Part 17 (1/2)

She smiled. ”He spoke again. He asked where his carbine was.”

”What time is it?”

''After midnight.”

”You must be exhausted yourself.”

”Well...” She nodded.

”I'm fine to sit up. I'm not tired at all.” Really, what I suddenly wanted was to be alone with my husband. Here we had been married all of ten months, had known each other for less than a year, and we had hardly been alone together, if you thought about it.

”I am tired,” she said, ”but I hate to ...” Moments later, she went off to bed, and my conscience smote me at my feelings of ingrat.i.tude. I took my place in the chair she had been sitting in and looked down at my husband. Frankly, I was amazed, still amazed. It seemed that there was no way I could get past this amazement into something more appropriate, more like what Louisa and the others seemed to be feeling. They had gone right into anger, sadness, and fear, just like that, but I was stuck in amazement. More even than the inner picture of Thomas falling behind the little wagon, I kept seeing the picture of Jeremiah rising on his back legs and then crumpling between the shafts. And of course, we hadn't returned Mr. James's little wagon or the harness. Everything-our flour and cornmeal and salt and the horse's body and the wagon and harness-had been out there on the prairie all day, as if we had simply walked away from it, careless. It was very hard to keep everything sorted properly in my mind. I knew that Thomas, right here before me, should drive out all other thoughts as unimportant, but I was simply too amazed for that still.

And yet it seemed as though the sight of him should work upon me in some other way, bring me into the present and set my grief before me. His face didn't look like any Thomas that I had ever seen before, even Thomas sleeping. His face looked as if Thomas was absent and the absence was filled with something new, which I speculated must be pain. I thought that if the Thomas I knew were present, then he would draw me out of my amazement, but then if the Thomas I knew were present, I wouldn't be so amazed in the first place. I put my hands to my head and felt it. I thought it must be feeling feverish from the thoughts that beset me, but it felt cool enough. He turned his head slowly this way and then that way, and gave out a noise. I did what Louisa had told me, which was to wring out a cloth in an infusion of witch hazel and place it over his forehead. He continue to turn this way and that, and strange thoughts continued to beset me. I said, ”Thomas! Thomas!” but he made no answer, and my voice seemed loud in the room, and so I fell silent again.

I sat there for a long time, deep enough into the night for the candle to gutter and expire. I regarded my husband without, I thought, taking him in. I did lie down on the bed, but then Thomas began turning his head back and forth again, as if in discomfort and pain, and so I got off the bed, for fear of making him worse. After that, I paced about the room for a while, looking out the little window to the dark street. Louisa had gotten a pane of gla.s.s somewhere. All of that-the troubles with the Missourians, the sacking of Lawrence, the Old Brown question-all of that had led to this, but this seemed such an astonis.h.i.+ng thing for that to have led to! Thomas stopped turning his head back and forth and lay still. I couldn't see him very well in the dim light, so I took one of his hands in both of mine, and filled with the conviction that he was about to pa.s.s on, I said, ”Don't be afraid, Thomas.” I thought, A sojourn in K.T. ought to prepare the soul for any other journey whatsoever. Sometime after that, he did pa.s.s on, and sometime after that-I don't know how long-I realized it. I thought that if I had known him better, perhaps, or found a way to be more married to him in the past ten months, I would have known the very moment. I was sorry I had failed in that.

I kissed his lips, cheeks, eyes, and forehead, and drew his hands out from under the covers, and placed them in the proper position. His eyes were closed. There was little to do except adjust his bed so that he made a neat picture, then sit down and wait for Louisa to wake up. Now I was a new person, one I had never desired or expected to be.

BOOK TWO.

CHAPTER 18.

I Reconnoiter.

IN THE TWO DAYS BETWEEN Thomas's death and his funeral, the news of the attack upon us rolled around Lawrence like ball lightning, setting the country aflame with indignation, or so I was told. Those around me seemed not so much indignant as stunned, and wondered why. I was stunned myself and wondered why. Hadn't we talked of something like this for months? Didn't we know something like this was always a possibility? Hadn't others been killed-Barbour, Dow, Captain Brown? I felt that we should not be stunned, and yet we were. It was a conundrum. Mostly, too, I wanted Frank to come back, or be found and brought home. If the news brought him, then that would be one good thing, the only good thing. I have noticed over the years that every tragedy has about it some good thing: At least it didn't happen in the winter, when it was so cold; at least we had ten months together; at least, at least. I thought, At least Frank may show up. But Frank did not show up, and then, thinking that he was staying away out of caprice or thoughtlessness, I got vexed with him and decided to put him out of my mind. When I confided these thoughts to Louisa, she told me, soothingly, not to be so hasty, but I was hasty, and I was angry with him.

[image]But children can be very early taught, that their happiness, both now and hereafter, depends on the formation of habits of submission, self-denial, and benevolence. -p. 224 Thomas's funeral reminded me of my father's funeral only by contrast. Where the one had been obscure and even just, the other was wildly unjust and the occasion of much public clamor. Charles and Louisa and some other citizens of Lawrence urged me to go all the way and have a military ceremony, as they had done for Barbour, who was killed in the Wakarusa War in December. Were we not in battle, were we not engaged in an undeclared war with the Missourians, of which Thomas was a casualty? But that didn't suit Thomas, I thought, whose approach to every event in K.T. had been cautious and peace-loving. He was most comfortable and happy in his black New England clothes, reading a book of poetry by the light of our evening candle. And so it wasn't a military funeral, but it was a martial one, and a martyr's one, and highly arousing to the swarms who attended. The procession that followed his coffin to the grave was a half mile long, and everyone carried arms. It didn't matter at all that I couldn't supply enough information about our a.s.sailants to even begin to know who they were; the funeral was all about vows of revenge, repayment, and retribution for a crime that should never have been committed, a vile act of b.e.s.t.i.a.l cruelty that was simultaneously beyond the human pale and perfectly typical of the Missourians. Mrs. Bush walked along with me at the front of the procession and held my arm to comfort me. ”Oh, my dear,” she said in her kindest voice, ”I knew that something like this would certainly happen. I knew it a year ago when we first set out for K.T. Those people-well, you hardly want to call them people-were fulminating and cheating at elections and vowing revenge for ills they had not suffered, and of course it had to lead to something like this, but I always wonder, why this one? Why does the Lord pick this one rather than that one? Why Thomas and not Mr. Bush? Just last night, Mr. Bush declared that it should have been him if it had to be someone, as he's lived a long life and done many things, and you and Thomas are just starting, were just starting. We've been along that road time and time again. I don't know, my dear, we never know, but I am just so heartily sorry.”

The consensus of the group around the grave, most of whom were of a religious turn of mind, as most people are, was that the Lord would provide for Thomas, and handsomely, but that they would take care of the Missourians and a.s.sure them their just deserts.

The troubling question was, who would provide for me? For the second time in a year, I found myself the subject of this discussion: What would I do, how would I support myself? At least I had no children, as some of the other K.T. widows had. I will hasten to say that I did not know the answers to these questions myself. What we had had was our crop, our stove, our claim, our youth, energy, and hard work. None of these had much value, especially the claim. Claims had stopped rising in price in the winter and had even begun to decline. The wonders of 1855, where a man bought a bit of land for a hundred dollars and sold it for five hundred, had ceased. In 1856, he was lucky to get seventy-five for it, or fifty. Immigrants from the east weren't so desperate any longer, were choosy. And they were leery of Lawrence. It was as if the southerners and we ourselves had conspired to frighten the easterners away. You had to have convictions to live in Lawrence. The folks in Lawrence declared this with pride, but to most Americans, this was more of an accusation than a compliment.

Mr. James and two other men went and got the wagon and disposed of Jeremiah's remains. In fact, the prairie was dotted with the bones of oxen, mules, and horses that fell by the wayside. Jeremiah, so fast and so beautiful, had become one of these. Charles took Louisa and me out to the claim in one of his wagons. We pa.s.sed the spot where the killings had happened, or must have, but though I watched for it, I couldn't recognize it for sure. It was just a stretch of prairie, after all. We gathered my things and Thomas's things. I gave most of Thomas's clothes to Charles, and we brought the stove back, too. I sold that to Mrs. Lacey for ten dollars. Mr. Bush said that if the crop came in in August, then he would give me fifty dollars for that.

My sisters wrote their condolences but didn't suggest, right then, that I return to Quincy (I suppose they weren't ready for that so suddenly). Harriet urged me to send Frank back, ”since thinking of the two of you alone out there in that G.o.d-forsaken place simply gives me a such a turn I can't think about it.” Thomas's father also wrote me by return post after receiving my letter detailing the murder. He lamented the news, which had prostrated Thomas's mother. He and his other sons had never quite understood Thomas's desire to travel, and they had felt that the Ma.s.sachusetts Emigrant Aid Company would surely take better care of these boys than it seemed they had done. While the elder Mr. Newton shared most of Thomas's beliefs, and adhered to them still, he had felt a year before that the emigrants were on a fools' errand, which opinion this event had now shown to be true, perhaps, though Mr. Newton also felt that there were events afoot in the United States that were unprecedented. At any rate, as their daughter-in-law-though they had never yet met me, they felt they knew me through my notes to them (Thomas had written six letters and I had appended messages on five of these)-I was welcome in their home, and they knew a place would happily be made for me in their town. Mrs. Bush was partial to this plan, as the idea of living in Medford, civilized and orderly Medford, was akin to the idea of living in paradise to her.

”You just don't know what it's like there!” she urged. ”The town is so clean and neat, and the ladies are so good to one another! Sometimes I think that I would gladly pa.s.s on if I could just take afternoon tea one more time in my old home! It would be a winter afternoon, and Mr. Bush would have hitched our pony to the sleigh, and I would drive over there myself and sit by the fire with my friends Elizabeth and Katherine Keys and my cousin Lucy, who is very dear to me, and we would eat Elizabeth's little cakes as the darkness closed in, and then Mr. Bush would appear, all snowy from his walk, and we would drive home in the darkness to a nice chowder by the fire.... Oh, my dear, you can't imagine, such bliss! You never mind the wind in Ma.s.sachusetts, even in the winter. It stays outside, for goodness' sake, where it belongs! Oh, it hurts me to think about it, a little. You surely must take them up on this!”

Louisa wanted me to stay in K.T. She didn't say so, but I knew she was a.s.sessing which of the many single men who were about might be the likeliest prospect. She didn't have to say much-we both knew that many of the niceties of mourning for folks in the States disappeared fairly quickly in K.T. If it was hard for a man to be without a wife, it was all the harder for a woman to be without a husband, especially as most folks were so far from their families. And there were fewer women than men. A twenty-one-year-old with a claim of her own and no children was, well, not quite so attractive as the twenty-seven-year-old woman of property and experience Louisa herself had been only six months before, but the answer to my dilemma was there for all to see, and, as I had reflected so many times before, sentiment was deadly in K.T. When I said to Louisa, ”But I don't know Thomas well enough yet for that,” she could not grasp my meaning.

Thomas remained the great enigma, all the more now that he offered no additional clues. To discover who he was, why I married him, what that meant, I had to sift through the clues I already had, teasing out others that might be lurking there. As always-even more than always-other people interfered. I had never had enough time alone with him, and now had even less alone with my thoughts of him, since everyone wanted to do me the kindness of keeping me company, especially the kindness of talking about him and his virtues: He was such a thoughtful, calm man, very judicious and educated. Everyone looked up to Thomas, and so forth. More than one girl in the Emigrant Aid Company had set her cap for him. And a good husband, thoughtful and solicitous. Not every man in the world had to be the most enterprising. There was plenty of room for more deliberative types, like Thomas. And reserve was certainly a virtue, too. I listened to these remarks, but all they did was confuse me. They made a construction around the figure of Thomas that I was trying to get at, and I found myself very irritated but having to smile, anyway, and express appreciation of such kind thoughts.

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 languis.h.i.+ng: 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 survivors.h.i.+p.

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 of 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 pa.s.sing. 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 f.e.c.kless of you, Lydia. You simply cannot be f.e.c.kless in K.T. and expect even to live! K.T. demands boldness and energy. We have chosen an unforgiving home.”