Was

by Geoff Ryman

  “Dorothy, I’m sorry I hit you, but you almost got us…” He could not imagine what would have happened. “Honey, we got to keep quiet about this. We got to keep as still as mice. It’s like it’s our own little world. It can’t touch the other world at all.”

  “Okay, Uncle Henry.”

  He looked at her with love and great misgiving. His eyes were saying: What have I got myself into?

  “I better go in,” said Dorothy.

  I got them dancing, thought Dorothy. I got Aunty Em with a pin through her, squirming like a butterfly, and she don’t even know it. And Uncle Henry, he’s just got to be so careful. All I got to do is make sure nobody knows, and I can just keep pushing pins.

  She stopped at the barn door and turned. “Tell Aunty Em that I need some new boots,” she said.

  I’m bad, she thought, rejoicing. I’m wicked, I’m evil. I’m the Devil’s own.

  “You can get them for me, when you go to Manhattan,” she said, and went into the house. She burned the pork, deliberately, burned it black, and she was smiling all the time.

  The next day or the day after that, in Manhattan, at school, a pretty little girl fell in the schoolyard and started to cry.

  Aw, thought Dorothy. You poor little thing you. Is that all you got to cry about? Is that the only reason you have to cry?

  Dorothy grinned and pretended to help the little girl up. She was so little and so thin and Dorothy was so big. She could feel her size.

  “Does it hurt?” she cooed, and sliced the edge of her nails down the girl’s wrist. The little girl looked up in bewildered horror.

  “Hurt?” asked Dorothy, and wrenched the flesh of the wrist in two directions at once, wrung it like a cloth.

  The little girl wailed.

  “Shut up,” whispered Dorothy, and punched her as hard as she could in the stomach. The little girl doubled up and went quiet.

  Dorothy looked at the pretty white dress and had an inspiration. “You got any money? Give me some money. I’ll stop if you give me some money.”

  The little girl wept in silence.

  Dorothy put her nails against her cheek. “You better give me some,” she warned her, and chuckled suddenly. “It’s going to be real bad if you don’t.”

  The feeble little girl reached for a pretty little purse kept inside her glove. Dorothy took it from her. “Tell your mother you dropped it,” she said. “And you better not snitch, or I’ll follow you home and whup you so bad you can’t walk.”

  The other kids said that Dorothy Gael was farm dirt. They said she was poor and had fleas. They said she smelled, which she did, and they refused to sit next to her in class. I can shut you all up, Dorothy realized. There’s nothing I won’t do to shut you all up.

  She was swollen with discovery. She hung up her coat and scarf right next to the other kids’.

  “Ew!” they cried with gestures of disgust.

  She very quietly grabbed one of them by the throat. She had chosen a boy, one of the bigger ones. She throttled him. She cut off his supply of air, and then relinquished just enough to hear him gasp.

  “You want to fight?” she whispered. She shoved him away from her, into the wall. She turned and spat on his coat. “You ought to be more careful with your clothes, Sam,” she told him. She looked around at the others. “Any of you little chickens tells, I’ll come for you.”

  Dorothy turned away with complete confidence. If anything happened to her slimy old coat, she wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t mind, and she’d beat them all hollow on the way home.

  Dorothy walked down between the rows of desks, feeling like a queen. And there was Larry Johnson, pug-faced Larry who always made the jokes. Well, well, well. His desktop was lifted open. She slammed it down as hard as she could on his fingers.

  No matter how tough he was, he had to yelp. “Ow!” Everyone turned. They saw Larry Johnson, sitting, looking up at Dorothy Gael, who loomed over him. They saw Larry Johnson having to fight to stop the tears, and he was big, in the eighth grade. A ripple of fear passed through them, as if across the surface of a pond. The people from the cloakroom came in, whispering. Dorothy Gael sat down and raked them all with her eyes. There’s going to be some changes hereabouts, her eyes told them.

  There was another poor, fat, ugly girl. She had a smile like a rat’s. The other little girl saw her chance. She saw how it was done. Curiously enough, her name was Em too, just like Dorothy’s aunt. When the teacher, Mr. Clark, came in she raised her hand and asked, “Sir, can I move my desk next to Dorothy’s?”

  A sigh came from the class, a sigh of loathing. The two misbegotten were teaming up together. It was an alliance against them all, and they knew it. The teacher considered. Dorothy was dangerously isolated, he thought. He wanted Em to stay in the front of the class where he could keep an eye on her, but anyone being friendly to Dorothy Gael was a change for the better.

  So this second Emma moved, cradling up her textbooks and slate. “All these slimy little Two-shoes,” she whispered to Dorothy.

  “Yea,” said Dorothy, with authority.

  So it went, into summer. The corn came through. Couple of times a week, Dorothy and Henry in the shed. Sometimes he would drive the cart into the woods on Prospect. Dorothy would lie under the trees and remember the days when she went to Sunflower School. School had only been a half-mile walk across the fields then. As she walked, the birds, the red-winged blackbirds, would leap up into the air ahead of her, and the Jewells’ cat Rusty Hinge would slink out from the corn and mew and come up to have his head scratched. In summer, the corn would move its leaves, and quail would run across the path. Sometimes the pinch bugs bit, but you soon got over that.

  The children each planted a tree around the schoolhouse and that tree was named after them. It was as if a piece of each child had been left behind to grow.

  Dorothy would lie down on the ground with Uncle Henry covering her, and she would look past his face. The trees would lean over as if in sympathy, and Dorothy would let her spirit fly up to them, to hide amid their leaves, to reside in them. She would make herself part of them. She felt herself bend and sigh with them; she felt buds and soft green leaves at the tips of her extremities. She was out of reach of Uncle Henry then. He could not touch her then. She was a tree. There were trees called Dorothy all over the hillsides.

  In summer the corn came up and they would lie down between the rows. Henry brought a sack along for her to lie on. So the dirt wouldn’t show, and she would look away from his face and up at the underside of the corn and see the fluted ridges of its leaves, the dance of the low afternoon sun through them. The hiss and rattle of the wind in the corn seemed to call her name.

  Sometimes he would call her back. He would try to make her speak. She couldn’t even hear what he said. You stink, Henry, she thought. You got wrinkles all over. You farmer. You stink like a hog.

  “Do you love me, Dorothy?” he asked her.

  “Course I do,” she told him.

  Manhattan, Kansas

  1882

  In a show of rebellion, Adolf decided to run away from home. Somehow Alois learned of these plans and locked the boy upstairs. During the night, Adolf tried to squeeze through the barred window. He couldn’t quite make it, so took off his clothes. As he was wriggling his way to freedom, he heard his father’s footsteps on the stairs and hastily withdrew, draping his nakedness with a tablecloth. This time Alois did not punish him with a whipping. Instead, he burst into laughter and shouted to Klara to come up and look at the “toga boy.” The ridicule hurt Adolf more than any switch, and it took him, he confided to Frau Hanfstaengl, “a long time to get over the episode.”

  Years later he told one of his secretaries that he had read in an adventure novel that it was proof of courage to show no pain. And so “I resolved not to make a sound the next time my father whipped me. And when the time came—I can still remember my frightened mother standing outside the door—I silently counted the blows. My mother thought I had gone crazy
when I beamed proudly and said, ‘Father hit me thirty-two times!’”

  — JOHN TOLAND, Adolf Hitler, as quoted in

  For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing

  by Alice Miller

  Dorothy and Emma, her little ally, came to be called the Furies, or the Kindly Ones. The schoolteachers called them that. The schoolteachers knew Greek.

  The teachers made sure no other children sat near the Furies. If a child did, and she had nice long hair, it would be tied to the back of her chair in so many knots that the hair would have to be cut off. Pockets were found full of ink. Cowpats were placed on the seats of chairs. The Furies talked to each other, loudly, while the teacher, Mr. Clark, spoke. At least Mr. Clark was better-looking than Henry. Dorothy hated him, too. The Furies developed a horrible screeching laugh that they used together. The other children went still with fear.

  The schoolteachers knew Greek and that gave them the right to beat children. The boys, that is, were regularly beaten. It was thought to be good for them. Toughen them up. Some boys, the timid ones, were very difficult to beat, because they didn’t do anything wrong. Even the teachers thought they were sissies.

  “Can’t stand a kid without any gumption,” they might say. “That Jenks needs a hiding, just to wake him up.”

  And the chance would finally come. Somebody would throw a spitball, and blame Jenks. Mr. Clark would pretend to believe him. Mr. Clark was kind. He believed that beating Jenks would be for his own good, to make him less different from the other boys.

  “Why did you do it, Jenks?” Mr. Clark asked, silkily. The other children squawked with laughter. The Furies screeched. They all knew the game that was being played.

  “I did not do it, Sir,” said Jenks, appalled.

  “Did he do it, class?” asked Mr. Clark.

  “Yes!” the class shouted.

  It was very gratifying. Jenks began to cry. “But I didn’t, Sir. I didn’t do it!”

  “Why should you be treated any different than anyone else, Jenks?” Mr. Clark asked. “Jenks, I think we better go to the Principal’s office.”

  There was a theatrical gasp from the children. Jenks was going to get the Strap. The children terrified themselves deliciously with tales of the Strap. They said it had spikes on the end. It was a dark and terrible thing. Jenks began to blubber with fear. “Mr. Clark,” he begged, his voice a whine.

  “Angela. Take charge of the class, please.” Angela was Class Monitor, a two-edged sword, who led the mayhem when he was out of the room, and then organized the tidying up before he came in, so that he did not have to deal with it. He knew that. The class knew he knew that. The class knew he secretly approved of a bit of mayhem as long as it was kept absolutely hidden.

  Angela sat on the teacher’s desk. “Jenks, getting the Strap. I never. I never would.”

  “They won’t give him the Strap,” someone said, knowingly. Jenks’s grades were too good.

  “They have to now, Mr. Clark said he would, and it would look too bad if he didn’t. Who else do we want to have the Strap?”

  Dorothy barked out a laugh and stood up. She looked at them all with undisguised scorn. “All of you. All of you little smarty-pants. You all think it’s so great. I’d like to take you all and whip your asses.”

  Silence.

  Jenks came back into the room with a face the color of sandstone from weeping. He couldn’t sit down. But the class didn’t laugh at him or tease him. They didn’t lean forward whispering out of the corner of their mouths, asking him about the exploit. Something was wrong. The class looked cowed and silent. “Thank you, Angela,” Mr. Clark said. He thought perhaps that Angela had simply kept them firmly in line.

  Or maybe, maybe they hadn’t thought it was right. Well then, if Jenks didn’t do it, they should have told me the truth.

  That Dorothy Gael, the children thought. We got to do something about that Dorothy Gael.

  But the terror of the Strap meant there was one unbreakable rule: You never told, you never snitched. They couldn’t snitch, and if they did, what would Dorothy do, what revenge would she extract? What, what could they do about Dorothy?

  One day in spring term, her ally, Emma, said something. That was what broke it. Nobody knew for certain what it was that Emma said. She whispered it, but it sure was something Dorothy Gael didn’t like. Em had trusted Dorothy a bit too much and grown too familiar. She teased her about something, her size, maybe, or her shoes, her dress. Maybe it was something about her family. Evangeline Thomas claimed she heard Emma whisper the word “Henry.”

  There was the word “Henry” and Dorothy Gael’s face twisted up like a painting of the Devil, and her lips pulled back in concentrated hatred, and she slapped Emma across the face. The noise was so loud that Mr. Clark dropped his chalk. Emma wailed in shock.

  “Dorothy Gael. Did you hit her?” Mr. Clark knew that this was his chance.

  Dorothy said nothing. Her face was puffed out like an adder, arrested in an expression of utter rage and turmoil that unmanned Mr. Clark for a moment. He had never seen an expression like it on a child’s face.

  “Did anyone see what happened?” Mr. Clark asked.

  That’s when it broke. “No,” said Angela, the two-edged sword. Her arms were folded. She had decided. The time had come. “But Dorothy is always doing things like that.”

  “She picks on people.”

  “She makes Amy Hugson give her money, and if she doesn’t she hurts her real bad.”

  “She put cowpat all over Tommy’s face.”

  “She hits people all the time.”

  In chorus, like a Greek tragedy.

  “Dorothy Gael, is all of this true?”

  The terrible head turned toward him. Not a Fury, he thought. A Gorgon. A glance turns to stone.

  “Why are you asking me, Clark?” the child said. No “Mister,” just a hard, blunt last name like in a bar room.

  The child was smiling at him. “Everything I say is a lie. I got to lie all the time.”

  Mr. Clark was thinking he had never seen the like of it for pure evil.

  Dorothy was thinking: My uncle does that to me every day in the dirt. Is that the truth you want to hear?

  “Dorothy. You’re going to come with me to the Principal’s office.”

  There was no gasp, just silence. The children were almost sorry then. Girls did not get the Strap. This was a real change. Girls keenly felt the distinction of Straplessness both as a privilege and a penance. In part, they wanted to be beaten because it was an approved achievement that was denied them. But now that it was happening, the change, the revolution, was shocking. They were too young to have seen many changes.

  “Let’s go then,” said Dorothy Gael. She almost sounded bored. As she walked up the aisle, she bumped her hips from side to side to say, That’s what I think of you all.

  The children had another shock. Mr. Clark boxed her ear. “You stop acting up,” he said. The child stared back at him stony-faced. What else you going to do? the expression seemed to ask, as if she were invulnerable.

  Mr. Clark marched her to Professor Lantz’s office. There had to be a Principal and he had to be a man, so that there could be a Strap.

  “I think the time has come to give Dorothy Gael what she’s been asking for,” said Mr. Clark.

  The Principal was older, fatter, with ridiculous gray whiskers that went from one end of his face to another. He wore checked trousers. He leaned forward in his chair and adopted a smooth and soothing voice that was supposed to sound wise.

  “Dorothy. I think you know why this is being done. You know the sorts of things you’ve been doing. This is happening because the other children have finally decided that they have to turn to us to discipline you. Are you sorry for what you have done?”

  “No,” said Dorothy.

  The Principal sighed and looked at Mr. Clark and his female assistant, Mrs. Warren.

  “You’ve brought this on yourself, Dorothy.”

&nbs
p; “Can we just get it over with?”

  There had to be a woman present. The Principal had already taken legal advice. And he could not beat a little girl across her bottom. The proprieties had to be observed. It had to be across the hand—or the wrist if the child tried to pull away. The wrist was far more painful. All the children knew it was up to them not to pull their hands away.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  Dorothy presented it. Mrs. Warren grabbed the fingers and held them flat. The eyes behind Mrs. Warren’s spectacles were like tiny pebbles. The Principal struck, using a one-inch-wide leather Strap. It sounded worse than it was. He didn’t strike too hard at first. He looked into the child’s eyes for some sign of contrition. All he saw was rebellion. He struck again, looking this time for pain. The face went red, but there was no surrender. He hit her ten times. The hand was released.

  Her eyes were full of heart-stilling hatred.

  “One day,” the child whispered, “I’m going to be bigger than you are and I’m going to break your nose.”

  “The other hand,” said the Principal. He got more satisfaction this time. The face went red on the first stroke, and involuntarily, Dorothy tried to pull away. She decided she could not absorb the pain after all. She began to struggle; her hand and wrist darted about. All right then, be it on you, thought the Principal. The Strap lashed her about the wrist. Welts and little purple dots showed on the skin. He had to stop after another ten. They had never given more than ten to any child.

  Dorothy Gael’s face was puffed out like a serpent’s, but she held her tears. Her hands were claws. Professor Lantz looked at her, panting. They all looked at her. With immense effort, Dorothy Gael managed to smile.

  “What do we do now?” asked Mr. Clark, who realized that the punishment had done no good.

  The Principal shook his head. “Take her back.”

  The child walked ahead of Mr. Clark down the hall. He could see her hunched and tense, determined not to cry. He had to hand it to her. She was tough. They made them tough in Kansas. She stopped just outside the classroom door.