Title:  The Wizard, the Witch and the Whirlwind

Epilogue/Prologue:  The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Based on The Wizard of Oz  (1939)

Author:  Shoshana

Summary:  Spock and McCoy pay a visit to Jim Kirk at his childhood home in Riverside, Iowa.  But the trio doesn’t remain there.    

Pairings:  Dorothy/original character(s)    K/Edith

Warnings:  This coda is devoid of S/Mc content; Spock and McCoy are mentioned only very briefly.  Readers may wish to skip this section.  Deals primarily with the fate of Dorothy Gale.  Also references The City on the Edge of Forever.  This section includes brief, non-explicit references to a minor’s sexual encounter and marriage.                             

Rating:  PG-13   

Word count:  1800

Disclaimer:   Brief dialogue quoted/adapted from The Wizard of Oz, screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf, based on the children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.  I do not own The Wizard of Oz or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or its sequels.  Nor do I own Star Trek.  Not a molecule, atom, quark or vibrating string of it.

Author’s note:  Thanks to Stef, for the beta.  Errors are my own.

“Edith!”

Edith Keeler released her companion’s hand, as both turned to see who was calling her name.  Half a block away, another young couple was walking, their arms laden with groceries. 

Edith and Jim waited at the trolley stop for the others to approach.    

“Jim, these are my friends Si and Dottie Head,” Edith said.  “And this is Jim Kirk.  He’s working at the mission.”  Edith smiled, pleased to be showing off her date.  “We’re going across town to see a vaudeville show.”

Greetings were exchanged, and the two men exchanged an awkward handshake as Simon juggled grocery bags. 

Dorothy asked Jim, “How long have you been working at the mission?” 

“Just ten days.” 

“Edith helped us get on our feet when we came to New York four years ago,” Simon said.  He was a tall man, about six foot, with a prominent nose and a serious demeanor.  “She helped me find training as an electrician, and Dottie work as a seamstress.”

“Jim has a friend whose hobby is building radios,” Edith said.  “They were in the service together.”

“Our older boy’s nickname is Jimmie,” Dottie said.  Attractive without being as pretty as Edith, with wavy auburn hair, she was a full foot shorter than her husband and about ten years younger.  She was looking intently at Jim.  “You were in the service?  Do you have a relative named James Kirk who was a naval officer? 

A father or uncle?  Or grandfather?”

Jim shook his head.  “There isn’t another James among the Kirks, at least not in my time.  I was named for my mother’s father.”

Si looked with puzzlement at his wife.  “You know someone who was in the Navy besides Al?”

Dorothy hesitated before answering.  “In one of his letters Al mentioned an officer named James Kirk.”  To the others Dottie explained, “Al was a friend of ours, who died while serving in the Great War.”  

Technically true, Dottie’s latter statement was misleading on several counts.  Just eight days after his arrival at Norfolk Naval Base, Alan Lyons had died overnight of Spanish Influenza, never having crossed the ocean, much less having seen battle.  That two weeks earlier he had impregnated Dorothy was a secret known only to Dottie and Si, albeit suspected by a handful of people in Kansas.  One month after Al’s death, Simon had quietly married Dorothy, a few days after discovering the distraught sixteen-year-old rummaging among his books in hopes of finding a medical text.  Si had married her, not out of love, but out of compassion and (he admitted to himself) sexual frustration and even greed, in the knowledge Dorothy would be sole heir to the Gale farmstead.  But he and Dorothy had grown to love each other, and he loved his daughter Emily as dearly as he did his two boys with Dorothy.  They had a good marriage. 

Edith said, “Jim was a captain.  Maybe he knew your friend.  Where did he serve?”

“I wouldn’t have met him,” Jim said.  “I entered the service after the Great War.  ‘James Kirk’ isn’t an unusual name.”

Dottie asked, “Would the two of you like to come over to our place for coffee later?”  She addressed the couple, but her gaze remained fixed on Jim.
  

“We’ll be getting back late tonight,” Edith said.  “Tomorrow, perhaps.  We’re planning to catch a movie at the Emporium early.  

Oh – there’s our trolley!” 

Si and Dottie resumed walking home.  Simon said, “I’m glad Edith finally is seeing someone.  A woman that pretty shouldn’t be living like a nun, the way she has the last four years.”

Dottie said, “I don’t think she’s living like a nun these days.  Maggie told me today a man had been leaving Edith’s room early in the morning the last two nights.”  Remembering the way Edith and Jim had looked at each other, she smiled, pleased for her friend’s new happiness.  She had no concern (as she would have for some others) that Edith might find herself in the distressing predicament Dottie had experienced twelve years earlier.  Edith was no naïve rural teenager; she might be idealistic, and head over heels in love, and have been leading a restricted social life for years, but she was also pragmatic and shrewd.  She would know how to keep from getting in trouble.      

Simon made a sour face.  He disapproved of gossip, though he knew Dottie would not pass on this information – if information it was – to anyone save himself.  “How could Magdalena Buchholz possibly know?  She doesn’t live on the same block as Edith, much less the same building.” 

“How does Maggie know anything?  But her gossip always turns out to be true.”

“That busybody knows when folks are expecting or marrying or dying or most anything else before their own friends and family find out.”  Scowling, he added darkly:  “The woman should be a spy.  The government could send her to Germany.  She knows the language.”      

“You really think there’s going to be trouble there again, Si?”

“In the long run, yes, the way the Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany.    And the Nazis worry me.  Bavaria should have kept that troublemaker Hitler in jail.” 

Dorothy’s brow furrowed in concern.  A German-born Jewish friend had recently described to Simon the subversive contents of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf.  “If there is trouble, I hope America stays out of it.  Or that you’re too old to go, and Jimmie and Lennie too young.”  Filled with foreboding, she changed the subject.  “I’m glad, too, that Edith has a beau!  I didn’t know you thought she was so pretty!”   Her tone was teasing. 

“You’re jealous of Edith?” he teased back. “You couldn’t take your eyes off Jim.”  Underlying Si’s joking demeanor was the faintest echo of jealousy.  Not for Edith Keeler’s new boyfriend; Jim Kirk resembled the long-dead Alan Lyons, and this, Simon took for granted, accounted for his wife’s keen interest in her friend’s companion. 

Like Dottie, Si had noticed the way Edith and Jim had gazed at each other.  Long ago, Dorothy had looked at Al with that same shining expression, but never at him.  Si reminded himself that few if any couples looked at each other that way after more than a decade together, as he and Dottie had been. 

“He’s good-looking,” his wife admitted.  “But that wasn’t it.”  Dorothy looked away.  “Jim . . . reminded me of someone.”

Si said gently, “He looks like Al.”  An older version, of course; Al was eighteen when he died.    

Dorothy shook her head.  “He does, but that wasn’t it, either.  His voice reminds me of someone’s.  Someone I met a long time ago.”

Si slanted a look down at his wife, sensing she was hiding something.   The lone letter he had received from his friend prior to his death had made no mention of an officer named James

Kirk, although it was possible Al had done so in his pair of letters to Dorothy.  Simon remembered, too, his wife’s insistence during her first two pregnancies that the child, if a boy, would be named James. 

Si might have said something just then, but they were startled by the sudden screeching of brakes and the angry honking of a car horn.  The driver leaned out the window, berating the young man on a bicycle whom he had stopped just short of hitting.

“Thank God he’s all right,” Dottie said.

“Someone’s going to get killed by a car around here,” Simon said, “unless the drivers and the bicyclists and the pedestrians aren’t more careful.  I’d rather take my chances getting trampled by a horse or even a bull than getting hit by an automobile.”

Edith Keeler’s new boyfriend for the moment forgotten, they continued on their way home.  But at bedtime that evening, the subject of James Kirk returned.   

“I should have asked him if he knew a Leonard McCoy,” Dorothy was saying to herself, as she sat on the bed.  She was speaking low, but the word “Leonard,” the name of their younger son, caught the attention of Simon, standing unseen in the doorway behind his wife.  “Or Spock, or the Enterprise.  But he’s too young . . . They said they were retired . . . . ”

Simon closed the door and sat on the bed beside her.  It wasn’t like Dottie to be talking to herself.  “Dorothy, what are you talking about?  Who’s retired?” 

She was silent.  

“Is this about Edith’s friend Jim Kirk?”

She nodded without looking at her husband.  To his consternation, Si saw there were tears in her eyes. 

“Honey, what’s wrong?”  Perhaps Jim’s appearance had dredged up memories of Al, after all.

“If I tell you, you’ll think I’m crazy.”   

He took her hand.  “No, I won’t.” 

It was a long moment before Dorothy continued.  “Si, do you remember the tornado?  Not the bad one, but the first one?”    

“Of course I do.”  The first tornado had happened when Dottie was fourteen; failing to reach the storm cellar in time, she had been knocked unconscious by debris flying in the mostly undamaged Kansas farmhouse where she was being raised by her uncle and aunt, Henry and Emma Gale.  The “bad” tornado had occurred four years ago.  It had demolished the Gale farmstead one night, killing her aunt and uncle, as well as Si’s fellow farmhand Jackson Cutter, and all the Gales’ livestock.  The sole survivor had been the old one-eyed barn cat (he had lost the eye in a fight with Dorothy’s dog Toto a decade earlier) who, remarkably and with feline insouciance, had been left unscathed.  Dorothy and Simon and their three children had been spared because they had decided, due to threatening weather, to stay the night in town where the family had been shopping.  Rather than starting over, Si and Dottie had used the insurance money to move to New York City.  (Simon mourned Henry and Emma sincerely, but, long discontented with rural life, had secretly hoped to sell the farmstead after their deaths.) 

Si wondered if Dottie was crying over the memory of the second tornado, or the first.  “What does the tornado have to with Edith’s date?” he asked. 

“While I was unconscious, I had a dream.  At least, Auntie Em and Doc Anderson told me it was a dream.  They’re the only ones I ever described it to.”

Simon nodded.  “I knew you had had a dream, or a hallucination, while you were blacked out.  Emma never said what it was about.”

“It was so real it never seemed like a dream.  Jim Kirk was in it.  At least, someone named Jim Kirk was in it.  He sounded just like Edith’s new boyfriend, but he . . . .”  Dorothy swallowed.  “In the dream, he didn’t look like Edith’s Jim.”

Simon gazed wonderingly at his wife.  “Of course not.  But go on.”

“It’s a long story . . . .”

        *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Historical notes:  The Spanish Influenza pandemic (January 1918 through December 1920) was the most devastating epidemic in history, killing an estimated 30 million to 100 million people worldwide, including at least 500,000 Americans.

Construction of Naval Station Norfolk began in the summer of 1917; by Armistice Day (November 11, 1918) tens of thousands of military personnel were stationed there. 

The author does not know if there was an outbreak of influenza at Norfolk in 1918, but the pandemic’s second wave hit in late summer/autumn of 1918.  Military personnel worldwide were hit especially hard by the Spanish Flu, due to close quarters and young adults having an unusually high mortality rate from the illness.

Adolf Hitler was convicted of high treason in 1923 for organizing an attempted coup in Bavaria.  He was pardoned the following year by the Bavarian Supreme Court, having served one year of a five year sentence.  His autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf was published in German in 1925, and translated into English in 1933.