Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  On New Year’s Day, Calliope the mule was hauled out, snorting with cold, and was hitched to the wagon. Inside the house, Toto was barking over and over to be let out, to go with them.

  “Couldn’t we bring Toto with us?” Dorothy asked.

  “What, bring a dog into Mrs. Purcell’s parlor?” said Aunty Em. “She can just about bring herself to let us in, let alone Toto.”

  All the way down the lane, the sound of Toto’s barking followed them.

  “That’s how much he misses us. But just think how snug he is next to the stove.”

  Even from the lane, Dorothy could see Blue Mont, on the other side of the river, four and a half miles away. It took two hours, and the mountain never seemed to get any closer. The sound of Toto followed them across the valley. They rode beside the woods, the trees as bare as burned black skeletons. Branches passed by overhead. Dorothy broke off a piece of ice and looked at the perfect imprint of the twig. “Don’t suck it, Dorothy,” said Aunty Em, “or you’ll perforate your stomach.” Dorothy began to hum to herself. Aunty Em sang hymns. With each turn of the road, Dorothy hoped for the rise and fall of the road that would signal their sudden decline toward the river.

  Finally, finally they got to Manhattan, frozen stiff as always. The church ladies were gathering in Mrs. Purcell’s house on South Juliette. There was an alleyway with stables behind. A boy took hold of Calliope, and Aunty Em rather grandly pressed a penny into his hand. She inspected Dorothy’s dress, tugged and thumped it, and then took her hand to walk around the front of the house, to be admitted as guests.

  The door was opened by a maid. There were gas lamps everywhere, frosted glass globes, and the tops of the chairs were dark and polished and carved into the shapes of leaves. From somewhere behind all the front rooms, there came a chorus of baby cries. The ladies, buttoned in black, sat in a circle amid a forest of tea tables.

  Mrs. Elliott was there for the Methodists, the wife of the man who had brought Grandfather Matthew’s career to an end. Mrs. Parker was there from Aunty Em’s own church, as if Aunty Em were not sufficient in herself to represent the Congregationalists.

  The Purcells were Presbyterian and owned the bank that had sold the mortgage to Emma Gulch’s farm.

  Dorothy knew of these people. She was interested to see them. She wondered how it was that Aunty Em could bear to smile at them. Dorothy looked at the frosted lamps, at the line of fuel within them like water under ice. She pretended to herself that the lamps had grown naturally frozen out of the Zeandale marshes.

  Mrs. Purcell, no longer young, but very brisk and pleasant, came in with baby John. He had just been born a few months before. He was passed around the ladies, who complimented him and talked to him. Baby John beamed like an ancient old man. “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!” the ladies piped.

  “His little hand!” cooed Aunty Em.

  Dorothy peered into his soft, unformed face. Intelligence in his eyes met hers.

  “Bah bah,” he said. “Mo ta woe?”

  It was how babies talked.

  “Oh yes? Oh yes?” said Mrs. Parker too brightly, as if she understood. Maybe she did. The baby was passed to a maid to be taken upstairs. Tea and cakes were served, and the adults talked about Chinese people.

  “Apparently they fry all their food in very hot oils,” said Mrs. Elliott. “My cousin visited such a home once, and her fur collar smelled peculiar for weeks. They couldn’t think what the odor was; it was so unpleasant, but not at all identifiable. Finally someone said it was burned sesame seed oil.”

  Mrs. Parker produced a nosegay from her purse and silently held it out. “I shall endeavor not to resort to this, since I’m sure Mrs. Sue will do her utmost to be polite.”

  “It’s not the oil, it’s the incense that will choke me,” said Mrs. Lyman. She was the doctor’s wife and she was beautiful and young, with red hair. Aunty Em made a point of chuckling. Mrs. Lyman was from St. George, just across the river from the Gulch farm. Aunty Em always made a point of saying how enchanting she found her. “Just a good, plain-speaking Kansas beauty,” Aunty Em would say, again and again.

  “Well,” said a woman whose name Dorothy did not know. “My tablecloth came back cleaner than the gravel by the river.”

  Dorothy did not know much about the Chinaman herself, but she could see that the adults were frightened of him.

  The seven ladies, Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist, Lutheran, wrapped themselves in scarves and pinned on hats and were helped into coats that nearly reached the ground. They walked unsteadily on the boardwalk of South Juliette, north towards Poyntz, the main avenue. They walked past one Methodist church and Mrs. Elliott’s house. They walked across Houston, past the Bowers’ and the Buells’. On the corner of Poyntz and Juliette was Aunty Em’s own church, white limestone, small. They turned right and swept down the broad main avenue.

  Poyntz was lined with wooden-frame buildings, with wooden awnings that stretched out over the wooden sidewalks. The ladies passed another Methodist church, with a tall, graceful spire, and an Episcopalian and a Presbyterian. They passed the Manhattan Institute, which was a hospital built of brick. There was Huntress’s Dry Goods, a two-story building of stone. On Poyntz Avenue alone, there were four banks, three land offices, three drugstores, a lumberyard, several general stores, clothing stores, hotels and two county offices. There were many businesses, with many owners, but amid those many names, a favored few kept reappearing: Higinbotham, Stingley, Elliott, Purcell.

  The street was shuttered and closed, peaceful and safe. An old black man everyone called Uncle was sweeping the ice that covered the boardwalk. Someone Mrs. Elliott knew passed them, tipping his hat, breathing out vapor into the sunlight, nodding “Good morning, ladies,” as he passed.

  Mr. Sue’s shop stood near the corner of Humboldt and Second, opposite the Wagon Shop.

  There was a wide space around it, a market garden that was the town’s only source of sorrel and green peppers. The laundry hissed out back, white stream rising up even on New Year’s Day. Dorothy took hold of Aunty Em’s hand, afraid.

  The store was dark. Mrs. Purcell took it on herself to try the door. It opened with a clinking of bits of metal hung across the doorway. They peered inside, into scented shadow.

  “Mr. Sue?” called Mrs. Purcell. Dorothy began to wish she hadn’t come.

  Mr. Sue emerged from some inner recess, smiling, smiling.

  “Good morning, ladies. So kind to come. I hope you are not cold. Thank you, thank you.”

  He looked funny. Dorothy wasn’t sure how. He was small and quick, wearing perfectly normal clothes and a bowler hat. Dorothy was miffed. Didn’t he know it was impolite to wear a hat indoors? Then she saw him take it off, over and over, once for each of the ladies.

  Inside the store, the air smelled a bit like soap, nice soap, and there were things in pretty boxes, nice colors, very pale and gentle. There were bolts of shiny cloth and little cups and teapots. There were china people, white with pink cheeks, frozen forever, looking shy and a bit afraid.

  Dorothy began to be afraid for Mr. Sue. China was made of clay and so, said the Preacher, were people. China could fall and break. Maybe that’s why the adults were frightened. They were frightened that they could shatter him. They walked so carefully around him as he smiled and smiled. He pulled back a curtain and held out his hat to show them the way they should go.

  They went into a room, and Dorothy wondered if China people lived in tents like Indians. The wall seemed to be made of blue cloth. Dorothy pushed the cloth. There was a solid wall behind it. Perhaps wood or stone was too rough for China people.

  There were cushions everywhere, with cloth flowers sewn on them, and the little room was hot as a stove, and full of the soap smell.

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Purcell, looking around the tiny place in surprise. She looked larg
e and clumsy, as if she would knock something over. But Dorothy felt at home. Everything was the right size for her.

  Then Mrs. Sue came in and Dorothy knew she was right. China people could be broken.

  Mrs. Sue walked in with breathless child steps, small and very quick, and her eyes and her face were lowered from shyness and she smiled shyly. She wore blue trousers and a blue top, very shiny, and she was painted like the frozen people outside. Pink on her cheeks, black around the eyes, red on her lips.

  “Da doh, da doh,” she seemed to be saying, unable to look at the ladies, bowing to them. She held out her hands.

  The ladies looked at each other.

  “She doesn’t speak English, and she wants to take our coats,” said Aunty Em, crisply. “Dorothy, please to help Mrs. Sue with all these coats. Mind you take them where she shows you.”

  Aunty Em passed her own thick, black, worn coat to her. “Thank you, thank you, Mrs. Sue,” she said loudly, very plainly, smiling with her leaky gray teeth.

  Mrs. Sue averted her face and bowed, again, and said something with the gentleness of the wind.

  “May I help you?” Dorothy asked, looking up at her.

  Mrs. Sue could bear to look at Dorothy but not at the adults. She looked at Dorothy and smiled. Dorothy strode boldly among the ladies, taking coats. She knew she would not knock anything over.

  “We are to sit on the cushions,” announced Aunty Em.

  The ladies raised their eyebrows. This would be indelicate. Dorothy wanted to see how plump Mrs. Purcell and bony old Mrs. Elliott would manage it. Mrs. Sue, in a soft and singsong voice, was trying to tell her something, so Dorothy turned and saw she was to follow through another curtain, into an alcove. There was a white statue in the alcove of a fat and naked smiling man. There were pipe cleaners all around it, burning. Did Mrs. Sue think you were supposed to smoke the cleaners and not the pipe? Mrs. Sue reached and hung up the coats. She folded and smoothed down the ladies’ scarves. They looked beautiful, the scarves, folded so tidily, Mrs. Sue smiled her gentle, withdrawn smile, and Dorothy knew she was to go back to the adults.

  Back in the hot room, the ladies were sitting, backs straight. Mrs. Purcell and Aunty Em had adopted the side saddle position they had learned as young ladies. Mrs. Elliott was thrashing, trying to fight her way upright. She kept slipping off the cushion.

  “Knees under you, Emeline,” said Mrs. Purcell.

  Mrs. Sue came toddling in, carrying something that was neither a tray nor a table. It was made of beautiful brown wood and carved in funny shapes, and there was a teapot with red and blue crisscrosses on it. The tray was placed on the floor. There was tea and little pink cakes. Mrs. Sue lowered her head and held out her arms with a sweep over the tea and cakes.

  “Isn’t it exquisite,” announced Aunty Em, determined they would all feel the right thing. “And so charmingly presented.” She inclined forward, with her broken and horsey smile. Mrs. Sue tried to look pleased, but she could not bear the huge, coarse visage and had to look away, lest the distaste show.

  Dorothy felt she was having some kind of revenge. The adults all looked wrong, like pigs or straggly plants. The only beautiful person in the room was Mrs. Sue.

  She began to pour the tea, and to pass the cakes, looking up hopefully to make sure that everything was all right, that she had done nothing wrong. And Dorothy knew, just from looking, that Mrs. Sue was alone in Kansas, and that she was trying as hard as she could, but that she and these women would never be friends, no matter how correct they all were, no matter how polite. It was all done in hopefulness and was doomed to failure.

  “The cakes,” said Mrs. Purcell, in horror. “I think they’re made out of fish.”

  Dorothy tasted one of them. It was bland and chewy.

  The pink bland cakes were followed by sweet spicy ones that were also to no one’s taste. And Mrs. Sue, trying hard, adopting all the right postures, sent signals of sociability that were only partially received. They were swamped by the heavy-handed and insincere gestures that came in reply.

  “These are very unusual. Very unusual. Nice,” said Aunty Em, loudly, holding up the spice cake.

  Mrs. Sue kept smiling, looking nowhere. She leaned forward like a river reed to fill more cups with tea.

  “Shouldn’t she let it steep more?” wondered one of the ladies without looking at the others.

  “Chinese tea is famous for its delicacy,” Aunty Em informed them.

  “I wish the incense was,” said Mrs. Parker.

  It couldn’t go on much longer. Tea and cakes can only do so much without conversation. More smiles and nodding, and Mrs. Sue knew she had failed. Her eyes were veiled as she tried to look pleased and honored when the ladies left. Dorothy went to help her with the coats.

  Dorothy wanted to say something. But how could you say something to someone who had not learned to talk?

  She had an idea. She talked like a baby would talk. She made sounds without the words that she found she lacked. Dorothy whispered, sadly, “Da toh nah sang ga la ta no rah tea so la tee ree.” Without having to find words, Dorothy said that she was sorry, sorry that Mrs. Sue was alone in a foreign country, and that her cakes had not been liked, and that no one else was coming, and that her husband would probably be cross.

  Mrs. Sue knew that the little girl was really trying to say something, something kind. And she could see what she was not supposed to notice, that the child was poorly dressed. Mrs. Sue had a happy idea. It was a season of gift giving. She turned and gave the child a folded-paper doll, dressed in crepe paper, with a folded face and a painted smile.

  “Thank you,” said Dorothy.

  They filed back out through the hot, cushioned room, through the curtain, down the cooler, wooden corridor, back into the store. Mr. Sue was smiling, thanking them for the call. Do tell your wife how charmed we were, said the ladies, what a lovely room, what a lovely blue . . . um . . . ensemble she wore, a delightful tea, such a departure from the usual. Why, Dorothy wondered, do adults always lie?

  Back out into the cold.

  “Oh,” said one of the ladies, a safe distance away. “Back out into God’s own air!”

  “Poor little thing. Fancy not speaking a word of English!”

  “She was the soul of courtesy,” insisted Aunty Em. “I cannot imagine how her behavior could be in any way improved.”

  “Perhaps by using less incense so a human body could breathe!” exclaimed the Reverend Parker’s wife.

  “That was like your nosegay,” said Dorothy. “She was frightened that you’d smell.”

  “Dorothy!” exclaimed Aunty Em. “Apologize to Mrs. Parker.” But she sounded less angry than usual.

  When they were back in the wagon, Aunty Em laughed. “Dorothy, your mouth!” she said, shaking her head. “The things you come out with! Mind, your mother was the same.”

  Dorothy could see that she had done something right, but did not understand what it was. Aunty Em was a mystery, to be watched, to be solved.

  A few days later, Aunty Em learned that her poem was not to be read at the Church anniversary. Her own suggestion had been taken up, Mrs. Blood in Illinois had been written to, and the old woman had responded with a detailed reminiscence of life in Manhattan’s early days. It would be read in full to the congregation, as would Mrs. Parker’s poem. Aunty Em had a letter from Miss Mudge, thanking her for all her efforts.

  That night Dorothy heard her pacing around and around the little room in silence.

  The next morning, Toto slipped his rope and disappeared, into the snow.

  Manhattan, Kansas

  Spring 1876

  Go east and you hear them laugh at Kansas; go west and they sneer at her; go south and they “cuss” her; go north and they have forgotten her . . .

  —William Allen White, in an editori
al called

  “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

  Suddenly it was spring in Kansas. There were wildflowers all along the roads and in the thorny hedges. Dorothy was relieved. It was as if some part of life had smiled on her at last.

  Today was Sunday, no school, and it was sunny, a strange sort of sunlight that glowed in haze near to the ground. It was comfortable riding in the wagon. Dorothy still had to wear her coat, but the lap robes weren’t necessary, and her feet and toes were no longer an agony. It was as if the whole of Kansas had sighed in relief.

  Aunty Em was in a strange mood too. In the morning, as she had hitched the mule to the cart, there was a kind of secret smile on her face, and she moved with more of a bounce in her step.

  “C’mon, Dorothy, it’s just you and me today. Your Uncle Henry don’t come, because he don’t have the Spirit,” said Aunty Em, feeling chummy. “So it’s just us two, Dorothy. We’re going to go and have our souls raised up like summer flowers. I tell you, when the Spirit moves, you don’t mind anything, because God is with you, and nobody can take that away.”

  They weren’t going to church. That was very strange. Meeting was obviously going to be slightly like church, there could be no escape from something holy on a Sunday, but it was obviously something more delicious and exciting, a kind of spring church. Aunty Em clucked her tongue, and the cart jerked forward, and they moved out into the fields.

  Dorothy caught her aunty’s mood. “We’re going to Meeting? We’re going to Meeting!” she exclaimed excitedly.

  Aunty Em chuckled. “Yes, we are, honey, and we’re going to meet all kinds of nice people.” There was a kind of snarl in Aunty Em’s voice, on the word “nice,” that made Dorothy breathless with anticipation. Nice people. It had been some long since she’d met any.