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
