by Geoff Ryman
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 large 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 ha
d 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 editorial 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.
“Nice people,” Dorothy repeated. Saying it made her feel small and warm and comforted.
“It’ll be like going to church in Lawrence,” said Aunty Em. “We just had the one old cottonwood meeting hall, and the sun made the boards curl up, so the wind blew between them, and we’d all sing just to keep warm. Sometimes your grandfather would read the lesson. He had a fine voice for reading, he’d make the words come alive. He would read the Sermon on the Mount and make people weep from the truth of it. That was his most favorite passage in the Bible. And we’d stand up from those wooden benches and sing those grand old hymns just like in New England. And your mama, she was the littlest and she would sing such a sweet little song.”
Suddenly Aunty Em was no longer smiling. “I don’t suppose your mama ever told you about Lawrence.”
Dorothy could feel the sun going behind a cloud. “No, Ma’am.”
“She never told you?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Well. That was where we lived first. Kansas was just being settled, and we wanted it settled by Northerners. So the Company was formed to help us move across. We came from New England, Dorothy, from Massachusetts. Your grandfather was one of the first to say he’d go. He was a very brave man. He came all the way across the United States to Kansas, and he was one of the first. He left July 17th, 1854, one of the first thirty men. And it was a triumphant progress. They were cheered at the train stations.”
Dorothy half imagined it, the flags and excitement, and people cheering a good man. It was all part of the Meeting feeling.
“Your grandfather wrote letters about it back home to the newspapers, Back East. He was such a lettered man, your grandfather. We followed the next year. I came across when I was thirteen years old. Oh! This was a beautiful country then! Nothing between horizon and horizon. I can still remember my first sight of Lawrence, across the river, in the trees. We came across in the ferry and stayed with such nice people, a minister. He had an Indian servant girl, and she gave me a buffalo rug to sleep on. Then we went out to look at our new house that your grandfather had built.”
Aunty Em paused, looked at the fields, the flowers. “I can remember the first time I heard a Western voice. A woman from Iowa. She told us a store had ‘a right smart chance of calicoes.’ Your mother and I laughed and laughed, and no one could understand why two little Yankee girls would find it funny.”
Aunty Em went silent again, listening to the mule. “Anyway,” she whispered, “it’s the children of the Company we’ll be meeting today.”
Aunty Em drew a deep and shaky breath.
Lawrence sounded beautiful and happy and full of laughter.
“Lawrence had trees?”
“Lots of them, honey, all over the place.”
“And Indians and buffalo?”
“Not so much even then. People were planning to make their living farming. The hunters had already moved on, to places like Wichita.”
“Why are we living out here?” Dorothy asked.
Aunty Em’s face went darker. “We had to move out here, Dorothy. Didn’t your mama ever tell you why?”
Dorothy shook her head.
“Border ruffians attacked the town. Called themselves Federal Marshals and carried the flag of South Carolina.”
Aunty Em flicked the reins. “I remember getting up in the morning and seeing them on top of Mount Oread. The birds kept singing, the sun shone, and there were five hundred armed men on the hill. They fired cannon at the Free State Hotel until it fell. They destroyed the office of the Herald of Freedom where your grandfather wrote his paper. They came to arrest him, but he had already given them the slip. They came into our house, all leering, and asking for the man of the house. And I told them they knew where he was, driven from his own home. So they ransacked it. They were as drunk as skunks and singing ‘Katy Darling’ and ‘Lily Dale.’ And they read our letters and stole our clothes. They even destroyed the only daguerreotype I had of my mother! Then they set the house on fire. My little sister and I had to push a burning bed through the window. After that, my father thought we would be safer out here.”
Aunty Em’s rage seemed to subside, then flared up again. “And they did it twice! Once in ’56 and again in ’63. Only the second time they killed every man they could find. And not only men! They killed boys, children. They even killed babies if they were little boys.”
“Why?” whispered Dorothy in horror.
“Oh! Because the South wanted to own slaves. They wanted to own people like dogs. And because of them the whole country had to go to war!”
“Why did they kill children?” Dorothy asked.
“Because their minds were twisted. They were so deep in evil, they couldn’t find a pathway out. The glorious South. And your mother went to live there! In Missouri, St. Louis, the city that tried to stop us from even getting to Kansas. She has to go and move there, not four years after the ashes of Lawrence were finally cold.”
Dorothy could not remember a war. She could not remember anyone in Missouri killing people. But it would seem that her mother had lied to her, not to tell her this.
“How could she do it to us?” said Aunty Em, helpless with anger and unhappiness. “Go off to St. Louis with that man.”
Dorothy’s mother was a bad woman. Dorothy had no idea her mother had been that bad. She began to be afraid that she was bad, too.
“Those Southerners owe every Union family five hundred dollars at least. Clemency indeed! You let them go and look what you have. Outlaws, that’s all they are. You hea
r of the James gang, Dorothy?”
Dorothy shook her head.
“Murderous, thieving scoundrels. They were Southerners. They were there in Lawrence that very night. They were there, killing children. They ought to have been hunted down like dogs.”
Aunty Em drew in a long, shuddering breath, and Dorothy hung her head and picked at her nails. “God forgive me. But that’s what I feel.”
It had been a beautiful day, and Dorothy had been happy. She had thought she was going to be happy. She began to cry now, for the horrible thing she didn’t understand, and for the promise of happiness that seemed to have been broken.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” said Aunty Em. The sight of the child crying, crying for the right reason, crying for the reason Aunty Em wanted her to weep, moved her beyond measure. “We won’t talk about that. We won’t talk about that anymore. It’s just too nice a day to spoil.”
Aunty Em stopped the wagon and enfolded Dorothy in her sweaty hug. It seemed to the child that the very earth was bleeding. What other terrible secrets were there? She could imagine the terror, being in your own house, and having to run from bad men who wanted to kill you.
“I’m not a Southerner,” said Dorothy.
“No, honey, of course you’re not.”
“But I lived in Missouri!”
“Well, that wasn’t your fault. Your mother went to live there, and you were born there.”
“But they still kill people!”
“Yes, but that’s only a few of them. Now hush, there’s no need to be scared now, the war’s over.”
Dorothy wasn’t weeping because she was frightened; she was weeping because it had happened at all. Didn’t Aunty Em understand that?
Aunty Em kept her bony arms around her. “We’re going to Meeting,” she said. “Meeting’s in a big white tent.”
How could a big white tent make up for murder?
“And there’s going to be lots of singing, and we’ll meet some nice new friends who’ll be so happy to see you.”