The Emerald Circus

by Jane Yolen

  “No crying allowed,” said a harsh, familiar voice.

  “No crying aloud,” said a quieter voice, but one equally familiar.

  Alice looked up. The Red and White Queens were standing in front of her, the White Queen offering a handkerchief that was slightly tattered and not at all clean. “Here, blow!”

  Alice took the handkerchief and blew, a sound not unlike the Jabberwock’s roar, only softer and infinitely less threatening. “Oh,” she said, “thank goodness you are here. You two can save me.”

  “Not us,” said the Red Queen.

  “Never us,” added the White.

  “But then why else have you come?” Alice asked. “I am always saved on this path . . . wherever this path is at the time.”

  “The path is past,” said the Red Queen. “We are only present, not truly here.” As she spoke the dirt path dissolved, first to pebbles, then to grass.

  “And you are your own future,” added the White Queen.

  Alice suddenly found herself standing in the meadow once again, but this time the Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse were sitting in stands set atop the table. Next to them were the Caterpillar, his fishing pole over his shoulder; the Cheshire Cat, grinning madly; the White Knight; the Tweedle Twins; the Beamish Boy, in a bright red beanie; the Duchess and her pig baby; and a host of other Wonderlanders. They were exchanging money right and left.

  “My money’s on you,” the White Queen whispered in Alice’s ear. “I think you will take the Jabberwock in the first round.”

  “Take him where?” asked Alice.

  “For a fall,” the Red Queen answered. Then, shoving a wad of money at the White Queen, she said, “I’ll give you three to one against.”

  “Done,” said the White Queen, and they walked off arm-in-arm toward the spectator stands, trailing bits of paper money on the ground.

  “But what can I fight the Jabberwock with?” Alice called after them.

  “You are a tough child,” the White Queen said over her shoulder. “You figure it out.”

  With that she and the Red Queen climbed onto the table and into the stands, where they sat in the front row and began cheering, the White Queen for Alice, the Red Queen for the beast.

  “But I’m not tough at all,” Alice wailed. “I’ve never fought anything before. Not even Albert.” She had only told on him, and had watched with satisfaction when her mother and his father punished him. Or at least that had seemed satisfactory at first. But when his three older sisters had all persisted in calling “Tattletale twit, your tongue will split” after her for months, it hadn’t felt very satisfactory at all.

  “I am only,” she wept out loud, “a tattletale, not a knight.”

  “It’s not night now!” shouted the Hatter.

  “Day! It’s day! A frabjous day!” the Hare sang out.

  The Beamish Boy giggled and twirled the propeller on the top of his cap.

  Puffing five interlocking rings into the air above the crowd, the Caterpillar waved his arms gaily.

  And the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, burst out of the Tulgey Wood, alternately roaring and burbling. It was a horrendous sound and for a moment Alice could not move at all.

  “One, two!” shouted the crowd. “Through and through.”

  The Jabberwock lifted his tail and slammed it down in rhythm to the chanting. Every time his tail hit the ground, the earth shook. Alice could feel each tremor move up from her feet, through her body, till it seemed as if the top of her head would burst open with the force of the blow. She turned to run.

  “She ain’t got no vorpal blade,” cried the Duchess, waving a fist. “How’s she gonna fight without her bloomin’ blade?”

  At her side, the pig squealed: “Orpal-vay ade-blay.”

  The Beamish Boy giggled once more.

  Right! Alice thought. I haven’t a vorpal blade. Or anything else, for that matter.

  For his part, the Jabberwock seemed delighted that she was weaponless, and he stood up on his hind legs, claws out, to slash a right and then a left in Alice’s direction.

  All Alice could do was duck and run, duck and run again. The crowd cheered and a great deal more money changed hands. The Red Queen stuffed dollars, pounds, lira, and kroner under her crown as fast as she could manage. On the other hand, the Dormouse looked into his teapot and wept.

  “Oh, Alice,” came a cry from the stands, “be tough, child. Be strong.” It was the White Queen’s voice. “You do not need a blade. You just need courage.”

  Courage, Alice thought, would come much easier with a blade. But she didn’t say that aloud. Her tongue felt as if it had been glued by fear to the roof of her mouth. And her feet, by the Queen’s call, to the ground.

  And still the Jabberwock advanced, but slowly, as if he were not eager to finish her off all at once.

  He is playing with me, Alice thought, rather like my cat, Dinah. It was not a pleasant thought. She had rescued many a mouse from Dinah’s claws and very few of them had lived for more than a minute or two after. She tried to run again but couldn’t.

  Suddenly she’d quite enough of Wonderland.

  But Wonderland was not quite done with Alice.

  The Jabberwock advanced. His eyes lit up like skyrockets and his tongue flicked in and out.

  “Oh, Mother,” Alice whispered. “I am sorry for all the times I was naughty. Really I am.” She could scarcely catch her breath, and she promised herself that she would try and die nobly, though she really didn’t want to die at all. Because if she died in Wonderland, who would explain it to her family?

  The Jabberwock moved closer. He slobbered a bit over his pointed teeth. Then he slipped on a pound note, staggered like Uncle Martin after a party, and his big yellow eyes rolled up in his head. “Ouf,” he said.

  “Ouf?” Alice whispered. “Ouf?”

  It had all been so horrible and frightening, and now, suddenly, it was rather silly. She stared at the Jabberwock and for the first time noticed a little tag on the underside of his left leg. made in brighton, it said.

  Why, he’s nothing but an overlarge windup toy, she thought. And the very minute she thought that, she began to laugh.

  And laugh.

  And laugh, until she had to bend over to hold her stomach and tears leaked out of her eyes. She could feel the bubbles of laughter still rising inside, getting up her nose like sparkling soda. She could not stop herself.

  “Here, now!” shouted the Beamish Boy, “no laughing! It ain’t fair.”

  The Cheshire Cat lost his own grin. “Fight first, laughter after,” he advised. “Or maybe flight first. Or fright first.”

  The Red Queen sneaked out of the stands and was almost off the table, clutching her crown full of money, when the Dormouse stuck out a foot.

  “No going off with that moolah, Queenie,” the Dormouse said, taking the crown from her and putting it on top of the teapot.

  Still laughing but no longer on the edge of hysteria, Alice looked up at the Jabberwock, who had become frozen in place. Not only was he stiff, but he had turned an odd shade of gray and looked rather like a poorly built garden statue that had been out too long in the wind and rain. She leaned toward him.

  “Boo!” she said, grinning.

  Little cracks ran across the Jabberwock’s face and down the front of his long belly.

  “Double boo!” Alice said.

  Another crack ran right around the Jabberwock’s tail, and it broke off with a sound like a tree branch breaking.

  “Triple . . .” Alice began, but stopped when someone put a hand on her arm. She turned. It was the White Queen.

  “You have won, my dear,” the White Queen said, placing the Red Queen’s crown—minus all the money—on Alice’s head. “A true queen is merciful.”

  Alice nodded, then thought a moment. “But where was the courage in that? All I did was laugh.”

  “Laughter in the face of certain death? It is the very definition of the Hero,” said the White Queen. “The Jabberwock
knew it and therefore could no longer move against you. You would have known it yourself much sooner, had that beastly Albert not been such a tattletale.”

  “But I was the tattletale,” Alice said, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Who do you think told Albert’s sisters?” asked the White Queen. She patted a few errant strands of hair in place and simultaneously tucked several stray dollars back under her crown.

  Alice digested this information for a minute, but something about the conversation was still bothering her. Then she had it. “How do you know about Albert?” she asked.

  “I’m late!” the White Queen cried suddenly, and dashed off down the road, looking from behind like a large white rabbit. Alice should have been surprised, but nothing ever really surprised her anymore in Wonderland.

  Except . . .

  except . . .

  herself.

  Courage, she thought.

  Laughter, she thought.

  Maybe I’ll try them both out on Albert.

  And so thinking, she felt herself suddenly rising, first slowly, then faster and faster still, up the rabbit-hole, all the way back home.

  Blown Away

  1.

  That little Dorothy Gale was the sorriest child I ever saw. She wore her hair in two braids that—however tight in the morning her aunt had made them—seemed to crawl out of their tidy fittings by noon. She had the goshdarnedest big gap between her upper front teeth and a snub nose that seemed too small for her face. And she was always squinting as if she had trouble seeing things clearly, or as if she was trying hard not to cry.

  Well, I suppose she had a lot to cry about, though didn’t we all in those days. Both her parents had got themselves killed in a train crash coming home from a weekend in Kansas City. Not unexpected. They’d tried balloon ascension the year before and it went down into the Kansas River which—luckily—wasn’t flooding.

  They weren’t exactly on the train; it was their car got stuck—one of the first in our part of Kansas—and it had run out of gas, because Martin Gale had been too tightfisted to buy a full tank in Manhattan. And of course his luck being what it was, they ran out just as they were at a crossing where the streamliner, the Southern Belle, usually passed around noon.

  They were the only ones who died, because it wasn’t the Belle at all, thank the Lord, just a freight hauler. But the two of them were dead before an ambulance could even get to them.

  That meant little Dorothy, not quite eight, was sent to her aunt and uncle’s farm to live out here in the Middle of Nowhere Kansas. It was a small holding with some pigs, horses, a few cows. And the chickens. Always the chickens, who were in Em’s special care.

  The house itself was quite small, just one room really, there having always been just the two of them—Henry and Em—so in Henry’s mind there’d never been a need to build bigger. No kids, though Em had wanted them of course, but by that time she was long past bearing and worn down to a crabbed, stooped, gray middle-aged woman.

  Henry was Dorothy’s blood uncle, being her father’s only brother, though ten years his senior. He might as well have been fifty years older, if you judged by his looks. He was just as tightfisted, and not particularly welcoming to the little girl, either, since now the one room seemed crowded, what with Henry and Em’s bed at one end, and little Dorothy’s at the other, over by the stove.

  At least Em, long-suffering as she was, tried to give the child a bit of her heart, which—after all those years of living with Henry on that old gray farm in the middle of the gray prairie—was as dried up as an old pea. She tried, but she wasn’t much good at it. It was a bit like trying to water a budding flower in the middle of a dry Kansas summer with a watering can poked through with holes.

  Course the Gale brothers weren’t the only misers in those years. I could name a whole bunch more right in our little town, and need six extra hands to count them on, especially my mother-in-law, that old witch, who didn’t even have the decency to die till she was well into her eighties, having burned through a good portion of the money that should have come to my wife and me. That money would have changed our story, I’ll tell you that.

  I’d trained as a carpenter once, loved working with wood, but things being so difficult those days, I never got to make much and I sold less. Instead, I spent my best years hiring out to one tightfisted farmer after another. About the time Dorothy Gale came to stay with Henry and Em, I was working there, bad luck to me.

  Henry had enough money saved at that time to hire three farmhands. Though he paid a pittance it was better than nothing. And a pitiful lot we were: me, Stan, who was a big joking presence even when there was nothing to joke about, and Rand, Stan’s younger brother, who was as scared of life as he was of death, having been in a near-drowning as a boy and never gotten over it. Imagine finding somewhere in dry Kansas to drown in that wasn’t the Kansas River!

  None of us had kids, and we felt so awful for little Dorothy, we did what we could to cheer her up.

  Rand found her a puppy, the runt of an unwanted litter, that Old Man Baum who owns the farm down the road was about to drown. Rand had an immediate fellow-feeling for that dog, as you would guess. Old Man Baum had already sold the other pups in the litter, but no one wanted this stunted rat of a dog—black, with long hair, berry-black eyes, a real yapper. Even so, young Dorothy took to it the moment she laid eyes on it.

  “You done a goodly deed this day,” Stan said, after Rand handed her the dog. “Even a Godly one.” Stan had recently been saved in a tent meeting and couldn’t stop talking about it. Joking about it, too. Called it his tentative change of life. And that he had a tentdency towards God. We just learned to ignore him.

  Stan gave Dorothy a cracked bowl he’d found thrown out on the road, only about good enough to use for a dog’s dinner. Just as well, as she couldn’t actually feed the ratty thing from one of Em’s best china now, could she? Not that Em fed anybody with that china. It was saved for some special event that never came.

  I gave Dorothy a leather rope I’d braided myself, plus a collar cut down from a bridle I’d found in my mother-in-law’s barn. And no, I didn’t ask permission. She’d have said no anyway.

  Dorothy’s eyes got big. “For me? Really? For me?” It was about the longest speech I’d heard from her up to that time.

  We were afraid she was going to try and kiss us or something right then and there, and so we shuffled out the door to get back to our chores. But when I turned around to see how she was making out, she had her little pug nose on the dog’s nose, as if they’d been stuck together by glue.

  After that, there wasn’t a moment those two weren’t in one another’s pockets. She named the dog Toto, though where she came up with that, we were never to know. I thought for sure it would be something like Silky or Blackie or Fido. But Dorothy, she was always a queer kind of kid, as you will see.

  2.

  There were two cyclones, not one as has been reported. Old Man Baum liked to tidy things up, you know. Dogs, twisters, you name it. He tidied. Made for a clean house, but his stories . . . well, take it from me, they weren’t to be believed.

  Of course we always get cyclones around here. It’s kind of an alley for them where we get mugged on a regular basis. But mostly we just hunker down in our dark little underground rooms that are dug into the unforgiving soil. Some folks like to call that kind of hole a cellar. More like a tomb for the hopeful living.

  Usually the wind goes zigzagging past a farmhouse, picking up cows and plows, flinging them a county or two away, which does neither cow nor plow any good at all. But sometimes it flattens a whole house and everything in it, which is why we hide ourselves away.

  That first twister young Dorothy was part of was one that had the Gale farm in its sight from the very first.

  I was the only hand about that day, Stan and Rand were off at a cousin’s funeral. Sorry man shot himself on account of losing his farm and land to the bank. He was never meant to be a farmer and was bad at it, an
d worse at keeping accounts, so no one was surprised.

  There I was out in the back acres, hoeing along—furrowing I sometimes called it—and suddenly I felt the air pressure change. I heard a low wail of wind, and when I looked north, I could see the long prairie grass bowing in waves all the way to the horizon where the shape of a gray funnel cloud could be seen heading our way.

  I dropped the hoe and ran for the house, yelling for Henry and Em and Dorothy to hightail it to the cyclone cellar. It was going to be a tight squeeze, even without Stan and Rand, but the one good thing about twisters is that they don’t hang around very long. Just a minute or two, though the damage may last a lifetime.

  Inside the Gale farmhouse, like many of the houses hereabouts, was a trapdoor with a ladder leading down into the cellar-hole. By the time I got inside, Em was already lifting the trapdoor up and climbing in. Henry was looking frantically out the window.

  “Where’s Dorothy?” he cried, his long beard waggling as he spoke.

  Em called up, “Probably chasing that dang dog.”

  Henry grunted, said something like, “You never should have let her keep that blasted animal. It’ll be the death of us all.” He not only looked like a prophet out of the Good Book, he often sounded like one.

  “Well,” Em called back, “what was I to do, that poor child so brokenhearted and all?”

  While Henry searched for an answer, I turned and ran out the door, and around the side of the house, where I saw Dorothy laying on her belly and trying to coax the frightened Toto out from under the porch.

  “He’ll be safe enough there,” I said, and because I never lie, she believed me. I held out my hand. “But unless you can crawl down there with him, and me after you, we’d better get into the cellar.”

  She was reluctant to leave the dog, but she trusted me, took my hand, and we raced back inside and climbed down into the hole with hardly a moment or an inch to spare.

  Well, you never can tell with a twister. They are as mean, as ornery, and as unpredictable as an unhappy woman. This one only nudged the house off its cinderblocks. We could feel the hump and bump as the house slid onto the ground. But then the wind scooped in under the porch, and dragged the poor dog out of there. We could hear it yelping, a sound that got farther and farther away the longer we listened till it was overpowered by the runaway train sounds a twister makes.