The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [36]
Thomas asked, "Why do they call it the goose question?" but Mr. Graves shook his head. "No one knows. Anyway, I don’t."
I glanced at Thomas, wondering if he had noticed, as I had, that Mr. Graves’s mode of speech had changed. He now spoke more roundly and fluently, as if his former "Ruffian" expressions had been a trick. This gave him an air of mystery to me and made me wonder about him, but I only had a minute or two to ponder this, for as soon as he fell asleep, we unrolled ourselves from our blankets and sat close beside one another, unable to sleep. The night before, I had been afraid of shots through the floor, and the night before that, of a boiler explosion on the Independence. Each scene seemed to have passed in an earlier lifetime, as distant from these stars and this fire as the Roman Empire. The prairie was full of sounds—the wind through the grasses, but also the yipping of what I later learned were coyotes; the whine of mosquitoes, but also the liquid call of night birds. Nor did every traveler stop with the darkness—I heard the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the calls of one man to another. They didn’t molest us, though.
Thomas held my hand between his. I did not have the tiny hand you read about in books—it did not disappear between the two of his—but I was just as ready to have it held. The requirements of traveling had given us little leisure, and arrangements on the steamboats and in the hotel after Saint Louis had conspired to keep us apart. Always in the past I had accepted without much thought the flocking of men with men and women with women. It was no surprise to me that Mr. Graves presumed that my husband’s conversation would be with him. Once he had made me a comfortable place to sit and helped me into it, it was clear that Mr. Graves considered me well taken care of. Once in a while, he would address some informative remark to me, as a courtesy to Thomas’s manhood, as if not wishing to imply ignorance on Thomas’s part. Perhaps this was the key to his differing modes of expression, too: he lowered his style to a manly roughness for Thomas, elevated it for me. And if Thomas attempted to have any private conversation with me, Mr. Graves would eavesdrop and hem and haw, waiting to stick in his two cents’ worth. He wasn’t the first to distinguish between us; this was the way men and women behaved, were supposed to behave. I was perfectly familiar with it, but now Thomas and I seemed to be like two souls in separate lifeboats (speaking of maritime adventures—and I had never seen the sea, either; when I read about a governor of Illinois who had recently been much laughed at when he went to Baltimore and asked in all innocence, looking at the tide, if the place flooded like that twice a day every day, I hadn’t gotten the joke), who could never quite reach each other, never quite get close enough to converse. Except that now that we were that close, I could not begin to think what we would say to one another. He said, "Every time I set out on what seems very much like an adventure and imagine myself lost in some vast solitude, I discover when I get there that there are plenty of men before me, and that they are all great talkers."
"That is certainly true of Mr. Graves," I said. "But I must say that I didn’t mean to find vast, solitary places here in Kansas. I meant to find pleasant new towns with all manner of services that had sprouted out of the prairie like mushrooms. That’s what all the bills in Horace’s store promised. Space enough for all mankind, but no inconvenience."
Thomas laughed.
"I’ve been reading Miss Beecher.