“Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home!”
So what happens the following day? Or the following week—the next month? PTSD happens, of course, amid the shambles of the Great Depression where a malignant cast of opportunists are more than happy to exploit a little Kansas farmgirl and her implausible story about Oz.
Taking cues from the devastation of Dust Bowl Kansas during the Great Depression, 'Baumed' takes an honest look at the realities that Dorothy Gale would have faced in the weeks after she returned from Oz—delivered first-person through the humor and feminist grit of Dorothy herself.
“Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home!”
So what happens the following day? Or the following week—the next month? PTSD happens, of course, amid the shambles of the Great Depression where a malignant cast of opportunists are more than happy to exploit a little Kansas farmgirl and her implausible story about Oz.
Taking cues from the devastation of Dust Bowl Kansas during the Great Depression, 'Baumed' takes an honest look at the realities that Dorothy Gale would have faced in the weeks after she returned from Oz—delivered first-person through the humor and feminist grit of Dorothy herself.
CHAPTER ONE
There’s no place like home—and by golly, isn’t that just so?
And my goodness, there have been plenty of times over the past few days—or even weeks, or however long I was in Oz—when I really didn’t think I’d find my way back to my own room, my own cathedral-window quilt, my own personal view of the homestead top-section, feeling the bones of this old farmhouse solid as the Rock of Ages beneath me.
Of course, Auntie Em tells me I’d only been ‘under’ for a few hours—in a comatose state, she insists—and that I never left this room at all.
“Quite a bump on the noggin,” says Uncle Henry, holding a pen for who-knows-what-reason since the old coot can barely write. Never left this room? I’m a little more clever than I let on, and that much you’ll learn soon enough. Grownups never give the quiet little well-behaved girl in the back of the classroom enough credit, and even though I left that cow-chip-heated, wind-leaking schoolhouse when I turned thirteen, I assure you that I was the cleverest girl in attendance. Even the teach-lady from Gyman recognized that. I could recite circles around anyone; ‘Horatius at the Bridge’, ‘Curfew Will Not Ring Tonight.’ And just look at the irrigation system I built for the school’s truck garden—twenty-five open-ended Franco-American cans lined up in a row—those cabbages and beans never had it so good. Oh, and that rainbow song I made up right off the top of my head just before the storm hit? Who can do something like that who isn’t from Hollywood? Little old me, that’s who—somebody with the native shrewdness; someone who doesn’t need diplomas and scholarships to be a wonder. I’m pretty much a child prodigy; I’ve won every spelling bee I ever entered. I’ve read every book in the Carnegie library at Bur Oak and the rolling book wagon ...twice ...and to top that off, I am the assistant editress of the Bur Oak Literary Society.
Anyway, I know I’ve been gone for a few days at the very least, and probably even longer since the whole time I was ‘under’ in that poppy field and locked inside the witch’s dungeon must count as time away too, correct?
Plus, I can always tell when Auntie is lying because she is so awful at it. She rings her hands like the arthritis is acting up and her voice quavers like a November corn stalk. She knows (they all must know, I think) that something really, really extraordinary happened to me during that tornado and that there must be a reason for it. I was touched by that experience—chosen (if you wish to think of it like that)—to serve as an ambassador from Kansas to Oz after I destroyed the wickedness that had infiltrated the region.
Auntie Em won’t admit this, of course, because to her, the Devil is behind anything she can’t explain in common old Kansas English or the Plaut Dietsch she used to talk to my granny and sometimes still talks to a few sorry sod-busters in Hamlin’s general store. And then there’s Uncle Henry—a poor brittle geezer like a thin grey ghost—he walks in a persistent hunch, like he’s towing a great weight. Most of the time he supports everything Auntie Em says, but this time, the whole time she was ‘splainin’ things to me, he hung back with his useless pen clutched in his tree-stump hands and didn’t say a word. Nary a single word. He knows too. And the farmhands? They must know, because they were there in Oz with me, all dressed up like it was Halloween—or else it was their identical twins. Which frankly makes more sense since these three chuckleheads were probably hiding among the salt pork and sauerkraut in the storm cellar when the weather hit, so they wouldn’t have ended up over the rainbow like I did.
Anyways, in the morning I intend to ask around a bit; maybe make the five-mile hike into dull little Plum Ridge or hitch a ride over to Bur Oak in Hunk’s jalopy and try to come up with some answers. But for now, my head is throbbing and light hurts my eyes, so I am grateful for Auntie’s wet compress on my forehead.
I try to focus on gay thoughts and forget about my recent travels, because Aunt Em and Uncle Henry have enough to worry about with the incubator gone bad and the crop of winter wheat having come in under knee-high for the second year running, not even tall enough for a rabbit to hide in. They don’t need me bearing witness against their lies just yet.
But come on. To tell me that all of Oz, in its power and glory, is nothing but a dream? Horsefeathers. Lying here under the wet washrag, I try to remember once, even once before in my life when I had dream so filled with such remarkable detail and so many amazing storybook characters. Talking lions and bubble-bound witches and cities full of circus dwarves? Not to mention all the incredible colors—colors everywhere, prettier than the Easter primroses at the Church of God. And since when do you fall asleep in your own dreams? The answer is ‘never,’ that’s when. And even if you did, nobody dreams about falling asleep and then wakes up in the exact same dream. Dreams are short, silly little puffs of dandelion seed, and if dreams are sometimes seamy and nasty, that’s Satan under your pillow creeping inside your head and making you do things you wouldn’t do in real life but just can’t stop yourself from doing in a dream.
But one thing is certain: You don’t think about ‘going home’ all the time in your dreams, do you? And why is that? Because you don’t know that you are in a dream; everything around you seems normal, even when it isn’t. You certainly don’t invent countries and races of people and giant cities full of skyscraper buildings and then try to escape from it. A dream? Codswallop. This was like reading a whole book cover to cover or seeing a main feature at the Rialto in Bur Oak.
Something strange is at work here, clearly—something that Aunt Em and Uncle Henry don’t want me knowing about. Even before the storm, I noticed that they were doing a lot of whispering; muttering about things behind closed doors, just beneath the level at which I could hear them. They’ve always acted like ghosts and recently they’ve been sounding like ghosts too.
Oh, how I wish Toto could talk! He’d tell the lot of them what happened to us. I’d love to see Aunt Em explain to a talking dog that he somehow managed to dream the exact same dream as me. That would be rich. Dear Toto knows the truth.
I feel around the quilt at Toto’s usual spot near my elbow and it’s empty. I remove the dish towel and find, to my surprise, that night has already crept in—I must have drifted off again without realizing it. And see that? I didn’t dream a single fluff of dandelion seed let alone a whole picture show.
“Come here, darling,” I cry, patting the quilt, thinking he’s probably scampered under the bed. That nervous little dog gets old-woman jitters whenever the sky starts twitching with thunderclaps and lightning, so maybe I’d slept through another whopper.
“Where’d you get to?” I cry out, concerned and puzzled.
No response. I feel under the bed, but there’s nothing but dust bunnies, a couple old canvas shoes and the album of wildflower pressings I made last summer. My bedroom door is closed—Aunt Em has left it so, but the window is wide open since the frame busted out in the storm. Outside, a big moon is just now rising over the Chinese elm, throwing ghastly white light over our big-shouldered barn, the Sawyer-Massey and an old stockman’s windmill hard by the edge of the shelter belt whose shaft squeaks when the wind takes the fins.
Now I realize what must have happened! I was ‘under’ again when Toto had to go tinkle and he couldn’t alert me. He’s small, sure, but still big enough to hop from the bed to the nightstand and then onto the sill and make it out the window, and that is exactly what he must have done—he couldn’t get back inside, of course, so he probably trotted over to the bunkhouse where the hired hands sleep. He likes Hickory, although not Hunk or Zeke, and I feel the same way—Hunk is an Okie moron always horning on about how he can ride, rope and cuss better than any Kansan alive. And Zeke, he’s just a lug.
Well, I figure I better go fetch Toto pretty quick or else he might get in a tussle with a pole-cat or ky-ote on the way back. Of course, I don’t want to wake anybody, so I lift myself out the empty window as quietly and ladylike as I can manage with my achy head, even though nobody is watching me but that cold pie in the sky—the big old Comanche moon.
I skip over gravel harder than the cellar floor, across the grassy triangle where an old tractor tire swings from an elm limb; I circle the barn and follow the barb-wire fence along the path to the hired hands’ bare-ribbed bunkhouse. The flame of a carbide lamp glows in the only window, a good sign that means the hands are still awake, probably jawboning, playing gin rummy and spitting tobacco into cups.
I peek inside, hoping that Toto is there with them, and hey! —I see what I see and will never forget seeing and will certainly never see again: Zeke and Hickory are snoring away on straw mattresses by the stove, but in the easy chair—the only furniture inside that tarpaper shack—Hunk is hunched over with a copy of his precious ‘Rodeo Round-Up featuring Bobby Dry-Guts Dane’ magazine with Sears & Roebucks overhauls around his ankles. He has something in his right hand that looks like a rolling pin, red as a cob from the cob pile. But it isn’t a corn cob, by cracky—it’s the kingbolt that sprouts underneath breeding horses, only Hunk’s got his own breeding-horse kingbolt.
My mouth sets like the lockjaw and you can believe I hightail it out of there faster than if I’d found a nest of centipedes in the drapes. In fact, so rattled am I that I’m not thinking straight, so instead of climbing back through my window, I head straight up the porch steps like I normally do, and there on a rocking chair is Uncle Henry looking—as the saying goes—rode hard and put up wet. He’s sucking on a jar of broomcorn whiskey with his raisin-face gone blank as ice and what little hair he has left all mashed and plastered over his forehead. He is muttering to himself, tapping his fingers on the porch rail.
I sing out, “Have you seen Toto, Uncle Henry?”
He doesn’t even look up—he might as well have been an old scarecrow shell that the wind hollowed out. I repeat myself and he says, all hoarse and hiccuppy, “It’s a slow-death shudder, Dorothy.”
“What is?” I ask in a tone I reserve for drunkards; trying to converse with them is like letting a bucket down an empty well and drawing up air.
“Working land that don’t want to be worked, where wind done sucked out all the life. I know what that wind is, too—the ghost of them Paiutes we killed made God’s own soil give up.”
He leans back into the rocking chair with his tongue lolling out, as thick and red as Hunk’s never-you-mind-what. I refuse to hearken to blasphemy so I head inside, where I find Aunt Em in the kitchen, next to the coal range, dressed in shapeless hand-sewn cotton sackcloth, scribbling frantically in a ledger.
I saunter in smooth as griddle grease and she cries out, “Dorothy Gale! What in the heavens are you doing outside at this hour?”
“Looking for Toto,” I snap back.
Her face is normally a shade paler than pearled barley, but now it gets even whiter: “Toto is gone, dear.”
“I know he’s gone. I just said that. I’m looking for him.”
“But... We were going to tell you in the morning. Miss Gulch took him.”
Not being one to put tail between legs for a lying old biddy, even one who is blood through marriage, I say, “I know that, silly. But he got away from her and came back home. He was with me when the storm hit!”
“Well, that may be, but Almira Gulch was here at half past eight this evening while you was resting up from your hurt, and she brought the sheriff this time. She has that legal order, remember? We had to let Toto go a second time.”
I toss my head, and I am a very convincing head-tosser: “And your old milksop husband did nothing but wilt ...for a second time?”
“Why, she threatened to call in our debt and then we’d lose the whole farm—she’s the largest shareholder and sits on the bank board. I’m very sorry, Dorothy but you’re just going to have to accept how things work in the adult world—sometimes you just put on your harness and pull your load.”
“If that’s so, then I’ll definitely be an adult about it. I’ll get my own legal order and have her arrested for dognapping. I’ll hire my own lawyer, too.”
Aunt Em frowns, but then her voice gets oily and softens to molasses: “Lawyers cost money, sweetheart. And we have next to nothing left.”
“Nothing? Well, I simply don’t believe it. I don’t trust a single word you say any more, Auntie.”
That gets her dander up; her eyes spark like the fire beneath the Glenwood top and about as hot: “Well, missy, if you are old enough to go gallivanting at this hour of the night, you’re old enough for hard truth—we’ve tried to keep it from you. That twister—the last one—stripped what little fruit the orchard trees had and it turned the chicken coop into matchsticks. Heaven knows what county the hens wound up in, and us with the incubator down? Corn was already twenty-percent burned up with drouth and that hail took the rest. We’d need three years of bumper with prices steady high to get out of the quicksand. We got one foot in foreclosure as ‘tis.”
“What about the Durocs?” I say. “The sow dropped a litter last week.”
“With market price below the cost of rearing one? We’ll have to sell them off to cover next year’s seed corn. You’re just a child, Dorothy; we don’t expect you to understand these things, but really—to stand there and brazenly accuse me of telling falsehoods? What has gotten into you?”
I sniff—she can pretend I’m not the national heroine of Munchkinland, that I haven’t been to the Emerald City and killed not one wicked witch but two, but it won’t wash with me, not even a teeny bit. Courage, brains and a lion’s heart is what has gotten into me. But I didn’t want to open that can of worms just yet.
“Hickory says the capitalistic system is doomed,” I say instead—I’m not sure what it means but it sounds high-brow and worthy of a personal friend of nice witches and the destroyer of wicked ones.
“Well, then let Hickory go find work in Rooshia.” Aunt Em sniffs. “Or head up north to the Dakota cow dips. The lot of ‘em are worthless as a glass eye at a keyhole. And anyway, I expect they’ll light out any day now—they haven’t seen a paycheck this month and at this rate, by autumn, we’ll be feeding them tumbleweed in brine.”
“Oh, stop being dramatic, Auntie. You sound like Carole Lombard. We can sell my ruby slippers.”
“Your what?”
“The slippers I had on my feet when I came back from Oz. You didn’t notice them? Or are you going to tell me that Almira Gulch stole those too when she took Toto? Those slippers are worth a million dollars, especially when somebody learns how to use them. That’s what Glinda says. If Miss Gulch actually stole them, consider your bank debt paid in full, with enough left over to buy me my damn dog back.”
Upon hearing me curse Aunt Em has a complete collapse and begins to sob like a suckling babe. I’m torn between being annoyed and being comforting. I’m standing my ground, but I confess to leaning toward the niceness side of things because I’m a nice witch after all and Emily Gale is family, if only by marriage.
I say, “Okay, I’m sorry I used profanity, Auntie Em. Stop that crying. If you’re telling the truth, then okay—raise your hand to Father, Son and Holy Spirit and swear that Toto was taken by Miss Gulch this evening. Right here and now. Emily Hippolyta Schorn Gale—do you take a blood oath to God Himself that a pair of ruby slippers were not on my feet when I came back from Oz? Under penalty of perdition?”
That made her cry even harder: “There are no ruby slippers, Dorothy! It was a dream! But what has happened to you that you would bring such oaths into a Christian home and take the Lord’s name in vain?”
With this, she throws her apron over her face and skitters from the kitchen; I hear her bedroom door slam. Definitely matinee time at the Rialto, and rather convenient for getting herself out of having to swear that oath.
I pick up the blue ledger and glance at it briefly. Aunt Em is right about one thing—although I am good at sums, I can’t make heads nor tails of all the squiggles and numbers and red pencil marks in that book.
And then something occurs to me: Could I have left Toto in Oz? Not on purpose, of course, but maybe he jumped out of my arms at the last second, like he did when that state fair balloon was taking off. I seem to remember him cuddling in my arms when Auntie Em put the compress on my forehead after I came around, but maybe I imagined that part of it. After all, Uncle Henry said I got a nasty bump from the window frame, and for a while there, I was pretty dizzy. The more I think on it, the more sense it makes.
Or maybe the power of the ruby slippers is such that only I could come back to Kansas. Not Toto or the ruby slippers themselves. Well, that changes everything, doesn’t it? I’ll just have to go back over that rainbow and rescue him, like he did me in the witch’s fortress. A man made out of straw, even with the biggest brain in the world, can’t care for a dog properly and the biggest-heartest tin man that ever lived couldn’t love Toto as much as I do. And that lion—he must be brave enough by now to eat Toto for a midday snack.
The problem is, of course—how I’m supposed to get there?
Just in case, I click my heels together three times and say, “There’s no place like Oz, there’s no place like Oz...” but nothing happens. Of course not—I no longer have ruby slippers on my feet. The slippers hold the power, not my heels.
Well, I don’t want to have to wait for another tornado, but what else can I do? There may be no other resort and ...my dear little Toto! But there are ways to bring on storms, I believe: Last year, Auggie Grochowsky, who is old enough to have fought in the War Between the States, says that downpours always happened after a battle, so they shot that cannon in the Plum Ridge square and sure enough, a week later, the sky opened up. I also remember when Balthazar Ragsdale killed a den of rattlesnakes and hung them up and down his barb-wire fence for a solid mile with their white bellies turned to the sun. And sure enough, it rained half an inch the following Thursday. I bet I could get Hickory to kill some snakes for me while he’s weeding the corn north of the feed lot. Bet Hunk would do it if I offered to touch him on the rolling pin. But since I’m not about to do that, guess I might have to hide out in to my room under my quilt and pray hard nails for another twister.
And then, suddenly something else hits me between the eyes like a window frame and makes me drop that ledger quicker than if it had been made out of tarantulas.
I look around at the kitchen and smell the air; I pick up the faint odor of cabbage and Scrubb’s ammonia and horse manure drifting in from the clover field. It’s all quite familiar. I began to walk around, running my fingers over objects that have been known to me since the day I came to live with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry when I was three, too young to even remember it: The treadle machine beneath the south window, the pumpkin-shaped Bundt pan on the kitchen island, the dough trencher, the white pitcher, the Maxwell House can filled with Aunt Em’s pinched pennies—since the Crash, she trusts cans more than banks—a cigar box filled with random hardware, the icebox with fruit jars of lemonade and the remains of last Sunday’s ham, the tin-topped barnwood cabinet with Uncle Henry’s bits of antique barbed wire and, of course, our Emperor blue porcelain plateware. Everything is just as I remember it.
And in the hallway too: The painting of grazing sheep, the oval-framed, velvet-lined tin-type of a girl with a tiny waist and a gold medallion, my great-granny Ottilie Schorn. Every freckle on her face is as familiar to me as the freckles on my own face.
But it isn’t her—it isn’t the same photo. These are not the same plates either—not the same ham shank that Auntie Em cooked last Sunday. These are not the same pennies either. They cannot possibly be; they are all duplicates, placed here to fool me.
You see, as I said, I am more clever by half.
At the end of the hall is the room where Aunt Em and Uncle Henry sleep. I listen at the door to see if I can hear any more crying. I don’t, and I wouldn’t: It has all been an act. I rap softly and there is no response, but I can hear my aunt on the far side of the door, trying to be quiet—her breath is tatty from a lifetime of inhaling prairie dust.
I apologize to her, but I’m not at all sorry. If she can act, so can I. Very softly, I recite the Pentecostal lullaby I remember her singing to me when I was very little:
“Scheckle, scheckle, schei-ja,
Oostren et wei Ei-ja, Pinksten et wie witte brot,
Stoaw wie nicht, den woa wie groot.”
In a moment, her voice drifts softly from the far side of the door, “You still remember that old song, honey?”
“Of course I do. Auntie Em. I just wanted to see if you did.”
“I do, yes I do—my mother used to sing it to me when I was in the cradle, and her mother to her. And someday, perhaps you will sing it to your own daughter.”
“Perhaps I will,” I say. “What do the words mean?”
“Why, they are meaningless, Dorothy. Just folderol words that happen to rhyme. It doesn’t translate to anything.”
“What do the words mean?” I repeat, louder. “Of course they translate. Brot means bread and Oostren is Easter. Tell me!”
“No, honey. I don’t like to tell you what they mean. I won’t say it.”
And there it was! I’d exposed her, like Toto did with the man behind the curtain. A duplicate Aunt Em might look the same in every way, wear the same feed-sack dresses, talk in the same grit-ground voice and have the same turkey wattles wiggling under her chin, but the one thing a replica of Aunt Em probably wouldn’t have remembered to do is learn the Plaut Dietsch.
“You don’t like to because you can’t. You are not Aunt Em at all, are you? And that’s not Uncle Henry on the porch sucking down the hooch, is it? You may look the same, but you aren’t the same. Just admit it. This is not my house and all this is a big fat hornswoggle. I can see through you all just like you’re made of window glass.”
“Oh, stop it, Dorothy!” she shrieked. “I can’t bear any more of this!”
“Then what do the words to the song mean?”
“They mean ‘Swing, rock, shush, at Easter we eat eggs, at Pentecost we eat white bread, and if we don’t die, we grow up.’”
“Die? What kind of lullaby is that to sing to a child?”
“I said I didn’t want to tell you it, Dorothy. It’s just a silly rhyme; it’s meaningless.”
“Is that what happened to me? Did I die in the cyclone? Am I in Hell?”
Another shriek, to which I respond, “Never mind with your answer, Fake Aunt Em. I won’t believe you anyhow. Your words are nothing but a bucket of curdled spit.”
The loudest shriek of all comes now, followed by more convulsive sobbing. Fake Aunt Em is a regular Hollywood ingénue and I am, as you are learning, quite adept at turning a deaf ear when I have a mind to.
Back in the kitchen, that Sunday ham smells real enough and the water tastes as sweet as always, so I fill up the white pitcher and carry both back to my room. I return and fetch the box of nails and a hammer, then lock the door. Outside, the full moon is staring at me through the window hole. Enough of all this, I decide and nail the quilt over the window hole. And why not? It’s not my lovely quilt anyway; it’s counterfeit.
Isolated and safe, I lie down on the sheets and place the compress back across my eyes. There’s no place like home, by golly! But this isn’t home. It couldn’t possibly be, and here’s how I know it:
I left my home, along with my bed and quilt, in Oz, square on top of that squashed jitterbug of a Wicked Witch of the East. If I couldn’t bring Toto back to Kansas with me, or the ruby slippers, it stands to reason that I couldn’t bring back the whole damn house.
The favourite film of Salman Rushdie, James Cameron, David Lynch, John Waters, and John Wayne Gacy, The Wizard of Oz is a timeless classic that has universal appeal and is thus ripe for satire. We all know this. We’ll all get the joke. That this joke happens to be as meticulously, confusingly but (to commit a cardinal sin with a third adverb) admirably crafted as a long algebraic equation… is only one of the many pleasures of Chris Kassel’s Baumed.
The story of Dorothy Gale as you’ve never read it before, Kassel does an excellent job of capturing a teen’s mind in ‘39 with what appears to be myriad intellectual detail that shocked me. Not once does the mask slip. That may sound cliche and naive, but I felt like I was actually reading the perspective of a young girl (shock, horror). Kassel even describes Period Pain with what I would imagine to be eerie accuracy (having read Period: It’s About Bloody Time by Emma Barnett). The level of insightful detail is incredible. I feel like (and this is heresy) Kassel makes Dorothy feel more flesh and blood than L. Frank ever did.
Granted, Kassel doesn’t really do much with her and L. Frank wrote children’s books with an emphasis on plot rather than perspective. The main joke of this book is all emphasis on literary style rather than plot. Kassel’s broader writing style is exactly that. Capital B broad. His is one of those throw-everything-at-the-wall-including-the-kitchen-sink-and-hope-it-lands styles that is marmite to the modern reader. You either love or hate. I loved and hated at the same time which may sound like a contradiction but, as Mark Kermode once said, the best films are the ones you love and hate at the same time. Maybe this is true of the best books also.
Even at 140 pages, the joke is spread thin and while it was impressive watching Kassel’s writing style as if he was spinning plates, eventually the joke started to get old. But this is a fine satirical novel that, at times, comes close to the satire of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court without once resorting to vulgar modern and disgusting humour (in fact, the kind of vulgar and disgusting modern humour that I use in my own writing). We see everything through Dorothy’s antiquated eyes.
Do you like James Joyce? I preferred his earlier, funnier books. If you hate JJ with a passion, this may not be the book for you. And while I’m not suggesting Chris Kassel is a successor to Joyce’s insane clown prose, he certainly has some of the same wink and charm.