The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [256]
It was surely only six-thirty or so, and I stood outside Beatrice’s familiar green door for a few minutes before knocking. In former days, I would have walked in. But I knew that this time I might appear as a ghost and give everyone a fright—they needed a knock to know that it was a person outside. I waited and knocked again, then suddenly the door opened, and there, a joy absolute and unexpected in his very person, was my nephew Frank. He had a yellow shirt on, brown trousers, and a green cap pushed back on his head. He had an apple in his hand. He stared at me. I stared at him. We stood like that until Beatrice’s voice from the back of the house called out, "Is there someone at the door? Did someone answer the door? Frank? Where are you?" Then she said, "Well, land o’ mercy! I just yesterday sent that woman in the jail money for you! How did you get here? Lydia, I swear, I am displeased with you—you are nothing but trouble in two states and one territory!" And then she threw her arms around me and burst into tears.
Well, how simple it came to seem once we put it all together! Frank’s story was this: Exactly one day after I left Lawrence with Mr. Graves and Mr. Graves and the fair songstress Davida, a letter arrived for me from Harriet, insisting that Frank return to Quincy, as they had just heard of the sack of Lawrence. This letter was dated at the end of May but had been delayed in a bundle of confiscated mail in Leavenworth for over a month. The day after that, Frank himself turned up in Louisa’s shop, shoeless, hatless, seegarless, horseless, and hungry, looking for me and Thomas; and two days after that, brother Roland himself turned up, with a team of horses, three rifles, two pistols, a knife, two kegs of cornmeal, one of flour, and one of highly rectified whiskey, all of which he had purchased in Weston as a way of financing his search for Frank: upon receiving no reply to Harriet’s letter, he had resolved to take a look for himself He now sold these in Lawrence for a tidy profit, and returned to Westport with Frank in tow. At this point, everyone felt confident that I was on my way to Quincy. Meanwhile, what had happened to Frank was strange enough, even by K.T. standards. He had gotten in with a fellow named George Lambert, who had two brothers with him. With Frank and several other boys, they made up a band of some eight young men, George at twenty-five or so the eldest. The Lamberts said at first that they were Emigrant Aid Company folks and that they knew Old Brown and meant to find him down in Osawatomie and join his army. While they rode around for six weeks, they never met up with Brown (a good thing, because Brown got into a few deadly battles). After a while, it turned out that Lambert and his brothers were really Mormons and had spent the previous winter out in Utah Territory but had been kicked out for some reason, Frank thought for stealing some money. Guerrilla conditions were of the most basic sort—none of the boys knew how to hunt except Frank, and then the horses got into some sort of poisonous plant and three of them died, including Frank’s mount. Of his companions, Frank only said, "They didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They never even looked around for anything to pick up to trade and sell. I don’t know. I was pretty disgusted, myself. When I had to walk back to Lawrence, I ate better than when we rode around takin’ stuff." He promised faithfully to attend school when he got back to Quincy. This was why he was presently with Beatrice, in town. Horace walked him to school and delivered him right into the hands of the schoolmaster every day and received him from those same hands every afternoon. Otherwise, Frank employed himself under Horace