Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  “I reckon old Bob Jewell’s giving up,” said Uncle Henry. His voice went lower and quieter. “The land can break a man, Em.”

  “Depends on the man,” sniffed Aunty Em. She was pulling her hair again.

  Home came slowly toward them. Home was small and gray, a tiny box of even, unpainted planks of wood, with a large stone chimney and no porch, just steps. It nestled between two hills that reached from opposite directions into the valley. Dark twisted woodland reared up behind it. The barn sagged. Dorothy took account of manners and was silent. Toto began to bark over and over.

  Aunty Em covered her ears. “Dorothy, try to still your dog, could you?”

  “Ssh, Toto,” said Dorothy. Deep in his throat, teeth slightly bared, Toto kept growling.

  There were fields, but tall marsh grass grew up among them, even in the drought.

  “Dorothy,” said Aunty Em. “See that grass there? That marks a wallow. Now you must be careful of the wallows, whenever you see them. They’re quicksand. Children disappear into them. There was a little girl who got swallowed up in the buffalo wallows and was never found again. So when you play, you go up those hills there.”

  Dorothy believed in death. “Yes, Ma’am,” she said very solemnly.

  Toto still growled.

  Hens ran away from the wagon as it pulled into the yard. Toto snarled as if worrying something in his mouth and then scrabbled over the running boards. “Wow wow wow wow!” he said, haring after the hens.

  The hens seemed to explode, running off in all directions. Aunty Em jumped down from the wagon, gathering up her gray skirts. She ran after Toto into the barn, long flat feet and skinny black ankles pumping across the hard ground.

  “That’s going to get your aunt into a powerful rage,” said Uncle Henry, taking the mule’s lead.

  Inside the barn there were cries like rusty hinges and the fluttering of wings. Hens scattered back out of it, dust rising behind them like smoke, pursued by Toto. Aunty Em followed with a broom made of twigs.

  “Shoo! Shoo!” she said in a high voice.

  “He won’t hurt them, Aunty Em!” said Dorothy.

  Aunty Em brought the broom down on Toto with a crackling of twigs. He yelped and rolled over. She whupped him again, and he kicked up dust and shot under the house.

  “Henry, get a rope,” said Aunty Em.

  “Got to take care of the mule, Em.”

  The house rested about a foot off the ground on thick beams. Toto peered out from between them, quivering. Dorothy saw his eyes.

  Aunty Em sighed and caught an escaping wisp of hair. “Dorothy,” she said, sounding somewhat more kindly. “Your dog is going to have to learn to stay away from the hens. Now let’s get you inside.”

  Aunty Em held up her arms and lifted Dorothy down. She walked back to the house, holding Dorothy’s hand. “We’re going to have to tie Toto up, Dorothy. Just for a while. He can’t go inside, or we’ll never keep things clean, and he’ll just have to learn not to worry the livestock.” Aunty Em lifted Dorothy up to the level of the front door, and then looked into her eyes. “Do you understand, Dorothy?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” murmured Dorothy, scowling, confused.

  “Well, in you go,” said Aunty Em, giving Dorothy’s hand a rousing shake. “Let’s have some food and get you cleaned up. Henry, please see to the dog.”

  Then Dorothy saw inside the house. “Oh no!” she grizzled. It wasn’t nice. There was only one room, and it was dark, with only one window with no curtains.

  “Guess it isn’t St. Louis,” said Auntie Em. She flung open the door of an iron stove, red with rust, and lit two tallow candles. Immediately there was a smell of burned fat.

  In the flickering light, Dorothy saw that inside, the walls were made of thick raw logs. There was a worn throw rug over a wooden floor, and a bare table and bare chairs; there was a wardrobe and a table with a chipped china basin and long handles on which towels hung. The chimney and fireplace occupied one entire side of the room, but were empty and cold. There was a bed crammed into one corner, and a blanket hung across the room. On the other side of it was a pile of straw.

  Dorothy thought of Toto, who was still under the house. She felt disloyal being here. She wanted to hide, too, under the house.

  Aunty Em took a deep breath and then sighed, a long, high, showy kind of sigh that she meant Dorothy to hear. She had decided to be nice.

  “Well,” she said, animated. “What have we got here but some nice stew! I think there’s probably a little child somewhere who has had a very long day. Maybe she’d like something to eat.

  Dorothy was not hungry, but she said, “Yes please, Ma’am.”

  “What a nicely brought up little child she is,” said Aunty Em, still piping.

  “Can Toto have some too?”

  Aunty Em managed to chuckle. “Heh,” she said. “This is people stew, Dorothy. We got special food for dogs.”

  Aunty Em passed her the stew. It was brown, in a brown cracked bowl. Aunty Em leaned over to peer, grinning, into Dorothy’s face as she took a spoonful.

  “There!” Aunty Em said, soothing.

  The meat was hard and dry in the middle and very, very salty and there were bubbles of salty fat in the gravy, and there were no vegetables with the meat. Dorothy’s mother had always eaten lots of crisp vegetables, lots of fresh fruit, like she could never get enough of it. Dorothy was going to ask for some, but looked around, and saw there was no fruit or vegetables. Dorothy chewed and swallowed. But she couldn’t lie. She couldn’t say it was nice.

  “It’s greasy,” she whispered. If this was what they fed people in Kansas, what did they feed dogs?

  Aunty Em tried to be nice. “Well,” she said, with another drawn-out sigh. “How about some nice hot cornbread to soak it up? Fresh-made this morning.” She didn’t want to wait for an answer. She turned away smartly, and began to saw away at the bread. Dorothy could see she was still mad. Aunty Em dropped the bread on her plate from high up. The bread was bright yellow.

  From under the house came a low, warning growl.

  “Nice doggy. Nice doggy,” Uncle Henry was saying outside the front door. Dorothy’s back was toward it. She didn’t dare look around.

  “You just eat up, honey,” said Aunty Em. “I’ll go make sure Toto’s happy.”

  Dorothy heard Em’s boots on the floor. Dorothy sat still and tried to swallow the meat and she chewed the bread, and it went round and round in her mouth, rough and gritty. She began to weep silently and slowly, listening to what they were doing to Toto.

  “He’s gone right under!” grunted Henry.

  “Well, hook him out with the broom,” Aunty Em was whispering.

  Dorothy did nothing. If she had been big and brave she would have done something. She would have hit Aunty Em with the broom and called Toto and walked away and never come back. But she knew what the world was like, now. It was like that train ride. Here, at least, she would be fed.

  “Got him,” said Henry.

  Aunty Em came back in, smiling at Dorothy. “It’s going to rain, soon,” she said. “Oh, you can smell it in the wind. We need that rain. And you, young lady. You need a bath.”

  Dorothy nodded, solemnly. She did. She liked baths. The water was hot, and it smelled nice, and she always felt pretty afterward. Aunty Em kept smiling. She pulled a big metal tub out of the corner, and poured a kettle into it. The water was boiling. Dorothy heard the ringing sound of water as it hit the metal. It was a sound she had always liked. It was a sound from home.

  “You want to get ready, Dorothy?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Outside, Toto began to bark. He went on barking.

  “Toto’s always quiet when you let him inside,” said Dorothy, unbuttoning her dress.

  “He’ll bring in the dust, D
orothy,” explained Aunty Em. “Here now.” She pulled off the dress. Dorothy heard boots.

  “Henry, please! Can’t you see the little lady is engaged in her toilet?” Aunty Em was still trying to sound nice. The joke was an adult joke, made for adults, the kind of joke a child wouldn’t understand. Dorothy, her head covered by the white fairy dress, could only hear Henry grunt and stomp away.

  Dorothy was going to test the water with her toe. Aunty Em snatched her up and lowered her into the bath.

  It was hot, far too hot. “Ow!” yelped Dorothy. The heat seared into her. “Ow, ow, ow,” she danced back and forth in the tub and tried to climb out. Aunty Em held her in.

  “It’s hot!” wailed Dorothy. Em stuck her hand in.

  “It is not too hot, Dorothy.”

  It was. Very suddenly Dorothy and Em were wrestling. Dorothy jumping, leaping, trying to keep out of the water, held by Em’s hands.

  “All right!” said Aunty Em. She pulled Dorothy out. Dorothy stood naked, rubbing her shins.

  “It was too hot!” Didn’t she know that adults and children felt heat differently? Her mama knew that.

  Bath time here was not going to be nice. Aunty Em stopped smiling. She dumped a pail of cold water into the tub. “Now let’s try again,” said Aunty Em. She didn’t let Dorothy climb in by herself, but yanked her up and dropped her, as she had dropped the cornbread. The water was now too cold, as Dorothy had known it would be. She said nothing and sat down. Aunty Em came at her with the soap.

  Kansas soap smelled like the stew and burned. “Ow!” Dorothy yelped. Aunty Em kept scrubbing grimly. “Dorothy,” she said. “You came from a house where there was sickness. That means we got to get you extra clean.”

  There was a pig-bristle brush, and Aunty Em began to scrub her with it. That was too much for Dorothy. Bath time or not, she was leaving. She began to crawl out of the tub. Aunty Em pushed her back down. She probably didn’t mean to hurt her, Dorothy knew that, but she slipped anyway and landed hard, on the bottom of the tub. Was everything in Kansas hateful? It was that thought, more than the pain, that set Dorothy wailing again.

  “I have never known a creature to make such a fuss,” said Aunty Em. She scrubbed anyway. She imagined she was stripping away a miasmatic coating of contamination. The bristles bit deep, scraping away skin.

  Dorothy knew. She was being punished. Punished for being here, for being Dorothy, for coming from a household with the Dip. She bore as much as she could. “Ow oooh. Ow,” she kept saying, knowing it would do no good, trying not to do it, but the brush hurt so badly. Aunty Em held her hand out flat and buffed away at it with the brush.

  “And I do believe this hair of yours has never been cut.”

  Dorothy had black shiny hair, down the middle of her back. Her mother used to sing to her as she combed it. Dorothy knew she would lose that too.

  “You can’t have long hair like that trailing everywhere in the dirt,” said Aunty Em.

  “Are you going to cut it off?”

  “Seems a good time,” said Aunty Em. She imagined disease could linger in hair like perfume. “Now hold still.”

  “I don’t want it cut off.”

  “Well, you’re a big girl now. Big girls have their hair cut.”

  Dorothy was in simple terror now. It froze her. She saw the scissors, big and black. Aunty Em held Dorothy by the hair. The scissors came. Dorothy could feel them as they closed, cutting through part of her. She made a kind of screech and bounced forward. Her hair caught in the joint of the scissors and was torn out. That really hurt. She squealed.

  “Hold still!” Aunty Em was beginning to lose patience. Dorothy began to fight again, not because she wanted to be bad, but simply because she couldn’t help it. She began to beat her hands around her head and to jerk her head.

  “Hold still!” The scissors bit again, Dorothy pulled again, more hair was torn, and Dorothy screamed as she had never screamed, a high-pitched squeak that was like nails on a blackboard.

  “Stop that!” quailed Aunty Em. It was a sound she could not stand.

  Uncle Henry stomped in. “Em. What are you doing to the child?”

  That was all it took. Aunty Em threw a towel at him. “I am trying to get this child clean!” she shouted. “I guess we’ll just have to leave it like that, half-cut, until tomorrow. But it is going to be clean, at least.” She worked the soap up into a lather. “Keep your eyes closed,” she told Dorothy.

  The lather went into her hair and into her eyes and seemed to scald them, worse than the water.

  “I told you to keep them closed,” said Aunty Em, as the battled started. Dorothy was beyond thinking of anything at this point. She hit and kicked and tried to clamber out of the bath.

  “Hold her, Henry,” said Aunty Em. Uncle Henry’s hands, as rough as the soap, grabbed Dorothy by the elbows. Aunty Em worked the hair. Dorothy’s eyes seemed to sizzle like eggs. Then suddenly she was pushed underwater. She swallowed and coughed and came up coughing. They let her go.

  “I never saw the like,” said Aunty Em. “Never!”

  “She’s still got lye soap in her eyes,” said Henry. He clunked away and came back.

  “Put your face in this, Dorothy,” he said.

  “No,” she whimpered.

  “You got to wash the soap out.”

  “It hurts.”

  “Everything hurts,” said Aunty Em.

  “You got to.”

  Dorothy did as she was told. She put her face in the water and opened her eyes. They stung like before. But maybe, maybe, they were a bit better as well. Had she been good enough now? Would they leave her alone, now?

  She opened her eyes, and everything was bleary, and they still stung around the edges.

  Aunty Em was opening her suitcase. “Now, Dorothy,” she said. “You come from a household with diphtheria. It killed your mama and your little brother, and it will kill us too, you especially, if we don’t get rid of it. So we got to burn your clothes.”

  “My clothes,” Dorothy whispered. There seemed to be no point crying.

  “I am going to have to scrub the skin off my own hands after dealing with you. It just ain’t clean.”

  “It’s cleaner than this place,” said Dorothy, numb.

  “I expect my sister didn’t have to cope with a valley full of dust or mud,” said Aunty Em. She swung open the red rusty door of the stove. Dorothy saw the fire. She saw her white theater dress, sequins flickering in firelight. Dorothy grabbed it and ran, wet and naked. She jumped sprawling down from the front door and fell onto the ground. The dust was splattered with drops of rain.

  Toto was gasping. There was a rope around his neck, and he had pulled and pulled against it. He tried to bark and could only cough. Dorothy tried to untie the rope. It hurt her hands. She saw Uncle Henry on the doorstep. She screamed as if she had seen a monster. He came down the steps toward her.

  Dorothy turned and ran. She knew she had lost. Her clothes would be burned—except for the white dress that had been worn only once by a fairy in a play.

  It was night now, black. Dorothy ran clothed in darkness, as the rain came, hard. “Dorothy!” called Uncle Henry. “Dorothy!” called Aunty Em.

  Down in the fields, there was death. Dorothy ran uphill, feet pattering in mud. She slipped and the mud peeled away in a damp layer, like flour. She stood, coated in mud, still clutching the fairy dress, now besmirched.

  Sssssh, said the rain, as if comforting her.

  Suddenly branches clawed at her face, catching her half-chopped hair. She plunged through a thicket, her face scratched, and her hands were suddenly scrambling at the rough bark of a tree trunk. She went deeper into the woods. She would stay in the woods; she would live there like an Indian; she would never go back.

  “Do-ro-thee!” call
ed a voice down the valley.

  “Holy Jesus,” said a voice closer at hand.

  Dorothy stopped running and looked around her. Rain ran over her face. She imagined wolves or giants.

  “Is that Dorothy?” It was Wilbur’s voice. “Is that you crying?”

  “She’s burning my clothes,” said Dorothy.

  Rain like tiny people running on the leaves.

  “It’s raining. You better go back.”

  “I don’t want her to burn my clothes.”

  “I guess it’s because your papa and mama died.”

  “My papa didn’t die. He left.”

  Wilbur said nothing for a moment, in the dark.

  “Oh. I thought that’s what your aunty said.”

  “I’ve got my fairy dress. I want to hide it.”

  “I know a place,” whispered Wilbur. “There’s a hollow tree just around here. Hold on to my hand.” Dorothy reached out and their hands met. He seemed to be carrying a big stick. She could hear something thrashing the leaves.

  “Ow!” cried Dorothy as she skidded barefoot over a gnarled branch. There was a hollow thump as Wilbur’s stick hit something.

  “Give me the dress,” said Wilbur. He took it from her. Dorothy had an impression that it was lifted over her head.

  “You can come back and get it later,” he said.

  “She’ll never find it, ever,” said Dorothy. She squished mud between her toes. Wilbur’s hand reached back for her.

  “What have you got on?” Wilbur asked, feeling her shoulders. He gave her his shirt. It was huge and wet, clammy and musty at once, but at least it covered her. They walked blindly, feeling their way down the hill.

  They came to the lane and saw a lamp.

  “We’re over here, Mr. Gulch,” called Wilbur.

  Uncle Henry had a coat draped over his face, over the lamp, Dorothy saw his face solemn in its red light.

  “Thankee, Wilbur,” said Uncle Henry. He took Dorothy’s hand.