Was

by Geoff Ryman

  Once, it was their father’s birthday. Jonathan joined Helen and Matty in singing “Happy Birthday” to him. Helen’s father was a big man with big red hands and orange hair. Helen and Matty sat on his knees as they sang, and his rough face went kindly and soft. “I can’t think of anything nicer,” he said, “than to be sung to by two cute little girlies like you.” Jonathan wondered why he felt so different from them.

  The real world was pushing the Oz people to one side. They watched from the corner while Jonathan pondered the fact that rough Mr. Quicke could be kind. Outside again in the muddy backyard, the Oz people could only watch as Jonathan and Matty and Helen dug a hole to the Center of the Earth.

  Why didn’t he speak to the Oz people when Helen and Matty were around? He would try to, but fear would grip him. What was he afraid of? Jonathan decided that he would force himself, force himself to act as if the Oz people were there.

  Jonathan knew how to behave. He had been drilled in politesse. He knew that you introduced people properly.

  So one day, toward the end of that spring, he ushered Helen into his bedroom. He was going to do it. He really was going to do it.

  “Helen,” he said. “May I introduce the Oz people.” He pointed to each one of them in turn. “The Lion. The Tin Man…”

  He couldn’t finish. Panic overcame him. Helen gasped and covered her mouth. He looked at her arms and the very fine, pale down on them. Helen stared at him, grinning, eyes wide. She knew what was happening. She knew that Jonathan thought the Oz people were really there. Jonathan tried to say something else, but the words stuck.

  Helen squealed, hand over her mouth, and turned and ran. Disturbance seemed to follow her, swept in a spiral like a dust storm. It spun out of the doorway of Jonathan’s bedroom, taking something with it.

  Jonathan turned back to the corner of the room. There was no one there. He saw that there was no one there, that there never had been anyone there.

  Shame covered him like darkness. Helen would know. Helen would tell. “Sissy,” her brother called him. And he was a sissy, to make up people who were not there.

  His room had been stripped bare of magic. It consisted now only of his parents’ cast-off chest of drawers, the trampolined bed, some toys in which he had no interest. His room was devoid of interest. So were the grass and the trees beyond. It was this stark world from which he had been trying to hide.

  He wanted to break every single toy, wrench off their heads, their butterflies on wires; he wanted to tear up all his books and rip to shreds all his drawings, everything he loved that was so thin and frail, and which could not defend him. The rage seemed to rise up into his eyes as an ache. He was blinded by anger, rising up in his gorge to choke him, overwhelming and complete. There was nothing that could satisfy it, but himself. He broke himself. He took the self he had been and broke it again and again. He called himself all the names he could think of: stupid idiot dope nincompoop sissy crybaby brat. Worm. He called himself a worm and seemed to see himself crushing himself underfoot. He stood absolutely still, with his elbow wrapped around his eyes. Then, very suddenly, he flung it away from his face and glared.

  The world was diminished. It was smaller, duller, and he was unutterably bored by it. He didn’t want to play with his crayons, his coloring book, his papers, his toys, his stupid plasticine. He prowled the field of his vision like a caged beast, restless, made aged and jaded and grim. He was five years old.

  Helen’s family moved away shortly afterward, to Brampton. In those days, there was a vast expanse of farmland between Corndale and Brampton. It seemed a long way away.

  Jonathan was relieved. He and Helen had stopped playing together and her older brother was even more of a menace. Jonathan knew now that he would have to learn how to fight. He would have to learn how to throw a ball and to win at games. He was not a little boy any longer.

  But one afternoon, just before they moved, Helen came running to Jonathan’s house, calling his name over and over. It was an act of unexpected kindness. She wanted him to come out and look at the rainbow.

  She rushed up the path, her pageboy bob flapping into her eyes and stains around her mouth. Jonathan sat disconsolately on his front steps.

  “Jonny, Jonny, there’s a rainbow!”

  Jonathan had once yearned to see rainbows. He had seen them in storybooks, where they were short and thick and made of the brightest colors. Sitting there on the front steps, Jonathan was surprised by a tearful yearning for color, as bright as books.

  He leapt up from the steps and ran down the artificial hill to meet her. “Where? Where?” he called.

  They were suddenly friends, real friends, united in mutual excitement. “Up there! Up there!” Helen jumped up and down, over and over, pointing to the sky.

  “I can’t see it! I can’t see it!” Jonathan cried.

  As if infected by him, the rainbow disappeared for Helen as well. She walked backward, scowling. “Maybe you can’t see it from here,” she said. She led him running back to her house, back to the place where she had seen it. They ran up her drive and around the back and up the wobbly, unpainted wooden steps that led to the back door. The steps formed a kind of landing, high off the ground, above the deep foundations.

  “There it is,” said Helen, her arm pointing over Jonathan’s shoulder. She jabbed her finger at it over and over. “There! There! There!”

  Jonathan was being stupid again. How stupid could he get? He scanned the sky, trying to see something very short, an arch made of paint-set reds and greens and blues, all in sharply defined bands, as he remembered them.

  “Cantcha see it, Jonny?” asked Helen’s mother, Mrs. Quicke. She came out of her kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She leaned on the railings, a thin, worn woman with long hair pulled back in the fashion of ten years before. She wore glasses and had bad teeth.

  “It’s there, just keep lookin’,” Mrs. Quicke said, with the rough, kind foreignness of someone else’s mother.

  “I can’t see it,” whispered Jonathan, as if in exile. Later, he would recall seeing dimly a wispy yellowish trail across the sky, like smoke.

  Jonathan couldn’t see the red or the orange; he couldn’t see the green or the mauve. He could only see a brownish streak of mist and the blue beyond it.

  Jonathan had become color-blind.

  For him, green and red were muddled into a grayish brown. He no longer played with his box of fifty-two Crayola crayons. Color no longer sang to him. He could see no difference between blue and purple, between pink and gray. The world had become as dim for him as Oz on TV.

  Jonathan became a good little boy. He did everything he was told. He called people “Sir” and said “please” and “thank you.” Old ladies were enchanted. He went to school for the first time in autumn and was badly beaten up the first day by a gang of older boys. They had been waiting for him. It was the price of feeling superior.

  In the photographs taken after that, Jonathan looked watchful and wary, suspicious and very adult. The good little boy only looked good in photographs in which he was scowling. His smiles were twisted, cheesy and false.

  In life, he was timid and silent around others, embarrassed and awkward if made the center of attention. He was always ashamed of himself—of his clumsiness, of his many fears, of his fantasies, of all the things that made him inadequate. The things he enjoyed, he did in secret. He rocked surreptitiously at night. He dreamed surreptitiously, after memorizing his homework. He earned straight A’s. His teachers wrote in his reports that he was socially backward.

  Jonathan became a fan of horror movies. He watched them on TV every Saturday afternoon with another boy who eventually grew up to be a sadomasochist. The other boy would beat Jonathan, even at age eight, across the bottom, and Jonathan would bear it, for the same reason that he would bear the horror movies.

  It was one more way of being a good little boy. He was proving he was no longer afraid of the Witch. He was proving he could take the pain, as the other
boy butted him with his head or took a switch to his backside. Being beaten was no different from watching television. The role of entertainment is to toughen us up and whip us into line.

  Jonathan wanted to be tough. Above all, he wished he could stop feeling things. He wanted to be a machine. He despised himself. When Jonathan was alone, hidden in his room or, even better, far away from the village, he would visit Oz in secret. He knew it wasn’t real, he knew Oz couldn’t help him, so he gave no outward sign and hated himself for it. But alone on his good-little-boy holidays, away from school, his mind would begin to wander. He would start to imagine things. Jonathan would walk through Canadian evergreen forests, up the sides of Canadian mountains, or across shelves of rock beside still Canadian lakes, and he would hum the songs of Oz. There were no Canadian songs to fill the silence. Jonathan would imagine the four companions ahead of him on their way through Oz. He saw their backs. The Emerald City would rise up over the brow of a Canadian hill in another part of the story that had been left out.

  The story kept on growing. Jonathan imagined a new ending to the movie. Dorothy looks up at her bedroom walls in joy, as before. Then Aunty Em holds up a pair of slippers, slippers that should have been red but now look gray. Aunty Em says, “But Dorothy. Where did you find these shoes?”

  And Jonathan would look down at his own gray feet.

  Zeandale and Pillsbury’s

  Crossing, Kansas

  1883

  The Fields were Full of Life

  Title of a diorama in the Kansas State Historical Society Museum, Topeka, Kansas. A rather small area is shown full of native grasses and taxidermic wildlife, including one large, hunched, stuffed buffalo. On the rail around the exhibit there is a block of wood covered with a worn hide. A sign beside it says:

  BUFFALO HIDE—PLEASE TOUCH

  Of course there was a scandal. All the children had heard, and told their parents what Dorothy Gael had said. There was a queasy moment in each Manhattan household as minds seesawed back and forth from shock and indecision.

  Nothing is hidden, but some things are blocked out. Everyone in Manhattan knew, really, what was wrong with Dorothy Gael. It was revealed in every twisted movement, each bitter and angry smile, each horrifically knowledgeable look, in the hefty size of her body, in the grimness of her aunty’s face, in the child’s rages and the way in which she could brook all pain and insult. They all knew, really, what it meant.

  But nice people were not supposed to be able to recognize certain things, because they were supposed to be so untainted that they couldn’t even think about them. People sincerely believe that they were shocked and surprised and that they had had no idea such things happened. They sincerely thought they found it difficult to believe. There were veiled preachings from the pulpit. The Devil was here, in Kansas, but how to recognize his terrible face? The Devil, the Preacher said, could lurk within each of us. To recognize the Devil, we had only to look into ourselves. Let the other folks alone.

  No one would tell Em what it was exactly that Dorothy had done to be expelled. “Some things are best left unsaid,” the Principal had told her. “But she has told some wicked lies, and is something of a bully.”

  It was beyond Emma Gulch. It did not sound like her Dorothy at all. Her little Dodo, a bully? Quiet, shy little Dodo? At first she could not believe any of the stories. What could have been happening? Emma found that people would not speak to her unless she spoke to them. They murmured without looking at her and she began to realize that Dodo, little Dorothy, had been lying about Henry and her.

  “What has the child said?” she demanded to know, hands on hips. She stamped her foot. “I’ve been part of this town, woman and child, for going on thirty years. Will somebody tell me?”

  People were unable to tell her. The words stuck. Their eyes skittered like ball bearings on grease. “Some things,” they said, “are best left alone. You mustn’t fret, Emma. No one believes her.”

  “Believes what?” Aunty Em yelped. No one would answer.

  So she knew it was really terrible. And she also knew, really, what had happened. Emma knew her husband and herself and the life they led. For that very reason, she did not even begin to contemplate the truth. Instead, Emma made a point of coming into town with Uncle Henry, made a point of parading with him, normal as could be.

  They looked normal. They were normal. Em was upstanding and bitter, made ugly by years of sun and drought and dissatisfaction. What could be more normal? Her husband was docile and sweet and unloved, confused and in terror and desperate for the next piece of sport, uncertain that there would ever be one. Underneath the dust and the poverty, the people of Manhattan saw themselves in Em and Henry, and they didn’t want to look too deep.

  “Mind you,” some of the nastier males said, when drunk and alone with each other, “if I lived with a woman as fulsome as Emma Gulch, I’d be looking elsewhere, too.”

  The “elsewhere” and the “too” meant that they knew, really, what had happened.

  But they decided, on balance, to blame Dorothy. Dorothy, they decided, had been lying. She was an unpleasant, ungrateful child with a diseased mind. She would contaminate the other children if left near them. The young, they said, must be protected. They spoke about Dorothy’s mother, Em’s sister, in dark tones.

  “Now that sister of hers was…” theatrical pause, “an actress.” The word meant so many sinister things in Kansas. “She went off with one of them fast crowds, went East to St. Lou, and married some minstrel Irishman. Just look at the result. All these years, I wondered what was eating Emma Gulch, and now I knew. She’s been fighting this, that child, her sister. Mind you, it runs in families.” The dark hint was that Emma Gulch had had to fight against it too, the lure of fast crowds. They all had to fight against quickness. They all resented their children, because children were fast and had to be taught to be slow. They all had to be what was called good, and it was a constant battle.

  Dorothy Gael ceased to exist. She went into Manhattan only once more. She walked by herself the whole distance, for Aunty Em would not have allowed it. She walked into Manhattan and no one saw her, and no one spoke to her, and no one served her in a store. She was invisible, like the Indians. She walked past the schoolyard and only one child saw her, a little boy in the first grade. He ran to his older sister. She glanced at Dorothy just once. None of the others saw her at all. They jumped rope for a while and then turned and went in before the bell. Dorothy watched them go in, and waited. She thought maybe one of the teachers would come out and chase her away. Even that did not happen.

  It was quite remarkable. The children would have taunted or physically wounded a less monstrous transgressor. The teachers would have surely come out and threatened her. But Dorothy had become a legendary figure of fear, as if the Devil would breathe fire on the children, on the teachers, if they got too close to her.

  Dorothy was not upset. For so long her only hope in life had been to be left alone. She asked for no better for herself, because she believed what they believed, and believed that her punishment was just.

  So. No one would talk to her, she was beyond hope, and that was that. She turned and left the school and felt herself go quiet and still inside. She stayed that way. Badness had not been enough. Badness had not protected her. It was a shield that had cracked. So she was deprived even of that proud sensation. She was not bad; she was nothing, a hole. She was an adult.

  She was set to work by a baffled, wounded Aunty Em.

  “I don’t mind telling you, Dorothy Gael, that I am ashamed, deeply ashamed of you. You’ve got yourself kicked out of school, closed the door on your chances of success, so you better learn to work, and you might as well learn here. You’ll have to get used to it.”

  Dorothy ceased to talk. She ceased to talk altogether. She washed the clothes; she fed the hogs; she shoveled muck; she looked after the hens; she swept the floor; she cooked; she sewed; she scrubbed, all without speaking. She ate without speaking. That sui
ted Aunty Em, who could only bear to speak to Dorothy to tell her what to do next, or to tell her to do it more quickly. There was sometimes a quiet dreaminess to the child that annoyed Em. It made her work slowly. Ponderously, tamely, Dorothy did exactly what she was told. No more. She would sit until told to do something else. She would sit staring all day, if not told exactly what to do.

  Em found she had no heart for business. She would open the books to begin her accounts and couldn’t go on. She would sit, hand pressed over her mouth, her thoughts bitter with a sense of failure. Must everything in her life turn out so badly? Even little Dodo? It was too much, too much for Emma to bear. What else was there for her? Pushing Henry, pushing the dry land, pushing herself until she died? Aunty Em grew to hate the clumping of Dorothy’s boots.

  Uncle Henry avoided Dorothy out of terror. His escape had been too narrow. His escape had changed him inside. He loathed Dorothy now, hated the very sight of her as she had once hated him. And he hated himself as much as Dorothy had hated herself. He could not bear to be with her or with himself. Each of them was utterly and completely alone and stranded, in the newly whitewashed house with its extra room in the beautiful valley, with its trees and hills and its Kansas River.

  Dorothy was fed corn and cornbread and sometimes a scrap of meat or a slice of lard. Dorothy grew fat and malnourished. Her plump legs jiggled when she walked. She ate her meals outside the house or in the barn.

  She slept in the summer kitchen. It was honey-colored inside, the wood being raw. It was hot in summer, sleeping near the still warm stove. In winter, the wind rattled through the shakes. Aunty Em let her have dung and twigs to burn, but that meant the stove had to be lit each night, and Dorothy didn’t bother. The blankets were as cold as the snow outside. She started to sleep on the hay in the barn where the animals were kept. It was warmer.