Oz Reimagined Part 19

"You done a goodly deed this day," Stan said, after Rand handed her the dog. "Even a G.o.dly one." Stan had recently been saved in a tent meeting and couldn't stop talking about it. Joking about it, too. Called it his Tentative change of life. And that he had a Tent dency toward G.o.d. We just learned to ignore him.

Stan gave Dorothy a cracked bowl he'd found thrown out on the road, only about good enough to use for a dog's dinner. Just as well, as she couldn't actually feed the ratty thing from one of Em's best china now, could she? Not that Em fed anybody with that china. It was saved for some special event that never came.

I gave Dorothy a leather rope I'd braided myself, plus a collar cut down from a bridle I'd found in my mother-in-law's barn. And no, I didn't ask permission. She'd have said no anyway.

Dorothy's eyes got big. "For me? Really? For me?" It was about the longest speech I'd heard from her up to that time. We were afraid she was going to try and kiss us or something right then and there, and so we shuffled out the door to get back to our ch.o.r.es. But when I turned around to see how she was making out, she had her little pug nose on the dog's nose, as if they'd been stuck together by glue.

After that there wasn't a moment those two weren't in one another's pockets. She named the dog Toto, though where she came up with that, we were never to know. I thought for sure it would be something like Silky or Blackie or Fido. But Dorothy, she was always a queer kind of kid, as you will see.

There were two twisters, not one as has been reported. Old Man Baum liked to tidy things up, you know. Dogs, tornadoes, you name it. He tidied. Made for a clean house, but his storiesawell, take it from me, they weren't to be believed.

Of course we always get twisters around here. It's kind of an alley for them where we get mugged on a regular basis. But mostly we just hunker down in our dark little underground rooms that are dug into the unforgiving soil. Some folks like to call that kind of hole a cellar. More like a tomb for the hopeful living.

Usually the wind goes zigzagging past a farmhouse, picking up cows and plows, flinging them a county or two away, which does neither cow nor plow any good at all. But sometimes it flattens a whole house and everything in it, which is why we hide ourselves away.

That first twister young Dorothy was part of was one that had the Gale farm in its sights from the very first.

I was the only hand about that day; Stan and Rand were off at a cousin's funeral. Sorry man shot himself on account of losing his farm and land to the bank. He was never meant to be a farmer and was bad at ita"and worse at keeping accountsa"so no one was surprised.

There I was out in the back acres, hoeing alonga"furrowing I sometimes called ita"and suddenly I felt the air pressure change. I heard a low wail of wind, and when I looked north, I could see the long prairie gra.s.s bowing in waves all the way to the horizon where the shape of a gray funnel cloud could be seen heading our way.

I dropped the hoe and ran for the house, yelling for Henry and Em and Dorothy to hightail it to the tornado cellar. It was going to be a tight squeeze, even without Stan and Rand, but the one good thing about twisters is that they don't hang around very long. Just a minute or two, though the damage may last a lifetime.

Inside the Gale farmhouse, like many of the houses hereabouts, was a trapdoor with a ladder leading down into the cellar hole. By the time I got inside, Em was already lifting the trapdoor up and climbing in. Henry was looking frantically out the window.

"Where's Dorothy?" he cried, his long beard waggling as he spoke.

Em called up, "Probably chasing that dang dog."

Henry grunted and said something like, "You never should have let her keep that blasted animal. It'll be the death of us all." He not only looked like a prophet out of the Good Book, he often sounded like one.

"Well," Em called back, "what was I to do, that poor child so broken-hearted and all?"

While Henry searched for an answer, I turned and ran out the door and around the side of the house, where I saw Dorothy laying on her belly and trying to coax the frightened Toto out from under the porch.

"He'll be safe enough there," I said, and because I never lie, she believed me. I held out my hand. "But unless you can crawl down there with him, and me after you, we'd better get into the cellar."

She was reluctant to leave the dog, but she trusted me, took my hand, and we raced back inside and climbed down into the hole with hardly a moment or an inch to spare.

Well, you never can tell with a twister. They are as mean, as ornery, and as unpredictable as an unhappy woman. This one only nudged the house off its cinderblocks. We could feel the hump and b.u.mp as the house slid onto the ground. But then the wind scooped in under the porch and dragged the poor dog out of there. We could hear it yelping, a sound that got farther and farther away the longer we listened till it was overpowered by the runaway-train sounds a twister makes.

The Lord only knows how long the storm played with the little yapper, tossing him up and down, spinning him around, before finally flinging him into a coal bin some five counties away.

Henry posted a twenty-dollar reward for anyone who found the dog, which was nineteen dollars more than the animal was worth and five dollars more than Em said he should post. The woman who owned the coal bin sent a note, but she declined the reward, which was both Christian and silly of her, one and the same.

The twister had watered Toto well, and the coal bin woman had combed out his long silky hair. He was a good deal prettier than he'd been in some time. But he was also dead as could be, and no amount of weeping and snuffling and flinging guilt around that little farmhouse for days, like a baseball going around the bases in a game of pepper, was going to bring him back.

Rand had taken a course in taxidermy when he was still in high school, so he volunteered to skin, stuff, and mount little Toto for Dorothy. I was the only one who thought that a bad idea.

"More than likely scare the bejeebies out of her," I said. But to show I was a good sort, I made a little cart out of an old piece of oak I had lying about, too small for a table or anything other than a serving tray, which the wife didn't need. I sanded it down, shaped it a bit, and put on some wheels from a soapbox car I'd scavenged a while back. Then Rand mounted the dog on that.

Now, Rand hadn't done any taxidermy in years, so the dog didn't look very alive. The gla.s.s eyes were ones he took from a moth-eaten goose he'd mounted on his first try at taxidermy in high school. But Dorothy took to that stuffed dog like she'd taken to the live one and pulled it after her everywhere she went, using the plaited leash I'd made for Toto when he first came to the farm.

You squinted your eyes some, it looked like the dog was following her around. And now it didn't need much maintaining. That pleased Dorothy as much as it pleased Henry and Em.

So maybe she wasn't the only queer one in the family. After that, I kept my opinions to myself.

We went on like that for three years, and the only thing to change was that Dorothy began to grow up. Grew a little prettier, too, the gap in her teeth closing so it looked more like a path than a main highway.

And then when she was thirteen, after years of near misses with twisters, the farmhouse was. .h.i.t big. Other houses in the county had gotten flattened in those years, and one little town was just plain wiped off the map. People got parceled out to relatives, or they moved to the East Coast or the West, and we never saw them again after that. But for some reason, Henry and Em's place had been spared year after year.

The big hit began just like the last one, except I was cleaning out the pigpen. Rand was working on Henry's plow, which had developed a kind of hiccup between rows, as had his old plow horse, Frank. Henry and Stan were out checking on fencing, and they came roaring back, Henry shouting, "In the cellar! Everyone! It's the biggest twister I've ever seen, and it's heading right this way. I'm going to let the horses and cows out into the field."

We piled in, one on top of another, Henry coming in last.

About a minute later, Stan noticed that Dorothy wasn't with us. We found out much, much later that she'd gone under her bed to pull out that little dog on wheels. She hadn't played with it for a couple of years. Too grown up, I'd guess. But she wasn't about to have Toto taken from her again.

Well, we kept the trapdoor open for her till the wind hit, howling like a freight train running right through the center of the house. And then Henry reached up and slammed the door down.

That left Dorothy under her bed, the dog on wheels clutched in her arms. Which, under the usual circ.u.mstances, might have been just fine.

But there was nothing usual about this wind. It was a killer. Should have had its name on a reward poster. It was that bad.

It just lifted up the little house and carried it away. Henry had never gotten it back on the cinderblocks, but that didn't seem to matter. Off that house flew, with Dorothy in it. And we never saw the house again.

We sat cowering in the hole, in the dark. Me, I wondered about my wife and her mother and our chickens, but there was nothing we could do except sit while that wind fretted and banged and gnawed around the house.

When the noise was finally gone and Henry lifted the trapdoor, the light nearly blinded us. We were expecting to find ourselves in the house, of course.

"Lord's sake," Em whispered, as if the wind had taken her voice away, too. "There's nothing left." She was too shocked to weep.

But surprising us all, including himself, Henry began to sob, though the only word he got out, over and over and over again, was Dorothy. "Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy." Who would have guessed he loved that little child so.

They posted notices all the way to Kansas City, that being the direction the wind had been tracked. And Henry even hired a private detective to search for her. But she was as gone as if she'd never been.

In less than a week, there was a four-room house-raising that all the neighbors attended. One room was set aside for Dorothy. The neighbors brought pies and hot pots and cider. We men got that new house up and tight in a day, and I did a lot of the inside woodwork, including the bed frames. It felt good to be doing what I loved best for once, being a woodman again.

The newspaper covered the house as it went up, taking some close photographs of the hearth I made, with carvings of the little dog on wheels. I got calls from all around the state for work after that, and my wife and I set a bit of money aside. Not in the banks. We didn't trust the banks any more than Henry did, so we bought land instead. I did really well for almost a year, and then some newspaper reporter wrote that I didn't have a lot of polish, meaninga"I thinka"I couldn't make small talk with the customers. But other people thought it was a judgment on my furniture-making, so the work dried up after that, and I was glad to get my old job back with Henry.

The five of us often sat in front of the hearth after the day's ch.o.r.es were done. Fire lit, cider in hand, we'd talk about where Dorothy might be now.

Em thought maybe she'd married, because she'd have been sixteen, close to seventeen. "Maybe to a lawyer," she said, "her memory all blowed away by that wind, or she would have sent us an invite. Maybe even to a doctor."

Henry shook his head. "That girl was bound to be a teacher. She read books."

Stan and Rand said, "Bank teller." Stan added, "Bank manager soon enough."

Once in a while, I would wax a bit fanciful. "Balloonist," I said once, "flying through the clouds."

Henry always laughed at my fancies, a slow laugh with little happiness in it. "I think she'd have had enough of flying through the air."

None of us said she was dead. But we all knew that was the most likely.

Em put it this way, "I hope wherever she is, she's treated well. She never did a hurtful thing to anyone."

It was as close to an epitaph as any of us wanted to go, but it was a good one.

I have to say this about the predictable life: it's easier on the body, easier on the soul. We worked the seasons on the Gale farm, we drank cider and talked a bit at the end of the day. Months turned into years.

My mother-in-law went from difficult and cranky to forgetful and cranky. When she became bedridden, my wife took care of her as if she was a colicky infant, the only one we ever had.

I hoed, cleaned pigsties, walked the plow on occasion, anything Henry asked me to do I set my hand to. I rarely thought about working wood unless it was to mend fences. I mean, what was the point?

Then one afternoon in late autumn, after the ch.o.r.es were all done, we five were sitting watching the fire. We'd grown silent with the years and with the predictability of our lives. None of us seemed to miss the old conversations. If Dorothy was still alive, she wasn't interesting enough to talk about anymore. Or we'd run out of what-ifs, which is the way stories get started. In the living room, the only thing contributing to the conversation was the fire, spitting out snappy one-liners none of us tried to top.

There was a knock on the door. I wondered briefly if someone had come to tell me my mother-in-law had died, so I stood up to see. No use letting Em have to come face-to-face with that particular announcement. She'd been worn down by enough bad news in her life. I wasn't going to let her be bothered by mine.

As I walked out of the room, for the first time in months the others all began to speculate. Their ideas followed me into the hallway. Police? Twister? Telegram? Doctor's a.s.sistant?

When I opened the door, standing there was a tall, pretty young woman, her hair in a short bob. Unlike the local farm girls, she wore careful makeup on her face. It enhanced her odd beauty. The women in Kansas City, the two or three times I'd been there, used makeup as a weapon or as a disguise.

She smiled at me with strong, evenly s.p.a.ced teeth. If she hadn't been carrying the little dog on wheels, along with a satchel, I wouldn't have known her.

"Dorothy!" I cried out, my voice carrying back into the living room, where suddenly everything went silenta"even the fire.

"Come on in," I said, as if this was an everyday visit, as if it was my house to invite her into.

She entered, looking around in wonder. "Golly!" is all she said.

It took me a minute to remember that this wasn't the old farmhouse she recalled. "The neighbors all helped to build it afteraaftera" I hesitated.

"After I was blown away." So she had remembered. I wondered why it'd taken her so long to get in touch. I mean it had been seven years after all.

Before I could ask, the hallway was as crowded as the cellar hole had once been. Everyone was touching Dorothya"her hair, her shoulders, her handsa"saying her name in soft wonder.

I pulled back, not trusting this part of the story. Could such a glamorous creature really be our Dorothy? And why had she returned, why now?

They drew her into the living room, where the fire had resumed its one-sided conversation, only this time everyone ignored its snap.

"Where have you been, Dorothy?" Rand was the only one innocent enough to just come right out and say it. "All this time?"

Her next words surprised us. "Why, in the Emerald Circus. The performers heard a huge crash near their Missouri campsite and found me under a tree, pieces of wood scattered all around. My memory was as shattered as the farmhouse. All my clothes blown away but my shoes. The little people got to me first."

I refused to dignify her story with questions, but no one else had the same reaction.

"Little people?" asked Em.

"Dwarfs, used to be miners in Munich. Though they don't like to be called so," Dorothy said. "Just Little People."

"Oh," said Em, "the clowns who run around through the audience. I've seen them. You did, too, Dorothy," she said. "We went to the circus once. Together."

Dorothy got an odd look on her face. "I don't remember." It turned out to be something she was to say many times over the next weeks.

If Dorothy was to be believed, her life in the circus over seven years had been like a dream. Little people. A freak show full of oddities. Wire walkers. A lion that jumped through hoops. Dancing dogs. Bareback riders. Even an elephant.

"And yet," she added quickly, "all just people. Like you, like me." Then she laughed softly. "The dogs, the horse, the lions, the elephanta"not them of course."

Well, of course circus folk are just people, I thought, only not like us at all. Though I didn't say it out loud.

Dorothy had become part of the show, dressing in tights, a fitted bodice, and silver shoes.

"Tights! Land sakes!" Em said, her hand on her heart as if she was going to faint.

Dorothy even got to wear a blond wig.

"Think of that!" Henry put in.

Her toenails were painted gold.

"Real gold?" asked Rand.

"Don't be stupid," Stan said, pounding a fist into his brother's shoulder.

At first Dorothy had just walked around the ring, smiling at the folks in the audience, turning and turning like a whirligig. But all the while, when it wasn't show time, she practiced wire-walking with the Italian acrobats, the Antonioni Family, until she was good enough to become part of their act. They even wanted her to marry their son, Little Tony, and carry on the family tradition.

"But I told them I was too young, and besides, I wasn't the marrying kind." She smiled at Uncle Henry. "I knew that one day I would remember where I came from and want to go back there." She opened her arms and turned around and around, like she was still performing. "And here I am."

"Here you are," Henry said, grinning.

But I wondered if it was true.

All of it.

Any of it.

Dorothy stayed, taking her turn at the house ch.o.r.es, gathering eggs, making lunches, cooking soups, plucking chickens. The usual. She seemed content.

But then, about a month later, she convinced Stan to get a bunch of strands of strong wire, which she braided together. Then he stretched the wire from one part of the pigsty fence all the way across to the other, nailing it down hard on each end.

We watched as she climbed onto the fence, wearing overalls and a silver shirt. Those little silver dancing slippers on her feet.

The piglets looked up at her and squealed, but the sow seemed unconcerned.

I was probably the only who thought we were going to be picking her out of the pigpen, covered with mud.

She started off cautiously, one small slippered foot after another, testing the tightness of the wire. But after about three steps, she walked as if going along a wide asphalt road. Even stopped in the middle to turn like a whirligig, arms wide open, before lifting one leg high in the air behind her.

"Arabesque," she said, as if that was an explanation.