The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [159]
We drove southeast, and soon we were out of Lawrence, farther than I had been southeast since September, as our claim happened to be north of town. The day quickly grew hot, and I tried as best I could to withdraw into the brim of my bonnet. The two Mr. Graveses sat hunched over, their hats pulled down. The girl looked at me for a while, then out over the prairie. The wagon lurched along well enough; the rains had stopped weeks before, and the ground was hard. In places, the grasses were tall and bent over, and the prairie presented the aspect of a meadow, but either because I saw things differently now, or because they were different, the prairie looked not at all wild to me anymore. A group of three wagons on the horizon, approaching us, was merely the most visible emblem of what K.T. was now—not an empty spot under the sky but a seething human landscape that had lost every vestige of freshness and the hope that went with it. The grass and flowers were oppressed by what lay scattered about—here was a wagon wheel, broken, here a broken keg that had held whiskey, here were some bones and the skull of an ox, here was the shaft of an ax or another tool, here some rails, split, broken, left, here a piece of milled lumber, or half a one. The busyness and building that had amazed and thrilled me from time to time in Lawrence had its cost, as I well knew. Everything carried there, made there, bought and sold there, moved across the prairie; some part of it was lost or broken or destroyed and left behind, evidence of the intentions of men. And I knew from my life there that those intentions were generally far from honorable, the main intention being always to make money, as much of it in as little time as possible. Should we pass the wagons ahead of us, should I look into the faces of their owners and passengers, the primary things I would see would be greed and fear—greed for the wealth every bill promised in K.T, fear of being too late. The New Englanders, as much as they liked always to display their moral preeminence, were as greedy and fearful as folks from anywhere else. And their fears were justified. If there had been a month or two in 1855 when a man could get rich on the dreams of those coming along behind, well, that month was gone now, and there was only jostling for survival left.
K.T. was already old with conflicts—that was the sharpest lesson. No sooner were the Indians removed (and who ever thought of them? a few missionaries here and there) than the newness of the place was used up through disputes that were as old as the United States. It was as if a bride and groom turned to one another at the altar, each expecting the other to be new and young and strong and beautiful, and found instead old age, old acquaintance, old battles, old hatreds. Where else in the whole United States had there been no honeymoon at all, no short space of good feelings? Nowhere else but K.T, as far as I had heard. The residents hadn’t even taken the time to work up their own hatreds but had instead brought along what they already had plenty of. I thought of those few nights in the fall when Thomas and I had been alone in our little cabin with the sailcloth over the hole in the roof. The prairie had seemed so wide and pathless then, its emptiness as old as it was broad. That had lasted how many nights? Fifteen? Twenty? That was the length of our honeymoon, the total accumulation of our innocence, K.T.’s innocence. After that, we’d been caught up in the conflict, too.
The wagon jolted along, and the sun rose higher. Mr. Graves passed me ajar of water, and I took a drink, then passed it to the girl. We got closer to the wagons ahead of us, which were moving slowly, and I heard the two Mr. Graveses