WAS (44 page)

"I'm very, very thirsty," said Jonathan.

"You're dead on your feet as well. My name's Marge Baker. Who are you?"

"I'm Jonathan. This is my counselor, Bill."

Bill stepped forward. "I would be very grateful if you could give Jonathan a drink," he said. "He's not well."

"I can see that, too," said Mrs. Baker. "Come on in and I'll give you some lemonade." She began to walk toward the house. The front porch had white metal railings around it and wind chimes that tinkled. A Dalmatian stood up in his cardboard box and barked and barked.

"Oh now, Rex! He's not used to visitors."

"Tell me," said Bill. "Did this farm used to belong to people called the Gulches, or the Branscombs?"

"I'm not from around here myself. I just came here to teach school and ended up marrying a farmer. Come on in."

They went through a side door into an extension, a kitchen, with wooden wainscoting and wooden floors, a rainbow rug, made of thick, braided, concentric circles of color, reds and greens and yellows. By the door, there was an old cabinet. It was thick and lumpy with generations of white paint. Inside it was a host of tiny oil lamps.

"Oh I collect those," said Mrs. Baker. She opened up the cabinet for them. She took out one with a blue glass base. NUTMEG, it said in embossed letters.

"Back then people used to buy spice in them. Now mind, these wouldn't be parlor lights. They would be little nightlights for children."

Very carefully, she put it back. "I said I would get you some lemonade, didn't I?"

"I'm sure it's delicious," said Jonathan. "But I think it might burn my stomach. Could I just have a glass of water?"

"Nothing simpler," she said. She poured a tumblerful from a new mixer tap.

"I'd like to look at your shed," said Jonathan.

He wants to get outside, thought Bill, in case he's sick.

"It is quite a feature," said Mrs. Baker.

Bill had not noticed the shed. It had been half hidden beside a newer outbuilding made of corrugated iron.

It was a log cabin.

As they approached, a cloud of crickets jumped up from the grass. The cloud swirled, thickened, thinned again, with cries like windup birds. Bill was pelted by them. They flew into him, their wings throbbing against his chest.

"Hello, Mary Ann," Jonathan whispered to them. "Hello, Ellery."

Mrs. Baker affected not to notice. "This is our storm cellar," she said. There was a doorway into the ground. It was made of wood, framed with limestone, and along the frame was a line of old stoneware jugs. Jonathan was running his fingers through the leaves of a tree. "What kind of tree is this?" he asked.

"That's a hackberry bush," said Mrs. Baker. "You can't do anything with the fruit, but the birds love them."

"What kind of birds?"

"Chickadees," said Mrs. Baker, and she and Jonathan shared a smile.

They walked on, toward the shed. It was tiny, square. A thick limestone chimney rose up one side of it, supporting a vine. The frame of the front doorway was jammed up hard against the frame of a window. There were thick beams holding the whole structure off the ground.

"We have a lot of people asking to see this," said Mrs. Baker. "This is an original pioneer dwelling."

She and Jonathan walked around to the side.

"They were embarrassed," said Jonathan. Bill came around to join them. From under the apex of the roof, flat planks of wood covered part of the log walls.

"See? They didn't want anyone to know they still lived in a log cabin, so they covered it with clapboards," said Jonathan.

There was another door on this side of the cabin. "Why two doors?" Bill asked.

Jonathan touched an outline in the ground with his foot. "There was an extension on this side," he said. "I bet it was a summer kitchen."

"I bet it was too," chuckled Mrs. Baker. "It would get awfully hot without one."

Farther up the hill, there was a 1940s car. Jonathan walked on toward it, more crickets jumping out at him. The car had a long sleek hood, a short rounded trunk. Its paint had faded and rusted.

"That's my grandson, Paige," explained Mrs, Baker. "He collects old machines. Tractors mostly. Some of them you have to crank up to start. He even has one that runs on butane. They're in the other building, if you would like to see them."

Jonathan looked at the car in silence.

"Paige wants to be a farmer. We know there's no future in it. But we just have to hope he sees that for himself. Do you know, they are bulldozing some of the old farmhouses?"

Jonathan's smile was fixed, his eyes unfocused.

There was a rumbling of a tractor up the road. "Well," said Mrs. Baker. "Here comes my husband. I'll just go down and check the oven, if you want to come along presently."

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Baker," said Bill. Jonathan did not move. Mrs. Baker walked back down the hill toward the wind chimes.

Jonathan was holding his breath.

"Breathe, Jonathan, slowly and deeply."

"It's green and red, isn't it, Bill?" he said, without breath.

"What is?"

"The car!" Jonathan was smiling in wonder. "It's green and red, very pastel in patches, like someone had airbrushed it. Very light, very metallic?"

"I'd say that's a pretty good description."

Jonathan turned toward him, still smiling. "I'm seeing green and red," he said, and clenched Bill's arm. "I'm not supposed to be able to. I'm supposed to be color-blind.

"And the trees," he added. "And the crickets, in a flash."

Bill looked at his watch: quarter past one.

Jonathan leaned over and lost all the water he had just drunk. Bill stroked his back.

In the driveway, Mr. Baker was patting the Dalmatian's head. Mr. Baker wore dungarees. He was a big man, but faded, with watery blue eyes and blue veins in pale skin. He held a clean new straw hat in one hand. His wife came out of the house.

"Vance," she said. "These two gentlemen came to ask me about Sunflower School." She introduced Bill and Jonathan. Vance shook their hands and smiled with perfect false teeth.

Jonathan showed him the photograph.

"Well, I'll be," said Mr. Baker. "That's my sister!" He pointed to a little girl in checked gingham.

"And that will be Miss Soupens, the teacher."

"Was there another Sunflower School? One before that?" Bill asked.

"Why yes, there was."

"Where?" asked Jonathan, his voice rough.

"Stand over here, young man," said Mr. Baker. He leaned over Jonathan's shoulder and pointed. "See that hump of trees there? That's where it used to be. You see, the Worrells wanted to be able to say they were helping everybody so they built a new schoolhouse and paid the teacher. But the old schoolhouse was there until, oh, 1961. Thereabouts. Old Paul Jenkins lived in it with his mother. I think he set it alight when she died."

"Yee hah!" Jonathan screeched. His voice gave way, and he began to cough.

The Bakers smiled a bit nervously, and Mr. Baker stepped back. "Well, I'm pleased to have been able to help," he said.

Jonathan kept coughing, unable to speak. He doubled over, hand over his mouth. He danced in place, still happy.

"Thank you, thank you very much. It really means a lot to him," said Bill.

"Well, you're both very welcome," said Mrs. Baker. Jonathan was still coughing, smiling, shaking his head.

"Now, if you'll excuse us, my husband needs his lunch," said Mrs. Baker. "Then he'll go lie down. I'm afraid he's not very well either."

The Bakers walked back to their house, arm in arm.

"We did it," croaked Jonathan.

They drove on down the lane, through fields of plowed, rich, brown-black soil. Off to the right, far away on the horizon, there was a slight rise of trees, with a white, test-tube tower. It was the hill over Manhattan.

"Stop," whispered Jonathan, his voice gone. He patted Bill's arm.

Ahuh ahuh ahuh.

Bill eased the car to a stop. One-thirty.

"The hill," whispered Jonathan, and pointed to the left. His skeleton hands fluttered against the window.

There it was in bald ziggurat layers. Dorothy's hill.

"It's around here. It really is!" chuckled Bill.

"Hurry," said Jonathan.

As Bill drove, Jonathan seemed to fold up smaller and smaller on the front seat. He leaned back, mouth open. His lips were cracked. As the car bounced up onto the main road, he began to talk to someone.

"Sure they will be. I know they will be," he said, hoarse. "They'll be there."

Then Jonathan paused, as if listening.

"But you didn't die," Jonathan answered. "You grew up. Into me."

They came to the lane. rock spring, said the sign. The clump of trees was at the crossroads. Bill turned right and parked the car. The lane was unpaved, white gravel, and it led in a straight line to the ziggurat hill. A row of old-fashioned telephone poles ranged along it on the left, like a line of crucifixes. Two huge farm machines stood some way away amidst the sorghum. On the other side of the lane, the field was harvested, bare earth, thrashed stalks. Everything was seen. Everything was visible.

Quarter to two. We've done it. Thank you, Jesus.

Bill patted Jonathan's knee. "Come on, kiddo," Bill said. "Let's go see it."

Jonathan still smiled. He didn't move.

"Come on, Jonathan."

"Yes, Daddy," he answered in a whisper. He stirred slowly.

Bill helped him out of the car. Bill got out the plat-book map and turned it upside down, south on the top.

"You're not going to believe this, Jay," said Bill, with a nervous chortle. "The Bakers' farm? That was it, Jonathan. That cabin. That was the house. That was where she lived."

Jonathan moved as if he were on a ship at sea. His smile was fixed. Did he even understand?

"Let's go have a look at where the school was," said Bill. There was a collapsed fence of barbed wire that he had to hold down and a ditch beyond it that made climbing over the wire difficult. They had to duck under and around small conifers or larger ash trees. And then, unmistakably, there was a clearing, a clearing where a building had been.

Jonathan stepped into it and smiled toward one end. "Hello," he said. He stood still in the low grass with its purple heads.

"This is where the school was," said Bill.

Or maybe not. In the midst of the thicket there was another building, gray and parched.

"Let's go and have a look at that there," said Bill. He fought his way through leaves and whiplike branches. He swept them away from his face. He saw a window, some kind of shed or outbuilding perhaps.

"Wait for me," he heard Jonathan whisper behind him.

"It's okay, you can get through," said Bill, distracted. Elbow across his eyes, he stood up. There was still glass in the windows, and a glass jar on one of the windowsills. There was a paintbrush in it.

"Wait for me!" Jonathan screeched.

Bill turned around and shrugged his way back through the trees. The clearing was empty. There was the sound of the car starting.

"Jonathan?" shouted Bill.

He heard the car pulling away, dirt spurting out from under the wheels. Bill sprinted across the clearing. Through the trees he could see the gray car accelerate, swerving. Bill got caught on the barbed wire. He slipped down the grass in the ditch. His trousers tore. He pulled himself back up and over the fence, into the lane.

The car had stopped. Dust still rose from it. The driver's door hung open. Bill broke into a run, down the row of telephone poles toward the hill. He got to the car. Its engine was still running. The key was still in the ignition. It swung back and forth like a clock.

Bill looked around him, shouting "Jonathan!"

On the right, bare and harvested, there was no one.

"Where are you?" Bill started to run across the fields, toward Dorothy's farm and then stopped. This is crazy, he thought. There's nowhere to hide. If Jonathan was ahead of him, he would see him, running. If he had fallen over, he would still see him, there was no cover, Bill could see every clump of dirt.

Bill turned and pelted back toward the car, up and over the lane and down into the other fields.

"Jonathan!" wailed Bill. "Answer me!" He thought Jonathan was lying hidden among the sorghum. He plunged down into its midst and ran across the orderly rows, looking up and down them. Nothing. No one.

They had husbanded the lower slopes; they had dug ditches across the fields to drain the wallows, the buffalo wallows where children disappeared.

It was crazy, but Jonathan had gone.

It seems that spring has come once more and farmers go forth to seed their fields. Some oats are already sown. The rain has moistened the earth, making a good outlook for rich harvests. Though nature seems to smile upon the fields, yet some heavy hearts rest among us, grieving over the departed soul of Sister Reynolds.

…Though her body was broken

Through her misery unspoken

Though deformity changed her aspect

Though earth's duties were hard,

She complained not a word,

For all these she could leave in the casket.

She was gentle and kind

Always bearing in mind

That she had a work to perform

And with meekness and love

All things were performed in their turn…

To those children so dear

To their mother while here,

We would say in their anguish and sorrow

Be strong in the Lord

Abide in his word

Eternity is only tomorrow…

– Lines written by "True Friendship" on the death of Etta Parkerson Reynolds, as published in the
Manhattan Nationalist
, March 18, 1889, as recorded by Ellen Payne Paullin in her edition of
Etta's Journal

Inside the cyclone, Dorothy dreamed.

She dreamed she was still on the road westward, walking toward Wichita. Wilbur F. Jewell was with her. Wilbur was still thirteen. He was now as old as Dorothy. Wilbur was dressed like an Indian, with a colored headband with feathers and painted lines on his face. He had gone to the Territory and found the Indians and lived with them. Dorothy's heart swelled with happiness for him. Wilbur had come back from the Territory to find her and take her with him. The Territory would be full of Indians and buffalo and magic. Wilbur was tall and bony and gangling, and he looked so young to her now. Dorothy knew in her dream that she loved him, would have loved him if he had lived.

America walked with them, westward out of the East. Dorothy dreamed that they had stopped in a wayside camp. There were wagons and tents. There were women in gingham dresses and children in smocks and narrow-eyed men in black hats. The men mumbled with metal bars in their mouths.

The adults were in harness. Great thongs of leather led out from the bits in their mouths, and their eyes were circled with rings of exhaustion and shielded by black leather blinders. They wore them even as they sat slumped on the ground, sprawled carelessly around small grubby fires. There was ash and blood on their hands, and they were burning coffee black in greasy tins. Beside the camps there were mounds of buffalo bones bleaching in the sun. Children ran up them barefoot. Under their feet, clattering hip bones had sockets like eyes. All around them, on either side of the road, there were stumps of trees, lined up like tombstones.

There was a constant sound of chopping. Dorothy saw, beyond the stumps, the blue-green tops of conifers. They waved back and forth and then fell out of sight with a distant crash. Wilbur and Dorothy went to look. The sound grew louder, multiplied many times.

There were Mechanical Woodsmen. They were a labor saving device, a sign of progress like telephones. They went on chopping and chopping, cutting out sections of living wood. The Mechanicals were steam-driven, jets of it coming out of funnels in their heads. Wreaths of acrid orange-brown smoke came out of their mouths. Their faces, their arms, their legs, were coated in thick black grease. Whirling gears and belts moved them and they dripped scalding water. They couldn't keep themselves from cutting down the trees.

One of them looked up at Dorothy and she saw he had living eyes. He wept boiling water. The eyes were Uncle Henry's. It's not my fault, he seemed to say, I can't help it. He looked embarrassed, ashamed, as he slammed an ax into the trunk of a cedar.

Dorothy knew then that she was frightened of men, almost all men except for Wilbur. She wondered how she would ever learn to love men or live with them.

A whistle blew, a long mournful sound like all the loneliness that drove the men and the machines. The Mechanicals hissed and chuffed and came to a halt, ready to move on.

"All aboard!" someone cried.

The people of the camp groaned and stood up. The leather harnesses creaked and stretched. The adults were hauling their houses behind them. They were all moving West, to escape the past, escape the East. Why didn't they ever look behind them? Did they never wonder why they were so weary and mean? Dorothy knew and despised them. They were all pulling the East with them.

They carried guns. They shot things. They shot anything that moved. They shot a black man running toward freedom. There were flocks of deer, bounding away, white tails like the waves of the sea. Rifles crackled and the deer fell, their legs suddenly breaking under them like twigs. There were clouds of birds in the sky, darkening the sun. The men raised their rifles like thunder, and there was a rainfall of blood, blood and feathers, and pelting corpses of pigeons. People slipped on blood. Without thinking, without even knowing, the men raised their rifles and fired.

Lift the rifle. Crack. Lower the rifle. Lift the rifle. Crack.

One of them turned to Dorothy, coated in grease, grinning.

"We're civilizing the country," he said.

Dorothy knew that by the time they got to the Territory, it would be gone, always advancing away from them like a rainbow.

They all walked on, toward Wichita.

As the settlers drew near Wichita, there was a great lowing sound and a cloud of dust ahead of them. A herd of Bad Women was being driven toward the river.

"Yee ha!" the cowboys on horseback shouted and herded the women down the banks so they could wash. The women were brown with dust and they skidded down into the water, their dirty stolen dresses billowing out on the surface of the river.

The settlers walked through a shantytown, between lean-to shelters with lace curtains and open doors with women standing in them. The Bad Women were not pretty; they were fat and sour or skinny and mean. Dorothy looked at the settlers but their eyes were fixed ahead of them and they seemed not to see.

They seemed not to see the women running races naked through the streets like horses. Men lined the course, wearing bowler hats and drinking straight from the bottle and laying down bets. The women ran with breasts swinging. Their smiles were fixed; their eyes were dim. Alongside the course, two Bad Women in all their finery got into a fight, tearing feathers and hair. Men gathered around the fight to laugh at it and to cheer them on. The women screeched in pain.

At the bridge, the gates to Wichita, the shantytown was left behind. There were bankers there to meet the settlers. The bankers were the guardians of the cowtown, with vests and rotund stomachs and extravagant whiskers. The bankers took away each man's gun. There was nothing to shoot in Wichita but people and that would be bad for business. The bankers took away the horsemen's blinders and put on blindman's glasses instead. The glasses were tinted green. They made the gray grass and the gray sky and the gray soil look alive. And the bankers sang!

Fine property, with water nearby, in balmy gentle climate!

The travelers sang too, swinging their arms out in front of them like blind people. The pilgrims stumbled through the gates, singing "Land of Goshen."

Wichita had streets of unpaved mud, churned up by wagons and human feet. There were wooden boardwalks and vast puddles and ramshackle tents, and cheap wooden buildings with lies painted on them. FINEST DRY GOODS, said one shack, sweltering in a puddle. FIRST NATIONAL BANK, said a sign over a tent.

Fights began to break out as people tried to camp. Women sat down in the mud and wept. Along the boardwalks, there were freak shows. One-armed men. Women with beards. Tattooed couples, all green and red and pink and lavender. There was a black man with no arms and legs, opening a box of matches with his teeth to light a cigarette. It was a show. In her vision, Dorothy knew that he had cut off his arms and legs himself, to make a living.

There were brass bands in front of the restaurants and emporia. The music they played was loud and squawking, harsh and blaring. They were in competition with each other. They had to make you hear them at the expense of the others. A man in woman's clothing lifted up his dress to step around a puddle. Dorothy peered at his face. He was Jesse James. His face was made of black lines, like an engraving. The look he gave Dorothy stilled her heart with fear.

Behind the shacks and false-front palaces, there were mounds of stinking hides, laid out, with scraps of meat still clinging to them. There were deer's heads, and bears' paws, all in mounds. There were slaughterhouses, full of cattle lowing, smelling blood, knowing they were going to die, voiding their bowels and bladders, so the stink and the flies rose up.

I want, thought Dorothy, to go home.

She didn't want to see any more, because she knew this was a truth. Would her father be here? How could she find out? Wilbur said there might be a list in the County Offices.

The County Offices were two stories high and were made out of brick, with stone arches over the windows. There was a gaslight outside them on the corner and signs by the door saying probate and law office. There was a telephone. Dorothy could hear it ringing and ringing, with no one to answer it.

Inside, the County Offices looked like a bank. Ruined, desperate men lined up in front of tellers, all in peaked caps. Everyone was shouting. A policeman bustled a howling man out of the place. Telegraph messages squeaked like a flock of birds.

Dorothy was in despair, waiting in line. In her dream, she knew no one would be able to help her. They wouldn't even be able to hear her over the din. Wilbur took her arm and led her into another room. Great doors opened, and beyond them, the County Offices looked like a church.

There were Gothic pillars and fragmented, colored-glass windows and beautiful distant singing that was forever out of reach, like a colored scarf being blown away by the wind.

And all around them, the people worshiped, on their knees. Worshiped what was good, able to worship what was good by deliberately using it to cover up the bad. They worshiped the things they had destroyed.

Our Father, who art in Heaven

And Dorothy was afraid and knelt down and prayed.

They worshiped the buffalo. They had his head and horns on the wall, and his hide on the floor.

They worshiped the Indian, his blankets around their shoulders, a row of drums in a glass case. They worshiped their heritage. A heritage is something that was never yours, and which has been destroyed.

They worshiped a child in a manger. The Kings and Wise Men, the shepherds, the cattlemen and thieves had all gathered around the crib. They worshiped the mother of the Child, but only because she was a virgin. All other women were bad.

As Dorothy watched, the Wise Men and the Kings, the shepherds and the cowboys and the mayor of the cowtown lifted up the Child, who was plump and innocent and happy. "Dear little thing," they said. "Isn't he dear?" He smiled at them without guile. And they smiled back, knowing.

Knowing they had a cross. And Dorothy cried out, but all the people around her wore the Green Glasses and couldn't hear, because they were praying. They bound the Child tightly in swaddling clothes so that he could not move. They pulled tighter and tighter on the linen.

They drove a nail through his swaddled feet. The Child screamed and wailed and howled. The men looked around in embarrassment.

"I told you what would happen if you did that again," they said in warning, shaking their heads.

Then they placed a nail on his forehead, and they raised a hammer. No, said Dorothy, no, but the words came out like glue, viscous and silent. And the hammer struck home, piercing the skull, pinioning the babe to the cross, and the cross was raised, and his murderers knelt to worship him.

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.