Was

by Geoff Ryman

  “I don’t have much time anyway,” said Jonathan, hunter’s urgency upon him. “Can I start?”

  “Okay,” nodded the pale young man. “Look, things are a bit of a mess. What do you need?”

  Jonathan’s mouth hung open. Come on, Jonathan. You have a degree in history. You know how this works.

  “I need the census. Do you have a census?”

  A wisp of a smile on the pale face. “I’m afraid you’ll need to be a bit more specific.”

  No place like home, Jonathan remembered, Millie Branscomb, aged 8, 1856.

  “Eighteen sixties. Eighteen seventies.”

  “Sure. You might as well come in,” said the young man.

  There were rooms to the right and left, darkened, full of displays of furniture and clothing and blown-up photographs. Jonathan and the librarian passed beyond those into a large room lined with old bookshelves of varying heights. There were tables littered with books and files. On the walls were giant maps of the county and aerial photographs of the airport. There were filing cabinets, giant staplers and a statue of a Paul Bunyan figure with a scythe instead of an ax.

  “Jeannie and I have been trying to file all this stuff,” said the young man.

  “All what stuff?”

  “Oh. Everything,” said the young man. “We got all these memoirs to file, old photographs, things like that. Have a seat, I’ll find you a copy of the 1875 census. It isn’t all that long.”

  Jonathan sat down, shaking. There was a smell. A smell of pancakes. Very hot, slightly charred. Was that wind stirring his hair?

  I am losing my mind, he thought.

  Very gently, in the distance, he heard cattle lowing. He wanted to weep, but not from dismay. He wanted to weep from yearning. For grass and huge buttercups and the sound of air moving across distances.

  “It was, uh, it was retyped,” said the young man.

  I’ll just look her up. Here. I’ll find her. Jonathan held a sheet.

  EXPLANATION

  In 1875 the townships of Riley County were Ashland, Bala, Grant

  That’s right, Bill said she didn’t live in Manhattan. She lived near it. Where did Bill say?

  Madison, Manhattan, May Day, Ogden and Zeandale

  None of it rang a bell. There was still the sensation of moving air. Jonathan felt sick. His throat clenched and there was a nasty taste in his mouth.

  “This will be fine,” he said, his voice clenched. He needed air. “Can you Xerox it for me?”

  “We have to charge,” said the librarian’s assistant.

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  Dear God, stop me being sick. I can’t be sick here.

  “Some of those memoirs. One of those memoirs. I can read it tonight.” Jonathan clutched his throat. He could feel the ribs of his voice box.

  “I need some air. Could I step outside, please, while you Xerox them? I’m terribly sorry. I don’t feel well.”

  He could feel his face coated with sweat as if he had smeared Brylcreem all over it.

  The librarian’s assistant was concerned. “Listen, give me a couple of minutes and I’ll have these ready for you. You step outside, sure.”

  The Riley County Historical Museum was made of plates of limestone, laid flat into the wall. It was set on a green slope, and halfway down that slope there was a barn and an old house.

  1850s, said Jonathan’s clock.

  Breathing in sunset shadow, calming his stomach and his killer instinct, he stumbled down the hill toward the house.

  It was made out of stone, obviously having grown in extensions from a smaller core. A large wooden room had also been added about the same time, now painted orange with green shutters. Another young person was climbing out of it, with a key.

  “How old?” asked Jonathan. “How old is it?”

  “The first rooms of the house were built in the 1850s. Do you know about the Goodnow House?” The delivery was practiced, polished.

  “I’d love to,” said Jonathan.

  “Well, okay. The first rooms were built in 1855 when Isaac Goodnow and his wife, Ellen, came to live in Manhattan. It was called Boston at the time.” She smiled. “Isaac Goodnow was a staunch abolitionist and a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s. I’m afraid the house is closed for the afternoon, otherwise I could show you the envelope we have addressed to Professor Goodnow in Lincoln’s own hand. The house is fully furnished with pieces either belonging to the Goodnows or to the period. The Goodnow furniture came to us through Harriet Parkerson, one of the Goodnows’ two nieces who came to live with them.”

  “Why are there so many nice young people here?” asked Jonathan.

  “Uh?” said the girl. “Oh, that’s because of KSU.”

  It sounded like a symptom.

  “Kansas State University,” she giggled and made a helpless gesture. “That’s where I’m studying. Um. In fact, KSU was founded by Isaac Goodnow. It started out as an agricultural college. Blue Mont College.”

  “Why is there brick in the wall?”

  He was confusing her. He pointed. The limestone wall had a snake of brick down its front.

  “That’s the chimney. You see how it curves around the window? Well, that’s because Mrs. Goodnow wanted to have a window there and they had to build the chimney around it. That room there is where one of the nieces slept. She was Etta Parkerson and she worked for the Goodnows. Um. We actually have her diary from that time, with photographs of the house and family. Would you like to purchase a copy?”

  “Oh, please,” said Jonathan, in a voice like the wind.

  The girl stared at him for a moment. “Okay.”

  Without moving otherwise he passed her his credit card. He was leaving a trail of numbers behind him.

  Then he tried to photograph the house.

  30 30 30. Too dark.

  “You’re going to have to do it without the camera, this time,” said a voice.

  Jonathan thought it was the KSU student. He turned, but she was gone. There was no one there.

  “You’ll have to do it for yourself,” said the child’s voice.

  The student came back with books, and Jonathan held out the camera bag toward her.

  “Here,” he said. “Take this. Keep it.”

  “I can’t take this, this is an expensive camera.”

  “I can’t use it,” said Jonathan.

  “Look, it’s got a book of instructions.”

  “It will just be a burden,” said Jonathan, and cast off one more thing. “I think it will keep me from seeing.”

  The room at the Best Western was exactly as Jonathan had hoped it would be, clean and anonymous, with a patterned quilt over the bed, and ornate lighting on a brass chain and cable TV. It was stuffy, though. It only had a huge French window that would let in both air and burglars. Jonathan had developed an unreasoning fixation about being burgled. He did not open the windows.

  The room also had two doors, one leading out to the pool, the other to the parking lot. This confused Jonathan. He chained and double-locked the door leading to the pool. He went out through the parking lot door to get a Coke. He tried to get back in through the wrong door. His key didn’t seem to work. He tried the key in several different doors. This caused nervous women to cry out, “Who is it?” He asked for Angel’s help. “Which door did you come out of?” she asked, finally.

  Back inside the room, he went to work, sipping a Diet Coke. He still thought that he needed to lose weight.

  There was no Branscomb listed in the census.

  There was a Bradley, D. W., blacksmith, twenty-six years old, white male, from Illinois, living in Manhattan City. Married to C. W. Bradley, twenty-four, and living with L. H. Bradley who appeared to be both five and twelve years old.

  Same ages as Dorothy. Five in the book, twelve in the movie.

  There was Brady, Susan, forty, white female, seamstress, from Virginia, Manhattan City. She lived with Lewis and Betty, eighteen and fourteen, respectively.

  A widow?

/>   Jonathan saw her in his mind, as if in a photograph, wide gray dress with neat black trim and neat black hair pulled back. Susan Brady had an earnest, slightly smiling, honest face.

  Then came Breese, a farmer from Indiana, with lots of children.

  No Branscomb.

  So he looked for Gale. He hit pay dirt.

  There it was; he had found her; there was an H. S. Gale, from Iowa, living in Zeandale. Thirty-three years old, born in New York State. Twenty-eight-year-old wife from Pennsylvania, with four children. Only one of them was a female, twelve years old in 1875. Would that be about right? Initials A.L. Anna Louise? Not Dorothy.

  But maybe that was where Dorothy came to stay.

  Grow, Guduhan, Guinn, Gulch…

  Maybe not.

  What now? Bill had said she lived near Manhattan, but that could mean anywhere in hundreds of square miles. Jonathan had another thought: Oh, Lord. What if she went to stay with her mother’s sister? If she had married, the name wouldn’t be Gael or Branscomb. It would be another name altogether.

  “Fool’s gold,” he murmured.

  He took out the Xeroxed memoir.

  In the upper right-hand corner there was dim Xerox pencil writing: Donated by Annie Pratt, copied by her from papers written by author.

  It was typed, in a very old-fashioned, heavily serifed face.

  “Pioneer Beauty,” it said, without further accreditation.

  We came to Manhattan in the fall of 1857 because of the first sacking of Lawrence the year before. We were hardened to pioneer life by then. Manhattan was even then a sizable place, not too unlike Lawrence.

  We had nothing to start with except our hands and feet and some land the good Josiah Pillsbury let us have on very reasonable terms. The land was heavily wooded, and so with the help of the Pillsburys and Mr. Monroe Scranton, we soon had a house.

  Out on the wild hills, the grass was taller than a man, and my little sister and I used to walk through it back to back because it was said the wolves would not attack if your eyes were upon them. We called them wolves because of the howling. They would be recognized as coyotes now, but they seemed no less threatening because of that.

  Sometimes we could see the wild deer ranging on the bare hillsides. Sometimes we could see the wolves basking in the sun after getting all they could eat.

  There were many Indians in those days. They used to pass by our house en route from the reservation near Council Grove to cross the Kaw to get to hunting grounds or to raid the Pawnees.

  They would come to our door, wishing to trade venison for some bacon or cornmeal. They would visit for an hour or so and piece quilts. They were very friendly and inclined to be neighborly, to our family especially. My father Matthew was an abolitionist and journalist and took the treatment of the Kansas very much to heart. Already squatters were flooding their reservation. Demands were being made to President Buchanan to reduce its size. The stated intention was to remove them from the land altogether! And yet, years later, these same Indians were to be drafted into the Union Army!

  My little sister seemed to be their particular delight. She was nine years old and had long blond hair which the Indians found fascinating. They would sit at our table and tell us stories in halting English of the hunt and their great seasonal treks. At this stage, the Kansa tribe still wore Indian dress, headscarves and leather trousers. At first I felt a great deal of concern over their presence. At sixteen, I was able to leave them with the impression that I was the lady of the house, a married woman, which I felt gave me a measure of protection. I was worried about little Millie, but I need not have. First, Millie, as always, seemed to dance over any difficulty. Secondly, the Indians themselves were as far as I could see a peaceable people, interested mostly in trading and the conversation which accompanied it.

  Millie soon learned their language. I also picked up a few words, and it is now the most bitter sadness to me that none of us had time to write them down. I am told there is now no record or lexicon of their language—the Indians who gave their name to our state.

  Sometimes odd words come swimming up to me as if from the bottom of a creek.

  “Caye” meant chief. “Pi-sing” meant game. I know that “zetanzaw” meant big and “basneenzaw” meant little, which is what the Indians called my sister and myself: Big and Little.

  I can remember walking with them to the river. It was not unusual in those days to see two or three hundred of them crossing the Kaw. When a party of Indians arrived at it, the men would throw themselves down onto the grass and spend the time in talking and games while the women prepared the meals and fixed things for the crossing.

  I remember Millie being able to ask them in their own tongue why the men did no work, and I remember being able to understand the answer: “Big braves do not work.”

  The women would unpack the bundles and spread out on the ground large buffalo skins. They would then cut themselves lengths of small bushes or hickory about five or six feet long. They would use these as the frames of small boats, bending them across each other and stitching the skins in place, to make a rudderless, prowless square craft. The women would then pile into them the corn and the reed bowls and the naked children.

  Then a woman would get her pony and drive it into the river. She would hold on to its tail with one hand, and the boat with the other, and in this way pull life and property across the current. The men simply swam.

  I remember one night my father, my sister and I camped with them overnight. I remember the moon. I remember the smoke from the fires and from the pipes. I remember women sharpening knives and feeling no apprehension. I remember we ate a fish caught fresh from the river, a giant channel cat that must have weighed all of forty pounds—or so my father declared.

  There was no whisky among them. This may have been unusual. At least my father was not supplying them with it. I remember him picking his teeth with a fishbone and trying to explain mortgages to the Kansa men, who roared with laughter.

  My father was always a hero to me, but the next day, he became a hero to others. It was at the time of the June rise and the river was full to the bank. My father and I were up early, to begin the trek home. It was first light, and the women had already begun their crossing.

  My father noticed one horse, with woman and boat, pull away from the crowd and start downstream. I think most of the men were asleep, and most of the other women were wrestling with the strong current, for it was my father who ran down the bank and plunged into the water. I saw him swim toward the woman and catch her by the hair, just as she went under. He pulled her back toward the bank, into the arms of some of the women. The boat went spinning downstream, a child wailing on top of it. My father went after the boat as well, which tangled with some branches overhanging the stream. By the time he had rescued the child as well, the entire camp was aroused. I can still remember the gratitude on the faces of the braves. The pony was swept away and drowned.

  I grow confused in time, which seems to me to be like a river. Trying to remember is like trying to hold on to the current. It does seem to me that my father was marked for good things by the Indians because of that incident, so I think that my other memories of them must follow this incident.

  To this day I think of Indians and my father in “one breath.” Neither of them worked and both of them drank whisky and both of them were robbed of their birthright. In the end, both were wretched and miserable. In 1873, Congress finally took the Indians’ diminished reservation, and the Kansa tribe was forced to march away from the state that bears their name. My father died the same year.

  The air conditioner was clanking.

  Jonathan woke up on the thick patterned coverlet of the bed, leaves of Xerox scattered all around him. His throat was horribly sore. Sitting on the chair by the desk, a plump young man looked at him. Jonathan knew his face, but from where?

  “It sure is stuffy in here,” said the young man. “You ought to go outside for a while.”

  It was the kid f
rom the Con. “Karl,” said Jonathan, sitting up.

  “Hi,” said Karl, grinning with his huge white teeth. “How are ya?”

  “I’m not well,” croaked Jonathan.

  “Yeah, I heard,” Karl’s eyes were downcast.

  Jonathan remembered and felt a flood of misgiving and guilt. “And you. Are you okay? I mean, are you well?”

  “I’m okay,” said Karl. “When I heard about you, I took a test. Nothing. We didn’t do that much, remember?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s right!” Jonathan settled back onto the bed with relief. “We didn’t, did we?”

  “I thought you might like to know that,” said Karl. “Come on, there’s somebody wants to see you.”

  He helped Jonathan to his feet, and Jonathan fumbled woozily with the locks on the door. Outside the air was cool and sweet-smelling and seemed heavier, as if it contained more oxygen. White light glowed inside the blue swimming pool. Worms of light wriggled over the walls of the Best Western.

  And Moonflower walked toward them. For some reason she was wearing a 1930s evening dress, white satin with a long train. Her small breasts hung unsupported within it. Her hair was still wild, uncombed.

  “We were all real upset when we heard about you,” she said.

  “All of us fans,” said Karl.

  “Some of us used to talk to you when you weren’t there,” said Moonflower.

  Jonathan held up a hand. “It was just a part. All you could see was the makeup.”

  “You became,” said Karl, “an icon. We saw your picture so much, you moved from the right-hand side of the brain to the left. You stopped being a visual image, you became more like a word sign. You became a meaning.”

  “That’s the trouble with you intellectuals,” said Moonflower. She slipped the satin dress off over her head. “You always stare at the images and tell us what they mean to you. You should ask us what the signs mean. We’re the people who use them. You should be doing scientific surveys, not staring at your own belly buttons.”

  She walked away, naked. Her legs and arms were thin, her hips and stomach already settling down with age. Seagulls in the blue light played about her hair.