The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [95]
It had to be as cold in Missouri, which of course was only a few dozen miles distant, but it seemed to many of us that the cold was an especial mockery of our ambitions, for of course, many had come on the promise of the sunny, warm, dry prairie winter. Since only September I, Thomas Newton and I had found blistering heat, relentless winds, cracking tempests, cold wet misery, and cold frozen misery. And during the month of October, we’d seen fires everywhere, snaking over the prairie and dimming the blue sky with smoke. The fires, like much of the weather, had a grand and powerful beauty of their own, if you could lift your mind out of fear and discomfort long enough to appreciate it, but anyone who had hoped that Kansas Territory would gently embrace men and their civilization was quickly and repeatedly disabused of these notions. In Lawrence, there was considerable talk of California, more as the winter deepened. The New England women—Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Jenkins, Mrs. Lacey, Mrs. Bisket—began to talk more frequently of the neat villages and towns that they’d left behind. These Yankees weren’t the impoverished emigrants that most westerners were or derived from. They had emigrated on principle rather than out of need, and many had left houses and farms and thriving businesses behind, though, as Mrs. Bush reminded us, and perhaps herself, "Prospering in New England takes plenty of contrivance, too. I won’t hide from you that I was looking for things to be a bit easier here than there."
I didn’t say what I had been looking for in K.T.—something I myself didn’t know, something alien and unexpected, perhaps. If that had been it, then I had certainly found it.
On the day before Christmas, it was said by those who knew that it was seventeen degrees below zero. On Christmas morning, it was thirty below. I reckoned that we were colder by fifty or more degrees than we’d been on our last days on our claim, when we’d felt ourselves so unbearably cold. But cold as it was, the people of Lawrence, and we with them, kept up the flow of commercial and political activity. It went the same as with everything else: The first time your fingers or nose or toes got a touch of the frostbite, you were shocked and terrified. The fourth time, or the fifth, you were hardly impressed at all.
Louisa Bisket, ensconced in our stone building, kept the stoves burning hot with big chunks of black walnut that Mr. Bisket hauled in from the banks of the Kaw, as behooved a woman of property. She was a good cook, too, especially at concocting soups and stews. Her appetite for conversation was a grand one, and she couldn’t hear enough, or say enough, about Mr. Bisket.
"I love the way he talks," she said. "He’s delightfully expressive. Now, Thomas is a quiet sort—he barely says a word, though he reads beautifully and has such a deep, powerful voice, but Mr. Bisket! Well, he has a way with words, and a flow of talk! When I first met Mr. Bisket, well, my head turned right around. I knew..." She lowered her voice. "Everyone is quite aware that it’s been a mere six weeks since Mr. Wheelwright suffered his unfortunate accident, and I was heartsick, as you can imagine...."
"I thought," I said, "that Mr. Wheelwright died of a fever...."
"Well, he did, but you know, it came on as a result of ... well, he was trying to get our wagon across the river, and he fell in, and he couldn’t swim! He just about drowned then, and he never recovered. When he went down with a fever three days later, I said right then to myself that he wasn’t to live."
She looked genuinely stricken. She was ironing tiny pleats into one of her petticoats, while I sewed a shirt of a sort for Frank, who had grown in K.T. by an inch or two. She had the ironing board pulled as close as possible to the stove, but even so, it was so cold that the iron chilled in the