Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  “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 d
ust, poppies springing from their spectral feet.

  In one poem, an old woman paces the hollow, thumping floorboards 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 soliders’ 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.

  “I don’t like her,” Frank said. Nanny smelled of sweat and washed his face with her own spit daubed on a handkerchief. Frank looked at his mother’s green dress with what seemed to him like thick green ropes embedded in the fabric. He wondered vaguely if they were for hanging things on. Or hanging up the dress? Hanging up his mother, from the walls?

  “Nanny doesn’t always understand,” said his mother.

  That was not Frank’s problem. He felt his mother stroking his hair. He looked up at her face. The eyes were full on his.

  “She doesn’t remember what it is like to be a child,” his mother explained.

  “Why not?” Frank asked. It seemed to him to be a simple enough thing to do. Overhead, the clouds had faces, and they smiled.

  “Because it was such a long time ago,” said his mother. She whispered, in case the trees were listening.

  Frank looked at the clipped hedges and the white fences, the water snaking its way from the fountain’s mouth. He looked at the china soldiers and his wooden duck with the wheels on the stone steps. The steps glinted in the sun as if blinking. The hens, feathers billowing in the slight breeze, looking like clouds with legs. They kept kissing the ground.

  “I’ll remember,” promised Frank.

  Reality Check

  I am a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism. Because I am a fantasy writer, I am particularly aware that every work of fiction, however realistic, is a fantasy. It happens in a world that is an alternative to this one.

  There is a town called Manhattan, Kansas, that is very like the one in this novel. It was settled by people called Purcell and Higinbotham and Pillsbury. There was a Professor Mudge, an Etta Parkerson and her Mr. Reynolds. There even was a Dr. Lyman. To my knowledge, however, he was not related to Lyman Frank Baum, nor did Baum visit the town, though he was in Kansas in the 1880s.

  To my knowledge, no Chinese people lived in Manhattan in the 1870s. There was, however, a Mr. Win Tsue who lived in Deadwood, South Dakota, and who invited local women to meet his wife on New Year’s Day.

  There was a Blue Earth village on the Manhattan side of the two great rivers. At one time, it consisted of 128 lodges, each sixty feet long. The marks in the ground were visible for many years afterward, still remembered by people writing in the 1920s.

  There is a Zeandale; there is a Pillsbury’s Crossing. The Aiken family still lives in the area. There were indeed two Sunflower Schools, one of which has disappeared, leaving only a clearing in a small hump of woodland where a lane meets the main road. That lane does lead to a smooth, ziggurat-shaped hill.

  There is a farm rather like the one my Dorothy lived on, except that the people who lived there, the St. Johns, the Eakins, have been moved over by about a mile to make room for the Branscomb Estate. My Zeandale is a much bigger place.

  The real one did have buffalo wallows which are remembered as having swallowed one child whole. If memory serves, the last buffalo in Zeandale was seen as Pillsbury’s Crossing, by a member of the Aiken family, in 1882.

  There were many other sources in reality of this fantasy.

  Mr. and Mrs. Aiken spoke to me and showed me where the first Sunflower School had been. They told me the story of the buffalo wallow and another story of lilacs planted on the hills to commemorate another child who had died.

  The interior of Mrs. Baker’s farmhouse is rather like that of Mrs. Marjorie Sand’s, who in two interviews told me much about Riley County and life in the old days. It was Mrs. Sand who managed to produce for me one of the last available copies of Pioneers of the Blue Stem Prairie, and exhaustive and invaluable work tracing the family history of all the original settlers of a huge area of Kansas.

  I am indebted to Charlotte Shawver of the Registry Office in Manhattan and to Nancy Gorman and Dala Suther, who provided enthusiastic help during my brief visit there.

  I could not have written the book in such detail without the days of personal help given to me by Cheryl Collins and Jeanne Mithen of the Riley County Historical Museum. They found and allowed me to photocopy unpublished memoirs, census records, historical books, photographs and plat books. These memoirs provided the basis for those of Aunty Em. In particular, the memoir of Anna Blasing was a source of much of the material. Aunty Em’s description of the burning of Lawrence in 1856 was based on that of Sara T. L. Robinson in her book of 1856, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life.

  The Manhattan Public Library is to be thanked for preserving their store of local newspapers from the nineteenth century. Wilbur F. Jewell got his name from them—he was a thirteen-year-old boy who committed suicide. The description of the celebration of the Congregationalist church came from those microfilms, as did the text of Aunty Em’s poem. It was in fact recited at the banquet. The Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka also keeps a very large store of such material, from which information about Professor Mudge was derived.

  Descriptions of life in Wichita in Dorothy’s dream and elsewhere are derived in part from Wichita: The Early Years, 1865–80 by H. Craig Miner (University of Nebraska Press).

  Acknowledgements following this “Reality Check” give credits for those sources quoted in the chapter heads.

  Thanks are also due to the Lancaster, California Public Library. Special attention is reserved for the person who stole the microfilm of the Lancaster local newspaper for the year 1927. It was the only publicly available copy of the microfilm, and the newspapers from which it was made have disintegrated.

  The chapters on the childhood of Frances Gumm and the life of her mother, Ethel Milne, owe a great debt to Young Judy by David Dahl and Barry Kehoe.

  I must acknowledge a great debt, too, to The Making of the Wizard of Oz by Aljean Harmetz. It is extremely difficult to retrieve the amount
of in-depth detail that this author managed to find.

  The real film was made in a slightly different way to mine. For example, Judy Garland’s makeup would have been done by a man. Millie Haugaard did not exist. At first I called her Millie Shroeder; I then found that by coincidence Millie Shroeder was the name of Bert Lahr’s wife.

  I couldn’t find out where MGM staff parked their cars, so I have Millie take the bus. There were many things I could not find out about MGM during my short stays in Los Angeles. Most of what is available is old publicity material. A lot of the MGM archives were used as landfill under the freeway system. In one hundred years’ time we will know more about Manhattan, Kansas, in the 1870s (the high-school newspaper is preserved) than we will about the working lives of MGM staff. But we still have the films.

  There was a Corndale, Ontario, Canada, under another name. There was a very similar house to Jonathan’s, long ago, in Was.

  The chapter set in Manhattan High School owes an enormous debt to an unpublished manuscript entitled “A Teacher Learns” by Major John Hawkins. He is in part a model for the character of Baum as portrayed in this chapter, and the particular incidents described in it are drawn from his experiences as a teacher. Dorothy’s singing death is also inspired by a Hawkins family story. Thanks also to John Clute for reinforcing the idea of Jonathan’s disappearance. Johanna Firbank has been a continual inspiration in the long discussions on such subjects as childhood conditioning and the nature of literature.

  My greatest debt is to L. Frank Baum and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

  Books make authors, not the other way around. Books come out of their own accord, authors just write them. Books can be written without authors. They can come, like epic poetry, out of many different mouths.