The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (10 page)

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 butter 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. Nobody 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 constitution—"

"It’s not a botch, Helen, it’s a crime!" said Mrs. Jenkins. She turned to me. "My dear, it is a constitution 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 constitution 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 Massachusetts 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," asserted 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 nobody 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.

Susannah blushed, and Mr. Bisket looked at his shoes. Thomas and I exchanged a quizzical glance. After a moment, Mrs. Jenkins said, "Mercy me, you must be tired! I do so wish I could show you a nice chamber with windows and a soft bed! My mother’s house in Ipswich has five bed-chambers! Goodness, I dream about that house as if it were heaven itself! There’s a fireplace in every room." She shook her head. "My mother has such neat ways. It’s almost a failing with her. I don’t know what she’d think of K.T."

The only possible arrangement, it turned out, was to put up a curtain across the one room of the leaning house and to have the men on one side and the ladies on the other.

The next day, all the men returned from Big Spring. In addition to Mr. Bush—a little man, smaller than his wife, but with bright, terrier eyes and a cheerful manner—and Mr. Jenkins, who had white hair and a white beard and, beneath his irate manner, an air of resignation, there were four other men, all single: Mr. Smithson, his son, his brother, and Mr. Bush’s nephew, Roger Lacey, who, Susannah told me, had a wife and three children back in Massachusetts, waiting to come out. "But," she whispered, for she was a great whisperer and confider, "he won’t bring her and won’t bring her and keeps saying he’s not ready. Papa says he’s not really all for Kansas, but Mama says he’s not really all for her!" She laughed. We had been sent to the river for water. There were wells, but the leaning house was closer to the river than to the nearest well, and the water was only for washing. We each carried two heavy buckets. "Just wait," said Susannah cheerfully, "till you get out to your claim. You can spend the whole day going after water until you get the well dug."

She asked me about myself, then said, "Oh, we’re the same age, then. But you seem older, because you’re so tall, maybe. You have beautiful hair. My hair is the bane of my existence, which Mama says is a good thing, because it is a daily rebuke to my vanity. But I don’t see why my vanity needs to be rebuked on a daily basis."

I paused and set the buckets down, then shifted them. They were lop-sided and hard to carry. She said, "If I had nicer hair, perhaps Thomas would have thought to marry me." I stared at her, looking for some evidence of rancor or disappointment, but she said it just the way you might say that you should have bought one pair of shoes rather than another. And then she skipped to another topic. She said, "I saw you looking at Mr. Newton last night when we were talking about Stringfellow."

"You were very mysterious."

"I wasn’t. I’m not supposed to know what he said, and of course Mr. Bisket wouldn’t say it in front of the ladies, but everyone knows what he said."

"What did he say?"

"He said that men will of course do low and cursed things with women, that’s their nature, and in a slavocracy, it’s a protection for the white women that the slave women are there for the men. He said that’s the best thing about slavery. But don’t tell Mr. Newton, or I shall die of embarrassment, and don’t let on to Mama that I told you. She already thinks that this life in K.T is making me coarse and wild."

"But none of the lynchers are slaveholders, they said."

"Do you expect the Border Ruffians to make sense? I don’t."

We walked on.

After a moment, she said, "And it is making me coarse and wild here. We’re all loosening up. The congregation in Medford that gave us some money to come out here would be shocked. For one thing, we went to services back there every Sunday, sometimes twice, but here, with one thing and another, we’re lucky to go once every three weeks. But you’re from the west yourself, so it probably isn’t much of a change for you."

I said, "I don’t know. Ask me in a month."

There had been big doings in Big Spring, and the next thing would be a constitutional convention a few weeks later, where the Free Staters would write the laws that they intended to live under. By the time we got back to the leaning house with the water, Thomas was up to his neck in all the issues. And I saw that the box of "harness" was not where we had left it but pulled out into the middle of the floor, by the stove. The men were lifting out the carbines and admiring them. Later, in the evening, they divided them up. That was how long it took us to become Free Staters all the way.

It turned out that it was waiting for the carbines that had delayed Thomas in his first departure from Massachusetts: accompanying them had been his assigned task, though all had joined in purchasing them. And so it turned out that it was to the box of Sharps rifles that I owed my marriage.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Jenkins knew just where our claim was, right between theirs on the river about three miles north of town. It was good land, they said, with a gentle slope to the river, but it had no timber. They were both prepared to cede us a timber lot in exchange for access to the river. Bush, in particular, had to have a way to get his cattle—his future catde, which he didn’t yet own—down to the water. At the moment, he had a cow and a calf out there. They were grazing our place. Now that Mr. Jenkins had been squeezed on the other side by a claim jumper whose rights had been provisionally upheld just three days before, he was still deciding what to do. He had two town lots, and maybe he would give up the farming idea and go into business in town. All the men agreed that it would take a few days, at the most, to put up a livable cabin for us and that I could stay here, at the Jenkinses’ place in town, while Thomas and the other men attended to this matter. They also agreed that they had better get started with it, because they wanted to get it up before the constitutional convention in Topeka, which would take place in less than two weeks and last several days. They were already talking as if it were understood that Thomas would be at Topeka, wherever that was, with them. I wondered what it would be like, three miles out, in my new cabin, all by myself.