The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (17 page)

And then they would come over to this cabin, and they would see what we had plastered on our walls, and they would burn it to the ground. And if my husband hadn’t been shot but was just their prisoner, they would shoot him for treason to the Territory of Kansas, under the new laws, and possibly me, too (I didn’t know how the laws applied to women). And perhaps Frank would get himself in trouble, though it was obvious that he was only a boy, but what did they care about that?

I began to shiver in the chill night air, convinced I was already a widow. Below me, on the floor, Frank stirred. I shivered harder and pondered the thought of my burying my husband in Kansas. It was unbearable....

Then I heard Jeremiah trot into the yard again. Thomas dismounted. The horse trotted into his pen. A few minutes later, the door opened and closed, and I knew Thomas was in the room.

Suddenly ashamed of my fears, I tried to make my voice sound sleepy. "Are you—"

"We threw them into the river," whispered Thomas. "We tied them to a couple of logs and sent them down the river."

"All five of them?"

"There were only two, the old man and one of the sons. The others had gone for reinforcements, because they didn’t think we’d come back till tomorrow. Daniel James thought that would happen. That’s why we went back tonight."

"Where are they now?"

"James and Holmes fished them out of the river about a mile down. They’re keeping them in the woods for the rest of the night, then marching them back to Missouri in the morning. Bisket and I are to stay here and watch out if anyone else comes. Jenkins decided to sell the hay house and his town lots and move out here for the winter, just to be on the scene." I couldn’t help shivering inside my quilt. It was a cold night. Thomas, when he came into the cabin and subsequently got into our bed, carried an extra dimension of cold with him, and I didn’t envy the men who’d gone into the river. But I was elated to see my husband and to know that our side had suffered no losses. And the Missourians with their slave woman had been run off. Some festering that had promised to disturb us was now averted. Thomas, himself elated and chilled with his adventure, matched my gladness at his return with his own.

CHAPTER 12

I Am Swept Up by Events

A third method, is, for a woman deliberately to calculate on having her best-arranged plans interfered with, very often; and to be in such a state of preparation, that the evil will not come unawares.—p. 151

IN THE FEW DAY AFTER the Missourians were driven off, there was plenty of talk about what should be done with their property. What had been done with one item of it was a mystery, though— no one knew what had become of the bondwoman who’d run out of the cabin when the Smithson boy fired through the window. Thomas said that she had not been in evidence; though he had privately planned as they rode through the darkness to offer her her freedom, events had driven the thought out of his mind, and he’d not sought after her in the night. Each of the men had a theory—either she’d already been taken back to Missouri before they arrived, or she sensed what was in the wind after they came, and she went off on her own account, or she’d hidden out in the woods and was possibly still there. Whether they should have liberated her had they found her was a matter of rather hot debate—more tempers flared over this question than over any other element of the encounter. Thomas, Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Smithson were all for giving her her freedom and doing so openly—"challenging Satan," said Mr. Holmes; "acting according to principle," said Thomas; "showing the bunch of them," said Mr. Smithson. Mr. Bisket came down much on the other side and got quite exercised over it, saying, "Freeing that woman would be adding in something extra to the whole business! We an’t disputing them having a slave woman right this minute. Right this minute we’re disputing their claim. My view is, you follow out your disputes one at a time—"

Mr. Smithson exclaimed, "You sound just like a lawyer, Bisket, drumming up business. If you got ’em on the run, then you make ’em run as fast as they can. You don’t make ’em trot for one thing and run for the other!"

Everyone laughed. Mr. Bisket got red in the face. "They can’t live with us if they think we’re going to steal their slaves every time they turn their backs."

"They can’t live with us," said Mr. Holmes. "We can’t live with them. We can’t look upon them holding bondmen without going blind to the will of the Lord, nor can we live beside them undirtied by their filth. We have our souls to think of as well as theirs and the souls of their slaves."

"There an’t one person in ten here in K.T.," said Mr. Bisket, "who thinks like you do, Holmes, and eight of the nine who don’t would like to kill you for that sort of talk. I think if we keep our mouths shut, those slaves’ll disappear from here soon enough. Can’t do anything with them in K.T. They don’t grow cotton here."

"But," said Thomas, "they grow hemp right over in Missouri, and tobacco, too. Slaves do that work."

Mr. Bush said, "I give way to no man in my aversion to slavery and the slave power. Eli Thayer is a personal friend of mine, and I feel no less strongly than he does about it. But even so, I hesitate to free a bondman I’ve never met from an owner I don’t know, and send him or her off to a life she may not understand or want. Do we come upon a woman in the night, wrench her from sleep, tell her she’s free, and send her packing? Where does she go? Who are her friends? What funds does she have? I ask myself if I’m prepared to guarantee her for a week or two, to send her to friends. If I’m not, then I’d better not meddle."

I said, "You might have asked the woman what she wanted to do."

All the men turned and looked at me. This remark put a stop to the conversation. All in all, I thought, it was no doubt better that the woman had been gone. Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew about what to do with its sour fruit.

There was less discussion, let me say none, about what should be done with the Missourians’ cabin. The Jenkinses moved into it within a few days and did just as we had, though with a degree more satisfaction—they papered over the log-and-mud walls with sheets of the treasonous Liberator. I was pleased to have Mrs. Jenkins and Susannah in the neighborhood, and they immediately became friends with Mrs. James, who was a sweet lady and, Susannah said, not at all like her husband. That the Jenkinses’ new cabin was a considerable improvement over their old one seemed to render them extremely forgiving. Now there was a woman or two every half mile, or even closer. It made the country seem settled and gave our windy cabins a cozy feel.

I think we all thought we were settled now, that we had passed through a few trials, done some unpleasant but necessary deeds, and established ourselves. Certainly, Thomas and Frank and I felt that way. In the course of our labors, there was much visiting back and forth, sharing tasks, and discussing every little thing.

Susannah, who now went four or five days between shaking, told me that she liked to come to our cabin above all, and tried to do so every day or two, always bringing along her own bit of tea and a few corncakes, and her own cup and spoon. "You know," she said, "I do like being out here with Mama and Papa, and the cabin is ever so much nicer than the hay house is, but I wonder how my husband is to find me out here. Mama and Papa discussed it the whole night before we came, standing outside the hay house and trying to keep me from hearing." It was true that their place was a little more out of the way than ours, and they had fewer passing visitors.

I said, "The whole night?"

"Well, long enough for the subject to become tedious even to me. But they never disagree, you know. When they talk about something, first Papa says one thing, then Mama says another, then Papa says what Mama just said, and Mama says what Papa just said. In this case, Papa said that we couldn’t very well leave the cabin empty, and Mama said that a young, well-grown girl had to be in the way of traffic, not out on the prairie, and then they each said what the other said, and then Papa said, ’Well, what about Mr. Bisket?’ and Mama told him the story about Mr. Bisket."

"What is the story about Mr. Bisket?"

"Mr. Bisket courted me for two days some weeks ago."

"He did?"

"I suppose so, or maybe he thought so. He came to the hay house and sat beside me, and he asked if I would like to hear a song, and I said that I would, and so he sang ’Camptown Races,’ and then he asked if I would like to hear another, and I said I would, and he sang one I didn’t know, and then some men came in and wanted to talk about Jim Lane, and I suppose that it wasn’t very nice talk, because Papa said they should take their talk elsewhere, and so they did, and Mr. Bisket went with them. But he came back the next day and he sang three more songs—one of them was ’Camp town Races’ again. But you know, I didn’t have a thing to say to him. I’ve just known Mr. Bisket for such a long time, since I was ten and he was fourteen, and I thought it very hard that I should come all this way and after all settle for Charles Bisket, when Mama says there must be four men for every woman in K.T. Mr. Bisket wasn’t considered very enterprising back in Massachusetts. Not nearly so respectable as Mr. Newton."

Just then, Thomas and Frank came in for their own tea, and our conversation turned to other topics, namely the Jameses. Susannah had stopped there the day before and discovered that Mrs. James’s cow had disappeared. "And you know," she said, "she couldn’t go after it as she might have, because she is in such a condition, and she would have had to carry the boy, and even though he’s not very large, well, he is four, and she isn’t very large herself I told her she might have left the boy off with us, but of course she feels uncomfortable, and so they lost their little cow. She was utterly dejected, and nothing I could do would cheer her up."

"Cow ken git to Missouri from here," put in Frank, "if it keeps runnin’." This was true. I heard of two or three lost cows being found in Missouri, or so it was said. After Frank and Thomas went out, and Susannah and I were clearing up the cups, she said, "I didn’t want to say this in front of the others, but Mr. James was fit to be tied when he found out the cow was gone. It made me want to leave right there, but I didn’t dare look like I was running away. He has the devil of a temper."

"Did he abuse her in front of you?"

"Why, no, and she’s so pretty that you wonder how he ever could, but when he came in, the boy exclaimed, ’Don’t tell Papa about our little cow, don’t tell him!’ and ran and hid in the bed! And then Mrs. James did tell, and he flew out of the house in a rage and didn’t come back while I was there, but she said to me in a low voice, ’He would never hurt us. He has terrible passions, but he would never hurt us. Don’t think that he would!’ Well, after that I left."

I shook my head, not knowing what to say, then changed the subject. I was torn, for while I didn’t care to be seen as gossiping about my own husband, I knew that Susannah had known him longer than I had, perhaps considerably longer. I hazarded, "Well, if you’ve known Charles Bisket since you were ten, when did you meet Thomas?"

"Oh, well. Mr. Newton." She glanced out the open door, then looked into my face, then settled her hands on her hips. "He’s not an old friend of ours, like Mr. Bisket. Papa and old Mr. Bisket were schoolboys together, you know. But old Mr. Newton has tremendous means. He makes sails for all the ships, and his father did it before him. They are just the sort of people who would consider someone like Mr. Newton a disappointment to them."

"They do?"

"Well, I shouldn’t speak so openly to his own wife, but they are deathly proud, those Newtons. And the brothers are worse than the father, Mama says, but I don’t know about that. The oldest brother is as old as Papa, and the father has run that factory since 1800, if that’s possible." She gave me a look, half sheepish and half impish. "Mrs. Bush said, before we left Massachusetts, ’Thomas Newton is only going with us because he knows his papa will never pass on.’ Though they are great abolitionists, too. Old Mr. Newton is very tall, you know. A head taller than your Mr. Newton."

And Thomas was a bit taller than I, so his father was possibly the tallest man I had ever heard of. I said, "A head taller?"

"At least. He’s well known for it. Mama always said it was a blessing they had no sisters—" But then she looked at me and blushed.

I said, "Thomas hardly ever speaks of his relations. It makes me wonder if there’s ill feeling."

"I don’t think so. You could ask Mama. But everyone is always wondering what Mr. Newton thinks. It’s quite a feature of our group. They chose him to bring over those rifles because they thought he was the least likely to divulge the information. Or any information of any kind."

We couldn’t gossip away the afternoon, because Susannah had duties at home. I saw, though, that there was much to be learned, and I was eager to learn it.

Thomas, Frank, and I made pleasant companions, and I didn’t at all mind Frank’s presence—for you had to call it that, even though the boy was perennially off doing something. Once he and Thomas had built him a lean-to on the side of the cabin and a little bed to put in it, we weren’t always sure where he was. He thought nothing of running off to Lawrence, for example. Literally running. Thomas and I could walk to Lawrence, if the ground was hard, in half a morning. On Jeremiah it was an easy hour. Some days, Frank would go off to Lawrence before breakfast and come back before supper, his pockets full of bits of things he had found and was keeping to trade, or of pennies and dimes he had gotten through his trades. One night, he said, "I an’t never seen such a place for folks dropping stuff."

"Haven’t ever seen," said Thomas.

"I’ll be goin’ along, an’t nobody around anywhere, and here I see a saucer buried in the grass. I picked one up yesterday, all painted with violets and all, gold rim, and it said ’Hampton’ on the bottom. Not a single chip, but no cup, neither. And this morning I got me a perfectly good boot, almost new, hardly even broken in yet. Just sittin’ there. Folks in town is just as bad."

"Are just as bad," I said.

"You just got to keep your eyes on the ground. I got me a dollar between today and yesterday. Mr. Stearns give me two bits for that boot, ’cause he said, ’Someday a one-legged fella’s gonna walk into this store looking for a boot, and if it’s the left leg he’s lost, well, then, I’ll fix him right up.’ "

But for Thomas and me, Lawrence seemed a long way off. We didn’t leave the claim twice in a week, except to go to a neighbor cabin. And it wasn’t only that our work at home filled our days; it was also that we were disinclined to be swept up in the talk and upsets of town. It was easier to deepen our well with a shovel and a bucket and a rope and a pulley, wet and shivering, than it was to know what to think with every new bit about the depredations of the Missourians. Frankly, we considered the Missourians less important to our future well-being than the well. Now that our little area was more thickly settled by our friends, I had to go farther afield for game, and I had to bring more home, too, because I knew that what we weren’t sharing now (and we were sharing some) we would be sharing later. It was a source of wonder to the New Englanders that Frank and I were such successful meat gatherers, and they put this down to our western nature. Mrs. Holmes, for example, asked me if Quincy was in Kentucky, and when I said no, it was in Illinois, she guessed that such places were all the same in the end, weren’t they, and did we have animal skins stretched over the outer walls of our house in Quincy, and did my brother-in-law the farmer have to carry his rifle into the fields with him to frighten off the red Indians? But she thanked me anyway for the meat and told me I would be repaid in heaven, as if she had a personal account there. Well, I didn’t like her, I admit it.