Was

by Geoff Ryman

  “Why yes, there was.”

  “Where?” asked Jonathan, his voice rough.

  “Stand over here, young man,” said Mr. Baker. He leaned over Jonathan’s shoulder and pointed. “See that hump of trees there? That’s where it used to be. You see, the Worrells wanted to be able to say they were helping everybody so they built a new schoolhouse and paid the teacher. But the old schoolhouse was there until, oh, 1961. Thereabouts. Old Paul Jenkins lived in it with his mother. I think he set it alight when she died.”

  “Yee hah!” Jonathan screeched. His voice gave way, and he began to cough.

  The Bakers smiled a bit nervously, and Mr. Baker stepped back. “Well, I’m pleased to have been able to help,” he said.

  Jonathan kept coughing, unable to speak. He doubled over, hand over his mouth. He danced in place, still happy.

  “Thank you, thank you very much. It really means a lot to him,” said Bill.

  “Well, you’re both very welcome,” said Mrs. Baker. Jonathan was still coughing, smiling, shaking his head.

  “Now if you’ll excuse us, my husband needs his lunch,” said Mrs. Baker. “Then he’ll go lie down. I’m afraid he’s not very well either.”

  The Bakers walked back to their house, arm in arm.

  “We did it,” croaked Jonathan.

  They drove on down the lane, through fields of plowed, rich, brown-black soil. Off to the right, far away on the horizon, there was a slight rise of trees, with a white, test-tube tower. It was the hill over Manhattan.

  “Stop,” whispered Jonathan, his voice gone. He patted Bill’s arm.

  Ahuh ahuh ahuh.

  Bill eased the car to a stop. One-thirty.

  “The hill,” whispered Jonathan, and pointed to the left. His skeleton hands fluttered against the window.

  There it was in bald ziggurat layers. Dorothy’s hill.

  “It’s around here. It really is!” chuckled Bill.

  “Hurry,” said Jonathan.

  As Bill drove, Jonathan seemed to fold up smaller and smaller on the front seat. He leaned back, mouth open. His lips were cracked. As the car bounced up onto the main road, he began to talk to someone.

  “Sure they will be. I know they will be,” he said, hoarse. “They’ll be there.”

  Then Jonathan paused, as if listening.

  “But you didn’t die,” Jonathan answered. “You grew up. Into me.”

  They came to the lane. ROCK SPRING, said the sign. The clump of trees was at the crossroads. Bill turned right and parked the car. The lane was unpaved, white gravel, and it led in a straight line to the ziggurat hill. A row of old-fashioned telephone poles ranged along it on the left, like a line of crucifixes. Two huge farm machines stood some way away amidst the sorghum. On the other side of the lane, the field was harvested, bare earth, thrashed stalks. Everything was seen. Everything was visible.

  Quarter to two. We’ve done it. Thank you, Jesus.

  Bill patted Jonathan’s knee. “Come on, kiddo,” Bill said. “Let’s go see it.”

  Jonathan still smiled. He didn’t move.

  “Come on, Jonathan.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” he answered in a whisper. He stirred slowly.

  Bill helped him out of the car. Bill got out the plat-book map and turned it upside down, south on the top.

  “You’re not going to believe this, Jay,” said Bill, with a nervous chortle. “The Bakers’ farm? That was it, Jonathan. That cabin. That was the house. That was where she lived.”

  Jonathan moved as if he were on a ship at sea. His smile was fixed. Did he even understand?

  “Let’s go have a look at where the school was,” said Bill. There was a collapsed fence of barbed wire that he had to hold down and a ditch beyond it that made climbing over the wire difficult. They had to duck under and around small conifers or larger ash trees. And then, unmistakably, there was a clearing, a clearing where a building had been.

  Jonathan stepped into it and smiled toward one end. “Hello,” he said. He stood still in the low grass with its purple heads.

  “This is where the school was,” said Bill.

  Or maybe not. In the midst of the thicket there was another building, gray and parched.

  “Let’s go have a look at that there,” said Bill. He fought his way through leaves and whiplike branches. He swept them away from his face. He saw a window, some kind of shed or outbuilding perhaps.

  “Wait for me,” he heard Jonathan whisper behind him.

  “It’s okay, you can get through,” said Bill, distracted. Elbow across his eyes, he stood up. There was still glass in the windows, and a glass jar on one of the windowsills. There was a paintbrush on it.

  “Wait for me!” Jonathan screeched.

  Bill turned around and shrugged his way back through the trees. The clearing was empty. There was the sound of the car starting.

  “Jonathan?” shouted Bill.

  He heard the car pulling away, dirt spurting out from under the wheels. Bill sprinted across the clearing. Through the trees he could see the gray car accelerate, swerving. Bill got caught on the barbed wire. He slipped down the grass in the ditch. His trousers tore. He pulled himself back up and over the fence, into the lane.

  The car had stopped. Dust still rose from it. The driver’s door hung open. Bill broke into a run, down the row of telephone poles toward the hill. He got into the car. Its engine was still running. The key was still in the ignition. It swung back and forth like a clock.

  Bill looked around him, shouting, “Jonathan!”

  On the right, bare and harvested, there was no one.

  “Where are you?” Bill started to run across the fields, toward Dorothy’s farm and then stopped. This is crazy, he thought. There’s nowhere to hide. If Jonathan were ahead of him, he would see him, running. If he had fallen over, he would still see him, there was no cover, Bill could see every clump of dirt.

  Bill turned and pelted back toward the car, up and over the lane and down into the other fields.

  “Jonathan!” wailed Bill. “Answer me!” He thought Jonathan was lying hidden among the sorghum. He plunged down into its midst and ran across the orderly rows, looking up and down them. Nothing. No one.

  They had husbanded the lower slopes; they had dug ditches across the fields to drain the wallows, the buffalo wallows where children disappeared.

  It was crazy, but Jonathan had gone.

  Dreamtime and Zeandale,

  Kansas

  1883

  It seems that spring has come once more and farmers go forth to seed their fields. Some oats are already sown. The rain has moistened the earth, making a good outlook for rich harvests. Though nature seems to smile upon the fields, yet some heavy hearts rest among us, grieving over the departed soul of Sister Reynolds.

  …Though her body was broken

  Through her misery unspoken

  Though deformity changed her aspect

  Though earth’s duties were hard,

  She complained not a word,

  For all these she could leave in the casket.

  She was gentle and kind

  Always bearing in mind

  That she had a work to perform

  And with meekness and love

  All things were performed in their turn…

  To those children so dear

  To their mother while here,

  We would say in their anguish and sorrow

  Be strong in the Lord

  Abide in his word

  Eternity is only tomorrow…

  — Lines written by “True Friendship” on the death of Etta Parkerson Reynolds, as published in the Manhattan Nationalist, March 18, 1889, as recorded by Ellen Payne Paullin in her edition of Etta’s Journal

  Inside the cyclone, Dorothy dreamed.

  She dreamed she was still on the road westward, walking toward Wichita. Wilbur F. Jewell was with her. Wilbur was still thirteen. He was now as old as Dorothy. Wilbur was dressed like an Indian, with a colored headband with fea
thers and painted lines on his face. He had gone to the Territory and found the Indians and lived with them. Dorothy’s heart swelled with happiness for him. Wilbur had come back from the Territory to find her and take her with him. The Territory would be full of Indians and buffalo and magic. Wilbur was tall and bony and gangling, and he looked so young to her now. Dorothy knew in her dream that she loved him, would have loved him if he had lived.

  America walked with them, westward out of the East. Dorothy dreamed that they had stopped in a wayside camp. There were wagons and tents. There were women in gingham dresses and children in smocks and narrow-eyed men in black hats. The men mumbled with metal bars in their mouths.

  The adults were in harness. Great thongs of leather led out from the bits in their mouths, and their eyes were circled with rings of exhaustion and shielded by black leather blinders. They wore them even as they sat and slumped on the ground, sprawled carelessly around small grubby fires. There was ash and blood on their hands, and they were burning coffee black in greasy tins. Beside the camps there were mounds of buffalo bones bleaching in the sun. Children ran up them barefoot. Under their feet, clattering hip bones had sockets like eyes. All around them, on either side of the road, there were stumps of trees, lined up like tombstones.

  There was a constant sound of chopping. Dorothy saw, beyond the stumps, the blue-green tops of conifers. They waved back and forth and then fell out of sight with a distant crash. Wilbur and Dorothy went to look. The sound grew louder, multiplied many times.

  There were Mechanical Woodsmen. They were a labor saving device, a sign of progress like telephones. They went on chopping and chopping, cutting out sections of living wood. The Mechanicals were steam-driven, jets of it coming out of funnels in their heads. Wreaths of acrid orange-brown smoke came out of their mouths. Their faces, their arms, their legs, were coated in thick black grease. Whirling gears and belts moved them and they dripped scalding water. They couldn’t keep themselves from cutting down the trees.

  One of them looked up at Dorothy and she saw he had living eyes. He wept boiling water. The eyes were Uncle Henry’s. It’s not my fault, he seemed to say, I can’t help it. He looked embarrassed, ashamed, as he slammed an ax into the trunk of a cedar.

  Dorothy knew then that she was frightened of men, almost all men except for Wilbur. She wondered how she would ever learn to love men or live with them.

  A whistle blew, a long mournful sound like all the loneliness that drove the men and the machines. The Mechanicals hissed and chuffed and came to a halt, ready to move on.

  “All aboard!” someone cried.

  The people of the camp groaned and stood up. The leather harnesses creaked and stretched. The adults were hauling their houses behind them. They were all moving West, to escape the past, escape the East. Why didn’t they ever look behind them? Did they never wonder why they were so weary and mean? Dorothy knew and despised them. They were all pulling the East with them.

  They carried guns. They shot things. They shot anything that moved. They shot a black man running toward freedom. There were flocks of deer, bounding away, white tails like the waves of the sea. Rifles crackled and the deer fell, their legs suddenly breaking under them like twigs. There were clouds of birds in the sky, darkening the sun. The men raised their rifles like thunder, and there was a rainfall of blood, blood and feathers, and pelting corpses of pigeons. People slipped on blood. Without thinking, without even knowing, the men raised their rifles and fired.

  Lift the rifle. Crack. Lower the rifle. Lift the rifle. Crack.

  One of them turned to Dorothy, coated in grease, grinning.

  “We’re civilizing the country,” he said.

  Dorothy knew that by the time they got to the Territory, it would be gone, always advancing away from them like a rainbow.

  They all walked on, toward Wichita.

  As the settlers drew near Wichita, there was a great lowing sound and a cloud of dust ahead of them. A herd of Bad Women was being driven toward the river.

  “Yee ha!” the cowboys on horseback shouted and herded the women down the banks so they could wash. The women were brown with dust and they skidded down into the water, their dirty stolen dresses billowing out on the surface of the river.

  The settlers walked through a shantytown, between lean-to shelters with lace curtains and open doors with women standing in them. The Bad Women were not pretty; they were fat and sour or skinny and mean. Dorothy looked at the settlers but their eyes were fixed ahead of them and they seemed not to see.

  They seemed not to see the women running races naked through the streets like horses. Men lined the course, wearing bowler hats and drinking straight from the bottle and laying down bets. The women ran with breasts swinging. Their smiles were fixed; their eyes were dim. Alongside the course, two Bad Women in all their finery got into a fight, tearing feathers and hair. Men gathered around the fight to laugh at it and to cheer them on. The women screeched in pain.

  At the bridge, the gates to Wichita, the shantytown was left behind. There were bankers there to meet the settlers. The bankers were the guardians of the cowtown, with vests and rotund stomachs and extravagant whiskers. The bankers took away each man’s gun. There was nothing to shoot in Wichita but people and that would be bad for business. The bankers took away the horsemen’s blinders and put on blindman’s glasses instead. The glasses were tinted green. They made the gray grass and the gray sky and the gray soil look alive. And the bankers sang!

  Fine property, with water nearby, in balmy gentle climate!

  The travelers sang too, swinging their arms out in front of them like blind people. The pilgrims stumbled through the gates, singing “Land of Goshen.”

  Wichita had streets of unpaved mud, churned up by wagons and human feet. There were wooden boardwalks and vast puddles and ramshackle tents, and cheap wooden buildings with lies painted on them. FINEST DRY GOODS, said one shack, sweltering in a puddle, FIRST NATIONAL BANK, said a sign over a tent.

  Fights began to break out as people tried to camp. Women sat down in the mud and wept. Along the boardwalks, there were freak shows. One-armed men. Women with beards. Tattooed couples, all green and red and pink and lavender. There was a black man with no arms and legs, opening a box of matches with his teeth to light a cigarette. It was a show. In her vision, Dorothy knew that he had cut off his arms and legs himself, to make a living.

  There were brass bands in front of the restaurants and emporia. The music they played was loud and squawking, harsh and blaring. They were in competition with each other. They had to make you hear them at the expense of the others. A man in woman’s clothing lifted up his dress to step around a puddle. Dorothy peered at his face. He was Jesse James. His face was made of black lines, like an engraving. The look he gave Dorothy stilled her heart with fear.

  Behind the shacks and false-front palaces, there were mounds of stinking hides, laid out, with scraps of meat still clinging to them. There were deer’s heads, and bears’ paws, all in mounds. There were slaughterhouses, full of cattle lowing, smelling blood, knowing they were going to die, voiding their bowels and bladders, so the stink and the flies rose up.

  I want, thought Dorothy, to go home.

  She didn’t want to see any more, because she knew this was a truth. Would her father be here? How could she find out? Wilbur said there might be a list in the County Offices.

  The County Offices were two stories high and were made out of brick, with stone arches over the windows. There was a gaslight outside them on the corner and signs by the door saying PROBATE and LAW OFFICE. There was a telephone. Dorothy could hear it ringing and ringing, with no one to answer it.

  Inside, the County Offices looked like a bank. Ruined, desperate men lined up in front of tellers, all in peaked caps. Everyone was shouting. A policeman bustled a howling man out of the place. Telegraph messages squeaked like a flock of birds.

  Dorothy was in despair, waiting in line. In her dream, she knew no one would be able to help he
r. They wouldn’t even be able to hear her over the din. Wilbur took her arm and led her into another room. Great doors opened, and beyond them, the County Offices looked like a church.

  There were Gothic pillars and fragmented, colored-glass windows and beautiful distant singing that was forever out of reach, like a colored scarf being blown away by the wind.

  And all around them, the people worshiped, on their knees. Worshiped what was good, able to worship what was good by deliberately using it to cover up the bad. They worshiped the things they had destroyed.

  Our father, who art in Heaven.

  And Dorothy was afraid and knelt down and prayed.

  They worshiped the buffalo. They had his head and horns on the wall, and his hide on the floor.

  They worshiped the Indian, his blankets around their shoulders a row of drums in a glass case. They worshiped their heritage. A heritage is something that was never yours, and which has been destroyed.

  They worshiped a child in a manger. The Kings and Wise Men, the shepherds, the cattlemen and thieves had all gathered around the crib. They worshiped the mother of the Child, but only because she was a virgin. All other women were bad.

  As Dorothy watched, the Wise Men and the Kings, the shepherds and the cowboys and the mayor of the cowtown lifted up the Child, who was plump and innocent and happy. “Dear little thing,” they said. “Isn’t he dear?” He smiled at them without guile. And they smiled back, knowing.

  Knowing they had a cross. And Dorothy cried out, but all the people around her wore the Green Glasses and couldn’t hear, because they were praying. They bound the Child tightly in swaddling clothes so that he could not move. They pulled tighter and tighter on the linen.

  They drove a nail through his swaddled feet. The Child screamed and wailed and howled. The men looked around in embarrassment.

  “I told you what would happen if you did that again,” they said in warning, shaking their heads.

  Then they placed a nail on his forehead, and they raised a hammer. No, said Dorothy, no, but the words came out like glue, viscous and silent. And the hammer struck home, piercing the skull, pinioning the babe to the cross, and the cross was raised, and his murderers knelt to worship him.