”Why, there's a free Negro in town,” said Mrs. Bush as she stirred together some corncake batter, ”a young man who's got a claim not far from ours, and they've been threatening to go out there and take him back to his master, but they don't know who his master is! He doesn't have a master, but you can be sure they'll find him one! They hate the sight of a free Negro!”

It was a warm night after an, exceedingly warm day, though a hearty breeze blew through the leaning house and set all the doors and windows to rattling. The house possessed a stove, but the stovepipe stopped a few feet above our heads, and the smoke was meant to issue out of one of the openings at either end of the ceiling. Perhaps because of this unorthodox arrangement, or the wind, or both, the stove was difficult to light, and it took some time for the corncakes to be cooked. The three ladies were friendly and eager for conversation. They asked all about me, and Mrs. Jenkins whispered to me at one point, ”Oh, my dear, everyone is so fond of Thomas Newton! He is a good, sober man!”

Mr. Bush and Mr. Jenkins, it turned out, were out at Big Spring, at the convention, and the women didn't know whether to expect them that night or the next day. ”But whenever they come,” declared Mrs. Bush, ”I guarantee you they'll have done some business, because they were fit to be tied when they left. You know about the gag law?”

I did not. I didn't know anything about Kansas politics to speak of, but I quickly learned, because that was all anyone talked about. When Thomas and I arrived, even though K.T. had been open to settlement only a few months, events had very much begun.

Mrs. Bush pushed up her sleeves and opened the throat of her bodice another b.u.t.ton, then hitched up her skirt. When she saw me staring, she laughed and said, ”Lydia, Kansas is no place for gowns and petticoats! I an't going to burn up, is what the women from Missouri say when they cut off their skirts, and for once they're right! And you're always having to raise your skirts anyway, owing to the tobacco spittle! Anyway, there's a law coming in one of these days-”

”In nine days, on the fifteenth,” interjected Susannah, who had finally gotten the fire going and was now giving the corncakes another stir.

”-that says that if you even talk about freeing slaves, or write about it, or bring a paper like The Liberator into the territory, you can be put to death for it!”

”Oh, Helen,” said Mrs. Jenkins. ”Surdy not for just subscribing to The Liberator.”

”Yes, indeed! Doesn't Garrison advocate freeing the slaves? Doesn't he advocate conspiring together to do so? There you are. Ten days from now, if they see that paper in your hands, they could arrest you and put you to death.”

We contemplated this. I wondered if Thomas, who I knew was carrying some eastern papers in his bag, was aware of this law.

”And,” said Mrs. Bush, ”if you so much as give a fugitive a drink of water, that's hard labor for ten years!”

She flipped the cakes, which were now smoking on the griddle. ”But listen to this! This is the worst! You get two years of hard labor just for saying that someone in K.T. doesn't have a right to hold slaves! I swear!”

”Helen,” said Mrs. Jenkins. ”Don't swear.”

”And if someone gets convicted of one of these offenses, not even the governor can pardon him.”

”That shows they an't sure of the governor.”

”Well, they weren't sure of Reeder, but they're sure of this Shannon.” She turned to me. ”He's the new governor. He's one of them.”

”That Stringfellow is the worst,” said Susannah. ”He will print anything in that paper of his. It scares me.”

”It don't scare me,” said Mrs. Bush. ”It just makes me mad. That cup and saucer are mismatched, Lydia, dear. All my cups and saucers from England that I got for my wedding, all but three cups and two saucers from two different sets, were smashed on the way here. I'm sure I'd like this place better if that hadn't happened.”

She handed me a cup of tea and a plate of corncakes. I set them on a tiny table at my elbow, which looked to be made of two boxes set one on top of the other. It was dark, because the candles had blown out in the interior breeze, but my eyes had adjusted. Mr. Bisket, Thomas, and the third man, or boy, came in and sat down. Mrs. Bush handed Thomas a plate of corncakes, too.

I said that they were delicious.

”Well,” said Mr. Bisket, ”you need a big hunger for corncakes if you're going to live in K.T. Though I saw that Mr. Stearns has b.u.t.ter and eggs and apples and plums in his new store.”

”If they'd stick to that store and give over speculating, they might have a business someday,” said Mrs. Jenkins, ”But half the time both of them are out. Here's what I think: They say claims are the making of this country, but to me they're the breaking of it. n.o.body wants to settle down to business, because everybody's distracted by some venture or scheme. And you can't build this or you can't plant that, because it might end up that what you think is your claim an't it at all, and you've got to give up what you built or planted to someone you've never seen before!”

Everyone present clucked sympathetically, and later Susannah confided to me that her father had built a nice twelve-by-twelve cabin on their claim outside of town, only to be sued by another claimant for the same bit of property. ”We ended up losing the cabin and twenty rods of fencing, and that did set my father back, you know. Kind of took the wind out of his sails.”

”How could you lose your claim?” I asked. ”I thought if you claimed it, it was yours. And who is Reeder?”

”Oh, my dear,” caroled Mrs. Bush. ”Here you are just arrived, and we talk to you as if you know everything there is to know! We've been here a little over a month ourselves, and we feel like old settlers! Reeder was the territorial governor, but they drove him out. You must get to know Dr. Robinson. He is our Winthrop, you know. He seems to have come out here a hundred years ago, but really, he only claimed Lawrence a year ago July. Isn't that something? Look how far along we are after only a year and a month!”

Indeed, events moved with considerably more swiftness in K.T. than ever they did in Quincy. Already the territory had finished up one governor (Reeder, the one the Missourians apparently didn't like) and had just received the second (Shannon, the one the Missourians apparently did like). Already an election had been held (the previous March), and already a scandal had ensued from it. Most of the voters had come over, or been brought over, from Missouri, and they had elected their own slate of nonresident officials, who had, already, made a mess of things, according to Mrs. Bush and the Jenkins ladies. ”Those who can read,” claimed Mrs. Bush, ”are generally too drunk to do so, and they made a terrible botch of the territorial const.i.tution-”

”It's not a botch, Helen, it's a crime!” said Mrs. Jenkins. She turned to me. ”My dear, it is a const.i.tution written in the H- of slavery for the imposition of that H- upon others! A sane person cannot read it, simply cannot! Mr. Jenkins tried four times to get through it. It gave him a fever, and he was down for three days. My true feeling is that if he had not tried to read that const.i.tution when he did, we wouldn't have lost our claim!”

Mrs. Bush gave me a skeptical glance, but said, ”Perhaps not, my dear.”

But the Free-Soil party, to which all my new acquaintances belonged, and which had been surprised and overwhelmed in the spring, was stronger now. ”Look at us!” said Mrs. Bush. ”We swell the ranks. My own opinion is that Dr. Robinson is far too kind a man, and far too good. He was unprepared by his own virtues for the sheer malice of the other side. And Eli Thayer! Well, he is a cousin of Mr. Jenkins's mother's cousin, and I've met him, and say what you will about this money and that money, and how much he has and how he got it, he is an innocent babe!”

I said, ”Thomas mentioned Mr. Thayer.”

”He's our benefactor!” said Susannah. ”He founded the Ma.s.sachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. He's a terrific abolitionist!”

”Such an inspiration,” added Mrs. Bush.

I didn't know what to think. These people were all so friendly and warm and welcoming, and the leaning house was breezy and quaint, and the corncakes were hot and delicious, but every word that they spoke amazed me. It wasn't just what they reported-I didn't doubt for a minute that the men who had challenged us the night before were full of menace and hatred, and that wherever they came from, there were plenty more like them. I didn't know why the three Missourians had threatened us and then ridden away. But the strangest thing was how differently I saw things in K.T., even after but one or two days, than I had seen them in Illinois. Every river town is full of braggarts and ruffians; Illinois was full of wild-talking Roland Breretons, whose fathers and uncles were from Kentucky and Tennessee. But what I had known about such types-that they would go so far into violence and no farther, that the talk was all-I no longer knew. Rather, it seemed just the reverse-that these new men, or the same men in this new place, preferred hurting us to not hurting us. That was amazing enough, but what was even more amazing was the way my new friends spoke of these events. They deplored them, of course, but in addition to that, if the tones of their voices were to be believed, they were a little thrilled by them. They sounded inured to such things but also fascinated by them, even drawn to them.

”Who is Stringfellow?” asked Thomas, ”Ha!” exclaimed Mr. Bisket. ”You don't know Stringfellow? I thought he was famous all over the States. Not so long ago, he made a speech telling his hearers to mark every scoundrel they knew who was in the least bit contaminated with Free-Soilism and exterminate them. He's always calling for tarring and feathering or lynching or hanging or exterminating or shooting or cutting up or driving out. They love him in Missouri. And his brother's the speaker of the bogus legislature.”

”That's not the worst,” said Mrs. Bush, and the others nodded, all apparently knowing what the worst was but not daring to say.

”Remember Park?” said Mrs. Jenkins. ”He had a paper over in Missouri, and after the elections he ran an editorial. All it said was that the people in K.T. ought to be allowed to run their own affairs.”

”They attacked his office and threw his presses in the river, and they were about to lynch Patterson, the editor.”

”They had the rope around his neck,” said Mrs. Jenkins. ”Would have scalped him, too. They do that.”

”But his wife just hung on him and begged for his life.”

”That's all that saved him,” said Mr. Bisket.

”And he was proslave all the way,” a.s.serted Mrs. Bush. ”But if you an't for everything-slavery stealing elections, driving out northern settlers and burning down their houses, and, most of all, extending slavery everywhere-then they hate you as bad as anyone else.”

”There an't but a handful of slaves over there, anyway, and those are all house slaves. I'm telling you,” said Mr. Bisket, ”a citizen from South Carolina or Louisiana wouldn't know Missouri was a slave state. And n.o.body who comes over here to lynch us or burn us out ever actually owns a slave.”

”Well, you know...,” said Mrs. Bush.

”It's true,” said Mrs. Jenkins.