Bleeding Kansas Read online

  “I’m a new face here—maybe they’ll take to me,” she said to Jim’s grandmother. Young wife, triumphant in her youth and sexuality, sure they made her invincible.

  She baked an apple pie, using Baldwins from the Grellier trees—the offspring of wild trees Abigail had found on the land—and Abigail’s recipe for crust, which meant buying lard, since, to Susan’s disappointment, the Grelliers didn’t butcher their own livestock. One raw November morning, she drove down the narrow gravel lane that connected the Schapens to the rest of the world.

  Myra Schapen came to the door. “Oh. You’re Grellier’s wife. What do you want?”

  Susan was taken aback. She managed to hold out the pie pan and stammer that she wanted to meet Arnie and Arnie’s wife, Kathy, that this was a neighborly visit.

  “We don’t need charity in this house,” Myra snapped. “Especially not Grellier charity. You tell Jim Grellier and that grandmother of his that I wasn’t born yesterday, I know what they’re up to sending you over here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Susan said, her voice high and squeaky, as it always became with stress or excitement. “They didn’t want me to come at all.”

  “Maybe you’re lying, maybe you’re telling the truth. Either way, we don’t need any Grellier pies.” And Myra shut the door on Susan.

  Susan flushed a painful red. She ran back to the car, slipping on the gravel in the yard so that she ended up dropping the pie. She didn’t notice Arnie come out of the barn and take a tentative half step toward helping her back to her feet. She clambered into her car and drove home, blinking away tears, sliding in through the unused front door of the house so she could change out of her dirty jeans before Gram saw her and said, “I told you so.”

  Over at the Schapens’, Myra recounted her triumph to Arnie and Kathy. Kathy, who worked at a bank in Lawrence to help pay the farm bills, said she thought it was time they got over all this grudge holding. “It was brave of her to come here, Mother Schapen.”

  “Brazen, you mean,” Myra clacked. “I know you dated Jim Grellier when you were in high school, but you married my son, and I expect you to remember it. And remember that you’re a saved Christian and they’re no better than pagans. No, they’re worse than pagans, because they have the chance to hear God’s saving Word and they turn their backs on it.”

  In Myra’s eyes, people who worshipped at Riverside United couldn’t have been closer to hell if they’d been Catholics.

  FROM ABIGAIL COMFORT GRELLIER’S JOURNAL

  June 22, 1855

  Kansas Territory

  My new home! what is there in it to raise my spirits? We are settled in a fine piece of land about five miles east of Lawrence, but M. Grellier was unable to find lumber for a house, so we dwelt for four weeks in a tent, where I also was delivered of my son, whom I have christened Nathaniel Etienne, in memory of my dear father and my babe’s own father. How I have need of my father’s spirit and guidance in this land.

  As I lay ill, not knowing if I should live to suckle my little one, Mrs. Schapen, who has arrived to keep house for her son Robert, came to visit. She is one “whose mercy never fails,” for she saw the straits in which I was reduced, and her son, a fine young man of some two and twenty summers, appeared the very next day with a party of other young men, and within two days had a prairie home built for us. In truth, it is a rude shelter, and I try not to sigh too loud for the comforts of my mother’s home, the carpets, the glass windows: here, we put in sheets of unbleached muslin to keep the fleas and mosquitoes as far removed as is possible. And the unfinished floor allows the prairie mice to dance merrily around me as I nurse my little Nathaniel. But we are able to assemble a bed and raise it above the ground. We have a roof that keeps out the prairie showers, and with these good neighbors I would be unworthy of the love of God if I had a disposition like a perpetual dripping on a rainy day.

  The Fremantles, whom we also met on our journey westward, are settled near us as well. We are three little sailboats on the Kansas prairie, the Fremantles, the Schapens, and us. When you ride the California road west from Kansas City, and then turn a half mile to the north, you come first to the Fremantles, where Mr. Fremantle, who was a Judge in Boston, is building a fine house, two stories, and a stable to house three horses and a team of oxen. Then you arrive at our rude shanty, and a quarter mile farther on Robert Schapen and his mother, who live as simply as we do.

  July 17

  The Missourians pour into Kansas territory every day, seeking to harm us, and a woman alone with an infant is not an invitation to their mercy but to their rapacity. Last week, I heard horses’ hooves upon the road while I was washing Baby’s skimpy clothes and saw a cloud of dust as a band of eight or nine of these ruffians rode toward Lawrence along the great California Road. I gathered little Nathaniel and lay beneath the bed, pressing his face against my breast so that he should not whimper. I heard the men say, “No one here, shall we burn the place?” and another reply, “No, for we may want to move into such a nice home by and by,” and then off they rode again.

  August 22

  Mrs. Fremantle came to call when Mr. Schapen was helping me hang a front door on our shanty home. She herself, of course, lives in great comfort in the mansion Mr. Fremantle is building for her. I try to suppress the sin of envy, for we are not to be concerned with “what we should eat and how we should dress,” but I confess in my secret self that I would dearly love a wooden floor rather than an earthen one. So why would she grudge me a real door to replace one of hopsack that lets in every piece of dirt and vermin to attack my poor wee mite of a baby?

  “Mr. Schapen, you must be well ahead of the rest of us with your plowing,” said she with a broad smile, “if you have time to help Mrs. Grellier with her housekeeping.”

  “Mr. Grellier is so busy with his school that the rest of us are pitching in,” my kind neighbor said. “A school benefits the whole community, and I’ve never seen anyone so fired up with ideas for the improvement of mankind as Mr. Grellier, even if I can’t always understand him.”

  My husband’s French accent becomes heavy when he is excited, as he often is these days, both by our political woes and by his own ideas for the improvement of mankind. When we are alone we speak French together, but of course few people here can converse in that tongue. Mr. Grellier’s mind is so lofty that he seldom remembers the trivia of daily existence.

  I will not pine for the fleshpots of Boston, like the apostate children of Israel in the desert. I will not indulge in regrets, remembering my dear mother questioning me, “You are so prone to impetuosity, my dear Abigail. Perhaps we should not have named you so, your spirit is too often highly exalted, and then, as if in reaction your spirit goes into mourning (meaning in Hebrew my name signifies ‘father of exaltation’). I hope, my beloved daughter, that you do not find yourself in a period of mourning for this impetuous marriage.” And I, dear Mother, thinking I knew better than you, and knowing that Mr. Grellier is a good man, a disciple of Fourier and of our own beloved Bronson Alcott, thought not of the hardships the women in Mr. Alcott’s community have endured.

  Oh, let there be no repining, nor any attention to Mrs. Fremantle and her insinuations! I will boil water for the laundry and the dishes in a tin pan that I have to carry some two hundred paces, from where we were able to find a well of potable water, and bear my yoke like a Christian, for I am here not for my own comfort but “to ease every burden and to let the oppressed go free.” And in my own darkest moments I know that my life is free and easy in comparison to the bondswoman.

  Three

  THE PASSIONS OF SUSAN

  THE WEEK BEFORE Gina Haring moved in, Uncle Doug and Aunt Mimi came down from Chicago for Thanksgiving. Doug was a litigator, Mimi a financial consultant, and their one child was around seven. The brothers didn’t see each other often—it was hard for Jim and Susan to get away from the farm, and Mimi, frankly, hated country life. Chip and Lara had spent a month with them in Chicago the previous sum
mer, but Mimi and Doug hadn’t been to the farm for almost three years.

  Thanksgiving morning, Chip took off early to spend the day with his girlfriend. Neither Susan nor Jim was crazy about Janice Everleigh: “Surely he can do better than that,” they’d worry, after she spent a day on the farm with Chip, wearing heavy eye makeup even while going out on the combine in the hot sun with him, giggling, flirting, but never talking. Jim, looking at Janice’s large breasts bobbing up and down under her tank top, gritted his teeth and talked to Chip about safe sex, keeping his opinions of the girl to himself. Don’t make her into a martyr in his eyes, Susan had cautioned.

  Susan didn’t like Chip abandoning his family for the Everleighs, not on a major holiday, and not while his aunt and uncle were visiting, but Jim put a finger over her lips when she tried to argue Chip out of it. “I don’t think your folks liked you spending all those Christmases with Gram and Grandpa before we got married, Suze.”

  “That was different! My parents’ house was so—so dreary. Here, it always felt like Christmas, and I try to make it feel like Thanksgiving, too. But you’re right, I mustn’t be a possessive mother. Let Chip spread his wings.”

  Chip bent her backward in a sweeping bow and kissed her. “Don’t worry, Mom, your little bird will come home in time for Grellier apple pie.”

  “Her little turkey bird, is more like it,” Lara yelled at him as he went out to his car.

  While the turkey cooked, Lara and Susan showed Mimi and Nate the X-Farm. This was Susan’s latest passion, but Lara was, if anything, more enthusiastic about it than her mother. Doug and Jim watched them from the kitchen window

  “Susan doesn’t wear out, does she?” Doug said. “First the bread oven, then the co-op market, now an experimental farm. What’d Lulu say they were going to grow? Confection sunflowers?”

  “We figure we can’t compete with the big producers if Susan tries for an oil-use crop, but everyone wants to eat healthy nowadays. Organic seeds should be a hit in the health-food stores.”

  Jim spoke tersely, not wanting his brother to see he was worried about Susan and the X-Farm. Doug and Susan had never really hit it off, going back to those Christmases and summer vacations when she’d visited the farm. Doug would tease her about her interest in local history, but there was always a bite to his teasing that made Susan flare up.

  When Jim told Gram and Grandpa he was thinking of asking Susan to marry him, Doug had exclaimed, “You sure you want someone that intense on a working farm, Jim?”

  “Mind your own business,” Jim snapped back. “You never wanted to work this farm, you’re running off to law school to turn into one of the leeches who suck the life out of the land, and now you don’t want to admit the country bumpkin can attract a woman as amazing as Susan.”

  “All I’m saying, Jim, listen, she’s beautiful, she’s fascinating, but she carries on about those old diaries as if Abigail and our farm were a movie. Can she be happy living real farm life, not a made-for-TV romance?”

  Jim had tried to knock him down, which led nowhere, because even though Doug was in law school he was still stronger than Jim.

  Jim thought about that conversation from time to time, when Susan’s enthusiasms swept away everything in her path. The ill-fated co-op market had been the most disastrous venture, because it had been the biggest, but there’d been other smaller actions along the way.

  Many farmers in the valley had a small market on their property where they sold fresh produce in the summer. Many also went into Lawrence twice a week to set up a stand at the town’s farmers’ market. One year, Susan decided that a co-op market would be the salvation of the area’s small farmers. Everyone would bring their produce to one central location, the families would staff it to cut down on overhead, and they’d eliminate the brokers who took all the farmers’ money and gave nothing back.

  Susan brought a missionary zeal to the idea, talking it up at the extension office, visiting neighbors with pages of cost projections, produce suggestions, and profit possibilities. When Susan had a head of steam, she could persuade most people to do most things.

  Although the Schapens and Greynards said they weren’t giving up their private markets so a Communist like Susan Grellier could make money off them, Liz Fremantle agreed to it. The Fremantles, even when they were old, widowed, the last of their line to farm, carried a lot of weight in the valley; nine more farms followed suit.

  Jim remembered how excited Lulu was the day the Kaw Valley Market opened. She kept waking him, demanding to know if it was time to get dressed. She insisted on skipping school to help Susan open the doors. Once it got going, the market garnered interest all over the three-state area. Susan gave interviews on Nebraska and Missouri public radio as well as the Lawrence television station. Her picture was on the cover of the Kansas Farm Bureau Journal and in the Douglas County Herald. Lulu brought all the articles into school, and Mrs. Lubbock put them on the bulletin board.

  For eighteen months, Susan rose at four and drove round all the participating farms, collecting whatever they had for sale at the moment—flowers, pumpkins, lettuce, dried gourds, goat cheese, even emu steaks. Every Sunday afternoon, she’d tot up the week’s sales and scrupulously divide the proceeds among the participants.

  The market was a success of sorts, in that people did drive out from Lawrence and Eudora to shop, but the store never made enough money to hire a manager. The burden fell on Susan to keep the market open and staffed; the other families taking part didn’t treat working there as a serious commitment. During the co-op’s last six months, Susan slept less and less, and she had a feverish flush all the time.

  One morning, Susan slept through the alarm, slept through Jim getting up to make coffee. She was still asleep when he came back at noon for lunch.

  Susan finally got up in the middle of the afternoon, her face stained with tears. “I can’t do the store anymore, Jim. I’m not strong enough, or good enough, or—I don’t know what enough—to inspire the rest of the families to help me out, and I can’t keep it going on my own.”

  “Then let’s make a plan for closing it down. Give people notice.”

  “They don’t give me notice when they don’t show up for their shifts and I have to drop what I’m doing on our own place to fill in!”

  “Baby, I know you’re right, but you can’t just turn your back on it. That’s a recipe for courting ill will. It was a hard enough job getting people to sign up. Now they’ll call you a quitter, and it’s not good to get people riled up, even if they’re in the wrong. You can’t farm out here if you’re on bad terms with your neighbors—our farms are too small. We have to cooperate to survive.”

  “Then tell your old friends to cooperate with me for a change. I’m tired of it being a one-way street. I’ve been neglecting Chip and Lara to help out the neighbors. Chip’s playing in a big game over in Shawnee tomorrow—I’m driving over to watch. If people get upset enough to start pulling their weight, then maybe I’ll get involved again.”

  The next morning, Jim sent Curly out to collect the produce, even though he’d been planning on using Curly in the oat field that day, and Curly kept the store open for a few hours.

  Curly—Tom Curlingford—worked in the winters for a cousin who had a construction business in town; he was a font of news about everyone across northeastern Kansas. Jim knew Curly would tell the whole world some exaggerated version of Susan’s behavior, but he didn’t know what else to do—he couldn’t take the time to run the store himself, and he couldn’t spare Blitz, who was more like his right arm and best friend than a farmhand.

  Sure enough, although some people, like Annie Wieser, spoke up for Susan, and others, like Peter Ropes, who farmed south of Grelliers’ and had always been a mentor to Jim, refused to discuss Susan at all, most people had a field day at her expense.

  Lulu was heartbroken. She loved that market. She’d gotten into fights at Kaw Valley Eagle with Robbie Schapen and Chris Greynard over whether the market was a Communi
st idea. Two days after Susan turned her back on the project, Jim got a call from Mrs. Lubbock at Kaw Valley Eagle to say Lulu hadn’t come in. Jim found his daughter down at the market, trying to shift hundred-pound bags of produce, crying with rage and helplessness. She was ten years old, tall for her age, but Jim picked her up and carried her to the truck, and spent the day with her, away from the farm, from school, treating her to a hot-fudge sundae and a movie in town.

  The building still stood at the crossroads on Fifteenth Street, the paint on its sign peeling, the Jayhawk strutting across the board faded to a pale blue. Junior Schapen and Eddie Burton had shot out all the windows, and the inside smelled of mold and rat droppings.

  The market had come after Susan’s passion for starting a bakery. The stone oven, where she could make five hundred loaves a day, still stood behind the greenhouses. Occasionally, she’d fire it up and make bread for a church fund-raiser or to raise money for uniforms for Chip’s baseball team. Susan had built the oven herself, over Gram’s objections, and made it work, too. She’d even signed up a half-dozen grocers in the county to carry her homemade bread, but, as with the market, the effort had never turned into a paying proposition. Susan had dropped it with only a week’s notice to her customers.

  Along the way, she took up lesser projects, learning how to make flashing for the chimneys, setting up a loom in the front room so she could weave cloth the way Abigail Grellier had done, re-creating the Freedmen’s school Etienne Grellier started in 1863 and coaxing the Lawrence schools into sending their classes to see it one spring.

  Her latest enthusiasm was for organic farming. “We can all do our part to make our carbon footprint smaller,” she announced. “Farms are terrible energy users, and if we could farm organically our profit margins would be so much better.”