“I look ordinary because I was,” she said simply, lifting her eyes from the food on her plate to meet his across from her. “Who I am now, what I have to offer...I don’t know. Perhaps very little.”
“Not possible.” Sequoyah’s quiet confidence reached her ears and her heart at the same time. Why everyone here continued to believe in her, she could not fathom. But she was slowly starting to think that just maybe they had reason to.
“How can you be sure? You know nothing about me,” she said quietly, not daring to look at him this time.
“I know enough.” His tone was quiet but certain.
“Probably got an earful from Babe about you as soon as he got back,” Sawyer teased. “But he’s not wrong. You’ve got something, kid. And I, for one, can’t wait to find out what it is.” Then he took a determined stab at his last sliver of greens and dove it straight into his waiting mouth.
“You’re close to Babe?” Annis asked, suddenly uneasy. Babe had a way of lifting veils without being invited in. Though Annis had been grateful for the unspoken exchange they shared earlier, she hadn’t considered that Babe might put into words the things she’d concluded about her.
Sequoyah shot a look in Sawyer’s direction that Annis couldn’t interpret as anything other than unpleasant. Then he stood from his seat, clearing his plate as he went.
“They raised me. Her and Hugh,” he explained casually, his attention primarily on the empty plate in his hands. Annis had to wonder if it was a tactic meant to keep his gaze directed at anything but her. “But don’t go thinking that means Babe is a river letting everything flow through her. She’s the safest place to let your secrets land. They go in and never come out.” He smiled, glancing over at her at last, but it was laced with a sadness Annis couldn’t place. “What I know, I saw for myself. Didn’t take more than a moment to see.” Then he turned to Sawyer, still picking at what little was left of his food. “You gonna spend all evening on that? Come on, we got work to finish before the crowd shows.”
“You go ahead. I’ll find you when I’m done,” Sawyer said, waving him on.
Annis got the distinct feeling this wasn’t at all the answer Sequoyah had hoped for, but he left with no choice but to accept it. He gave a nod in her direction and then took his dishes to the tub filled with suds near where Momma T was busy at work.
Silence set in as Annis and Sawyer sat together, just the two of them again. Uncomfortable with the quiet space between them and the thoughts that threatened to fill it, Annis searched her surroundings for a new topic of conversation. Then, her eyes landed on Floyd, who sat alone on the other end of the tent and was clearly talking to himself. Chills ran down her spine even as she tried to push the memories of her encounter with him from her mind. She moved her gaze back to Sawyer, who went about eating his dinner without a worry in the world.
“Floyd,” she started, unsure of how to ask what she needed to know. “What...what will he be doing in the show tonight?”
Sawyer stopped short of taking another bite. “Floyd doesn’t have an act,” he said, giving no indication that he meant to expound on his answer.
Still, Annis pressed for more. “Then what does he do here?”
Sawyer sighed, slowly turning to glance over his shoulder at the old man still sitting hunched over his plate. His food sat untouched as he muttered words no one else could hear. “Floyd is special,” he began, crossing his arms over his chest. He sat back from the table with his eyebrows furrowed. His customary smirk missing from his face. “Where most of us are physically unique, Floyd has the unfortunate predicament of also having an altered mind.”
“I’m sorry?” Annis didn’t follow.
“You see him,” Sawyer said, watching her watch Floyd, who sat in the distance behind him. “Alone. It’s how he always is. Because he’s already got too many voices in his own head to take on anymore.”
“So, he’s mad,” Annis concluded. She wasn’t sure if this made her feel more at ease about what he’d said to her earlier or not.
“He hears voices,” Sawyer corrected. Annis could hardly see a difference, but Sawyer went on before she could say so. “Poppy says he has a gift, same as everyone. But, as with most of us, the world just wasn’t ready for it. It scared them, and so they tried to snuff it out of him. Only it didn’t work. After years of being locked away, of having doctors experiment on his brain and torture him, the gift became a curse.”
“I don’t understand,” Annis admitted.
“They broke him,” Sawyer said, sadness darkening his blue eyes. “Flooded his mind until he drowned inside it, unable to surface above the noise.” He shook his head, staring down at the table. “Whether he escaped or whether they deemed him too feeble to be of concern to anyone, no one really knows. Babe found him wandering in a field of sunflowers six years ago, talking to them, still wearing his hospital gown. She brought him home and he’s been here ever since, still lost inside his own head and unable to get out.”
“So, when he talks to others, it’s just nonsense?” Annis asked, on the verge of having her fears erased.
Sawyer looked up to meet her gaze with narrowed eyes. “He doesn’t.”
“He doesn’t what?”
“Talk to others. He can’t even see us, let alone hear anything outside of the noise in his head. Only reason we know what we do is ’cause of Hugh going into town that night and asking around about him. Didn’t want to just take him away if it meant leaving people behind who might miss him. Needless to say, he found stories a plenty, but not a single person sorry to see the old man go.” His gaze traveled back to Floyd once more. “He’s lost. He’ll never find his way back out to us.” He shrugged, slowly returning his attention to the remains of his dinner. “Truthfully, I’m not sure he’d even want to.”
Annis frowned. “But he talked to me. Earlier, inside the big tent. He looked me right in the eyes and spoke.”
Sawyer shook his head. “Not possible. Trust me, we’ve all tried to reach him. He’s not able to come out.”
She’d been tired, of course, and still trying to recover from intense dehydration when Floyd had approached her and given her the stone. Maybe her mind had been playing tricks on her, taunting her with what she feared most. It wasn’t entirely unbelievable that Floyd had never really spoken to her. And yet she couldn’t shake the sense she hadn’t imagined anything, and that Floyd was closer to the surface than anyone knew.
She looked at Sawyer, tempted to press the issue more, but then thought better of it when she noticed the thin line of his mouth still unwilling to curve back into its usual smirk. Determined to turn things around with him, she forced herself to stay silent—but it wasn’t long before her wandering mind stumbled upon a new nagging curiosity desperate to be answered. Before she could stop them, the words found their way to the forefront and out of her mouth.
“Hugh and Babe. They’re...Sequoyah’s parents?” It made sense, given the comments about Babe’s inability to accept that Sequoyah had grown into a man and her particularly high levels of anxiety where his well-being was concerned. Annis had written it off as part of her maternal flare. She hadn’t been far off, except apparently Babe’s maternal feeling was more specific to the fact she considered Sequoyah her son.
Sawyer nodded, grin slowly returning to his face. “You just loaded with questions this evening, aren’t you?” He placed his fork onto his now empty plate and Annis took note of her own still being nearly full. She’d stopped eating some time ago. “But, to answer, yes, they are. Closest thing he’s got anyway. Been with them since he was little. Babe’ll mother anyone who lets her, but with him it’s more because he really did need a mother when she came along.”
“But what about his family. His tribe?” Annis didn’t know much about Indigenous peoples and what she’d heard, she was more convinced than ever, probably had little to no truth to it.
“You’re looking at it. The tribe of misfits.” Then, he added, “There’s our chief now.” He poin
ted over Annis’s shoulder toward the opening of the tent. She hardly had to move her gaze to see him. Given his height, Hugh was easy to spot.
“If you’re finished up there, I could use a few more hands on Millie and Edi. Francis is having a hell of a time trying to get their gear on. Edi keeps snatching everything and tossing it, making Francis fetch like a well-trained dog. It’s been fun to watch but we really do need to get things done now.”
Sawyer chortled and climbed to his feet, and then up onto the table. “You seriously asking me to help dress an elephant?”
“Not asking you to do it alone,” Hugh countered, clearly serious about his request. “Grab Sequoyah on your way over. You can ride on his shoulders. That ought to help you reach.”
“I mean, that’s offensive. But I can see where it might work.” Sawyer jumped from the table, grabbed up his empty dishes, and headed toward Hugh. After dropping his plate with Momma, Sawyer patted Hugh’s arm in passing while Hugh stayed to eat the large helping of dinner that he’d just received from Momma T.
“You look like you could use some company,” Hugh said kindly, inviting himself to sit with Annis. She didn’t mind one bit.
“I didn’t know you had elephants,” she said, wondering what other animals Hugh and Babe might have collected to complement their quirky tribe of misfits, as Sawyer had called them.
“We don’t so much have them as we seem to be stuck with them,” he grumbled, though even when he tried, Hugh was hardly grumpy or stern. “If only our income were as big as Babe’s heart.” He chuckled softly. “Seems to always measure up somehow, though, and saying no to Babe has never been a talent of mine.”
“I don’t know,” Annis said as she picked up her fork again. Her appetite had slowly returned now that the butterflies had left along with Sequoyah, who seemed to be directly responsible for them. “I think your heart may be part of the problem in your ongoing collection here too.”
He laughed. “You know, it’s not polite to call a man out for his faults when you’re reaping the benefits of his shortcomings.”
She smiled sheepishly. “I didn’t realize generosity was an undesirable quality.”
“Only when you’re in the habit of giving more than you’ve got.” His laugh quieted down to a subtle chuckling as he began to dig into his heaping helping of red beans and ham. “But then I’ve always believed in maintaining a vacuum. Keeping the safe empty is a surefire way of getting it filled.”
Annis nodded, taking a bite. “Better to live with the flow of the river than build your life inside a puddle.”
Hugh stopped short of letting his fork meet his mouth and smiled. “Precisely.”
Hunger took the forefront as both focused on their meal. A quiet comfort surrounded the unlikely pair. Annis could hardly believe she’d only just met Hugh a few hours ago. Being near him felt like being near family.
“Does everyone call you Poppy?” she asked suddenly. “Or is it just Sequoyah?”
Dabbing his mouth with the corner of a coarse, linen napkin, he sat back from the table a bit, taking her in as though she’d said a great deal more than the two simple questions she’d posed.
“He was the first,” he answered after a moment of contemplation. “But it caught on rather quickly.” He placed his napkin back on the table and folded his long arms loosely in his lap. “Why do you ask?”
This time it was her turn to hesitate in answering. Why had she asked?
“Sequoyah said you raised him. You and Babe.” Annis felt her fingertips tingle from knotting her hands so tightly. She began to fidget with her own napkin just to get the blood circulating again. “And I guess it just helped me make sense of it all.”
“What’s that?”
“Being around you both. There’s just something so familiar about the way you’ve treated me. The way you’ve cared for me. And now I understand. It’s because you’re parents. You treat me like parents would treat their own.”
She felt her skin flush hot and cold, waging a war against itself whether to react with humiliation or to go numb from the pain that came with saying those words out loud. Hugh and Babe were parents. But they weren’t hers. No matter how much kindness they bestowed upon her, she was grown. She’d been raised. The job was done. She would have no more parents to turn to in her life because she required no more parenting. And because those who’d done the job were gone now.
“I meant what I said earlier, love. This is our family. And we may only call one of you lot our son, but we call everyone here ours. And that includes you now.”
Annis gulped to clear the lump in her throat but it bobbed back into place every time she tried to force it down. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Think nothing of it, love.” He stretched one arm out across the table until his hand reached hers, cupping it gently. He held her hand as he continued eating and both of them finished their dinner in a warm silence.
By the time they were clearing their plates and taking them back to the suds station, a whole new party of people had shown up for Momma’s cooking. Afraid she might get tangled up in the crowd pouring in, Annis stayed close to Hugh, whose wide strides led him through the mess of people in no time at all.
It wasn’t until they were both outside that he noticed she was still right behind him. “You plan on being back here all night, then?” he asked.
Annis briefly considered the question before she replied with one of her own. “Is that a viable option?”
Hugh chuckled again. Annis was beginning to suspect this was a standard response of his. “If you plan on sticking with me for the evening, perhaps it will improve your scenery to walk beside me.” No sooner had he said the words was he hooking his fingers around her elbow and tugging her up to walk on his right. “Left eye’s no good,” he explained. “Won’t be able to see you there. Liable to knock you out and not even know it.”
“Good to know,” Annis said, making a mental note to steer clear of his left side at all times. The man did have a habit of excessive gesturing and gesticulating, and so it really could be quite dangerous given she came even with his elbow.
“So, this your way of telling me your aspirations here include taking over as ringleader one day?” he asked. Annis half-believed he was being serious.
“Me? Commanding the crowds? Quite unlikely,” she said, skipping over the rocks and ropes still strewn about from assembling the tent. Every time Annis looked at the tent, she was certain it was larger than the last time she’d seen it. Its bright, inviting colors and high peaks like turrets on a castle gave way gracefully to the wind every time a breeze moved through. She admired the way it conformed to its surroundings yet remained sturdy.
“You don’t think you have what it takes?” Hugh challenged her, leading the way inside after tying up the tarp to keep the entrance open.
“Oh, I know I don’t.” Annis had never been good at commanding attention. “I can make a good assistant, though. Or some sort of background person in an existing number,” she offered. She was thinking out loud, mostly. After being offered a job, she’d put off the task of having to come up with an act. “I’m trained in ballet. Maybe I could do a little dancing in the background while the sisters sing. Or I could mimic Bess on the ground like a sort of shadow. I’ve seen part of her routine and I think I could learn it.”
Hugh shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
The finality in his statement caught her off guard. It was the most authoritative thing she’d heard him say.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Maybe it’d be best to just put me to work with Francis and Will, then. I know I don’t look strong, but I can do more than I seem capable of. I swear. If I set my mind to it, I’ll learn my way, Hugh.”
He slowed down, gradually coming to a complete stop right at the center of the main ring of the three in their arena. Once he was still, he dropped his chin and lowered his gaze until Annis could see his face. He wore a serious expression, but there was no sign of the harsh
chill she’d expected after his last words.
“Annis,” he said calmly, “I have a sense about people. Always have. I can see things in them, things most people can’t. Do you know what I see when I look at you?”
She didn’t dare consider the possibilities. “A scared runaway who hasn’t a clue of the way of the world?” she suggested and averted her eyes from his.
“A phoenix,” he corrected her, ignoring her interpretation. “I see a girl life set on fire but couldn’t burn. A girl whose fight was stronger than the flame. A girl who conquered the blaze who, when the smoke cleared, simply stepped from the ashes and carried on.”
Annis felt his eyes on her but she couldn’t bring herself to meet them.
“Now, love, does that sound to you like the sort of girl I would let fade away in the shadows of another? Does it sound to you like that would even be possible?”
She raised her chin and lifted her gaze slowly. “But I’m not really her, Hugh.”
“Yes, you are.”
Then he turned on his heel and walked away, leaving her there at the center of the ring as though she were the star of the show.
Chapter Five
THE DANCE
“Show me something,” Hugh’s voice rang out from the otherwise empty audience seating.
“What?” Annis heard the tremble in her voice. She felt furious to think something as simple as being on stage could scare her. There’s nothing left to be frightened of, she scolded herself. She’d seen the worst. This was not it.
“A dance. A trick. A secret talent. Anything you’d like.”
The Wild in her Eyes Page 5