Was

Part Two. The Summer Kitchen

Manhattan, Kansas-1881

…the men burning houses and barns and horses so that for ten years and more the countryside was an inferno of revenge, broken by a fifth season of arson. The tramps who packed guns and overran whole towns. The old men who went mad with jealousy. The old women who jumped down wells. All those mothers: the ones who carried their children into the rivers, the ones who fed them arsenic and strychnine so that, if they had to die, at least it wouldn't be of epidemic disease… All the men who cleansed the putrescence of their lives with carbolic acid. All the others who killed themselves with the same insecticide they used on the potato bugs…

By the end of the nineteenth century, country towns had become charnel-houses and the counties that surrounded them had become places of dry bones. The land and its farms were filled with the guilty voices of women mourning for their children and the aimless mutterings of men asking about jobs. State, county, and local news consisted of stories of resignation, failure, suicide, madness and grotesque eccentricity. Between 1900 and 1920, 30 per cent of the people who lived on farms left the land…

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 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 hooves 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 finally to 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 hand. 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.

"That was a right smart supper, Dodo, thank you," said Aunty Em, with a smile. The only thing Dorothy knew about dodos was that they were extinct.

"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.

In the afternoon, she walked back down Poyntz and along the road toward the bridge. She had made plans. If Henry was not there, she would slip back into the school and sleep by one of the stoves. But Uncle Henry was there, blue in the dusk, waiting for her, holding the horse's lead.

And that night, as he led the horse and the cart toward the barn, he grabbed her wrist, and pulled her with him. Inside the barn, he held her to him and blurted out a kind of a sob. He rested his shaggy, smelly head on her shoulder and neck, and his cheeks were damp and he pressed her to him.

He did love her after all. Dorothy went weak from gratitude. She hugged him back, and his huge, rough hands pushed her even closer to him. The whole length of his body was against her, and he kissed her cheek. Was he saying he was sorry? He must be. Dorothy kissed him back. She meant to kiss him on the cheek, but he turned his head and their mouths met. That startled Dorothy and she jumped back. He worked her shoulder, and his smile crumpled and went grim. He turned away, and Dorothy wondered again if she had done wrong.

The next day, the ride was joyful. Uncle Henry sang old campfire songs. Dorothy had never seen him like that. She giggled and he turned his eyes toward her and they had a sparkle she had never seen before. It suddenly occurred to her that Uncle Henry had once been young. He would have been a young, broad-shouldered man with sparkling eyes. And bad teeth.

So when did it begin? Every evening in the barn, or sometimes in the woods, when it was dark, he would pull the wagon to a stop, and hidden under lap robes, he would tickle her. Dorothy was getting bored with being prodded and tickled. Henry kept looking back and forth up the road as if it were something naughty, something bad. She pitied him. Poor Henry, old Henry, she thought, and she hugged him. Was that bad? He was just hugging her, and he loved her, so was it bad?

His hands were blunt and large and rough. They kept rubbing her shoulders. When did they begin to rub her legs?

She remembered him cupping both her tiny breasts in his hands. "Pretty little things," he had said, forlornly. Even then, Dorothy was not sure that it was bad. He looked into her eyes. His eyes were blue and large, cold and soft at the same time, and his cheeks were always bright red on deep brown and covered with tiny purple veins all over the surface. He looked lost.

"Do you like it when I touch you there?" he asked.

She didn't like it, not really at all. It was private and it wasn't nice, but he was Henry and he loved her.

"You're so kind, Dorothy. You're so good to old Henry."

One evening in the barn, his trousers came down, and she saw his thing, and she knew then that this was bad.

"No, honey, no, Dorothy, don't look away, don't look away from old Henry. Here, look, I put it away, see?"

The only thing that Dorothy had thought was good about her life was bad. All her life was bad; it was something to do with her. She must be bad, if this was what happened. The thought of her badness made her go still. It must have made him go still too.

He didn't do it right away. He tried to hold off. But it was too much for him, alone with the flat wilderness, his drying fields, and Em.

Finally he did it, quickly, in the barn, while Em sat with her books The thought of her own badness made Dorothy go small and still, Dorothy looked at the straw and the wooden beams and knew that everything would change. When he was done, he was scared. He pulled up his trousers and began to weep. "Oh God, oh salvation. There's no praying that can heal this."

She knew it was truly terrible then. Dorothy watched, as if pork were frying. He did not look at her. He will hate me now, she knew. She was ready. It was all she deserved. There was more blood. More bad blood. She was so full of that bad blood, it just oozed out of her.

"You better get into the house," he murmured, looking away from her.

That night at dinner there was a terrible silence. Even Em could sense it. She was full of rage. It was Aunty Em's turn to cook and she banged down the plates and the coffeepot. She had boiled up some jerky and some dried corn and that was all they had to eat. Dorothy thought she must have seen them, that she must know. The silence was terrible, but Em did not notice anything unusual. For Em, the silence was always there, and always terrible. Em was oblivious to her own rage, but Dorothy ate in suspense. Later, Dorothy went out into the darkness and threw up, quietly, so Em couldn't hear. There is no pit, Dorothy thought, no hole in the ground deep enough and black enough to cover me. There was a hook on which they hung the bodies of the hogs. It went right up through their guts. Dorothy thought of putting the hook through herself.

Once again, Henry did not come for her after school. Dorothy had known that he would not. He'll be scared, she thought, beginning to feel contempt for him. He'll keep well away. He might be so scared, he won't do it again. Either way, she knew she could no longer count on Henry for anything. He might send her away. He might want to keep her near and do it again. He might ignore her and pretend that nothing had happened. There was nothing good that either one of them could do. She hitched a ride home with Max Jewell. He had grown up nice and polite and was very interested in Dorothy. He asked her all sorts of questions about Manhattan and tried to catch her eye. Dorothy saw Uncle Henry in him and answered coldly, yes or no.

It took a week. Uncle Henry let other people take her back home for a whole week. Neither one of them said anything to Aunty Em.

Max had found repeated excuses to come out to town, in order to give her a lift back. That in itself was ominous. It might be good to discourage Max.

Finally Uncle Henry showed up, waiting at the bridge. Max was there too. Max called hello to Henry, somewhat unwillingly, and his quick crumpled smile in Dorothy's direction was one of apology. Max assumed quite rightly that she might not want to ride with some smelly old man.

Dorothy felt herself go into abeyance. She watched herself. What, she wondered, am I going to do? She saw herself climb down from Max's wagon.

"Thank you, Max," she murmured. It sounded like a farewell.

She got into the wagon. Henry waved Max away. Henry pulled hard on the reins to keep the wagon still. Henry waited until Max was out of sight, disappearing over the top of Prospect.

"We don't share no blood," Henry said solemnly. "We're not blood kin."

That meant nothing to Dorothy. Did he mean that he had no bad blood? Did he mean that only she did? She waited, as an animal waits when it is cornered by a predator.

"I'm just older than you, that's all." He tried to smile, but there was a shaking in him. "You aren't going to do nothing, are you, Dorothy? You aren't going to go away, are you? 'Cause old Henry, he needs you. You are the light of his life. You are the only beautiful thing. And a man needs that, Dorothy."

He paused and looked at the wall of trees, full of spring buds, climbing the side of the hill. The buds gathered together on the trees looked from a distance like a slightly purple mist. "We'll have to be careful of her. We'll just have to watch our step. In summer, the corn will be as high as you like."

He means we'll do it in the corn, thought Dorothy. He'll wait for me here, and we'll go into the corn. He wants to go on doing it.

"She can't live forever."

He wants Aunty Em to die.

Then he gave her a ride home, a chaste distance from her. It was already late, so they walked into the house, Dorothy first, Henry a few minutes later. Chores, he told Dorothy. Got a few things to do. You just go right on in. He was lying.

The next day, they went into the barn. "I got to do it," said Henry, grinning. "I just can't keep away. You are a wicked, wicked little thing." He smiled and rubbed his nose against her, and she went still and cold and quiet as ice.

"You like that, you like that, don't you?" he said, and it made no difference that she didn't answer.

It went on and on and Henry got rougher and rougher with his raw hands. Yes, I'm bad, thought Dorothy. I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad. She could feel herself twist inside. She hated Henry's smell, she hated his body, she hated the barn. And she wanted Aunty Em to see them.

She wanted Aunty Em to see them, so bad she could taste it. Her so God-fearing, her so church-loving, to walk in and see her husband pig-backing a kid, pig-backing me, doing what you should be doing Em, you old dried piece of beef jerky. You should see this. I can just hear you yelping.

So she pulled up Henry's shirt, and she pushed his trousers down, so that there would be no mistaking. No one hugs a child with their milkwhite bottom bare in early spring unless they're doing that.

And one day, muddy, bleak, not so cold, his trousers were down around his knees, and he kept pulling them up, chuckling, "Don't do that, honey," and Aunty Em yelled out, real close to the barn.

"Henry, where are you?"

Henry gasped and ducked away, scuttled around behind the bales of hay. Dorothy stayed where she was. Her dress fell back down by itself, but she would not have pulled it down. Her flannels were still down around her thighs. She leaned against the post and waited.

Aunty Em came in, carrying a pan. Mocking her, Dorothy made a coy little-girl motion with her hips and head. Little old me do anything wrong?

"You seen your uncle?" Em asked.

"Sure, he's just around there," said Dorothy and pointed.

Em looked between Dorothy and the hay. "What you doing there?" said Em to Henry. "Why didn't you answer?"

Henry stood up. Down on his knees, he had managed to hoist and fasten his trousers. "Thought I saw a rat," said Henry, looking straight at Dorothy. Dorothy's eyes went wide. Did I do something wrong, Uncle?

"Well, get up off the floor and tell me when we can get into Manhattan. I can't use this pan. It's finally gone through."

"Friday. We'll go Friday."

"High time too. Dorothy, if you're through in here, come in and sweep up."

"She'll be 'long momently, Em," said Uncle Henry. "She's doing some chores in here for me."

"All right, but send her along." Aunty Em left, sensing something too big to even acknowledge. She left scowling.

Pause. Dorothy looked at Henry, with that cold curiosity.

He took two steps toward her and whupped her right across the mouth and onto the floor. Dorothy tasted blood, in triumph. Yup, yup, that was right. That was what it was. Now she could hate him.

"What the hell are you trying to do?" he said, whispering, shaking in fear. "You want her to know or something?"

"Did I do something wrong, Uncle Henry?" she asked in a little-girl voice. "She asked where you were and I told her."

"You just keep quiet. You just keep quiet about everything. Oh Jesus!" He hid his face.

"What am I going to tell her about my mouth?" she said. Dorothy puffed out her lips as she spoke to make it sound as though she were hurt worse than she was, all swollen.

"Tell her you fell. You're pretty good at making up stories."

"Like you are, Uncle," said Dorothy very quietly.

She was silent and smiling, and she knew that the smile said: Why should I lie for you? Give me a reason. Then she spoke. "You gonna bring me back something nice from Manhattan?" she said.

Uncle Henry looked scared again. He leaned over and helped her up. He started to brush her dress. "Yeah, yeah, I'll do that."

Dorothy smiled sweetly at him, so that he could see all her teeth were red.

"Dorothy, I'm sorry I hit you, but you almost got us…" He could not imagine what would have happened. "Honey, we got to keep quiet about this. We got to keep as still as mice. It's like it's our own little world. It can't touch the other world at all."

"Okay, Uncle Henry."

He looked at her with love and great misgiving. His eyes were saying: What have I got myself into?

"I better go in," said Dorothy.

I got them dancing, thought Dorothy. I got Aunty Em with a pin through her, squirming like a butterfly, and she don't even know it. And Uncle Henry, he's just got to be so careful. All I got to do is make sure nobody knows, and I can just keep pushing pins.

She stopped at the barn door and turned. "Tell Aunty Em that I need some new boots," she said.

I'm bad, she thought, rejoicing. I'm wicked, I'm evil. I'm the Devil's own.

"You can get them for me, when you go to Manhattan," she said, and went into the house. She burned the pork, deliberately, burned it black, and she was smiling all the time.

The next day, or the day after that, in Manhattan, at school, a pretty little girl fell in the schoolyard and started to cry.

Aw, thought Dorothy. You poor little thing you. Is that all you got to cry about? Is that the only reason you have to cry?

Dorothy grinned and pretended to help the little girl up. She was so little and so thin and Dorothy was so big. She could feel her size.

"Does it hurt?" she cooed, and sliced the edge of her nails down the girl's wrist. The little girl looked up in bewildered horror.

"Hurt?" asked Dorothy, and wrenched the flesh of the wrist in two directions at once, wrung it like a cloth.

The little girl wailed.

"Shut up," whispered Dorothy, and punched her as hard as she could in the stomach. The little girl doubled up and went quiet.

Dorothy looked at the pretty white dress and had an inspiration. "You got any money? Give me some money. I'll stop if you give me some money."

The little girl wept in silence.

Dorothy put her nails against her cheek. "You better give me some," she warned her, and chuckled suddenly. "It's going to be real bad if you don't."

The feeble little girl reached for a pretty little purse kept inside her glove. Dorothy took it from her. "Tell your mother you dropped it," she said. "And you better not snitch, or I'll follow you home and whup you so bad you can't walk."

The other kids said that Dorothy Gael was farm dirt. They said she was poor and had fleas. They said she smelled, which she did, and they refused to sit next to her in class. I can shut you all up, Dorothy realized. There's nothing I won't do to shut you all up.

She was swollen with discovery. She hung up her coat and scarf right next to the other kids'.

"Ew!" they cried with gestures of disgust.

She very quietly grabbed one of them by the throat. She had chosen a boy, one of the bigger ones. She throttled him. She cut off his supply of air, and then relinquished just enough to hear him gasp.

"You want to fight?" she whispered. She shoved him away from her, into the wall. She turned and spat on his coat. "You ought to be more careful with your clothes, Sam," she told him. She looked around at the others. "Any of you little chickens tells, I'll come for you."

Dorothy turned away with complete confidence. If anything happened to her slimy old coat, she wouldn't mind. She wouldn't mind, and she'd beat them all hollow on the way home.

Dorothy walked down between the rows of desks, feeling like a queen. And there was Larry Johnson, pug-faced Larry who always made the jokes. Well, well, well. His desktop was lifted open. She slammed it down as hard as she could on his fingers.

No matter how tough he was, he had to yelp. "Ow!" Everyone turned. They saw Larry Johnson, sitting, looking up at Dorothy Gael, who loomed over him. They saw Larry Johnson having to fight to stop the tears, and he was big, in the eighth grade. A ripple of fear passed through them, as if across the surface of a pond. The people from the cloakroom came in, whispering. Dorothy Gael sat down and raked them all with her eyes. There's going to be some changes hereabouts, her eyes told them.

There was another poor, fat, ugly girl. She had a smile like a rat's. The other little girl saw her chance. She saw how it was done. Curiously enough, her name was Em too, just like Dorothy's aunt. When the teacher, Mr. Clark, came in, she raised her hand and asked, "Sir, can I move my desk next to Dorothy's?"

A sigh came from the class, a sigh of loathing. The two misbegotten were teaming up together. It was an alliance against them all, and they knew it. The teacher considered. Dorothy was dangerously isolated, he thought. He wanted Em to stay in the front of the class where he could keep an eye on her, but anyone being friendly to Dorothy Gael was a change for the better.

So this second Emma moved, cradling up her textbooks and slate. "All these slimy little Two-shoes," she whispered to Dorothy.

"Yeah," said Dorothy, with authority.

So it went, into summer. The corn came through. Couple of times a week, Dorothy and Henry in the shed. Sometimes he would drive the cart into the woods on Prospect. Dorothy would lie under the trees and remember the days when she went to Sunflower School. School had only been a half-mile walk across the fields then. As she walked, the birds, the red-winged blackbirds, would leap up into the air ahead of her, and the Jewells' cat Rusty Hinge would slink out from the corn and mew and come up to have his head scratched. In summer, the corn would move its leaves, and quail would run across the path. Sometimes the pinch bugs bit, but you soon got over that.

The children each planted a tree around the schoolhouse and that tree was named after them. It was as if a piece of each child had been left behind to grow.

Dorothy would lie down on the ground with Uncle Henry covering her, and she would look past his face. The trees would lean over as if in sympathy, and Dorothy would let her spirit fly up to them, to hide amid their leaves, to reside in them. She would make herself part of them. She felt herself bend and sigh with them; she felt buds and soft green leaves at the tips of her extremities. She was out of reach of Uncle Henry then. He could not touch her then. She was a tree. There were trees called Dorothy all over the hillsides.

In summer the corn came up and they would lie down between the rows. Henry brought a sack along for her to lie on. So the dirt wouldn't show, and she would look away from his face and up at the underside of the corn and see the fluted ridges of its leaves, the dance of the low afternoon sun through them. The hiss and rattle of the wind in the corn seemed to call her name.

Sometimes he would call her back. He would try to make her speak. She couldn't even hear what he said. You stink, Henry, she thought. You got wrinkles all over. You farmer. You stink like a hog.

"Do you love me, Dorothy?" he asked her.

"Course I do," she told him.

Manhattan, Kansas-1882

In a show of rebellion, Adolf decided to run away from home. Somehow Alois learned of these plans and locked the boy upstairs. During the night, Adolf tried to squeeze through the barred window. He couldn't quite make it, so took off his clothes. As he was wriggling his way to freedom, he heard his father's footsteps on the stairs and hastily withdrew, draping his nakedness with a tablecloth. This time Alois did not punish him with a whipping. Instead, he burst into laughter and shouted to Klara to come up and look at the "toga boy." The ridicule hurt Adolf more than any switch, and it took him, he confided to Frau Hanfstaengl, "a long time to get over the episode."

Years later he told one of his secretaries that he had read in an adventure novel that it was proof of courage to show no pain. And so "I resolved not to make a sound the next time my father whipped me. And when the time came-I can still remember my frightened mother standing outside the door-I silently counted the blows. My mother thought I had gone crazy when I beamed proudly and said, 'Father hit me thirty-two times!' " -John Toland, Adolf Hitler, as quoted in For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing by Alice Miller

Dorothy and Emma, her little ally, came to be called the Furies, or the Kindly Ones. The schoolteachers called them that. The schoolteachers knew Greek.

The teachers made sure no other children sat near the Furies. If a child did, and she had nice long hair, it would be tied to the back of her chair in so many knots that the hair would have to be cut off. Pockets were found full of ink. Cowpats were placed on the seats of chairs. The Furies talked to each other, loudly, while the teacher, Mr. Clark, spoke. At least Mr. Clark was better-looking than Henry. Dorothy hated him, too. The Furies developed a horrible screeching laugh that they used together. The other children went still with fear.

The schoolteachers knew Greek and that gave them the right to beat children. The boys, that is, were regularly beaten. It was thought to be good for them. Toughen them up. Some boys, the timid ones, were very difficult to beat, because they didn't do anything wrong. Even the teachers thought they were sissies.

"Can't stand a kid without any gumption," they might say. "That Jenks needs a hiding, just to wake him up."

And the chance would finally come. Somebody would throw a spitball, and blame Jenks. Mr. Clark would pretend to believe him. Mr. Clark was kind. He believed that beating Jenks would be for his own good, to make him less different from the other boys.

"Why did you do it, Jenks?" Mr. Clark asked, silkily. The other children squawked with laughter. The Furies screeched. They all knew the game that was being played.

"I did not do it, Sir," said Jenks, appalled.

"Did he do it, class?" asked Mr. Clark.

"Yes!" the class shouted.

It was very gratifying. Jenks began to cry. "But I didn't, Sir. I didn't do it!"

"Why should you be treated any different than anyone else, Jenks?" Mr. Clark asked. "Jenks, I think we better go to the Principal's office."

There was a theatrical gasp from the children. Jenks was going to get the Strap. The children terrified themselves deliciously with tales of the Strap. They said it had spikes on the end. It was a dark and terrible thing. Jenks began to blubber with fear. "Mr. Clark," he begged, his voice a whine.

"Angela. Take charge of the class, please." Angela was Class Monitor, a two-edged sword, who led the mayhem when he was out of the room, and then organized the tidying up before he came in, so that he did not have to deal with it. He knew that. The class knew he knew that. The class knew he secretly approved of a bit of mayhem as long as it was kept absolutely hidden.

Angela sat on the teacher's desk. "Jenks, getting the Strap. I never. I never would."

"They won't give him the Strap," someone said, knowingly. Jenks's grades were too good.

"They have to now, Mr. Clark said he would, and it would look too bad if he didn't. Who else do we want to have the Strap?"

Dorothy barked out a laugh and stood up. She looked at them all with undisguised scorn. "All of you. All of you little smarty-pants. You all think it's so great. I'd like to take you all and whip your asses."

Silence.

Jenks came back into the room with a face the color of sandstone from weeping. He couldn't sit down. But the class didn't laugh at him or tease him. They didn't lean forward whispering out of the corner of their mouths, asking him about the exploit. Something was wrong. The class looked cowed and silent. "Thank you, Angela," Mr. Clark said. He thought perhaps that Angela had simply kept them firmly in line.

Or maybe, maybe they hadn't thought it was right. Well then, if Jenks didn't do it, they should have told me the truth.

That Dorothy Gael, the children thought. We got to do something about that Dorothy Gael.

But the terror of the Strap meant there was one unbreakable rule: You never told, you never snitched. They couldn't snitch, and if they did, what would Dorothy do, what revenge would she extract? What, what could they do about Dorothy?

One day in spring term, her ally, Emma, said something. That was what broke it. Nobody knew for certain what it was that Emma said. She whispered it, but it sure was something Dorothy Gael didn't like. Em had trusted Dorothy a bit too much and grown too familiar. She teased her about something, her size, maybe, or her shoes, her dress. Maybe it was something about her family. Evangeline Thomas claimed she heard Emma whisper the word "Henry."

There was the word "Henry" and Dorothy Gael's face twisted up like a painting of the Devil, and her lips pulled back in concentrated hatred, and she slapped Emma across the face. The noise was so loud that Mr. Clark dropped his chalk. Emma wailed in shock.

"Dorothy Gael. Did you hit her?" Mr. Clark knew that this was his chance.

Dorothy said nothing. Her face was puffed out like an adder, arrested in an expression of utter rage and turmoil that unmanned Mr. Clark for a moment. He had never seen an expression like it on a child's face.

"Did anyone see what happened?" Mr. Clark asked.

That's when it broke. "No," said Angela, the two-edged sword. Her arms were folded. She had decided. The time had come. "But Dorothy is always doing things like that."

"She picks on people."

"She makes Amy Hugson give her money, and if she doesn't she hurts her real bad."

"She put cowpat all over Tommy's face."

"She hits people all the time."

In chorus, like a Greek tragedy.

"Dorothy Gael, is all of this true?"

The terrible head turned toward him. Not a Fury, he thought. A Gorgon. A glance turns to stone.

"Why are you asking me, Clark?" the child said. No "Mister," just a hard, blunt last name like in a bar room.

The child was smiling at him. "Everything I say is a lie. I got to lie all the time."

Mr. Clark was thinking he had never seen the like of it for pure evil.

Dorothy was thinking: My uncle does that to me every day in the dirt. Is that the truth you want to hear?

"Dorothy. You're going to come with me to the Principal's office."

There was no gasp, just silence. The children were almost sorry then. Girls did not get the Strap. This was a real change. Girls keenly felt the distinction of Straplessness both as a privilege and a penance. In part, they wanted to be beaten because it was an approved achievement that was denied them. But now that it was happening, the change, the revolution, was shocking. They were too young to have seen many changes.

"Let's go then," said Dorothy Gael. She almost sounded bored. As she walked up the aisle, she bumped her hips from side to side to say, That's what I think of you all.

The children had another shock. Mr. Clark boxed her ear. "You stop acting up," he said. The child stared back at him stony-faced. What else you going to do? the expression seemed to ask, as if she were invulnerable.

Mr. Clark marched her to Professor Lantz's office. There had to be a Principal and he had to be a man, so that there could be a Strap.

"I think the time has come to give Dorothy Gael what she's been asking for," said Mr. Clark.

The Principal was older, fatter, with ridiculous gray whiskers that went from one end of his face to another. He wore checked trousers. He leaned forward in his chair and adopted a smooth and soothing voice that was supposed to sound wise.

"Dorothy. I think you know why this is being done. You know the sorts of things you've been doing. This is happening because the other children have finally decided that they have to turn to us to discipline you. Are you sorry for what you have done?"

"No," said Dorothy.

The Principal sighed and looked at Mr. Clark and his female assistant, Mrs. Warren.

"You've brought this on yourself, Dorothy."

"Can we just get it over with?"

There had to be a woman present. The Principal had already taken legal advice. And he could not beat a little girl across her bottom. The proprieties had to be observed. It had to be across the hand-or the wrist if the child tried to pull away. The wrist was far more painful. All the children knew it was up to them not to pull their hands away.

"Hold out your hand."

Dorothy presented it. Mrs. Warren grabbed the fingers and held them flat. The eyes behind Mrs. Warren's spectacles were like tiny pebbles. The Principal struck, using a one-inch-wide leather Strap. It sounded worse than it was. He didn't strike too hard at first. He looked into the child's eyes for some sign of contrition. All he saw was rebellion. He struck again, looking this time for pain. The face went red, but there was no surrender. He hit her ten times. The hand was released.

Her eyes were full of heart-stilling hatred.

"One day," the child whispered, "I'm going to be bigger than you are and I'm going to break your nose."

"The other hand," said the Principal. He got more satisfaction this time. The face went red on the first stroke, and involuntarily, Dorothy tried to pull away. She decided she could not absorb the pain after all. She began to struggle; her hand and wrist darted about. All right then, be it on you, thought the Principal. The Strap lashed her about the wrist. Welts and little purple dots showed on the skin. He had to stop after another ten. They had never given more than ten to any child.

Dorothy Gael's face was puffed out like a serpent's, but she held her tears. Her hands were claws. Professor Lantz looked at her, panting. They all looked at her. With immense effort, Dorothy Gael managed to smile.

"What do we do now?" asked Mr. Clark, who realized that the punishment had done no good.

The Principal shook his head. "Take her back."

The child walked ahead of Mr. Clark down the hall. He could see her hunched and tense, determined not to cry. He had to hand it to her. She was tough. They made them tough in Kansas. She stopped just outside the classroom door.

"Open the door, Dorothy," he said.

"I can't," she answered him, with mere impatience. How stupid are you? she seemed to say. My hands have been beaten raw.

Mr. Clark understood then that they had made a terrible mistake, a tactical error. They had not punished Dorothy Gael. He saw her gather herself in. He opened the door and watched her enter in triumph.

She was smiling, beaming, and she held up both hands in triumph, both arms raised so that all the class could see the welts and the blood.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked them in a silky voice she had learned from the teachers. "There's nothing they can do to me. There's nothing any of you can do to me."

The class and Mr. Clark understood then that they had created a monster. And monsters have to be appeased.

Little Emma, the ally, had been whipped into line. She had learned never to tease Dorothy again and she knew that she was nothing without Dorothy. The second Fury was more than content to be Dorothy's lieutenant. And the teacher and the class let the Furies talk, and they let the Furies laugh. Angela began to lose power. Mr. Clark was helpless. Teaching became impossible. He dreaded going into the classroom. He knew he had failed the children, failed to protect them, and they saw no reason now to take him seriously. They all began to call him Clark, last name only. He became ill.

That's how they got the Substitute Teacher. The children knew the Substitute was not a real teacher because he was so soft. He had a round and smiling, handsome face, and he was young, only about ten years older than them. He had a lovely voice, very warm and soft and beguiling, and his movements were small and neat and quick. He wore a straw boater. He was like nothing the children of Kansas had seen.

He was, it turned out, an actor from New York. He told them about a play he had written called The Maid of Arran and he was touring with it and playing the lead role.

"Of course," he chuckled, "the handbills can't say written and directed and starring all the same person, so the posters say that the actor is called George Brooks."

What is your name? What is your name? all the children asked in chorus.

He chuckled, pleased. "Frank," he said.

You couldn't call a teacher by his first name!

"No!" the class chorused, laughing. "What's your last name?"

He told them, and Dorothy misheard. She thought his last name was Balm. Frank Balm. It was a meaning name.

"Honest Ointment!" shouted Larry Johnson, as if it were a quack medicine, and the actor bent forward with laughter.

"The original and genuine article. Every bottle is signed," grinned the Substitute. He sounded just like a hawker.

He lit a cheroot. In class, he lit a cigar. He sat on the desk and crossed his legs at the ankles, and he leaned back to let a serpent of cigar smoke rise up from his lips. There was a frisson of real excitement from the class, and the children looked at each other, eyes goggling.

"My other occupation," he continued, satisfied with the progress of the smoke, "was inventing chickens. I would breed new kinds of hen. My hens won awards. I even wrote about them. My new kind of Hamburg hen." He made a certain motion that may have been like a hen, or like something else. The children weren't sure what, except that it looked a little racy and made them laugh.

The Substitute had dash. He smelled of New York, he smelled of money, and he didn't care that teachers weren't supposed to smoke. He was small, what the children called a squirrel, but he was a nice squirrel. An unspoken agreement passed in silence around the class. As long as he doesn't try to make us do anything stupid, we'll be nice to this one.

Dorothy fell in love with him. My parents were actors, she wanted to tell him. They were like you.

She whispered the name to herself, all the way home. Frank, she thought, Frank, Frank, as her uncle put his hands on her and then moved them away again in fear. In summer evenings, there was too much light; they could be seen from too far away. Sometimes Uncle Henry didn't do anything, except smile and pat her knee. Tonight was one of those nights. All the trees seemed to whisper in gratitude. Could she plant a tree and call it Frank?

Frank, she whispered as she fried sausages. She thought of his smooth hands, his one clean suit, his funny hat, his groomed moustache, his light and pleasing tenor voice. She thought of his kind and handsome face. His name seemed to sum up everything that was missing from her life.

Frank, she thought, as she lay down that night. She thought of him, and she thought of her own unworthiness, and tears stung the lower edge of her eyes. It was as if she were in a boat cast adrift, never to come ashore to some green and happy land, where people laughed and everything was beautiful. She herself had cast the boat adrift, and there was no going back. Now she would never get home. Now she would never be where Frank was. He was too good for her. She began to hate him just a little. And said his name again.

The next day, the Substitute brought in a thick red book.

"How many of you," he asked them, "can speak Ottoman Turk?"

The class looked back at him in silence.

"Well, this is a book called the Redhouse Osmanli-English Dictionary, and it tells me what words are in Turkish. How many of you know anything about Turkey?"

Stupid question.

"Uh-you eat them at Thanksgiving," said Larry Johnson. The class laughed, somewhat shyly, because they knew they were ignorant. The Substitute smiled, too, lightly, happily.

"Turkey is a wonderful country," said the Substitute, his blue eyes going pale with wonder. "The Turks worship in huge domed buildings called jamis, bigger than any cathedral. Vast domes, with pigeons flying around inside and carpets on the floor and fountains where the faithful wash before worshiping. They have wonderful tiles on the walls, all blue and green. And the sultans have many wives and many concubines, so many that they all live together in beautiful prisons which no man may enter-or he'll be killed. In the palaces there are special fountains where executioners wash their swords."

This was very racy stuff indeed. The class was fascinated.

"Ask me a word in Osmanli," he whispered.

There was a shuffling and a shrugging of shoulders and birdlike exchange of nervous giggles.

"What's the word for sunflower?" asked Angela, who was brave.

"Moonflower," said the Substitute promptly, smiling with anticipation. He didn't have to look it up.

The class laughed, partly in relief that this was going to be fun, and partly from the pleasant strangeness of another language. It was like a mirror that reflected things backward.

"They pronounce it 'aychijayee,' " he said and turned and wrote it on the blackboard. "It's the Arabic alphabet," he explained.

They asked him the word for hen and the word for school. Dorothy Gael put up her hand.

"What's the word," she asked, shyly, "for home?"

The Substitute blinked and then his face went soft. Just answer the question, thought Dorothy.

"Ev," said the Substitute. "Ev means 'home.' "

"What's your name in Turkish?" asked Larry Johnson, grinning.

The Substitute smiled, spun smartly on his heel and wrote, without hesitation. Then he pronounced the word.

The class laughed in unison. "Ooze?" they asked.

He made a kind of embarrassed swallowing gesture. He pronounced it again. This time it sounded more like "Uz." "It means 'frank' in Turkish. And Frank's my name. It means a lot of other things as well. It means 'real and genuine.' It means 'pure and unadulterated.' It means 'kernel and cream,' and it means 'self.' It's the root word for 'yearning' and for 'homesickness' and for all the things that people want. It also happens to be the original name of the Turks. They were a tribe called the Uz, or the Uzbecks. Or the Oz, and they came out of the wilderness."

Dorothy was suddenly hauled out of herself by a gust of childish interest. "You mean like the Indians?" she blurted out, her voice loud and lacking in grace.

The class laughed until the Substitute, the full power of his smile trained on Dorothy, said, "Very like the Indians. They were desert nomads who lived in tents. They came out of the East and the North, they came out of the desert, and they conquered the Greeks and they conquered the Arabs. Turkey is a country where the Indians were the settlers. The Indians won."

He held up the book called Redhouse, like Red Indians, and he said, "And this is the Oz-English Dictionary."

The Substitute got bored just as quickly as the children did. The fire for Oz went out of his eyes, and he began to talk about other things. He told them the story of his play. He told them how it had run out of money, and how he was now "resting." They chuckled at his joke. "Mind you, actors are always resting. That is the attraction of the profession."

The class tested him. They mocked his New York accent. "I say, I am an actor from Noo Yawk."

He laughed. They waited. It wasn't a false laugh-that would have showed he was pretending to think it was funny so he wouldn't have to do anything about it. He didn't imitate them back, so he wasn't sarcastic or mean. And he didn't tell them it was wrong to make fun of people just because they were different, so he wasn't a pompous fool. Instead, he genuinely seemed to think it was funny.

He laughed and looked a bit mystified.

"Why," he asked, "is it that people laugh?" He asked it in wonder.

Was it a trick question? It seemed to be a pretty dumb one.

"Cause something's funny?" ventured one of the girls.

"Yes, but what do we mean by funny? I mean, what is funny?"

It was the sort of question a little kid about five would ask. Unanswerable. It was a real question, one the Substitute himself had no answer for.

Suddenly the Substitute was looking at Dorothy. He remembered her question about Indians, about home. It was as if he had recognized a kindred spirit. The look he gave her was questioning. He wanted a mystery solved, and he wanted to know more about her. The look, confiding and sincere, alarmed Dorothy. It was not unlike the look that Uncle Henry gave her.

"Dorothy," the Substitute asked. "Why do people laugh?"

"To show who's boss," said Dorothy Gael.

The smile of the Substitute slipped. "Yes, but for what other reason?"

Dorothy considered. "Sometimes it scares people."

"But your parents, why do they laugh?"

"My parents are dead," said Dorothy.

The nice squirrel looked stricken. "I'm so sorry."

"Why?" asked Dorothy. She was suddenly impatient with the Substitute. "I'm not sorry. Can't hardly even remember them. Nobody laughs around our place anyway."

"Nobody laughs?"

"Life's too hard," shrugged Dorothy. She wanted to shrug away her love of him. She hated his dazzle. The love hurt. "The hogs don't laugh, why should we?"

You stupid squirrel, Dorothy thought. You got a face like a pillow.

"That's a terrible thing," said the Substitute.

"Shut up," said Dorothy.

"Dorothy," said the Substitute, "that's very rude."

"Shut your squirrel's face up," said Dorothy. Is that rude enough for you to get my meaning?

The Substitute looked straight at her and looked sad and wise, and he smiled. "You're too old for this class, aren't you, Miss Gael?"

That made Dorothy afraid. The fear gathered strength and speed like a rockface slipping from a mountain. Dorothy was stricken with terror. No, she thought, I'm not old, I'm not too old.

The Substitute thought she was surprised at being treated with courtesy. He thought, quite rightly, that no one had ever been courteous to Dorothy before, but it was fear that made her go still. Dorothy was realizing that at nearly thirteen, she was almost an adult. At fifteen, two years from then, she would leave and go to work. As a child, she had power. She knew that as an adult, fat and ugly and slumped in dirty clothes, she would have none. Her childhood was almost over and she could not remember ever being happy.

"Could you do something for me, Miss Gael? Would you mind leaving the class?"

Dorothy began to grin a crooked grin. Oh, yes, you want to get rid of me that easily?

But he held up a hand. "I've got an idea for an assignment that I want you to work on. I want you to go into the bookroom and just sit quietly and write something. It doesn't have to be long. But it can be about anything you like. Anything at all."

Dorothy stood up, still grinning crookedly. She had been cast out before. She took pencil and paper. "I'd do anything to get out of here," she said.

"Thank you, Miss Gael. Take as long as you like."

Outside, Dorothy thought: So why on earth should I go to the bookroom? Stupid squirrel. Stupid groundhog.

Then she thought: Where else do I have to go? Only home. And I don't want to go home. I hate home. I'd rather stay here, but I hate it here, and everyone here hates me. I hate everybody and everything.

She went to the bookroom. Mrs. Warren glared at her. "Teacher sent me here," said Dorothy. There was one table and shelves of spare textbooks. Proud as they were of their schools, even the people of Kansas could not call this a library.

But it still smelled of books and varnish and sunlight. Sunlight came through the window, fierce and hot, Kansas sunlight, parching. It was warm and airless, and Dorothy felt sleepy. She wished she had come here before, to lay down all her cares. She bowed her head, to the table. She wanted to stay just here, in this one place, and never leave it.

Write something, he had said. Write about what? Write about all the kids who hate me? Write about how stupid little Emma is and how she follows me around because I scare people? Shall I write about how I am God's worst sinner, and how I know I am going to go to Hell and that that is the only reason I don't kill myself, because I see the Devil when I sleep at night, and that I smell Uncle Henry around my mouth all day long, and that nobody loves me. Not even God. Should I write that God doesn't love me? Or do I write about how beautiful you are and how I know how ugly I am and how you could never have anything to do with me?

But she found what she wanted to write about very close to the surface. She wrote about it, weeping. And then she dried her eyes and found she wanted someone to see it, just so that someone would know there was a bit more to Dorothy Gael than blows and bad blood.

She walked back into the classroom, hugging the paper to herself. She walked up to the Substitute's desk.

"That was quick, Miss Gael. Have you written something?"

Wordlessly, she passed it to him, a whole page both sides, and she stood over him and watched him as he read.

What he read was this:

TOTO

I have a little dog called Toto. He is a terrier which means that he has short wiry hair and is gray. He waits for me every day when I come home. When he sees me he comes running. He jumps up and down. He wiggles and nitters and wants me to pet him. I say to him "Good Toto, good boy." And he nitters again because he knows his name. We walk home together. He loves chasing sticks. I throw sticks for him, and he brings them back to me and drops them at my feet. When I throw them, he runs and runs, flat out. He even runs when I don't throw sticks. He runs all over the fields, yipping. It is like he is saying hello to everything. He chases the quail, but he never hurts them. He runs all over the hills. He runs and comes back to me and runs again. I can hear him barking.

I get home and Aunty calls hello and tells me what's for supper and I tell her all the things I did that day. So I fetch the water for Uncle Henry's bath, and Aunty Em says I can go and play with Toto. So we go out into the fields, for hours and hours and I sit down and eat an apple that Aunty Em give me, and Toto and I sit down, on top of a hill where I can see all the farm. Toto sits on my lap, and I scratch his ears and his neck under the collar. He licks my hand, and he goes to sleep on my lap. He has a cold wet nose. He goes to sleep with his nose against my arm. At night, I give him his supper in a red bowl. I fix him oatmeal and egg and a bit of jerky that Aunty lets me have for him.

I did not call him Toto. That is the name my mother gave him when she was alive. It is the same as mine.

That was where Dorothy had to stop writing.

The Substitute went very still and quiet. Dorothy knew he had finished reading, but he didn't say anything. Dorothy guessed that it wasn't very good. Nothing was very good, but that was as good as she could make it. So he had to say something.

He coughed and still didn't look up at her, and he said in a very rough voice, "Thank you, Dorothy."

Then he managed to look up and Dorothy saw that his face looked horrible and that he was trying not to cry. "I'm very glad," he murmured, "that you have something to love as much as that little animal."

You stupid, stuck-up, New York freeloader. You skinny little balloon-faced squirrel.

"I don't have a dog!" Dorothy shouted. Her voice went thin and screeching, and she kept on shouting, as loud as she had ever shouted, shouted to bring the walls down. "I don't have a dog because Aunty Em killed him! He was the only thing I got to take with me from home and just 'cause he barked and chased the hens, she killed him, and she didn't even tell me, so for years and years every time I heard a dog bark I thought it was Toto, and I run and I run after him, calling out his name, and she heard me do that and she never said nothing, she just let me call, because she hates me, she makes me work, and she never feeds me 'cause there's never any food and I'm always hungry and I don't have nothing and she never gives me nothing, and I can't say anything."

The Substitute was on his feet and the class gaped in amazement. The child had gone hysterical, just as suddenly as a roll blind when it snaps up. He tried to take her in his arms.

He tried to take her in his arms and she screamed. It was a horrible sound, a sound like a spaniel caught in a bear trap, a horrible wrenching yelp that turned into a thin, piercing, seagull wail, and she pushed the Substitute away.

"And every day Uncle Henry does it to me, he pushes me up against a wall or down into the dirt, and takes up my dress and he does it to me, with his thing, he does it to me!"

The other children heard. The Substitute gathered her up and tried to bundle her out of the room, but she fought. She pummeled him about the face. His glasses broke. "You stupid, stupid squirrel. Why did you have to come here? You stupid, stupid man!"

And then the great galumphing gal curled up onto the floor and wept like a baby.

She tried to dig a hole in the floor. Her hands were gouging at the varnished wood. She curled up smaller and tighter and tried to dig, her eyes closed, her mouth closed, like a mole, and when he tried to stop her, when he grabbed her wrists she fought and was as strong as he was. Finally he let go, and she went still. She went still, making a small, squeezed, wheedling little sound.

"If she gets up, keep her here!" he told the class. He turned and ran. He heard his flat feet clatter in the corridor, and he felt his bad heart beat. At first the Principal didn't believe him.

"Collapse? Dorothy Gael? That girl has the constitution of an ox."

"Even an ox can die of heartbreak," said the Substitute. "There's been something terrible going on. She shouted it out, and all the children heard."

"Did they indeed? What's she been doing, stealing peaches? All right, Mr. Baum, I'll come and see."

She was still there on the floor, no longer wailing, but shivering, and she had stuck her thumb in her mouth. Professor Lantz walked in and one of the children giggled. They were all biting their nails.

"DeEtta," the Principal said to his assistant, "take the children out into the yard, please."

"Come on, children, there's nothing more to see here," said Mrs. Warren as the children gaped in wonder.

"What she said!" breathed out one of the girls.

The Principal looked up and waited until the children had left. He was taking Dorothy's pulse rate. It was a scientific thing to do.

"All right, Mr. Baum. What did she say?"

The Substitute found he couldn't say it. He had had a delicate upbringing. The Substitute could feel his cheeks roasting with embarrassment. He sighed and hissed with the difficulty of even finding words for it.

"Out with it, Mr. Baum, there are only us men here."

"She says that her uncle has relations with her."

For just a flicker, as if time had blinked, Professor Lantz went still.

"I mean, what she actually said was that he pushed his thing up her." Frank Baum felt his voice suddenly shudder and go weak. He was nearly in tears.

"Buck up, man," said Professor Lantz. "It doesn't surprise me. Dorothy Gael is quite capable of imagining anything. She said this in front of the other children?"

"Yes," said the Substitute, overwhelmed by the horror of it.

"Dorothy Gael," said the Principal, as if the child were not curled up under his hands, "is a very wicked creature. At times she almost convinces me of the truth of demonic possession. She has said before, herself, that she lies about everything. She is capable of uttering any untruth and, I'm afraid to say, of thinking up all manner of foulness by herself. You do not know the girl, Mr. Baum." The Principal was fat and had to grunt as he stood up. Without realizing it, he made a gesture of wiping his hands.

"We'll get your relative, Dr. Lyman, in to have a look at her. And then we will bundle her up and send her home and ask her never to come back to this school."

The Substitute followed him out of the room glancing back and forth between him and the girl. "Are you sure? Are you sure you should send her home?"

"Where else does she belong, Mr. Baum?"

"Whatever else may be true, she is desperately unhappy there, Professor Lantz. Please! Look at her! What would make a child try to dig her way into the floor?"

"I don't know," said Professor Lantz, looking back with a half smile. "Perhaps a handsome young actor from New York."

The Substitute found that dismay was turning to anger. You are going to blame me for that in there? "What," the Substitute asked, drawing himself up, "what if what she said is the truth?"

Professor Lantz stopped smiling and his gaze went steely.

"There must be a reason for it!" exclaimed the Substitute.

"The only reason," said the Principal, "is fantasy. Fantasy is pretty unhealthy as a general rule. I will remind you, Sir, that you are an itinerant actor invited here to teach class for a few days at the suggestion of Dr. Lyman. You do not know Dorothy Gael, nor her guardians, the Gulches. You could not hope to meet more God-fearing or civic-minded people. Her uncle takes her to and from Manhattan every day, the distance of four miles each way, simply to bring her here since her last school failed to effect any improvement. She gets the best care her people can afford. Particularly since she must be a very great trial to them. And I am afraid, Sir, that we will not be requiring your services tomorrow. After creating that incident in there I think you can see why. Cigar smoke and all."

The Professor waved his hand in the air as if to wipe away the stench of smoke, of actor, of fantasy.

Dr. Lyman arrived, with a weary glance at his worthless young cousin. "Sexual hysteria," he pronounced, having heard the story from Professor Lantz. "There's not much I can do for her, except take her home. Which under the circumstances I will do gratis. Not my normal policy." He glanced up again at the actor. "Frank, perhaps you would care to assist."

"I will ride back with her," said the Substitute.

"No," said the Doctor. "You will not."

They got the great lump of a girl to stand. She really was huge, the size of a grown woman and stronger than most boys her age. The Substitute took her hand, and she grasped his firmly, but he had the feeling she did not know who he was. The flesh on her face hung dead and limp and yellow. She was quite tame. She stepped up onto the Doctor's coach as if somnambulating. The effect was curiously ladylike. She sat tall and straight. The face had a faraway expression, almost refined, and the Substitute had time to see that the face was beautiful. With the anger and the pain fallen from her, Dorothy Gael would have been a beautiful woman.

And then the child murmured, "Frank. Frank."

And the Substitute thought: Oh no. They were right.

"Frank," she said again, in a faraway, failing voice, and it was the voice of a little, little girl, calling for a story.

Dr. Lyman, his fearsome host, glared at the Substitute and raised an eyebrow and clucked with his tongue and shook the reins, and the coach swept around in a gracious circle. With the wheels spinning faster, making patterns across each other's faces, the coach sped away down Poyntz.

The Substitute turned and walked back toward the classroom. It was nearly dark now.

Was it his fault? It must have been his fault. He thought of his cigar and his stories and leaning on the desk, and he felt like a fool, a fool of a show-off actor. Damn, he murmured. Damn. And he needed the money, too.

He walked back into the classroom. It was silent and smelled of children and warm, dead wood. He gathered up his hat and his umbrella and sighed and opened the door to go. He looked back to check if he had left anything behind. On the desk there was a piece of paper.

He picked it up and read it again, and he was sure; he knew that he had been right, that the child had told the truth. He read it and telt the pit open up under his feet.

"Oh, mercy," he said aloud.

A place where no one ever laughed except to frighten or to crow victory, a place without love, a child who had no love, except when she dreamed that she still had a dog.

"How could they?" he said aloud, looking about him in anger. She was telling the truth and they were all determined not to believe her. The horror of it rose up and choked his gentle soul. "I wish I could do something, Dorothy," he whispered. "I wish there was something I could do."

He stared at the piece of paper and nearly let it drop. Then he folded it up and put it in his pocket with its names-Dorothy, Em, Henry, Toto. He picked up the red book of Osmanli, the language of Oz. Then he moved on. The door closed behind him and his footsteps echoed down the Kansas corridor.

Comdale, Ontario, Canada-November 1956-Spring 1957

The picture also opened well in the thirty-two key cities surveyed by Variety, bringing in more money in the first week than such recently successful MGM films as Goodbye Mr. Chips and Idiot's Delight. But the picture didn't have enough legs to justify its cost… The Wizard of Oz cost $2,777,000 and grossed $3,017,000 for the studio. When the cost of distribution, prints and advertising were added to the cost of making The Wizard of Oz, it meant a loss to the studio of nearly a million dollars. The movie edged into the black during its first re-release in 1948-49, when it brought in another $1,500,000; but it did not really make money until it was leased to television…

The film was shown for the first time on 3 November 1956 from 9 to 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. With a 33.9 rating and 52.7 per cent share of the audience, The Wizard of Oz did extremely well-but not as well as it did in 1959, 1964, and 1965. As of July 1975, The Wizard of Oz was in 11th place on the list of the highest-rated movies ever shown on network television. (It was also in 12th place, 14th place, 16th place, 21st place, 23rd place and 25th place.) -Aljean Harmetz, The Making of the Wizard of Oz

In his later years, Jonathan would look at old photographs of the house in Corndale. There would be a kind of electric jolt from the photographs, a cattle-prodding of memory. The photographs were surprisingly small, cracked, rather greasy-looking, with crinkle-cut edges like tiny pies.

In the photographs Jonathan would see his father's old drinking mug and Jonathan would remember its rich brown color and the black etchings of highwaymen printed onto its surface. It was silver around the rim and made everything taste slightly of beer. He would see the wicker basket in which logs were kept next to the fireplace. He would suddenly be able to feel in his fingertips the smoothness of the wicker-work, with its suddenly harsh edges. He would remember how dismayed he was as a child when the basket was displaced from its corner by a new desk.

He would see a brass elephant bell, and he would remember its sound and he would remember the shelving it had been kept on. It stood in a glass display case built into the wall next to the front door. The case went through the wall; its outside was frosted glass. Standing on the front steps, you could see all the treasures kept inside it: a brass ice bucket; a porcelain squirrel that was a souvenir of Algonquin Park. They would be seen as if through a mist.

In the photographs Jonathan would see his parents when they were young. He would see his mother, standing on a pile of dirt in high-heel shoes in the early 1950s. His mother was the picture of Canadian elegance, her yearning for style and urbanity revealed in immaculate hair and dress and the angle at which her cigarette was held. His father was standing beside her, with his shock of Einstein hair. He was young and slim and bare chested. A baby hung suspended from his arms. This was the ground-breaking for the new house in Corndale. Beside them, in swim trunks, with a shovel, there was a rather handsome Scottish-looking man whom Jonathan did not know. Neither, now, did his parents.

His first world. Through all the later changes in his life, Jonathan would remember his childhood as happening in that house. They had moved away from it when he was nine years old, but the interior of the Corndale house was the continent of his infancy.

The photographs would bring it back. He would remember the uncomfortable texture of the gray sofa. It had raised, rough surfaces in the shapes of flowers and vines. They made his skin itch.

He preferred instead to lie on the floor under the ultramodern chairs. He would trace with his finger the snakelike wiggle of the metal strands that supported the cushions. He liked the feeling of being enclosed, hidden, safe.

One of the ultramodern chairs was crimson, the other was bright green, and they stood by a lime-green throw rug that slipped underfoot on the polished pinewood floors which always smelled of wax. There were bookcases made of boards sandwiched between bricks, and on them stood small Indian vases, with bright blue and yellow flowers embedded in the red ceramic.

Jonathan could remember the colors, even though the photographs were black-and-white. This was very strange. Jonathan was colorblind. Except in the strongest light, green and red looked the same to him. Blue and purple were indistinguishable.

So how had the infant been able to see them? Jonathan could remember loving red, a color he could not now perceive.

Love is almost too feeble a word for the rich passion that red had inspired. Red moved the infant Jonathan like music. In his coloring books, everything was red. He wanted the whole world to be red. He tried to make it red.

He would steal his mother's ruby lipsticks and, to her misery, scrawl all over the walls, over the pale pinewood of his bookcase, over the prints of Canadian forest scenes. He alarmed her by painting his fingernails red with her polish. He would rub lipstick all over his face, surprising visitors.

Jonathan loved Indians. They were called Red Men. He had an Indian blanket that was red and a pink piggy bank that looked like Pow Wow the Indian boy. He loved his picture books that were full of figures of Indians, hunting buffalo in the grass or dancing. He would coat them with layers of red-lipstick, jam and Crayola crayon.

It was difficult for Jonathan to imagine now, but he had been a very bad little boy. He was still surprised to hear his aged mother refer to him as a problem child. The person Jonathan remembered being was a horribly polite, cringingly well-behaved child who loved his parents and thought of them as his best friends.

But the photographs showed a burly, tough-looking boy. The Corndale house was growing around him in stages. He would stand chuckling amid its wooden skeleton holding a hammer, a wild destructive light in his eyes. He was a hefty little brute who looked as if he would grow up round and small and hearty. Jonathan had grown up to be tall and thin, distant and mild.

The little thug looked wonderfully happy. Jonathan the adult was tempted to say insanely happy. The eyes sometimes seemed to be stricken with a faraway vision, fogged with wonder. The smile sometimes blazed beyond delight. Something broken would be clutched in his stained and brutish, pudgy fist. The smiles of his parents would be sideways and nervous.

Jonathan needed reminding that Dr. Montemuro in Streetsville had diagnosed him as being autistic.

Jonathan had smiled and Jonathan had rocked. He would sit on the floor cross-legged and rock back and forth for hours. Jonathan the adult could not sit cross-legged at all.

The bad little boy had rocked himself to sleep each night. He threw himself back and forth, until the cot swayed dangerously, wood creaking. His parents said they had built the extension to give themselves a separate room in which to sleep. The rocking was very noisy, particularly as the little boy hummed and keened to himself. The songs would be wild, tuneless, like the crying of a bird, his mother said. He shook his head from side to side as if denying the world. He would fall asleep from sheer exhaustion.

He ripped his sheets. He tore holes in them big enough to crawl through. His mother thought it was his constant nightly exertions. In fact, he tore them quite deliberately with a guilty, almost sexual delight. He would work a small tear in the center and gradually prize it open.

He was trying to make a hole big enough to climb through. It was as though the sheet were a screen that separated him from somewhere else. When the hole was large enough, he would climb through it, hoping to emerge somewhere wonderful. It was a disappointment to him, to find himself still alone in his room. He kept on tearing sheets.

He was subject to fits of blinding rage.

He broke his Indian bow and arrow quite coldly out of hatred for something he did not understand. It was terrible because he had truly loved his Indian bow and arrow. He was stricken with remorse.

"Is that your bow? Your new bow?" his mother demanded, invisible from within the house. He wept as he held it up, like a broken bird.

"Well, this time your father is not going to fix it for you."

He hid under his Indian blanket in the driveway. He knew his father would coast into the driveway, up and over it, over him.

"You stupid child! Don't you ever do that again!" his mother said in alarm, shaking him, her eyes wide and fearful. Jonathan's face was covered in the red crushed juice of berries, as if he were bleeding.

What kind of kid was that? Jonathan asked himself, remembering. And why did he look so happy?

His earliest memory was of being small enough to be bathed in the bathroom sink. He kept striking the warm water, to make it splash over him. "Oooh, lovely warm water," his mother cooed. He understood her. He said something in reply, in the language of childhood, a series of sounds. His mother didn't understand him. Why not?

Jonathan could remember the moment of dismay when the infant realized that he would have to use the same word each time for the same thing. He could remember the horror: he realized the size of the task ahead of him. He became enraged with disappointment. The world should work so that everyone understood out of love, as he did.

Jonathan did not begin to speak until he was three years old. He was angry. He rejected the world out of rage.

The scrawls he made on the walls were writing without words, messages in Crayola and lipstick. "Walt Disney owns Cinderella and Mickey Mouse and Disneyland too," the scrawls would say in the swirling shapes of cyclones.

When Jonathan finally decided to speak, it was in a complete sentence. He had been able to speak all along. Every family has its legends, and this was one his mother was pleased to relate, entertaining visitors.

"I nearly died!" his mother might say, laughing and shaking her head. "Three years without saying a word, and suddenly he asks for a glass of water! After that his nose was never out of a book!" The implication for listeners was that Jonathan's extraordinary verbal skills were somehow brewing in that silence.

Throughout Jonathan's later career as a good little boy, his teachers expressed satisfaction with his ability to write, to speak, to act in schoolroom plays. In the tests they gave to measure potential, Jonathan scored, frankly, at near-genius level on verbal reasoning. On the strength of his verbal reasoning alone, Jonathan kept skipping grades until his skills matched the work load and he fell forever behind in mathematics.

The bad little boy's talents had not been verbal, but lay in the realm of color and shape. He layered strokes of Crayola crayon, fifty-two colors, as if each stroke was the plucking of musical strings. He had masses of plasticine, a nondrying clay, which he would mold and remold, making dinosaurs or Indian tepees that seemed to have been carved out of stone.

Jonathan could remember modeling a head in clay. He was playing at the back of the house, where his father was building a patio. His father was laying large slabs of stone, chipping the edges to make them fit in a patchwork-quilt pattern. For some reason, Jonathan had been given clay, real clay instead of plasticine. Jonathan's father had artistic ambitions as well, which the clay had been meant to fulfill.

And Jonathan was suddenly seized by the idea of clay. Out of it, from nowhere, he worked the head of a caveman. Jonathan loved cavemen, loved the idea of living in rock chambers, wearing hides and talking in grunts.

Jonathan the adult could still remember the caveman's face, his apelike brows, his monkey nose, his hedgehog ears and, above all, his expression. The flesh around his eyes was crinkled, ready to blink in dismay at the modern world into which he had strayed. The lips were half-open, as if the caveman were making up his mind to speak.

The tough little boy had even been sociable, in his own way. Hovering around the edges of the memory was another little boy called Robby Polk, who lived across the field. Jonathan's relationship with Robby was uneasy. Both of them liked to win, but Robby was better at it.

Robby looked at the caveman head and said, "That's lousy."

Jonathan was pleased. He felt he had caught Robby, trapped him into being petty. Jonathan's father had no kiln in which to bake the head. When the caveman finally dried, he split down the middle. Jonathan knew what Robby would say.

"Good," said Robby, and Jonathan knew he had made him look small. He smiled and looked away and pretended Robby was not there.

His mother looked at the caveman head and stroked Jonathan's disordered hair and said, "There are always compensations."

The bad little boy hated most books. He tore up the ones he didn't like. They were written by adults for children. Jonathan knew that not because anyone told him, but because he sensed it in the books themselves. They were not written for children at all. He tore up a library book called Anatole. It was about a French mouse and it told cheese jokes about Camembert and Roquefort. That was a joke for adults. What child would know anything about French cheese? Why write books for children if you knew nothing about them, if you were really writing for adults?

There were honorable exceptions. He loved a book about a monkey, called Curious George. George kept getting into trouble, breaking things. Jonathan also loved a book called Space Cat. It was rather long-winded, and Jonathan would torment himself by forcing his way through the languorous opening. It was about a cat and a space pilot who became friends. They went to the moon and Space Cat had his own spacesuit, with a sausage-shaped piece for his tail. On the moon, there were floating silver globes, full of light, that were alive.

And, Jonathan loved The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

He did not have the real book. His parents did not know that he could read. They read aloud to him and thought he just looked at the pictures. They had bought him a slim, picture-book version. There was a pretty, blond Dorothy and a smiling Scarecrow. The Wizard was shown as several different things, a beautiful woman and a monster. There was only one page that showed a witch, but she soon melted away like all bad dreams.

Jonathan loved a few books and hated the rest. He hated mechanical toys and model cars. Most of all, he loathed television.

In the first place, it was full of murder. Dale Evans would be tied to a chair-horrible violation-and even though he knew Roy Rogers would arrive in time, riding Trigger, it was still terrible. Why, he thought, why watch anything that you hated, telling yourself that it would be all right in the end because it was a TV show? If the only comfort was knowing it was not real, why watch it at all?

He also hated the thing itself. His parents' television stood on four spindly legs. It was as if it could walk, with its one huge unblinking eye. Jonathan had dim memories of seeing a film on that one blind eye, a film in which an alien disguised himself as a television set. Jonathan could imagine, so clearly, the television suddenly lurching toward him, shooting electricity in lightning bolts from its blank screen.

If his parents turned it on and there was a Western or a cartoon, things he was supposed to like, he would scream and run away or howl until it was turned off. His parents, still grateful that he had recently ceased to smear lipstick over everything, would leap forward to turn it off.

But worst of all, everything on television was in black-and-white.

Jonathan loved color. He loved red. He wanted everything in the world to be full of color. So what, the adult Jonathan would often wonder, what had made him change?

In November 1956, Jonathan saw the first broadcast of the film version of The Wizard of Oz. The movie started at 9:00 p.m. and would go on until eleven. Jonathan had never before been allowed to stay up so late. He wore his red-striped pajamas and his red bathrobe. He was covered by his Indian blanket and he leaned against his mother on the gray and itchy sofa. His father passed him a cup of hot chocolate in the brown highwayman mug. Jonathan felt very adult.

His parents were obviously excited themselves. Television was still new. The idea of seeing such a great film for free seemed a wonderful advance. Jonathan understood that the film was something delightful that had happened to his parents when they were young. They talked about it at great length as the commercials unwound. They were a mine of misinformation about it.

They told him that the story was a very old fairy tale that someone had updated and made modern. They told him that the little girl who played Dorothy had only been twelve when she played the part (though that seemed very old to Jonathan).

Then the CBS eye, black and floating against clouds, came up, and a man said in a voice of portent, "CBS presents a Ford Star Jubilee." There were advertisements for cars. Then the talking continued. "…a masterpiece of literature," said the announcer, "which has fascinated children and adults for years, ranks with the great works of all times." An old man talked to a little girl about how her mother had starred in the movie. It went on and on. What TV Guide had not said was that the film itself was only 101 minutes long-but the slot was two hours. Even Jonathan's parents began to shift uneasily.

Jonathan was in a kind of panic. He knew that he would fall asleep soon. Why couldn't they have all the talking after the movie?

A picture of a record sleeve came up. It showed a girl, and-there they were!-the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion! Jonathan squealed and kicked his legs under the blanket.

His parents beamed with pleasure. It was rare to get a reaction from Jonathan that was easily understood. The voice was asking people to write away for a special record album of songs from the film.

"I know a little boy who would like that," his mother said, smiling. And Jonathan went quiet with longing. He didn't dare say yes. Years later, he still regretted that they had never got the record.

Then suddenly it began. There were more clouds, like the CBS eye, and a chorus of voices rising up like a great wind.

Dorothy came running over a hill. She wasn't like Dorothy in his pretty little book. She was large and had dark hair, but as soon as she started to speak, there was something in her voice that soothed Jonathan as he worried. He was worried that it was so different from his book.

Her Aunty Em said a lot more things, and the farm was full of people. There was going to be more story. This was a delight to him, but he also felt betrayed. How could so many things have been left out of his book?

Jonathan remembered liking Dorothy swinging back and forth holding on to a huge barnyard wheel. It seemed like something fun to do. He was excited by her visit with Professor Marvel, who was brand-new and nothing to do with the story he knew at all. Then he grew suspicious. What if the movie was completely different and Dorothy didn't go to Oz at all?

He did not perceive Miss Gulch at all, nor was he badly affected by the threatened death of Toto. Jonathan had never had a pet to love. He had not learned to care for little animals. In fact, to him the eyes of animals seemed cold and alien. They chilled, rather than warmed him. Perhaps also he didn't understand the line about taking the dog to the Sheriff to have him destroyed.

The major disappointment was the cyclone. Jonathan was looking forward to seeing the cyclone almost as much as Oz itself. A few months before, there had been a cyclone warning, a great rarity for Ontario, and everyone had gone out and picked up loose branches and closed the shutters over windows. Jonathan had had to be dragged sullenly back inside the house. He had wanted to stay outside to see it.

But now the cyclone was lost for him amid the black-and-white blur of the television screen.

"There it is," his father said, pointing.

"Where?" demanded Jonathan, becoming angry. He had imagined cyclones as great, solid, spinning things that came from nowhere out of a blue sky. He peered narrow-eyed at the television, seeing only swirling clouds. "I can't see it!" he wailed. He saw Dorothy running, and behind her, beyond the porch of the house, he could just barely make out something moving in the sky. Was that the cyclone?

He forgot his anger when Dorothy woke up inside it. He loved the idea of being warm and safe, cradled in the wind. He loved the chickens flying about inside the storm and the people in a boat, rowing their way through clouds as if through water.

Then there was a lady on a bicycle. It had been a long time since Miss Gulch was on the screen; Jonathan had forgotten all about her. He didn't recognize her. He did recognize what she turned into.

Suddenly, clothes streaming behind her, there was a huge horrible witch riding a broomstick.

He screamed and hid under the Indian blanket.

"Jonathan!" laughed his mother, always taken aback by his susceptibilities.

"Is it gone?" he demanded.

"Yes, yes," said his mother. Jonathan stayed under his blanket. He heard Dorothy screaming, and he screwed his eyes shut.

There was a line in Jonathan's shortened book: "The cyclone set the house down very gently for a cyclone." He had liked that. He knew what it meant. There would be quite a big bump, but not so big that Dorothy would be hurt. He wanted to see the house land so he forced himself to watch. He looked out from under his blanket in time to see the room and the house come to a stop with a tremendous bump. Oh, said Dorothy. Perfect! They had done it perfectly!

Dorothy was in Oz. Jonathan wanted to see the Munchkins and he wanted to see the Good Witch. Most of all he wanted to see her give Dorothy the magic kiss that meant no harm could come to her. Jonathan loved the idea that no harm could come.

Dorothy went toward the door. Jonathan was so excited, he almost had to pee.

"Look," said his father. "This is the part that turns into color. She steps out and everything is in color."

The commentary was an unwarranted distraction. Jonathan knew perfectly well that the television couldn't show color. He was gripped by both joy and edgy suspense. Dorothy peered out through the door. Then she stepped out onto the porch, but he still couldn't see Oz.

"There, that's when it turns into color!" exclaimed his father.

Oz was black-and-white. It didn't matter. Dorothy's eyes were wide and round, and she wandered through a strange gray place full of television mist and giant leaves. Jonathan went breathless and still. And then, there was a floating, silvery globe.

"That's like Space Cat!" cried Jonathan, overjoyed.

The bubble turned into Glinda, the Witch of the North. The magic kiss was to come.

Glinda asked, so very politely, if Dorothy were a good witch or a bad witch. Jonathan loved the idea of good witches. He loved the way Oz people spoke, very polite and slightly addled. When Glinda asked if Toto was the Witch, Jonathan shrieked with laughter and kicked his feet.

"Sssh, Jonathan," said his mother, worried about the way he could get overexcited.

Jonathan loved it that Dorothy had killed the Wicked Witch. It was good that she had not meant to do it, and it was so strange to see the Witch's striped-stocking feet sticking out from under the house, strange in the way that being tickled is strange, slightly fearful and gigglesome at the same time.

"She'll be all squashed and flat," said Jonathan gleefully.

The Good Witch was beautiful, and the Munchkins laughed in high-pitched voices, and Dorothy was a National Heroine because she had saved them. Out came the Munchkins to celebrate. In Jonathan's book they all wore what looked like witch hats, only cockeyed and crumpled and amusing, and they all wore blue and played fiddles. These Munchkins looked different from that-but oh! they were all happy and sang aloud and Jonathan could not tell if they were adults or children. They looked like both. It was a new world, in which adults stayed children and children could be adults.

And they sang. They sang that the Witch was dead, and that they were free of her. No more bad witches, only good and smiling ones, like Glinda.

Then, when everything seemed nicest and happiest, and everyone was singing, there was a boom and a bash and everything was ruined. The Witch was back. The Munchkins ran.

Jonathan emitted a piercing shriek and hid under the blanket again. He screwed his eyes shut and plugged his ears.

This had not been his pretty little book. Glinda explained: this was the sister of the witch who was dead. This was the Witch of the West. Were all witches, even Glinda, sisters?

"Who killed my sister?" the Witch demanded. Jonathan didn't want to hear; he couldn't bear it. "Was it you?" the Witch roared at Dorothy, terrible with hatred, and Jonathan, under his blanket, wailed again. It was wrong to kill, even if it wasn't your fault. How would Dorothy explain?

"No, no, it was an accident, I didn't mean to kill anybody!" said Dorothy.

Why had they put the Witch there? He felt his mother's hand on his shoulder. He peeked out over the edge of the blanket again, and she was still there, swirling with hatred. He screamed again and hid again.

"Jonathan," said his mother, "if you keep this up, I'll have to turn it off."

Jonathan forced himself to come out. He watched, wincing.

The Witch promised death. She promised she would get Dorothy and her dog.

She screamed and cackled and then there was a great booming sound. The Witch exploded and went away, in front of horrified eyes. Jonathan did not learn until years later that in that flash of fire the actress who played the Witch was severely burned.

He stared numbly, bestilled by horror, taking comfort from Glinda's motherly voice. Quietly and gently, she was telling Dorothy about the great and wonderful Wizard of Oz. And then, and then, she kissed Dorothy on the forehead.

He waited for the kiss to stay there, glowing on her forehead. But nothing happened. Gradually Jonathan realized that in the movie, the kiss was not a spell. The kiss would not protect Dorothy. She could be hurt.

It was television, frightening him again.

"It's all right," said Jonathan's mother. "Look, she's off to see the Wizard." But her voice was solemn. Jonathan looked around and his mother's face was pinched and hurt.

Things began to get hazy. Jonathan wasn't rocking himself, but watching Oz was rather like being rocked. When he rocked himself to sleep, Jonathan saw things like Oz, wonderful things, colors and magic.

Half-asleep, he met the Scarecrow. Jonathan loved the Scarecrow the best, like he loved Indians. Nothing would shake his loyalty. He loved the floppiness, the weak ankles, the loud cries, the gentleness. In comparison, the Tin Man looked greasy to him and nasty, and besides he was a machine and machines had no magic for Jonathan. He almost disliked the Tin Man, even though he kept crying out of kindness.

The Witch came back, skulking in a corner, appearing on a roof. Terror jerked Jonathan awake.

She called to the Scarecrow like she wanted to play a game. Then, most dreadful of all, the Witch threw a ball of fire at the Scarecrow, fire to burn him alive. Jonathan's shriek was the most piercing yet. Someone, somewhere, had decided to terrify him. That was what frightened Jonathan most: that it was deliberate. They could have made a movie without a witch at all.

He glimpsed poppies. They were about sleep and he could feel his own limbs go still and heavy. The movie turned into color and he seemed to sink down into it. He sank down and settled very gently, his feet touching solid ground and seeming to spark with life. He ran, into Oz.

He could hear his own running feet, and he could feel cobbles underfoot through the soles of his shoes. The bricks were bright yellow, so bright that it hurt his eyes.

"Wait for me!" he called. And they all turned, Judy Garland and the Scarecrow and the Lion. He caught up with them.

"Can I come too? Can I come too?" he asked them, panting. The fields were bright red, and the sky was full of a white smiling face, and it was snowing too, flowers and snow together, and there was music, grand and happy at the same time.

"Why, of course you can," said Judy Garland.

Jonathan woke up in the morning in his own bed. The room was dim and gray, shadowed by a curtain. Except that at the foot of his bed, there was a flowering of color. He woke and imagined that the Lion and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow were with him. Jonathan could feel the weight of the Scarecrow, not too heavy, against his feet.

Wake up, Jonathan! Judy Garland seemed to say. We're off to see the Wizard!

"Hurray!" cried Jonathan. He threw off his blankets and hurled himself into the cold air. "We're off to see the Wizard!" He ran into the bathroom. His new friends crowded into the bathroom with him.

Dorothy brushed her teeth too, and the Lion used dental floss on his fangs, just like Jonathan's father.

It was November and cold, though it had not yet snowed, and Jonathan ran to sit in his morning place: in front of the ventilator duct by the kitchen door where hot air blasted out. He warmed his hands and feet. The Lion held the tip of his tail near it. The Scarecrow hung back in fear of the heat.

"Don't worry," Jonathan whispered to him. "It's not fire. There's no fire."

It was Sunday, and his father was home. Normally, Jonathan and his father ate Sunday breakfast together. Afterward they would check the boiler in the basement and make sure the water around the sump pump had not frozen and killed Jonathan's fish who lived there. This morning, however, Jonathan heard his father already hammering away in the attic. Jonathan was glad. He wanted to be with the people from Oz.

His mother walked in with a bowl of porridge. "You'll have to hurry this morning, Jonathan," she said. "It's late and you've got Sunday School."

He and his mother and the people from Oz all sat at the breakfast table by the front window. The people from Oz were going to have porridge as well. Jonathan's mother sat down opposite him, smiling with love.

"You fell asleep," she said, sympathetically.

"When?" Jonathan asked.

"Before the end of your movie."

"I did not!" Jonathan had felt very adult, being allowed to stay up late. It was a sign of great childishness to have fallen asleep.

"You did," said his mother, sweetly. She was utterly charmed. He had fought so hard to stay awake.

"I saw the whole movie," he protested.

"Did you?" said his mother. "What happened at the end?"

Jonathan thought back and found he couldn't remember. This was a truly terrible thing; he was sure he had seen the film, but he found he had no memory of the Witch's castle or of the inside of the Emerald City or of Dorothy's going home.

He went very silent. He wished his mother would stop smiling. He hadn't seen it, after all. He had slept through his movie. He would never see all of the story now.

"It will be on again," said his mother.

"I did so see it," he murmured.

He watched the brown sugar melt on his porridge. He liked that. He used it to help himself forget. Then he poured on the milk to cool it. Otherwise it was too hot. The aim was to get all the porridge floating whole on the milk, so that the sugar on top was not washed away. He blew on his porridge, and the friends from Oz blew with him.

He looked up at them, appraisingly. He must have fallen asleep and pulled them into his dream from out of the movie. So when he woke up they woke up with him and were still there, and that's how they joined him. So maybe it was lucky he had slept.

After the porridge, his mother bundled him into the bathroom again and washed behind his ears, which made him squirm, and then she put him into his own gray suit, with his own red bow tie. Then she put him into his mud-colored coat and his cap with flaps that could come down over his ears. She pushed his galoshes over his feet and then sent him off to Sunday School.

There was already a Christmas wreath on the front door, though there was no snow. The house stood on high Canadian foundations, out of the mud. There was a bank of concrete steps leading down from the front door to the earth. Just in front of the steps, waiting like a trap for the unwary, was Jonathan's wagon. His father had made it out of spare bits of wood. The rubber wheels had a suspension system his father had invented out of springs, too sophisticated for Jonathan to appreciate. He only knew that his wagon ran quietly and smoothly.

Jonathan loaded his new friends onto it and then he ran with his silent wagon, ran down the slope of the small artificial hill on which the house rested. The wagon rolled smoothly over the cover of the cesspit, which his mother was always telling him to avoid. He imagined it was a gate into the underworld or an entrance to an underground house, like Peter Pan's. He ran over the cesspit to the front drive and its broad opening through the white fence that enclosed the Corndale house as if it were a ranch. He left the wagon right in the middle of the entrance where he always did, ready to be flattened.

The people of Oz walked to Sunday School with him. He hoped that he would see no one else, just them. The Second Line West became the Yellow Brick Road. The circular tin culverts under the driveways seemed full of secrets.

Jonathan carried his secret into Sunday School. He told no one that the Oz people were with him. They were his friends alone. The Oz people sang "Yes, Jesus Loves Me" to the colored slide that showed Jesus and the words. They sang "Suffer Little Children." They listened to the story of the parting of the Red Sea, and on the way home, they and Jonathan imagined that they were walking between two high magic walls of seawater, pursued by Egyptians. Within the glassy green walls there were giant fish.

The Oz people were with him when his mother undid his bow tie and changed him into his ordinary clothes. They were with him when they ate Sunday lunch, roast goose with roast potatoes. "How did you like the movie?" his father asked Jonathan, having descended from the attic. Jonathan murmured something through a mouthful of food.

"I think he's forgotten it already," said his mother.

In the afternoon, he and his friends went out and played in the mud. Jonathan sank himself as deep as he could into it. It filled the tops of his galoshes. Together with the people from Oz, he made mud pies. They made patties of the wet cold soil. Jonathan had a bottle of poison from the bathroom. It was a bright red bottle of iodine with a skull and crossbones on it. It was a magic spell. Together, he and the Oz people put poison in the mud pies.

"We're going to feed them to the Wicked Witch," whispered Jonathan. He crept through the back door. He kicked off his boots, heavy with mud, and peeled off his smeared and sodden trousers and ran into the kitchen, trailing mud from his hands and socks. He put the mud pies on plates. He thought that mud was like melted chocolate and would go crisp and solid in the refrigerator.

His mother arrived to find her best china coated in mud and Jonathan in wet socks and underpants, shivering and leaning into the refrigerator.

"I'm poisoning the Witch," explained Jonathan. His round face was evil and eldritch. "Those are Poison Pies, so don't eat them!"

"I promise not to eat Poison Mud Pies," said his mother, endeavoring to find it amusing. "Where are your trousers?"

"Um," said Jonathan.

She went to find them. "Oh, Jonathan!" he heard her cry from the back door. She came into the kitchen holding out the trousers, a twist of cloth and mud. "How did you do this?" she demanded. There were wet footprints across her green rug, her polished floor.

Jonathan spent the rest of the afternoon indoors. He rubbed red poison iodine all over his face and lay on the green carpet, closing one eye. The fibers of the carpet looked huge, like trees, and he and the people from Oz walked through them, on their way to see the Wizard.

"Jonathan, wash your face, now," said his mother. He left red face-stains on the lime-green rug. "What are we going to do with you?" his mother asked.

He and the people from Oz hid in the shoebox. It was a great wooden box that filled one end of the corridor just outside the bathroom. He and the people from Oz lifted the lid and crawled inside it and nestled down amid the smells of rubber and leather and socks, the shoes and boots alternately hard and soft underneath them.

"We're going to disappear," Jonathan told the people from Oz. He burrowed down into the boots, piling shoes on top of himself. Later, when his parents began to try to find him, they even opened the lid and looked in and didn't see him.

Jonathan was as invisible as the people from Oz.

All that winter, Jonathan withdrew from the world to be with his friends. They wandered to the woods far down the Second Line West. They walked quickly and quietly, hoping no one would see them, past Billy Tait's house, past Jaqui Foster's house, all the way beyond the house of his parents' friends, the Harrisons. Jonathan looked down at his feet as he walked, as if ashamed, as if frightened of falling. When he thought there was no chance of anyone seeing him, he broke into a run.

Under a gray November sky Jonathan plunged into the forest through the tangle of shrubs and twigs. Inside, the woods were even darker and grayer. The ground was covered with brown leaves amid the smooth trunks of ash and sycamore. There were birch trees with their magical, white-paper bark that the Indians turned into canoes.

They were in Oz. They all sang and danced together, kicking up leaves. They danced along the banks of a tiny branch of the Credit River. Tree roots overhung the bank. Underneath them were secret houses, full of Munchkins. They would come out to join the Oz people, singing "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead." The singing went on amid showers of fallen leaves.

Then, one morning, Jonathan got up and saw that the world had turned white and that the air was full of falling flakes. The last time it had snowed had been nearly a quarter of his lifetime ago. He greeted winter like a friend he had not seen in decades. He ran out in ordinary shoes and flung handfuls of snow into the air. The sky was white.

He loved winter. In the dark, as he lay in bed in the mornings, there would be the comforting sound of the snowplows, rumbling past. His father would have to dig snow out of the driveway before he could leave for work. There would be sliding on the ice and toboggan rides. The inside of the living room windows was coated in great leafy patterns of frost. Jonathan and the Oz people sat at the breakfast table, wandering among them, in a forest of frost. As soon as breakfast was over, he would run outside.

Jonathan loved sunlight on snow, and he loved the mystery of ice. One day he and the people from Oz walked on the frozen surface of the ditches, imagining water babies shivering underneath the ice. The surface cracked and Jonathan fell in, soaking himself in ice water to the knees. He kept on walking, enchanted by the world he and his Oz friends walked through.

There were high billowing clouds. Cold made them seem solid, like icebergs in the air. Television had once told Jonathan that there were things in the air called Mushroom Clouds. People saw them and died.

Jonathan pretended that Corndale was under threat from advancing Mushroom Clouds. Jonathan was the only person who had a coat made of Jet-Age Plastic. He was protected, no harm could come to him. He walked to the gate of each house, walking on the crisp surface of the snow on his numb and frozen feet, pretending to warn them about Mushroom Clouds. He forgot about the cold.

There were canyons of ice overhead. White light swung around him like a sword. The people from Oz said that each sparkle of light on the snow was a fairy. The snow plains of Canada glittered with them, were spangled with laughing souls. If all the snow had taken to the air at once, with cries of joy, Jonathan would not have been surprised. He stood and looked at the snow, his trousers drenched, his feet and the water in his eyes ringing with cold.

When he got home, his feet were frostbitten. He howled as his toes were lowered into a basin of lukewarm water. There were sad, sick patches of gray on his skin. His mother wept. "Jonathan. Why didn't you come inside?"

She had to go to the store for ointment. Jonathan listened to the car murmuring out of the front drive.

Then he went to the new extension and took out a stepladder.

"Sssh!" he told the people from Oz. "This is the best." He climbed up the ladder and pulled himself into the attic.

It was cold inside the attic, with a single bare light and the smell of raw wood. The underside of the roof was coated in thick sandwiches of paper stuffed like mattresses. Some of it was wound up in rolls. Jonathan sat on them. There were wooden joists, and between them the back side of the plasterboards, still with writing on them.

"Careful," Jonathan warned the Oz people. "You can only stand on the boards." Fearful, grateful for his presence, the Oz people tiptoed toward him, balancing delicately.

He reached out for them. He was shivering and his feet were bandaged. He was not aware of what happened next. He must have slipped. Very suddenly, he was somersaulting through space. There was a lovely crisp sensation of breakage, as if falling through potato chips.

Then he was lying facedown, amid dust, bouncing slightly as if dropped by a cyclone.

He had fallen through the ceiling. He screamed in terror at the idea. By sheer chance he had fallen onto a roll of wire netting that was used to hold plaster to walls. There was blood.

Then he looked up and saw a rough and broken silhouette of himself punched through the smooth white surface of the ceiling. It was like Bugs Bunny running through a door.

When his mother got back, she arrived to hear peals of laughter. She went in the extension's front door and found Jonathan, bruised and bloody, looking up at the hole he had made and roaring with laughter.

"You fell through the ceiling?" she shouted. She couldn't believe it. "You fell through the ceiling?" Each time she shouted it, Jonathan laughed even louder.

His parents left him alone after that, for a while. His mother discovered that if he was left to do as he chose, he grew quieter and quieter, and more safely housebound. He no longer rocked in place, but he did sing to himself all the time, drawing layer on layer of colors on paper or making castles out of plasticine or sugar cubes that sparkled like snow. Sometimes he spoke to people who were not there.

He had never been happier.

Winter became spring, filling Jonathan with misgiving. Where there had been snow, there was mud, and on the branches of the pussy willows were buds that hung like centipedes. There was a thaw, and Jonathan peered out of the window down the Second Line West toward the schoolyard.

There lay his future, crowded with other children, more outgoing and physically larger than he. He could see them sunbathing, leaning against the white wooden walls of the schoolhouse, or sitting on the steps. He retreated from the window and went back into his room for his afternoon nap.

He imagined that he and his friends went to a circus. There were no fast or terrifying rides in this circus. There was a Ferris wheel, slow and gentle, and the Cowardly Lion was the most fearsome beast among the donkeys and sheep and friendly pigs. Even so, in this gentle circus, someone got hurt. Perhaps it is not possible to tell a story without someone being hurt, without a witch appearing.

The Scarecrow was wounded. Jonathan knew you were supposed to tell an adult as soon as a friend was hurt. He didn't want to tell anyone. He had never told his mother about his friends. If the Scarecrow really was hurt, then he had to. Why didn't he? Jonathan challenged himself. What was he afraid of? Jonathan steeled himself. Feeling fateful, he left his room and went to his mother.

"The Scarecrow caught his penis in a door, but Judy Garland kissed it better," he told her.

His mother was alarmed on several counts. "No, she did not," she said, not appreciating how truthful and dutiful he had been. "It's a lie, and I don't want to hear you talking like that again."

"But he did," protested Jonathan, in a voice that was almost too weak for even him to hear.

"You are going to go outside," said his mother, "and find some other children to play with."

Jonathan found Helen and Matty Quicke. They were sisters who lived two doors down. Helen was the same age as Jonathan. She had a floppy pageboy haircut and there always seemed to be a dirty stain of orange juice around her mouth. Her nose was always running. It was always running, Jonathan's mother said, because her parents didn't feed her properly.

Helen's elder sister Matty took care of both her and Jonathan. She liked to boss people, which meant that if Helen and Jonathan started to argue, she would stop the fight and make a decision. The great thing about the girls was that they understood the point of playing pretend. The point was to believe, not to win. The girls made up rules and stuck to them.

They played House. Jonathan always played Father-they needed a boy for that. They went through elaborate rituals of cooking meals and washing up and taking care of babies and fixing cars. It was so much like real life, that each one knew what to do, except that Jonathan had two wives.

They played Vikings. They would stand together on the prow of a longship, and they would attack a castle, but they were always on the same side. "Okay, men!" Matty would say, and they would all run together, brandishing swords.

They went to Sunday School. The Oz people came as well, but Jonathan couldn't concentrate on them. He got confused and stumbled over the words of the songs and couldn't answer the questions asked by the Sunday School teacher. The teacher wore tartan trousers, and her nose ran, like Helen's.

Afterward, Matty would be elated by the idea of goodness and became insistent on righteousness. She would say that you should do whatever Jesus told you. You should never say "ain't," though Matty otherwise said it all the time. Enlivened by religious instruction, they would play Jesus. Jonathan stood on a fence post, his arms outstretched, being crucified while the sisters adored him on their knees. He liked that game. His mother made them stop.

His mother did not entirely approve of Helen and Matty. Their family offended against the world of style and grace she was trying to build. The Quicke home was ugly, with roof tiles over all of the walls. Helen and Matty's elder brother was only ten, but he wore his hair greased up. He smoked cigarettes and had a dog called Nigger. His eyes were hard, and he trained them on Jonathan.

Once, it was their father's birthday. Jonathan joined Helen and Matty in singing "Happy Birthday" to him. Helen's father was a big man with big red hands and orange hair. Helen and Matty sat on his knees as they sang, and his rough face went kindly and soft. "I can't think of anything nicer," he said, "than to be sung to by two cute little girlies like you." Jonathan wondered why he felt so different from them.

The real world was pushing the Oz people to one side. They watched from the corner while Jonathan pondered the fact that rough Mr. Quicke could be kind. Outside again in the muddy backyard, the Oz people could only watch as Jonathan and Matty and Helen dug a hole to the Center of the Earth.

Why didn't he speak to the Oz people when Helen and Matty were around? He would try to, but fear would grip him. What was he afraid of? Jonathan decided that he would force himself, force himself to act as if the Oz people were there.

Jonathan knew how to behave. He had been drilled in politesse. He knew that you introduced people properly.

So one day, toward the end of that spring, he ushered Helen into his bedroom. He was going to do it. He really was going to do it.

"Helen," he said. "May I introduce the Oz people." He pointed to each one of them in turn. "The Lion. The Tin Man…"

He couldn't finish. Panic overcame him. Helen gasped and covered her mouth. He looked at her arms and the very fine, pale down on them. Helen stared at him, grinning, eyes wide. She knew what was happening. She knew that Jonathan thought the Oz people were really there. Jonathan tried to say something else, but the words stuck.

Helen squealed, hand over her mouth, and turned and ran. Disturbance seemed to follow her, swept in a spiral like a dust storm. It spun out of the doorway of Jonathan's bedroom, taking something with it.

Jonathan turned back to the corner of the room. There was no one there. He saw that there was no one there, that there never had been anyone there.

Shame covered him like darkness. Helen would know. Helen would tell. "Sissy," her brother called him. And he was a sissy, to make up people who were not there.

His room had been stripped bare of magic. It consisted now only of his parents' cast-off chest of drawers, the trampolined bed, some toys in which he had no interest. His room was devoid of interest. So were the grass and the trees beyond. It was this stark world from which he had been trying to hide.

He wanted to break every single toy, wrench off their heads, their butterflies on wires; he wanted to tear up all his books and rip to shreds all his drawings, everything he loved that was so thin and frail, and which could not defend him. The rage seemed to rise up into his eyes as an ache. He was blinded by anger, rising up in his gorge to choke him, overwhelming and complete. There was nothing that could satisfy it, but himself. He broke himself. He took the self he had been and broke it again and again. He called himself all the names he could think of: stupid idiot dope nincompoop sissy crybaby brat. Worm. He called himself a worm and seemed to see himself crushing himself underfoot. He stood absolutely still, with his elbow wrapped around his eyes. Then, very suddenly, he flung it away from his face and glared.

The world was diminished. It was smaller, duller, and he was unutterably bored by it. He didn't want to play with his crayons, his coloring book, his papers, his toys, his stupid plasticine. He prowled the field of his vision like a caged beast, restless, made aged and jaded and grim. He was five years old.

Helen's family moved away shortly afterward, to Brampton. In those days, there was a vast expanse of farmland between Corndale and Brampton. It seemed a long way away.

Jonathan was relieved. He and Helen had stopped playing together and her older brother was even more of a menace. Jonathan knew now that he would have to learn how to fight. He would have to learn how to throw a ball and to win at games. He was not a little boy any longer.

But one afternoon, just before they moved, Helen came running to Jonathan's house, calling his name over and over. It was an act of unexpected kindness. She wanted him to come out and look at the rainbow.

She rushed up the path, her pageboy bob flapping into her eyes and stains around her mouth. Jonathan sat disconsolately on his front steps.

"Jonny, Jonny, there's a rainbow!"

Jonathan had once yearned to see rainbows. He had seen them in storybooks, where they were short and thick and made of the brightest colors. Sitting there on the front steps, Jonathan was surprised by a tearful yearning for color, as bright as books.

He leapt up from the steps and ran down the artificial hill to meet her. "Where? Where?" he called.

They were suddenly friends, real friends, united in mutual excitement. "Up there! Up there!" Helen jumped up and down, over and over, pointing to the sky.

"I can't see it! I can't see it!" Jonathan cried.

As if infected by him, the rainbow disappeared for Helen as well. She walked backward, scowling. "Maybe you can't see it from here," she said. She led him running back to her house, back to the place where she had seen it. They ran up her drive and around the back and up the wobbly, unpainted wooden steps that led to the back door. The steps formed a kind of landing, high off the ground, above the deep foundations.

"There it is," said Helen, her arm pointing over Jonathan's shoulder. She jabbed her finger at it over and over. "There! There! There!"

Jonathan was being stupid again. How stupid could he get? He scanned the sky, trying to see something very short, an arch made of paint-set reds and greens and blues, all in sharply defined bands, as he remembered them.

"Cantcha see it, Jonny?" asked Helen's mother, Mrs. Quicke. She came out of her kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She leaned on the railings, a thin, worn woman with long hair pulled back in the fashion of ten years before. She wore glasses and had bad teeth.

"It's there, just keep lookin'," Mrs. Quicke said, with the rough, kind foreignness of someone else's mother.

"I can't see it," whispered Jonathan, as if in exile. Later, he would recall seeing dimly a wispy yellowish trail across the sky, like smoke.

Jonathan couldn't see the red or the orange; he couldn't see the green or the mauve. He could only see a brownish streak of mist and the blue beyond it.

Jonathan had become color-blind.

For him, green and red were muddled into a grayish brown. He no longer played with his box of fifty-two Crayola crayons. Color no longer sang to him. He could see no difference between blue and purple, between pink and gray. The world had become as dim for him as Oz on TV.

Jonathan became a good little boy. He did everything he was told. He called people "Sir" and said "please" and "thank you." Old ladies were enchanted. He went to school for the first time in autumn and was badly beaten up the first day by a gang of older boys. They had been waiting for him. It was the price of feeling superior.

In the photographs taken after that, Jonathan looked watchful and wary, suspicious and very adult. The good little boy only looked good in photographs in which he was scowling. His smiles were twisted, cheesy and false.

In life, he was timid and silent around others, embarrassed and awkward if made the center of attention. He was always ashamed of himself-of his clumsiness, of his many fears, of his fantasies, of all the things that made him inadequate. The things he enjoyed, he did in secret. He rocked surreptitiously at night. He dreamed surreptitiously, after memorizing his homework. He earned straight A's. His teachers wrote in his reports that he was socially backward.

Jonathan became a fan of horror movies. He watched them on TV every Saturday afternoon with another boy who eventually grew up to be a sadomasochist. The other boy would beat Jonathan, even at age eight, across the bottom, and Jonathan would bear it, for the same reason that he would bear the horror movies.

It was one more way of being a good little boy. He was proving he was no longer afraid of the Witch. He was proving he could take the pain, as the other boy butted him with his head or took a switch to his backside. Being beaten was no different from watching television. The role of entertainment is to toughen us up and whip us into line.

Jonathan wanted to be tough. Above all, he wished he could stop feeling things. He wanted to be a machine. He despised himself. When Jonathan was alone, hidden in his room or, even better, far away from the village, he would visit Oz in secret. He knew it wasn't real, he knew Oz couldn't help him, so he gave no outward sign and hated himself for it. But alone on his good-little-boy holidays, away from school, his mind would begin to wander. He would start to imagine things. Jonathan would walk through Canadian evergreen forests, up the sides of Canadian mountains, or across shelves of rock beside still Canadian lakes, and he would hum the songs of Oz. There were no Canadian songs to fill the silence. Jonathan would imagine the four companions ahead of him on their way through Oz. He saw their backs. The Emerald City would rise up over the brow of a Canadian hill in another part of the story that had been left out.

The story kept on growing. Jonathan imagined a new ending to the movie. Dorothy looks up at her bedroom walls in joy, as before. Then Aunty Em holds up a pair of slippers, slippers that should have been red but now look gray. Aunty Em says, "But Dorothy. Where did you find these shoes?"

And Jonathan would look down at his own gray feet.

Zeandale and Pillsbury's Crossing, Kansas-1883

The Fields were Full of Life

Title of a diorama in the Kansas State Historical Society Museum, Topeka, Kansas. A rather small area is shown full of native grasses and taxidermic wildlife, including one large, hunched, stuffed buffalo. On the rail around the exhibit there is a block of wood covered with a worn hide. A sign beside it says:

BUFFALO HIDE-PLEASE TOUCH

Of course there was a scandal. All the children had heard, and told their parents what Dorothy Gael had said. There was a queasy moment in each Manhattan household as minds seesawed back and forth from shock and indecision.

Nothing is hidden, but some things are blocked out. Everyone in Manhattan knew, really, what was wrong with Dorothy Gael. It was revealed in every twisted movement, each bitter and angry smile, each horrifically knowledgeable look, in the hefty size of her body, in the grimness of her aunty's face, in the child's rages and the way in which she could brook all pain and insult. They all knew, really, what it meant.

But nice people were not supposed to be able to recognize certain things, because they were supposed to be so untainted that they couldn't even think about them. People sincerely believed that they were shocked and surprised and that they had had no idea such things happened. They sincerely thought they found it difficult to believe. There were veiled preachings from the pulpit. The Devil was here, in Kansas, but how to recognize his terrible face? The Devil, the Preacher said, could lurk within each of us. To recognize the Devil, we had only to look into ourselves. Let the other folks alone.

No one would tell Em what it was exactly that Dorothy had done to be expelled. "Some things are best left unsaid," the Principal had told her. "But she has told some wicked lies, and is something of a bully."

It was beyond Emma Gulch. It did not sound like her Dorothy at all. Her little Dodo, a bully? Quiet, shy little Dodo? At first she could not believe any of the stories. What could have been happening? Emma found that people would not speak to her unless she spoke to them. They murmured without looking at her and she began to realize that Dodo, little Dorothy, had been lying about Henry and about her.

"What has the child said?" she demanded to know, hands on hips. She stamped her foot. "I've been part of this town, woman and child, for going on thirty years. Will somebody tell me?"

People were unable to tell her. The words stuck. Their eyes skittered like ball bearings on grease. "Some things," they said, "are best left alone. You mustn't fret, Emma. No one believes her."

"Believes what?" Aunty Em yelped. No one would answer.

So she knew it was really terrible. And she also knew, really, what had happened. Emma knew her husband and herself and the life they led. For that very reason, she did not even begin to contemplate the truth. Instead, Emma made a point of coming into town with Uncle Henry, made a point of parading with him, normal as could be.

They looked normal. They were normal. Em was upstanding and bitter, made ugly by years of sun and drought and dissatisfaction. What could be more normal? Her husband was docile and sweet and unloved, confused and in terror and desperate for the next piece of sport, uncertain that there would ever be one. Underneath the dust and the poverty, the people of Manhattan saw themselves in Em and Henry, and they didn't want to look too deep.

"Mind you," some of the nastier males said, when drunk and alone with each other, "if I lived with a woman as fulsome as Emma Gulch, I'd be looking elsewhere, too."

The "elsewhere" and the "too" meant that they knew, really, what had happened.

But they decided, on balance, to blame Dorothy. Dorothy, they decided, had been lying. She was an unpleasant, ungrateful child with a diseased mind. She would contaminate the other children if left near them. The young, they said, must be protected. They spoke about Dorothy's mother, Em's sister, in dark tones.

"Now that sister of hers was…" theatrical pause, "an actress." The word meant so many sinister things in Kansas. "She went off with one of them fast crowds, went East to St. Lou, and married some minstrel Irishman. Just look at the result. All these years, I wondered what was eating Emma Gulch, and now I know. She's been fighting this, that child, her sister. Mind you, it runs in families." The dark hint was that Emma Gulch had had to fight against it too, the lure of fast crowds. They all had to fight against quickness. They all resented their children, because children were fast and had to be taught to be slow. They all had to be what was called good, and it was a constant battle.

Dorothy Gael ceased to exist. She went into Manhattan only once more. She walked by herself the whole distance, for Aunty Em would not have allowed it. She walked into Manhattan and no one saw her, and no one spoke to her, and no one served her in a store. She was invisible, like the Indians. She walked past the schoolyard and only one child saw her, a little boy in the first grade. He ran to his older sister. She glanced at Dorothy just once. None of the others saw her at all. They jumped rope for a while and then turned and went in before the bell. Dorothy watched them go in, and waited. She thought maybe one of the teachers would come out and chase her away. Even that did not happen.

It was quite remarkable. The children would have taunted or physically wounded a less monstrous transgressor. The teachers would have surely come out and threatened her. But Dorothy had become a legendary figure of fear, as if the Devil would breathe fire on the children, on the teachers, if they got too close to her.

Dorothy was not upset. For so long her only hope in life had been to be left alone. She asked for no better for herself, because she believed what they believed, and believed that her punishment was just.

So. No one would talk to her, she was beyond hope, and that was that. She turned and left the school and felt herself go quiet and still inside. She stayed that way. Badness had not been enough. Badness had not protected her. It was a shield that had cracked. So she was deprived even of that proud sensation. She was not bad; she was nothing, a hole. She was an adult.

She was set to work by a baffled, wounded Aunty Em.

"I don't mind telling you, Dorothy Gael, that I am ashamed, deeply ashamed of you. You've got yourself kicked out of school, closed the door on your chances of success, so you better learn to work, and you might as well learn here. You'll have to get used to it."

Dorothy ceased to talk. She ceased to talk altogether. She washed the clothes; she fed the hogs; she shoveled muck; she looked after the hens; she swept the floor; she cooked; she sewed; she scrubbed, all without speaking. She ate without speaking. That suited Aunty Em, who could only bear to speak to Dorothy to tell her what to do next, or to tell her to do it more quickly. There was sometimes a quiet dreaminess to the child that annoyed Em. It made her work slowly. Ponderously, tamely, Dorothy did exactly what she was told. No more. She would sit until told to do something else. She would sit staring all day, if not told exactly what to do.

Em found she had no heart for business. She would open the books to begin her accounts and couldn't go on. She would sit, hand pressed over her mouth, her thoughts bitter with a sense of failure. Must everything in her life turn out so badly? Even little Dodo? It was too much, too much for Emma to bear. What else in life was there for her? Pushing Henry, pushing the dry land, pushing herself until she died? Aunty Em grew to hate the clumping of Dorothy's boots.

Uncle Henry avoided Dorothy out of terror. His escape had been too narrow. His escape had changed him inside. He loathed Dorothy now, hated the very sight of her as she had once hated him. And he hated himself as much as Dorothy had hated herself. He could not bear to be with her or with himself. Each of them was utterly and completely alone and stranded, in the newly whitewashed house with its extra room in the beautiful valley, with its trees and hills and its Kansas River.

Dorothy was fed corn and cornbread and sometimes a scrap of meat or a slice of lard. Dorothy grew fat and malnourished. Her plump legs jiggled when she walked. She ate her meals outside the house or in the barn.

She slept in the summer kitchen. It was honey-colored inside, the wood being raw. It was hot in summer, sleeping near the still warm stove. In winter, the wind rattled through the shakes. Aunty Em let her have dung and twigs to burn, but that meant the stove had to be lit each night, and Dorothy didn't bother. The blankets were as cold as the snow outside. She started to sleep on the hay in the barn where the animals were kept. It was warmer.

She liked it there. It smelled of the horses. She accepted banishment as her due. She knew she was not being punished for the act. People did not believe the act had taken place. But she thought the punishment was fit for what she had done. She was even grateful for escaping so lightly. If this is what people did when they said she was lying, what would they have done to her if they had known the truth? Dorothy learned not to pay much mind to anything at all.

She liked the pigs. They had round cheerful faces, and they knew her. They greeted her. Uncle Henry would slaughter them.

I am a pig, she thought, cheerfully. I smell like one, I shit like one, in the straw away from the house. She thought of wallowing in muck like a pig. Who would notice the difference? Maybe I'll just become a pig, maybe there's a magic spell that will make me one. I'd wake up one morning on all fours grunting. I'd marry a little pig of a husband and have lots of piggy babies and then one day they'd take me away and slit me open. The lining of white fat and pink-gray meat and blood on the walls.

She drifted off to sleep, dreaming of lines of butchered, gutted Dorothys hanging on the walls. That's what happens to us anyways, she thought.

She dreamed it was wartime. There was a war between children and adults. Adults were hunting children across the landscape, on wagons and horseback. The children had to hide under the leaves. If the adults caught you, they made you a slave like in ancient Egypt. But if it was your parents who caught you, then they killed you.

Dorothy would wake up under straw, counting snowflakes blowing into the crib. She would stumble across the icy desert of the yard to the house to feed the stove, to bring in wood or coal or dung to burn. She fumbled with frozen fingers to find eggs and she brought them in to cook for breakfast.

No one came to the house to call. It was as if the Gulch farm were haunted, full of tales now. No one saw how Dorothy was living, except maybe Max Jewell. He dropped by once, on a Sunday morning, to drive her to church. He saw Dorothy huge and shapeless in bundled torn cloth, a blanket tied around her with rope. The sight of her fat face, as heavy and numb as dead meat, appalled him. Max never came back. Dorothy went on into the house.

The winter drew on. Em said nothing. Henry said nothing. Dorothy felt like some great slug, a cocoon, about to hatch. She waited for the spring.

Spring was full of mud. Dorothy lost a boot trying to rescue chicks. The sun came and baked the mud into hard plates. Dorothy broke the ground with a hoe to plant the vegetables. She scrubbed the floors and everything else in the house, where it was warm, while Aunty Em sat in silence, darning. Still there were the dreams full of death and things far worse.

Spring to summer. Rising corn again. Dorothy dreamed that the ears of corn opened out and inside each one was a baby, Henry's children from mating with the earth. And that Aunty Em boiled them, five minutes only so that they were still crisp, and they were eaten buttered, with tiny forks stuck into them on each side. Dorothy dreamed of walking through the fields, to find the ground covered in white slime, smelling of Uncle Henry. Had anyone spoken in the house for months?

To escape the dreams, Dorothy tried to stop sleeping. As spring warmed toward summer, she began to wander all through the warm nights, lit by Kansas stars, Kansas moon. She would visit the trees that had her name, sitting under the boughs high on Prospect, as if in conversation with them.

Dorothy walked along the lanes of Zeandale. It was a different place at night. It was blue and balmy and all the flowers were moonflowers, turquoise or aquamarine or purple in the dim light. She slipped like a shadow past places where there were people. She would see golden light shining from windows or from porches. The light would have a hazy halo of bugs dancing around it. Across the wide flat fields, through the still Kansas night, there would come the sound of voices, the sound of laughter, the trailing of music.

Dorothy would creep closer to the tall white farmhouses; she would hide behind the barns or outhouses. She would watch the apple-bobbing, the taffy pulls, she would hear the calming sound of singing and piano keys, the rough and carefree scraping of a violin and the light applause after sedate dancing. Dorothy would watch and listen and try to understand.

The terrible, incomprehensible truth was this: that delight was commonplace in Kansas. Delight in summer, in being young, in being with friends; delight in the warm nights that came between storms, droughts, locusts and disease. Delight in simple games, in cards held out in concealing fans; delight in the river while floating in candlelit canoes. Delight in the broad shoulders and handsome faces of German immigrant farmers with ice-blue eyes; delight in the Kansas damsels with their tough, wry smiles.

Dorothy would hide in the corn and see the awkwardly growing children of Kansas walking out together in pairs, the beefy young men in bunched-up, ill-fitting suits walking chastely beside tall slim girls in long swirling dresses.

The sight of them devastated Dorothy. It was not jealousy. Dorothy did not believe she deserved someone to walk with and had given up even dreaming of it. What devastated Dorothy was that these young people should have each other and have the light and the games and the music, have the crowded parlors and the hot fudge and names to call out to each other. They had all these things and Dorothy's night as well. They also had the blue stillness, the stars and the moon, the only things that Dorothy had thought were her own.

The realization drove her deeper and later into the night, to even more secret places at even more secret times. She would walk across the fields to Sunflower School. She looked at the trees that children had planted and that had their names. She found her own tree. It had not withered or been cut down. It was growing tall and straight, and its leaves rustled as she drew near, as if to say hello.

Then Dorothy would stand on tiptoe and peer through the windows into the classroom that would be lit with moonlight. Sunflower School became Moonflower School. Shadows of window frames cast by moonlight fell over empty desks. There would be sweeps of erased chalk across the genuine slate of the true blackboard, and there would be the stove, and the glass jars in the inkwells, and the empty pegs on which would be hung the faded bonnets in summer and thick wool coats in winter.

The trees were getting bigger, like the children who had planted them. Most of her schoolmates were already gone, adults like her, and the rooms would be suddenly full of children she didn't know. Not even ghosts.

One night toward the end of that summer, Dorothy stepped out from Sunflower School back onto Rock Spring Lane and looked up its straight length toward her hill.

Dorothy remembered Miss Francis telling them about the Aztecs, the Indians of Mexico who had built such fine, high stone buildings. Dorothy's imagination had been caught, and Miss Francis told her about the pyramids they built, rising up in layers. And Dorothy had walked out and seen the hill. It rose in layers, too, as if someone had cut giant steps out of it. Dorothy had been convinced, had wanted to be convinced, that Indians had built her hill as well, and that they lived inside it, like Aztecs. She did not ask Miss Francis if that were so. She had decided that it was so, and that it was her secret.

Dorothy no longer believed in Indians. Rather, she believed in the hopeless, flat, beardless faces wearing dirty white men's clothes, like her own. Dorothy wore britches and boots like a man.

The hill stayed silent as she walked through the secret places of the night. Dorothy wandered through the orchards of Squire Aiken. She did steal a peach and ate it in starlight. She headed east and then south in a great curve around to Pleasant Valley Cemetery. All the dead were lined up as straight and foursquare as they had been in life. There were no terrors for Dorothy in Pleasant Valley Cemetery. She knew most of the people in it. There was Wilbur and Mrs. Jewell; there were some of the Pillsburys and some of the older McCormacks and Allens. She picked wildflowers in the moonlight and left them on the graves. And walked on. She walked miles. Cemeteries and dark woods were better than her dreams.

And suddenly the road plunged down into a hollow, and Dorothy was at Pillsbury's Crossing.

The first time that Dorothy had gone to the Crossing was with the school, her first year in Kansas. It was America's Centennial, 1876, and she was how old? Six? They had come here to have a picnic.

Dorothy remembered the road, plunging down straight across the river. The river was only inches deep, flowing over a single, huge rock. The children had waded in the water, delighting in the cool shade of the hollow. Dorothy had felt ripples under her feet, in the stone, like the ripples water makes in sand. Was rock sand? It was, in a way. Teacher said so.

Teacher said a glacier had probably left the rock there. She said that a glacier was a river of ice, but that didn't make sense. Dorothy thought that perhaps a glacier was some great animal, carrying stones on its back.

The river swept on, in a huge bend, and suddenly slipped over the edge of the rock in a great horseshoe waterfall. It was confusing, because the water started to flow diagonally across the stone. Suddenly it was pouring over it, right next to the road and in the same direction as the road. The other children had yelled and shouted to each other. Dorothy had not liked the noise or the slashes of sunlight through the leaves. Little Dorothy had hidden under a cleft in the great rock itself, behind the waterfall. She watched the flowing screen of water that concealed her. She had heard Miss Francis shouting her name over and over, but Dorothy was in hiding and it simply had not occurred to her to reply. Gasping in panic, Miss Francis found her. "Dorothy!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you say something?"

Little Dorothy had not known why and could not explain. The next evening Miss Francis came to call for the first time, to have her first long talk with Emma Gulch about what to do with Dorothy.

Now it was night, and everywhere was a hiding place. Once again, Dorothy walked down the road toward the crossing of the waters.

It was very dark in the hollow, and she could only hear, rather than see, the river. She felt her way down a slope of stone toward the crossing.

And then, it seemed to her, she saw the glacier.

Something was stranded in the shallow, rippling water. It snorted a blast of air like a dragon and tried to raise its great head. It had huge hunched shoulders, and it thrashed in the water, pawing with its front legs, trying to stand, failing to stand.

Dazed with sleeplessness, Dorothy simply stood and watched. She waited until her eyes grew used to the dark, began to see things in the starlight that fell through the leaves.

There was a buffalo. A single buffalo alone. Here in Zeandale? There were no more buffalo in Zeandale. And buffalo moved in herds. They did not live alone.

The beast knew she was there. It held up its head, unmoving and watchful. There was a glint of moonlight on its living eyes and on its tiny horns. Dorothy seemed to feel the strain in its neck muscles. The buffalo snorted again and tried to thrash its way to its feet.

And then, the buffalo lay down its head in the waters of the Crossing.

And Dorothy understood. This was the last buffalo. It had come back home to die. Its home would have been the hills above Zeandale. Now those were pastures for cattle, ringed around with barbed wire.

The buffalo were becoming extinct. Like giant flying lizards, or dodos.

Dorothy could hear its breath, hoarse and panting. The beast was dangerous. Its head was huge and a single convulsion would knock her off her feet or tear her flesh. But Dorothy did not want to leave it. She did not want it to die alone, unnoticed. She did not feel that it wanted to be left alone.

She watched it from the shore, warily. It had stopped thrashing and its giant head lay still in the shallow water. She could feel its life draining away. Dorothy sat down on the stone and unlaced her boots and walked out onto the Crossing, toward the edge of the waterfall.

The water was cool, and she felt underfoot again the stone that was rippled like a sandbar. Dorothy walked as close to the beast as she dared.

Then she put her spirit into the buffalo. She felt the vast, exhausted bulk that had gone as immobile as stone; she felt the covering of wiry, curly hair caked with mud. She felt the tail wet and heavy, beyond flicking, floating in the shallow water. The buffalo was settling into the stone. Its huge pink tongue was lolling in the water.

Don't let me die alone, the buffalo seemed to say to her. Buffalo live together; we are taken by the wolves if we cannot keep up a march. If we lag behind, we are quickly torn away, but we do not understand loneliness. Don't leave me alone.

And Dorothy knelt close beside him and stroked his mighty head and the huge hump of his shoulders, and she felt how once he had been a king. No king should die unmourned. He went very still. Breath bubbled out of him in the water. His hide twitched.

Give me to the river, the buffalo said. Hide me away from men. I don't mind the coyote or the vulture; I don't mind the beetle or the muskrat. But I don't want men to get me. I don't want them to hang my brow and horns on their wall; I don't want my skin on their floor or on their backs. Let me go whole back into the earth.

Dorothy tended the king until he died. She stroked him until she was sure he was dead, until the chest no longer heaved with breath, until there was no bubbling in the water, until the flesh was still.

Then Dorothy tried to roll him over the edge. She was very strong and perhaps the current helped. She succeeded in half rolling the corpse of a bull buffalo up onto his haunches.

It was as though she had sparked something. The legs suddenly twitched. Yes! the muscles seemed to say, Yes! Dorothy heard the hooves scrabbling on the stone.

As though the buffalo had tried to leap into Heaven, the corpse launched itself into the air. It shivered its way over the edge of the rock, a moonlit sheen of water pouring over its shoulders. It fell over the horseshoe plunge, where Dorothy had once hidden herself.

The buffalo fell between the waterfall and a large boulder. He landed, with a rearing up of his small legs, which were now limp again. He reared up and settled back and it was as if he had sighed with relief, accepting the embrace of stone.

There was a large branch stranded on the edge of the fall, and Dorothy dragged that forward until it fell too. It slipped slowly sideways, hardly falling at all, it seemed, the heavier end of its trunk crashing down onto rocks and puddles. The upper boughs lashed the air at about the level they had been at before. Except that the buffalo was covered, hidden perhaps, safe perhaps from men.

Then Dorothy stumbled back home toward the summer kitchen. Her clothes were wet, but there was no one at home who would mind. Who needs dreams? she thought. This was better. As she walked, she felt her eyelids drooping. She picked up a stick to lean on.

It was blue-gray in the sky by the time she reached the woods over the farm. She planned to walk down out of the trees, unseen. She was idly slashing at the hickory with the stick. She thumped a large tree trunk and realized that it was hollow.

There's a hollow branch up there, she thought. And there was. Now how did I know that? She reached up into a broken branch and felt leaves and pulled.

Something came out, brown as Kansas. She shook it. It was a child's dress, very lacy. Would have been white once. And there were tiny, flaking platelets of metal sewn onto it. Dorothy held it up against herself. Definitely a child's dress.

Something stirred, as if there were something else alive within her. She felt it move. It was as if there were a dreamworld somewhere, which she could dimly see. Had she left the dress in the tree?

Dorothy remembered Wilbur. She remembered the first day and the train trip and something about staying with people on the way to Kansas. There had been another life, as if the world had divided in two. She had not always lived with Aunty Em. Dorothy rolled up the tiny brown thing and hid it in her coat.

Back down on the farm, there was nothing to greet her or welcome her. She dropped down onto her mattress and sank into the deepest kind of sleep, as deep as a well and dreamless. All unaware, she had dammed up a reservoir of dreams. They grew heavy, as if hairline cracks ran through the bones of her forehead.

As Dorothy worked that day, she stumbled. She stared ahead, terrible rings around her staring eyes. Aunty Em said, "I reckon you best rest a spell, Dorothy." Dorothy looked back at her, almost refusing. But I don't want to rest, she thought. I might have the dreams.

"Go on and lie down." Aunty Em's voice sounded sad and weary. Dorothy noted how it sounded even as she turned to obey automatically. It was easier to obey than to try to think. She plodded into the barn. Her feet were like heavy stones. She slumped down onto the bales of hay and curled up on one of them, boots drawn up under her knees. She stared ahead. She would not close her eyes. Aunty Em had told her to lie down, but she would not sleep.

Aunty Em came in.

"You're still awake," Emma said in sorrow.

Aunty Em came and sat next to her on the straw. "You don't sleep, do you, Dorothy?"

Aunty Em sighed when Dorothy did not answer. She moved closer and there was a rustling of hay. "Your clothes are soaking wet and your boots are covered in mud and grass and pine-tree needles. Where do you go, Dorothy? Where do you go at night?"

Dorothy didn't answer. She stared ahead. Aunty Em began to stroke her hair, as Dorothy had stroked the buffalo.

"What happened, Dodo? What happened to you? You were such a beautiful little girl. You'd always help around the house and were so kind to your poor old aunty. And you used to make me laugh. Like when you told off all those old ladies about the way they treated the Chinawoman. Remember? Or when we caught caterpillars and put them in preserving jars with grass to see if they'd turn into butterflies. I thought that was the funniest thing."

A shabby black sleeve on bone-thin arms with a veined and muscular brown claw at the end, smoothing down Dorothy's hair, trying to untangle it.

"Did we do anything, Dodo? Was it something we did? Is it something we can undo?"

Dorothy couldn't think. Yes, probably, she thought, but she wasn't sure she had said it out loud.

"Dorothy," said Aunty Em. "Please come back. You were the light of my life. You were what kept me going all those years, just to hear you laughing, or naming the birds, or working away at your books."

Dorothy thought just two words. The words were: too late. It was a very simple, very final thought, and she wondered how something so simple could be so complete. Too late. She could not think much beyond that and she did not need to.

"Come on, up. Let's get you into the house." Aunty Em coaxed her to her feet and led her up the wooden steps to the summer kitchen.

The next Sunday, Aunty Em went alone to Meeting. She went to howl in tongues, flushed with the love of Jesus, a stick jammed between her teeth to keep her from biting off her tongue. One of Dorothy's worst dreams had been about all of Aunty Em's talking tongues slithering out of her mouth, hydra-headed.

Uncle Henry was out communing with his fields, which meant masturbating into the dirt. It was a good summer, warm and gentle, though today was surprisingly cool.

Dorothy finished all her chores. She did them without questioning. She washed Aunty Em's clothes, her nightdress. She washed Uncle Henry's socks and his loose and baggy underwear. She went out to the clothesline with a basket and pegged all their clothes up on the line.

Then she stood up, as straight and sudden as if someone had called her name. That was it. She was finished here.

Dorothy knew she was big enough to go. Big enough and ugly as a pig's backside, but that made no difference. The weather was perfect, brilliantly sunny without being hot. Em and Henry were away, so she could steal what she needed.

She would go to St. Lou, or Abilene, or Wichita. She would go there and be one of those bad girls. It was better than scrubbing the yellow garments Emma Gulch slept in. Dorothy wasn't entirely sure what it was that bad girls did, but if it was lying with men like she had lain with Uncle Henry, she could stand it. She didn't feel anything when that happened. She knew she looked older than she was. And if they found she was younger, they probably wouldn't mind. They'd probably like it. But she needed some clothes.

She opened up Aunty Em's wardrobe and saw four dresses and stole two of them. She judged very carefully which ones she took. Em was wearing her second-best Sunday and had left her best Sunday for another occasion. If Dorothy took her good Sunday or the striped crinoline, Em would send the law after her. So she decided on the old bottle-green dress, stitched and darned back into shape. There was another old one, her coming-out dress Aunty Em called it, splotched and itchy blue. She took a dried-up old bonnet with wilted cloth flowers. It didn't matter if she looked poor. Poor meant bad and that would draw the men. It didn't matter what it looked like as long as it looked adult. Enough.

Right in the middle of the room, Dorothy changed. She had no shame left. If Uncle Henry walked in, she would not turn around. Let him see it, it would be nothing new to him. Nothing meant anything to her. She put on the bottle-green dress because it would not be so uncomfortable when she sweated and would not show the dust as the blue one would. She rolled the blue one up like a towel around the brown boots Uncle Henry had brought her back from Manhattan two years before. She could wear her old ones. She looked around the small dark room. It had never done her any harm. There was the bed and the new dresser with its rows of ill-assorted plates. The room had a face that seemed to smile. The old clock on top of the wardrobe. The Bible, and all of Aunty Em's old books in rows. The new table rocked when you tried to cut bread.

It might have been a home. Goodbye, she said to the room, but not the people in it.

She could imagine what would happen later that afternoon. Emma would come back from Meeting and call for her. "Dodo? Dodo?" she would say and then walk out to the barn. She would realize that Dorothy was not there. She would pace around the floor for a time, hoping that Dodo had only gone for a Sunday walk. Then she would think. She would check her cupboard and cry aloud, covering her mouth when she saw that the dresses were gone. Alone in the house, she would cover her face and weep.

When Henry finally came back in, she would blurt out to him, "Henry! Dorothy's gone!" Henry would try to look sad, and he would stand over Emma and pat her on the back and say, There, there, Em, and she would say: She stole my dresses! And they would decide that maybe it was worth the price of a few dresses to have Dorothy gone. And the house would return to silence.

Dorothy forgave them, almost forgave herself. They had all failed, failed in the most fundamental way-to make a way of life that was possible. Dorothy felt fear now, fear of the world beyond the familiar fields. She had no reason to suppose it would treat her any more kindly than her own kin. And she saw them in her mind and surprised herself with a mild stinging of tears in the bottom of her eyes. The Aunty Em she hated seemed to melt away. In her place was a woman who was nothing like as old as she looked, a woman who had not been loved since her father died, and who did not know how to say what she really felt and who hated her life, dressing in black, saving her good clothes for occasions that never came, stabbing at the rotten socks, trying to keep them together, stabbing them and her fingers with the needle. Too late. And Henry. Poor soft old Henry who could only have power over children. It was as if they had all stood back-to-back, shouting "love" at the tops of their lungs, but in the wrong direction, away from each other.

But goodbye, goodbye as fast as I can. If Dorothy had to eat one more meal from the hands of Aunty Em, it would choke her. If Uncle Henry so much as glanced at her covertly, something kindling again in his eyes, she might kill him.

Was there anything else she needed? Dorothy remembered that there was one thing only that was indisputably hers. She went to the summer kitchen, and from under her pillow she took the child's dress. She stood in the yard and took one final look, not to remember, but to forget, and then Dorothy walked.

There was no softening haze over the fields. It was a strange day, fiercely bright, but cool, very cool in a Kansas August. When a day was as fierce as that, it always meant it would be cloudy by noon. Dorothy was glad it was cool; she could walk farther. The corn would be tall; it would hide her as she walked. She could not be seen on the roads. The sunlight on the corn leaves engraved them with lines. The soil underneath was baked as firm as any roadway, in hard clumps that tickled Dorothy's hardened feet.

Dorothy began to skip. Witch, witch, Wichita. Which witch from Wichita, witch? Which Wichita? She was going to Wichita, to be a whore, but now, just for now, the sun was shining, and just for now, she could be a kid, one last time. She spun around and around and around. She knocked a stalk of corn. Goddamned corn, the whole country was corn. It used to be a prairie, full of sage and groundhogs. Her hands were like a scythe as she spun. She could feel herself chopping the corn down. She staggered spinning, giddy. Gol-danged corn, she thought and tore up a stalk of it by the roots. She began to march with it over her shoulder, like a soldier, and she began to sing a Civil War song and march to it:

When Johnny comes marchin' home again

Hurrah! Hurrah!

And it felt as if she were going home, or somewhere. She slashed at the corn with the stalk in her hand until it broke. She kicked at the corn, knocked it over, tore it up, broke it, giddy and grinning, and began to spin again, spin around, harder and harder, to spin the world away, spinning out of the plowed rows, through the corn itself, breaking the order of the lines, spinning until her stomach rebelled. It clenched and suddenly poured out the breakfast of grits in another circle, a great arc of gray and inferior food. The last breakfast from Aunty Em. Dorothy was free from that too.

Chuckling at the sudden outbreak of utter foolishness, Dorothy allowed herself to be spun onto the ground. The ground seemed to tilt up to receive her, and Dorothy was on her back, looking up through corn leaves to the sky, to the clouds gathering overhead, and the sky and the clouds seemed to spin above her. They seemed to spin and stay in one place at the same time, moving and not moving. The world's turning all the time. Only we can't see it.

Dorothy turned and looked at the ground. An old black beetle struggled up and over the clumps of gray dirt that looked the size of boulders. There were hills and forests under the leaves. The ground was splashed with pallid shadows and pallid fading sunlight, and the corn was taller than trees. It whispered, calling her name.

It was another world. Dorothy wished she were that small, to live hidden under the leaves. She would ride field mice and live in a burrow that had a little smoking chimney, and she and the other little people would dance and laugh and spin until they were giddy and hide when the big people came. Maybe when you grew up, part of you was left behind, to live unnoticed under the leaves.

The leaves began to rattle in a breeze. Was it cooler? Dorothy stood up. My green dress is dusty, she thought, but she didn't mind. I don't want to look like an adult just yet.

Maybe I'll just walk through these fields the rest of my life and no one will find me. I'll wear corn leaves or cobwebs, and I'd build a sod house so far underground that they'll plant the corn right over it. And I'll sit in my house and hear the plows go overhead and laugh. I'd rock back and forth and have the gophers in for dinner.

But it was time to move on. Dorothy began to walk again, reeling as if drunk. She stumbled on the baked clods of earth that were as hard as stone. The sun went behind a cloud and stayed there.

Did she really want to walk to Wichita? Was there anything else she could do? She could try to find her father and live with him. She didn't know his first name. Only Gael. And that may have been made-up. Gaelic to Gael. He was Irish and an actor, and she wouldn't know him if she saw him. And he would not know her. He was probably dead, or in New York.

Dorothy came to the end of Uncle Henry's fields. There was a screen of leaves between her and the end of her known world. The sky got darker. There looked like being a storm. She would have to walk through rain and mud.

And suddenly she hid her face and wept. What was she going to do in Wichita except starve and beg and get dirty and smelly and used? Who did she know in Wichita? Who did she know anywhere? No one in Manhattan, where people looked straight through her. No one in the only place she could remember living. All Dorothy needed was extreme cleverness, and fearlessness, and love and a home, and she had none of those things. Dorothy needed magic. She needed some magic spell that would change her, give her different clothes, a clean face. She needed magic to scoop her up and drop her down in Wichita as a famous actress. She dreamed of being rich, of taking the train, of being met by carriages, of wearing pretty clothes and having doormen greet her.

There was no way out. No way back. She kept walking. She began to have another fantasy, that she was walking backward. She was walking backward through the years, and she was going to walk back home, to St. Lou before the diphtheria, to find her mother and father waiting for her, in the home she did not remember, away from Is, into the land of Was.

She pushed aside the last of the corn leaves and found a pasture of sunflowers.

They were wild, multistemmed with tiny yellow blossoms. They bobbed in a gathering breeze. They looked like a field of lamps. Dorothy stepped down from the barbed-wire fence, her adult dress held up around her ankles.

She ate the sunflower seeds, like the Indians did when they had lived in a place they called Blue Earth. If only there were Indians, real Indians that she could go and live with.

Then she heard a giggle under the leaves.

High-pitched, as if the gophers had acquired human voices.

"Hello?" she asked. "Hello?" She crouched, looking under the leaves, thinking to see children. The Jewells had children. She remembered them. One was small and hard and jealous. What was his name? And the other one was tall and shambling. A scarecrow on a Sunday. Would they have yellow sunflower faces? They would have sunflower faces. She looked but couldn't find them.

"Hello?" she called again, chuckling kindly, so they could hear she meant no harm. Then she thought: Were the sunflowers laughing? And then she heard deep voices.

Wichita ta ta

Wichita ta ta

It was a chant.

Wichita ta ta

Wichita was an Indian name, it was the name of the tribe of Indians the white adults had pushed aside, marched into the desert so that they died. But some of them escaped. They had stayed in Kansas, to live secretly under the cornfields. They had finally, finally come out to dance.

Wichita ta ta

She saw them, under the sunflowers. They were tiny brown men no taller than her knees. They were naked except for the feathers of birds and they were slightly wizened, like children that never grew up, or adults who had decided to stay children. They danced in a circle, chanting. They were Indians who had won. They were the Indians of Oz.

Wichita ta ta

Topeka

Manhattan

Ha ha

Tan tan

The gophers were standing in a ring to watch. There was a slight change to the sound.

Wichito to

To to

TopekaWichito to

To to

Toto

And suddenly she heard a dog bark, far away.

All the sunflowers began to bob and bend in a gathering wind. There was a low animal whine from all around her. The wind plucked at her adult clothes and there seemed to be smoke. It trailed across the ground, between the flowers, over her shoes. Smoke from Indian fires? The air was full of dust and smelled suddenly of soil. The chant went on: Toto, Toto.

Suddenly, all the sunflowers broke free. They rose up, leapt into the air, and spun away as Dorothy had spun.

Wichita to

Topeka

The sunflowers spun smiling all around her, like the scythes of her hands. There was a blast of wind and dust. Dorothy's dress was whipped about her legs. It spun around her like a sheep caught in barbed wire. The dust was flowing now like a wide thick river. She was standing in the middle of it. Dust blew up into her eyes, stinging, she had to look away.

The dust was making her weep. The Indians kept chanting. She let her eyes water, to clear them, and when she opened them again, the whole of the field had risen up into the air, spiraling sunflowers, a plowed line of dirt drawn up into the air like soda through a straw. Still blinking, Dorothy looked up and saw it.

A twister. A twister.

And Dorothy froze. She went stock-still.

The twister loomed over her as huge as a man, spinning, turning, trawling its vast single foot lazily across the fields.

Dorothy thought she was calm. I made it, she thought. It came out of me. I spun and spun and I made it, as twisted as I am. And now it's coming for me. There is no place to hide. I ran away, and there was no escape. I ran into the fields, the one place you are not supposed to go in a cyclone, and I can't go home. You need to have a burrow in the earth. And that was what I wanted. Somewhere to live hidden. And now I'm going to die. I'm going to die.

It seemed to her suddenly to be the way out, to let the wind blow her away, like dust, to somewhere else.

She watched the twister as it came, passive as she had been before Uncle Henry. She waited as if for a lover. She was unable to move.

Then suddenly there was a bright, fierce little bark, a sound like shattering mirrors. Dorothy looked down, and there was Toto, bouncing with rage, turning around and around in the dust.

Toto, she tried to say, but the wind pulled the breath out of her lungs.

He was full of life and anger. You don't want to die! he seemed to say. Run!

Dorothy broke free. She screamed and covered her eyes. With a thrill of self-love, she began to run.

Toto ran with her, yipping, on tiny terrier legs, circling her ankles. She ran blindly, arm across her tender eyes.

In a twister, you set the horses free, free to run. Some know to run away from the twister. Some run into it, and no one knows why. Some want the twister, betrayed by something inside them.

Toto shepherded her. He drove her away from it, toward the hills, out of the valley. She ran with long hungry strides over the broken earth toward shelter, the Aikens' house. She ran listening for the howl of wind in a peach orchard. The twister turned and changed shape, the blast sucking one way and then exploding in another. Our Father who art in Heaven.

The cyclone was behind her, then in front of her, dodging like a clever, nasty boy weaving his way toward a touchdown. Toto barked. This way! This way!

Hallowed be thy Name.

The wind clutched at her adult dress and tore at it viciously.

Thy kingdom come.

Lost in a world of burning dust.

Thy will be done.

The ground beneath her suddenly gave way. She felt her boots flood with water.

On earth as it is in Heaven.

She had run into the wallows. She felt the mud suck at her feet and pull her down. Oh God, don't do this, oh God, I'll be good, I promise. Dorothy fought her way forward, thrashing with her hands. Hands were cut. Was it a thorn bush? Dorothy fell forward into rolls of barbed wire.

It had been nailed to stakes, to keep it secure, pegged firm, a maze of wire to be stretched around the fields and to encircle the wallows.

It was a great extended hollow tube of wire, a second twister. Dorothy's arms and chest were enmeshed in its embrace. She thrashed against it, arms working their way deeper into it. The mud pulled down. The wire held.

The twister wanted her. It roared in anger and pulled. Dorothy was snatched up. The wire sang. The wire extended like a spring; the mud pulled down. One end of the wire broke free. Dorothy found a fence post and grabbed it and held, and the loose spiral of wire turned around and around her, lashing her to the post, holding her to its wooden bosom as if to say, I will keep you, Dorothy, I will keep you in Kansas. The wire whipped around her, binding her tighter and tighter. The mud tried to pull her down. Overhead was the flock of sunflowers. They still giggled. Dorothy was held.

And in the dust, part of the dust, there was a nittering. Dorothy felt a cold wet nose. Toto climbed up onto her lap. She could feel his shivering warmth; she could feel his rough, loving tongue.

And the dress, the old dress slipped free from under her arm.

Dorothy blinked. How had it become so clean? It seemed to her that it was white, blazing white and covered in sequins. They flashed in the sunlight that peeked under the clouds. It ascended.

The dust was as thick as syrup and Dorothy had to close her eyes. Dust sizzled on her face like fat dancing on a hot, hot pan, and her skin was scoured. She stroked Toto with her raw hands; she could feel his fur like pine needles. You led me right, dog, she thought. The wire held her.

The wind shrieked and scraped. It passed singeing over her, enveloping her, brutalizing her with its love, like any love she could remember.

Then, as if something had popped, everything went still. Dorothy had time to open her eyes. In the center of the twister, the air was almost clear and everything was a beautiful blue. Blue Earth. Everything stood up straight, the grass, her hair, the wire, all hauled toward Heaven. She seemed to see buffalo, swirling up into it. All the extinct creatures had been pulled into Heaven. Dorothy had time to be glad. The twister drank the air out of her lungs. The Indians sang:

Wichita ta ta

to to

tot tot

ta ta

Then the singing stopped.

Waposage, Kansas-November 1956

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was kept off most public library shelves until the 1960s because librarians considered it hackwork. When Cornelia Meigs edited a 624-page Critical History of Children's Literature for Macmillan in 1953, there was not a single mention of Baum in the book. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz does appear in the fourth edition of May Hill Arbuthnot's Children and Books, revised by Zena Sutherland and published in 1972-but it does not appear in the first three editions, and in the 1972 edition, it is simply listed among "Books that Stir Controversy." -Aljean Harmetz, The Making of the Wizard of Oz

The hostility to the Oz books is in itself something of a phenomenon…

It is significant that one of the most brutal attacks on the Oz books was made by the director of the Detroit Library system, a Mr. Ralph Leveling, who found the Oz books to have "a cowardly approach to life." They are also guilty of "negativism." Worst of all, "there is nothing elevating or uplifting about the Baum series." For the Librarian of Detroit, courage and affirmation meant punching the clock and then doing the dull work of a machine while never questioning the system. -Gore Vidal, in an essay, "The Oz Books"

Bill Davison had a few months to go before he got his draft notice, so he went to work in the Home. He was hired for his muscles. Bill Davison had been a linebacker on the school football team, had fairly bad grades and was generally recognized to be a nice guy. He was huge, happy and surprisingly gentle. Girls loved his gentleness. He was seventeen now and engaged to his girlfriend, Carol. He was a practicing Christian and had the bravery and confidence to be kind to his mother in public.

His father had been killed when he was six, during the Italian campaign. The experience had been terrible for him. He had needed and wanted his father, kept photographs of him in his uniform, had a map on the wall that traced with pins where his father was. The news of his death had been delivered personally by a friend of the family at the recruiting office. War had taken Bill's father away and would make of him a young man whose urges to violence were all sublimated into sports.

Bill's grades were bad-straight C's. Even so, people were surprised when he took on work at the Home. Who cared about grades? Bill was a presentable young man and could have gotten a good job behind a counter or in an office somewhere. Fat white women with too many kids ended up working at the Home, or blacks, or Mexicans. The Home was one of three state institutions for the mentally ill in all of Kansas. The citizens of Waposage were rather proud of their provision for the insane. They just didn't want to work in the place. Bill did.

He wasn't sure why. "Oh, I don't know," he would tell people. "I guess I just wanted a job helping people. The Home was nearby."

Since graduating in June, he had been working in an electrical supply store and showroom. It was run by Mr. Hardie. He was one of the many friendly older men who thought they had taken on the job of acting like a father to Bill.

"People in the Home can't always be helped," said Mr. Hardie, when Bill told him he was leaving the store.

"Well. They still need caring for," Bill replied.

"That's true, Bill, and it's a fine thought. But you still have got to think of yourself, and of Carol too. They won't be paying you much money for that job."

"Carol's got her job at the hairdresser's. And anyway, I got the Army coming up in a couple of months. It's just till then."

"From now on," said Mr. Hardie, "you got to be thinking of how you're going to set yourself up in life. You got to be thinking about what's going to happen after those two years. You find things are getting tight over the next few months, or you just want a change of scenery, you know there'll always be a job waiting for you here in the store. Need a fine young man like you."

Bill knew he was a fine young man-he had worked at it-but he wore his knowledge lightly. "Thank you, Sir," he replied.

Bill Davison started work in September 1956, in the geriatric ward. He would always remember arriving. On his first day at the Home, he was shown around by another orderly. The man's name was Tom, Tom Heritage. Tom was tall, plump, friendly, and had a very nearly invisible blond beard. He had been a truck driver until he lost his license for three years.

"First thing you do every morning is help wheel up the food from downstairs. Then, while they're eating, we change all the bedding. Some of them leak a little, so we just give them clean sheets. You make their beds for them, tidy up. During the day you help some of them around, maybe take them for a walk. If any of them get sick, you help them down to the infirmary."

"Anything else?" Bill asked, disappointed.

"What, you mean like try to cure them or something? No way, son. That's the Doctor's job."

Tom Heritage pushed against the swinging doors, and they walked into a ward of cots. The old people slept in cots to stop them from rolling out at night. Each one of them had a metal locker that doubled as a bedside table, and a chair to sit on.

"This here's what we call Heaven. It's where all the ones that don't give anyone any trouble are. The Angels."

One old man was still in bed, back turned to the door.

"Okay, Bobby," said Heritage, neatly flipping down one rank of blue cot bars. "It's time to get up. Breakfast."

The old man's face had fallen in on itself, collapsed, and he stared ahead with watery blue eyes. There was white stubble all over his chin.

"Sorry, Bobby, but we got to make your bed." Heritage gave Bill Davison a nod. Bill stared back. "Got to lift him out," explained Heritage. "You take the legs."

Heritage took the arms. Quickly, neatly, the old man was hoisted out of bed and lowered down into his wheelchair. He still stared. One foot began to jiggle up and down with nerves.

Heritage stood back and held up a greeting card from the table, The card had grown soft and worn around the edges, as if trying to grow fur. The corners were grubby. On the front there was a wide-eyed cartoon bunny.

"It says 'Get well soon,' " said Heritage, his eyes and smile just the slightest bit grim.

Heritage wheeled the old man off to his breakfast. All by himself, Bill stripped the beds. It was all so impersonal. The Angels of Heaven were bereft of possessions. Pajamas, a change of clothing, used handkerchiefs, a smell of weak and sweaty bodies. There would be nothing to move away when they died. Heritage returned with the sheets.

About eleven o'clock, they moved off toward the women's ward. From somewhere down the corridor came dim, echoing voices, murmuring or raised and querulous. They sounded like a choir that had not yet begun to sing.

"We treat the women just the same as the men, except that we come in after breakfast when we know they're all decent. Some of the old dears are a bit old-fashioned."

"Don't we do anything to help them?" Bill asked again.

Heritage gave him a thin-lipped smile and shook his head. "Nobody's going to help these people," he said. "Some of them been here for fifty years."

Some of the women sat beside their cots. One of them was making knitting motions with empty hands.

"Good morning, girls," said Heritage. None of them responded, except for one woman who looked up, very slowly, with round, haunted eyes.

Then, suddenly, someone spoke. It was a surprisingly smooth, polished voice, almost like an adolescent's.

"If you're through gabbing, you could get me up off this floor," said the voice. An outraged head reared itself up over the horizon of a crumpled cot.

It was a fine head, a noble head, something like a lion's, ringed with wild gray hair. The eyes were wild too.

Heritage closed his eyes and smiled. "Remember how I said none of them were trouble?" he said. He began to walk backward toward her, looking at Bill, talking to Bill. "Well. Meet trouble."

Bill Davison followed him, tardily. "Dotty," Heritage asked, "what are you doing on the floor?"

"I fell down!" she exclaimed, enraged. "Fell down and I can't get up!"

Tom Heritage had slipped his arms under hers and already had her on her feet when Bill finally arrived to offer assistance. He managed only to touch her elbow.

"Where do you want to be?" Heritage asked.

"Anyplace but here. In that chair."

She moved in tough little jerks, and she talked in tough little jerks. Looking at her, Bill thought: The West, the Old West. She had the tang of it.

"You miss breakfast?" Heritage asked her.

"Dang right," said Dotty. "That eggy stuff looks like cat sick. Can't stand it."

Heritage was smiling again. "Bill," he said, "this here's Old Dynamite. Dynamite Dotty. You want to help people, well this is one of our success stories. Used to take three big men to hold Old Dynamite down. Till she became an Angel and grew wings."

"I," announced Dotty, "always had wings." She began to stroke them, growing invisibly from her shoulders. She looked regal. "Hmmmph!" she said, and made a dismissive gesture.

"Come on, we got to make all these beds," said Heritage.

As they worked, Bill looked at Old Dynamite. A smile had grown on her face. It grew wide and joyous, and the eyes fixed on Heaven seemed to be full of light.

Bill stood and looked at her. He wanted to say to Heritage that she looked like something in a Sunday School painting. Heritage was rolling sheets, quickly, into loosely wound balls and throwing them into sacks. Dimly, Bill could hear her singing. She sang to herself. It was an old, grand song, some kind of hymn, but not one that Bill knew from years of church-going. But he did know it from somewhere. The words, high and thin, over and over, were "Hally hoo hah."

"There's nothing wrong with her," Bill said, later.

"Dot? Stick around," said Heritage.

Bill and Heritage wheeled up lunch in huge industrial catering tureens on carts. They boomed their way through swinging doors that were plated with metal. They themselves ate and then wheeled the tureens back down.

And after lunch, they stood watch over the men and women in the common room. There were wide windows looking over the lawns, It was cold and misty, and the landscape was in layers of misted silhouette. A row of leafless trees looked like charts of nerves.

There was nothing for any of the Angels to do. Some of them were playing cards. The cards were black around the edges. There was a chess set. Pieces were missing. There were a few deserted books, all of them left a quarter of the way through, facedown. And the constant murmuring, almost musical. The sound of the Angels.

"We call this the Pearly Gates," said Heritage.

Women sat mouthing the air or rocking the ghosts of children.

"It's so boring for them," said Bill.

"Used to be a radio, but they kept messing with the dials until it broke." Suddenly Old Dot loomed next to them. She was huge, almost as tall as Bill, and even now neither fat nor thin. She was very stiff on her pins, but that lent her a kind of creeping iron dignity.

"We haven't died, you know," she said, to Heritage. "Not yet, anyway."

Heritage leaned back against the wall and gave her an amused and crooked smile.

He feels superior, thought Bill. That's it. He's not mean or anything. He just knows he's farther up the scale, and he thinks there's nothing to be done. So he won't listen.

Bill thought he knew what the old woman meant. "So you think we shouldn't call this place Heaven?" Bill asked Dotty.

"But it is," she said, suddenly fierce, drawing up. "It is, goddamn it. Take a look! I don't know. You people!"

Old Dynamite turned away, shaking her head. Heritage gave Bill another crooked smile. You see? his raised eyebrows seemed to say. Very slowly Old Dot crept toward the window. From behind, she looked far more frail, bowed, her shoulders turning inward.

She stared out the window at the mist until it was dark.

Without realizing it, Bill must have said something to Mr. Hardie, because a few days later Hardie Electrical Supplies donated a television set to the Home. It was a great embarrassment. First, it embarrassed Bill, who had not asked and thought perhaps the Home would think he had been criticizing it. Second, it embarrassed the Home, which was overwhelmed by the generosity but was worried that one of the Angels would shove a fist into the vacuum tube.

When they tried to give it back, Mr. Hardie apparently suggested that Bill be put in charge of it, to change channels, to turn it off, to wheel it around, to guard its plugs and dials and glass face.

Bill was very wary of television sets himself. He had seen an accident. An assistant at Mr. Hardie's had been carrying two picture tubes, whistling as he walked, swinging them gently. The tubes hit each other, and there was a kind of popping sound, like small pistol shots, and a gasp. Glass had been sucked in and then spat out. The assistant stood surprised and startled, rivulets of blood trickling down his face and his arms. Slivers of glass had been driven into him all over his body. Like the wilderness, like a cyclone, televisions had a nothingness in their hearts.

There was some discussion among the senior staff of the Home. It was decided to allow television only at certain times. Late evening was forbidden in case the dependants of the Home got overexcited. News would be forbidden or any program with guns or violence. The children of the Home would be allowed Captain Kangaroo and The Three Stooges and the morning game shows like The Price Is Right and Queen for a Day. In the afternoon, they would be allowed soap operas.

Bill carried in the television the first day. He switched it on with trepidation and stood guard over it.

The first show the Angels saw was Search for Tomorrow. The title appeared over a picture of the moon in a cloudy night sky.

Bill waited for the reaction. There was none. At first the old, mad people kept staring somewhere else in their own private world. Then some of the women looked up, attracted by the sound of a young female voice and the sight of fresh makeup and nice dresses.

Brought to you by Procter and Gamble.

They scowled slightly, not sure they had the thing figured out. A kind of radio with pictures. They were only mildly bemused. The whole world had passed them by so long ago that nothing made sense. But they liked the sound of families, and breakfasts, and husbands being kissed goodbye, and the softened voices of women dealing with secret shame.

At night, it was taken away.

The next day, they clustered around it, a new hunger in their eyes. Inside that little box, children bounced in and out of living rooms or wept in their mothers' arms. Grand and powerful women schemed: husbands faced bankruptcy; toothpaste was sold. Gradually the nothingness sucked in the Angels.

Old Dynamite stood with her back to it, looking out of the window. Or she sat, staring somewhere else, her mouth creased around with smiles as if her face were a pond into which someone had thrown a stone. Sometimes her eyes blazed. Sometimes she sang softly. Bill found himself growing disturbed by her.

"Listen, Bill," said Tom Heritage, "the only way you can stick this job is to put it all to the back of your mind. You start taking it to heart, you could end up like them. Once I get my license back, I'm getting out of here, drive a taxi, anything. You should do the same, boy, I can tell you."

Forty years, fifty years, in this place, thought Bill. What a waste of a life.

In November, there was going to be a movie on TV. Networks did not usually show movies, so it was a special thing, a lot of publicity. It was a kids' movie, but a lot of the staff wanted to see it. A kids' movie would not have anything in it to rile the Angels.

So it was decided to wheel out the television from nine to eleven at night. The Angels, like children all over the country, were going to be allowed to stay up late to watch it. Bill, the gentle master of the TV, took the night shift for the first time.

The staff crowded in, the caterers especially, all the employees who were still too poor to own a television. They returned to the Home in their cloth coats. Some of them brought their kids. The children looked fat and sleepy and grumpy. A few of the Angels showed up too, drawn by the excitement and by the sound and sight of children.

The old people in their slippers shuffled up to the children, cooing, confused, wanting to warm their hands around young life, such as they had never had a chance to nurture. The children hated it.

Old Dynamite came lumbering forward too, like some stick insect on long prairie pins, in her Home pj's, smelling slightly of sweat and dry-cleaned sheets. She staggered smiling toward one of the children.

"Hello, hello," she said in a breathless but supple voice. "Hello children. Hello my little ones."

"Mo-mmmie!" wailed one of the children in fear, and turned her face toward her mother.

"I told you, Hattie," said the mother. "I said you was to be nice to the old people."

"Now aren't you the prettiest little thing!" said Dotty, with longing and bad breath. The child covered her mouth, shrank back into her mother's arms.

"Sunflowers," said Dotty. "You like sunflowers, honey?"

The child stared at her with sullen dislike.

"Well," whispered the old woman. "Their real name is moonflowers."

Bill smiled at the mother to let her know that nothing was wrong. "Come along, Dotty, it's just about to start," he said, across the room.

"Do you like Indians? I'll tell you a secret, honey. The Indians won. They're everywhere, but they're just invisible."

Bill walked among the old people, gently guiding them away from the children, into chairs. They should have realized the effect that seeing children would have. None of them had seen children in so long.

"And taffy apples," Old Dynamite was saying. "Oh, I used to like those. They pull out my teeth now."

Bill was next to her, lulled by the normality of her voice. Bill still thought normality was hardly to be breached. He touched Old Dynamite's arm, to lead her away.

The insanity came leaping out of her. Her face twisted up, and she hissed at him like a snake and threw off his hand with clumsy, sweeping strength. She staggered backward and nearly fell over. Bill felt something in him leap back with fear. Her back stiff with pride, Dynamite began to walk by herself toward an empty wheelchair.

The child's mother shifted her body and the subject, looking away from the old insane woman. "I don't know why they have to put on a kids' movie this time of night," she said to her buddy from the kitchens. She had been hoping all the Angels would be asleep, so her little Hattie need not be frightened. She was bitter about being poor and what it cost her little girl.

That'll teach me, thought Bill. Looks sweet, but she's in here for a reason. I reckon Old Dynamite could still be quite an ornery handful. Some rough old pioneer lady who went mad.

They had their first bad reaction to the TV that night. Wasn't more than five minutes into the movie when Old Dotty stood up and shouted. "Who put this on?" she demanded.

Bill moved quickly. He put a hand on her shoulder. "Just sit still, Dotty," said Bill, trying to soothe her.

"How'd it get there?" she shouted, loud. "That's me. How did I get there?"

"It's just a movie, Dotty."

"Who said they could put me on that thing? They got it wrong! Wasn't like that. Only one room we had and couldn't afford no hired hands, I can tell you."

The woman from the kitchen made clicking sounds of disapproval. Did everything have to be ruined for her little girl?

"It's just a movie, Dotty," said Bill.

"What is that thing?" She pointed at the television.

"It's a TV. It's like a radio with pictures. You can show old movies on it. That's what that is, an old movie."

For some reason, that seemed to mollify Dotty. She dropped back down onto her chair, sulking, arms folded. "I ain't never seen a movie," she said, as though that might explain how she came to be in one. She sat looking merely disgruntled for a few minutes more.

Then the cyclone came. When the wind began to moan, Old Dotty began to shake her head from side to side, no, no, no. She looked confused; her hair was wild but her eyes looked frightened and lost. When she finally saw it was a cyclone, she shouted, once, very loudly, and covered her mouth. And when Judy Garland stepped out of Kansas into Oz, Old Dotty covered her face and wept. She pulled in breath with great heaving sobs. The little girl began to cry too.

"I want to go home!" said the little girl.

The mother began to gather up her coat in a rage. "Just for once," she muttered in bitterness.

"I want to go home," echoed Dotty, so softly that only Bill could hear.

"Come on, Dotty," he murmured. Experimentally he wheeled the chair around. Dotty did not fight. She had gone still and staring, her head hanging slightly. Bill wheeled her down the corridor to where the Angels slept.

"Here we are," said Bill. "Back home."

Old Dynamite didn't fight as he helped her up onto the bed and lifted her feet around, pulled up the bars of the cot. She turned her old seeping head with staring, watery eyes onto the pillow as he tucked her under the quilt. She's peaceful now, Bill thought. Getting her to go to the John will only rile her up. I'll clean her in the morning, before anyone sees.

"You just sleep now, Dotty," he whispered. He patted her arm, helpless to offer anything. He began to walk back quietly toward the lighted window in the door.

"Take me to the ocean," said Dotty.

Bill stopped and turned. Did she want to say anything else? He waited. There was a silence for a while. He was about to go again when she said, "I ain't never seen the sea."

"We're a long way from the sea, Dotty," he whispered back to her.

"I'd like to see the ocean," she said. "And then I'd like to die."

What could he tell her? That he'd take her there in the morning? That things were going to get better? That anything good was ever likely to happen to her now?

"They show the ocean on TV, sometimes," he said.

"I ain't no use to anybody. You oughta take me to the sea and drown me."

"I don't think that would be a very good idea."

Two beds down, old Gertie began to moan.

"If we keep talking, we'll wake everybody up. I'll come visit tomorrow," he said.

"It was about me," she whispered. "I really am Dorothy. Dorothy Gael, from Kansas."

The skin at the back of Bill's neck prickled. My, but that's spooky. That's what the character just said in the film.

Better say nothing, he thought. He walked out of the room backward. Better let her sleep.

He shuddered, involuntarily, and tried to calm himself. Whew. Must have been strange for her. Never seen a movie. Been in here since before movies. So she didn't know what they're like. So she sees an old movie that starts in Kansas about a little girl on a farm, must be like her own life coming back. He listened to his own footfalls, soft-shoed, on the corridor.

He went back to the TV, dreading that maybe someone had knocked it over and got hurt. Everything was fine. Bill leaned over to Jackson, the black janitor. He'd been working in the Home for an age.

"Jack," he said, "what's Old Dotty's real name?"

"Don't know," said Jackson. "Don't know their names, mostly. They got files on them all, though."

Wouldn't it be strange, though, if the names really were the same?

Bill drove the car home, and it all seemed to get stranger and stranger, the more he thought about it. Say she was about eighty. She could have been sent here when she was thirty and that would be about 1900. She could have been in here all that time. A whole world could have gone by. The Wright brothers, movies. And both world wars. It's like when they had Veterans Day parades, when he was a kid, and some old guys would come tottering along with their decorations, and they'd be decorations from the Spanish-American War. You had to pinch yourself to realize that there were people who could remember the Spanish-American War.

He needed to talk to Carol. He drove to her house, breathing the smell of the car heater. He parked and ran through the cold to the front door. Lights were still on downstairs. He rang the bell and waited, stomping his feet, waving his hands.

"Is Carol up, Mrs. Gilbert?"

"Why yes, come in, Bill. Anything wrong?" The door was speedily closed behind him.

"No, I'd just like to talk to her."

"Sure," smiled Mrs. Gilbert. It was hard for the young people when they were almost married to have to go bouncing back and forth between houses. "Carol?" she called upstairs. "Bill's here."

Carol Gilbert knew herself to be lucky. She had the boy she wanted. Everything about it was just perfect. Everybody thought so, even her parents. Even her mother, who left the two of them alone with a cup of coffee each in the living room.

He looked up at her and Carol reminded herself how good-looking he was, how reliable, how nice. He needed to talk, so Carol listened, like you were supposed to do. He talked to Carol about some old lady in the Home.

"You can't let it get to you like this, Billy," said Carol, stroking the hair at the back of his neck.

"It's just she's been in there so long. Can you imagine how strange that must feel?"

"You can't imagine how she feels and neither can I. It's sad, Billy, but she went mad and had to be put away."

"She asked me to drown her." Bill looked down at his big hands that could so easily kill.

He was so nice. Big and handsome and sweet. Carol took the back of his neck in both of her hands and pulled him to her and kissed him. She thought of the life they were going to have together. May not be rich, but we'll be happy. Why couldn't he just fix his mind on that?

"Anyway," said Carol, "tomorrow's Sunday. We can go looking for the house again."

"Oh!" said Bill, but it was a groan. "I promised I'd go talk to her tomorrow."

"Well," sighed Carol. "You got a choice. Me or an old mad lady."

He tried to smile and gave her a quick and slightly dismissive little kiss.

"How long you got before the Army?" she asked. She would hate being alone.

"Just a couple of months, I guess. Still haven't had my notice."

"Well," said Carol firmly. "We have got plenty to do before then." The wedding was going to be before then, and that too would be just perfect.

On Monday morning, Bill ran up the steps of the Home. He'd had an idea.

First he went to see Dotty. She sat in a wheelchair with her beautiful smile focused far away.

"Good morning, Dotty," he said. "This is Bill."

She didn't respond.

"Remember me? After the TV show?"

She began to hum nervously, in a high, frail, barely audible voice, shutting him out. That old song again.

Bill knelt by her chair and hung his head. A fine help you've been, Bill Davison. Between you and that television that got brought in here because of you, this old lady is worse than ever.

"I'm sorry, Dotty," he told her, whispering. He didn't want anyone else on the staff to hear. People had been fired for caring too much.

Then he went to see Gwen Anderson, in Admin.

Gwenny was one of his mother's many friends, a funny little widowed lady whose conversation Bill permitted himself to find tedious. It ran in a tight repetitive circle of cooking and homemaking. He had not visited Gwen since coming to work at the Home, and he felt bad about that. He felt worse now. He was going to ask a favor of her.

It was a bit better when he saw her. She let him off easy.

"Bill!" she exclaimed. "Hiya, honey. You haven't been to see me. I was just telling your mother."

"Oh. You know how it is. There's so much stuff to be done before the wedding and all."

Bill felt guilty again. He talked to her about the church's Christmas plans, and about the seat covers his mother was making for her, and how delicious her lemon sponge was. He also talked about the wedding, though he was surprised at how little he had to say about it. So was Gwenny. There was just a little lurch in her face as he ran out of things to tell her.

"Well, a February wedding will be such a treat," she said. "It'll come just when it seems that winter will never end. You must be real happy."

"Real happy, yeah," said Bill. "Carol's a good girl."

"I bet," said Gwenny. Her glasses seemed to smile for her.

And finally, Bill felt able to say, "Gwen, there's a patient here and I feel real sorry for her. Any chance that there'd be a file on her or something? I'd really like to know a bit more about her."

Gwenny was only too pleased to help. The files were supposed to be confidential but there wasn't an untrustworthy bone in Bill Davison's body. The file was big and fat. Bill could sit there in the office since the boss was late. Gwenny unfolded the wax paper around the white bread sandwiches that she took to work in place of breakfast. Breakfast made her feel sick. She ate daintily as Bill read.

Old Dynamite's name really was Dorothy Gale, or rather Gael. The spelling was different. That's what the latest reports said, but maybe they were wrong. Bill went all the way back through limp brown folders to the oldest layer of papers. There was a stiff shiny folder, with printed scrolls and lettering with leaves intertwined. Waposage Home for the Mentally Incapacitated, it said. There was a paper dated 1899:

Subject is well known to local people in the Abilene area under a variety of names and is a known vagrant thought to sleep in rough places including outbuildings or railway sheds. It is thought that she survives through petty theft from orchards and gardens, though it is thought she spent some years in and around Wichita. Records there do show a registration of a Dorothy Gael as a "singer" and common prostitute. She has shown belligerence and violence to officers of the law and is regarded by some people as a public menace. Apprehended in the course of a theft, she attacked a woman in Abilene and has been convicted of causing an affray in the same town. It was the recommendation of the judge that the woman be taken into state care for her own sake and for the sake of the community.

Subject shows some signs of religious mania. She frequently quotes Scriptures and sings hymns in a garbled and sometimes sacrilegious fashion. Her own hard experiences and corrupt nature make a bitter mockery of the sacred words, denying all comfort and salvation. Her oaths are such to blast the ear of the most hardened habitue of lowlife, entwining the Savior and lustful remarks in one evil net.

When not excited by theft or song, the subject is frequently to be found in a kind of trance that suggests alcohol poisoning or the more extreme forms of withdrawal noted in patients of this kind. In care she can sit without movement of any kind for hours. But do not be fooled, for she is capable of flaring up suddenly in a mighty rage, during which the stoutest men in the establishment have difficulty restraining her. Care will need to be taken to make sure the patient, whose hard life seems only to have served to make her physically strong, is kept under a degree of restraint.

She is a woman lost to the world, to sense, and to God.

Bill folded the file shut and sat and stared. Maybe, he thought there are some things you can't go into too deeply. There's no help for them and no solace. Common prostitute. Blast the ear of the most hardened habitue. It was like staring into the pit. So where did the beautiful smile come from?

"Thanks, Gwen," he murmured darkly, and passed the file back to her.

"These people, Bill," she said, "they're like the rocks. You can dash yourself to pieces against them, and it won't help."

That's what everyone says, Bill thought as he smiled to Gwenny and thanked her. Everybody says don't get too wrapped up in them. But God, God commands us to love everyone. God says to find the lamb that is lost. And all these good people are telling me to forget, just close the file and put it away.

He went back to Dotty and pulled up a chair and sat next to her.

"You used to be a singer," he said.

There was a pause. "Yup," she answered him, abruptly.

A silence. Where to go from here?

"Where did you sing?" he asked, after having to think.

"Church," she said, and drew herself up and sniffed. Another long silence. "Nobody ever told me I could sing. Nobody ever asked me to sing. I just found out. So I'd sleep in one town and go to church in another. Sing in the choir. Till they found out who I was. Drove me out."

"Drove you out?" He was appalled.

Dotty didn't answer. Her jaw jutted out, and she jerked it in decrepit defiance. She pretended to brush something off her knee. "Couldn't have the likes of me singing in church."

Let those of you who are without sin…

"That wasn't very Christian of them," he said.

"Totally and completely Christian," she answered him. "Look what they did to the Indians."

He had a sudden strange feeling that Dotty had seen what had happened to the Indians.

"How old are you, Dotty?" he asked.

"Five," she replied. "Took a look around and decided to stay five. I just grew up five, and lived five."

The smile came flitting back across her face like a swallow over a cornfield. "I was a fairy," she whispered. "I lived in the fields, under the leaves. I had a laugh like broken glass." She nodded her head. Then she leaned forward.

"All of us here," she whispered, "are either Indians or fairies." She nodded again.

"Did you ever see any Indians?"

"Only good, Kansas ones. The ones that sleep all day drunk. Those are good Indians. The bad ones are invisible."

"What kind of house did you live in?"

"Underground. Wilbur lived underground, and he went first, and I followed him. We lived underground with the gophers. And Uncle Henry and Aunty Em, they lived in a cottonwood house that let all the wind in. It was better to live underground."

"What year was that? Do you remember what year?"

"No, I didn't know the year. That was why I felt so stupid. After that, I didn't need to know the year. Each year is the same year. All you got. Right now."

Crazy people talked crazy. It was like trying to grasp a handful of fog. You knew there was something there, but you couldn't feel it or touch it.

"And where was this?" he asked.

The stare had come back too. Old Dotty was looking somewhere else.

"In Was," she said. "It's a place too. You can step in and out of it. Never goes away. Always there." She smiled a moment longer and then suddenly said, "My mama died."

"How did she die?"

"I killed her," said Dotty. "I gave her the Dip."

The great stretch of the years.

"My daddy died," said Bill. "He got killed in the war."

"There you go," said Dotty, as if something had been proved.

"It can leave you pretty lonely." He was trying to understand.

"No it can't. People are the only thing that can make you feel lonely." He felt corrected. Loneliness had never been his problem.

"There's the China people," she added. "You got to watch out or they'll break. Crrasssshhhh." She made a spreading, breaking sound.

"Are… are you a China person?" he asked.

Her mouth twisted around in exasperation. "Now do I look like it? I ask you!"

"No," he admitted cautiously. But he found he was smiling.

"I told you," she said. "I am a fairy."

Tom Heritage with the crooked smile happened to be passing. He grabbed Bill by the shoulders. "Well, he may not look like it, but he's a fairy, too, Ma'am."

Joke. Hah hah. "Thanks for butting in, Heritage," murmured Bill

"He is not a fairy!" insisted Dotty, suddenly fierce. She looked like a wrinkled old snapping turtle. "He's a healer." She looked back at Bill. "Just like Frank was," she told him.

"Well, when you get through healing, Bill, we got us some beds to strip." Heritage's eyebrows were raised with meaning. But he walked on.

"I got to go, Dot," said Bill.

"I don't see what's stopping you," said Old Dynamite.

Bill stood up. "Who's Frank?" he asked.

"He was the Substitute," said Dotty, as if Bill should have known. "Frank Balm."

Heritage was at the door, holding it open. "Substitute for what?" Bill asked, walking backward. Her face had gone immobile. "Dotty? Substitute for what?"

She just kept smiling. She was gone. Bill was just at the door when he heard the answer to his question.

"For home," Dotty whispered.

Bill took all of this home to Carol, and Carol was disturbed. What she loved in Bill was his normality. She had been trained to confuse that with virtue. What Bill was involved in now was nothing to do with normality.

"I don't want to hear any more," she said, flustered. "It's a lot of babbling from some crazy old woman."

"But it's like it isn't crazy," he said. "It's like it makes a certain kind of sense."

"Oh, Bill! Can't we just forget it?"

There were so many things to be done. Christmas was coming up, and Mrs. Davison was going to spend it with Carol's family. After all, they were all going to be one family soon. And everybody in Waposage always had everybody else in for Christmas. That meant a cold hard clean of the house, and then Christmas decorations, and lights up along the eaves, maybe a Santa on the roof if you were really public-spirited, and taking relatives on long drives around the town and villages to look at the lights. And presents! Near enough everybody who came to the house had to have a present, not to mention all the stuff you had to get for Christmas morning. And after that, not two months later, there was the wedding.

So why was he getting all wrapped up in some old lady? Because he's a nice boy, that's why. But that kind of niceness could get you down, if it went on too long, and that kind of niceness opened up a door that led to God knows where. That kind of niceness scared Carol to death.

So they went about all their business, going from store to store, Carol's arm in his, finding presents for brothers and sisters and cousins. Bill got a bit worked up about what to get his mother. He felt bad because he was leaving her at home, well, he would have to once they were married, but he wanted to get her something especially nice. Carol helped. She especially devoted herself to finding Mrs. Davison the perfect gift. "I think I've got it," she said. "A home permanent kit!"

He was a man and didn't understand. "Look," Carol explained patiently. "She doesn't have one, and I know she likes going to the beauty parlor, she always just sits back and relaxes when she comes in. But every woman likes to think she can get her hair up for something special if she can't get into the parlor. And look, this is a real good one. Comes with full instructions, rollers, the whole bit."

Bill really didn't seem to understand what a great present it was.

"I'm just worried it might make her feel more alone," he said. "You know, staying in with her hair in rollers and no one to take her out."

"Look. We'll get her the home permanent and something else. Hey, wait, I got it. A new dress for the wedding! Mrs. Harris just made her one, didn't she? She'll have her measurements. Oh, come on, Billy!"

"Okay, okay, you win," he said, smiling and holding up his hands.

"Trust me," said Carol.

They picked up some stocking stuffers for the kids, and perfume for her mother, and went on to the hardware store for some new drill bits for Daddy. They passed the bookshop. "Hold on," said Bill.

"Since when," asked Carol, following, "have you been interested in books?"

Bill wasn't. In fact, he had never been in a bookshop and felt very uncomfortable going into one. But the book was in the window.

"That book in the window," he asked, after waiting for ages behind people at the counter. "Is that the book they based that movie on?"

"The one on TV? Yup," said the salesgirl and waited.

"Could you get it for me?" he asked, helpless.

"Um. It's just over there," she replied, pointing. "I got to work the cash register."

"Oh. Sure."

He really did feel out of place, but he found the book. Carol rejoined him, with a few books for the relatives and the kids.

"You're buying that?" she asked him. Her mother was a librarian. "That's supposed to be a real bad book for kids. None of the libraries will stock it. They don't even list it in the guides and things."

He turned the book over in his hands. "Is it dirty or something?"

"No. But the fantasy is unhealthy. Bad for the little ones."

"Well, it isn't a present for a kid."

"Who is it for, then?"

"It's for Dotty."

Carol felt fear. "You're buying that old mad lady a Christmas present?"

"Somebody's got to," he said.

He bought her The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He looked at the name on the cover and felt that strange prickling again. Frank Baum. She had mentioned him. Did she really know him? Or was that too much of a coincidence?

"How's my girl?" Bill would ask Dotty in the mornings, when he arrived.

"Oh, just fit as a fiddle," she might reply. And then they would talk.

"I just realized," Dotty said one morning. "You boys call us Angels, don't you? I used to make angels. Wilbur and me."

He understood now that Wilbur was a childhood friend. He also understood that Wilbur was often with her.

"Has Wilbur come by again?" Bill asked.

"Oh he comes and sets a spell, just like you do," Dotty told him. "He used to set all day by the road, just waiting to see who would happen by. Sometimes God did."

Bill was thrown for a moment. He coughed. "Anybody else come and visit?" he asked.

"The Good Witch," she said. "And the Bad Witch."

He felt the prickling again. That was in the book. He'd read it. Most of it.

"They're the same person," she confided, in a whisper.

"Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm not a witch at all. I'm Dorothy Gael from Kansas. And that's not East, and that's not North, and that's not South, and that's not really even West. Kansas is nowhere at all."

"Right where everyplace else meets."

"Meets right here," she said, and tapped her own head.

Bill found he was piecing her world together. She had at some point obviously read the book and found it so much like her life that it got wound up in the strange world she lived in. There was, as far as he could gather, this other place she went to when she got the stare. And in that place she was happy, with lots of old friends, all together there. She only got mad when someone tried to pull her out of it. He knew better than to talk to her if she was too far lost in the stare. Or if reality had been too far pushed under her nose, and she wanted to go back to the place she called Was.

And sometimes poison would jet out of her, as if from a wound.

He said hello to her one morning. "Why you talking to me?" Dotty demanded. "You must have something better to do." She shrugged herself deeper down into her own embrace.

"I'm just visiting."

"Go visit somewhere else. I know what you're after. All you men are just the same."

Then she said, "You'd pig-back Christ on the cross given half a chance."

"Dotty, there's no call to talk to me like that."

"You wanna see? You wanna see? You wanna have a good look?"

She said it in hatred. She started to pull her dress up. "Go on, then have a look at a poor old lady."

Bill backed away. You had to make sure people saw you weny nowhere near her. For legal reasons.

"You know you do it to children. Go on. Look at a poor old lady You can't hurt her anymore with that thing of yours. Go on!"

Bill had to walk away. He knew his face was white and he could feel his hands trembling. He had been shaken in the depths of his purity. She had been made so bitter! Bill could not imagine what could make anyone as full of bile as that. Except that it seemed to him that it must have come from something terrible that was done to her.

The next day he saw her, and she laughed when she saw him and clapped her hands, like a child again.

"I baked you a cake," she would say. "A nice plum cake." And she would move the invisible cake onto her tray and pretend to cut it.

"How big a slice you want?"

"As big as you can cut it."

"Oh!" she said. "I know you! You'd have me cut just a teeny piece for myself and give you the rest. I don't know. Here you go."

And she passed him the cake on an invisible plate, and he would pretend to eat it.

Tom Heritage passed by the bed. "Watch it, Billy," said Heritage. "That's the first sign." He turned to Dotty. "How often does he eat cake that isn't there?" he asked Dotty.

"Only," she insisted, "since he's met me and I showed him how. Now he doesn't ever have to go hungry. Would you like a slice?"

"Uh. No thanks. Just had my invisible lunch," said Tom.

After Heritage had gone, Dotty said, with a sigh, "He'll never leave Kansas."

Christmas bore down on them like an express train, jamming all the days together. Billy put up lights on his mother's house for the last time. He and Carol were at a party every night, with relatives or friends. Their high-school class had a Christmas reunion party. Six months after graduation, everybody was pretty much the same, except for a couple of the brainy kids who went away to college. Muffy Havis was there.

Billy wanted to talk to her because she was studying psychology. He tried to talk to her about Dotty.

He loomed toward her. He and Muffy Havis had never spoken much. Muffy had grouped him together with the rest of the huge and popular athletes of the school. She called them the Dumb Oxen.

His hands did most of the talking, as if trying to pull words out of the air. He talked about some patient in the Home, a few scraps of her conversation; some problem she had with the television.

"What's the diagnosis been?" Muffy asked him. "Schizophrenic?"

"I don't know," he said, and smiled his big, dumb, sweet smile.

"It's a bit early in the course for me to give a diagnosis," she said wryly. She was amazed Bill Davison was interested. It made her feel on edge.

"What… what kind of things do you study?" Bill Davison asked her. "Do they help you understand people better?"

"No," admitted Muffy quite cheerfully.

Muffy Havis liked classical music and read all kinds of things and had not been terribly popular. She was hefty and pale and had her hair pulled back into a plain ponytail. Being asked unanswerable questions by one of the Dumb Oxen was not something she enjoyed.

"I sure wish I could understand Dotty better."

Really? Muffy thought. Or did you think everything would be as open and straightforward as playing football and getting drunk with your cronies? Muffy wished she had not come. She was tired of realizing that there was not a single person in her high-school class that she could call a friend.

And here came Carol Gilbert, blond hair, curls, bright smile; she's going to be oh so gracious and get him away from me. Oh, come on, Carol, this is Muffy, remember? You don't have to be jealous of me. Plain old Muffy. Aren't you going to pretend to be nice to me?

"What are you two finding to talk about?" Carol asked.

"Psychology," said Muffy.

"That's all he talks about these days since that job of his." Carol was smiling and dancing in place to get away.

"Maybe he should go into insurance," said Muffy, coolly.

"Something sensible like that," agreed Carol.

There are two kinds of stupid people, thought Muffy. The nice ones and the shrewd nasty ones. And both kinds come out on top.

Bill Davison murmured something. Muffy wasn't sure, but she thought it was "All-fired rush to be sensible."

"What was that, honey?" asked Carol, leaning forward. Oooh thought Muffy. Trouble in the ranks.

Bill didn't answer. Instead he looked up straight into Muffy's eyes big, dumb and not so sensible after all. "I'd really like to talk some more about this," he said. "Now's not really the time. Can I drop by while you're still in town?"

"Uh. Sure," said Muffy. What the hell, she thought, is happening?

"Maybe you could come out and see her."

"What? In the Home? Uh. Okay." Muffy looked to Carol, signaling: This is none of my doing.

"Give you a call," said Bill Davison. A football star, interested in me? Muffy maintained her quizzical expression.

"See ya, Muffy," said Carol, pulling at Bill's sleeve. She even gave her a dinky little wave with the tips of her fingers. Muffy gave her a dinky wave back. It's not you, Muff. It's that old woman he cares about. How strange.

People, Muffy decided. They really do grow up sometimes.

And, she thought, he really is sweet. Not to mention rather toothsome.

And sometime about mid-December, before Bill had a chance to call on Muffy, it snowed. A good hefty Kansas snowfall, in time for Christmas. It started about lunchtime. Bill was cleaning the tables and fixing trays. Some of the patients needed feeding. Dotty came running in. Her feet couldn't leave the ground, but she made a hurried, hopping motion with her hands and head.

"Billy. Billy," she said. "Come and see the snow."

She pulled him to the window. Great fat lumps of snow were falling like flakes of lard.

"God's dandruff," she announced.

Bill laughed out loud.

"Angel feathers. They're cleaning out the roost upstairs, making room for a few more."

"Dotty…" he said, shaking his head. He was going to say, You are out of your mind. It was what he said to anyone who made him laugh out loud.

"The snow's warm," she said. "The Eskimos make their houses out of it. They live in great snow cities, with snow skyscrapers, but nobody can see them because they mix right in with everything else. So the airplanes go over, and never notice. So it's all right. The Eskimos are safe. Nobody's going to touch them." She gave her head a determined nod. "Ride around on polar bears," she told him.

"Hell," she said, her voice suddenly different. "I used to sleep under snow six months out of every year. Snow's always been good to me. Let's go out."

"Can't, Dotty."

"Why not?"

"Rules," he said. "Besides, you haven't got a coat."

"You don't need a coat in the snow. I told you, the snow is warm!"

"Dotty. I can't let you out in it."

Her face went small and mean. She looked at him accusingly. "You're one of them," she said. "You're one of them!"

"Come on, Dotty, it's lunchtime. Let's have some food."

She snarled at him and threw off his hand.

"I'm not your servant," she growled. "I don't have to kowtow to the likes of you."

She held out her hand flat. "You can't do anything to me," she said. "Go on. Hit me! Hit me! You think that will stop me!" Her voice went down into a whisper. "I am the Happy One," she told him. "I come to avenge murder."

She walked away, flinging her hands around her head. "Hit me! Come on! Hit me! Doesn't hurt. Doesn't hurt. They make us tough. They make us tough in Kansas." She walked toward the doors shouting, outraged.

"They sport us till we're as tough as old boots. They'd stick their things up Jesus Christ Himself and make their wives lick off the holy blessed shit from Jesus's holy, blessed asshole."

The doors swung shut behind her. The tirade went on, echoing, horrible, down the corridor. Was it okay just to let her go?

"Then they stick their knives up our sweet little dewlaps and rip them open and hang them from hooks until we dry in the sun and then they call us beef jerky and we clack and clatter when we walk, gutless, flies in the intestines. Oh, no! It's not just enough to kill us! No! Never enough just to make us die."

It was the worst it had ever been. Behind the doors, a man shouted. Bill decided he better go see. He had to put down the trays first. He swung open the doors, following her into the corridor.

Dotty was in a fight with Tom Heritage. She was punching him in the face as he hugged her. The Angel had fallen.

Heritage seemed to have forgotten all his training. Don't come at them from the front, don't try to hit them, get them from behind and make them go still. Billy saw why he had forgotten. Tom Heritage was angry. He was trying to get a good enough hold with one hand, so that he could hit her with his right.

Bill slipped up from behind and got Old Dynamite in a headlock. He pulled back tighter, and she squawked and howled, her arms hoisted helplessly over her head. They waved in the air. She tried to kick backward, but her legs were feeble. Bill held off as long as he could and then swept her feet out from under her.

"Calm down!" he shouted at Heritage. Heritage swallowed blood and wiped his face. "Come on, Dotty, let's go sit down."

She howled in nameless rage and slapped the air and tried to kick. Heritage also slipped in behind, twisting one of her legs in front of the other so she couldn't kick. They lifted her up like a sack of potatoes. Both of them had been hired for their muscles.

Dotty began to sob "No, no, no," over and over. The Graveyard was near. Jackson the janitor saw them and pushed open the swinging doors and flipped down the side of her cot. By the time they had loaded her onto the mattress she had gone quiet. She shivered.

They stood over her. Heritage was nursing a split lip.

"Do you think you could see a way not to report it?" Bill asked Tom Heritage. He looked around at Jackson.

Tom Heritage glared back at him, working the inside of his mouth, tasting blood.

"It's only been this once. Only you, me and Jackson saw it. Please don't tell anybody, or they'll stick her back in the Pigpen. Please. It was my fault, I told her she couldn't do something and I should have just humored her or something. Please don't tell, Tom. Please."

"Okay, okay," said Tom Heritage, sounding bored. "I shouldn't have hit her anyway."

After lunch, Bill wheeled out the TV and stood guard over it. It was late afternoon by the time he got back to the Graveyard to see how Dotty was.

She was lying on her back, smiling the smile, singing to herself.

"Sleep well, Dot," he told her. "Have yourself a beautiful dream."

The next day he got to work late, and Jackson greeted him, wheeling out a tub of laundry.

"We've had a casualty," he said, his voice dark and laconic. Accusing?

"Who?" The old folks often passed away in the night or hurt themselves.

"Old Dynamite. They found her out in the snow. She'd slept out in it all night. She was lying on her back. She'd been making those angel things the kids make. You know, waving her arms up and down to make wings."

"Is she dead?"

"Near as, dammit. She can't breathe."

Bill started to move toward the Graveyard. "Not there," said Jackson, grabbing his arm. "Hospital ward."

Oh God, oh Jesus, please God, please Jesus. He said it over and over to himself as he walked. He got lost, found locked doors, heard strange cries, asked for help. "Why aren't you on duty if you work here?"

"The patient is a kind of friend of mine."

"We're not here to be friends of patients."

"She's ill. Can I see her?"

They'd strapped her to the bed as a precaution. There were tubes in her nose. Her breath came in wheezes and gurgles. Her eyes were closed, but she was smiling the smile.

"Dotty?" he asked.

"She's been unconscious since they brought her in. She's got pneumonia pretty bad. They call it the old man's friend. It is around here, at any rate."

"She doesn't want to die," he said.

"Really?" said the Nurse. "Why not?" She looked at him with a hard, straightforward glance that said, Are you kidding, with the lives these people lead?

"She's happy. Most of the time, she's really happy," he said. "The only thing that makes her unhappy is us."

He went out into the snow. The snow was still falling. It was filling in the angel she had made. It was a huge angel, with great sweeping wings and a head and a long, wide dress that she had made by moving her legs out and in across the snow. She had even scooped a halo out of the snow, around the top of the head. There were footprints all over the snow, big, heavy, booted footprints. But none of them led directly to the angel. They had hoisted her up out of it. That was the whole point. It had to look like an angel had gone to sleep there. And then woken up and flown away.

"It's the best angel, Dot," he said. "It's the best angel ever."

He knelt down and tried to brush away the snow that was falling into it, blurring the crisp, deliberate outline. As he brushed, his gloved and clumsy fingers broke the edges, blurring them. There was no saving it. Like everything else, it was to melt away into history. Like all of us, he thought as he stood up and walked away. Like that great muddy brown river. Like those broken stones. The names wear away. Like the log cabins and the rickety old carts and the sod-and-stick houses and the tent churches. Whole towns swallowed up, gone, lost. A whole America, he thought, it's going.

He went back to work. He worked with a vengeance, trying hard not to cry. It never occurred to him to think crying was unmanly. His mother had told him, when his father died, that it would be unmanly not to, because not to cry, to pretend nothing had happened, that was really cowardice. So you cry, son, she told him. You cry all you can. You do it in his honor. Bill wept now, for Dotty and suddenly also for his father and for the mystery of why all things had to pass away.

"Hard luck, Kid," said Tom Heritage.

"Yeah," said Bill, his voice thin.

"Kind of the end of an era, really."

"Yeah."

"Listen. Uh. I know I joke around and all, but… I really think you did the best another human being could do for that old lady. That was really good. You know?"

"Thanks, Tom." There was no consolation, because Bill found he blamed himself. "She said the snow was warm. She said she wanted to go out in it, and I stopped her, and so there was that fight." The conclusion was inescapable. "We should have reported it."

Tom just shrugged. Nothing for it.

Bill wheeled the TV out after lunch and listened to the soap operas. The Guiding Light. Brought to you by Ivory soap. The only washday powder that comes in flakes like snow.

The Nurse came in. "Mr. Davison," she said. "It doesn't look like it'll be too long now. Do you want to be there?"

Anything less would be cowardice.

"Yeah," he replied, nodding.

This time, led by the Nurse, it was a short walk to the hospital ward. Somewhere a radio was blaring. Voice talking. Music started up, some Christmas song or another, ghostly, echoing. It ended. The voice talked again, radio voice, soothing, phony. They opened the door.

Dorothy looked emerald green, and it seemed there was no breath at all.

"She's real weak," whispered the Nurse and left them alone.

Down the hall, the music from the radio started up again. Bill had heard the piece before. It was real old and sounded kind of creaky with just a couple of instruments and lots of people singing together.

Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

Bill had time to think: That's it, that's the song she sings all the time. Then Dotty was singing too.

Hallelujah! she sang. Only she pronounced it like a child.

Holly hoo hah! Holly hoo hah!

Bill felt his breath go as still as the air in the underheated ward. The voice was clear and strong, pure as a river, though her eyes were closed and tubes were taped into her nostrils.

She sang it over and over.

Holly hoo hah! Hally hoo hah!

Bill didn't know much about music, but he knew it was a voice that could have sung opera. Oh, Dotty, thought Bill. How could you sing like that and no one know?

They didn't ask me, he remembered her saying. And she seemed to go on to say, You didn't ask me.

One thin and withered arm was lifted up.

For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!

The Nurse came back in. "What is going on?" she demanded.

"She's singing," said Bill, helpless. "She used to sing in church."

The arm punched the air. Dotty was smiling as if in her sleep The words began to weave back and forth, and Dotty lit on them where she would, like a bird.

The Kingdom of this World…

For the Lord God…

Hatty hoo hah!

Reigneth!

"Do you believe in miracles?" asked the Nurse. Her face was hard and she was chewing gum.

"Yes," said Bill.

"Well, you're seein' one. She shouldn't even be able to breathe hardly."

The arms folded themselves up like the wings of a scrawny chicken. Dotty kept on singing: King of Kings. Lord of Lords. Bill and the Nurse watched in silence. There was no one else to see or hear.

Bill took Carol to the service. There wasn't going to be one, but Bill offered to pay for it, and the local undertaker, inspired by his example, donated his labor. It was not held in the Home, but in the local crematorium. Bill's preacher, Reverend Carey, gave the sermon.

It was overheated to the point of discomfort. The mourners tried to slip discreetly first from out of their winter coats and then their sweaters. Tom Heritage brought some of the Angels with him. They shuffled along the pews looking utterly and completely lost. Heritage saw Bill, smiled, waved and ushered some of the old people to their seats next to Carol. They smelled of medicine and confinement. They saw Carol try to smile at them and saw her draw back, and they stared at her like frightened children, their jaws slack.

The Preacher told the story of Job, of faithfulness in suffering. Reverend Carey had listened to Bill and had understood that the old woman was in some way religious. Bill was trying to attend, but his mind kept wandering.

It had fallen to Bill to sort through Dorothy's possessions. She had two: the old green pioneer dress she was wearing now and another dress. At first Bill had not known what it was. It was tiny and crisp like an old leaf, brown, but made of lace. He had peeled apart its layers to find that it was a child's dress. It had once been covered in sequins. The child's dress was in the coffin with her.

So was the book. Bill had never had a chance to give it to her. Its ashes would now mingle with hers. It was just a kids' book, but Bill had read the first few pages and remembered them. There was so much in them that was like things Dot had told him about her life.

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles.

Dot had said they kept pork cool in holes in the ground, sealed in earthenware jars full of lard. They wiped the lard off and fried the meat in heavy skillets that were protected against rust by leaving on the fat. Women wore the same woolen dress all winter and just changed the apron.

There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds.

Airplanes, Bill thought, airplanes and radio and movies. She never saw anything like that come in. She was in the Home, instead. Like she was safe from it.

The Preacher was asking them to sing a hymn. There was a rustling of paper as people found it in the book. The music started too soon.

Oh God our help in ages past

Our hope for years to come…

The Angels looked lost. They couldn't find the place in the book-or even the book itself. Carol was trying to be nice and help one of them, her smile fixed and thin, but the old woman next to her had frail hands that mumbled the pages aimlessly while her eyes were fixed on the mystery of Carol's young face, with its short, slightly bouffant hair and its magenta lips. One of the male Angels was singing, very loudly, in a bellowing, tuneless voice:

Home, home on the range!

Bill thought of the book.

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions.

Drapes were pulled back. The coffin began to move. People kept singing.

Even the grass was not green…

The coffin was swallowed up. Carol wasn't singing. Bill could tell from the rigid way Carol was standing that she was holding her breath. Bill felt sweat trickle from his ears onto his collar. The curtains closed. It's like the old days, Bill thought, like the old days were being swallowed up as well. Nobody knows.

When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart…

Carol gave his hand a little tug, then a little shake. The organ finally stopped.

The old man kept on singing, Home, home on the range. Billy, knowing that Carol wanted to leave, strode toward the lectern. Carol hastily gathered up her scarf and coat.

It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings.

Bill went up to Reverend Carey, shook his hand, thanked him, and offered him a lift. "No thanks, Bill," said Reverend Carey, "came here in my own car." He said hello to Carol, and Bill thanked him again.

"I think Carol wants to go," he said, his smile edgy.

"Bill, I'm happy to stay," said Carol.

They walked in silence out of the crematorium. The corridor was the bleary kind of yellow or green that looks like vomit and there were echoes, of their feet, of dim voices, of the Angels being gathered up. The modern glass doors swung open and shut, and the air seemed to blast into their faces, tingling and cold.

"Uhhhhh!" sighed Carol. "Feel that good, night air!" She smiled, bright-eyed, trying to be pert and full of pep.

They drove home. Bill's knuckles were white on the steering wheel and he couldn't think why. Carol was silent and looking out the window.

"I'm going to have to do something about all of this," he said. It was a warning. He was saying: I will be going to work in places like that in the future.

"Like what?" said Carol, in a tired voice. She still looked out the window at the snow. "What are you going to do? What can anybody do for them?"

"I don't know," Bill said. He wanted to say something like: Make sure that they know somebody loves them. But he found he couldn't say something like that to Carol.

"Like maybe go to school or something," he murmured.

"You just got out of school," Carol said, lacing the words with scorn. Going back to school of any kind would be to surrender adulthood.

"I mean, go to college or something. Study nights or stuff."

"Oh, that's just great," said Carol miserably.

What am I supposed to do? Carol thought. Work my butt off in some beauty parlor while you hang around with a bunch of creepy college kids like Muffy Havis? And then what? Then I'd have to spend my life with people like in there this afternoon. But Carol couldn't say that to Billy.

None of this was normal. Maybe she wasn't normal. Carol knew what was normal in situations like this. You were supposed to be warm and helpful and understanding and talk sensibly about how they could get by while he studied. She should be telling him how proud of him she was. She wasn't proud of him. The life he was offering would choke her.

"Why can't you just go and get a job at Mr. Hardie's?" she asked him, pleading. A job like everyone else. "What's wrong with staying in the Army, like your father?"

People like you and me, Carol thought, we're better off in something like the Army, Billy. I can see you in the Army. I can see me there with you.

"There's nothing wrong with it." Billy looked impatient. There was a kind of light in his eyes that Carol didn't like, couldn't trust. "But I'd like… I don't know. I'd like some kind of qualification."

Big heart, thought Carol. If you've got such a big heart, what about saving some of it for me?

"What about us?" she asked him. She thought of white gloves, light pink fabrics, beaded purses, the smell of new hairdos. She thought of home.

"It shouldn't make any difference," Billy said.

It shouldn't, it shouldn't, she knew it shouldn't. But it did. The car was warm now, and the hot air coming through the heater smelled of something harsh and itchy. It made the back of their throats go dry. Billy coughed. Carol said nothing. There was something dry and hot and dark between them. Finally it was Billy who said it.

"Maybe it's a mistake getting married this young," he said.

A pause. There was such a slender bridge leading out into the darkness, and Carol saw herself on it in high heels and a black cocktail dress. Black for mourning. Nothing she had been taught was adequate to deal with this. She felt dirty somehow. She felt defenseless.

"Maybe so," Carol whispered, admitting defeat. She dreaded the shame that was to come, and the embarrassment of telephoning friends, of telling her aunts. She contemplated her coming freedom as well, with a lightening of the heart.

"Maybe, you know, it's just a bit too soon, what with the Army and all," said Bill, and coughed again.

That's what they would say to everybody, that they felt they were rushing into things because Billy was about to go off into the Army. She could say that they just felt maybe it was better to wait awhile. Carol could live with that. People would say how sensible they were being. They would know what was going on, but that wouldn't matter. The date for the marriage would be postponed, to some dim future, in some other life.

Goodbye, Billy, she thought. She saw autumn leaves in her mind. That's what he said, when he kissed her goodnight on her chaste doorstep. Goodbye, with something in his voice that had no promise of tomorrow.

About four months later, in the spring, Bill's church started a drive to collect funds for the Home. The Preacher knew what he was doing. The sight of some big ordinary kid like Bill in his Army uniform would be worth ten preachers.

There was a launch party with banners and free punch. Bill gave a speech. He kept it simple and short.

"It says somewhere in the Bible," he began, "that to approach Jesus you've got to be like a little child. Well, that's how some of the people in the Home are. I don't mean that some of them aren't unpleasant or even dangerous, because they are. But they see things differently than we do, and not always in a bad way."

He told the story, as best he could, of Dorothy Gael of Kansas. He told them what he knew of her childhood long ago amid the steam trains and peach orchards and school stoves that smoked and how she had stayed a child. He told the story of how she had died making angels in the snow, and how she went out singing hallelujah to the God she had cursed.

"You see something like that, you know we've all got something inside us," he told them, eyebrows slanting with pained honesty under his tiny Army hat. "We've all got something of worth, even those people in the Home, and they deserve just as good as we can give them."

Money? There was an avalanche of it. Turned out that Bill Davison had a talent for money as well.