The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [150]
And yet it seemed as though the sight of him should work upon me in some other way, bring me into the present and set my grief before me. His face didn’t look like any Thomas that I had ever seen before, even Thomas sleeping. His face looked as if Thomas was absent and the absence was filled with something new, which I speculated must be pain. I thought that if the Thomas I knew were present, then he would draw me out of my amazement, but then if the Thomas I knew were present, I wouldn’t be so amazed in the first place. I put my hands to my head and felt it. I thought it must be feeling feverish from the thoughts that beset me, but it felt cool enough. He turned his head slowly this way and then that way, and gave out a noise. I did what Louisa had told me, which was to wring out a cloth in an infusion of witch hazel and place it over his forehead. He continue to turn this way and that, and strange thoughts continued to beset me. I said, "Thomas! Thomas!" but he made no answer, and my voice seemed loud in the room, and so I fell silent again.
I sat there for a long time, deep enough into the night for the candle to gutter and expire. I regarded my husband without, I thought, taking him in. I did lie down on the bed, but then Thomas began turning his head back and forth again, as if in discomfort and pain, and so I got off the bed, for fear of making him worse. After that, I paced about the room for a while, looking out the little window to the dark street. Louisa had gotten a pane of glass somewhere. All of that—the troubles with the Missourians, the sacking of Lawrence, the Old Brown question—all of that had led to this, but this seemed such an astonishing thing for that to have led to! Thomas stopped turning his head back and forth and lay still. I couldn’t see him very well in the dim light, so I took one of his hands in both of mine, and filled with the conviction that he was about to pass on, I said, "Don’t be afraid, Thomas." I thought, A sojourn in K.T. ought to prepare the soul for any other journey whatsoever. Sometime after that, he did pass on, and sometime after that—I don’t know how long—I realized it. I thought that if I had known him better, perhaps, or found a way to be more married to him in the past ten months, I would have known the very moment. I was sorry I had failed in that.
I kissed his lips, cheeks, eyes, and forehead, and drew his hands out from under the covers, and placed them in the proper position. His eyes were closed. There was little to do except adjust his bed so that he made a neat picture, then sit down and wait for Louisa to wake up. Now I was a new person, one I had never desired or expected to be.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER 18
I Reconnoiter
IN THE TWO DAYS BETWEEN Thomas’s death and his funeral, the news of the attack upon us rolled around Lawrence like ball lightning, setting the country aflame with indignation, or so I was told. Those around me seemed not so much indignant as stunned, and wondered why. I was stunned myself and wondered why. Hadn’t we talked of something like this for months? Didn’t we know something like this was always a possibility? Hadn’t others been killed—Barbour, Dow, Captain Brown? I felt that we should not be stunned, and yet we were. It was a conundrum. Mostly, too, I wanted Frank to come back, or be found and brought home. If the news brought him, then that would be one