Wicked_-_Gregory_Maguire
Wicked - The Life and Times of the
Wicked Witch of the West
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Wicked - The Life and Times of
the Wicked Witch of the West
Wicked - The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
By Gregory Maguire
Prologue
On the Yellow Brick Road
A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind’s forward
edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent
wheeling away by the turbulent air. ‘White and purple summer
thunderheads mounded around her. Below, the Yellow Brick Road
looped back on itself, like a relaxed noose. Though winter storms and
the crowbars of agitators had torn up the road, still it led, relentlessly,
to the Emerald City. The Witch could see the companions trudging
along, maneuvering around the buckled sections, skirting trenches,
skipping when the way was clear. They seemed oblivious of their
fate. But it was not up to the Witch to enlighten them.
She used the broom as a sort of balustrade, stepping down from
the sky like one of her flying monkeys. She finished up on the
topmost bough of a black wiliow tree. Beneath, hidden by the fronds,
her prey had paused to take their rest. The Witch tucked her broom
under her arm. Crablike and quiet, she scuttled down a little at a time,
until she was a mere twenty feet above them. Wind moved the
dangling tendrils of the tree. The Witch stared and listened.
There were four of them. She could see a huge Cat of some sort-
a Lion, was it?-and a shiny woodman. The Tin Woodman was picking
flits out of the Lion’s mane, and the Lion was muttering and
squirming from the aggravation. An animated Scarecrow lolled
nearby, blowing dandelion heads into the wind. The girl was out of
sight behind shifting curtains of the willow.
“Of course, to hear them tell it, it is the surviving sister who is
the crazy one,” said the Lion. “What a Witch. Psychologically
warped; possessed by demons. Insane. Not a pretty picture.”
“She was castrated at birth,” replied the Tin Woodman calmly.
“She was born hermaphroditic, or maybe entirely male.”
“Oh you, you see castration everywhere you look,” said the
Lion.
“I’m only repeating what folks say,” said the Tin Woodman.
“Everyone is entitled to an opinion,” said the Lion airily. “She
was deprived of a mother’s love, is how I’ve heard it. She was an
abused child. She was addicted to medicine for her skin condition.”
“She has been unlucky in love,” said the Tin Woodman, “like the
rest of us.” The Tin Woodman paused and placed his hand on the
center of his chest, as if in grief.
“She’s a woman who prefers the company of other women,” said
the Scarecrow, sitting up.
“She’s the spurned lover of a married man.”
“She is a married man.”
The Witch was so stunned that she nearly lost her grip on the
branch. The last thing she ever cared for was gossip. Yet she had been
out of touch for so long that she was astonished at the vigorous
opinions of these random nobodies.
“She’s a despot. A dangerous tyrant,” said the Lion with
conviction.
The Tin Woodman pulled harder than was necessary on a lock of
mane. “Everything’s dangerous to you, you craven thing. I hear she’s
a champion of home rule for the so-called Winkles.”
“Whoever she is, she must surely be grieving the death of her
sister,” said the child, in a somber voice too rich, too sincere for one
so young. The Witch’s skin crawled.
“Don’t go feeling sympathetic now. I certainly can’t.” The Tin
Woodman sniffed, a bit cynically.
“But Dorothy’s right,” said the Scarecrow. “No one is exempt
from grief.”
The Witch was deeply irked by their patronizing speculations.
She moved around the trunk of the tree, stretching to catch a glimpse
of the child. The wind was picking up, and the Scarecrow shivered.
While the Tin Woodman continued fussing over the Lion’s tresses, he
leaned against the Lion, who held him tenderly. “Storm on the
horizon,” said the Scarecrow.
Miles off, thunder echoed. “There-is-a-Witch on the horizon,”
said the Tin Woodman, tickling the Lion. The Lion got spooked and
rolled on top of the Scarecrow, whimpering, and the Tin Woodman
collapsed on top of them both.
“Good friends, should we be wary of that storm?” said the girl.
The rising winds moved the curtain of greenery at last, and the
Witch caught sight of the girl. She was sitting with her feet tucked
underneath her and her arms wrapped around her knees. She was not
a dainty thing but a good-size farm girl, dressed in blue-and-white
checks and a pinafore. In her lap, a vile little dog cowered and
whined.
“The storm makes you skittish. It’s natural after what you’ve
been through,” said the Tin Woodman. “Relax.”
The Witch’s fingers dug into the bark of the tree. She still could
not see the girl’s face, just her strong forearms and the crown of her
head where her dark hair was pulled back into pigtails. Was she to be
taken seriously, or was she merely a blow-away dandelion seed,
caught on the wrong side of the wind? If she could see the girl’s face,
the Witch felt she might know.
But as the Witch craned outward from the trunk, the girl at the
same time twisted her face, turning away. “That storm is coming
closer, and in a hurry.” The feeling in her voice rose as the wind rose.
She had a throaty vehemence, like someone arguing through the
threat of impending tears. “I know storms, I know how they come
upon you!”
“We’re safer here,” said the Tin Woodman.
“Certainly we are not,” answered the girl, “because this tree is
the highest point around, and if lightning is to strike, it will strike
here.” She clutched her dog. “Didn’t we see a shed farther up the
road? Come, come; Scarecrow, if there’s lightning, you’ll burn the
fastest! Come on!”
She was up and running in an ungainly way, and her companions
followed in a mounting panic. As the first hard drops of rain fell, the
Witch caught sight, not of the girl’s face, but of the shoes. Her sister’s
shoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkled
like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars.
If she had seen the shoes first, the Witch would never have been
able to listen to the girl or her friends. But the girl’s legs had been
tucked beneath her skirt. Now the Witch was reminded of her need.
The shoes should be hers!-hadn’t she endured enough, hadn’t she
earned them? The Witch would fall on the girl from the sky, and
wrestle those shoes off her impertinent feet, if only she could.
But the storm from which the companions raced, farther and
faster along the Yellow Brick Road, troubled the Witch more than it
did the girl
who had gone through rain and the Scarecrow whom lightning
could burn. The Witch could not venture out in such a vicious,
insinuating wetness. Instead, she had to tuck herself between some
exposed roots of the black willow tree, where no water could
endanger her, and wait for the storm to pass.
She would emerge. She always had before. The punishing
political climate of Oz had beat her down, dried her up, tossed her
away-like a seedling she had drifted, apparently too desiccated ever
to take root. But surely the curse was on the land of Oz, not on her.
Though Oz had given her a twisted life, hadn’t it also made her
capable?
No matter that the companions had hurried away. The Witch
could wait. They would meet again.
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Wicked - The Life and Times of
the Wicked Witch of the West
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Book 1 - Munchkinlanders
From the crumpled bed the wife said, “I think today’s the day. Look
how I’ve gone.”
“Today? That would be like you, perverse and inconvenient,” said
her husband, teasing her, standing at the doorway and looking outward,
over the lake, the fields, the forested slopes beyond. He could just make
out the chimneys of Rush Margins, breakfast fires smoking. “The worst
possible moment for my ministry. Naturally.”
The wife yawned. “There’s not a lot of choice involved. From what
I hear. Your body gets this big and it takes over-if you can’t
accommodate it, sweetheart, you just get out of its way. It’s on a track of
its own and nothing stops it now.” She pushed herself up, trying to see
over the rise of her belly. “I feel like a hostage to myself. Or to the
baby.”
“Exert some self-control.” He came to her side and helped her sit
up. “Think of it as a spiritual exercise. Custody of the senses. Bodily as
well as ethical continence.”
“Self-control?” She laughed, inching toward the edge of the bed. “I
have no self left. I’m only a host for the parasite. Where’s my self
anyway? Where’d I leave that tired old thing?”
“Think of me.” His tone had changed; he meant this.
“Frex”-she headed him off-“when the volcano’s ready there’s no
priest in the world can pray it quiet.”
“What will my fellow ministers think?”
“They’ll get together and say, ‘Brother Frexspar, did you allow your
wife to deliver your first child when you had a community problem to
solve? How inconsiderate of you; it shows a lack of authority. You’re
fired from the position.” She was ribbing him now, for there was no one
to fire
him. The nearest bishop was too distant to pay attention to the
particulars of a unionist cleric in the hinterland.
“It’s just such terrible timing.”
“I do think you bear half the blame for the timing,” she said. “I
mean, after all, Frex.”
“That’s how the thinking goes, but I wonder.”
“You wonder?” She laughed, her head going far back. The line
from her ear to the hollow below her throat reminded Frex of an elegant
silver ladle. Even in morning disarray, with a belly like a scow, she was
majestically good-looking. Her hair had the bright lacquered look of wet
fallen oak leaves in sunlight. He blamed her for being born to privilege
and admired her efforts to overcome it-and all the while he loved her,
too.
“You mean you wonder if you’re the father”-she grabbed the
bedstead; Frex took hold of her other arm and hauled her half-
upright-“or do you question the fatherliness of men in general?” She
stood, mammoth, an ambulatory island. Moving out the door at a slug’s
pace, she laughed at such an idea. He could hear her laughing from the
outhouse even as he began to dress for the day’s battle.
Frex combed his beard and oiled his scalp. He fastened a clasp of
bone and rawhide at the nape of his neck, to keep the hair out of his face,
because his expressions today had to be readable from a distance: There
could be no fuzziness to his meaning. He applied some coal dust to
darken his eyebrows, a smear of red wax on his flat cheeks. He shaded
his lips. A handsome priest attracted more penitents than a homely one.
In the kitchen yard Melena floated gently, not with the normal
gravity of pregnancy but as if inflated, a huge balloon trailing its strings
through the dirt. She carried a skillet in one hand and a few eggs and the
whiskery tips of autumn chives in the other. She sang to herself, but only
in short phrases. Frex wasn’t meant to hear her.
His sober gown buttoned tight to the collar, his sandals strapped on
over leggings, Frex took from its hiding place-beneath a chest of
drawers-the report sent to him from his fellow minister over in the
village of Three Dead Trees. He hid the brown pages within his sash. He
had been keeping them from his wife, afraid that she would want to
come along-to see the fun, if it was amusing, or to suffer the thrill of it if
it was terrifying.
As Frex breathed deeply, readying his lungs for a day of oratory,
Melena dangled a wooden spoon in the skillet and stirred the eggs. The
tinkle of cowbells sounded across the lake. She did not listen; or she
listened but to something else, to something inside her. It was sound
without melody-like dream music, remembered for its effect but not for
its harmonic distresses and recoveries. She imagined it was the child
inside her, humming for happiness. She knew he would be a singing
child.
Melena heard Frex inside, beginning to extemporize, warming up,
calling forth the rolling phrases of his argument, convincing himself
again of his righteousness.
How did that proverb go, the one that Nanny singsonged to her,
years ago, in the nursery?
Born in the morning,
Woe without warning;
Afternoon child
Woeful and wild;
Born in the evening,
Woe ends in grieving.
Night baby borning
Same as the morning.
But she remembered this as a joke, fondly. Woe is the natural end of
life, yet we go on having babies.
No, said Nanny, an echo in Melena’s mind (and editorializing as
usual): No, no, you pretty little pampered hussy. We don’t go on having
babies, that’s quite apparent. We only have babies when we’re young
enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full
measure of it-we’re slow learners, we women-we dry up in disgust and
sensibly halt production.
But men don’t dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the
death.
Ah, we’re slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can’t learn at
all.
“Breakfast,” said Melena, spooning eggs onto a wooden plate. Her
son would not be as dull as most men. She would raise him up to defy
the onward progress of woe.
“It is a time of crisis for our society,” recited Frex. For a man who
condemned worldly pleasures he ate with elegance. She loved to watch
the arabesque of fingers and two forks. She suspected that beneath his
righteous asceticism he possessed a hidden longing for the easy life.
“Every day is a great crisis for our society.” She was being flip,
answering him in the terms men use. Dear thick thing, he didn’t hear the
irony in her voice.
“We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in
jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.”
He wasn’t talking to her so much as practicing his tirade against the
coming spectacle of violence and magic. There was a side to Frex that
verged on despair; unlike most men, he was able to channel it to benefit
his life’s work. With some difficulty she set herself down on a bench.
Whole choruses were singing wordlessly inside her head! Was this
common for every labor and delivery? She would have liked to ask the
nosy local women who would come around this afternoon, growling
shyly at her condition. But she didn’t dare. She couldn’t jettison her
pretty accent, which they found affected-but she could avoid sounding
ignorant about these basic matters.
Frex noticed her silence. “You’re not angry I’m leaving you
today?”
“Angry?” She raised her eyebrows, as if she had never encountered
the concept before.
“History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives,”
said Frex, “and at the same time larger eternal forces converge. You
can’t attend to both arenas at once.”
“Our child may not have a small life.”
“Now isn’t the time to argue. Do you want to distract me from holy
work today? We’re facing the presence of real evil in Rush Margins. I
couldn’t live with myself if I ignored it.” He meant this, and for such
intensity she had fallen in love with him; but she hated him for it too, of
course.
“Threats come-they’ll come again.” Her last word on the subject.
“Your son will only be born once, and if this watery upheaval inside is
any indication, I think it’s today.”
“There will be other children.”
She turned away so he could not see the rage in her face.
But she couldn’t sustain the fury at him. Perhaps this was her moral
failing. (She wasn’t much given to worrying about moral failings as a
rule; having a minister as a husband seemed to stir enough religious
thought for one couple.) She lapsed sullenly into silence. Frex nibbled at
his meal.
“It’s the devil,” said Frex, sighing. “The devil is coming.”
“Don’t say a thing like that on a day our child is expected!”
“I mean the temptation in Rush Margins! And you know what I
mean, Melena!”
“Words are words, and what’s said is said!” she answered. “I don’t
require all your attention, Frex, but I do need some of it!” She dropped
the skillet with a crash on the bench that stood against the cottage wall.
“Well, and likewise,” he said. “What do you think I’m up against
today? How can I convince my flock to turn away from the razzle-dazzle
spectacle of idolatry? I will probably come back tonight having lost to a
smarter attraction. You might achieve a child today. I look forward to
failure.” Still, as he said this he looked proud; to fail in the cause of a
high moral concern was satisfying to him. How could it compare with
the flesh, blood, mess, and noise of having a baby?
He stood at last to leave. A wind came up over the lake now,
smudging the topmost reaches of the columns of kitchen smoke. They
looked, thought Melena, like funnels of water swirling down drains in
narrowing, focusing spirals.
“Be well, my love,” said Frex, although he had his stern public
expression on, from forehead to toes.
“Yes.” Melena sighed. The child punched her, deep down, and she
had to hurry to the outhouse again. “Be holy, and I’ll be thinking of you-
my backbone, my breastplate. And also try not to be killed.”
“The will of the Unnamed God,” said Frex.
“My will too,” she said, blasphemously.
“Apply your will to that which deserves it,” he answered. Now he
was the minister and she the sinner, an arrangement she did not
particularly enjoy.
“Good-bye,” she said, and chose the stink and relief of the outhouse
over standing to wave him out of sight as he strode along the road to
Rush Margins.
Frex was more concerned for Melena than she knew. He stopped at
the first fisherman’s hut he saw and spoke with the man at the half-door.
Could a woman or two spend the day and if needed the night with
Melena? It would be a kindness. Frex nodded with a wince of gratitude,
acknowledging without words that Melena was not a great favorite in
these parts.
Then, before continuing around the end of Illswater and over to
Rush Margins, he stopped at a fallen tree and drew two letters from his
sash.
The writer was a distant cousin of Frex’s, also a minister. Weeks
earlier the cousin had spent rime and valuable ink on a description of
what was being called the Clock of the Time Dragon. Frex prepared
himself for the day’s holy campaign by rereading about the idol clock.
I write in haste, Brother Frexspar, to catch my impressions before
they fade.
The Clock of the Time Dragon is mounted on a wagon and stands
as high as a giraffe. It is nothing more than a tottering, freestanding
theatre, punched on all four sides with alcoves and
proscenium arches. On the flat roof is a clockwork dragon, an
invention of green painted leather, silvery claws, ruby jeweled eyes. Its
skin is made of hundreds of overlapping discs of copper, bronze, and
iron. Beneath the flexible folds of its scales is an armature controlled by
clockwork. The Time Dragon circles on its pedestal, flexes its narrow
leathery wings (they make a sound like a bellows), and belches out
sulfurous balls of flaming orange stink.
Below, featured in the dozens of doorways, windows, and porches,
are puppets, marionettes, figurines. Creatures of folk tale. Caricatures of
peasants and royalty alike. Animals and fairies and saints-our unionist
saints, Brother Frexspar, stolen out from underneath us! I get enraged.
The figures move on sprockets. They wheel in and out of doorways.
They bend at the waist, they dance and dawdle and daily with each other.
Who had engendered this Time Dragon, this fake oracle, this
propaganda tool for wickedness that challenged the power of unionism
and of the Unnamed God? The clock’s handlers were a dwarf and some
narrow-waisted minions who seemed to have only enough brain capacity
among them to pass a hat. Who else was benefiting besides the dwarf
and his beauty boys?
The cousin’s second letter had warned that the clock was making its
way next to Rush Margins. It had told a more specific story.
The entertainment began with a thrum of strings and a rattle of
bones. The crowd pushed close, oohing. Within the lighted window of a
stage, we saw a marriage bed, with a puppet wife and husband. The
husband was asleep and the wife sighed. She made a motion with her
carved hands to suggest that her husband was disappointingly small. The
audience shrieked with laughter. The puppet wife went to sleep herself.
‘When she was snoring, the puppet husband sneaked Out of bed.
At this point, up above, the Dragon turned on its base, and pointed
its talons into the crowd, indicating_without a doubt- a humble well
digger named Grine, who has been a faithful if inattentive husband. Then
the dragon reared back and stretched two fingers in a come-hither
gesture, isolating a widow named Letta and her snaggle-toothed maiden
daughter. The crowd hushed and fell away from Crine, Letta, and the
blushing maid, as if they had suddenly been inflicted with running sores.
The Dragon rested again but draped a wing over another archway,
which lit up to reveal the puppet husband, wandering out in the night.
Along came a puppet widow, with sprigged hair
and high color, dragging along a protesting, flinty-toothed daughter.
The kissed the puppet husband, and pulled off his leather trousers. He
was equipped with two full sets of male goods, one in the front and
another hanging off the base of his spine. The widow positioned her
daughter on the abbreviated prong in the front, and herself took
advantage of the morning arrangement in the rear. The three puppets
bucked and rocked, emitting squeals of glee. When the puppet widow
and her daughter were through, they dismounted and kissed the
adulterous puppet husband. Then they kneed him, simultaneously, fore
and aft. He swung on springs and hinges, trying to hold all his wounded
parts.
The audience roared. Crine, the actual well digger, sweated drops as
big as grapes. Letta pretended to guffaw, but her daughter had already
disappeared from shame. Before the evening was out, Crine was set
upon by his agitated neighbors and investigated for the grotesque
anomaly. Letta was shunned. Her daughter seems to have vanished
entirely. We suspect the worst.
At least Grine wasn t killed. Yet who can say how our souls have
been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages
to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at much
indignity, don’ t you agree?
Sometimes it seemed to Frex that every itinerant witch and
toothless gibbering seer in Oz who could perform even the most
transparent of spells had seized on the outback district of Wend Hardings
to scratch out a trade. He knew that folks from Rush Margins were
humble. Their lives were hard and their hopes few. As the drought
dragged on, their traditional unionist faith was eroding. Frex was aware
that the Clock of the Time Dragon combined the appeals of ingenuity
and magic-and he would have to call on his deepest reserves of religious
conviction to overcome it. If his congregation should prove vulnerable to
the so-called pleasure faith, succumbing to spectacle and violence-well,
what next?
He would prevail. He was their minister. He had pulled their teeth
and buried their babies and blessed their kitchen pots for years now. He
had abased himself in their names. He had wandered with an unkempt
beard and a begging bowl from hamlet to hamlet, leaving poor
Melena alone in the minister’s lodge for weeks at a time. He had
sacrificed for them. They couldn’t be swayed by this Time Dragon
creature. They owed him.
He moved on, shoulders squared, jaw set, stomach in a sour uproar.
The sky was brown with flying sand and grit. The wind rushed high over
the bills with the sound of a tremulous wail, as if pushing through some
fissure of rock, on a ridge beyond any Frex could see.
It was nearly evening by the time Frex had worked up the courage
to enter the ramshackle hamlet of Rush Margins. He was in a deep
sweat. He hit his heels to the ground and pumped his clenched fists, and
called out in a hoarse, carrying tone. “Hist, oh ye of small confidence!
Gather while ye may, for temptation is abroad, to try ye sorely!” The
words were archaic, even ridiculous, but they worked. Here came the
sullen fishermen, dragging their empty nets up from the dock. Here
came the subsistence farmers, whose hardscrabble plots had borne little
during this dry year. Before he had even begun, they all looked guilty as
sin.
They followed him to the rickety steps of the canoe repair house.
Frex knew that everyone expected this evil clock to arrive at any instant;
gossip was as contagious as the plague. He yelled at them for their
thirsty anticipation. “Ye are dull as toddlers reaching their hands to touch
the pretty embers! Ye are as if spawn of dragon womb, ready to suck on
teats of fire!” These were time-worn scriptural imprecations and they fell
a little flat tonight; he was tired and not at his best.
“Brother Frexspar,” said Bree, the mayor of Rush Margins, “could
you perhaps tone down your harangue until we get a chance to see what