Part 25 (1/2)

On the evening of the thirteenth of August, however, two fellows came galloping over the lawn up to the house just at suppertime, and Papa ran out to meet them, while Helen, who had been telling us a story of some biscuits she had been learning to make that afternoon, sat staring at me, her mouth open, her eyes wide, and her hand pressed to her throat. We couldn't help it-we sat there still as rocks, listening for the voices on the lawn to rise above a rumble. They did not. Soon enough, the hors.e.m.e.n galloped away and Papa returned to the table, a smile of rea.s.surance so fixed on his face that it didn't rea.s.sure at all. He was clearly alarmed and could hardly prevent himself from hopping about. Nevertheless, he made for his seat, sat down in it, and darted his fork at his baked apple. But it was no use, and he threw down the utensil and stared at Helen for a second before saying, 'Jim Lane has raised an army in Lawrence and attacked Fort Franklin. There was a great deal of shooting, and then they set the place afire! Our gallant men managed to defend themselves without a loss, but then the devil Lane rounded up the postmaster and threatened to hang him, until his wife begged for his life. I understand that it was only her great beauty and the devil Lane's susceptibility to the fair s.e.x that preserved the man, if you'll pardon my referring to such things, my dear.”

This had the ring of truth about it, but I said nothing, only stared at my plate. I thought all at once of Frank, who could easily have joined up with Lane, and was filled with dread.

Papa went on. ”Only property has been lost, but the Kansas criminals have made a serious vow. I hesitate to mention it to you, my dear. We shall see.”

”They're coming here!” cried Helen.

”Now, Helen-”

”They are! I can see it in your face!”

”Not right here, darling, not to Day's End-”

”What's to stop them?”

Jim Lane's foolishness, I thought, but of course I didn't open my mouth.

”It's seventy miles or more between here and there. We're back from the border a good ways. Senator Atchison won't allow it. The President-”

”Oh, they are demons! I wish they were dead. I-”

”Helen, my dear, calm yourself. Of course I am rattled a bit by the news, but I don't expect to be personally affected. Fort Franklin is right beside Lawrence, and Lawrence is days away. This is merely an example of the growing lawlessness of-”

”Oh, Papa! Oh, Papa!”

Now Papa's voice developed some steel, and he said, ”Helen! I must insist that you calm yourself!” He leaned toward her and spoke almost in a whisper. ”Don't you realize what a temptation this presents to the servants? If they were to think, however wrongly, that these abolitionist types are nearby, they would give in to temptation and try to get to them! They would think that they could leave us and find support and ease for the rest of their lives. They have childlike fantasies that will lead some of them astray. You, my dear, must fortify yourself and dissemble your fear, because they a.s.sume that you know something and that the more afraid you are, the closer the abolitionists are to the house. Helen! Do you understand me?”

”Yes, Papa.” But her voice trembled.

”Now look at Louisa, here. She is far calmer and more realistic about this news. My dear, I wish you would strive to emulate Louisa. If you are going to have your own establishment, your husband will rely on you to always remain collected and even in your responses to daily trials. You cannot live otherwise!” In fact, I was far from composed but instead besieged with thoughts of Frank. I was stiff with anxiety.

Helen cast me a look, took some deep breaths, and made herself eat two bites of her baked apple. I smiled at Papa as best I could, more insensible than imperturbable, and attempted to keep on eating, too. But Papa was more agitated than he let on, and was soon galloping away on his horse to find out more. I spent the rest of the evening trying to avoid imagining Frank and Louisa and Charles and the others and trying to present Helen with an example of composure, reading, sewing, listening to her play the piano, until I finally took her into my bed once again and brushed her hair until we were, if not calm, then tired enough to sleep. After that, I lay awake myself, thinking of the pistol under the bed, until Papa and some of his friends rode up. I fell asleep to the drumming of their earnest voices. Helen thought I was her protector, but I knew that she was mine.

I held no affection for Franklin-Franklin was a wretched Ruffian town that Papa and Helen would deplore if ever they saw it-but the next day I said nothing at all as they mourned its (miserable) post office and its (crude) hotel, as well as its (regrettably unshot) citizenry. I even asked Papa where Franklin was and tried to maintain a demeanor of ignorant but well-meaning concern. What, I said, had Papa heard about this fellow Jim Lane?

He had begun, Papa said, as merely a scamp, but the influence of the abolitionists had transformed him into a bloodthirsty charlatan and brute.

Had Papa ever seen the fellow?

Certainly not-he was not curious about such men-but others had seen him. He affected wild clothes, and his eyes blazed with iniquity, more so every day. The senators and congressmen who had seen him in Was.h.i.+ngton had told Atchison that if this was a fair type of ”Free-Soiler,” then by all means should the Union be preserved from them!

”Helen mentioned this man Robinson?”

”Ahh. Now, Robinson is a smooth one. Looks normal, respectable, even. Works carefully and slowly, said to be in thrall to his wife, who is even more calculating than he is himself.” Papa shook his head. ”These are the rumors, of course. I don't put much stock in rumor myself.”

I nodded at the wisdom of this course.

The next day, there were even more alarms. It began in midmorning- the first cool morning we'd had. Helen had made up her mind that she was going to make an oilcloth for the back parlor, and Papa had brought her a sheet of canvas from town. This she had unrolled in the hallway, and she was laying lavender iris blossoms around the borders by means of a stencil. She had also made a stencil for the leaves, and she had a pot of green paint, too. She was just explaining to me how neat and colorful this oilcloth would make the back parlor look after she had impregnated it with enough coats of sh.e.l.lac, when a horse, once again, galloped up the front lawn to the porch. Papa nipped out of his library, where he had been working at some papers, scooted around us where we were kneeling over the canvas, and hurried out the front door, being careful to close it even in his rush. Helen sat up and looked out, then rose up and went over to the window, which was open, and listened. I began to admonish her about eavesdropping, but she suddenly exclaimed, ”Oh, they're at it again!” and ran into the kitchen. Moments later, the messenger galloped away, and Papa entered, opening and closing the door with considerable care. He looked at me where I was kneeling between the two pots of paint, and he said, ”Where's Helen?”

”She went into the kitchen.”

”Good. She's not been raised in a manner that has prepared her for the sorts of perils we now have to fear. I regret that, but who was to know? Until last year, we lived in peace here, all of a like mind, expecting only to go on in perpetuity, like the yearly round of the seasons and the daily round of the sun.” He sighed. ”Ah, well. My dear Mrs. Bisket, I regret to inform you that there is another attack being perpetrated by the devil Lane even as we speak. Rather more in our direction, though still in Kansas.”

”Mercy me! Where?” I exclaimed. I thought of Frank at once, with dread.

”They are marching. Or, they were marching as of last night. No one is quite sure to where, but we haven't the forces to turn them. They may sweep all before them! One thing is clear: Lane proposes to force a military solution to a political conflict, and we will have to answer him in kind.”

We stared at one another, and then I slowly stood up, wiping my hands on a rag. Papa took my large hand between his two small ones and said in a dramatic voice, ”Much might be asked of me, Mrs. Bisket. My older daughters are far away, and I have only my Helen, the most delicate flower of the three. I dare not commend her to servants, but I feel that I may commend her to you. Your coming here in this time of uncertainty has a fortuity to it that I cannot ignore, though I'm not a superst.i.tious man. At the very least, I shall be away some of the time for the next period. Delia and Lorna know perfectly well how to run the house, and Malachi and Ike can take care of the farm. They love us and depend on us, and we upon them; that is the virtue of our inst.i.tution. But to you I surrender my fairest and most precious possession, my Helen. I ask you to keep her safe and occupied! Should something untoward happen to me, then I ask you to take her into the custody of Bella, in Saint Louis, who has a fine establishment there. I feel that I may depend upon you!”

”Why?” I said, thinking distractedly of Frank still.

”Because you have a plain, honest look about you, which is more pleasing to a loving father than all the beauty in the world.”

In short, I looked like a governess or a schoolmistress, and so could be relied upon to act like one.

Papa said, ”Go to her, please!” And then he turned and went out.

I found Helen in the kitchen, crying by the stove, where Delia was brining some pickles, and not long after, Papa and one of the Negroes, whom I didn't recognize, galloped away. From time to time, Delia stroked Helen on her yellow hair, and then Lorna came in, carrying a large basket of white was.h.i.+ng that she'd been doing over a fire in the yard. Her face was dark and steamy, and clearly her temper was short. She glanced at Helen and said, ”De trouble of de world ain' touched you yet, so why you bawlin'?”

”I-” But remembering, I think, what her father had said to her two nights before, Helen simply wiped her tears away and sat up.

Now Delia spoke in a low voice. ”Men is rus.h.i.+n' 'round wid guns and thangs. n.o.body knows what gone happen, Lorna. You done got ta be a hard woman.”

”Let's see what dey is to carry on about before we carries on, dat's what I say.”

”You kin be a hard woman in good times, and you kin be a hard woman in bad times, and you always got a reason to be a hard woman, but it don' do you no good in the end. Dat's what I say,” said Delia. Then she turned to Helen and said, ”You eat some biscuit wid b.u.t.ter and honey on it, child, and you be better prepared fo' what's ta come.” Then she made us places at the deal table where she had been working on the pickles and gave us each a plate. Lorna sniffed and went out.

Well, Jim Lane and his army got to Fort Saunders, sure enough, and they mounted an attack and went in shooting, but as everyone knows, they discovered rather soon (not right away, though) that the fort was undefended, unoccupied by a single soul. They then left a skeleton force to maintain Free State control of the place, and then Lane took some of the men and went off to Nebraska. Thus he was not even present when an actual engagement happened to take place the next day. Of course, I heard nothing of Frank, but the intelligence seemed to be that there were no casualties. I took solace in that.

There was a man, Sam Walker, who had a claim right outside Lawrence, and also a ruffian named t.i.tus, who was a great bully, much hated by the Free Staters, because he was always bragging and making threats. As I was able to piece the story together in the days to follow, from what I heard from Papa and some of his friends (who considered t.i.tus a rough enough fellow, but right-thinking, and who spoke of Sam Walker as one of the criminal leaders whose traitorous perfidy to the Const.i.tution put him outside the pale of civilization), Sam Walker and his men were heading north toward Topeka, looking for a fight, and t.i.tus and his men were heading east, likewise looking for a fight, when they happened upon one another in the dark and skirmished in some woods. After the skirmish, in which no one was badly hurt, Sam Walker went to his claim, which wasn't far off. He woke up later in the morning to the sound of pounding on his cabin door, and when he opened it, a man he had never seen before declared that he had t.i.tus's wife and two children with him on the Lecompton- Westport stage (”Oh, the cruelty of it,” harangued Papa. ”So typical of them!”) and that if Sam Walker wanted t.i.tus, he'd better do something about it now. So Walker and his men took over the prisoners and held them until a runner could get to Lawrence and summon the six-pound cannon they had there. Fifty hors.e.m.e.n then gathered near t.i.tus's place (which Papa insisted upon calling ”Fort t.i.tus”) and attacked at dawn on the morning of August 16. A Free-Soiler was killed, then the cannon leveled a wall of one of the buildings, and then t.i.tus surrendered. When Walker went in, he saw a printed handbill hanging on the wall, advertising a five-hundred-dollar reward for his own head, to be paid by t.i.tus! Then, according to Papa's reports, there was a great deal of fighting among the Free-Soilers about whether to kill the gallant t.i.tus, but they hadn't the manhood to do it, and so he and some of his cronies (”gallant allies,” said Papa) were carted off to Lawrence and imprisoned. A mob of Lawrenceites tried to get to him and hang him, but Walker or someone managed to preserve him, saying that war must be carried out by rule, and what we had here was a war. Papa agreed. All of Papa's friends agreed. What had been, on the one hand, a problem of governing and, on the other, a fight was now clearly rising up the scale and would soon be, if it wasn't already, an actual war. The hardest piece of all this intelligence, for me, was when Papa declared that the prisoners in Lecompton-that is, Governor Robinson and his a.s.sociates-were to be summarily hung in retaliation for all of this. I will say that I felt my face go white and my body go cold when he said it, but I was so used to dissembling by now that I only smiled and said, ”Surely that couldn't be according to the law,” and then Papa said, ”What law is there in Kansas?” and then it turned out not to be true. Those prisoners remained where they were, and other prisoners, taken in all of these skirmishes, were exchanged, and so hostilities, at least around Lawrence, ceased for the time being. Soon there were other rumors: Proslave households around Tec.u.mseh were attacked and all their goods stolen and taken to Topeka, where the Free Staters divided them up and took them home. (Papa believed this one, but I didn't.) A man in Leavenworth made a bet that he could scalp an abolitionist before sundown, and won it. (I believed this, but Papa said he didn't think any southerner could do such a thing. I kept my beliefs to myself; Papa did not. Helen believed every bad thing she heard.) Many names came up, but Frank's wasn't among them, nor Charles's nor any other that I knew. That was my only comfort.

I summarize these events because at the time they were extraordinarily hard to understand, what with the comings and goings of Papa and his friends, the dislocations of the housekeeping and farming at Day's End Plantation, and my own confusions and frights, not to mention Helen's. I could not help worrying about Louisa and Charles and the Bushes and my other friends in Lawrence, especially as Louisa was approaching her time, and there was no telling what the Missourians were planning to do to Lawrence should Lane be unable to defend the town (and he was surely unable to defend the town). In Papa's normally neat and orderly house, the unfinished canvas lay on the hall floor for three days before Lorna and I rolled it up and set it off to the side. The pots of paint and brushes somehow got out onto the porch railing, where they were still sitting, untouched, when I left Day's End Plantation for good, some time later. For me, these things were the emblem of all the order that ended then and all the disorder that began.

One of these days, toward supper, Helen and I were up in her room, sorting through her gowns, as she had decided that she would make do with what she had for the winter and not ask Papa for anything luxurious until, should it happen, she was ready to put together her wedding clothes. Minna's wedding, to take place in October, had come in for much discussion, also, and Helen was trying to be sweet and judicious at the same time. ”I don't think,” she said, ”that Minna really understands what we are having to put up with.”

”Have you written to her?”

”Not in a week.”

”Then how could she understand? The letter you read me about the linens was written two weeks ago or more.”

”Is nothing going on in Lexington? They're right on the river. They must know more than we do, even.”

”Has your papa written anything to her?”

”Papa is very indulgent of Minna, far more than of me, if you must know the truth. It's because she's, well, plain. He feels sorry for her.”