The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [154]
As I was looking at others, so others were looking at me. Each bereaved person had a story; some of the stories were exquisitely strange and the subject of much fascinated and regretful gossip. My story, too, had a couple of features of interest—the suddenness, the ruthlessness of the southern-rights killers, my search for help, the briefness of our marriage. I knew I was the subject of gossip and speculation, that folks gauged my manner, that I was a martyr to the cause almost as much as Thomas was. But I had lost all interest in the cause for the time being. I didn’t even want to cast my laments in political terms. I tried to stay quiet and hide out a little bit from my new fame.
And then there was Frank. Without any effort on my part, my anger at Frank grew, for Frank, too, had become famous, even though no one had seen him since days before Thomas was killed—he didn’t come to Louisa’s, he didn’t come to the funeral, there was no evidence at the claim that he had been there. By July, though we hadn’t heard from him, we had heard of him. He was a guerrilla, and he and his friends were known to have raided at least three farms of southern-rights families and stolen a horse, four cows, two oxen, a ham, and a chair. It was thought that Roger Lacey was with them, too, as his mother and father hadn’t seen him, but as far as they knew, he didn’t have a horse or any money. Much about these boys and their activities was unknown. A rumor would spread through town, and then there would be nothing for a week. One rumor was that Frank had come to see me on the night of Thomas’s funeral and that I had charged him with revenge. He was rumored to be eighteen, sixteen, fourteen, and eight years old (by then he was thirteen, young enough). He was said to be riding Jeremiah, the horse he had raced over the snow. He was said to be himself from Kentucky and to have turned against his first friends because coming to K.T. taught him the iniquities of slavery. All these rumors enraged me, as they portrayed a boy so callous and careless of my grief that I hardly knew how he had become that way. Louisa tried to reason with me—clearly few or none of these stories was true. Charles would find Frank; others were on the lookout for him, too. Then we would know why he hadn’t appeared. Was he, too, dead or injured somewhere? Tentatively, and then more firmly, Louisa made me ponder that possibility. But I preferred to feel misused by him. I just kept it to myself more. I kept many things to myself more. In my new state of supreme discomfort, I felt just a jot more comfortable that way.
Some political news pressed itself upon me in the midst of everything else. In the first place, money was rolling in, just as everyone had predicted. The New Englanders had raised thousands and, it was said, intended to raise more thousands. There were groups in Chicago, Buffalo, New York, Boston, and I don’t know where else, all of which sent cash for Kansas relief. "We’ll never know how much might be coming," said Louisa, "the way they are holding our things on the river and raiding our mail." But most of the money came through Iowa and Nebraska, carried by men known to be both loyal to the Free State cause and capable of protecting themselves. Once the cash got to Lawrence, the committee of safety oversaw it. I don’t know what was done with it, except that some merchants who had provisioned the town for the Wakarusa War laid claim to payments, while others simply forgave those earlier debts in exchange for cash on the barrelhead in the