WAS (40 page)

There was Brady, Susan, forty, white female, seamstress, from Virginia, Manhattan City. She lived with Lewis and Betty, eighteen and fourteen respectively.

A widow?

Jonathan saw her in his mind, as if in a photograph, wide gray dress with neat black trim and neat black hair pulled back. Susan Brady had an earnest, slightly smiling, honest face.

Then came Breese, a farmer from Indiana, with lots of children.

No Branscomb.

So he looked for Gale. He hit pay dirt.

There it was; he had found her; there was an H. S. Gale, from Iowa, living in Zeandale. Thirty-three years old, born in New York State. Twenty-eight-year-old wife from Pennsylvania, with four children. Only one of them was a female, twelve years old in 1875. Would that be about right? Initials A.L. Anna Louise? Not Dorothy.

But maybe that was where Dorothy came to stay.

Grow, Guduhan, Guinn, Gulch…

Maybe not.

What now? Bill had said she lived near Manhattan, but that could mean anywhere in hundreds of square miles. Jonathan had another thought: Oh, Lord. What if she went to stay with her mother's sister? If she had married, the name wouldn't be Gael or Branscomb. It would be another name altogether.

"Fool's gold," he murmured.

He took out the Xeroxed memoir.

In the upper right-hand corner there was dim Xerox pencil writing: Donated by Annie Pratt, copied by her from papers written by author.

It was typed, in a very old-fashioned, heavily serifed face.

"Pioneer Beauty," it said, without further accreditation.

We came to Manhattan in the fall of 1857 because of the first sacking of Lawrence the year before. We were hardened to pioneer life by then. Manhattan was even then a sizable place, not too unlike Lawrence.

We had nothing to start with except our hands and feet and some land the good Josiah Pillsbury let us have on very reasonable terms. The land was heavily wooded, and so with the help of the Pillsburys and Mr. Monroe Scranton, we soon had a house.

Out on the wild hills, the grass was taller than a man, and my little sister and I used to walk through it back to back because it was said the wolves would not attack if your eyes were upon them. We called them wolves because of the howling. They would be recognized as coyotes now, but they seemed no less threatening because of that.

Sometimes we could see the wild deer ranging on the bare hillsides. Sometimes we could see the wolves basking in the sun after getting all they could eat.

There were many Indians in those days. They used to pass by our house en route from the reservation near Council Grove to cross the Kaw to get to hunting grounds or to raid the Pawnees.

They would come to our door, wishing to trade venison for some bacon or cornmeal. They would visit for an hour or so and piece quilts. They were very friendly and inclined to be neighborly, to our family especially. My father Matthew was an abolitionist and journalist and took the treatment of the Kansas very much to heart. Already squatters were flooding their reservation. Demands were being made to President Buchanan to reduce its size. The stated intention was to remove them from the land altogether! And yet, years later, these same Indians were to be drafted into the Union Army!

My little sister seemed to be their particular delight. She was nine years old and had long blond hair which the Indians found fascinating. They would sit at our table and tell us stories in halting English of the hunt and their great seasonal treks. At this stage, the Kansa tribe still wore Indian dress, headscarves and leather trousers. At first I felt a great deal of concern over their presence. At sixteen, I was able to leave them with the impression that I was the lady of the house, a married woman, which I felt gave me a measure of protection. I was worried about little Millie, but I need not have. First, Millie, as always, seemed to dance over any difficulty. Secondly, the Indians themselves were as far as I could see a peaceable people, interested mostly in trading and the conversation which accompanied it.

Millie soon learned their language. I also picked up a few words, and it is now the most bitter sadness to me that none of us had time to write them down. I am told there is now no record or lexicon of their language-the Indians who gave their name to our state.

Sometimes odd words come swimming up to me as if from the bottom of a creek.

"Caye" meant chief. "Pi-sing" meant game. I know that "zetanzaw" meant big and "basneenzaw" meant little, which is what the Indians called my sister and myself: Big and Little.

I can remember walking with them to the river. It was not unusual in those days to see two or three hundred of them crossing the Kaw. When a party of Indians arrived at it, the men would throw themselves down onto the grass and spend the time in talking and games while the women prepared the meals and fixed things for the crossing.

I remember Millie being able to ask them in their own tongue why the men did no work, and I remember being able to understand the answer: "Big braves do not work."

The women would unpack the bundles and spread out on the ground large buffalo skins. They would then cut themselves lengths of small bushes or hickory about five or six feet long. They would use these as the frames of small boats, bending them across each other and stitching the skins in place, to make a rudderless, prowless square craft. The women would then pile into them the corn and the reed bowls and the naked children.

Then a woman would get her pony and drive it into the river. She would hold on to its tail with one hand, and the boat with the other, and in this way pull life and property across the current. The men simply swam.

I remember one night my father, my sister and I camped with them overnight. I remember the moon. I remember the smoke from the fires and from the pipes. I remember women sharpening knives and feeling no apprehension. I remember we ate a fish caught fresh from the river, a giant channel cat that must have weighed all of forty pounds-or so my father declared.

There was no whisky among them. This may have been unusual. At least my father was not supplying them with it. I remember him picking his teeth with a fishbone and trying to explain mortgages to the Kansa men, who roared with laughter.

My father was always a hero to me, but the next day, he became a hero to others. It was at the time of the June rise and the river was full to the bank. My father and I were up early, to begin the trek home. It was first light, and the women had already begun their crossing.

My father noticed one horse, with woman and boat, pull away from the crowd and start downstream. I think most of the men were asleep, and most of the other women were wrestling with the strong current, for it was my father who ran down the bank and plunged into the water. I saw him swim toward the woman and catch her by the hair, just as she went under. He pulled her back toward the bank, into the arms of some of the women. The boat went spinning downstream, a child wailing on top of it. My father went after the boat as well, which tangled with some branches overhanging the stream. By the time he had rescued the child as well, the entire camp was aroused. I can still remember the gratitude on the faces of the braves. The pony was swept away and drowned.

I grow confused in time, which seems to me to be like a river. Trying to remember is like trying to hold on to the current. It does seem to me that my father was marked for good things by the Indians because of that incident, so I think that my other memories of them must follow this incident.

To this day I think of Indians and my father in "one breath." Neither of them worked and both of them drank whisky and both of them were robbed of their birthright. In the end, both were wretched and miserable. In 1873, Congress finally took the Indians' diminished reservation, and the Kansa tribe was forced to march away from the state that bears their name. My father died the same year.

The air conditioner was clanking.

Jonathan woke up on the thick patterned coverlet of the bed, leaves of Xerox scattered all around him. His throat was horribly sore. Sitting on the chair by the desk, a plump young man looked at him. Jonathan knew his face, but from where?

"It sure is stuffy in here," said the young man. "You ought to go outside for a while."

It was the kid from the Con. "Karl," said Jonathan, sitting up.

"Hi," said Karl, grinning with his huge white teeth. "How are ya?"

"I'm not well," croaked Jonathan.

"Yeah, I heard." Karl's eyes were downcast.

Jonathan remembered and felt a flood of misgiving and guilt. "And you. Are you okay? I mean, are you well?"

"I'm okay," said Karl. "When I heard about you, I took a test. Nothing. We didn't do that much, remember?"

"Yes, yes, that's right!" Jonathan settled back onto the bed with relief. "We didn't, did we?"

"I thought you might like to know that," said Karl. "Come on, there's somebody wants to see you."

He helped Jonathan to his feet, and Jonathan fumbled woozily with the locks on the door. Outside the air was cool and sweet-smelling and seemed heavier, as if it contained more oxygen. White light glowed inside the blue swimming pool. Worms of light wriggled over the walls of the Best Western.

And Moonflower walked toward them. For some reason she was wearing a 1930s evening dress, white satin with a long train. Her small breasts hung unsupported within it. Her hair was still wild, uncombed.

"We were all real upset when we heard about you," she said.

"All of us fans," said Karl.

"Some of us used to talk to you when you weren't there," said Moonflower.

Jonathan held up a hand. "It was just a part. All you could see was the makeup."

"You became," said Karl, "an icon. We saw your picture so much, you moved from the right-hand side of the brain to the left. You stopped being a visual image, you became more like a word sign. You became a meaning."

"That's the trouble with you intellectuals," said Moonflower. She slipped the satin dress off over her head. "You always stare at the images and tell us what they mean to you. You should ask us what the signs mean. We're the people who use them. You should be doing scientific surveys, not staring at your own belly buttons."

She walked away, naked. Her legs and arms were thin, her hips and stomach already settling down with age. Seagulls in the blue light played about her hair.

"You also ought," she said, "to go swimming." She dived into the pool and disappeared amid a flurry of bubbles, white like pearls.

"Let's get some chow," said Karl. "You haven't eaten anything since Bill's last night, and you lost that."

For some reason, Jonathan already had the car keys in his hand.

The new town center was a huge shopping mall that covered the end of Poyntz Avenue, where the bank of the Blue River had once been. Jonathan walked inside and his breath was taken away.

It was glass-covered like a train station, with huge hoops of light in a row along the ceiling's pinnacle. The floor was made out of brick and there were tall fountains and shrubbery in pots and walkways leading off down avenues of shops to the closed and darkened caverns of department stores.

Jonathan walked forward with tiny, almost fearful steps, looking about him. It was late and the mall was just as deserted as the rest of the town center had been in daylight. Somewhere, echoing overhead, were the disembodied voices of children and the imprecations of adults.

He tiptoed down the main corridor, where it was narrowed by flanks of white columns, and out into a wider space. There was the sound of splashing water and emptiness. A sign hung over it. PICNIC PLACE, said the sign in neon.

In the center of Picnic Place was a black, convoluted, and somehow Italian fountain, surrounded by palm trees. Empty tables were rimmed around it. Along the walls were franchises for Mexican or Italian fast food, and for something called runzas. The voices overhead still had to find bodies. An Asian Indian woman strolled past him in a purple-and-silver sari. Her sandals made a flapping sound.

In the far corner there were double doorways that seemed to promise a more substantial restaurant. CARLOS O'KELLY'S MEXICAN CAFE, said a sign. Jonathan seemed to waft into it. Suddenly he was standing before an empty front desk. No one came to help him. He felt foolish. He walked past a kind of structural screen of plaster, meant to suggest a Mexican building.

The place was a confusing welter of decor-stuffed foxes, Pepsi signs, cow horns, old tin advertisements of women who raised fringed skirts like theater curtains over their thighs, antique (perhaps) mirrors. A table full of male students as big as sides of beef roared with laughter. Jonathan jumped as if they were laughing at him. A waiter finally came up, apologizing. "Sorry, it's kinda late, I'm the only one here," he said. For some reason he had a flapper haircut, like a woman from the 1920S. He wore very baggy shorts almost to the knee. He sat Jonathan at a table and passed him a large menu encased in plastic sheeting.

Chimichangas, thought Jonathan. They had not existed a decade before. In the 1970S, you sat down to beans, enchiladas and chile rellenos. Who invented chimichangas? Were they authentic? If not, how long did it take for something to become authentic?

Time seemed to be leapfrogging over itself. Parts of it were missing. The sides of beef had been laughing so long and so hard they couldn't stop and one of them was in danger of choking. He made squeaking noises like a mouse. Jonathan felt distant from them, and sour. How did they get so big, so strong? He didn't want to eat. The waiter came, bringing him a microwaved chimichanga. When had he ordered that?

Jonathan was used to being friendly and tried to talk to the waiter. Was he a KSU student? How did he find time to do this and his homework? Jonathan was losing his conversational touch-university studies are not called homework. Jonathan felt like one of those plastic fairgrounds smiles had been stuck on his face. It was held in place by biting down.

What was he studying? The answer flattened the conversation like some pathetic animal run down on the freeway. The young man was studying the marketing of new textiles. Uh. Did that mean he researched what kinds of new fabrics people wanted?