The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton by Jane Smiley Page B

they’re all Yankees, you know. So when that abolitionist picks up my pretty little package here, he’ll be picking up my warts. But he’s got to do it on his own. You can’t give it to him. He’s got to steal it for himself That’s the only way it works."
    He arranged the package on a clump of grass and climbed back into the wagon. "I know plenty of charms and cures. Most people here in K.T, they call me Mr. Graves, because I’m so respected for my healing powers, but I don’t make much of it, because it’s a gift, you see, from the Lord, and I can’t take the credit."
    After we’d gone forward a few yards and Mr. Graves had looked back at the package three or four times, he said, "I’m sure sorry for you that you can’t watch the healing, but it could take a day or so, and I know you want to be finding your place and setting yourselves up before then, but it would do you good to see it."
    "Perhaps it will happen more quickly than that," said Thomas.
    "You can’t tell," replied Mr. Graves. "No, one thing about this life is true, and that is that you can’t tell."
    Mr. Graves’s flow of conversation remained strong throughout the day and only petered out after we’d settled on the prairie for the night. We settled on the prairie for the night because Mr. Graves said that it was a quiet night, warm and clear, and taken all in all, the open prairie would surely be more congenial to us than the nearby cabin of Paschal Fish, "because I am an observant man, Mrs. Newton, and I have noticed that you have something of a distaste for expectorating, and between us, ma’am, Paschal Fish’s clientele have a genius for expectorating, and since the man himself makes a practice of never looking down or taking off his boots, he don’t know quite how it affects others."
    The sunlight seemed to evaporate off the prairie like steam off a vat of boiling water, leaving behind darkness that had already been there; on the other hand, the pale prairie flowers all around us shone against the grasses with a prolonged, dusky brilliance until the darkness simply extinguished them suddenly and at last. Night on the prairie was not like any other night I had ever seen: the blackness was below us and the light above, field upon field of stars stretched over our heads, rolling in every direction until your eyes lost the ability to see them. The bright pale road of the Milky Way beckoned toward Santa Fe in one direction and Iowa in the other, wide and smooth. After a bit of this, Mr. Graves pulled some sticks of wood from the wagon and built a fire. "No use," he said, "in taking chances. Better all around that folks know we’re here. I been thinking about it, and this is what we’ll do. If anyone rides up, we’ll put on that we’re sleeping, and then when they shout out and rouse us, we’ll try to discern their views on the goose question by the way they talk. Now, if they talk like they’re of your party, you can speak up, and if they seem to be of my party, why, then, I’ll vouch for you."
    I said, "Mr. Graves, what is this question about geese?"
    "The goose question is slavery, ma’am. If you are a proslavery man, then out here we say that you are sound on the goose." He was smoking a pipe, and he tamped it down and put some more tobacco in it, then said, "I’ll tell you something. Anyone out here who is one hundred percent sound on the goose question wants to talk about it. You folks don’t, so you see that give me the first inkling that you an’t sound on the goose question. But I don’t ask. And I only tell you this for your own good. And Lawrence is a den of black abolitionists, so it won’t matter when you get there, but when you are away from there, then you got to talk like you’re sound on the goose, or susss-pisssshhhhuns will be aroused."
    Thomas asked, "Why do they call it the goose question?" but Mr. Graves shook his head. "No one knows. Anyway, I don’t."
    I glanced at Thomas, wondering if he had noticed, as