The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [132]
We should have been fatigued but were not, at all, so eager was everyone of our party to view the aftermath. We drank our tea and went out, Thomas and Mr. Bush, each armed, in the lead, and the rest in the middle, with Frank and me, also both armed, bringing up the rear. But the Missourians were gone. The only people in the streets were ones we recognized, either because we knew them or by their grieving and incredulous countenances.
The citizens of Lawrence hadn’t, in the end, been hung, shot, knifed, dismembered, or cleared out, but our houses had been robbed and damaged (the Missourians loved more than anything to shoot out a pane of glass or leave bullet holes in a wall), our furnishings had been left in the street, smashed, ripped, and broken, our crockery and dishes lay in fragments, our bedclothes and hangings and blankets and sheets, even our nightgowns and commodes, had been tossed in the street; our flowers were trampled and pulled up by the roots. Here’s something—the streets were full of papers blowing everywhere: these were not only "contraband" sheets of newspapers from the north or old copies of our local sheets, but also family letters and legal papers, diaries and cookery books and novels and schoolbooks, scattered and torn by angry hands, precious photographs sundered in two or three pieces. I saw a wreath woven of some beloved person’s hair, cut and destroyed in a way that only those who desired above all things to hurt you in your heart would think of. That was what was shocking—you could stoop down and pick up some papers out of the dirt and see that they were just letters from someone’s sister or father, and yet some stranger had taken the time and effort to tear them up and toss them. They had put real thought and real effort into their hatred.
There were those who started looking on the bright side of things at once—Thomas was one of them. No Free Stater killed or wounded, the Robinsons thankfully absent, all damage to buildings other than the hotel and the Robinsons’ house superficial. Better than that, as far as we knew (and this turned out to be true), no Free Stater had perpetrated anything that might be construed as an offense. The attack on Lawrence could not be called a war but had to be called a sacking, a depredation, a crime. "You wait," said Thomas. "The men from the eastern newspapers will be here by balloon if they have to. Remember that fellow from New York, Brewer-ton? And there are plenty of others. They’ll turn Lawrence, K.T., into a woman in a white dress, lifting her pale arms and pleading for mercy! It looks worse than it is."
At Louisa’s place, the lower shop had been wrecked and my last length of rope stolen. Someone had taken our ax to the stairs and hacked three of them out, so it wasn’t easy getting to the upper story. And a fire had been set, though, lacking fuel, it had gone out—we could still smell the smoke. Upstairs, the rosewood bedstead had been shorn of its clothes and jerked about; it had one ax cut in the footboard. The bedstead we’d used was intact, but the ticking was torn, and good New England feathers lay in white bunches here and there. Our things that we had packed for going to the claim were rifled and spread around, but the only things missing were Thomas’s red flannel shirt and his shaving brush. A dress of mine had a big rent in the skirt. Louisa’s clothes, being richer, had suffered more—two of her dresses were gone, and a shawl and a pair of shoes. Her jewelry— two necklaces and two sets of earbobs—was missing, too. And odd things were gone—a candleholder, a worked pillow, one of Charles’s boots. But they hadn’t touched the books or the little guitar, and my sister’s last letter lay open on the