Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  “That’s why he hanged himself,” said Dorothy. “He wanted to be an Indian, a real Indian. But he wasn’t brave enough.”

  “Oh-ho!” cried Mrs. Jewell, unsteadily.

  “He didn’t like it here. He didn’t like school or anything. He wanted to get away.”

  But he was too frightened to leave, and so he felt ashamed. It was shame that made him kill himself. Dorothy could taste the shame and feel the shape it had, but she didn’t have the words for it.

  “Dorothy!” raged Aunty Em, stepping forward. Dorothy was seized, pulled and hauled away. Mrs. Jewell seemed to sag, waving Dorothy away. The drawing fell to the floor.

  “But Uncle Henry said you didn’t understand!” said Dorothy. Aunty Em gave her arm a savage tug. Dorothy knew she had done wrong, but she didn’t care. It was the truth.

  Aunty Em got her to the wagon and bundled her up onto the front seat. “Hurry up, Henry, let’s get away.” Uncle Henry speeded up somewhat. The mule was untied.

  “Dorothy. What am I going to do with you?” Aunty Em’s hand covered her face. Her face moved from side to side. “That poor woman.”

  Dorothy didn’t want to hear what she had done wrong. Everything she did was wrong. “It was a present,” she murmured.

  “It was a present that opened a wound. I told you, Dorothy, not to mention what he did!”

  “But I’m the only one who knows.”

  Knows that there is a nothingness in the wilderness, a great emptiness in the plains and the sky, a nothingness that needs to be filled, not only with houses and horses and plows, but with imagination, an inhuman nothingness that could suck you in and kill you.

  There was no point in talking. How could Dorothy make anyone understand that? She could not explain it; she had no words. She could only endure the incomprehension and the harsh words and the silence.

  It was dark by the time they got home. Scarecrows waved in moonlight. Instead of going inside, Dorothy hopped down from the wagon and ran.

  She ran up the slopes of the bald hill to where the snowmen were. There were still three of them, in a row, as glossy and hard as marble. They were white-blue in moonlight. They were here and Wilbur was not. When the sun came, they would melt, and nothing Dorothy could do would stop it. They would melt away like memories trickling out of her head. There was very little Dorothy could do about anything at all.

  And there were the angels in the snow, a tall one next to a little one. The trick was to leave no footprints, as if you had lain there for a time and flown away to heaven.

  And suddenly, Dorothy was crying. She found she could cry. “Will-hill-bur!” Maybe there were Indians in Heaven. Maybe Wilbur had found them there. Maybe he had finally joined them.

  Maybe not. The tears were soon over. Dorothy had faced death before. She was weary of it, bone-weary. People were here and then they were gone and you had to live as if they had never been here. What once had been, what might have been, could give her nothing. Powdery snow whispered in the wind as it blew. The scarecrows lined up over the wallows, though there was no need for them in winter. Even the wallows were as hard as stone.

  The clouds in the sky were as white as ice, and they raced in thin crystals over the surface of the moon. The stars were cold. The valley lay under a sheet of white, and smoke from chimneys hung like freezing fog.

  Only where there were houses was there light, was there warmth. It shone out of the windows, orange, fire red, faintly glowing. Those houses were the only place to go, the only life available.

  Dorothy finally saw what adults wanted her to see. She saw pioneer beauty, from the top of a hill. It was a trade. In exchange, she had to become resigned. Dorothy knuckled under. She heard Aunty Em call, and she walked back down to punishment and food and a new clean bed.

  A few days later, across the naked fields, Dorothy saw Bob Jewell armed with a shovel. For no reason, he was beating one of the scarecrows flat, in a rage.

  Zeandale and Manhattan, Kansas

  Winter 1875–1876

  “That would make me very unhappy,” answered the china princess. “You see, here in our own country, we live contentedly, and can talk and move around as we please. But whenever any of us are taken away, our joints at once stiffen and we can only stand straight and look pretty . . .”

  —L. Frank Baum,

  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

  Dorothy knuckled down to learning to read. She would sit by the window, and Aunty Em would open up some huge volume smelling of mushrooms and dust. Toto would tug at her dress to go outside. Toto was kept inside now to keep him from freezing, but he was tied up most of the time.

  “What was the first letter, Dorothy? Look at the book, child. Toto, set. Toto, get to your corner. Dorothy, what is the first letter?”

  Dorothy was ashamed. “E?”

  Another bad thing that Aunty Em had found out when Dorothy came was that she did not know her letters.

  “No, Dorothy, that’s a W. Now what does W sound like? A W with an H after it. Whuh. Whuh sound, Dorothy. Now I’ll just read this first sentence for you. ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’”

  Beyond the walls, the woods on the ridge sighed in the wind. Both the sky and the ground were the same white color. Aunty Em asked her to recite the alphabet. Dorothy forgot F.

  “Don’t start all over again,” said Aunty Em. “That’s just learning by rote, parrot fashion, and I want you to really know this. I don’t want people to think we’re ignorant, Dorothy Gael, and they will if you go to school without your alphabet and the rudiments of ciphering!”

  And then she said, “What was your mama thinking of?”

  Dorothy began to hate her mother, for all the things she had left out: prayers and table manners and numbers. Dorothy helped at candle making. She swept up the floor. She watched Aunty Em repairing shoes, repairing trousers, jabbing the needle so hard that she sometimes stabbed herself with it. She watched Aunty Em cook in a rage.

  In the evenings, Henry would come in moving slowly with his long, stick-thin limbs. He would slump in his chair as Aunty Em threw pots about the stove, spilling, burning, humming hymns to herself. She made terrible mistakes. She baked cakes with salt instead of sugar. Meat came out of the oven burned black outside but red raw inside.

  “You could plant an extra crop,” said Aunty Em, one night.

  Uncle Henry was baffled by exhaustion. “What crop?”

  “Spring wheat, corn, I don’t know.”

  “Most of this land is hillside turf, Em, or it’s covered in woods. What you reckon on clearing it?”

  “We could keep hogs in the woods.”

  “We got any spare cash to buy hogs with?”

  “We would have with what fifty acres of river-bottom prime would earn anyone else.”

  “It’s not prime land, Em. Your father didn’t do too much with it either.”

  The pot slammed down as if on a head. “My father was writing the newspaper at the same time, instead of sitting around here with his boots off.”

  “So we’re back to wheat. Every year since I come, people say it’s going to be eight-row wheat, and then ‘long comes the drought or the hail or the wind or the bust. This year, last year it was locusts.”

  “Such a good excuse for you, weren’t they?” said Aunty Em, talking over him.

  “Or the herd laws means somebody’s cows trample it. Worst thing of all is when you have a good year and the price just dries up till you get nothing for nothing.”

  “Well, I don’t see the Aikens or the McCormacks or the Allens in poverty.”

  “They got sons, they got brothers.”

  “Well, hire yourself a hand.”

  “We don’t have any money
,” said Henry, his voice muffled by the hand that rubbed his eyes.

  “Well, we got to do something!” shouted Aunty Em, and the stove hissed and steamed with spilled water. “We got that child to feed now and send to school soon as she’s old enough. Poor little creature.”

  Uncle Henry hung his head. Aunty Em’s back was toward him. He said, very slowly, “We could sell some of the land.”

  “That’s the only thing you can think of to do with it! My father settled this land.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “And you aren’t going to be the one to sell any of it!”

  “Won’t have to,” said Henry Gulch. “Mr. Purcell at the bank is going to get it all anyway.”

  Mr. Purcell was the enemy. He ran the bank and he wanted to take away their land and give it to people Back East. How would that be possible, if Aunty Em didn’t want him to have it?

  “Him too,” said Aunty Em, throwing food onto a plate.

  Reading, ciphering, and hogs and banks. Dorothy admired Uncle Henry and Aunty Em. They knew so much, all kinds of things, but everything rode on them; if anything went wrong they would be alone. And they never rested, never let up on themselves. Dorothy was grateful, but she didn’t ever want to be an adult.

  Aunty Em sat down to eat and began to rail against the people of Manhattan. Aunty Em never went to Zeandale village. It was always to Manhattan that they went for church, for stores, for company. It was Manhattan Aunty Em talked about, but not with love.

  She talked about Mr. Purcell, and also Mrs. Purcell, who was always organizing things and neglecting to invite Emma Gulch. There was L. R. Elliott. He had bought the Manhattan Independent from Reverend Pillsbury and then fired Grandfather Matthew.

  “Killed him, killed him just as surely as if he shot him!” Aunty Em said. “Him and his talk of real news. He bought the paper and then killed both it and my father and waltzed off to be a land agent, if you please. And railroad agent. And anything else he could lay his hands on.” Stew roiled forgotten in her mouth.

  “The Higinbothams, and Stingley and Huntress. They’re all in it together, all those people. They come here and take the town over from the people who built it up. And the good Dr. Lyman with his friendly little reminders—‘You owe the good Doctor money.’” Aunty Em let her fork drop, and covered her eyes.

  Later, she piled the tin plates one on top of the other. Aunty Em could produce a fine clatter of rage, and she plunged her raw hands into the water, which was near to boiling. She passed down the steaming plates for Dorothy to dry.

  Then she said, “Dorothy, it’s your bedtime. Say your prayers.” Aunty Em would stand by the blanket that hung across the room. She would listen to what Dorothy had to say to God. Dorothy prayed for God to bless everyone and then crawled into bed to be kissed on the forehead. Then Dorothy would listen. She listened to the whispering.

  “You ask me it wasn’t the Dip my sister died of, but shame. That man used her and then left. An actor, if you please, with I am told another wife and children Back East. And he was about as Irish as I am. Anthony Gael indeed. More like Angelo or Chico if you want to know the truth!”

  “You’re fretting, Em.”

  “Well, don’t I have enough to fret about?” A pan rang like a gong as it was hung on a hook. “Every time I look at Dorothy I can see that man’s face. It’s bad blood, Henry, and it will come out.”

  Uncle Henry would begin to snore, too exhausted to find the bed. Aunty Em would begin to recite. Aunty Em wrote verse. She would declaim it as she paced, the thumping of her boots punctuating the rhythm of the words. Throughout that winter, it had been the same poem, over and over:

  By day across those billows brown

  Across the summits sere

  The fierce wind blows; the sunlight streams

  From blue skies cold and clear.

  It was a poem about the beauties of Manhattan when it was first settled. The Congregationalist Church was about to have its twentieth anniversary after the New Year. With her whole being, Aunty Em wanted to recite her poem at the banquet. The pastor’s wife had also written a poem. It too was about the beauties of early Manhattan, and it was certain to be read at the banquet.

  By night along those meadows broad,

  In gleaming tower and spire

  O’er rolling hill, o’er rocky crest

  Creep crooked lines of fire!

  Her voice would be fierce and whispering. Sometimes Aunty Em would change the words; sometimes she changed the way she said them. Sometimes the words came shuddering out of her, full of meanings for her that they would have for no one else. Sometimes she wept, reciting to the stove, the empty room, her husband’s crushed and empty boots. Dorothy would pull the pillow down over her head and hide.

  Aunty Em was always in Manhattan, working for the Church. She set up social or church suppers; she chaperoned dances or sat on ladies’ committees or organized drives. She decorated the church for Easter (Christmas was not much celebrated). She took baskets to the poor, though Dorothy heard people say Emma Gulch was poor enough herself.

  “We are people of note in this community,” she told Dorothy once. “And we continue to be, despite straitened circumstances, which should be no bar in any civilized society.”

  And she and Dorothy would take the long road to Manhattan. Aunty Em inserted them both into the homes of women she considered to be her social if not economic equals. All through the autumn, into the first hot weeks of that strange December, Dorothy would find herself in the corner of Manhattan parlors, mollified by muffins or drinking chocolate.

  Aunty Em visited Mrs. Parker, the Reverend’s wife. She visited Harriet Smythe, who also threatened to give readings. She visited Miss Eusebia Mudge, daughter of the famous Professor Mudge. Miss Mudge was to provide the musical program by playing the organ.

  “And how is your dear father?” Aunty Em asked. “Is he still occupied with his pterodactyls?”

  “Oh, yes indeed,” said Miss Mudge. “He will be returning to Wallace this spring. He hopes to send a complete pterodactyl to the university in Topeka.”

  Aunty Em turned to Dorothy. “Dorothy. A pterodactyl is a giant flying lizard. The Professor discovered them in Wallace.”

  “They are extinct now, Dorothy,” explained Miss Mudge.

  “They have been, for millions of years. Just think of it!”

  After so many conversations about buffalo, Dorothy certainly knew the meaning of the word “extinct.” But she didn’t know how you could discover something that had been dead for millions of years, or how you could send one to Topeka. She thought it best not to ask. Aunty Em might think it was insolent.

  “The Professor also discovered a missing link in the evolutionary chain, am I right, Miss Mudge?” said Aunty Em. “A bird with teeth.”

  Dorothy wasn’t too sure that all birds didn’t have teeth. She tried to remember if their hens had teeth and decided that they did. By the time Dorothy resurfaced, the conversation had moved on.

  “Well, we simply have to get Brother Pillsbury and Reverend Jones to speak, though at opposite ends of the program for reasons we can both imagine,” said Aunty Em. Brother Pillsbury was a spiritualist as well as a Christian.

  “Certainly both should be acknowledged,” said Miss Mudge with caution.

  “Not to mention Mrs. Blood,” said Aunty Em, smiling, in one of her flights of efficiency. “She’s still alive, I hear, and there is time still to get a message to her in Illinois, so she can send something to us. I’m sure she would be most pleased.”

  Eusebia agreed. Aunty Em kept flying. She reminisced about the first Congregationalist services held in a tent or in Dr. Hunting’s house. She rehearsed the story of how a tornado tore the roof off the church just after it was built—it seemed to be the fate of most churches in the county. Sh
e talked about Dr. Cordley, who had ridden all the way from Lawrence to give the dedicatory sermon. Did Miss Mudge know that his famous horse Jesse was lost during Quantrill’s raid? Dorothy began to swing her legs. Eusebia Mudge bided her time.

  “Evergreen branches, I think,” said Aunty Em, talking of the decorations. “So in keeping with the season.” She talked about food. “I can certainly make a lemon jelly, if you, Miss Mudge, would oblige with your famous angel cake.”

  “Speaking of cake,” said Miss Mudge, whose time had come. “What are we to do with Mr. Sue?”

  There was a Chinaman in Manhattan. He had come with the building of the railroad. To everyone’s consternation, he was a member of the Congregationalist Church. He donated unsuitable cakes. They had unsuitable writing in icing.

  “God made the world,” the icing said. “Tzu made this cake.”

  Everyone called him Mr. Sue. Using a woman’s name made people smile, while preserving their old abolitionist consciences. When they smiled, Mr. Tzu thought they were smiling with pleasure at seeing him. Or at least, he smiled back. He had suddenly imported a wife, whom no one had seen. She was said to live in the rooms behind his store.

  “And you’ve heard of his invitation, perhaps?” inquired Miss Mudge.

  “Why, no,” said Emma Gulch.

  “He has sent a card to every church saying that his wife will be at home to receive visitors on New Year’s Day.”

  If anyone was so lost in good works as to go, it would be Emma Gulch.

  “How splendid of him,” said Aunty Em. “I’m sure we will all be happy to visit.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” Miss Mudge replied and permitted herself a smile.