The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [189]
When I returned to the livery stable that evening, a Saturday it was, I planned to probe Nehemiah a bit further about these Samsons, but he was nowhere to be found, and anyway, my conviction that they and Thomas’s killers were the same men already approached certainty.
All the distractions of Kansas City and my new life as a man did not at all deflect me from my sense that everything swirled around Thomas’s killing and the justice to be exacted, as a ball on a rope swirls around the boy spinning in the center. Although I had never been a woman of much religious sentiment, I had faith in this—that every event and every step I might make must lead from Thomas to his killers, just as the engines and cars on rail tracks must lead from one station to the next. The distractions that beset, and even intrigued, both Lyman Arquette and Lidie Newton were entirely exterior to that. And so I got up early Sunday morning, pulled on my hat and boots, took up my case, and set out for Blue Springs. I had some biscuits that I saved from my supper the night before, and I ate them as I went along.
I also gazed around me, memorizing the seething activity of Kansas City. The day was a hot one, and business started early, then there would be a lull in the afternoon, when folks who wanted to would go to services. There was none of the Sunday quiet here that prevailed even in Quincy, not to mention in places like New England. Forgoing business one-seventh of the time couldn’t be done where things were just building up. And anyway, there were few women around to present the claims of conscience.
It didn’t take so long for me to get out of Kansas City. I was eager and strong, and it was easy to walk in trousers, as I had noticed before. Giving away my petticoat had lightened my case some, and I contemplated tossing the whole thing aside, but in the end I couldn’t quite do that. It represented too much who I’d been. I was afraid to lose that entirely.
The difference between the look of the Missouri countryside and the look of K.T. countryside was striking. Missouri was regular land, the way you would see it in Illinois—hills and trees, fences and pasture, a regular amount of sky and a regular amount of privacy to everything. Houses and barns peeked out from groves and appeared around bends in the road. The hills and their canopy of trees ate up the vastness of the sky and broke up the wind—though there was a breeze, it eddied about rather than simply bearing down. And cultivation had made its mark. The area wasn’t as settled as the area around Quincy—cabins as humble as ours in K.T. were visible here and there, some with hogs milling about them, revealing what they’d fallen to. Mostly these had given way to larger, more refined log houses, or even to clapboard dwellings, even to whitewashed ones. And I did pass big houses, set well back, glass windows elegantly ranged to either side of the front door. Not every field was being worked by slaves, not every wagon was being driven by a slave; I didn’t see only slaves throwing out animal feed, or hanging out wash, or beating carpets, or weeding gardens. It varied from one farm to another: this one could be set in Illinois or Ohio, with its neat, small house and its diminutive yard; that other one could be set in Kentuck or Tennessee, with its columns and veranda, its wide approach, and its crew of dark laborers. Mostly I saw Negroes busy with hoes in fields of hemp. I knew Missouri was a great place for hemp, not so much for cotton, and I knew what a field of hemp looked like, but that was all I knew about it. White men and boys were busy in fields, too, hoeing corn or flax, say. Taken all in all, Missouri was a mixed-up sort of place.
There was a great deal of traffic between Independence and Kansas City, even on a Sunday, and many men on horseback, or driving wagons, went by. Some of them offered me rides, and as the day got hotter and my