Seeing them together like that, happy and playful and still as much in love as they’d ever been, I felt a swell of affection for them, followed immediately by sadness. I knew that, once upon a time, they had been as young as I was. Aunt Em had wanted to travel the world; Uncle Henry had wanted to set off to California and strike gold. They just hadn’t had the chance to do any of those things.
Instead, they had stayed here, and when I asked them about those days now, they waved away my questions like they were ashamed to admit that they’d ever had dreams at all. To them, our farm was all there was.
Will I be like them, someday? I wondered. Happy with crooked cakes and gray skies and cleaning out the pig trough?
“I’m going to go hang the lanterns outside,” Henry said, walking to the door and reaching for his toolbox. “People expect this place to look nice. After all, they helped build it.”
“Only after you got it started,” Aunt Em reminded him.
After the tornado had swept our house away—with me in it—everyone had figured I was dead. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had been heartbroken. They’d even started planning my memorial service.
Imagine that! My funeral! Well, sometimes I did imagine it. I imagined my teachers from school all standing up one by one to say what a wonderful student I was, that there was something truly special about me.
I imagined Aunt Em all in black, weeping silently into her handkerchief and Uncle Henry the very picture of stoic grief, only a single tear rolling down his stony face as he helped lower my coffin into an open grave. Yes, I know that without a body there could be no coffin, but this was a fantasy. And it was at that moment in my fantasy that Aunt Em would bolt up, wailing, and would race forward to fling herself in after my corpse, stopped only at the last minute by Tom Furnish and Benjamin Slocombe, two handsome farmhands from the Shiffletts’ farm. Tom and Benjamin would be crying, too, because of course, they both harbored a secret admiration for me.
Well, if one’s going to daydream, one might just as well make it a good one, don’t you suppose?
Of course, I know it’s vain, and petty, and downright spoiled of me to do such a thing as daydream about my own funeral. I know it’s downright wicked to take even the slightest pleasure in imagining the misery of others, especially my poor aunt and uncle, who have so little happiness in their lives as it is.
I try not to be vain and petty and spoiled. I certainly try not to be wicked (after my experiences with Wickedness). But we all have our bad points, don’t we? I might as well admit that those happen to be mine, and I can only hope to make up for them with the good ones.
There was no funeral anyway, so no harm was done. Just the opposite, in fact! When I showed up again a few days after the cyclone—without so much as a scratch on me, sitting by the chicken coop, which had somehow remained undisturbed through everything—people had assumed that my survival was some kind of miracle.
They were wrong. Miracles are not the same as magic.
But whether you want to call it a miracle or something else, every paper from Wichita to Topeka put me on the front page. They threw a parade for me that year, and a few months later I was asked to be the head judge at the annual blueberry pie contest at the Kansas State Fair. Best of all, because I came back from my adventures minus one house, everyone in town pitched in to build us a new one.
That was how we got this new house, to replace the old one that was still back in you-know-where. It was quite a spectacle to behold: it was bigger than any other for miles around, with a second story and a separate bedroom just for me, and even an indoor commode and a jaunty coat of blue paint, though that was just as gray as everything else in Kansas soon enough.
Henry and Em didn’t seem particularly happy about any of it. They were humbled, naturally, that our neighbors had done all this for us, especially seeing as how they had all suffered their losses in the cyclone, some of them bigger than ours. Of course we were grateful.
But when the neighbors had done their work and gone home, my aunt and uncle had examined all the unfamiliar extravagances and had concluded that the old house had suited them just fine.
“An indoor commode!” Aunt Em exclaimed. “It just doesn’t seem decent!”
How silly they were being. Grumbling about the gift that had been so kindly given to us.
On the other hand, I had to admit that even I felt that the new house left a few things to be desired. Nothing could compare to what I had seen while I had been gone. How do you go back to a two-bedroom farmhouse in Kansas when you’ve been in a palace made of emeralds?