Her sisters were going to go to school, Daddy was hiring other acts, and she was going to go to Los Angeles. Frances began to hear the unaccustomed sound of her father weeping. She sang louder, to cover the dissonance. The words of the songs were not important. The meaning behind them was, a meaning that could not be put into words. The meaning needed music. The meaning needed her, to sing it.
Manhattan, Kansas-Christmas 1875
– Nancy Banks-Smith, reviewing a television documentary about Mark Chapman,
Wilbur F. Jewell killed himself just before Christmas. No one seemed to know why. Some people blamed the weather.
It had been a strange December that year. Thermometers showed eighty-eight degrees if they were on a south wall out of the wind. It made the children restless, people said, to have summer in the middle of winter.
Then, as hard and sudden as a fist, winter slammed into them. The snow piled up in drifts, and schools were closed. Everything closed, even the sky which hung dark and low and heavy overhead. A few days before Christmas, Wilbur Jewell went missing. Uncle Henry and Will's father spent a day out in the snow looking for him. Dorothy was rather excited. Will had always talked of getting out of here. She thought he had done it. She thought he had run away and got on a train and become a steamboat pilot on the river or even gone out to the Territory, to join the Indians. She wished he had taken her with him.
Wilbur had walked clear to the other side of Manhattan to the telegraph poles.
Dorothy was in bed, listening, when she heard Uncle Henry's boots clunking up the stairs.
'The boy went and hanged himself,' was all he said.
'What! God have mercy. Has his mother been told?'
There was silence for an answer.
'Well we just got to go there,' said Aunty Em.
'She don't want nobody now, Em. She just sits in the corner rocking, and there's no comforting her. She don't want comfort. She just knocks it away.'
'Oh! It just tears the heart! What does she say?'
Dorothy heard Uncle Henry slump down onto the chair. 'She says he was a happy boy. She just says that over and over. He was a happy boy. And she says how she doesn't have anything to remember him by. Bob told me outside, he was going to get a photographer in. Photograph the remains.'
'Horrible habit. I suppose they'll have a wreath with it that says, 'Sleeping in the arms of the Lord.' '
'It'll be all the woman has.'
Dorothy could stand it no longer. She could very finely gauge what would annoy Aunty Em, what was safe and what was not. She could sense from the fine fierceness in Aunty Em's voice that almost anything would be all right.
'What's happened to Wilbur!' she said, walking out from behind the blanket.
'Oh, darling, did you hear?' Aunty Em sounded worried for her, instead of angry. Dorothy had been right.
'Wilbur's dead, Dorothy,' said Uncle Henry.
Aunty Em tried to hug Dorothy. She somehow always missed, all angles and elbows. 'We just have to hope that he's happy in the arms of the Lord,' she told Dorothy.
Dorothy did not need to be told what dead meant.
'Was it the Dip?' she asked very quietly.
'Oh honey, now, it wasn't. Wasn't your fault at all.' Aunty Em tried to kiss her. 'No.'
They weren't going to tell her why her friend had died.
'What does hanged mean?'
'Dorothy. That's something you must never mention. If you talk about it, it will only make it worse for everybody. I'll tell you, but you must promise not to talk about it. Say yes.'
'Yes, Ma'am.'
'It means he killed himself, Dorothy. I'm not going to tell you how because it'll just give you nightmares. But he killed himself.'
Dorothy didn't ask why. She knew. It was a way of leaving. She nodded and went back to bed.
'Dorothy?' asked Aunty Em, her voice trailing after the child. It was Aunty Em who needed to talk. Dorothy didn't. Dorothy threw herself on the tick mattress and pretended to be asleep. She heard Aunty Em pull back the blanket to look in.
'She's asleep.'
