"Are you surprised, with that background?" murmured Aunty Em, eyebrow raised.
"Hmmm," said Miss Francis, without commitment. Aunty Em did not know that Miss Francis's parents had favored the South.
"And how is my dear little charge progressing?" said Aunty Em, gazing on Dorothy with fondness.
It was the moment Dorothy dreaded. The bilious cornbread went round and round in her mouth. It was supposed to be a treat, to have tea with Miss Francis.
"Well," said Miss Francis looking around, pressing down a smile. ''Everything Dorothy does is as neat as wax."
"You should see her at her chores," said Aunty Em, nodding.
"All her work is quite brilliantly presented," said Miss Francis, "but it must be said that the content of her figure work and ciphering is not what it should be."
"Dorothy, are you paying mind to your teacher?"
"Yes, Mmm," whispered Dorothy.
"Speak up, Dorothy," said Aunty Em. "Sit up straight, and pay Miss Francis the compliment of your regard." She turned back to her ally.
"Dorothy is always beautifully behaved, a very model in all respects," said Miss Francis, still smiling at Dorothy. "Except one. She is still stone silent. She does not put herself forward. Nor does she appear to fraternize with the other children."
"Even now," sighed Aunty Em, looking at the table in sadness and concern. "It is the tragedy, hanging over her."
Dorothy was so weary of being reminded of her tragedy. She did not remember it. It was a universe ago. She did not remember the old house, she sometimes forgot she had once had a little brother, and her mother was the flattest and dimmest of memories. She had long ago given up dreaming that her father might come for her one day and take her away. Her father didn't know or care. It came as something of a surprise to remember that he was still alive, Dorothy had grown so used to telling everyone that he was dead. The tragedy, as Aunty Em called it, seemed to have nothing to do with her.
"Perhaps also," said Aunty Em, "it is that the other children do not wish to mix with her."
Aunty Em was coming to blame the rough local children of Zeandale. They ran barefoot in the dust and stole fruit from orchards and raided wildlife by the river. All sorts of mischief, while her Dorothy sat at home and polished and sewed and scrubbed and grew beautifully less.
Then Professor Hungerford left teaching to take advantage of all his many connections. He opened a business, offering abstraction and insurance. Aunty Em's loyalty to Miss Francis persisted for two years. Dorothy sat in the kitchen silent and still, sinking even deeper into a scholastic quagmire. Aunty Em felt compelled to ask Miss Francis to dinner.
Aunty Em told Miss Francis that something had to be done about Dorothy before it was too late. It was no reflection whatsoever on Miss Francis's program, but it was time that the child was given a different and more varied setting. With Professor Lantz now in charge, and Mrs. DeEtta Warren as his assistant, Aunty Em now had renewed confidence in Manhattan education. Miss Francis could do nothing but concur and skillfully manage to disguise a measure of relief.
So, though Zeandale now had a stone schoolhouse as well, Emma Gulch sent her quiet little mouse of a ward all the way to Manhattan rather than have her educated in the country. This was considered by the other farmers to be of a piece with the rest of her behavior.
It fell to Henry Gulch to take her in. All through the autumn of 1881, he and Dorothy would be up with the dawn. Through the long gentle ride to Manhattan, they would see the sun rise on fields and in forest. They would see the birds, though Uncle Henry would not insist on Dorothy naming them. He would let the birds be themselves. He let Dorothy be as quiet as she wanted to be, finally resting from work, her books in a bundle in the back, out of her arms. Often she fell asleep, leaning against him, listening to the plod of the horse's hooves in the dust.
Aunty Em was running the farm now, and running it well. It was prospering, and they did have hogs and they did have horses. There were plans finally to build an extension. Nothing grand, just a summer kitchen for Aunty Em to cook in during hot weather so that the single room in which they slept and ate would stay cool.
Winter came and was a bad one. Dorothy and Uncle Henry shared the same lap robes and jostled their feet on the hot stones taken out of the oven. They huddled together, and he tickled her. Uncle Henry tickled Dorothy and started to laugh, with broken teeth.
One night, in the middle of that winter, Dorothy started to bleed. She woke all wet and sticky down there. Something dreadful had happened. There would be blood on her nightdress, blood on her sheets. Bad blood, it was as if her bad blood were leaking out of her. Had she done anything unwittingly down there to cut herself? How could she explain to Aunty Em that she was bleeding down there for no reason?
It would require desperate action. She would have to say she had cut her hand. That would explain the blood on the sheets, perhaps, but not the blood on her nightdress. It was wet around her middle, there was no saying that was from her hand. Dorothy, who was always neat and tidy, who hated to see anything flow, was appalled at the mess she felt all around her.
She would have to burn the nightdress.
Very slowly she slipped out from under the blankets. The mattress rustled. She stood up, already in an agony of chill, but she could not put on her shoes for they would clump on the floor. She had to slip the nightdress off, over her head like a whisper. She nipped around the blanket that hung from the walls to divide the room and padded across the kitchen floor.
Dorothy knelt and lifted up and opened the door of the stove and threw the nightdress in, over the black and orange embers. She could see the steam of her breath in the faint light. Her bare legs rose up in goosebumps and her teeth began to rattle against each other.
"What are you doing?" demanded Aunty Em. Dorothy spun away and pushed the hot iron door shut with her hand. Had Aunty Em seen her, crouching naked in the light? Had she seen what she had done? Dorothy's throat went tight with terror and cold. She could hardly breathe. She couldn't talk.
"She's just feeding the stove, Em," said Uncle Henry. "She just wants to keep us warm."
"Well, be careful with the fuel," said Em. There was the sound of settling down under the bedclothes. Dorothy leapt into her bed, shaking for warmth and other kinds of shelter. How would she get up in the morning without being seen? What if the nightdress did not burn? What if it was found in the morning, laying cold on top of the coals? And what, what if she hadn't stopped bleeding? What if she bled to death? Dorothy began to weep, curling her lips inward and pressing them shut so no sound would escape. Her hand. She would have to cut her hand. Dorothy cursed herself for forgetting to bring back a kitchen knife. But how would she explain the cut of a knife in the middle of the night? What was she to do?