The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [99]
When the news came back to Lawrence of what they did to Captain Brown, we were convinced at last and permanently that the Ruffians were animals—worse than animals, merciless fiends who had no thoughts in their heads except of the most brutal sort. They killed him with hatchet blows and kicks, then got drunker, then threw him in the wagon and drove him home to his wife, where they threw him in the yard and shouted, "Here’s Brown!" and drove off, laughing. Some people said that he was still alive and died in her arms, but others said that he was dead. It was shocking enough either way.
Charles and Thomas knew the beginning of this story by the time they got home, but not the end. They had met Captain Brown and liked him; he was not an old man by any means, but someone like US. After everything was known, they were speechless in the way you get when some vile thing has brushed past you. All of Lawrence was talking of nothing else, but they didn’t want to talk of it at all.
We sat silent around our fire the next few evenings. Louisa knitted busily and I attempted to sew, but Thomas and Charles said nothing and did nothing. When I suggested that Thomas might read from one of his books, he said, "I can’t think which one," and Louisa didn’t dare suggest that Charles sing, one of his favorite amusements. Louisa and I traded glances over and over. I was not sure what she was thinking, as she was of an especially, you might say uniquely, sanguine temperament, and K.T. seemed to suit her very well; but I was thinking fearful and bitter thoughts, all mixed in together. I was of course glad that my husband had escaped without injury, but that gladness gave way to horror every time I thought of Mrs. Brown, who seemed, in my mind, to be myself in a different dress. I hated the Missourians for these deeds with a fresh hatred—as fresh as if my friends and I hadn’t known for months how the Missourians were. But I also resented our men, even Thomas and Charles, for going off and getting into it. I could both imagine and not imagine what they had seen, and I couldn’t throw off the feeling that they hadn’t needed to witness it and therefore to bring it home; and so, while I knew they weren’t at fault, I seemed to feel, some moments, as if they were. And yet, Thomas’s dejection aroused my pity, too. No authorities on marriage that I had encountered had ever discussed this welter of uncomfortable emotions that seemed to go with the condition. I feared that K.T. was going to bear me down in the end. I suppose we all did so.
On the other hand, the speed of events didn’t give us much leisure to ponder them, and it was hard to tell whether that would, in the end, contribute to our salvation or our destruction.
CHAPTER 14
I Do Yet Another Thing I Have Never Done Before
Those persons, who keep their bodies in a state of health, by sufficient exercise, can always be guided by the calls of hunger. They can eat when they feel hungry, and stop when hunger ceases; and then they will calculate exactly right. —p. 98
AFTER THE DEATH OF Captain Brown, the Missourians who were prepared to hang, shoot, dismember, kill, and otherwise clear us out of K.T began to gather in the border towns and prepare their springtime strategy. Some of their papers came into town, and in one, the very voice of the Kickapoo Rangers, the editor reflected our own sentiments back to us in a way that seemed astounding, given the horror of Captain Brown’s death. Declaring that "forbearance has now