The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [97]
I have to say that this was a question I had never before been asked. I didn’t know quite how to reply.
"I regard my corset as a saddle." She went on, "We’ve all heard of slave gangs where they bridle the troublesome slaves so as to both assert and proclaim control. Well, we women are similarly tacked up, though with corsets rather than bridles. They stifle our breath and cut us in two and shape us to the liking of our masters."
I would have to say that Thomas did not care for Louisa. He was careful to inform me that while he didn’t object to her sentiments, he could not quite like her manner, but I found it arrestingly daring and nothing if not genuine. Charles was hog happy, as Roland Brereton would say. He was fed, warmed, loved, and told what to do, and his sentiments about every matter quickly came to mirror his wife’s. K.T., he said, was the making of him, and it was true that in after years he prospered as well as any of our friends, died the father of eight and the grandfather of thirty-six, and spent sixteen years in the Kansas state legislature. And General Lane (later Senator Lane) always claimed that he admired Louisa Bisket and was admired by her in return, which was, of course, a recommendation to some and not to others.
We spent our holidays cozily enough, and in the new year, Lawrence looked about as up-and-coming as a frozen town could look. There were sleighs and drags everywhere in the streets, and building continued in spite of the weather and the sickness. Not long after New Year’s Day, regular mail was established between Leavenworth and Lawrence, and there were plenty of goods everywhere, not only food. As Mrs. Bush would say, "Some days the Ruffians want to shoot us, and some days they don’t, but they never stop wanting our money."
Charles was one of the carriers for mail and goods from Leavenworth, and in typical K.T. fashion, a few days after the route was established, he and Thomas made up their minds to combine a little trade with a little politics.
The situation was this: Our Topeka convention, which we Free Staters had held in October, called for elections to state offices on January 15 (they’d been imagining a different January 15 than the one we got—a mild, sunny day and not a bitter, blustery one). The men of Lawrence voted properly, on the fifteenth, but the next day everyone heard that as a result of the fracas in Leavenworth the month before, the Free Staters there had been afraid to vote. The result was that they planned to gather at a certain farmhouse in a village eight miles from town on the next day, the seventeenth, and cast their ballots. Some men from Lawrence, including the mail carrier, Charles, and his assistant, Thomas, wished to be present and well armed, just to insure that the voting was carried out in good order.
The men got up long before dawn and headed for Leavenworth, with Charles’s hot little gelding and Jeremiah in the traces. We resolved the question of Frank’s going along by the men’s sneaking out without him, which obliged him to sulk about the wheelwright’s shop all day. But for all Frank’s enthusiasm for the excitements of our life, on the one hand, and Thomas’s growing belief that events in Kansas must be brought to a climax in order for the slavery issue to be resolved once and for all, on the other, I often feared what Frank had gotten into with us, and I caught myself wondering how I would phrase the news of some disaster in a letter to my sister. Not all disasters, it now appeared, might come through the general bearing of arms by parties who hated one another; these days I also wondered how I might tell her that her boy had frozen to death.
Louisa and I were anxious throughout that day and into the next. We stayed up all night and kept sending Frank out into the street, as if there might be something to hear all the way from Leavenworth. As it turned out, we were worried with good reason, for the Missourians had