Bleeding Kansas Read Online Free

mold along the chimney walls and cat urine in the floorboards had turned the place squalid.
    Every time Jim or Susan went over to check on the roof after a microburst or tornado swept through the valley, they e-mailed John Fremantle with a catalog of decay. Jim got Blitz and Curly to help him seal up the basement so that cats couldn’t get into the house, and Susan, one hair-raising afternoon, climbed up to replace the flashing around the three chimneys. They couldn’t afford to take on other repairs themselves.
    Despite its decay, Susan loved the house. She’d fallen in love with the history of the three families and their fight against slavery before she’d fallen in love with Jim. Abigail Grellier, who Jim only thought of as the grim-faced woman in the photograph on the front-room wall, was a living person to Susan.
    The first time Susan visited the Grellier farm with Jim, back when they’d been students together at Kansas State, she’d asked a thousand questions about its history that Jim couldn’t answer. He and Doug never thought about things like Quantrill’s raiders, or the way the anti-slavery women circumvented the slavers’ posts along the Kaw River. Grandpa was entertained by Susan’s enthusiasm. He showed her however many great-grandmother Abigail’s diaries and letters in the tin trunk in the attic.
    Susan had stayed up half the night poring over the faded ink, reading bits out loud to Jim. “You mean you’ve never even read these? But, Jim, this is the trunk she brought with her from Boston. She had to keep her food in it the first year on the farm because it was the only thing the mice couldn’t eat through. I can’t believe it, can’t believe I’m sitting on the same trunk! And that piano down in your gram’s parlor, that’s the piano Abigail carried out here.”
    Jim tried to explain to her that his family’s history meant something different to him, something he found hard to put into words. It was a sense of having a place in the world, a place ordained for him. Susan, whose father, unable to hold on to a job, had moved every two or three years, responded with a kind of wistful eagerness that Jim found touching.
    She’d finally let him pull her down next to him, finally let him turn out the light, make love, but she’d been too excited to sleep much. Jim had grinned idiotically all through breakfast the next day while Susan catechized his grandparents about Abigail. How many of her children had survived? How had she decided who inherited the farm? Could Jim’s grandmother run the farm herself the way Abigail did when her husband was away?
    Grandpa couldn’t resist Susan’s flushed face and bright eyes, but Gram found her questions naive or pointless. This was a farm, not a museum. Even after Jim and Susan were married and Susan proved she could carry her weight at harvesttime, Gram often treated her as if she were a child who had to be indulged or restrained.
    When Lara was little, Susan used to take her over to visit the Fremantles. Mrs. Fremantle would give Lara sour lemonade and chocolate chip cookies while Susan wandered through the house, tracking the descriptions in Abigail’s journals against the floor plans.
    Now and then, Liz Fremantle let Susan lead a tour through the house for the Douglas County Historical Society or a Riverside Church study group. Susan showed visitors the outsize flour bins where Una Fremantle had hidden Robert Schapen and Etienne Grellier during one of the slaver raids and the basement room where Judge Fremantle stored guns for the anti-slavery militia in Lawrence.
    Susan mourned the fact that the Grelliers’ old two-room shanty (rebuilt after Quantrill’s raid in 1863) had been replaced by a proper house in the 1860s. That house had been demolished in turn in the 1920s, replaced by the comfortable two-story, brick-and-frame place where the family still lived.