Silas Snodgrass
- Toto Is Dead-
“Look at all these strange and marvellous things,” the girl said, peering out of the buggy’s window. After a very long ride, they had entered Kansas City.
The coachman, who was unpleasantly quiet, didn’t respond. He snapped his whip at the horse’s flanks. “I once met,” the girl continued, “a horse of a different colour. Is this a horse of a different colour?” But the coachman, who was consigned to live his life in grey, dreary Kansas, didn’t know about horses of different colours. He had only known horses to be of one colour, grey.
The girl had aristocratically tucked a parasol under her arm. By her knees, she kept a wicker suitcase and what appeared to be a broomstick, only the straw part had been burned off. She spied the man looking sideways at it. “I got this from that wicked witch. It was quite a fight,” she explained. “Did I tell you that I am also Lady Empress of Munchkinland?” Although she had, the man troubled himself not enough to nod or shake his head.
“Oh, dear me, no!” exclaimed the girl when the horse and then the buggy turned down a smaller road. “Ought we not to stick to the yellow brick road? We shall have lots of trouble if we leave the yellow brick road,” she said, sticking her head out the buggy window and looking at the road they had just left. She turned then to the coachman and whispered quietly, “I don’t think the witch is quite dead. And she’s an evil one. Quite mean. She got my dog.”
The coachman looked at last to the girl. He asked, quite cheerlessly, “Don’t you know where we’re going?”
“Sure I do. We’re off to see the wizard of Emerald City. And then, then you can see the horse of a different colour.”
The man leaned into the girl and looked at her severely. He shook his head despondently. “No dark child. There’s no wizard. There’s no Emerald City and there’s no horse of a different colour neither. I’m taking you to see the doctor. He’s a doctor of the brain. He works in an asylum. Do you understand me?”
But of course Dorothy Gale did not. She screwed up her face and closed her eyes and quietly tapped the heels of her shoes together, which were altogether too large for her delicate feet. Her lips barely moved as she repeated to herself, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”
Presently, the buggy delivered the girl to the Kansas City Asylum for the Mad, her new home.
Thank you for your letters, Mr. & Mrs. Gale. I have just today received your young charge. Forgive me for withholding any sort of preliminary judgment. Nevertheless, she has arrived in a state of good health if not cheer and she will be attended to during her stay here with utmost care. I wish to say that she sends her regards but I dare say the young thing knows not where she is. I remain to be convinced, dear Christian soldiers, that she has lacked for love or discipline, as you have worried.
Yours,
Dr. L.F. Baum
When Dr. L.F. Baum stepped into the girl’s room for the first time, she looked at him just a little suspiciously and asked, “Have you... have you been sent by the Wizard?”
“I am Dr. Baum,” he announced rather than answering her question. He chuckled and sat with the girl. He looked not so nearly as old as Uncle Henry. There was a boyish charm in his clear eyes of which Dorothy was instantly fond.
“I am Dorothy Gale. Of Kansas. I once went to a doctor when I had the measles. It was a very unpleasant visit and I think he was a very disagreeable man. Do I... d-do I have the measles again?”
“No, child. I am not that sort of doctor. I am a doctor of the brain.”
“Is my brain sick?”
The doctor folded his fingers together and touched his chin thoughtfully. “We shall see.”
Dear Mr. & Mrs. Gale,
Thank you for your continued correspondence. I continue my interviews with the young Ms. Gale. While I do not doubt the veracity of your statements, the girl’s recollection is altogether different, as if she has looked at the same history through a kaleidoscope. While the phrenologists agree there is no physical abnormality, she continues to live in a vast, vaporous fairyland. I believe that she has what my colleagues call brain fever. I have yet to discover the primary cause of this affliction. Perhaps, as you say, it was the blow to the head during the cyclone. Perhaps, in keeping with the new science of the unconsciousness, she keeps some memory of the ghastly way her natural parents died and she has invented this vast and queer world to protect herself. Whatever the cause, I believe the trigger was the death of her dog in which she invested all of her kindness and love.
It saddens me to say that I do not doubt that, whatever her capacity, she was, as your good sheriff contends, responsible for the fire at the Gulch home.
Kindest Regards,
Dr. L.F. Baum
After the storm, Almira Gulch, widow of the former mayor of Ashgrey County, returned to the Gale farm to collect the dog and see to it that it was destroyed for trampling her garden and for chasing her traumatized cat. When at first she discovered Dorothy in bed, perhaps the woman was satisfied that the girl herself was so very nearly dead, or perhaps, there was some heart in the woman after all, for she allowed the cur to live until which time the girl should awake.
So it happened that when Dorothy awoke, returned to health and home, she was with her loving dog, Toto, who licked her face. But when the girl slept again, the widow Gulch returned. “I have come for the beast,” she grumbled. “It is the sheriff’s order.” This time, the woman, who was fond of neither little girls nor dogs, was incoercible. She brought a chicken cage and crammed the dog in there.
And so it happened that when Dorothy Gale awoke the second time, she looked all about for her dog, for her Toto, until she was made to understand that Ms. Gulch had already taken it to the Town’s Shelter to be destroyed.
“Ding Dong,” this was Uncle Henry’s familiar name for his niece, “Ding Dong, the dog is dead,” he explained.
“The witch? The witch! The witch has taken my dog!” Dorothy exclaimed. “I must go. I must go and save Toto.” Both her aunt and her uncle, who were older, were unable to stop the girl who had leapt out of bed and darted out the door after the doomed dog.
According to the sheriff’s report, Dorothy pilfered the dead pup from a pile of gassed animals before it was committed to the incinerator. The Gales discovered the girl hours later in the backfields of their farm dancing around the stiffening body of the dog and chanting incantations. And to behold her, the Gales, who were of a strong Christian bent, were fearful for her soul. It took all three of the farmhands to restrain the girl who was wailing, “The Wizard will save him. The Wizard will save him.”
The Gales wrote to Dr. Baum: “Of course there was no saving him. Toto was really most sincerely dead. We buried him that night. Poor wicked child. Poor, poor, godless child.”
“Might I go now?” Dorothy asked of the wizened doctor. It was not quite a question and not quite a command. “I have been held here so terribly long.”
The man she called Doc grinned quite affably. His charge looked around cautiously and then whispered, “I think the witch is still alive. And she is so wicked, I am awfully worried about my friends.”
“The lion, the scarecrow, and the tin man?” the doctor asked.
“Yes, that’s them.”
“Not quite yet,” the doctor of the mind said.
Esteemed Dr. Baum,
What will become of our Dorothy? You have had her so long. Can she not be cured? We fear we will have to give up the farm if she comes back to us. Surely, we cannot stay in Ashgrey County. The townsfolk here have heard such wicked stories and they call her such names. We are not welcome in our old church anymore. They think she is bewitched. We are God-fearing Christian folk. How could this have happened?
Mr. and Missus Gale
After the demise of her dog, Dorothy refused to help out on the farm. And after the storm there was much to do. She often went missing. Some of the time, she was found in the fields, singing to the scarecrow. On stormier days she would run all around the county, whelping and calling the storm to come and to pick her up and to return her to Oz. Once, old Zeke, the keeper of the hogs, found her in the cornfield. She had cut a path nearly all the way through it and she was standing in the dirt in women’s shoes, the kind with heels, and when he tried to remove her, when he picked her up and carried her off, she kicked at him, planting her heels in his legs, and she shrieked, “We cannot leave the yellow brick road. Surely she will get us now. Surely she will get us now.” Aunt Em, who thought shoes with heels were too worldly, never owned a pair. It was never discovered where Dorothy had gotten her hands, or rather her feet, on the shoes.
Whether it was true or not, there was a story in town that alleged that on at least one occasion the girl had propositioned Hickory, the farmhand. According to one variation of the story, the wicked child had approached Hickory, the shoer of horses, and invited him up to the hayloft where, she said, she wanted to show him her Emerald City. The man, the story goes, allowed himself to be led up into the hayloft, and even the church reverend heard that the girl had asked him, “Are you all man, Tin Man?”
Dr. Baum of Kansas City was equally without the benefit of this story and of the writings of his colleague, Sigmund Freud.
“What happened then was rich,” Dorothy told the doctor. “I had to destroy the witch once and for all. I knew where she lived... in a dark, dark, hovel at the end of town. I should like to say that I wasn’t afraid. But I’ve seen what she can do. I was terrified. But I had to save my family. I got in through the back door. I knew immediately she was a witch. There was a curse over the place. I was received immediately by the witch’s hissing familiar. That’s a cat, Doc. A dreadful black cat with yellow eyes. I was afraid it would turn me into a tree, or perhaps some poor mousey that it might eat. But it didn’t, on account of my magic ruby slippers.”
“Is that when you killed it?”
“Oh dear, no. Don’t you know anything? When you kill the witch, all of her creatures turn to good. Or at least that’s what I thought at first. It would have been all wrong, and cruel besides, to kill the cat first.”
“Sorry,” the doctor mumbled. He pushed his spectacles up his nose and gave a nod of his round head.
“Well, what I did was I got a pail of water. And, when the door opened, and when the witch came in, I threw it at her. She screamed and I was pleased. I thought it was all over. But she just stood there, gnarled and confounded, and cursing. She didn’t melt. I didn’t understand it. I was afraid she might eat me or shrink me or shrink me and eat me, so I ran away.” The girl closed her lips real tight and just shook her head, obviously still confused. “That’s when I went back and killed her cat. I thought the cat might somehow be protecting her. It was easier than I thought. I was worried perhaps the cat might somehow kill me but it was all terribly easy. I just grabbed the cat like this,” the girl said, putting fist over fist for benefit of the doctor, “and turned quick like this.” The girl twisted her fists quickly, one over the other, “And that nasty cat just went limp in my hands.” The girl smiled quite cheerfully. “I left it for the witch in her bed.”
The doctor nodded. The girl scratched her cheek ponderously.
“Doc, I sure need to leave. Might I leave soon? I think the witch is still alive. And I need to oil the Tinman. He gets ever so rusty and stiff.”
“Soon, perhaps. Soon,” he said gently.
In a report to Dr. Baum from the Sheriff of Ashgrey County:
Ms. Almira Gulch of Ashgrey County contends that the juvenile girl, young charge of Henry and Emily Gale, also of Ashgrey County, had forcibly entered her premises, and after chasing Ms. Gulch around with a burning broomstick that the girl herself had lit, after physical and verbally threatening the life of Ms. Gulch, had maliciously and purposefully set the said premises afire, and is therefore culpable of arson and attempted murder.
“Who are all these people?” Dorothy Gale of Kansas asked her doctor.
“They are called a Board,” the Doc answered.
“Oh, yes. Quite so,” the sprite of a girl said, looking about. “Frightfully bored.”
“Yes, well,” the doctor whispered, “they are under a kind of spell. They look like that all of the time.”
The Bored was gathered together at a table to, as far as Dorothy could reckon, bare witness to some ceremony about to unfold.
Doc bent down to the girl. He presented a small black bag. The girl smiled at the doctor and then at the assemblage. All of this began to feel familiar. He patted her on the head.
“We have people here not very nearly as mad as you. But they have something you don’t have.” Here he thrust his hand into the bag and produced a document in a frame. It was a very impressive looking document. It had a gold seal and some signatures on it and Dorothy was assured that it was most official because it started ‘Be It Known.’
“A certificate of madness. You, dear child, are undeniably, certifiably mad.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You’re free to go, child. I’ve ordered you a coach.”Dorothy held her certificate and smiled proudly. She collected her things and was escorted to the front door, and outside into the wonderful light of day, still smiling proudly. And when the doctor left her to her own devices, the girl grew such a deliciously wicked smile and knew exactly what she must do.
*
Silas Snodgrass talks to himself, pesters his fish, and smokes too much. He also maintains a website called SnappedShots which he calls an artistic sit-in and an experiment in exile. Silas also loves his dog, Murphy.
This story came out of this idea: It has always troubled me, even as a child, that at the end of the movie, Almira Gulch, who, presumably is not dead, is still gunning for the dog.