The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [259]
But that made no difference. The audience acclaimed me. Here I was. There I had been. Giving testimony was more important than the testimony given. They clapped and applauded and shouted and passed the hat, until I was numbed by the whole experience and had to be led off the stage, a smile fixed to my face. Afterward, there was a reception with refreshments and much conversation. They were excited by everything I had to say, fortified for the conflict ahead, bright and eager, men, women, young, old. My lecture was a success.
I asked Thomas’s mother not to require any more lectures of me, and she agreed, remarking that perhaps everything was just too fresh, and of course there was my grief for Thomas.
There was, but that wasn’t it, though I allowed her to believe that it was. What it was was a revisitation, but far more strange and disturbing, to those feelings I had had that morning in Saint Louis, of being too big, too loud, too strange, of bringing tidings that were too unwelcome. No one could describe what was true in Kansas and Missouri. Hardly any Kansan or any Missourian, I thought, could describe what was true there to another Kansan or Missourian, even one supposedly on his or her side. To say what was true, you had to look into the eyes of your interlocutor and see something there that you recognized. I didn’t think you could do that about Kansas or Missouri. And when I looked into the eyes of my new friends in Boston, I didn’t see anything I recognized there, either. The more they embraced me and drew me in, the less I felt like one of them, like a woman, even like a human being. I felt like a new thing, hardly formed, wearing a corset and a dress and a shawl and a bonnet and a pair of ladies’ boots, carrying a parasol in my gloved hand, but inside that costume something else, which didn’t fit, something I felt myself to be but couldn’t name. By Christmas, I couldn’t tolerate Medford any longer, and I went back to Quincy for a while. At least there I was accustomed to feeling out of place.
And that, I suppose, is the end of my Kansas story. Everyone knows the end of the story, about the war and all of that. And most people know about the Lawrence Massacre, in August of ’63. The fellow Quantrill, who led it, was said to be about Frank’s age. No one had heard of him during my time in K.T., but he must have been as mad with rage as any of them, because he oversaw the killing of some two hundred men or so, all of them civilians, many of them in front of their wives and children. And as always, they burned what houses they could burn. I heard later from Louisa that Charles was safe—off in Leavenworth—and Governor Robinson hid in a gulch, while Jim Lane ran off across a field in his drawers. But Mr. Stearns, who had the store, was shot, and old Mr. Smithson was, too, and many, many others. Louisa wrote: "I never thought I would thank the Lord that the Bushes both passed on with that fever last winter, but I do, for no one who saw what those devils did will ever forget or forgive. The Lord Himself isn’t powerful enough to make you do it."
One thing is left to tell. After I returned from subsequent travels, and Frank returned from fighting in the war, with General Grant at Vicksburg for a while, then in Virginia, he was twenty-three years old and looked forty. It was only then that we ever spoke of K.T, and then it was only to agree that whatever anyone else thought, after K.T., nothing, not Bull Run or Gettysburg certainly not