by Geoff Ryman
The Child hung, like a scarecrow, and the wood of the cross bent gently in the wind like a tree. There was a gentle, sighing sound, and the Child stared like the buffalo.
His mind had been ruined. He could only speak now in the language of words. And he looked to Dorothy and cried aloud, “I’m alive!”
I know, said Dorothy in silence, but she seemed to be the only one who heard.
“I think I’m alive, aren’t I? Am I alive?”
One of the Wise Men turned and sat next to Dorothy.
“I was alive,” said the Child, perplexed.
“Hello, Dorothy,” said the Wise Man and hugged her. For a moment Dorothy thought she had found her father. She felt his broad male shoulders and his trimmed whiskers and her heart rose up into her mouth out of fear and desire, which for her were confounded.
Then the Wise Man pulled back and Dorothy saw that he wore a straw boater and had his jacket off, and that metal bands held up the shirtsleeves that were too long for his arms. He had a moustache and merry eyes. He was the Substitute.
Frank, whispered Dorothy, for she loved him too.
“What have you learned, Dorothy?” he asked her.
Dorothy thought a moment and said, “I learned to be disappointed and not to hope too much. I learned how to be beaten and how to beat others. I learned that I am worthless and the world is worthless, and that love is a lie and if it’s not a lie, then it’s wasted.”
“They learned you wrong,” he said.
Love is real? Where? How, how do we find it, Frank?
“You don’t have to go the way they want you to go,” he said. He pointed backward, behind her. And she smiled, and Frank kissed her chastely on the forehead, as a mother might.
Dorothy rose up full of joy in her dream, and she turned, and she walked the wrong way. She skipped out of the bank. It had fallen on hard times. The president had absconded with all the funds and the windows were boarded up. The city was a ghost town. Something about the extension railroad and quarantine lines. The wind whispered in the hollow eyes of its windows, and grass sprouted up between the planks of the boardwalks. Mrs. Langrishe clutched a nosegay over her nostrils. It was to kill the reek of death that rose up from her own body. She stumbled, blind.
The settlers had moved on, hoping to find the perfect pasture, the land that would make them rich. Dorothy saw the great trail they had left behind them, discarded pianos, broken clocks in the mud.
She laughed at them. Wheeee! she said, and spun on her heel. What did they think they would find, but more dust, more work, more dry wells and bankers and mortgages? There was no magical land in the West. They would all have to find another kind of Territory to explore.
One dream was over. Another began.
The train was hauled backward into St. Louis, with sgnilaeuqs and sgniffuhc. Dorothy stepped off it, wearing her white theater dress. It blazed in sunlight.
There was the wooden platform, the brick concourse, the stone frontage, just as Dorothy had forgotten they looked. She began to hear music. Somewhere there were calliopes playing, as at a fairground. The station was full of little people with funny faces she could not quite see, passing out pennants, tiny flags. It was a Day of Independence. Dorothy walked down the steps of the station and saw that everything was different.
St. Louis was a park, full of trees and great open areas. There was prairie grass and prairie wildflowers among them. Great gusts of laughter seemed to be blown across the fields, and Dorothy heard her best lace-up boots swishing through the long grass, with a cripple’s uneven gait.
Ahead of her there were swings and a sandbox. There were rhododendrons and other ornamental plants. A flood of children suddenly broke out from under them, shrieking with glee. Surprise! they called. Surprise! Dorothy knew them, from long ago. They danced around her in a circle. Come and play! they said. Oh, Dotty, come and play! They were her friends, they liked her. She knew their faces from long ago. A little red-haired girl covered with freckles who had a high, round forehead. Her quiet little brother in black shorts. Andy and Violet: she remembered their names. Dorothy took their hands and ran with them, and she stood on the swings and pumped back and forth. In her dream, Dorothy felt her hair rise and fall, along with her stomach. She felt the wind on her face. Below, the children turned somersaults on the grass and didn’t mind the stains on their clothing.
In the dream Dorothy knew that this was a place where children had been set free. She looked and saw that some of them were not children at all. They were a different kind of adults. They looked like Etta Parkerson. They were tiny and small and giggling, with funny whiskers and conical hats, and they played fiddles or sat with the children who were almost as big as they were, on their laps. They both started fires with magnifying glasses and hopped in sack races. The children and the adults were the same kind of creature.
Bison grazed on the grass and a wildcat lazed in a tree, flicking his tail. In the shade there were wigwams, with white smoke curling form the tops. Indian women sat on the ground sorting dried maize in baskets. The children and the Indians played together on the swings.
All around the park, there were rows of white houses with green shutters. Carts glided past them, pulled by huge gray horses with clopping hooves. The horses wore no blinders and the long white hair around their unshod hooves was flung from side to side by their dancing feet. Over the tops of the houses, there rose great domes of earth. Smoke curled out of them, and Indian ponies grazed on them. The bushes and trees seemed to hiss and whisper in the wind and the flowers made sounds like piano wires snapping.
A dog began to bark. His voice was echoing from far away. Dorothy swung back and forth, over ground that rocked like a pendulum. Then she saw him running toward her, as she always knew he would one day. She always knew he would come back.
“Toto!” she called. “Here, boy! Toto!”
She saw him charging through the long grass, partridge rearing up into the air around him. Dorothy launched herself form the swing and seemed to fly through the air. She landed in the grass and he burst through it and was all over her, whining and barking and licking her face, and she laughed and hugged him, remembered the feel of his tiny back and its wiry hair. He spun in a circle and his bark broke with joy. He picked up his red ball and dropped it at her feet. She had forgotten his red ball. It was covered with spit that smelled of him. Dorothy picked it up delicately, with two fingers only, and threw it for him. He sprang after it, rolled over the ground snarling, and caught it. Then, with a rambunctious toss of the head, he started to trot away, head and ball held high.
Dorothy followed him. She remembered the way now. She walked between the two huge chestnut trees and crossed the muddy street. She went to the front door, with the lion’s-head knocker. Dorothy remembered that there was a latchkey dangling on a piece of string inside the slot for letters. She reached inside for it with fat, clumsy fingers. She had to stand on tiptoe to open the door.
She smelled their hallway. There was the wooden table with the vase of dried flowers and the umbrella rack. There were the beat-up old shoes of the woman who cleaned and lived downstairs. There was the stairway.
Dorothy climbed, past the old framed engravings of the Jews in the wilderness, the parting of the Red Sea, the breaking of the tablets. Coats were hung on hooks, red and green and blue, brightly colored, and she recognized them as if they had been people. Dorothy heard, from behind a closed door, the sound of a piano being played. The door creaked as she pushed it open.
“Mama,” she whispered.
There she was, there she was, in a dress like a candy cane, red stripes, playing the piano, her back toward Dorothy, her hair in ringlets. There was her papa, sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, a brown-skinned man with black hair and black eyes and a moustache. I’m not Gael at all, Dorothy remembered. My name is Gutierrez. I am Dorothy Gutierrez.
Her mother saw and stopped playing. She turned and dazzled Dorothy with her smile. She was so young and pret
ty and she reached out to hold her. Dorothy ran.
“Dorothy. Where has my little girl been?”
Dorothy began to cry and fell into her mother’s arms and was held. “Oh, Mama,” she said. “I had a terrible dream! Daddy was gone and you were dead, and I had to go away, and I never saw you ever again!”
Dorothy buried her head against her mother’s bosom, her mother’s dress, her mother’s smell of soap and perfume she could not afford, and Dorothy wept. Her mother rocked her and sang to her gently. The song was an old one, one that Dorothy had not heard since St. Louis. She let herself be rocked and comforted.
When Dorothy had stopped crying, her mother patted her back, and moved her gently away from her and looked into her eyes. Dorothy’s mother was crying too.
“Everything dies, Dorothy,” she said. “Everything gets taken away in the end.”
Dorothy looked at the room. There was the rocking cradle in which her little brother slept. Toto peered into it, whimpering, his front paws resting on its edge. There was the divan with its lace covers. There was the black dresser with the cups with the gold edges and the dancing china pony on the piano, and the Nativity in the window, the china figures, the china manger. It was snowing outside.
Dorothy knew all of those things as if they had never gone, as if all she had to do was come here on a visit and find them there, solid, to be used. She looked at her father’s face.
“Muy linda,” he said, and smiled at her. It was Spanish, but Dorothy understood. He smiled at her. Her father’s smile was not to be trusted. He was so young, young and handsome and not to be held by anything, even love. Everything about him was true, true to the point of cruelty.
“This is just a memory,” her father said. “Here and then gone. But you have to remember, to have a heart, to have a brain. You have to remember in order to be brave. That’s how you grow up.”
“But all you’ve got,” said her mother, who was pretty and quite tough, “is now.”
Time left you in another world where everything was different, even you. Memory held it together. So where was home?
Her mother’s face crumpled with a tolerant, forbearing smile, and she leaned forward and kissed Dorothy on the forehead and said, “Look around you Dorothy.”
And Dorothy looked and saw she was lashed to a fence post in Kansas. It was as if she had made a stupid mistake. She had been in a field in Kansas all along, and it was full of wildflowers. They were tiny, red and white and blue, scattered by the wind, and there was the sky, blue streaked with pale white.
The world was haunted. It needed to be haunted. The Land of Was was cradled in the arms of Now like a child. Was made Now tender. Death made life precious. The wildflowers were shriveling and they shook in the dry wind. Dorothy looked down and saw the theater dress, brown and stained, still hugged to her breast.
Dorothy heaved her legs out of the mud. Thick and glossy, mud coated Aunty Em’s pioneer green. Dorothy unwound the wire from around herself and stood up and looked around her, feeling the dust caked on her face, and she grinned. The world was always beautiful. With a light heart she turned and began to walk, to anywhere.
Through those same fields, Bill Davison tramped up and down. The police were there with dogs now and the sky was orange. It was going to rain. Sunlight peeked under the shelf of clouds. The bald hill was green and red.
You can’t just disappear, Bill told himself. The dogs will find him somewhere. He felt humbled by the world, by Jonathan himself. This was what Jonathan wanted, Bill told the fiery light on the hillside. He wanted to stay here. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to find Oz.
Do you believe in miracles?
The rain came, cold, in huge drops that splattered over Bill’s bare arms, his striped shirt. The scent of running footsteps would be washed away from the fields. Bill looked up and saw the sunlight broken by rain. He saw rainbows, a corridor of them all along the valley, parallel to the hills, lined up over the straight, flat Kansas road. On his right he saw the sun, and all the sky there had flared orange. This is the rainbow too, he thought, this is what it looks like when you stand in a rainbow. For someone else.
“Oh, Jesus,” he murmured, in astonishment, in wonder. He started to pray and found he didn’t need to. Kansas prayed for him.
It moved inside his eyes. The hills seemed to rear back, pull away, and swell in size. His own eyes seemed to swell, like balloons. The whole land rose up like a wave, and he could see it, bearing them all along with it, the police cars like surfboards, the people balanced precariously, space and time moving as one, a never-ending wave that never broke. The hillsides gaped their mouths and furrowed their brows. The hillsides had a face.
Something huge in the land, like a shark, like a whale, moved past him. Sparing him? A living land that was also a person. After a lifetime of prayer, Bill Davison had finally had a vision. Of God?
And Dynamite Dot lay in the snow, beating her angel wings, the snow cupped in her fingers as thick as air. She was flying and singing and dying at the same time, and she was looking up at the winter stars in a sky that was clearing, but snow still fell, fell past her face as if she were moving through the midst of stars. The stars spoke to her.
“Dah do la ti sang,” they said. “Ming ming ming.”
They had voices like bells. They were not stars or snow, Old Dynamite realized. They were people.
And Ira Mildvan read a newspaper ringed around with handwritten words:
M’dearest Ox [it began]
You came to see me this morning. You were waiting by the Coke machine. You were 20 years old in blue jeans and you had thick hair, and wire-rim spectacles. You were the Ira who was going to become a lawyer to help Cesar Chavez and the lettuce pickers. Nowadays that sounds like the name of a band. I don’t know if this will help, but we both changed. We both went neutral on each other. Whatever happened really wasn’t your fault. I always made you do everything. I made you do too much.
It’s dawn here. The air is beautiful and clear and I wanted to get out in it, so I’ll try to write this quickly. I’m going to stay in Manhattan. It’s small and quiet and friendly, and better than that, it’s haunted for me. All this search for history was a search for home.
The old movie house here is called the Wareham and it’s a theater supper club now with a semi-pro production of Dinner at Eight. I could die on stage in a dinner jacket. If things got too bad, I could just walk into the River Kaw, where the Kansa Indians used to cross.
I found Dorothy. Or at least, I know where she went to school. Today, Bill and I are going to look for her. Even if we do find her, nothing magical is going to happen, except that finally, the circle will be complete. Bill and I will stand where she stood, and I’ll be able to stop humming those songs and flapping my arms for the part I will never play.
I keep seeing ghosts, Ira. In a dance. What would God see and hear, Ira, except a ghost dance, a chorus of people all at once, whole countries, outside time and place, all together, and alive?
Maybe you could come and visit me here.
Love, JONATHAN
In 1916 a book was published in a secure and settled Kansas, called Sunflowers: A Book of Kansas Poems.
Bill Davison had a copy, and he often read it. The poets of Kansas did not write about banks or clapboard cities. They did not write about Wyatt Earp or cattle or railways or dry-goods stores. They wrote about freedom and John Brown and marching truth. They wrote about Arcadia and knew their ancient Greek. They wrote about African cities of the future ruled by black people. They wrote about Shri Khrishna.
On his return from Kansas, Bill Davison reread the book and came with a start upon a poet who signed herself E. A. Branscomb.
For Aunty Em, the Kansas wind was like the brush of a child’s eyelash on her cheek. The teeth of the river gnawed the banks, hungry for land. She had visions of Indians rising from the dust, poppies springing from their spectral feet.
In one poem, an old woman paces the hollow, thumping flo
orboards of her house late at night, unable to sleep. Then she hears the laughter of a child. She opens the door and sees only darkness and calls out “Dodo?”
Outside her door is a town. An electric light shines on her porch. Somewhere in the night she hears the creak of wagon wheels, the protest of an ox under a yoke. Creeping out of the darkness toward her and into the electric light come the tired faces of those long gone, men and women in plain dress, standing amid the new, not surprised, not confused or outraged. Simply standing.
Rose Lawn Farm,
near Syracuse, New York
Summer 1861
It’s always best to begin at the beginning.
— THE GOOD WITCH
There were chickens at Rose Lawn and china soldiers. The hens were brown and white with feathers cleaner than sheets. They were alive. The soldiers were tiny and perfect, and for Frank they were alive as well.
Frank liked the soldiers’ pink cheeks, their tiny perfect eyes and the feel of their china faces under his fingers, smooth but slightly rough at the same time. The soldiers were French because their arms moved loosely under their uniforms. Their arms were held by threads. Frank lay one of them down very carefully next to him on the stone steps. Things got lost. Things got broken.
Was that snow glinting on the grass? Was it water? Did grass cry? Eagles flew. Frank looked up. It was as though he could leap up into the sky. Clouds sighed overhead, across the face of the sun.
Frank was running away. Frank was always running away to secret places and Rose Lawn was full of them. Frank was running away now. But he knew he had been found, sitting on two stone steps between cedars.
He heard the crunch of his mother’s boots behind him on the gravel walk. He did not look up. His mother began to speak. The words fell, as individual stars.
“Where’s Nanny?” she asked.
Frank shrugged. He heard the rustle of cloth as his mother knelt down beside him. He could smell soap and scent. Frank rubbed his eyes.