The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [183]
As to their present style of life, it is, of course, rough and not without deprivation. From time to time, their neighbors offer them a good meal. Otherwise, they fall back upon their own cooking. They have been given shirts, boots, and even a pair of pants by grateful southerners, and the captain has been promised another mount to replace his much-lamented long-legged bay mare. In the meantime, the camp is full of the excellent fellowship that grows out of an active conscience satisfied by an active life. And the band is making plans to move against the enemy in the enemy’s own territory, though how soon this will take place, your correspondent is not at liberty to reveal.
There are those among us who revile and deplore such groups as these, and it is true that they stand outside the law, but do they stand outside of moral righteousness? No one can deny that they answer a need felt in every breast for some stronger reply to the depredations of the so-called Free State party. We may wish the necessity for them gone, but in the meantime, we certainly wish them well!
Mr. Morton read this through, holding the paper close to his face and tapping his spectacles on the desk instead of positioning them on his nose, and afterward pronounced the writing "satisfactory but not bold enough. However, it will do for a first effort. Franklin can set it in type. He’ll show you that part of the business one of these days." He patted me on the back. I smiled and nodded, and went outside.
I have to say that the composition of this piece put me into a welter of strong feelings. I had taken it up, still pleased with my discovery of "Samson" and "Chaney," in something of a playful humor. What you’ve got when you go in disguise are some feelings that belong to your original self and some feelings that belong to your new self and are feigned feelings in many ways, but some of these feelings overlap, and it’s a job trying to keep them separate and identified. I thought my disguised self could go ahead and write up those boys’ story in the style of Mr. Morton’s paper and that it would remain outside of me, like the hat or the boots I had stolen on the boat. But what I found out was that my piece had a way of talking back to me. Every lie I put down on the paper made a claim, and every claim those lies made, made me mad. But I couldn’t seem to stop them. They ran right down the pages, one after another, each sentence that was a lie bringing forth the next one, until I got to the end. The truth seemed to protest, but it couldn’t really get in there. There wasn’t a place for it, for one thing, and my project couldn’t afford it, for another. I had to grip Thomas’s watch pretty strongly while I was writing the second-to-last paragraph, and pull it out and set it on the desk, right under my gaze, while I was writing the last paragraph. And then, to make it all the more complicated and hard to take, when I reread the piece I couldn’t help being a little proud of it. It didn’t tell much of a story, but there were some nice turns of phrase in it, and I was a bit insulted at Mr. Morton’s estimation of it. But then, after what you might call the flood of writing had ebbed a bit, I was ashamed of the sentiments it portrayed and also of how I thought it would make people feel when they read it. But then, after that, I was still a little proud of actually having written something other than a letter, and even of knowing that it was going to be set in type and printed out. Ah, it was all a tangle, and it made me want to run off to get away from it, but I couldn’t even do that, as I still had "Samson" and "Chaney" to uncover before Mr. Morton asked me to write him another piece and get myself into an even thicker tangle.
I felt very heavy and tired as I mounted the stairs to the newspaper office yet again, and thoughts of Thomas kept at bay by the perturbations of the day flooded over me. They were not good