The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [46]
She asked me about myself, then said, "Oh, we’re the same age, then. But you seem older, because you’re so tall, maybe. You have beautiful hair. My hair is the bane of my existence, which Mama says is a good thing, because it is a daily rebuke to my vanity. But I don’t see why my vanity needs to be rebuked on a daily basis."
I paused and set the buckets down, then shifted them. They were lop-sided and hard to carry. She said, "If I had nicer hair, perhaps Thomas would have thought to marry me." I stared at her, looking for some evidence of rancor or disappointment, but she said it just the way you might say that you should have bought one pair of shoes rather than another. And then she skipped to another topic. She said, "I saw you looking at Mr. Newton last night when we were talking about Stringfellow."
"You were very mysterious."
"I wasn’t. I’m not supposed to know what he said, and of course Mr. Bisket wouldn’t say it in front of the ladies, but everyone knows what he said."
"What did he say?"
"He said that men will of course do low and cursed things with women, that’s their nature, and in a slavocracy, it’s a protection for the white women that the slave women are there for the men. He said that’s the best thing about slavery. But don’t tell Mr. Newton, or I shall die of embarrassment, and don’t let on to Mama that I told you. She already thinks that this life in K.T is making me coarse and wild."
"But none of the lynchers are slaveholders, they said."
"Do you expect the Border Ruffians to make sense? I don’t."
We walked on.
After a moment, she said, "And it is making me coarse and wild here. We’re all loosening up. The congregation in Medford that gave us some money to come out here would be shocked. For one thing, we went to services back there every Sunday, sometimes twice, but here, with one thing and another, we’re lucky to go once every three weeks. But you’re from the west yourself, so it probably isn’t much of a change for you."
I said, "I don’t know. Ask me in a month."
There had been big doings in Big Spring, and the next thing would be a constitutional convention a few weeks later, where the Free Staters would write the laws that they intended to live under. By the time we got back to the leaning house with the water, Thomas was up to his neck in all the issues. And I saw that the box of "harness" was not where we had left it but pulled out into the middle of the floor, by the stove. The men were lifting out the carbines and admiring them. Later, in the evening, they divided them up. That was how long it took us to become Free Staters all the way.
It turned out that it was waiting for the carbines that had delayed Thomas in his first departure from Massachusetts: accompanying them had been his assigned task, though all had joined in purchasing them. And so it turned out that it was to the box of Sharps rifles that I owed my marriage.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Jenkins knew just where our claim was, right between theirs on the river about three miles north of town. It was good land, they said, with a gentle slope to the river, but it had no timber. They were both prepared to cede us a timber lot in exchange for access to the river. Bush, in particular, had to have a way to get his cattle—his future catde, which he didn’t yet own—down to the water. At the moment, he had a cow and a calf out there. They were grazing our place. Now that Mr. Jenkins had been squeezed on the other side by a claim jumper whose rights had been provisionally upheld just three days before, he was still deciding what to do. He had two town lots, and maybe he would give up the farming idea and go into business in town. All the men agreed that it would take a few days, at the most, to put up a livable cabin