Was

excitedly.

Aunty Em chuckled. 'Yes, we are, honey, and we're going to meet all kinds of nice people.' There was a kind of snarl in Aunty Em's voice, on the word 'nice,' that made Dorothy breathless with anticipation. Nice people. It had been so long since she'd met any.

'Nice people,' Dorothy repeated. Saying it made her feel small and warm and comforted.

'It'll be like going to church in Lawrence,' said Aunty Em. 'We just had the one old cottonwood meeting hall, and the sun made the boards curl up, so the wind blew between them, and we'd all sing just to keep warm. Sometimes your grandfather would read the lesson. He had a fine voice for reading, he'd make the words come alive. He would read the Sermon on the Mount and make people weep from the truth of it. That was his most favorite passage in the Bible. And we'd stand up from those wooden benches and sing those grand old hymns just like in New England. And your mama, she was the littlest and she would sing such a sweet little song.'

Suddenly Aunty Em was no longer smiling. 'I don't suppose your mama ever told you about Lawrence.'

Dorothy could feel the sun going behind a cloud. 'No, Ma'am.'

'She never told you?'

'No, Ma'am.'

'Well. That was where we lived first. Kansas was just being settled, and we wanted it settled by Northerners. So the Company was formed to help us move across. We came from New England, Dorothy, from Massachusetts. Your grandfather was one of the first to say he'd go. He was a very brave man. He came all the way across the United States to Kansas, and he was one of the first. He left July 17th, 1854, one of the first thirty men. And it was a triumphant progress. They were cheered at the train stations.'

Dorothy half imagined it, the flags and excitement, and people cheering a good man. It was all part of the Meeting feeling.

'Your grandfather wrote letters about it back home to the newspapers, Back East. He was such a lettered man, your grandfather. We followed the next year. I came across when I was thirteen years old. Oh! This was a beautiful country then! Nothing between horizon and horizon. I can still remember my first sight of Lawrence, across the river, in the trees. We came across in the ferry and stayed with such nice people, a minister. He had an Indian servant girl, and she gave me a buffalo rug to sleep on. Then we went out to look at our new house that your grandfather had built.'

Aunty Em paused, looked at the fields, the flowers. 'I can remember the first time I heard a Western voice. A woman from Iowa. She told us a store had 'a right smart chance of calicoes.' Your mother and I laughed and laughed, and no one could understand why two little Yankee girls would find it funny.'

Aunty Em went silent again, listening to the mule. 'Anyway,' she whispered, 'it's the children of the Company we'll be meeting today.'

Aunty Em drew a deep and shaky breath.

Lawrence sounded beautiful and happy and full of laughter.

'Lawrence had trees?'

'Lots of them, honey, all over the place.'

'And Indians and buffalo?'

'Not so much even then. People were planning to make their living farming. The hunters had already moved on, to places like Wichita.'

'Why are we living out here?' Dorothy asked.

Aunty Em's face went darker. 'We had to move out here, Dorothy. Didn't your mama ever tell you why?'

Dorothy shook her head.

'Border ruffians attacked the town. Called themselves Federal Marshals and carried the flag of South Carolina.'

Aunty Em flicked the reins. 'I remember getting up in the morning and seeing them on top of Mount Oread. The birds kept singing, the sun shone, and there were five hundred armed men on the hill. They fired cannon at the Free State Hotel until it fell. They destroyed the office of the Herald of Freedom where your grandfather wrote his paper. They came to arrest him, but he had already given them the slip. They came into our house, all leering, and asking for the man of the house. And I told them they knew where he was, driven from his own home. So they ransacked it. They were as drunk as skunks and singing 'Katy Darling' and 'Lily Dale.' And they read our letters and stole our clothes. They even destroyed the only daguerreotype I had of my mother! Then they set the house on fire. My little sister and I had to push a burning bed through the window. After that, my father thought we would be safer out here.'

Aunty Em's rage seemed to subside, then flared up again. 'And they did it twice! Once in '56 and again in '63. Only the second time they killed every man they could find. And not only men! They killed boys, children. They even killed babies if they were little boys.'

'Why?' whispered Dorothy in horror.

'Oh! Because the South wanted to own slaves. They wanted to own people like dogs. And because of them the whole country had to go to war!'

'Why did they kill children?' Dorothy asked.

'Because their minds were twisted. They were so deep in evil, they couldn't find a pathway out. The glorious South. And your mother went to live there! In Missouri, St. Louis, the city that tried to stop us from even getting to Kansas. She has to go and move there, not four years after the ashes of Lawrence were finally cold.'

Dorothy could not remember a war. She could not remember anyone in Missouri killing people. But it would seem that her mother had lied to her, not to tell her this.

'How could she do it to us?' said Aunty Em, helpless with anger and unhappiness. 'Go off to St. Louis with that man.'