Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (42 page)

“We must have walked a hundred miles,” said Frank. “We’ll never make it home by dark.”

“At the edges of your vision, where the cornfields are,” she said.

Only then did he see that in fact the cornfields were still there. And with every step they became clearer, and the palace of the Emperor of the Air grew dimmer, and the road beneath their feet turned from yellow brick to the dust of Aberdeen, and they were in front of a certain house.

A tiny house, barely two rooms wide and two rooms deep, and a woman sat asleep in a rocking chair on the little sagging porch. She looked exhausted and sad, and her face was etched with the harsh lines of a farmwife, though it occurred to Frank that he had never heard she was a wife of any kind, only the aunt to this girl. Auntie Bess. Bess Krassner, who had helped contribute to his father’s bankruptcy. Whose niece was grateful to her father for the credit he extended, which had saved her while it ruined him.

Theodora let go of Frank’s wrist. His wrist was immediately cold where she had held him, for she and he had
sweated profusely in their haste. He watched silently as she tiptoed up the steps and walked along the porch. It creaked under her foot, and Auntie Bess stirred and frowned but did not wake.

Theodora took the woman’s suntanned left hand in hers, and with the other hand slipped the golden ring onto the finger where it belonged. It slid on easily, though the fingers were much thicker than Theodora’s, and for her the ring had been too small.

In her sleep the woman’s face changed a little, just the tiniest bit, but now she seemed at peace, and the frown became one of concern and weariness instead of anger and loneliness. So much to see in such a tiny change, but Frank had learned that there were things to be seen at the edges of vision.

Theodora moved behind the chair and touched the woman’s hair with her fingers, and then placed her hand across the woman’s brow and smoothed the lines there. The woman woke and her hand flew up and found her niece’s fingers there, and the hands held each other, and the woman smiled.

“Theodora,” she said. “You lingered late at school? You weren’t in trouble, were you?”

“I had a job to do,” said Theodora. “And I made a friend.”

Only then did Bess notice the boy standing off the porch a little way. “Why, you’re Frank Baum’s boy, aren’t you?” she said.

“I better get home now,” said Frank.

“Your father is a good man,” said Bess Krassner. “Grow up like him.”

Frank saw at once the impossibility of such a thing. “I can only grow up like me,” he said. And then, because he
couldn’t hold it in another moment, he shouted, “I saw the Emperor of the Air!”

Bess Krassner looked in puzzlement to her niece, and Theodora laughed and kissed her aunt on the cheek. “It’s just a game we played,” she said. “And today I won, but Frank here didn’t mind, because he’s a good friend already.”

Frank waved good-bye, and Bess and Theodora both waved back, and then he was gone, running the dirt roads of Aberdeen until he reached the house where Father and Mother and his three younger brothers lived. Where he lived too, though it seemed so small and colorless, for he had seen the City of the Emperor, and he had stood on the green where the Emperor of the Air sat upon his simple stone and granted, not the wishes wished for, but the sweet relief owed to the dutiful who never hoped, who never thought to ask, but whose unwitting messenger had come to bring her the inheritance that she had earned so well.

Frank burst into the house and could hardly form sentences of all he had to tell his father, his mother, his brothers. The boys listened in wonderment and Mother laughed in delight and Father nodded. “That’s how it’s done, boy,” he said. “That’s how you tell a story. And much better than the ones about ordinary life!”

Then Frank understood that they did not believe that any of it really happened. But they loved the story anyway, and remembered it in bits and pieces, and over the next few days his brothers asked for it again and again, and even acted out the parts of lion, scarecrow, mechanical man, and Emperor.

Ten years later, his father would write it down, after embellishing it greatly, and having another man draw pictures of it, and he got so much of it wrong, but Frank loved it anyway, and was proud of his father for writing it,
especially because it made them very rich, and Frank was old enough by then to appreciate just how much that meant, not to be poor.

By then they lived in Chicago, the Aberdeen paper having long since failed. Frank didn’t really miss Aberdeen, with its bitter winters and hot and dusty summers. Bess Krassner and her niece Theodora had already moved away—had moved that very fall, because they knew they’d never last another South Dakota winter. With her, Theodora took Frank’s last hope of ever returning to the Empire of the Air, though he walked the route many times, looking through the edges of his eyes but never catching a glimpse of yellow, not even once.

She was a witch, he thought. A good one, a magical person. And I’m not. I could only get there by holding her hand.

But maybe the Emperor of the Air remembers me.

He held on to that thought, even after he became a man and understood that there was no Emperor, that it had all been a dream. A vivid dream, unforgettable, not a detail ever lost, more vivid than life itself.

Even if he doesn’t exist, the Emperor of the Air remembers me, as he remembered dotty Theodora and her hardedged Auntie Bess, and gave a treasure to them all those years ago.

BY JEFFREY FORD

T
he last time Dorothy returned to Oz, the silver slippers barely fit, the gingham dress was a dust rag in her broom closet back home, and Toto had been in the ground for fifteen years. She carried a briefcase instead of a basket. Her long overcoat covered a rumpled business suit—midlength skirt, a mint-green dress shirt, and a blazer. Her hair was cut short, dyed the pale color of Winkie Country, and already in need of another cut. A puffy face, wrinkles where the freckles had been. Shadows beneath her eyes. She landed in the field of poppies, along the road of yellow brick on the way to the Emerald City. The flight from Kansas had made her dizzy. She breathed deeply, sighed, and walked toward the spires in the distance, cutting a trail through jade blossoms, their scent like a cloud of vanilla.

When she was younger the perfume of the flowers always drew her down into sleep, but over the years their hold on her had weakened, now bestowing only the desire to sleep, but also a fierce alertness in the dark hollows of the mind. She trudged across the field to the edge of the road, where she stopped and set down her briefcase. She removed her overcoat and threw it back into the field. She kicked off the silver shoes and threw them after the coat. From the open case, she took a pair of sea green pumps and slipped
them on her stockinged feet. Also from the case, she drew a Colt .22 pistol and pocketed it inside her blazer.

Weeds poked up between the yellow bricks of the road, and its famous color was subdued beneath scuff marks and mold. Here and there, though, a brick was freshly shattered, revealing within the vibrant golden glow of her youth. Although she carried her years in Kansas City with a weary posture, one glimpse of that shining hue lifted the shadows and set her mind to memory. As she strode along, the faces of her old friends returned. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Lion, and dear Toto walked with her again. She thought about them till she smiled, and then she shook her head and breathed deeply, knowing her vision was a result of the poppies. Their scent stayed with you nearly a mile after leaving the field.

She was surprised to see no Munchkins on the road, no horse carts carrying corn and pumpkins from the fields. No children gleaning for grains of wheat left behind by the threshers. No scarecrow conversing with a fox. No soldiers on maneuvers outside the city walls. It was as if the land were sleeping. She scanned the skies out over the barren trees in the distance, but there was no sign of crows, no Winged Monkeys. A cold wind blew up the road from behind her. When she’d last left, the Emerald City had exactly 57,318 Munchkins. She thought it odd that no one would have come to greet her. What was forty years to the ageless? She wondered if they’d forgotten her so as not to wonder if she was alone in Oz.

At the main gate to the City, which was open and unguarded, she stopped and took a pair of glasses out of her shirt pocket. Their lenses were a deep emerald green. She slipped them on and continued forward amid the sparkling glass architecture and the warren of twisting streets that wound through it. She knew the way to the Palace and didn’t pass a soul. The stalls in the marketplace were empty.
No laughter came from the open windows, no chatter from the cafe. At the village square, which had lost its grass and was now a plot of hardened dirt, she watched the wind whip up a dust devil and send it off toward Quadling Country.

She turned down Gollyawp Way, a narrow lane where the buildings on either side cast the street in perpetual shadow. When last she lived in the Land of Oz, it was on this street. In a second-story apartment, by herself, at the age of eleven. Dorothy came to her old building and stopped to look up at the second-floor window. She pictured the view from it, sitting at a small table in her parlor. She’d been content there for the first two years of her four-year stay. She’d intended to never go back to Kansas. Shopping at the stalls, mingling in Munchkin society, trips to Gillikin Country with Ozma, or tea at the Palace with the Wizard. It was during the time when all who lived in the Land of Oz ceased to age. Dorothy turned away from the old house and began walking again. Her knees hurt, and the street was colder than the others for lack of sun.

At the entrance to the Palace, she found the great wooden doors, as ornate as those of a cathedral, flung open. The guard with the long mustache sat there, leaning back in his chair, wide mouth gaping. His tall fuzzy hat and long coat were tattered. His rifle lay across his lap. She drew near and nearly gasped when she saw his desiccated face, empty eye sockets and leather flesh made green like everything else. She stared at him for a moment, recalling his self-important way, and thought about how much he would have suffered in Kansas.

On her journey up the grand hallway, her shoes echoed against the glass floor, the reverberations bouncing off curving whale-rib columns and the vaulted ceiling. Ahead, a fiery ball the circumference of a hot air balloon spun slowly over a low altar, bright threads of electricity scribbling the air around it. When Dorothy drew within twenty yards of it,
the image of a face coalesced out of the green gas within. Eyelids sprang open. It glared at her, transforming rapidly from face to face—a wicked witch, a Winged Monkey, her dead husband, even a skull (the only one laughing).

“Halt!” said the thing in the floating globe. “Who dares to disturb the great Oz?” Its voice boomed down the hall, and she felt its power in the vibration of the floor.

“Dorothy Gale of Kansas,” she said.

“The Wizard is busy. Go away!” it shouted.

Dorothy walked past the globe and around behind the altar, where there was a curtained entrance to a room. As she swept the silken fabric back and stepped in, the Wizard turned from the mechanical controls that gave life and light to the remarkable Head. He looked over at her and laughed. She removed the glasses and took him in. His hair was white as a cloud and hung mid-length down his back. Bushy white eyebrows, a trimmed mustache, a sharp goatee. He was dressed in a purple smoking jacket and striped trousers. He wore no shirt, only a vest, with the white hair of his chest showing atop the plunging collar. A thin golden chair clung snugly to the folds of his neck. His cheeks were prodigious and his belly redefined the term.

He came toward her still laughing, and she took a step back.

“You remember me, don’t you?” she asked.

“My dear, I knew you’d come back before you did.” She cowered, and he lightly embraced her. She heard a whisper of a kiss in the air. As he backed away, he clapped his hands and smiled. “You look wonderful.”

“No, I don’t,” she said.

“You’re tired from the trip. Come sit at the table and I’ll brew us a cup of Tamornas tea.” She followed him across the room, noting the fireplace, the shelves of books, the vanitas paintings by the Quadling master artist, Heshrow. She’d
seen it all before but not in a long while, and seeing it again drew a sigh from her.

“That doesn’t sound good,” said the Wizard. He pulled a padded chair out for her at the table and then turned to fix the tea. She sat back in the chair and folded her arms across her chest.

“So,” said the Wizard, “I heard you were working in a shoe store in Kansas City.”

Dorothy laughed.

“Were you surprised?” he asked.

“When I was in the stockroom, going through the boxes, searching for something I knew wasn’t there but the customer insisted I look, I found them.”

The Wizard put the water on to boil and clapped his hands again. He twirled around slowly like a mechanism in need of oil and took the chair across from her. “Ozma told me she’d dreamed they’d fallen off your feet when you left last time.”