Please Remember This (14 page)

“I don’t know much,” Phil replied. “I was on the phone and so just got a voice mail from him. But apparently the bedroll was caught in the housing of the starboard paddle wheel. It must have been stowed somewhere on the deck and the current carried it back until it got caught.”

Ned’s plan—”which he will stick to,” Phil said; “he’s kind of obsessive that way”—was to remove any artifacts from the boat in as intact a way as possible
and bring them to the schoolhouse, where they could be examined in an orderly fashion. So Phil continued past the site to the school. Word of the find had spread, and eight or nine cars were already there, parked close to the ditches along the side of the road. Phil pulled up behind them.

“This is so good for the town,” he said. “We needed this.”

People were gathered around a long outdoor table. Tess moved in next to Carolyn Ravenal.

“Ned must be beside himself,” Tess whispered to her as a greeting.

“He’s over the moon. He won’t be able to sleep for a week.”

Spread out across the table was a mass of something dark. Two people from the crowd were holding green garden hoses, directing sprays of water onto it as Ned unrolled the length of textile. He was wearing rubber gloves, and the front of his shirt was soaked, clinging to his chest.

The table itself was made of a screen door propped up on a pair of sawhorses. Some one-by-sixes provided extra support for the screen. Underneath the table, a couple inches of dirt had been dug up and replaced with gravel to absorb the water that would be used for washing.

“There’s two layers of wool here,” Ned was saying. “But the threads that held them together must have been cotton. They’ve disintegrated. The animal proteins—wool, silk, beaver hair, leather—may survive because the mud has sealed them in an oxygen-free environment. All the plant-based fibers like cotton and linen will be long gone.”

The wool was soggy and heavy. He had to stop and move to the other end of the table, refolding the loose end of the bedroll. The water that streamed out from below the table was dark and sour-smelling.

“Here we go.” Ned eased the last of the fabric open, revealing some mud-covered lumps. He lifted one and held it under one of the hoses. A stream of water pushed aside the mud. A curved handle glittered. It was a tin cup. Ned cradled it in his hands for a moment before lifting it up.

“Deck passengers,” Ned explained to the small crowd, “just paid for transportation. They had to supply their own food and sleep in whatever spot they could find among the cargo.”

Phil was gesturing to him.
Pass the cup around. Pass it around.

Ned handed the cup to the person nearest to him and continued speaking as he lifted the next artifact. “You didn’t want to be a deck passenger. If someone was going to drown, it was one of them. If someone was going to be burned when the boiler exploded, it was one of them. Sometimes they even had to go ashore and help gather wood.”

Carolyn handed Tess the cup. It had a little dent in it and the handle had been mended once.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t Disneyland, it wasn’t Hollywood, but it was real. It had been used. An actual person—someone who had sweated under his arms and coughed if he breathed in some woodsmoke, someone who had decided to board the
Western Settler
and had a reason for being there, a plan—had used this cup.

People were asking Ned a lot of questions, and he answered as he turned objects under the stream of water. A plate, an iron skillet, a small knife, and a clay pipe emerged. “This was probably what the passenger was using every day on the boat, but it also might have been everything he owned in the world. We know about life aboard the
Western Settler
from Mrs. Lanier, one of the cabin passengers, and it’s not likely that she would have ever spoken to this man until after the wreck. Her life had a kind of
Gone With the Wind
gracious-living elegance, which his wouldn’t have had at all.”

The reference to
Gone With the Wind
captured the attention of several women in the crowd. Here was some prettiness. Who was Mrs. Lanier? What was her life like?

“Compared to a stagecoach, a cabin on a steamboat was a very comfortable way to travel.” Ned told them about the dining parlor and the ladies’ salon. “It seems that the Laniers were intending to stop in St. Louis and spend the summer there, but apparently enjoyed the trip up the Mississippi enough that they elected to keep traveling. They clearly thought of themselves as travelers or tourists, not settlers. They were planning on going back home.”

Ned had finished with the artifacts, but he continued to hold the hose over the bedroll. It would have to be completely rinsed before it could be refolded and frozen for future preservation. While waiting for the water to run clear, he spoke some more about the Laniers.

“We don’t really know why they didn’t return to
New Orleans. I have to wonder if they weren’t embarrassed to have to admit to their families that they had taken slaves in Kansas Territory.”

Slaves?
Tess was instantly alert. She plucked at Phil’s sleeve. “The two slaves, the ones who escaped after the wreck”—she had read about them in one of Phil’s many press releases—”they didn’t belong to the Laniers, did they?”

He looked down at her. “Of course. Two healthy adult slaves, and the woman an experienced midwife—that’s a significant investment. No one else on board had that kind of money.”

“But …” Tess was almost speechless. Why hadn’t she known this? “But that little book she wrote … she didn’t say anything about owning slaves.”

“She was writing twenty years later. Having owned slaves was nothing to brag about in 1879.”

Or ever.

Tess suddenly raised her hand as if she were in third grade. “Can you tell me more about the two slaves who ran away when the boat sank?” This time she spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. “Does anyone know what happened to them?”

“No, not for sure. But six months later a supposedly free black couple showed up in Lawrence, which was a center for antislavery activity. Oral tradition there says that the pair had escaped from a boat. Furthermore, she was reputed to be an excellent midwife, which suggests that she was Octavia, although she was going by a different name. There is documentation supporting this, a few letters and such, in which women urge each other to send for Harriet when ‘their time comes.’ “

“Did the owners try to get them back?” someone else in the crowd asked. “Didn’t the Dred Scott decision say that you could bring your slaves into free soil?”

“That’s what the Supreme Court said, but the people in Lawrence had guns—Beecher Bibles they were called because the New England abolitionists would send them in boxes marked as carrying Bibles. It’s hard to imagine Fleur-de-lis—it was still known as Hobbing then and was as apolitical as it was possible to be in those years—mustering the kind of force needed to have taken on Lawrence, which is what would have been involved. Plus, I like to think that Eveline realized she was a stronger and better person for not having a slave to rely on, but that may be too contemporary a thought.”

My grandmother Picard, who survived the wreck of the
Western Settler,
used to tell this story. A wagon had come out from town to bring the ladies and children back to shelter. Mrs. Lanier’s Negro girl, Octavia, helped her mistress into the wagon, tucking her damp skirts around her. Mrs. Lanier asked if the girl was fit to walk into town and she said that she was and would be along with the men.

There were two families of respectable character, and their womenfolk were offering such aid as they could. Mrs. Lanier volunteered that Octavia would be along shortly to lend a hand. Many of the men had stayed on the river, hoping to retrieve some of the cargo, and it was assumed that Rex and Octavia were with them, as
both were extremely strong and hardworking.

Mrs. Lanier showed no signs of worrying about Octavia, and only upon her husband’s return did she say that she had great need of the girl.

“They are with you,” Mr. Lanier said.

They both were very quiet and, Grandmother said, simply looked at each other, not speaking. They had thought that their Negroes were devoted to them, never thinking that the pair might want to escape, and at first they didn’t believe it. Mr. Lanier spoke to the captain about mounting a mission to capture the runaways, but the captain was discouraging. Few locals would support such an enterprise, and not many of the passengers would have either. None of them had come from slave-owning families.

Grandmother Picard said that on the lengthy trip up from New Orleans the passengers had come to think highly of the two Negroes. Both were respectful and willing to help other passengers. Rex, of course, won everyone’s gratitude by jumping into the river to save Mrs. Delon’s young son.

Grandmother used to ask Grandfather if he would have gone out to help capture the pair. “If the captain had asked, I would have gone,” Grandfather always answered. “But not much further than the nearest tree.”

Mrs. Lanier was not used to doing for herself, but she settled down and learned. Her daughter was sickly most of the summer and
so wasn’t seen much. When they had been on the boat, Mrs. Lanier had told the other ladies that Octavia was a skilled midwife, and Mrs. Lanier did have occasion to miss her greatly later that autumn.

Undated note, handwritten on
lined paper, found folded in
the Picard family copy of
The Wreck of The Western Settler

 

As a girl, Tess had wanted to live somewhere that it snowed, but the Kansas autumn took her breath away. The hickory tree on the Old Courthouse lawn turned a vivid yellow. The oak in Tess’s yard was softening into russet, and as she walked home each evening, leaves rustled at her feet and acorns crunched against the sidewalk. The air was clear and cool, faintly scented with the smoke from wood fires. Hawks flew low, and the geese swirled in wheel patterns that seemed to cover the whole sky.

All week Ned found more artifacts caught in the paddle wheel: a coffee grinder, broken dishes, a shoe. Phil sent out daily press releases, and the discoveries on the deck of the
Western Settler
were reported not just in Kansas City, St. Joe, Lawrence, and Wichita, but in St. Louis, Davenport, and Omaha. Many more people came to town the following weekend. On Saturday the Eislingers—the family who had opened a candy store/ice-cream parlor after their electronics store had gone bankrupt—had sold out of fudge at one-fifteen. By three they were out of peanut brittle and chocolate-chip cookie-dough ice cream. Tess
heard that Barb Eislinger went home that night, put supper on the table, and started to cry. For the first time, Barb could imagine that this might work; the family might be able to save their house; the kids might be able to go to camp again.

The painters were finished at the Lanier Building, and the casement pieces had been delivered. Tess began to display her merchandise. She had tablecloths and dinner napkins, place mats and lunch napkins, finger towels, hand towels, ladies’ hankerchiefs, antimacassars, doilies. She had pillowcases and sheets trimmed in handmade lace; she had factory-made blouses which she trimmed in handmade lace. She had filet lace, Battenberg lace, knit lace, drawn work, appliques. She also had gift items, most of them with some degree of handiwork—soft wool hats with silk roses, earrings made from antique buttons, crystal necklaces. Many of her linens were on hangers in the armoires, but others were displayed, draped across the drop leaf of a desk with a velvet-flower brooch and a twisting silver chain. She bought board games—backgammon, chess, Trivial Pursuits, Scrabble, even Candyland—and put them invitingly on a bookshelf, encouraging people to use them while drinking their coffee. On each table she put one of those little blank books and a mug full of pencils. It was very satisfying to arrange everything so beautifully. She could do it forever.

But the town needed her to open up.

With the help of Mrs. Fornelli, the high school guidance counselor, she found some high school students to work afternoons and weekends. A beautiful, although quiet, American Indian woman named
Sasha would work weekdays. At Carolyn Ravenal’s suggestion, the famous local baker Brenda Jackson was going to be providing baked goods to supplement what Tess was ordering from Mrs. Cavender’s bakery.

The first Sunday in November, Ned found a barrel full of building materials, hinges, bolts, door handles, locks, and keyhole covers, and at 6:30
A.M.
on Monday, the Lanier Building Coffee Company opened for business.

At 6:25
A.M
. Tess heard a car door close outside her front windows. She knew that Phil Ravenal would be her first customer. He had already made a habit of stopping by early every morning and letting her practice making espresso, but this morning he had also brought his parents and his brother.

Her door was already unlocked. “We’re early,” Phil said, “but we’re willing to stack cups and sweep floors until opening time.”

“I’m ready.”

The others followed him in. Tess started on Phil’s usual café Americano with half water while the others looked at the chalkboard menu over her head. “Are these to go or for in here?” she asked.

“In here,” Phil answered. “They’ll love your mugs.”

“Tess, this place is unbelievable.” Carolyn was looking in every direction. “I love it. I want to move in.”

Tess smiled. “You’re supposed to feel that way.”

“We’ve never had anything like this in town,” Dr. Matt said. He squinted at the chalkboard again. “Oh, Lord, I never know what to order in places like this. Just give me what Phil had.”

“No,” Phil said. “He has a major sweet tooth. Give him something with a flavoring.” Tess complied.

“And if that’s Brenda Jackson’s Tunnel of Death cake, give me a piece.”

“Oh, Matt,” Carolyn protested. “You aren’t having that for breakfast, are you?”

“I wasn’t going to call it breakfast.”

Carolyn rolled her eyes and spoke to Tess. “Anything wrong with this town should be directly attributed to the atrocious eating habits of the local doctor.”