of wagon wheels, the protest of an ox under a yoke. Creeping out of the darkness toward her and into the electric light come the tired faces of those long gone, men and women in plain dress, standing amid the new, not surprised, not confused or outraged. Simply standing.
Rose Lawn Farm, near Syracuse, New York-Summer 1861
There were chickens at Rose Lawn and china soldiers. The hens were brown and white with feathers cleaner than sheets. They were alive. The soldiers were tiny and perfect, and for Frank they were alive as well.
Frank liked the soldiers' pink cheeks, their tiny perfect eyes and the feel of their china faces under his fingers, smooth but slightly rough at the same time. The soldiers were French because their arms moved loosely under their uniforms. Their arms were held by threads. Frank lay one of them down very carefully next to him on the stone steps. Things got lost. Things got broken.
Was that snow glinting on the grass? Was it water? Did grass cry? Eagles flew. Frank looked up. It was as though he could leap up into the sky. Clouds sighed overhead, across the face of the sun.
Frank was running away. Frank was always running away to secret places and Rose Lawn was full of them. Frank was running away now. But he knew he had been found, sitting on two stone steps between cedars.
He heard the crunch of his mother's boots behind him on the gravel walk. He did not look up. His mother began to speak. The words fell, as individual as stars.
'Where's Nanny?' she asked.
Frank shrugged. He heard the rustle of cloth as his mother knelt down beside him. He could smell soap and scent. Frank rubbed his eyes.
'I don't like her,' Frank said. Nanny smelled of sweat and washed his face with her own spit daubed on a handkerchief. Frank looked at his mother's green dress with what seemed to him like thick green ropes embedded in the fabric. He wondered vaguely if they were for hanging things on. Or hanging up the dress? Hanging up his mother, from the walls?
'Nanny doesn't always understand,' said his mother.
That was not Frank's problem. He felt his mother stroking his hair. He looked up at her face. The eyes were full on his.
'She doesn't remember what it is like to be a child,' his mother explained.
'Why not?' Frank asked. It seemed to him to be a simple enough thing to do. Overhead, the clouds had faces, and they smiled.
'Because it was such a long time ago,' said his mother. She whispered, in case the trees were listening.
Frank looked at the clipped hedges and the white fences, the water snaking its way from the fountain's mouth. He looked at the china soldiers and his wooden duck with the wheels on the stone steps. The steps glinted in the sun as if blinking. The hens, feathers billowing in the slight breeze, looked like clouds with legs. They kept kissing the ground.
'I'll remember,' promised Frank.
Reality Check
I am a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism. Because I am a fantasy writer, I am particularly aware that every work of fiction, however realistic, is a fantasy. It happens in a world that is an alternative to this one.
There is a town called Manhattan, Kansas, that is very like the one in this novel. It was settled by people called Purcell and Higinbotham and Pillsbury. There was a Professor Mudge, an Etta Parkerson and her Mr. Reynolds. There even was a Dr. Lyman. To my knowledge, however, he was not related to Lyman Frank Baum, nor did Baum visit the town, though he was in Kansas in the 1880s.
To my knowledge, no Chinese people lived in Manhattan in the 1870s. There was, however, a Mr. Win Tsue who lived in Deadwood, South Dakota, and who invited local women to meet his wife on New Year's Day.
There was a Blue Earth village on the Manhattan side of the two great rivers. At one time, it consisted of 128 lodges, each sixty feet long. The marks in the ground were visible for many years afterward, still remembered by people writing in the 1920s.
There is a Zeandale; there is a Pillsbury's Crossing. The Aiken family still lives in the area. There were indeed two Sunflower Schools, one of which has disappeared, leaving only a clearing in a small hump of woodland where a lane meets the main road. That lane does lead to a smooth, ziggurat-shaped hill.
There is a farm rather like the one my Dorothy lived on, except that the people who lived there, the St. Johns, the Eakins, have been moved over by about a mile to make room for the Branscomb Estate. My Zeandale is a much bigger place.
The real one did have buffalo wallows which are remembered as having swallowed one child whole. If memory serves, the last buffalo in Zeandale was seen at Pillsbury's Crossing, by a member of the Aiken family, in 1882.
There were many other sources in reality of this fantasy.
Mr. and Mrs. Aiken spoke to me and showed me where the first Sunflower School had been. They told me the story of the buffalo wallow and another story of lilacs planted on the hills to commemorate another child who had died.
The interior of Mrs. Baker's farmhouse is rather like that of Mrs. Marjorie Sand's, who in two interviews told me much about Riley County and life in the old days. It was Mrs. Sand who managed to produce for me one of the last available copies of Pioneers of the Blue Stem Prairie, an exhaustive and invaluable work tracing the family history of all the original settlers of a huge area of Kansas.
I am indebted to Charlotte Shawver of the Registry Office in Manhattan and to Nancy Gorman and Dala Suther, who provided enthusiastic help during my brief visit there.
I could not have written the book in such detail without the days of personal help given to me by Cheryl Collins and Jeanne Mithen of the Riley County Historical Museum. They found and allowed me to photocopy unpublished memoirs, census records, historical books, photographs and plat books. These memoirs provided the basis for
