The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (27 page)

I must say that it came as a shock. I thought to remark that Jeremiah had won about sixteen dollars in his two races (and for that matter, there was no telling what Frank had in his pocket), but I kept my lips tightly closed. I saw that in his mind, my husband was compounding bad luck and personal failure. He looked again toward the broken bedstead, and his eyebrows lowered. He said, "We should have stayed out here."

"We might have died."

I was given to know through his lack of response that such an outcome seemed, momentarily at least, appealing.

"The James boy died of the cold. Mr. James forced them all to stay out here by themselves. Now Susannah says the woman and the baby are very poorly, as well."

He turned and walked out of the cabin, down the little step we had placed, which still defined our stoop.

What we had longed for so—the coming of spring, sunshine and relative warmth, survival, friends, and, in fact, each other, now seemed like nothing. Soon I would be twenty-one, but the future seemed like a block of stone a mile high, a mile wide, a mile deep, that I had to but could not get into.

Now we sat together on the stoop, gazing out over our snowy field, where we hoped to plant flax or oats. We sat together until I shivered, at which point Thomas circled my waist with his arm. "I saved my books, at least."

"And we have our clothes and most of our cooking things."

"The tools will be wet and maybe a little rusted, but they’ll be fine."

"I’m sure it looks worse than it is, with all this snow."

We sighed, hardly hearing our own hopeful words. I thought what an ugly place Kansas was. Folks in Lawrence generally took another line—that Kansas was not only fertile and clement but beautiful. I thought that perhaps I had never really seen a beautiful place. At the moment, I couldn’t think of one.

Thomas said, "This is how you feel after a shipwreck."

I looked at him. "Have you been shipwrecked?"

"No hands were lost. But yes, our ship broke up in a freak storm off Martha’s Vineyard, and we lost the cargo. That’s when I decided that maybe the sailor’s life wasn’t for me. The seas were twenty foot, they said, not so high. Men have lived through forty footers, but I didn’t want to."

When my brother-in-law Roland got discouraged, he would load his gun and go shoot something. That’s what I wanted to do right then. I suddenly hungered for the fresh meat—Louisa could roast it in town and serve it up, sizzling and delicious. That would be good. But mostly I just wanted to shoot something. I smiled. I said, "I think I’m turning into a wild Indian."

"I wonder what I’ve made of my life. My brothers do a good business with my father. Their wives and children are well taken care of. They all live in brick houses. If any of them are restless, I’ve never heard them say so. I always considered them dull. None of my three brothers opens a book from one year’s end to the next, and neither does my father, except for the Bible, and then he only looks at the bits he already knows. They make up sails for all sorts of ships from all over the world, but they never ask the owners or the captains what they’ve seen or done, and they never long to see or do it. They do their duty and are pleased with that. But me, I don’t know what life I’m fitted for. K.T. has sorted me out, my dear."

I said, "Thomas, you ride Jeremiah and I’ll ride the mule. We’ve got to go to the Jameses’—I promised Susannah—and it’s getting late."

We let the dread of what we might find at the Jameses’ enliven us a bit by removing our thoughts from our own situation.

And then Mrs. James was so glad to see us, though she couldn’t rise from her bed and had to call out to us to come in, that we rode upward a little bit on that, too.

They had fashioned a latch of the sort that came through the door, so I lifted that and walked in, while Thomas looked about the place for Mr. James. Mrs. James, Ivy, was as tiny as could be, hardly making any shape at all under her quilts. Her cheeks were pinched and yellow, but her eyes were huge and formed the bright centers of two dark hollows in her face. She had been very pretty once; now she was wondrous-looking, her beauty enhanced but rendered frightening by her illness. Beside her lay an extremely tiny, quiet baby, who looked, even to my unaccustomed eye, very close to his own end. Only his little face showed. His eyes were open. He, too, had regular, lovely features, but not of this world. She said, "Well, I’m waiting for him. Thanks for waiting with me."

"Waiting for whom, Ivy, dear?"

"Waiting for my boy, here, to pass on. Then I’ll go with him." Her voice was striking, neither weak nor strong, but penetrating. She ran her hand over the child’s face in a tender gesture.

"Are you alone? Where’s Mr. James?"

"He went out on his trapline for a bit. He thought there might be some meat this morning. I told him to. He’s very distraught."

"My dear, you should have come into town for the cold weather. There was room! Folks were all jumbled together, but it was warmer that way!"

"Daniel said the cabin would fall down and we would lose everything. It was me who wanted to stick it out. It really was. And then, when, uh, my older boy went on, well, I didn’t want to leave him out here by himself. Daniel is exceedingly angry at me for being so stubborn, but I just couldn’t do it."

"Oh, Ivy! I wish I’d been a better friend to you!" It hurt me to think of my days passed so easily with Louisa, when I had hardly given a thought to the Jameses. None of us had, what with the war and the cold and the murder in Leavenworth and this and that. Well, there was always an excuse, wasn’t there?

She said, "Is the war still on?"

"The war?"

"From before Christmas. Isn’t it almost spring?"

"Yes, it is, and the Missourians are quiet for the time being. Thomas thinks they’re going to go their way now and give in to reason. But it’s much warmer today. Can’t you feel that? If you hold on for a week, you’ll be warm as toast."

She shook her head. "He can’t suck. He’s too weak. He came before his time, weeks and weeks. Daniel tried giving him some pap, and I squeeze out the milk when I can and put it in his mouth, but it isn’t enough. K.T. isn’t for him, I’m afraid. But that’s okay. Daniel can take care of himself, and the rest of us need each other. I’m happy to go after my boy. He never thrived in K.T., either. I would hate to be one of those women who leave all their children behind." She smiled, and I have to say that she did look at peace.

"Are you hungry? Can I make you some corncakes? There’s a bit of a fire." I wondered where Thomas was, but I didn’t necessarily want him to come in.

She said, "Oh, my, it’s been so long since I had corncakes! That sounds heavenly."

"Corncakes are not heavenly, Ivy; they are of this earth and meant to keep you here."

She shook her head, smiling. I went away from the bedstead and began rummaging about for the griddle and a pot. The kitchen area was neat and orderly. Daniel, I suspected, could indeed take care of himself.

Still the baby made no sound. Sometimes he had his eyes open and sometimes he had them closed. That was the only way I knew he was alive. While I mixed up the cakes, Ivy fell into a doze, rousing from time to time to stroke the baby’s face and give him a kiss. I stoked the fire and added some wood. When the cakes were done, nice and light from the limey water and fragrant, too, she managed to sit up. I forked pieces between her lips. She chewed slowly and with concentration. Finally, she said, "When I woke up this morning, I told Daniel it was going to be a good day. Maybe today we shall be released."

"Maybe."

"My boy will get me into heaven, I know. Even though I’ve been vain and giddy and selfish, and thought too much over the years about dresses and shoes and petticoats. Lidie, I was so spoiled! It astonishes me now to think of it! I fancied myself altogether too much!" She laughed, and it had a merry sound. "But I had my boy with me for four years and two months, and he was such a good boy, and he taught me to think of someone other than myself."

I gave her some more corncake, and she chewed it deliberately, then swallowed.

"May I talk of a womanly thing, even though you haven’t a child yet?"

"You may talk of anything you please."

"When my boy was born, and they brought him to suck, I was so sore that I wanted to scream. I shudder to think it, but I hated the sight of him! That’s how frivolous I was, and shallow. He would cry and cry, and it didn’t matter what they said to try and help me; I was mean and sour inside, and I turned away from him for weeks. Daniel didn’t say a word to me, but I was very bad and asked him to find me a wet nurse. But my mama finally talked to me one day. She had never said a cross word to me in all my life, no matter how many cross words I said to her, but she came to me, and she said, ’Ivy, I am ashamed of you and of myself, for I have made you the way you are, and now my heart is sick, because I can see you turn away from your own child, who is the sweetest child in the world!’ "

She took some water from a cup.

"That day, I made up my mind to be his mama, and things got easier after a bit. But mostly I was sorry I’d lost all those years thinking of myself." Now her voice fell into a whisper. "You don’t think that I know what they say about Daniel, that he’s cruel and hard. He’s not so cruel and hard, but he is scared of K.T., more scared than Thomas seems, or some of the others. When Daniel is scared he bares his teeth and attacks, just like a wolf or some wild animal. He would like to attack death itself now." She sighed. "But all of this is very far away, too."

I offered her a bit more corncake, but she shook her head. The baby’s eyes were open. I said, "I hate to leave you like this. Maybe Thomas should go back to Lawrence, and I should stay with you."

"When Daniel returns, we’ll be fine. This is a good day."

Now Thomas came in, and Ivy held out her hand to him and let him give it a squeeze, but she didn’t talk anymore. After a moment, Thomas said, "I found James. He’s had some luck. He should be back before long." He sat down in the other chair, and we stayed there quietly, me holding one of Ivy’s hands, until Daniel James opened the door sometime later and came into the cabin. He was, in my estimation, in a towering rage, but he was polite to us and kind to his wife. She opened her eyes and said, "Daniel, Lidie made us some corncakes. There’s plenty left," Then she closed her eyes again. He nodded his thanks, and shortly after that we left.

We’d mounted and ridden a good distance, when Thomas said, "When I found him, he was beating his head against a tree. He said over and over that he had a good farm in Ohio, and now he’d killed his children and his wife, and he would never forgive himself, and his wife’s parents would never forgive him, as they’d begged him not to take her west."

"Oh, Thomas."

"We are all fools, Lydia, every man in K.T."

"You leave the women out?"

"We men—"

"Don’t leave the women out. We have lessons to learn of our own."

We rode back to Lawrence, much subdued. We heard that Ivy James’s baby died two days later and herself a day after that. And then Mr. Jenkins died, too, and he wasn’t the only one. Some had had the will to make it through the cold, cold weather, it seemed, but when the pressure let up, the will to live abandoned them, too. In fact, in many ways it seemed as though fate or luck was separating all of our acquaintances into layers. Here were Mrs. James and Mr. Jenkins, dead, and the other Jenkinses, and many besides them, ready to backtrack as soon as the weather would permit, their Kansas adventures failures and worse. Then, here was Louisa with her shop and her two rooms, seemingly set on a course for comfort and prosperity; and beyond that, here were the Robinsons, we heard. Their house on Mount Oread was going up fast, a wooden house, all of black walnut, it was said, with oilcloths and papered walls and furniture in every room, a regular house that would be rich, folks said, even for the States. This house was the subject of a great deal of talk. Some, of course, said, Why not, he has the money, and K.T. needs this sort of thing to show the way, or to make us look respectable enough for statehood, or just for the good of the work (you can’t bring good workmen into the territory and expect them to split logs for the rest of their lives); but others said, Where’d he get the money? Who does he think he is? He an’t got to be governor yet, according to Washington, D.C., and she an’t, either. The joke about it was that once the house was built, Jim Lane would be moving right in. But I thought, Well, Americans always sort themselves out one way or another into rich and poor, and then everybody gets blamed for however he ends up. Lawrence was the biggest town for gossip I ever saw, and it was only during a war that what folks said about each other was either respectful or kind.

K.T.’s march toward statehood, and free statehood, went forward. Charles and Thomas went over to Topeka, some fifty or so miles away, in early March. Thomas went to see what was doing, but Charles went as an avowed supporter of Jim Lane. They all drafted a memorial to the U.S. Congress and signed it. Thomas signed it, too, and Charles. They said so, and we knew it. That got to be important later on, after what happened. When they’d written up the memorial, Jim Lane and some others went off to Washington, D.C., to find someone to present it to Congress. Louisa was sure that would show the Missourians a thing or two.

Underneath her sympathy about the devastation we’d found on our claim, I could see that Louisa was both annoyed and anxious. For the first time all winter, she seemed ready to be rid of us, and I couldn’t blame her. Thomas and I had two bolts of sailcloth and not much money—and we agreed not to apply to his father for more, since any forthcoming funds would be accompanied by urgings to return to Boston and go back to work in the sailcloth factory. We continued to live at Louisa’s for a time, but now we two couples kept to our respective rooms and hung a quilt in the doorway for privacy. I went out each day and got the wood for the fire in our room, and I did most of our cooking. From time to time, visitors traipsed through our room, which was next to the stairs, to get to theirs, for evening gatherings that we weren’t always invited to. It was an arrangement that looked a bit like an estrangement but wasn’t, really. It was just some people finding their true levels with one another. It seemed as though it could not go on, but it did, day after day. While the men were gone to Topeka, Louisa and I resumed our old friendship and even slept together in her rosewood bed a couple of nights, so I saw that the problem was only our two families drawing into themselves, the way families do. One of these nights, Louisa said that she was pregnant. That was her word, right out, as if she were a cow or a dog. And she said she intended to be out and about all the way to the end—the most advanced authorities were very much against restricting women to their beds and their houses in such a condition, and she herself was very much against pretending to be ill when she wasn’t ill at all. And so forth. I was envious.