Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (45 page)

“Besides,” added Little Daffy, speaking from the sidelines, “if I might add a word, arithmetic has its own cultural moods. In the mauntery, for instance, any span of years more than six we counted as a decade. It doesn’t always mean ten years. It just meant ‘looks about like ten years, sooner or later.’ ”

“To say nothing of the fact,” added Brrr, as long as this was turning into a coloquy, “that when nothing seems to be happening, you can’t tel if time is stuck a little. Six years might go by—cal it a decade or cal it the blink of an eye—but until something else happens to make you pay attention, it doesn’t matter what you cal it. If there’s no reason to notch the memory, why waste time counting dead time?” The magistrate said, “I didn’t ask for opinions from the floor.”

Dorothy looked withered and testy. “So
I
say I was here six years ago, and now I’m sixteen.
You
say it was about eighteen years ago, depending on the moon, the province, and whether anyone remembered to notice that time was passing. According to you I could be twenty-eight. In Kansas that’s downright grandmotherly.” Clearing his throat, Temper Bailey ventured his first remark. “Time is fascinating, sure, but why are we spending time on this?”

“If I’m twenty-eight,” said Dorothy, “then I’ve reached my majority and I can serve as my own attorney. I want to cal for a recess. I’m going out to try my first whiskey smash. Uncle Henry says they’re great. Anyone want to join me?” She held out a forearm to the Owl so he might perch there.

“It’s hardly past breakfast, and the court hasn’t adjourned for the day,” said Nipp. “Not to mention that you are under arrest.”

“Oh, right.” Stil, Dorothy’s shoulders squared a little straighter on her spine.

“I shal begin,” said Dame Fegg, and Nipp nodded his assent. “I would like to start with a question about your life of crime
prior
to your first arrival in Oz, Dorothy Gale.”

“Oh, do cal me Dorothy,” said the defendant. “Everyone does.”

“In your home territory, Dorothy Gale, is kiling witches something one might have trained for in grammar school? Or taken up as an extracurricular hobby?”

“Goodness, Dame Fegg—is that how I should address you?—they didn’t teach much in grammar school. Some simple sums. Our letters and how to form them on a slate. A little Virgil. The Christian principles of government. Also how to share. In any case, there are no witches in Kansas, nor as far as I could tel in San Francisco either, though frankly I don’t believe I got to the bottom of what was going on there. It sure wasn’t like Kansas, though there felt like some kind of magic at work. In any case, I wouldn’t have kiled anyone, witches or no. Uncle Henry says we’re makeshift Quakers. We don’t believe in violence except of course at hog-kiling time, because as the waiter said to me in the San Francisco hotel, there is nothing like a nice hot sausage slapped between warm buns first thing in the morning.” The Sow in the second row turned grey and put her hooves over the ears of her littlest Piglet. “He was ’tremely agreeable you know but I do believe he wasn’t my type. Uncle Henry said I didn’t have a type as far as he knew and in any case by the looks of things I wasn’t going to find a felow for myself, suitable or otherwise, in San Francisco.” Dame Fegg had stopped as if calcified at Dorothy’s reply. Her mouth opened once or twice and when she made a note her hand was trembling. “Dorothy Gale, I must remind you to answer only the question I ask. Otherwise we could be here for a year. However we count it.”

“Oh, yes, Dame Fegg.
Answer only the question
. That’s what my teacher in Kansas used to say. That’s why I had to take my lessons sitting on a bench outside the school building. I could lean my books and my slate on the windowsil. If I started talking too much, the teacher would come over to the sil and close the window. So if I couldn’t hear him I just would look around at Kansas, which is maybe what first gave me a yen to travel. I mean you’d have to stand on your head to make Kansas novel, and even that only works for a while. Have you ever traveled, Dame Fegg?”

“Not to Kanziz,” said the prosecutor, in a voice that made it into a kind of joke, as if she were saying
haven’t gone out of my mind—yet
. The crowd tittered, not knowing if that was alowed, but Nipp hid his mouth behind his hand too, so maybe it was al right.

“I’d like to be the first to invite you to visit,” said Dorothy. “I would have to be your chaperone, of course, because a little woman like yourself might be considered a child, and then you couldn’t get a whiskey smash either. Not that you could get one in Kansas under any circumstances. It’s a dry state. Dry, dry, dry.” Dame Fegg pounced on those words as if Dorothy were casting a spel. “When you first came from Kanziz, Dorothy Gale, we were recovering from a drought that had plagued most of Oz for as long as we could remember. In a great wind you arrive, you with your suspicious name of Gale, which suggests windstorms and rain. You succeed in a matter of months in doing away with both of the Thropp sisters, who with their magic capacities might have further united and strengthened Munchkinland. In their absence, however determined our own population to govern itself, Munchkinland has not thrived. The annual rainfal has improved only slightly, and the armies of Loyal Oz have invaded our fair province and requisitioned Oz’s largest basin of potable water, the lake caled Restwater. You have a great deal to answer for.”

“Wel, let me start by saying we know drought in Kansas, believe me. I—”

“You may start by being quiet,” said Nipp. “Dame Fegg, at the moment please confine your questions to the matter of the murders. We may not number our years in Oz as they do in this place caled Kanziz, but we number our days as precious, and we don’t want to be here until our grandchildren have grandchildren. And you, missy, keep your answers short and to the point. You are brought up on most serious charges indeed.”

“Got it,” said Dorothy.

“Briefly, I beg you, briefly,” said Dame Fegg, “describe your arrival in Center Munch for us, however many years ago we pretend it was or wasn’t. I would like you to answer for us particularly how you knew that Nessarose, the Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland, would be present that day, and how you organized an assassination of such cunning and precision, and also when and how you decided to proceed with your march on the Emerald City.”

Chastised and trying to please, Dorothy recounted what she could of her first arrival in Oz, either six or eighteen years ago. Off to the side, Brrr remembered quite a bit of what she’d told him, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman. As far as he recaled she’d gotten the facts of her alibi down straight, if alibi it was. In the safety of her family’s farmhouse, the child Dorothy had taken refuge from a storm. Through some sort of catastrophe of nature, aided perhaps by a deep magic, the house had been lifted into the air, whirled through dark agency across the uncrossable sands that surround Oz, and deposited in Center Munch.

Right on top of Nessarose Thropp. Apparently Dorothy hadn’t been taught about Oz in her schooling on national geographics, though perhaps that was part of the curriculum she missed by being exiled to the bench outside the closed window. She had never been able to ask about Oz even after she returned to Kansas because the teacher, frightened out of his mind by the twister coming so near, had taken off for Chicago.

“Taken off for Shiz?” asked Dame Fegg, scratching her ear.

“Chicago,” said Dorothy, but trying not to run on at the mouth she just mimed a cityscape with huge buildings. “Chi-caaaaa-go.” Dorothy continued her narrative. It was a grisly tale. After landing, she’d learned that a good part of the town of Center Munch and outliers had gathered that morning for some sort of religious festival. Young students had been receiving prizes. Experiencing a sudden darkness, they al dove into the shrubbery and nearby homes. They heard a weird whistling folowed by a shattering crash at which precise moment al their eyes were closed in terror. When they emerged from hiding, they found that a house had stove in the grandstand erected for the occasion. Dorothy stood in the center of the town square, not far from the start of the Yelow Brick Road. It took the astounded citizens of Center Munch a few moments to realize that Nessarose Thropp, alone of them, had refused to move an inch, even under the signs of the imminent attack.

“How like her,” murmured Dame Fegg. “Proof of her character.” Though Brrr had remembered it being said that her standing her ground had been proof of her noxious superiority. Once she had learned to stand on her own two feet, that is.

“At any rate,” continued Dorothy, “you may cal it murder now, but at the time no one clapped me in chains. They celebrated their release from a wicked fiend. Or that’s how they said it to me. The Wicked Witch of the East had claimed for herself al powers of deciding right and wrong.” Dorothy straightened up. “I was hailed as a liberator, and soon Glinda arrived to set me on the road to the Emerald City to accept my reward.”

“Maybe she intended you to be imprisoned there, in Southstairs,” said Dame Fegg. “Getting a dangerous criminal out of commission is the first duty of a public figure.”

“It wasn’t like that,” said Dorothy. “There was singing and dancing, and someone brought out sweet bricks of bread spread with a hideous sticky cream jam of some sort. I had never meant to kil a witch—I hadn’t even known witches existed, except in storybooks, and not the kind of storybooks we were alowed to read in Kansas, believe me. It was al so sudden, you see.”

“There are a great many holes in your testimony,” said Dame Fegg. “For your house to crash exactly upon the place our Eminent Thropp stood, kiling her and her alone—it beggars credulity. It smacks of a conspiracy in high places. I suspect someone in the Emerald City was involved.”

“When I landed, they didn’t cal it an impossible coincidence,” said Dorothy in about as cold a voice as Brrr had ever heard her use. “They caled it a miracle.”

“I put it to the judge and the jury that with malice aforethought the defendant conspired to alight in a most deadly manner,” said Dame Fegg. “She wreaks havoc wherever she goes, both last time and this.

The poor cow.” Though it was unclear whether she meant Dorothy or the Glikkun milk cow she squashed upon arrival this time.

Brrr saw Little Daffy’s arm waving right in front of his nose. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I add a word?” She popped out of her chair and approached the magistrate’s desk.

“If it’s pertinent, go ahead,” said Nipp.

“I was there at Center Munch. I was about the age then that Dorothy is now, or says she is, I mean. I was sixteen or eighteen years old. It was the end of our year of studies of the writings of the unionist fathers. I can speak to what actualy happened and to the sentiment at the time.”

Nipp nodded, and Dame Fegg seemed wary, but she waved her quil at Little Daffy to proceed. Temper Bailey hopped on one leg, looking interested for the first time.

“Of course I was young,” said Little Daffy. “But none of us had ever seen anything like the arrival of Dorothy before. She wore that preposterous costume and carried that inarticulate puppy—”

“Oh, please don’t mention Toto or I just might cry,” said Dorothy.

“—and I verify that it seemed to al of us as if she might be a sorceress or a saint, arriving out of nowhere in some sort of portable house, to liberate Munchkinland from a tyrant of sorts.”

“The tyranny of Nessarose being primarily religious?” asked Dame Fegg.

“Yes. That’s right.”

“And yet you went on to spend your life in a mauntery. So your ilustration of Nessarose Thropp as a bigoted dominatrix of some sort is a bit lacking in smack.”

“It’s true I was dressed up as a sunflower or a daisy, or maybe even a daffodil,” replied Little Daffy. “It was a pageant of sorts. And as a young person of course I was susceptible to the special pleading of startling atmospherics. But my memory isn’t at fault here. Dorothy was greeted by wild regaling. The death of Nessarose was viewed as an accident. And I insist, a happy accident. I stand up to tel this because it is so.”

“Very nice, very sweet. Testimony of a daffodil. You may stand down,” said Nipp.

“And it wasn’t just me,” said Little Daffy. “Lady Glinda arrived soon thereafter.”

“That’l do,” said Nipp.

“May I pose a question?” The Owl seemed entirely too timid, thought Brrr, though perhaps that was a courtroom strategy of legal counsel who happened to be Animal.

“If you must,” said Nipp. Dame Fegg curled her lip.

The Owl said, “Did you like being a sunflower on display for Nessarose Thropp?”

“I adored it,” said Little Daffy. “I wore a kind of snood on which were sewn big flat yelow petals cut out of felt. We stood in ranks and had our own lines to sing when Nessarose walked by in those glamourous shoes she had. It was a children’s song caled ‘Lessons of the Garden.’ ”

“What was your line to sing? Can you recal it?”

“Out of order. Inappropriate,” said Nipp. “Besides, no one cares.”

“I do,” said Dorothy. “I love to sing.”

“If it pleases the court,” said Little Daffy, “and I won’t do the whole thing—I just had a single stanza. Correcting for pitch, as back in those days I was a soprano and now I’m a beery contralto, it went like this.”

“Oh, please,” said Dame Fegg. Brrr bared a canine at her. Just one.

“Go on, and perhaps I can become a sort of musical anthropologist, colecting melodies. I’l cal it ‘Songs of the Munchkinland,’ ” said Dorothy, clapping her hands.

Little Daffy sang,

Little sorry sunflower seed,

I know exactly what you need.

The love of the Unnamed God is pure,

As good for you as rich manure.

“Or maybe not,” said Dorothy.

“
That
took up a few valuable moments of my life,” said Nipp to Temper Bailey witheringly.

“I’ve established the innocent nature of Little Daffy and proven she isn’t lying to protect the accused,” said Temper Bailey.

“I was a maunt,” said Little Daffy. “I took vows not to lie.”

“You also presumably took vows of commitment, and you seem to have thrown
those
over when they got inconvenient,” snapped Dame Fegg, indicating Mr. Boss, who was holding his wife’s hand. “I recommend that we count as inadmissible anything the little Munchkinlander dandelion sings.”