The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [114]
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