The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [134]
Well, sentiment was a cruel joke in K.T.
And practically, of course, now we had no horse, and Louisa and Charles had no animals, either, and so how would we get our things out to our claim, and how would Charles, should he return from his imprisonment, make an income, and how would we all, in Lawrence, go on from this and recover even what we had had two days before, which was little enough in any case, if you thought of Susannah Jenkins’s letter, and how she counted up the losses she’d incurred in K.T. and settled happily for any sort of life at all, if only it wasn’t in K.T?
Everyone we knew was worse off than a year before: Mr. James had lost his wife and children; the Jenkinses had lost their husband and father and, it appeared, most of their means. The Bushes lived in a tiny fragment of a house, far humbler than what they’d left in Massachusetts, and were grate-ful for it. Louisa, for all the good face she put on it, had lost a husband and now, perhaps, another one. The Laceys? After she came, he was absent more and more, and now the rumor was that he was staying with a woman at the other end of town most of the time, but of course no one spoke of it, and all pretended that he was just very taken up with business. The Holmeses? They had barely made it through the winter on the charity of their friends, and any hopes he had had of forming a congregation had been dashed—no one in K.T seemed to cotton to his fiery brand of Christianity. The Smithsons? They were farther from their publishing project than they’d been in the fall, and old Mr. Smithson had broken his arm, to boot. Thomas and myself? We had little money, few hopes, and now had lost our most valuable possession. And who had not seen the waves of men and women who were worse off than ourselves and our friends, who’d died of fevers and other illnesses far from all friends and far from their homes, at the end of their funds and without their names being known to those caring for them? Even the Robinsons. There was the model for us all. They had risen the highest and had now fallen the lowest—he taken by the authorities, their house burned to the ground. The Kansas prairie was full of graves where people had buried everything they loved, everything they knew.
Frank, who was walking beside me, said, "I don’t know when I been this mad before."
I gave a little bark of bitter laughter.
"It an’t a laughing matter."
"Isn’t a laughing matter."
"Well, you are laughing. That just makes me madder."
I looked at him. His eyebrows were low over his eyes, and he was frowning mightily. He didn’t look especially boyish. He said, "My feeling is, they shouldn’t have done it."
"Well, of course not. Look at the suffering...
He caught my gaze, as if the suffering were beside the point. Transgression was the point for Frank.
"Men do what they think they need to do. I hate to say it, but the Missourians think they have right on their side, also. They think—"
"I an’t going to try and know what they think. I am going to fix my thoughts on what they did." He walked a little ahead of me, and I caught up.
"Frank—" But I didn’t have anything to say. You could look at it both ways. We were fools to have come to K.T. in the first place, or they were knaves to have destroyed us (hastened our destruction, perhaps a realist would say). Or both were true. As I’ve said elsewhere in this narrative, in K.T. most things were both true and false, and it depended on your circumstances how you chose among them.
Finally, I said, "Well, now we can say that maybe we shouldn’t have come here. When I look back to how I felt in Quincy, it seems like some kind of idle whim, the fruit of thoughtless ignorance. But back then, it seemed like everyone wanted