Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  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 her. 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.
<
br />   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.

  The Child hung, like a scarecrow, and the wood of the cross bent gently in the wind like a tree. There was a gentle, sighing sound, and the Child stared like the buffalo.

  His mind had been ruined. He could only speak now in the language of words. And he looked to Dorothy and cried aloud, “I’m alive!”

  I know, said Dorothy in silence, but she seemed to be the only one who heard.

  “I think I’m alive, aren’t I? Am I alive?”

  One of the Wise Men turned and sat next to Dorothy.

  “I was alive,” said the Child, perplexed.

  “Hello, Dorothy,” said the Wise Man and hugged her. For a moment Dorothy thought she had found her father. She felt his broad male shoulders and his trimmed whiskers and her heart rose up into her mouth out of fear and desire, which for her were confounded.

  Then the Wise Man pulled back and Dorothy saw that he wore a straw boater and had his jacket off, and that metal bands held up the shirtsleeves that were too long for his arms. He had a moustache and merry eyes. He was the Substitute.

  Frank, whispered Dorothy, for she loved him too.

  “What have you learned, Dorothy?” he asked her.

  Dorothy thought a moment and said, “I learned to be disappointed and not to hope too much. I learned how to be beaten and how to beat others. I learned that I am worthless and the world is worthless, and that love is a lie and if it’s not a lie, then it’s wasted.”

  “They learned you wrong,” he said.

  Love is real? Where? How, how do we find it, Frank?

  “You don’t have to go the way they want you to go,” he said. He pointed backward, behind her. And she smiled, and Frank kissed her chastely on the forehead, as a mother might.

  Dorothy rose up full of joy in her dream, and she turned, and she walked the wrong way. She skipped out of the bank. It had fallen on hard times. The president had absconded with all the funds and the windows were boarded up. The city was a ghost town. Something about the extension railroad and quarantine lines. The wind whispered in the hollow eyes of its windows, and grass sprouted up between the planks of the boardwalks. Mrs. Langrishe clutched a nosegay over her nostrils. It was to kill the reek of death that rose up from her own body. She stumbled, blind.

  The settlers had moved on, hoping to find the perfect pasture, the land that would make them rich. Dorothy saw the great trail they had left behind them, discarded pianos, broken clocks in the mud.

  She laughed at them. Wheeee! she said, and spun on her heel. What did they think they would find, but more dust, more work, more dry wells and bankers and mortgages? There was no magical land in the West. They would all have to find another kind of Territory to explore.

  One dream was over. Another began.

  The train was hauled backward into St. Louis, with sgnilaeuqs and sgniffuhc. Dorothy stepped off it, wearing her white theater dress. It blazed in sunlight.

  There was the wooden platform, the brick concourse, the stone frontage, just as Dorothy had forgotten they looked. She began to hear music. Somewhere there were calliopes playing, as at a fairground. The station was full of little people with funny faces she could not quite see, passing out pennants, tiny flags. It was a Day of Independence. Dorothy walked down the steps of the station and saw that everything was different.

  St. Louis was a park, full of trees and great open areas. There was prairie grass and prairie wildflowers among them. Great gusts of laughter seemed to be blown across the fields, and Dorothy heard her best lace-up boots swishing through the long grass, with a cripple’s uneven gait.

  Ahead of her there were swings and a sandbox. There were rhododendrons and other ornamental plants. A flood of children suddenly broke out from under them, shrieking with glee. Surprise! they called in a circle. Come and play! they said. Oh, Dotty, come and play! They were her friends, they liked her. She knew their faces from long ago. A little red-haired girl covered with freckles who had a high, round forehead. Her quiet little brother in black shorts. Andy and Violet: she remembered their names. Dorothy took their hands and ran with them, and she stood on the swings and pumped back and forth. In her dream, Dorothy felt her hair rise and fall, along with her stomach. She felt the wind on her face. Below, the children turned somersaults on the grass and didn’t mind the stains on their clothing.

  In the dream Dorothy knew that this was a place where children had been set free. She looked and saw that some of them were not children at all. They were a different kind of adults. They looked like Etta Parkerson. They were tiny and small and giggling, with funny whiskers and conical hats, and they played fiddles or sat with the children who were almost as big as they were, on their laps. They both started fires with magnifying glasses and hopped in sack races. The children and the adults were the same kind of creature.

  Bison grazed on the grass and a wildcat lazed in a tree, flicking his tail. In the shade there were wigwams, with white smoke curling form the tops. Indian women sat on the ground sorting dried maize in baskets. The children and the Indians played together on the swings.

  All around the park, there were rows of white houses with green shutters. Carts glided past them, pulled by huge gray horses with clopping hooves. The horses wore no blinders and the long white hair around their unshod hooves was flung from side to side by their dancing feet. Over the tops of the houses, there rose great domes of earth. Smoke curled out of them, and Indian ponies grazed on them. The bushes and trees seemed to hiss and whisper in the wind and the flowers made sounds like piano wires snapping.

  A dog began to bark. His voice was echoing from far away. Dorothy swung back and forth, over ground that rocked like a pendulum. Then she saw him running toward her, as she always knew he would one day. She always knew he would come back.

  “Toto!” she called. “Here, boy! Toto!”

  She saw him charging through the long grass, partridge rearing up into the air around him. Dorothy launched herself form the swing and seemed to fly through the air. She landed in the grass and he burst through it and was all over her, whining and barking and licking her face, and she laughed and hugged him, remembered the feel of his tiny back and its wiry hair. He spun in a circle and
his bark broke with joy. He picked up his red ball and dropped it at her feet. She had forgotten his red ball. It was covered with spit that smelled of him. Dorothy picked it up delicately, with two fingers only, and threw it for him. He sprang after it, rolled over the ground snarling, and caught it. Then, with a rambunctious toss of the head, he started to trot away, head and ball held high.

  Dorothy followed him. She remembered the way now. She walked between the two huge chestnut trees and crossed the muddy street. She went to the front door, with the lion’s-head knocker. Dorothy remembered that there was a latchkey dangling on a piece of string inside the slot for letters. She reached inside for it with fat, clumsy fingers. She had to stand on tiptoe to open the door.

  She smelled their hallway. There was the wooden table with the vase of dried flowers and the umbrella rack. There were the beat-up old shoes of the woman who cleaned and lived downstairs. There was the stairway.

  Dorothy climbed, past the old framed engravings of the Jews in the wilderness, the parting of the Red Sea, the breaking of the tablets. Coats were hung on hooks, red and green and blue, brightly colored, and she recognized them as if they had been people. Dorothy heard, from behind a closed door, the sound of a piano being played. The door creaked as she pushed it open.

  “Mama,” she whispered.

  There she was, there she was, in a dress like a candy cane, red stripes, playing the piano, her back toward Dorothy, her hair in ringlets. There was her papa, sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, a brown-skinned man with black hair and black eyes and a moustache. I’m not Gael at all, Dorothy remembered. My name is Gutierrez. I am Dorothy Gutierrez.

  Her mother saw and stopped playing. She turned and dazzled Dorothy with her smile. She was so young and pretty and she reached out to hold her. Dorothy ran.