by Geoff Ryman
The people who left the land came to the cities not to get jobs, but to be free from them, not to get work but to be entertained, not to be masters but to be charges. They followed yellow brick roads to emerald cities presided over by imaginary wizards who would permit them to live in happy adolescence for the rest of their lives . . . It is this adolescent city culture, created out of the desperate needs and fantasies of people fleeing from the traps and tragedies of late nineteenth century country life, that still inspires us seventy years later.
—Michael Lesy,
Wisconsin Death Trip
Kansas was a go-ahead place. It had been the first territory in the United States to propose votes for women—in 1859. It was to be the second state to grant them, nearly thirty years later.
Prohibition was a women’s crusade. Women couldn’t vote, but they organized and lobbied; and an amendment to the state constitution forbidding the sale and manufacture of intoxicants was passed by a narrow margin in 1880. The state became dry, as far as could be managed with towns full of hot and sweaty men. The local newspapers ruefully reported that the most popular local song was “Little Brown Jug” and that kegs were seen going to private parties. Women raided pharmacies that were too free with their medicinal alcohol.
Manhattan was a center of progress in the go-ahead state. The town had its first telephone in 1877, wired up by Professor Kedrie of the State Agricultural College. Professor Mudge had died, and there was talk of erecting a statue to his memory. Barbed wire arrived, Devil’s grass. It finally put an end to the question of the herd laws by ripping the flesh of cattle that tried to wander into farmers’ fields. No less a personage than G. W. Higinbotham was severely wounded by barbed wire, which tore out a chunk of his chest.
In 1878, Manhattan built a fine new schoolhouse of stone. It towered above Poyntz Avenue, two stone floors with a stone tower. It had four main classrooms on each floor to accommodate the growing numbers of little scholars.
Aunty Em’s instinct was to send Dorothy to the new Manhattan school. But Aunty Em did not approve of the school’s Principal, Mr. J. McBride. It was a matter of public record, jovially reported in the local press, that he was fond of drink. He was succeeded by Professor Hungerford, but this was no improvement. Professor Hungerford was considered to be the local actor and singer. Aunty Em did not approve of actors. He had quite taken over her own Congregationalist church. In May of 1880, the church had staged an opera, The Cantata of Joseph, with full orchestra and sixty costumes. Professor Hungerford took the leading role. The Independent reviewed the production and called him, particularly, “brilliant.”
“Brilliant indeed, like his hair,” said Aunty Em quite mysteriously. “In time the people of Riley County will tire of all this old crony-ism.”
So Dorothy stayed for a while in Schoolhouse Number 43, called Sunflower School. She was quietly content there. This was not enough for either Aunty Em or the teacher of the school, Miss Ida Francis.
Ida Francis and Emma had become firm friends. Miss Francis was a regular caller to tea, which she drank sitting at the Gulches’ one rickety table, little finger outstretched as if the place were grand. She could pour her heart out to Emma Gulch.
“They have finally, finally repaired the stove,” Miss Francis said once, eating Aunty Em’s biliously colored cornbread. “The poor little scholars are not being introduced to smoking via the school chimney any longer.”
“We must be grateful for that,” said Aunty Em with a chuckle. “The next thing is to do something about the books.”
“I must say again, Mrs. Gulch, how grateful we are for your donation.”
“I do what I can,” said Aunty Em, smiling, with her eyes closed.
“Would that Squire Aiken took such an interest.”
Squire Aiken lived on the slopes of the hill south of the river, on the wooded side. He had peach orchards. His family had settled there from Kentucky. His family had been slave-staters.
“Are you surprised, with that background?” murmured Aunty Em, eyebrow raised.
“Hmmm,” said Miss Francis, without commitment. Aunty Em did not know that Miss Francis’s parents had favored the South.
“And how is my dear little charge progressing?” said Aunty Em, gazing on Dorothy with fondness.
It was the moment Dorothy dreaded. The bilious cornbread went round and round in her mouth. It was supposed to be a treat, to have tea with Miss Francis.
“Well,” said Miss Francis looking around, pressing down a smile. “Everything Dorothy does is as neat as wax.”
“You should see her at her chores,” said Aunty Em, nodding.
“All her work is quite brilliantly presented,” said Miss Francis, “but it must be said that the content of her figure work and ciphering is not what it should be.”
“Dorothy, are you paying mind to your teacher?”
“Yes, Mmm,” whispered Dorothy.
“Speak up, Dorothy,” said Aunty Em. “Sit up straight, and pay Miss Francis the compliment of your regard.” She turned back to her ally.
“Dorothy is always beautifully behaved, a very model in all respects,” said Miss Francis, still smiling at Dorothy. “Except one. She is still stone silent. She does not put herself forward. Nor does she appear to fraternize with the other children.”
“Even now,” sighed Aunty Em, looking at the table in sadness and concern. “It is the tragedy, hanging over her.”
Dorothy was so weary of being reminded of her tragedy. She did not remember it. It was a universe ago. She did not remember the old house, she sometimes forgot she had once had a little brother, and her mother was the flattest and dimmest of memories. She had long ago given up dreaming that her father might come for her one day and take her away. Her father didn’t know or care. It came as something of a surprise to remember that he was still alive, Dorothy had grown so used to telling everyone that he was dead. The tragedy, as Aunty Em called it, seemed to have nothing to do with her.
“Perhaps also,” said Aunty Em, “it is that the other children do not wish to mix with her.”
Aunty Em was coming to blame the rough local children of Zeandale. They ran barefoot in the dust and stole fruit from orchards and raided wildlife by the river. All sorts of mischief, while her Dorothy sat at home and polished and sewed and scrubbed and grew beautifully less.
Then Professor Hungerford left teaching to take advantage of all his many connections. He opened a business, offering abstraction and insurance. Aunty Em’s loyalty to Miss Francis persisted for two years. Dorothy sat in the kitchen silent and still, sinking even deeper into a scholastic quagmire. Aunty Em felt compelled to ask Miss Francis to dinner.
Aunty Em told Miss Francis that something had to be done about Dorothy before it was too late. It was no reflection whatsoever on Miss Francis’s program, but it was time that the child was given a different and more varied setting. With Professor Lantz now in charge, and Mrs. DeEtta Warren as his assistant, Aunty Em now had renewed confidence in Manhattan education. Miss Francis could do nothing but concur and skillfully manage to disguise a measure of relief.
So, though Zeandale now had a stone schoolhouse as well, Emma Gulch sent her quiet little mouse of a ward all the way to Manhattan rather than have her educated in the country. This was considered by the other farmers to be of a piece with the rest of her behavior.
It fell to Henry Gulch to take her in. All through the autumn of 1881, he and Dorothy would be up with the dawn. Through the long gentle ride to Manhattan, they would see the sun rise on the fields and in forest. They would see the birds, though Uncle Henry would not insist on Dorothy naming them. He would let the birds be themselves. He let Dorothy be as quiet as she wanted to be, finally resting from work, her books in a bundle in the back, out of her arms. Often she fell asleep, leaning against him, listening to the plod of the horse’s h
ooves in the dust.
Aunty Em was running the farm now, and running it well. It was prospering, and they did have hogs and they did have horses. There were plans to finally build an extension. Nothing grand, just a summer kitchen for Aunty Em to cook in during hot weather so that the single room in which they slept and ate would stay cool.
Winter came and was a bad one. Dorothy and Uncle Henry shared the same lap robes and jostled their feet on the hot stones taken out of the oven. They huddled together, and he tickled her. Uncle Henry tickled Dorothy and started to laugh, with broken teeth.
One night, in the middle of that winter, Dorothy started to bleed. She woke all wet and sticky down there. Something dreadful had happened. There would be blood on her nightdress, blood on her sheets. Bad blood, it was as if her bad blood were leaking out of her. Had she done anything unwittingly down there to cut herself? How could she explain to Aunty Em that she was bleeding down there for no reason?
It would require desperate action. She would have to say she had cut her hands. That would explain the blood on the sheets, perhaps, but not the blood on her nightdress. It was wet around her middle, there was no saying that was from her hand. Dorothy, who was always neat and tidy, who hated to see anything flow, was appalled at the mess she felt all around her.
She would have to burn the nightdress.
Very slowly she slipped out from under the blankets. The mattress rustled. She stood up, already in an agony of chill, but she could not put on her shoes for they would clump on the floor. She had to slip the nightdress off, over her head like a whisper. She nipped around the blanket that hung from the walls to divide the room and padded across the kitchen floor.
Dorothy knelt and lifted up and opened the door of the stove and threw the nightdress in, over the black and orange embers. She could see the steam of her breath in the faint light. Her bare legs rose up in goosebumps and her teeth began to rattle against each other.
“What are you doing?” demanded Aunty Em. Dorothy spun away and pushed the hot iron door shut with her hand. Had Aunty Em seen her, crouching naked in the light? Had she seen what she had done? Dorothy’s throat went tight with terror and cold. She could hardly breathe. She couldn’t talk.
“She’s just feeding the stove, Em,” said Uncle Henry. “She just wants to keep us warm.”
“Well, be careful with the fuel,” said Em. There was the sound of settling down under the bedclothes. Dorothy leapt into her bed, shaking for warmth and other kinds of shelter. How would she get up in the morning without being seen? What if the nightdress did not burn? What if it was found in the morning, laying cold on top of the coals? And what, what if she hadn’t stopped bleeding? What if she bled to death? Dorothy began to weep, curling her lips inward and pressing them shut so no sound would escape. Her hand. She would have to cut her hand. Dorothy cursed herself for forgetting to bring back a kitchen knife. But how would she explain the cut of a knife in the middle of the night? What was she to do?
Then Dorothy knew what she had to do. She placed the thick flesh below her thumb into her mouth. That would satisfy Aunty Em. That would propitiate her. As her teeth overcame the resistance of her flesh, Dorothy had a single thought that mingled comfort and distress.
The thought was this: at least Aunty Em had not seen her naked. But Uncle Henry had seen her. He had been lying awake in the night.
Dorothy never remembered when it began. One day, she got snow deep into her boots. Her toes were an agony. Beyond a certain point, cold burns as harshly as fire. Dorothy wept with cold all the way home, scurrying into the winter kitchen in a kind of flatfooted shuffle. She dropped down on the floor and tried to tear off the boots, but her hands were white and blue and as lifeless as sausages. She could not undo the laces. Uncle Henry knelt in front of her and pulled the boots off and rubbed her bare feet.
“Poor little toes,” he said, smiling tenderly at them.
After school, when he met her at the bridge over the river, he would walk out to her, and back to the cart, holding her hand. Sometimes if the cold was too bad, if she couldn’t talk, he swept her up in his arms and carried her, and how grateful Dorothy was. She didn’t even mind when he suddenly kissed her, his mouth full of dead and rotting, reeking teeth.
The snows melted, and the road to the farm became a muddy track, mashed up by wheel tracks and the back-and-forth marching of their own boots. They would go into the barn sometimes before going into the house. Henry would grin naughtily and pull Dorothy in with him. They both understood. They were escaping from Em. They would play together in the straw. He would begin to tickle her, again. It was not so much fun, being tickled all the time.
When did it begin? Dorothy never remembered, it crept up on them so stealthily. One day he did not meet her at the bridge in the evening. The Allens were passing by, laden with stores. What was Henry Gulch thinking of, leaving the child to wait in a winter afternoon with cold descending? Up here with us, Dorothy, they said, though they had never been particularly kind to Dorothy before. Kindness foxed Dorothy. It made her go wary and suspicious. She did not even know that she was enraged at Uncle Henry.
When the Allens let her off, Dorothy went into the barn to find him. Uncle Henry’s back was to the door. He wasn’t doing any chores, he had no tools in his hand; he had simply been standing with his back to the door. And then he turned and looked at Dorothy as if he hated her.
What have I done now? thought Dorothy in dismay. She had come to think of Uncle Henry as her only friend, even if he did smell. Henry glowered at her, darkly, and he seemed to loom larger in the half-light. He seemed to fill the lopsided crib they graced with the name of barn. His eyes burned. Dorothy said nothing. She shook her head, trying to say: I’ve done nothing. I didn’t know I’d done anything. I didn’t mean to do anything. Henry stood stock-still, full of what looked like rage.
Dorothy crept back toward the house. Every limb felt weighted down by cold. She wanted to lie down and die. Whatever was wrong with her, the bad blood, had done it again. Even Uncle Henry hated her. She thumped slowly up into the wooden house.
“Evening, Dorothy,” said Aunty Em briskly, looking up from her account book. She wore little round spectacles, and her eyes blinking behind them looked huge, like a frog’s. “Nice day at school?”
“Yes, Mmm.”
“Nice drive back with your uncle?”
Aunty Em didn’t know. Aunty Em didn’t know Henry had not come for her. That must mean he really hated her, to do that and not tell Em. He must not have ever wanted her to come back.
“Yes, Mmm,” replied Dorothy, devastated. The house seemed to be made of bone.
“Once you’ve got yourself warmed up, there’s some cuts I fetched up from the cellar for frying. They’ve still got enough lard on them, so you won’t need to use any more. Waste not, want not.”
Aunty Em went back to her business. Dorothy cooked the evening meal, watching her hands move, as if they were someone else’s. The months-old pork, sealed in its own lard, was gray and flabby and slightly damp from delayed putrescence. Dorothy watched it smoke and steam. There was a scar on the bottom of her thumb. She took rags to bed with her at night. She watched the smoke rise and wished her bad blood could be similarly consumed, burned clean. She wished she could be burned clean. Perhaps if she drank carbolic, that would burn her clean from the inside, and then she would die clean.
Uncle Henry clumped into the house, with eyes as desperate as butterflies flitting. He was smiling. It was a thin smile, keen and sharp, and his movements were changed. Gone was the dear, slow, sad Henry. This man flickered, hands and eyes darting. Dorothy passed him a plate of food and he did not look at her. When she sat down, he turned away, crossing his legs in the other direction. Dorothy ate the tired old pork as if it were her due. It tasted of old wooden floors and rancid fat. They would all smell each other, all through the night.
“Don’t you worry about the washing-up,” said Aunty Em. “You just get on with your home studies. Henry, please could we clear a space for Dodo’s books?”
Henry said nothing, but stood up and went out into the night.
Aunty Em looked at Dorothy, smiling crookedly. “I surely hope he manages to produce something tonight.”
They were all bound up tighter than drums with pork and no vegetables. Aunty Em’s face was kind. It was taking Dorothy into her confidence, as if she were almost an adult. This confused Dorothy mightily. No! she thought. It’s too soon for that. She didn’t want to be treated like an adult. She wanted to be treated like a child. She wanted to be sat on someone’s knee and be told a story; she wanted to sit on someone’s knee and do nothing, leave the work behind.
“Dorothy,” chuckled Aunty Em. “No need to be shocked, child, there are some things that are perfectly natural to talk about sometimes.” She stroked Dorothy’s hair with fondness.
“Now you get settled in,” said Em with a sigh, and stood up and collected the dishes with a fine clattering of clay.
The next morning Henry got up and gave her a ride in to school and neither of them mentioned that he had left her alone, waiting at the bridge. They sat coldly side by side but at a distance. He did not even ask her how she had found her way home.
Dorothy passed the day at school in even deeper silence than usual, hugging the books that she yearned to lose forever.