by Geoff Ryman
No cries as yet. Too indirect. He wasn’t working them.
He changed tack. These people were not the farmers near Wichita. Politics did not move them.
“It could be that I don’t know much. I have seen no blinding light from Heaven, I have seen no angels in the sky. I call the gospel because I love it. I can bear witness, and I will bear witness long as I can, loud as I can, that there is more to God’s children than flesh alone or blood alone…or land alone or money alone, either.”
That was more like it. Meeting made more noise. It wanted to touch the Lord, to feel Him brush past them, as if His robe swept their souls.
“I don’t see no light of Heaven, it’s not given to me to see it. That is given to prophets to see, and I ain’t no prophet. But I’ll tell you. I see the light of Heaven, just a glint of it, in the eyes of each and every one of you here today. That glimmer there? That’s God shining out through you. And you can damn the bankers! You can damn all the fine folk.”
There was some sound here of disapproval. He overrode it.
“They damn themselves!” A roar of agreement. “This is where the word of God shines!”
There were cries now, shouts. A man stood up, lean, lean under thick clothing, and shouted. Dorothy thought he was angry. She flinched and drew closer to Aunty Em. Were people mad? Why were they shouting? Dorothy thought perhaps she liked church better.
Aunty Em kept staring ahead, a thin smile on her face. But her eyes were full of yearning. A hand crept up to her breast.
“So let it shine, brothers, sisters. Let the Word shine in you! Let the Lord Jesus come to you in the Spirit. Open up the gates! Don’t shut Him out. He sings in the wind. He whispers in the breath of every innocent young babe. He is all around us, to heal, to salve, to bring comfort, to warm the heart and bring peace to the mind.”
Hally hoo hah. Hay men. Oh, he was good, this Preacher, who started out so slow.
Aunty Em seemed to melt. She listed sideways like a candle, hand still over her heart. The young Preacher prowled about his wagon. He’d started out so slow, and now he was waving his hands, commanding.
“Why are you so silent? Are you afraid of the Lord? Are you afraid of your speaking sins? Don’t you know the Lord Jesus knows your sins, knows your pain, don’t you know He loves you, and forgives you, leaves you as innocent as the child, the little children, whom He suffered to come unto Him? Go to Him as a child, be a child again in His presence!”
Aunty Em rose up, arms outstretched, her head shaking from side to side.
“The Spirit, the Spirit’s on her!” called Harriet.
The old man with the beard grabbed her arms. Harriet stroked her brow.
“Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” said Aunty Em, her tongue rattling loose in her mouth. Her hands shook; her lined cheeks flapped loosely.
Dorothy wailed in terror. “Oh!” she cried, the shadow of the terror of Lawrence still on her.
“Bulor ep ep ahhh no up shelopa no no no shelopa apa apa no ma!” cried Aunty Em.
“Oh, the Spirit’s strong, the Spirit’s good!” said Harriet, wrestling.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” said the old man, looking worried.
Then the train came, with a whiplash whine along the metal rails nearby and a piercing shriek of steam through a whistle. A bell began to clang over and over. The horses in the corral whinnied and snorted.
And Dorothy remembered. The train had come once before and taken her away and shown her a world full of reasonable people who did not love her. The train came closer with a sound of steam and smoke, and Dorothy saw her aunty tossing her head back and forth, held down by other people, back and forth as if saying no, no, no. Aunty Em wanted to be hauled away from this world, from the farm, from the past. Dorothy was suddenly afraid.
“Don’t die, Aunty Em! Don’t die!” Dorothy shouted. The shadow of the train was cast on the white canvas.
The skinny woman leaned down, all pine-tree smells, breathing into Dorothy’s face. “Your aunty’s not going to die, darling,” she said. Dorothy clung to her aunty’s dress.
The Preacher had stopped preaching. He fought his way through the other people. Dismayed, he knelt down to look at Aunty Em.
“If you gentlemen could help me carry her outside,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have stopped, Preacher,” chuckled Harriet. “It’s what she came for.”
The men carried Aunty Em out to her wagon. The train was far down the track, leaving a slight haze over the field.
Broke it up as soon as it got going, said voices, complaining. Dorothy followed, a fist rubbing her eyes to make the point that she was unhappy too.
“It’s all right, darling, this means your aunty is with Jesus.”
“Will she want to come back?” Dorothy asked.
The old man lifted Dorothy up into the wagon. Aunty Em was looking at her dimly. “Hello, Dorothy,” she said gently, warm and soft and kind and far away.
“Oh, Aunty Em,” said Dorothy, and lay down on the rough boards. “Oh, Aunty Em. I love you, love you, love you, love you.”
“Why, child!” chuckled Aunty Em, pleased. She hugged Dorothy and kissed the top of her head.
“I thought you were going to die!” the child said.
“Oh, no,” said Aunty Em, recalling the impact of Christ’s love. “Not die.”
A dog tied to a wagon began to bark. Dorothy looked up. “Toto?” she asked.
Aunty Em’s hand, stroking her hair, froze.
Toto had lived throughout the winter in the buffalo wallows. The wallows had frozen hard, and the marsh reeds heavy with ice had fallen against each other to make ice shelters.
All through the winter, Toto would appear as if from nowhere, barking as he ran out of freezing mist that blazed with sunlight. He would bring Dorothy sticks to throw for him. They sparkled with frost. He bounced across crisp frosty ground to bring them back and drop them again at Dorothy’s feet.
When blizzards fell, making a low grinding sound as if the sky were being milled, Toto would bark as Dorothy passed the barn. She would find him in the hay, and he would whimper and lick her hands. Dorothy left him food in a broken bowl and would return each morning to find it clean.
Aunty Em’s hens began to disappear. “It’s that dog. He’s gone wild!” Aunty Em exclaimed. Toto unnerved her.
She would find him in her own yard, crouched and snarling at her, baring his fangs. When Aunty Em tried to grab him, he would scamper just out of reach and growl at her again.
“Dorothy! Dorothy! Come and call your dog!” Aunty Em would demand.
In the spring, the thaws began. Dorothy started school. She would walk every morning along the lane, between the ruts filled with muddy water and crusted with patches of ice. Toto would come out of the wallows from under the open arms of the scarecrows to meet Dorothy. He would be filthy, blinking and covered in mud. Dorothy would chuckle and kneel down. “You got that old lady real mad at you.”
He started to bring her presents. He brought her the Jewells’ chickens, murdered and whole.
“Dorothy, you must control that dog. The Jewells are good neighbors to us and they can’t afford to lose their livestock any more than we can. Now the next time you see him, you have a rope with you and you catch him and bring him back.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Dorothy. She somehow always forgot the rope.
Dorothy wanted to be good. That was why she worked so hard at her chores and her school exercises. She could sense goodness within her, like a pouch in her breast, to be opened. She wanted to love her aunty; it would be good to love her aunty. She loved Toto.
Toto was not good. He dug up the green shoots in Uncle Henry’s fields. He tore down the washing from the clothesline into the mud. Once in the lane, he bit through the sleeve of Dorothy’s only coat and tried to drag her with him, away.
“We can’t go back, Toto,” she said, stroking the rough gray hair of his terrier head.
She began to see him less
and less. Sometimes he disappeared for days at a time.
Then one day, in late afternoon, Dorothy walked back from school hugging her books, head down. Aunty Em was at the stove, slamming pots, loud as she could.
“Good day, Dorothy?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“What did you study, child?”
“Sub…subtraction.”
“Hmmm.”
They heard a bark.
“That dog. Back again.”
Aunty Em wiped her hands on her apron and opened the door.
The earth was soft, muddy, thawed. It was about four-thirty in the afternoon in late March, what had been a nice day, a sunset blur of orange and blue across a flat and featureless sky. Toto the dog sat waiting.
“We’ll have to try to catch him,” said Aunty Em. She swept her coat on in one motion and put on gloves and took a rope. Dorothy followed, not wanting Toto hurt.
They opened the door again, and Toto had not run away. He was still there, at the end of the yard, waiting beside one of Aunty Em’s dead flowerbeds. He barked as if to say: Here.
“What’s he brought with him this time?” said Aunty Em, striding.
He had dug something up. He waited over it, eyes fixed on Aunty Em.
Aunty Em suddenly gave a kind of coughing, stricken cry. Her hand went to her throat, and she dropped the rope. Dorothy knew then that Toto had done something terrible.
Aunty Em broke into a run. “Horrible, horrible animal! Horrible, horrible dog!” she said, sounding as if she were coughing. She ran toward him, trying to pick up a handful of mud, to throw at him. She slipped onto her knees and kept sliding toward the thing from out of the ground.
“Rob Roy,” cried Aunty Em, sobbing. “Oh, Robbie! Rob Roy!”
Toto barked at her, just out of reach. He ran around her, bouncing furiously.
Toto had dug up the corpse of another dog. Dorothy walked up next to her aunt and stood watching.
“Toto, stop,” she said weakly.
There was bone with some wet and bedraggled fur still clinging to it, and hollow eyes, and a doggy smile full of teeth, a large skeleton with some skin still attached, a long, big corpse of a huge long-haired animal.
Aunty Em knelt in the mud, sobbing, covering her face.
Raf raf, raf raf, said Toto. He came hopping toward Emma. He was small and fierce and full of hate. You see, you see? Toto seemed to say. You had one too.
“Toto. Leave her alone,” whispered Dorothy.
Aunty Em spun around and grabbed Dorothy and shook her, thick spittle clogging her lips, gray eyes wild. “Look at it! Look at it!” she demanded. “See it? See it? That’s death. That’s what your mother looks like now, in the ground.”
Dorothy looked and saw the hollow eyes, the somewhat surprised and empty face that seemed to ask what had happened to itself. Where had it gone? Dorothy knew it was the truth. Her mother had no flesh now, or eyes, in the ground. Aunty Em wept, and Toto trotted back away, revenge taken. Dorothy saw him go, his tiny legs strutting across the gray mud, between rounded gray humps.
Uncle Henry kept a shotgun leaning in the corner.
Toto did not show up for a day or two. Dorothy knew enough not to mention him. She thought he was hiding, keeping low for a while. He was such a clever dog.
But how low can you keep without disappearing, until you fade into less than a memory? When almost a week had passed, Dorothy asked if Aunty Em had seen Toto while she was away at school.
Aunty Em was scrubbing. “No, I haven’t,” she said, lightly.
“He’s been gone a long time.”
“I expect he’s gone away,” said Aunty Em, not looking at her.
“He wouldn’t do that,” said Dorothy.
“Well, he kept staying away for longer and longer,” said Aunty Em.
But he wouldn’t leave her, he wouldn’t leave Dorothy, she knew that.
“Why would he run away?”
“Guess he didn’t like it here.”
Dorothy slumped down onto her mattress. Aunty Em couldn’t stand it when anyone else cried. If anyone had a right to cry, it was Aunty Em. She looked around the edge of the blanket.
“There’s no point going against the will of God, if that’s what He’s decided,” said Aunty Em. Aunty Em looked at the good little girl who was so unhappy and relented a bit.
“Toto wasn’t happy here, Dorothy. That’s why he kept barking all the time and running off and did all those terrible things. So, I reckon he’s gone off to find somewhere happier. Maybe he’s gone off to find your old house in St. Louis. Maybe he thinks your mama’s there. He’s a dog and doesn’t know any better.”
“He wouldn’t leave me!” said Dorothy.
“Well he has, and there’s no way around it but to get used to it,” said Aunty Em. Dorothy heard her boots on the floor as she walked away.
Dorothy waited for Toto to come back. Maybe he had gone away because he knew he was bad and would come back when he thought he had been forgiven. Maybe you could find out you were bad, and go away from shame and come back when you were good again.
Every day after school, when she came to the track that led to the farm, she would expect to see him again. Maybe this time, maybe this time, she thought every day all through the rest of that March, into April, into the fullness of the Kansas spring. From time to time, she would call his name, expecting to find him lying close to the ground, ready to spring up and run yipping to her.
She knew just how she would feel when that happened. She knew there would be a leaping up of joy inside her, and she would say “Good Toto, good boy, good Toto,” and he would roll over and over and over, like he always did when he was especially glad to see her. That would happen, and everything would be all right.
Whenever she heard a dog barking at night, the sound coming across the Kansas hills, she thought it was Toto. She would get up.
“Dorothy. Where are you going?” demanded the voice in the darkness.
“I think it’s Toto,” she would reply. “I think he’s come back.”
“It’s not Toto. Get back to bed.” The voice would order.
And Dorothy would slink guiltily back onto her bed, in an agony in case Toto came back and found no one there to greet him. She learned how to slip out of the window, into the cool spring night in just her nightgown.
“Toto?” she would whisper, teeth chattering, icy mud between her toes. “Toto?”
She started hiding her boots under the mattress. She would go out and hunt for Toto at night, stumbling across the Kansas plain, following the sound of the dogs. She would be sure that he was just a field or two away, lost, not quite able to find the tiny single-room house in the wide flat valley.
One day after school, Uncle Henry met her at the crossroads and they walked together.
“You’re still worried about Toto, ain’t you?” He said. His kindness was inseparable from his smell. He still reeked, and there was food in his beard.
“When he can’t find my mama, will he come back here?” she asked.
“Well,” he said. “It’s possible that Toto is dead, Dorothy.”
Dorothy saw the bedraggled fur, the empty eyes.
“If he is, then he’s with all the other good little dogs in Heaven, and we should be happy for him.”
Dorothy said nothing.
“So maybe he has found your mama,” said Uncle Henry. “And your little brother. Maybe they’re all together, just like they used to be.”
“Maybe Wilbur’s there too,” she said. She still thought of Wilbur sometimes.
“I should think that’s right,” said Uncle Henry. “So you say your prayers, and be a good little girl, you’ll join them one day. They’ll be waiting for you at the gate.”
“By that time I’ll be too old, and I won’t care,” said Dorothy.
But she didn’t stop hoping. She just knew she had to hide it. Whenever she heard a dog bark, she would look up in hope.
But in another sense, Toto was
always with her, silent and invisible, bouncing and spinning around her as she walked to and from school, or sleeping by the rusty stove while Dorothy did her homework. She could almost feel him, tiny and coarse-haired, growing warmer next to her at night.
She told stories to herself to account for why he was still there. She could see the stories happening very clearly. There were thieves and they came and tied Aunty Em up and were going to steal money from the tin box behind the flue, but Toto came back and saw them and fetched Uncle Henry, and the thieves were foiled, so Toto was a hero. Aunty Em let him lick her face.
Dorothy daydreamed many things, walking back and forth from the crossroads. She daydreamed that an angel came down, right in the middle of school, where all the other children could see her. And the angel said that because Dorothy was so good, she could have three wishes. And Dorothy would wish that her mother was back, and that her father came back, and that they all lived together in St. Louis. And the angel would smile and say, “Your wishes are granted,” and there would be a great wind that would pick Dorothy up and blow her through the sky, back home.
She daydreamed the size of gravestone she would have. She thought that gravestones were earned by goodness, rather than paid for by money, and she imagined her gravestone, as big as a house, with angels carved all over it. Then she felt guilty because she knew her mother didn’t have one like that.
She felt guilty remembering her mother. To dream that her mother was back, rocking Dorothy in her lap, singing to her, divided Dorothy in two. Because the mother who Dorothy remembered, soft-faced with pursed lips, was nothing like the mother Aunty Em talked about. She wasn’t wild, she was hardworking. She had to practice the piano and she had to rehearse. She wasn’t a poor, silly little thing. She was sensible and kept a cleaner house than Aunty Em did. She was often away and tried to make it up to Dorothy. Dorothy remembered her mother kneeling down on the floor with her to make cakes in the shape of men with sugar faces. She was sure she could remember her mother and her father having a snowball fight in the park. She could also remember her mother on the settee, sobbing, clasping her hands and saying, “Dear God, please don’t let me ask him back. Don’t let me call him back.” Outside on the street her father was walking away.