by Geoff Ryman
“When the red, red robin comes bob-bob-bobbing along, along…” in something like harmony, and Frances knew she was the loudest, waving her arms, and she could hear people chuckle, and she knew that they liked her, that everybody liked her, there in the lights, where everything worked, and where there was love.
Frances woke up in the night. She didn’t remember being loaded into the car, or being carried up to the house in her father’s arms. She thought she was back in the theater, and that she would have to talk to people.
It was dark and it was silent. Then there was a shout, and a forced whisper, a whisper of hatred that made something in Frances’s chest prickle with horror. She heard the voices of her parents.
“It’s starting again, isn’t it? It’s starting all over again!” her mother’s voice was a whisper, but the whisper rose up with a keening wrench, like a bird taking wing from its nest.
Baby listened. The whispering was like a scratching on her eardrum or a record at the end when it goes round and round in the same groove.
“I’m the girls’ father, Ethel, you can’t do that.”
In this dark world, without the lights, without music, Baby Frances began to sing, softly, to herself. It was like having to sit through a movie. All you could do was sit and watch and hope for a happy ending. Frances hated movies.
Somewhere there was a movie that sang. Daddy had told her about it. It already existed. Al Jolson began to sing, right at the end.
If movies sang, would people want to hear them, the Gumms? What would hold the Gumms together? Maybe the movies were talking now, and not her mother and father. Maybe movies flickered on walls at night, whispering, a new kind of ghost. Maybe it was not her mother and father who were talking at all. If sound could come from nowhere, spoken by no one.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” Her mother’s voice was high and breathy, panicked. “Keep away from me!”
Nothing is hidden. Frances knew she existed to hold her parents together. She was the still point around which all the others turned. She and the music. She and the music were the same thing. Both of them had to stay in the center of attention. The center bore the weight, and if it slipped there would be disaster.
Her sisters were going to go to school, Daddy was hiring other acts, and she was going to go to Los Angeles. Frances began to hear the unaccustomed sound of her father weeping. She sang louder, to cover the dissonance. The words of the songs were not important. The meaning behind them was, a meaning that could not be put into words. The meaning needed music. The meaning needed her, to sing it.
Manhattan, Kansas
Christmas 1875
Chapman’s favourite film was The Wizard of Oz, in which Judy Garland travels continuously looking for the lost farm, the loved faces…
And here is Judy, Chapman’s first love, who had the same name as Garland…
Vince Smith, the director of the YMCA camp where Chapman worked for seven years: “He was particularly good with children, like a pied piper. I didn’t see a fault in Mark. His camp name was Nemo.” He gave that name up when someone told him it meant Nothing. And Cindy, who was a sobbing child in pigtails when Chapman comforted her in his camp: “He truly cared for me and that is very odd for an adult.” The last time she saw him she backed off. “His face looked different. He had shark eyes and no feeling in his face.”
In Hawaii he tried to kill himself…“You could always read Mark’s mind like a book,” said a fellow worker. We know the book. Holden Caulfield found adults phoney and Chapman fixed on Lennon, now living as a rich recluse, as the ultimate phoney…
Nemo does not, of course, mean Nothing. It means a Nobody.
— NANCY BANKS-SMITH,
reviewing a television documentary about Mark Chapman,
The Guardian, February 3, 1988
Wilbur F. Jewell killed himself just before Christmas. No one seemed to know why. Some people blamed the weather.
It had been a strange December that year. Thermometers showed eighty-eight degrees if they were on a south wall out of the wind. It made the children restless, people said, to have summer in the middle of winter.
Then, as hard and sudden as a fist, winter slammed into them. The snow piled up in drifts, and schools were closed. Everything closed, even the sky which hung dark and low and heavy overhead. A few days before Christmas, Wilbur Jewell went missing. Uncle Henry and Will’s father spent a day out in the snow looking for him. Dorothy was rather excited. Will had always talked of getting out of here. She thought he had done it. She thought he had run away and got on a train and become a steamboat pilot on the river or even gone out to the Territory, to join the Indians. She wished he had taken her with him.
Wilbur had walked clear to the other side of Manhattan to the telegraph poles.
Dorothy was in bed, listening, when she heard Uncle Henry’s boots clunking up the stairs.
“The boy went and hanged himself,” was all he said.
“What! God have mercy. Has his mother been told?”
There was silence for an answer.
“Well we just got to go there,” said Aunty Em.
“She don’t want nobody now, Em. She just sits in the corner rocking, and there’s no comforting her. She don’t want comfort. She just knocks it away.”
“Oh! It just tears the heart! What does she say?”
Dorothy heard Uncle Henry slump down onto the chair. “She says he was a happy boy. She just says that over and over. He was a happy boy. And she says how she doesn’t have anything to remember him by. Bob told me outside, he was going to get a photographer in. Photograph the remains.”
“Horrible habit. I suppose they’ll have a wreath with it that says, ‘Sleeping in the arms of the Lord.’”
“It’ll be all the woman has.”
Dorothy could stand it no longer. She could very finely gauge what would annoy Aunty Em, what was safe and what was not. She could sense from the fine fierceness in Aunty Em’s voice that almost anything would be all right.
“What’s happened to Wilbur?” she said, walking out from behind the blanket.
“Oh, darling, did you hear?” Aunty Em sounded worried for her, instead of angry. Dorothy had been right.
“Wilbur’s dead, Dorothy,” said Uncle Henry.
Aunty Em tried to hug Dorothy. She somehow always missed, all angles and elbows. “We just have to hope that he’s happy in the arms of the Lord,” she told Dorothy.
Dorothy did not need to be told what dead meant.
“Was it the Dip?” she asked very quietly.
“Oh honey, now, it wasn’t. Wasn’t your fault at all.” Aunty Em tried to kiss her. “No.”
They weren’t going to tell her why her friend had died.
“What does hanged mean?”
“Dorothy. That’s something you must never mention. If you talk about it, it will only make it worse for everybody. I’ll tell you, but you must promise not to talk about it. Say yes.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“It means he killed himself, Dorothy. I’m not going to tell you how because it’ll just give you nightmares. But he killed himself.”
Dorothy didn’t ask why. She knew. It was a way of leaving. She nodded and went back to bed.
“Dorothy?” asked Aunty Em, her voice trailing after the child. It was Aunty Em who needed to talk. Dorothy didn’t. Dorothy threw herself on the tick mattress and pretended to be asleep. She heard Aunty Em pull back the blanket to look in.
“She’s asleep.”
“That’s a blessing. Leave her be.”
Dorothy listened again.
“I knew there was something wrong with that boy.”
“He was all right, Em.”
“There’s something wrong, Henry, with a boy that age who prefers to play with little children.”
A few days before, Dorothy and Wilbur had made angels in the snow on top of the hill. They had lain down on their backs and waved their arms up and down. That made a shape like w
ings. The trick was to stand up from the snow and then jump away, so that there were no footprints leading from the image. Then you could say that it was a place where an angel had gone to sleep. Will would lean out and lift Dorothy out of hers. So hers were the best.
Then Dorothy and Wilbur and his little brother, Max, had made three snowmen. Dorothy loved the way the snowballs got bigger and bigger, in layers like a cake, and the crunching noises they made on the snow underneath. Will helped them roll the biggest snowball and lift the smaller snowballs up on top. He would make snow castles.
Wilbur made an ice road. He carried buckets of water up to the top of the hill and poured them on the ground to freeze. You didn’t have to walk on an ice road. You would run at it and stop walking. And then you’d slide. It was like flying. They made an ice road all the way down the hill. They could ride down that inside hessian sacks, spinning and giggling and landing in a heap at the bottom. It almost never hurt. When it did, Wilbur would get worried and rub Dorothy’s ankles until they were better. He never hit her, like Max did. He would stop Max from hitting her. “You don’t hit girls,” Wilbur said.
“Why not?” said Max.
“Because they’re smaller than you. If you hit her, then I’ll hit you, just so you know what it’s like.”
“And I’ll tell Mama.”
“And I’ll tell Mama that you were hitting on Dorothy, which is why I hit you.”
Max thrust out his jaw with hatred of his bigger, stronger, wiser brother and walked away, back down the hill, leaving his snowman behind.
Max was all right most of the time. You needed Max for most of the games. But it was nicer when it was just Dorothy and Will. After Max had gone, Will and Dorothy talked together about how much they hated Kansas.
“Just a big pile of dirt,” said Wilbur.
“Just a big pile of dirt and nothing to do,” said Dorothy.
“Nothing to do but work.”
“You just got to wait and wait.”
“And do your chores or go to school.” The way Will said it made it sound like something disgusting.
“Sk-ew-ew-l,” said Dorothy, imitating him. She admired Will because he had been to school and then quit and never went back.
“Stuff your head until it hurts and then tell you you’re stupid.” Will glowered and kicked at the snow. Dorothy kicked at the snow too.
“One day, I’ll get out of here,” he said. “One day, I’ll just get on the train, and go West.” West was the approved direction. Nobody ever went Back East, that was giving up. Everybody talked about going West.
“I want to see an Indian,” Dorothy said.
“I seen loads of ’em,” said Wilbur. “Till about three years ago, there used to be a whole reservation of the Kansa, out at Council Grove. Most of ’em dressed like poor white people and were drunk a lot. I saw one once kept waving a letter and my papa read it and it was from a judge and the judge said that this was a good Indian.”
“He didn’t wear feathers?” Dorothy was disappointed.
“Well, that was before all the Kansa left and went down the Nation. I expect they dress like Indians now.”
“Aunty Em talks about the Indians a lot.”
“She don’t know nothing about it,” said Wilbur.
Dorothy wanted to believe that, except that Aunty Em really did have a lot to say about the Indians: how they spoke, what they wore.
“Down the Nation, the Indians wear feathers,” Dorothy said, reassuring herself, “and they’re bright red, and they ride horses without a saddle and don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do.”
“They live in tents, not houses,” said Will. “And when they want to move, they just get up and go.”
“And they hide in the grass, and nobody can see them,” whispered Dorothy. “They’re invisible.”
Will was smiling, crookedly. “Well, we can’t see ’em. Maybe they’re all around us all the time, only we don’t see them.”
“Maybe they live underground,” said Dorothy. It was a game of pretend. Will still smiled. “Maybe you can hear ’em sing at night, under the ground.”
“I wish I was an Indian,” said Dorothy.
“There’s some kinds of Indian I’d want to be,” said Will, leaning back and looking terribly adult. “And some I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to be one of them tame Indians that try to be farmers. I’d want to be out in the Territory.”
“Let’s pretend we’re going to run away and join the Indians,” said Dorothy.
Will smiled again and shook his head. “Nope. I don’t want to pretend that. No point doing that unless you’re going to do it for real.”
He was right, of course. It would have been fun to pretend, but pretend was for things that could never happen. But there were Indians, and they did have a land of their own, the Territory, and you really could go there. You don’t pretend something like that. You plan it. Dorothy was suddenly sure that she knew Wilbur’s secret. Will was planning to go there. It was a secret she would lock in her heart and keep safe away.
Will was almost a man. He was calm and kindly like an adult, but he talked to kids. Dorothy knew that that was somehow wrong, talking to her as if she were anyone else, but she liked it.
She could tell him about how mean Aunty Em was, how she made her do things, and Will understood and didn’t say anything to his parents, who would only go to Aunty Em and tell her what Dorothy had said. And he would tell Dorothy in turn about his parents. He made her understand that they weren’t mean. In fact they could be nice. But his daddy was drunk all the time and didn’t do anything, and the farm was falling apart and his mama was unhappy and kept complaining.
“Craziest place for gloom,” he told her. “They just can’t wait to hunker down and be unhappy. And I can’t run that place by myself and I’m not going to. I don’t want to be a smelly old farmer.”
“Uncle Henry smells,” said Dorothy. “I can’t stand it.”
“That’s ’cause he’s got bad teeth,” said Will.
“He tries to kiss me with his beard. And his beard smells too,” said Dorothy.
They sat on the hessian bags listening to the gentle hiss of snow landing on fresh snow. It was nice, doing what they weren’t supposed to do, letting snow fall on them. The snow fell in big, light clumps that sat on their stockings.
“Eskimos are Indians that live right far north, all the way up in British America,” said Will. “They make their houses out of snow.”
Dorothy could see the Eskimo houses, sparkling in one of those bright, blue-sky days in winter. She saw an Eskimo town, their snow castles all lined up.
“Doesn’t it get cold?”
“Nope. You see, you get enough snow, it shuts the cold out, just like anything else.”
Another wonderful thing. Snow was warm if you got enough of it. There was a logic that made the world beneficent. It was a nice world, if you were an Indian.
“Indians are a lot nicer,” said Dorothy.
“Except when they get mean and kill people,” Will reminded her.
Dorothy scowled. That was the trouble with Indians. That was the thing that never made sense. Everybody liked Indians, even the adults. They bought Indian blankets. The Jewells had one up on the wall, and it was bright red and yellow in bumpy shapes. And they had an Indian buffalo hide on the floor, with the horns still on. Everybody liked Indians, but everybody was afraid of them too, and Indians tried to kill them.
“Why do they do that?” Dorothy asked in a small voice.
“’Cause this used to be their country and we took it.”
“But they got the Territory.”
Will was silent. It didn’t make sense to him either, even to him. They listened to the snow falling.
“I used to think the snow came straight from God,” said Will, looking up. “Used to think it fell straight off Him in pieces. Asked my papa if His dandruff was snow.”
“I used to think rain was God crying,” said Dorothy.
“Then it just freezes over Kansas, ’cause Kansas is so cold.”
“Let’s just sit here,” said Dorothy. “Let’s just sit here so the snow covers us up and see if it keeps us warm.”
They let the snow settle over them. They sat shoulder to shoulder and watched themselves turn white. Then they heard Mr. Jewell shouting. He was far away in the fields, standing in the snow, a small dark smear, like charcoal. He was angry. Shouting for them to come back inside. What the blazes did they think they were doing?
“Your daddy swears,” whispered Dorothy.
“Does a lot of other things as well,” said Will, with a grunt, and stood up.
It was like the two of them were putting on masks. “We’re terrible sorry, Mr. Jewell,” said Dorothy. “We weren’t cold. The snow would keep us warm.”
“You get on into the house,” said Mr. Jewell to his son. You couldn’t move around adults without doing something wrong.
It was the last time Dorothy saw Will.
The funeral was held in Zeandale village. Uncle Henry, Aunty Em and Dorothy all squeezed up together on the front bench of the wagon. Now that Dorothy had been scrubbed and boiled and shorn for months, she was clean enough to sit next to Aunty Em. They huddled under lap robes and put their feet on stones that had come red-hot out of the stove. Their toes were warm, but everything else stayed cold.
Across the iron-gray fields, there were scarecrows. Aunty Em had planted them over the buffalo wallows to warn Dorothy. They were as well dressed as the rest of the family. In the icy wind, their sleeves moved, as if beckoning.
The first stop was the Jewells’ farm. Bob Jewell was holding the family’s mule while they got into their cart. Bob Jewell looked raw, like stripped meat, all gray and red and splotchy, with the undefended look of someone who was not used to washing. Mrs. Jewell was fat and helpless, wallowing in flesh and grief. Aunty Em took her arm as she walked toward the Jewells’ wagon, and silently kissed her.