She liked the pigs. They had round cheerful faces, and they knew her. They greeted her. Uncle Henry would slaughter them.
I am a pig, she thought, cheerfully. I smell like one, I shit like one, in the straw away from the house. She thought of wallowing in muck like a pig. Who would notice the difference? Maybe I'll just become a pig, maybe there's a magic spell that will make me one. I'd wake up one morning on all fours grunting. I'd marry a little pig of a husband and have lots of piggy babies and then one day they'd take me away and slit me open. The lining of white fat and pink-gray meat and blood on the walls.
She drifted off to sleep, dreaming of lines of butchered, gutted Dorothys hanging on the walls. That's what happens to us anyways, she thought.
She dreamed it was wartime. There was a war between children and adults. Adults were hunting children across the landscape, on wagons and horseback. The children had to hide under the leaves. If the adults caught you, they made you a slave like in ancient Egypt. But if it was your parents who caught you, then they killed you.
Dorothy would wake up under straw, counting snowflakes blowing into the crib. She would stumble across the icy desert of the yard to the house to feed the stove, to bring in wood or coal or dung to burn. She fumbled with frozen fingers to find eggs and she brought them in to cook for breakfast.
No one came to the house to call. It was as if the Gulch farm were haunted, full of tales now. No one saw how Dorothy was living, except maybe Max Jewell. He dropped by once, on a Sunday morning, to drive her to church. He saw Dorothy huge and shapeless in bundled torn cloth, a blanket tied around her with rope. The sight of her fat face, as heavy and numb as dead meat, appalled him. Max never came back. Dorothy went on into the house.
The winter drew on. Em said nothing. Henry said nothing. Dorothy felt like some great slug, a cocoon, about to hatch. She waited for the spring.
Spring was full of mud. Dorothy lost a boot trying to rescue chicks. The sun came and baked the mud into hard plates. Dorothy broke the ground with a hoe to plant the vegetables. She scrubbed the floors and everything else in the house, where it was warm, while Aunty Em sat in silence, darning. Still there were the dreams full of death and things far worse.
Spring to summer. Rising corn again. Dorothy dreamed that the ears of corn opened out and inside each one was a baby, Henry's children from mating with the earth. And that Aunty Em boiled them, five minutes only so that they were still crisp, and they were eaten buttered, with tiny forks stuck into them on each side. Dorothy dreamed of walking through the fields, to find the ground covered in white slime, smelling of Uncle Henry. Had anyone spoken in the house for months?
To escape the dreams, Dorothy tried to stop sleeping. As spring warmed toward summer, she began to wander all through the warm nights, lit by Kansas stars, Kansas moon. She would visit the trees that had her name, sitting under the boughs high on Prospect, as if in conversation with them.
Dorothy walked along the lanes of Zeandale. It was a different place at night. It was blue and balmy and all the flowers were moonflowers, turquoise or aquamarine or purple in the dim light. She slipped like a shadow past places where there were people. She would see golden light shining from windows or from porches. The light would have a hazy halo of bugs dancing around it. Across the wide flat fields, through the still Kansas night, there would come the sound of voices, the sound of laughter, the trailing of music.
Dorothy would creep closer to the tall white farmhouses; she would hide behind the barns or outhouses. She would watch the apple-bobbing, the taffy pulls, she would hear the calming sound of singing and piano keys, the rough and carefree scraping of a violin and the light applause after sedate dancing. Dorothy would watch and listen and try to understand.
The terrible, incomprehensible truth was this: that delight was commonplace in Kansas. Delight in summer, in being young, in being with friends; delight in the warm nights that came between storms, droughts, locusts and disease. Delight in simple games, in cards held out in concealing fans; delight in the river while floating in candlelit canoes. Delight in the broad shoulders and handsome faces of German immigrant farmers with ice-blue eyes; delight in the Kansas damsels with their tough, wry smiles.
Dorothy would hide in the corn and see the awkwardly growing children of Kansas walking out together in pairs, the beefy young men in bunched-up, ill-fitting suits walking chastely beside tall slim girls in long swirling dresses.
The sight of them devastated Dorothy. It was not jealousy. Dorothy did not believe she deserved someone to walk with and had given up even dreaming of it. What devastated Dorothy was that these young people should have each other and have the light and the games and the music, have the crowded parlors and the hot fudge and names to call out to each other. They had all these things and Dorothy's night as well. They also had the blue stillness, the stars and the moon, the only things that Dorothy had thought were her own.
The realization drove her deeper and later into the night, to even more secret places at even more secret times. She would walk across the fields to Sunflower School. She looked at the trees that children had planted and that had their names. She found her own tree. It had not withered or been cut down. It was growing tall and straight, and its leaves rustled as she drew near, as if to say hello.
Then Dorothy would stand on tiptoe and peer through the windows into the classroom that would be lit with moonlight. Sunflower School became Moonflower School. Shadows of window frames cast by moonlight fell over empty desks. There would be sweeps of erased chalk across the genuine slate of the true blackboard, and there would be the stove, and the glass jars in the inkwells, and the empty pegs on which would be hung the faded bonnets in summer and thick wool coats in winter.
The trees were getting bigger, like the children who had planted them. Most of her schoolmates were already gone, adults like her, and the rooms would be suddenly full of children she didn't know. Not even ghosts.
One night toward the end of that summer, Dorothy stepped out from Sunflower School back onto Rock Spring Lane and looked up its straight length toward her hill.
Dorothy remembered Miss Francis telling them about the Aztecs, the Indians of Mexico who had built such fine, high stone buildings. Dorothy's imagination had been caught, and Miss Francis told her about the pyramids they built, rising up in layers. And Dorothy had walked out and seen the hill. It rose in layers, too, as if someone had cut giant steps out of it. Dorothy had been convinced, had wanted to be convinced, that Indians had built her hill as well, and that they lived inside it, like Aztecs. She did not ask Miss Francis if that were so. She had decided that it was so, and that it was her secret.