• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1742 0

(which many people owned and I had read parts of), and a poem by Mr. Longfellow called "The Song of Hiawatha." Some evenings, when no one was visiting, we would read parts of these and other books aloud. Thomas had a flat New England voice. I never read any of those authors later without hearing his voice in the telling of the story. Something I at first found disconcerting in Thomas was that he never offered an opinion until asked, and then his opinion flowed forth quickly and fluently, as if, I thought, he had been waiting for me to ask and that I had even been tardy in my asking. This sense that a life was being lived in my presence that was partly, or largely, unrevealed to me seemed eerie—the very hallmark of marriage. My sisters seemed to have learned to live with this other life by either ignoring it or dismissing it, which I attributed to their common lack of imagination. My aim was different—not a place to live with some children and a man you ignored as much as you could, but some sort of apprehension of him, out of which the other things would grow. That was what I called love. The mysteries of Thomas, who was awkward with tools but strong and persistent, who seemed never out of temper, who was less at ease with a rifle than I was and yet had brought along a large case of them, seemed like a treasure that it was my God-given task to explore. I watched for signs and clues. I wasn’t sure what my reward would be, but I was sure that it would be a delightful one.

Of course, we were eager to hear the news when Mr. Bisket returned from the Topeka convention, where the Free Staters were to frame a proper constitution that would stand as a model against the "abomination," as Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Jenkins had called it, of the proslave constitution. Much of interest had occurred, and one thing in particular that interested Thomas very much. I began to notice the name of a man called James, or Jim, Lane. Folks in Lawrence had talked about him, though not in the same way that they talked about Dr. Robinson, with respect and care. Mr. Lane later became a power in Kansas and, it was said, in the United States, for he was, or reported himself to be, a great friend of Mr. Lincoln. At any rate, people always talked about Jim Lane in the same way, from beginning to end: with some approval, some deploring, plenty of amazement, and a good deal of fascination. The fact was that he was born to be famous and was eager to assume his birthright. I had heard Mrs. Bush mention him in Lawrence. She didn’t like him and said that he had only gone Free State because he saw that that was where the future of Kansas was.

"But he saw that when few others did," said Mr. Jenkins. "Either it speaks well of him that he had the perspicacity, or it speaks well of us that we look like the coming party."

"Well," Mrs. Bush had said, "I won’t speak well of him no matter what."

This Mr. Lane figured in two interesting incidents at the Topeka convention. One was that he offered to fight a duel with Mr. Lowry when Mr. Lowry told some gossip about Mr. Lane and Mrs. Lindsay that had been going all around town already, anyway. The other was that Mr. Lane pressed and finally won the inclusion of a Black Law in the convention, for the purpose of excluding all Negroes, free or slave, from Kansas.

Thomas was astonished, but Mr. Bisket was not. He said, "You know, Tom, most folks think that if you look at it one way, well, they bring all sorts of problems with them, even when they don’t mean to. The problems just flock along after them, like Missourians. And then, well, a lot of folks were making one pretty good argument, I thought, and that was that you can’t make a party of abolitionists. Most people in the United States, at least outside of Massachusetts and New York, they hate abolitionists. You see, they can’t call us abolitionists now, can they? Everybody was for it, for just that reason. Whatever we may think ourselves, we got to appeal to ones who don’t care all that much about slaves and slavery."

I thought this was a good, or at least a practial, argument