The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [215]
And how quickly did I need to flee?
For flight was certainly required. I knew and felt that I was in every way the wrong bird for this flock and that my every movement and remark revealed it. That Helen and Papa seemed to accept me was a testament more to their hospitality (or blindness) than anything else. Every morning, after I donned my gown and before I left my chamber, I made sure that my pistol and its ammunition were safe inside my case. Before my nap and at bedtime, I reassured myself that nothing had been touched or disturbed. These were not the actions of a proper guest.
Most important, I quizzed Thomas, how should I go on with pursuing his killers? How should I leave? What direction should I take? Where were money and transportation to come from? How should I disguise myself, now that Papa and all his connections knew of my existence, now that I was wearing costumes well known in the neighborhood, now that my men’s clothes had been disposed of? What should I do after the deed was done, now that I was deep in enemy territory, settled territory, where the most desirable outcome, the deaths of Samson and Chaney, would certainly have ill consequences for me. In K.T., I had been planning revenge. In Missouri, I was most assuredly planning a crime for which I would be captured and punished, possibly killed (on balance, the easier consequence to ponder). I quizzed Thomas, but I got nothing from him. On this subject, he turned away from me. I had always been more bloody-minded than he, less judicious, more hasty and hot. And yet how could I let it go, and creep back to Quincy? It didn’t seem possible. It didn’t feel possible. And it didn’t seem just. To turn and walk away from his killing, in fact, seemed to both represent and partake of the very absence of justice that was K.T. from top (President Pierce) to bottom (the unknowns who died from time to time without anyones ever knowing who they were or how to get in touch with their loved ones). The hot days drifted by, and soon I had been with Helen and Papa for over a week.
It chanced, during this week, that Papa had few visitors and kept mostly to himself, though on most days he rode away to do business of some sort. His questioning of me and my refusal to answer became a more and more good-humored ritual (or, at any rate, good-humored on his side; on my side, fear gave my smiles and laughs a hollow quality). There were no parties and little news. Perhaps out of disinclination to alarm Helen, Papa said little more about Kansas than he had already. For several days after her alarm, Helen tried to take things in hand and make provision for a siege or something like it. She and Lorna and Delia bustled here and there, especially down in the cellar below the house and out in the root cellar cut into the hillside. They decided that there was an abundance of provisions for two or three months, anyway. But the sun shone and the heat held, and the danger seemed to recede as life kept on in its familiar way. To me, the idea of my friends back in K.T. attacking Day’s End Plantation from either the road in front or the fields behind seemed ludicrous. Papa had all the discernible advantages.
On the evening of the thirteenth of August, however, two fellows came galloping over the lawn up to the house just at suppertime, and Papa ran out to meet them, while Helen, who had been telling us a story of some biscuits she had been learning to make that afternoon, sat staring at me, her mouth open, her eyes wide, and her hand pressed to her throat. We