The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [151]
But children can be very early taught, that their happiness, both now and hereafter, depends on the formation of habits of submission, self-denial, and benevolence. —p. 224
Thomas’s funeral reminded me of my father’s funeral only by contrast. Where the one had been obscure and even just, the other was wildly unjust and the occasion of much public clamor. Charles and Louisa and some other citizens of Lawrence urged me to go all the way and have a military ceremony, as they had done for Barbour, who was killed in the Wakarusa War in December. Were we not in battle, were we not engaged in an undeclared war with the Missourians, of which Thomas was a casualty? But that didn’t suit Thomas, I thought, whose approach to every event in K.T. had been cautious and peace-loving. He was most comfortable and happy in his black New England clothes, reading a book of poetry by the light of our evening candle. And so it wasn’t a military funeral, but it was a martial one, and a martyr’s one, and highly arousing to the swarms who attended. The procession that followed his coffin to the grave was a half mile long, and everyone carried arms. It didn’t matter at all that I couldn’t supply enough information about our assailants to even begin to know who they were; the funeral was all about vows of revenge, repayment, and retribution for a crime that should never have been committed, a vile act of bestial cruelty that was simultaneously beyond the human pale and perfectly typical of the Missourians. Mrs. Bush walked along with me at the front of the procession and held my arm to comfort me. "Oh, my dear," she said in her kindest voice, "I knew that something like this would certainly happen. I knew it a year ago when we first set out for K.T. Those people—well, you hardly want to call them people—were fulminating and cheating at elections and vowing revenge for ills they had not suffered, and of course it had to lead to something like this, but I always wonder, why this one? Why does the Lord pick this one rather than that one? Why Thomas and not Mr. Bush? Just last night, Mr. Bush declared that it should have been him if it had to be someone, as he’s lived a long life and done many things, and you and Thomas are just starting, were just starting. We’ve been along that road time and time again. I don’t know, my dear, we never know, but I am just so heartily sorry."
The consensus of the group around the grave, most of whom were of a religious turn of mind, as most people are, was that the Lord would provide for Thomas, and handsomely, but that they would take care of the Missourians and assure them their just deserts.
The troubling question was, who would provide for me? For the second time in a year, I found myself the subject of this discussion: What would I do, how would I support myself? At least I had no children, as some of the other K.T. widows had. I will hasten to say that I did not know the answers to these questions myself. What we had had was our crop, our stove, our claim, our youth, energy, and hard work. None of these had much value, especially the claim. Claims had stopped rising in price in the winter and had even begun to decline. The wonders of 1855, where a man bought a bit of land for a hundred dollars and sold it for five hundred, had ceased. In 1856, he was lucky to get seventy-five for it, or fifty. Immigrants from the east weren’t so desperate any longer, were choosy. And they were leery of Lawrence. It was as if the southerners and we ourselves had conspired