The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [94]
It wasn’t much different in any river town, and in Lawrence we fumed, our hatred, and I might also say our fear, of the Missourians sharply renewed. But the weather and the season cooled us rather quickly. According to the election, Governor Robinson now became the governor, and after it, we all were careful to call him that.
What drove us away from the hotel was the illness. There was fever everywhere, and as the weather got colder, more and more of the sick were brought to the only really sturdy building, which was the Free State Hotel. At least the thick stone walls, thicker by far than the thickness of an ax-hewn shake, kept the wind out. But there came to be feverish and delirious men and women in every room, and anyone who was healthy was obliged by charity to help care for them, especially in the nights, when the cold grew to be more than any man-made thing—be that trousers or shirts, socks or boots, quilt or cloak or shawl or hot drink or fire—could stave off. The more you craved to be huddling in your quilts with your head muffled by pillows, the more you were obliged, it seemed, to stir up fires, hunt for wood, boil some ice into water. After two weeks, Thomas and I were both hollow-eyed and exhausted, more or less resigned to succumbing to the fever ourselves, as most of the nurses did sooner or later.
Just then, though, Mr. Bisket found us a place to stay, through himself getting suddenly married to a widow that he met at the beginning of the war, a few days before he was captured. Mrs. Bisket was not so tall as Mr. Bisket but twice as big around, and Thomas and I thought he must have married her for the warmth: her cheeks were always red, and she never wore more than a light shawl over her shoulders in the coldest weather. She and her first husband had brought a great carved rosewood bedstead all the way from Connecticut at huge expense, and a second bedstead as well, though a humbler one, of maple. She kept all her feather beds and quilts fluffed up and inviting. Her name was Louisa. Her property amounted to a brick storefront with two rooms above on Massachusetts Street, two blocks down from the Free State Hotel. Louisa had a stove in each room and checkered oilcloths on the floors. She showed us around with pride. "I said to my first husband, Mr. Wheelwright—isn’t it funny that Mr. Wheelwright was a wheelwright?—that I would not be traveling to Kansas Territory as a wretch, but as a woman of property. We shipped our goods from Boston to New Orleans, then up the river. We brought three wagons from Independence. We sold the extra two and the mules, at a tidy profit, I must say." She smiled beatifically, as so many New Englanders did when proclaiming similar sentiments. Thomas and I moved in that same day. Since Mr. Bisket now had two wagons, three mules, and a horse, as well as a ready-made home to live in and a ready-made inclination toward prowling around and contriving this and that, he set himself up in a sort of business. Hauling was what he called it, but hauling was only its excuse. He might haul a barrel of apples and, say, a load of wooden shakes to a man on Pinckney Street, and stay there awhile to help nail up some shakes, then be offered the job of clearing some brush or chopping some wood or, as December progressed, clearing snow. Sometimes both wagons would be required, and on those occasions, Thomas would drive the second. So it was that we supplemented our diminishing funds after we moved into Lawrence. And then Thomas’s father sent him a quantity of sailcloth, and this we sold by the piece from the old wheelwright shop below. Needless to say, this life suited my nephew Frank right down to the ground; he slept in the shop below and came and went as he pleased.
We and our friends weren’t the only ones to come in from the prairie. Every house had two or more families living there, and each of