Dorothy half imagined it, the flags and excitement, and people cheering a good man. It was all part of the Meeting feeling.
"Your grandfather wrote letters about it back home to the newspapers, Back East. He was such a lettered man, your grandfather. We followed the next year. I came across when I was thirteen years old. Oh! This was a beautiful country then! Nothing between horizon and horizon. I can still remember my first sight of Lawrence, across the river, in the trees. We came across in the ferry and stayed with such nice people, a minister. He had an Indian servant girl, and she gave me a buffalo rug to sleep on. Then we went out to look at our new house that your grandfather had built."
Aunty Em paused, looked at the fields, the flowers. "I can remember the first time I heard a Western voice. A woman from Iowa. She told us a store had 'a right smart chance of calicoes.' Your mother and I laughed and laughed, and no one could understand why two little Yankee girls would find it funny."
Aunty Em went silent again, listening to the mule. "Anyway," she whispered, "it's the children of the Company we'll be meeting today."
Aunty Em drew a deep and shaky breath.
Lawrence sounded beautiful and happy and full of laughter.
"Lawrence had trees?"
"Lots of them, honey, all over the place."
"And Indians and buffalo?"
"Not so much even then. People were planning to make their living farming. The hunters had already moved on, to places like Wichita."
"Why are we living out here?" Dorothy asked.
Aunty Em's face went darker. "We had to move out here, Dorothy. Didn't your mama ever tell you why?"
Dorothy shook her head.
"Border ruffians attacked the town. Called themselves Federal Marshals and carried the flag of South Carolina."
Aunty Em flicked the reins. "I remember getting up in the morning and seeing them on top of Mount Oread. The birds kept singing, the sun shone, and there were five hundred armed men on the hill. They fired cannon at the Free State Hotel until it fell. They destroyed the office of the Herald of Freedom where your grandfather wrote his paper. They came to arrest him, but he had already given them the slip. They came into our house, all leering, and asking for the man of the house. And I told them they knew where he was, driven from his own home. So they ransacked it. They were as drunk as skunks and singing 'Katy Darling' and 'Lily Dale.' And they read our letters and stole our clothes. They even destroyed the only daguerreotype I had of my mother! Then they set the house on fire. My little sister and I had to push a burning bed through the window. After that, my father thought we would be safer out here."
Aunty Em's rage seemed to subside, then flared up again. "And they did it twice! Once in '56 and again in '63. Only the second time they killed every man they could find. And not only men! They killed boys, children. They even killed babies if they were little boys."
"Why?" whispered Dorothy in horror.
"Oh! Because the South wanted to own slaves. They wanted to own people like dogs. And because of them the whole country had to go to war!"
"Why did they kill children?" Dorothy asked.
"Because their minds were twisted. They were so deep in evil, they couldn't find a pathway out. The glorious South. And your mother went to live there! In Missouri, St. Louis, the city that tried to stop us from even getting to Kansas. She has to go and move there, not four years after the ashes of Lawrence were finally cold."
Dorothy could not remember a war. She could not remember anyone in Missouri killing people. But it would seem that her mother had lied to her, not to tell her this.
"How could she do it to us?" said Aunty Em, helpless with anger and unhappiness. "Go off to St. Louis with that man."
Dorothy's mother was a bad woman. Dorothy had no idea her mother had been that bad. She began to be afraid that she was bad, too.
"Those Southerners owe every Union family five hundred dollars at least. Clemency indeed! You let them go and look what you have. Outlaws, that's all they are. You hear of the James gang, Dorothy?"
Dorothy shook her head.
"Murderous, thieving scoundrels. They were Southerners. They were there in Lawrence that very night. They were there, killing children. They ought to have been hunted down like dogs."
Aunty Em drew in a long, shuddering breath, and Dorothy hung her head and picked at her nails. "God forgive me. But that's what I feel."
It had been a beautiful day, and Dorothy had been happy. She had thought she was going to be happy. She began to cry now, for the horrible thing she didn't understand, and for the promise of happiness that seemed to have been broken.
"Oh, honey, I'm sorry," said Aunty Em. The sight of the child crying, crying for the right reason, crying for the reason Aunty Em wanted her to weep, moved her beyond measure. "We won't talk about that. We won't talk about that anymore. It's just too nice a day to spoil."
Aunty Em stopped the wagon and enfolded Dorothy in her sweaty hug. It seemed to the child that the very earth was bleeding. What other terrible secrets were there? She could imagine the terror, being in your own house, and having to run from bad men who wanted to kill you.
"I'm not a Southerner," said Dorothy.
"No, honey, of course you're not."
"But I lived in Missouri!"
"Well, that wasn't your fault. Your mother went to live there, and you were born there."
"But they still kill people!"
"Yes, but that's only a few of them. Now hush, there's no need to be scared now, the war's over."
Dorothy wasn't weeping because she was frightened; she was weeping because it had happened at all. Didn't Aunty Em understand that?
Aunty Em kept her bony arms around her. "We're going to Meeting," she said. "Meeting's in a big white tent."
How could a big white tent make up for murder?
"And there's going to be lots of singing, and we'll meet some nice new friends who'll be so happy to see you."
"Did my papa kill anybody?" Dorothy asked.
"No, honey. He was an Easterner."
"Is that the same as North?"
Aunty Em's face was crossed. "Yes," she decided.
"But St. Louis is East and people call that the South."
Aunty Em sighed. "Honey. Kansas is right in the middle, where North and South and East all meet." She went into a long explanation, of halves of the country, but it still wasn't clear. Then Dorothy understood. In Kansas, North and South and East and West were ways of calling the same thing good or bad, depending on how you felt about it. Dorothy's father had been from the North, but he was bad, so he was East, that's all.