The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (29 page)

By the time it started raining, which was just before supper, they’d arrested maybe a half dozen or fewer, all men of no importance, who were rather flattered to have been on the list. As for looking for the ones they wanted outside of Lawrence, on this claim or that one, well, they didn’t have the men, or the imagination, or the energy, or the will, or maybe the interest. And they did keep Jones from doing things the way he would have liked to, barging in and knocking people about, or breaking something up or in some other way venting his anger. Thomas said, "I expect the troops haven’t been quite the help Jones thought they would be." Later, we heard that some Lawrence folks were quite a bit ruder than we were—John Speer’s wife threw water into someone’s face, and one or two fired off shots. It all seemed more like a game than anything else, that is, until someone killed Jones.

The Missourians and the troops had set up camp in some trees by the river, and the sun went down. It was a wet night, but the rain cleared off a bit after supper, and some Lawrence men decided to go down by the camp, to keep an eye on it. And, said Louisa, who was beginning to worry a bit about Charles, "to invite trouble." Thomas was asked along but for once agreed with Louisa and declined. Little did we know that Frank did go, with the Lacey boys. We thought Frank was still working somewhere, since his little wagon was in great demand, and he’d been making a considerable sum each week. The fact is, I should have noticed that his rifle was gone, but I didn’t.

Thomas and I spent the evening in our room, making ready for our departure to our claim, which we had put off one day. We had packed all of Thomas’s books, so when we were finished, we asked Louisa if she would like to wait for Charles with us. She seemed worried and down in the mouth, as she and Charles hadn’t actually made much of a plan, so she didn’t know where he was or when he might be back. She knitted, Thomas sat quietly, no doubt pondering our soon-to-commence life as farmers, and I attempted to sew a little bit on the cuff of a shirt I was making for Frank. In fact, I expected Frank to come in, and had just said, "I told him for the last three nights that he had to put his things together, and when I look down there, it looks like he hasn’t done a thing."

Louisa sighed. "You don’t have to leave. I’ve been thinking about it. You’re going to be very lonely out there, is my opinion."

"Lots of folks have moved out there already," I said.

"But they aren’t necessarily your close friends. They don’t necessarily know how to promote your interests. Charles will miss you exceedingly, Thomas. In the business and otherwise." She sighed again and laid her hand over her middle. Her condition was not yet in evidence, but it was very much on her mind.

Thomas didn’t say anything, no doubt feeling that even to discuss the issue was to allow an opening that he wanted to avoid. We had spent a large sum on seed—barley and flax. Having it meant we had to plant it, didn’t it? But town still seemed bright, lively, and open to me, while our claim seemed small, dark, and silent, a rock on the prairie, a home too small in a world too vast. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to make myself into one of those I saw all around me, who, no matter what their present circumstances, were already living in their futures—bright white clapboard houses with real United States windows looking out on broad, richly cultivated fields, but I thought if I willed myself to improve my character, I would get along well enough.

"Won’t you at least stay until Charles returns? If something unfortunate should befall him ..." She put her hand across her eyes. "I’m a strong woman, and I never flinched, all through Mr. Wheelwright’s painful end, but such a blow at this time, well..."

Thomas looked at me, not sure of what to say, and just then there was another knocking at the lower door. Louisa cried, "Oh, my land! What is that!"

Thomas went down. I stepped over to Louisa’s chair and put my arm around her shoulders. She laid her head against me. Thomas was back up the stairs in a moment. His face was flushed, and he was more upset than I’d ever seen him. He said, "That was Lacey and some others. Jones has been shot!"

"Hurt?" exclaimed Louisa.

"Killed," said Thomas, in a deep, horror-struck voice.

We jumped up in alarm. The danger to all of us in Lawrence as a result of this was only too apparent, and perhaps the danger to Charles was vastly increased. Thomas put on his coat and grabbed his hat. Then he seized his Sharps carbine and some rounds. I looked to the corner by the door where my carbine and one of Charles’s also stood. Thomas and I didn’t say aloud that we expected an attack before morning by the Missourians who had been threatening such an action for months, but we both thought it—we were both certain sure of it. Thomas said, "I have to find out what’s going on, and I have to find Frank, and I’ll try to find out something about Charles, too. But I have to go out. I can’t sit here."

"We’ll be fine, but you do have to find Frank," I said, "and then you have to give him a hiding, because he is scaring me to death."

And he was gone.

"Well!" said Louisa as the door closed after him. "We need to get ready!" She was no longer sighing, at least. She ran down the stairs to the shop, her wrapper flying behind her, and locked the door, then I helped her draw some heavy boxes in front of it. The shop had two small windows, and in front of these we tacked up blankets. Then we dragged all of the goods that might have any value to a back room and locked that door. After that, we ran up the stairs and closed that door behind us, and pushed the bedstead Thomas and I had been using in front of it, then we retreated to Louisa’s room and climbed into her giant rosewood bedstead together and hid down under the quilts. Louisa couldn’t shoot, but I had the two carbines near at hand.

We took somewhat different positions on the shooting of Jones. We both agreed that it had to be done, on the analogy of removing a burr under a saddle or easing an unbearable goad. "Now he’s gone," I said, "things will actually calm down, because he’s been the moving force behind Shannon and the rest of them, even President Pierce, I’ll bet. None of them cares about Lawrence as much as Jones did."

"But now they will," said Louisa. "Now, by killing him, we’ve proved our very lawlessness. They’ll view him as a martyr, if you ask me. This will galvanize them!"

"But everyone, everyone in his right mind, knew what Jones really was!"

"Who is in their right mind? When the K.T. question comes up in certain quarters, it drives people right out of their right mind."

I must say that though we were worried about our husbands and Frank, at the same time our own coziness gave us a deep-down faith in their safety. Louisa, who had followed some of the more advanced thinkers in Boston and the east, even said that should something happen to any of them, we would feel it, a sort of unearthly vibration, communicated to us from the spiritual realm. That sounded reassuring to me.

Mostly what we thought about the killing of Jones was that now things would go one way or the other, that our uncertain spring, all fraught with speculation, would turn into a summer where at least all the parties knew where they stood. We blew out the candle, and then we drifted off, or I did. The next thing I knew, Louisa had let Thomas in, and he had Frank and Roger Lacey with him. Two candles were lit. I sat up in bed. I said, "Is there a war?"

"Everything is quiet," said Thomas. "And I know where Charles is." Louisa nodded. Across the room, the two boys were silent. I thought they were tired. I said, "My goodness, Frank! What do you mean by getting Thomas out at all hours to be looking for you? I am going to have to send you back to your mother if I can’t handle you! You are as wild as an Indian and twice as self-sufficient!"

Thomas said, "Frank was out by the Missourians’ camp."

"What in the world were you doing out there, boy? I thought you were getting some supper."

"We went out there," said Frank.

"Well, we know that."

"Everybody was out there. Governor Robinson was, and Senator Lane. The whole town was out there."

I looked at Thomas. He cocked his eyebrow and shrugged, as if to say he didn’t think so, and then said, "They had their guns with them."

I was shocked. "Whatever for! You are boys! You do not need to go armed about your business!"

The boys didn’t say anything.

I said, "Frank, I’m going to take your gun away from you before it gets you in trouble, I swear! Or I’m going to send you back to Illinois, because another night like this, well... "

But the fact was, Frank was already out of hand, had been out of hand even back in Quincy. As a last insult, I said, "I don’t know what is going to become of you, Frank. You have no schooling to speak of, you run around on your own all the time, I don’t know what you eat or when you sleep. You do not live a well-regulated life!" But whose fault was that?

"I got a hundred dollars, though," he offered.

"Oh, my goodness! Go to bed!"

It was three a.m. We bedded the boys down on some quilts in the shop and forbade them to leave before morning. Later, when Thomas and I went to bed, he said to me in a low voice, "He knows who shot Jones."

"How does he know?"

"He knows. I heard him and Roger whispering about it when I was bringing them home, but when I challenged them, they clammed up."

"If Roland were here, he would beat it out of him."

"We’ll see," said Thomas. "We’ll see if it comes to that."

The next morning, everyone got into position with regard to the shooting. Jones had been taken to the Free State Hotel, and his wife and the editor Stringfellow, who was also a doctor, had been sent for. As soon as they came, things got very secretive, though Governor Robinson, also a doctor, and Mrs. Robinson tried to be very attentive. The Missourians took Jones and left the next day. Everyone who saw the tyrant Jones said that he didn’t look deathly at all, but he was plenty mad. The people of Lawrence were, of course, shocked, appalled, and astounded. Thomas went to a meeting, where they passed a resolution that went something like: "This was the isolated act of one vicious citizen, in no way sustained by the community," though I do remember there was a phrase in there that referred to Jones as the "so-called" sheriff, or the one who "claimed" to be sheriff. The newspapers in the Missouri River towns, Leavenworth, and Kickapoo were beside themselves. Stringfellow vowed to sacrifice every abolitionist in the territory in revenge, to level Lawrence, and to destroy the Union, if need be.

Of course, the tyrant Jones was not dead, we all knew that; it turned out there had been two shots, according to the colonel of the dragoons, one through his trouser leg and one more telling, though I never understood rightly if he got hit in the leg, the hip, the shoulder, or the jaw. Alive though he was, the Missouri papers were full of memorials to him and vows to avenge his death with a war, if at all possible. These newpaper reports circulated all around Lawrence, and mostly we had a laugh at them, but it did give you cause to wonder at either the egregious lying or the egregious stupidity. Maybe that was the thing about the Missourians that made the people of Lawrence so angry in the end—they were either too stupid to credit or too outrageous in their lies. As the days went by, most people in Lawrence decided that the shooting had actually been committed by a southern sympathizer. Why not? In the first place, no Lawrence man, no New Englander, would do so rash a thing, and in the second place, Jones was unloved by even his own men—what better for them than the small sacrifice of a tyrant for the sake of blackening the character of the citizens of Lawrence? The Missourians would do anything ; we already knew that about them. Or what about this—the whole shooting was a hoax arranged among Jones and Stringfellow and Jones’s wife? As the time passed, it was easy to forget that Lawrence people had been there, too, tending to the wounded tyrant.

Thomas and I never quizzed Frank on what he knew. But there was a segment of the town that held the opinion that a boy had done it, one of the group of boys who had been out near the camp. Almost no one agreed with this group—they could never come up with the boy, or said they couldn’t. After long thought, I decided that Frank was not the boy. But I believed Thomas when he said that Frank knew who the boy was.

A day or so after the shooting, Governor Robinson offered a five-hundred-dollar reward for the capture of the perpetrator. The captain of the dragoons thought he had something to say about the whole affair, too—he sent Governor Robinson a letter, which said that Jones’s shooting had been reported in Washington, D.C. (no doubt, said some jokers, by the ghost of Jones himself, who appeared to the President in his worst nightmare), and that it was being taken most seriously there, etc.

The congressional committee departed in haste, which seemed ominous.

And then there was further fuel for outrage: one of the men who’d testified to the committee was followed home and attacked by some very vocal southern sympathizers and left for dead. He lived, fortunately, but there was nary a peep out of any federal body about the attack on him.

Now the relative calm of the spring, made up of moneymaking and business and planning for the future, gave way to one upset after the other. Sheriff Jones’s deputy, an illiterate who was nevertheless fully armed and eager for any pretext, persisted in trying to arrest everyone involved in the Branson rescue. Sometimes he had the dragoons with him, in which case he would stop people but then let them go if he found nothing against them. Most times he didn’t have the dragoons with him but had other men, men who spoke in the accents of the deep south and looked like roughs, but not entirely like our Ruffians. We all knew they were bringing men in from the south, especially from the hot-blooded places like South Carolina. Thomas and Frank got stopped every day or so. Frank finally got a little pass from the deputy that read: "Let this man pass I no him two be a Law and abidin Sittisin." Well, these were our duly constituted officials. As New Englanders, and generally well educated, the citizens of Lawrence were especially galled to be insulted and arrested by fools and ignoramuses who couldn’t contain their glee (spitting and staggering from tobacco and drink) at getting over New Englanders.