The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [136]
As for me, I held many incompatible views in a kind of seething soup or stew, and I wondered at the consistency of the others. I thought that in a place like K.T, you could easily act one way one minute and another way the next minute, and smile or laugh or cry all in the same minute. I wanted to kill something, preferably a Missourian, preferably the man who had driven off Jeremiah, preferably more than one. Before they died, I wanted them to give back Jeremiah, apologize to me, and know what brutes and liars they were. At the same time, I wanted no more violence of any kind, no disturbances to my system, to the town, or to the spring that was shaping up before us. I wanted no more burnings or screaming, no more of those revelations of loss such as I had had when I saw the broken and empty corral, which made you feel suddenly drenched with grief. I wanted no more fear such as we all felt right then, fear of the Missourians, yes, but a greater fear of something else, which hadn’t yet happened but had certainly been set in motion.
I wanted Frank to stick right with me and show me at every moment that he was safely himself, a thirteen-year-old boy interested in money and business; but he wasn’t, and I simultaneously wanted him out there, where I knew he was, banding together with other boys who had their weapons with them and righteousness on their minds. My brain held many contradictory thoughts, but I knew Frank’s didn’t. Frank’s brain held a simple thought, and I wished for his sake that he knew the many complexities, but also I wished for my sake that I believed in the simple.
Ah, well, I was agitated. All over Lawrence, citizens were praying for various things—revenge, peace, war, fortitude, wisdom, safety, the death of enemies, the elevation of the bondman. Had I been the praying sort, I would have prayed only for a quiet mind.
We went to bed that night, Thursday, and the next. By Saturday, the cold ones were getting on with business, and Lawrence seemed calmer. Charles had bought a new mule of a backtracker, and Thomas and I had agreed to borrow the mule on Sunday to take our things out to the claim.
There was an old man in K.T. who afterward became famous, by the name of Old Brown, old John Brown. He came from Ohio or New York somewhere, and wasn’t related to any of the other Browns—there were lots of Browns in K.T. I can’t say that I ever saw him, though Louisa said that she did. Perhaps we saw some of his sons or associates, as there were quite a few of them, riding through the town or buying something here or there. They had a place south of town, down on the Marais des Cygnes, where my brother-in-law Horace always talked about settling. Free Staters and proslavery people were all mixed up down there—it wasn’t pure enclaves, as it was in the north. Later Mr. Holmes said that he saw Old Brown with his famous weapon, some kind of thing like an adze or a pike, odd-looking. But afterward, as with everything else, all sorts of people wanted to get next to it, and that is why I want to stress that I never saw Old Brown or his sons or friends, nor did I know at the time that what Old Brown did would become the most famous thing about K.T. in some quarters and utterly unknown in others. The fact was, what Old Brown did, and to whom, and why, was a common story around the time that it happened, and it showed us all the new world we had gotten into and what that meant, and so most people didn’t say much about it, because that was a world that most people in their right mind didn’t enter willingly.
We went to bed Saturday night. Sunday morning, we got