The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [226]
"Did Lorna try to escape?"
She went over and closed the door, then lowered her voice. "It was Bella’s fault. Bella has a miserable temper, you know. She can’t help it. But she hit Lorna with a rolling pin, right over the head, and raised a terrible bruise, even though you never hit a house servant like that, but she was the same with me when we were children, she always hit me with anything that she had in her hand, and so Lorna got her mad, and she happened to have the rolling pin in her hand, and so she hit her and knocked her down! Oh, Papa was furious with Bella, and Ralph—that’s Bella’s husband—was, too. But then Lorna made it worse by running off, and they had to advertise, and the catchers caught her, and they beat her worse than Bella did. Papa says sometimes you can’t control the catchers, because they are of a very low sort. Well, Bella was all set to sell her south, but Papa wouldn’t let her and brought her back here and made her promise never to run off, because that’s like stealing, you know, and so she has another chance, but it was such a to-do that if it happens again, Papa will surely just sell her south, because if the others see one run off and then go unpunished, well, it makes them restless."
We finished our breakfast and went out of the room. I felt well enough, in spite of my wakeful night, but everything about me had the quality of seeming magnified—larger, brighter, louder than usual—and I felt as though I were stretching myself to accommodate this, and that sometime the stretch might be too great, and I would snap.
Two days passed after the failure of my plan, and I told myself that I had to take things slowly and think carefully about what to do. I thought that I might write a letter to my sisters, asking them for money to get back to Quincy, but I had no way to post a letter, and secrecy was still such a habit with me that I couldn’t quite bring myself to entrust my letter to Papa. But in addition to that, posting such a letter amounted to giving up on finding Thomas’s killers, and I was so used to planning revenge that even without a plan, I couldn’t give up the revenge. I thought it would be easier to come up with a plan than settle for nothing, so I solaced myself by carefully thinking the same thoughts over and over. And indeed, this was a time of great news and perturbation. Very soon, we all knew, the invisible boundary between fighting and war would be crossed, and so, many times every day, my carefully thought thoughts were scattered by some rumor or fear. The prevailing belief was that if Lane could not be stopped, he would be killed, and if he was killed, the northern newspapers would raise such a fuss that someplace like Leavenworth or Westport would be attacked by the federals, and then war would roll from there eastward, widening and inexorably speeding up, until the whole nation was drawn in. Papa said that in the days when it took weeks to get to the east by boat or coach, there might not have been such a danger, but now, with trains and telegraphs, there would be no stopping it. Or sometimes, instead of rolling east, it was said, the war would suck everything west, as if Leavenworth were an ever-widening sinkhole that would soon enough engulf Boston, on the one hand, and Charleston, on the other. Under the influence of these thoughts, Papa wondered aloud what it might be like to go off to California, but really, he was too old for that, wasn’t he? And so all of us in the house— Helen, Papa, myself, Lorna, I suppose, and even Delia, who counted her stores over and over—were in our separate ways disheartened and perturbed. I wondered