“You know, James,” Mom said with a conspiratorial laugh, “I’m so happy you and Nathan are willing to indulge me in this little excursion. Your father would come here with me if he absolutely had to. But he really hates anything that has to do with farming, and I couldn’t bear to ask him.”
“Well, I like all this,” I said truthfully enough, though I think what I liked best about the daytime fair was being with my mother, who never made educational seminars out of our small expeditions, but just enjoyed them. I even felt somewhat conspiratorial myself; and when I thought of that other secret, the secret Nat and I shared, and our “camping trip,” a scary thrill went up my spine.
Around noon we climbed up to a sparsely occupied section high in the grandstand and opened the wicker picnic basket Mom had packed the night before; boiled ham sandwiches on homemade bread, a fresh garden salad, baked beans, pickles, sharp cheese and crackers, raspberry pie, and chocolate cake!
“Have you noticed?” Nat said with his mouth full. “This is the only place on the grounds where everyone seems to be just sitting still?”
My mother nodded and smiled. “Time doesn’t entirely seem to stop here, Nat, but everything slows down in a way I like. I could sit here all afternoon.”
“Me too,” Nat and I said together.
I had never seen my friend so relaxed. Maybe, in the crowd, he found an anonymity he’d been looking for. Maybe the bustle reminded him of Montreal, or maybe the old-fashioned exhibits and events coincided with his idea of the way authentic country ought to be. Whatever it was, Nat, like my mother and me, loved the fair at first sight, belittled nothing, couldn’t get enough of it. Yet reflecting now, I wonder if it might not have been being with my mother, or any gentle, motherly woman, that Nat really liked.
Except for the loudspeakers announcing the intermittent sulky races it could almost have been a hundred years ago. In between the trotters and pacers, the workhorses were brought out of the barns to pull buckboards and high old delivery wagons with elegant stenciled lettering. Then the track was swept smooth by a farm truck trailing a half dozen freshly cut birch saplings with their leaves still on, an outlandish broom of the woods that amused us all to no end.
Around three, Mom told us to have a good time camping out and left to get ready for her part in the Grand Saturday Cavalcade, in which most of the animals shown at the fair were led or driven by their owners in a wondrous procession twice around the racetrack in front of the grandstand—hundreds of dairy cattle, scores of riding horses with richly tooled saddles and working horses with great hammered silver harness trappings and jingly brass bells, strutting tom turkeys, herds of sheep caparisoned in brilliant yellow and blue and red mantles like miniature medieval war steeds, flocks of chickens and ducks, and yes, Leroy the Gander, the Grand Fowl of the Show, being led on a string by my proud, pretty mother.
By the time the cavalcade ended, the afternoon was well advanced. “Well, Nat,” I said, “how about hitting the midway?”
“Okay,” he said. “Excelsior!”
Despite all the wonderful things we’d done and seen so far on that wonderful day, despite the far more exciting thrills we anticipated for the night ahead, I was as eager as a ten-year-old to get over to the rides and games. For at Kingdom Fair or any fair, the midway is the one place where you don’t just see the events. There, with luck and a receptive frame of mind, you can temporarily become a part of them.
Early dusk was the best time to walk along the midway. The strings of colored lights glowed softly and invitingly, and looking in at the game booths always reminded me of strolling home through the village with my father at Christmastime and looking in house windows at the beautifully lighted trees. Fried food smells clung agreeably to the cooling air. The pitchmen had their second wind after the heat of the day but weren’t frazzled and irritable yet, the way they’d be at the end of the night.
“Step right up and give it a try, you can’t win a prize by walking by,” they chanted over the blaring midway music. Of course Nat and I couldn’t win anything by playing those age-old rigged midway games, either, but that didn’t keep us from trying. We tossed a lopsided baseball into a slanted bushel basket that bounced it back out every time. After five attempts, Nat finally managed to knock over three weighted milk bottles with a softball. I tried twice to cover up a red circle with five silver disks and left plenty of red showing both times. Nat had his palm read by a gypsy woman with a monstrous gold hoop in one ear, and we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl and octopus until the whole fair began to spin slowly away from me and I barely escaped being sick.
Then Charlie showed up with Reverend Andrews, whom he was giving his long-promised grand tour of the fair, and insisted that Nat and I join them on a battered old carousel with a glorious menagerie of carved wooden circus animals with chipped and faded trappings but an eternal stately prance. Next we visited the Freaks and Wonders of the World Show. Here, for fifty cents apiece, we saw a tattooed lady sticking pins up her nose, a sword swallower and fire eater, a contortionist who nonchalantly folded his legs behind his head and smoked a cigarette, and for an extra quarter, a real live geek who turned out to be none other than Titman White, whom Charlie had gotten off the hook in Ornery Ordney Gilson’s murder trial. He was sittting in a tom burlap loincloth, painted all over his body with stripes like a zebra, in a pen with a few sick-looking garter snakes draped around his bare feet. Every so often he would grab one of them and stick its head in his mouth and pretend to bite it off. Nat took one look and left the tent, but Reverend Andrews kindly told Titman that if he was looking for part-time work, he’d hire him to cut the cemetery grass on a weekly basis.
Bumper Stevens and Mason White were standing nearby and overheard the minister’s offer.
“Say, Mr. White, which would you rather be, a Presbyterium preacher or a stud horse?” Bumper said loudly in his stagy minstrel-show voice.
“Why, I don’t rightly know, Mr. Stevens,” said Mason, who always played Bumper’s straight man at the annual blackface show. “Which would you rather be?”
“I’d much rather be a Presbyterium preacher, Mr. White.”
“Why’s that, Mr. Stevens?”
“Use your head, Mr. White. Breeding season’s longer for the preacher.”
“Let’s clear the hell out of here, Reverend,” Charlie said angrily. “Not all the freaks seem to be in the freak show.”
On the way out of the tent we met Royce St. Onge, Stub Poulin, and two or three other players from Charlie’s team on their way in, laughing and drinking beer. Stub yelled, “Hey, here’s Charlie K!”
When we brushed by fast, Stub turned and called after us, “What’s the matter, Charlie? Ain’t you got time for us white folks tonight?”
We rejoined Nat outside the tent and started back up the midway the way we’d come. But before we’d taken five steps a gong began to clang. Simultaneously a siren shrieked out. Thirty feet above our heads a sparkling burst of colored lights erupted.
For a moment I thought a ride had blown up; but it was nothing of the kind. All this uproar was only my cousin Welcome’s latest invention, which he’d just unveiled the tallest and strangest high striker I’d ever seen, announcing the first winner of the evening.
Every country fair has a high striker—also known as a hammer-and-bell—the strength-testing machine where young huskies try to impress one another and their girlfriends by ringing a bell at the top of a sort of gigantic vertical yardstick by sending an iron weight shooting up it with a post mall. But no other fair I’ve ever seen has boasted a high striker remotely like the one my cousin had been working on in secret that summer. Besides its spectacular pyrotechnics and fire-engine sound effects, it was twice as high as most others and equipped with more elaborate lights and mirrors and slogans than a cross-country eighteen-wheeler. Astraddle the top was a life-size tin replica of an alien-looking green girl with two green antennae, called Marsha the Martian, between whose shapely emerald legs the iron weight momentarily
disappeared when a customer rang the bell.
Reverend Andrews laughed and shook his head. “Only here,” he said.
“My lord!” Charlie said in genuine awe. “Welcome, you have outdone yourself with this gorgeous artifact. She’s a true work of art.”
“I imagine she is, Cousin,” Welcome said as a crowd gathered around the high striker. “Have a whack, Jimmy?”
I hefted the mall. It was heavier than it looked, but I heaved it up over my head and let fly at the spring-weighted platform. The weight zipped up to the line on Marsha’s knees marked “Sissy Boy.” She made a rude noise, the crowd laughed, and I retreated in ignominy.
“That’s not very polite,” Welcome said to the green girl. “You were little once too.”
“I’ll give her a go,” said Royce St. Onge. Royce sent the weight speeding up to her thigh—“He-Man”—but no farther.
“Judas priest, will you look at this contraption, now, Mr. Stevens,” said Sheriff White, who had come to see what the noises were about. “Only a Kinneson could come up with something this outlandish.” He peered up at the slot between Marsha’s legs. “Why, this is ob-scene, to boot!”
“I bet you could ring the bell, High Sheriff,” Welcome said. “Give her a whirl.”
“Try her out, Mace,” an onlooker chimed in. “Big tall fella like you ought to drive that bell clear up in her gullet.”
“Nope, boys, not when I’m in uniform. Hat and gun here would get in the way.”
“Take them off,” Charlie said in a needling voice.
Standing back in the crowd beside Reverend Andrews in his baseball cap and sweatshirt, holding a half-full bottle of beer, my brother looked like any other fairgoing workingman.
“Come on, Sheriff,” Royce said. “I’ll hold your hat and gun for ya.”
“Well, now.”
“All in good fun, Sheriff. Might get you an extra vote or two this fall.”
“All right, all right.” Mason took off his hat and gunbelt and handed them to Bumper. “You hold on to these, Mr. Stevens, if you will. Reach me that mallet, there, Welcome.”
Now, although Mason White was as skinny and awkward-looking as Ichabod Crane, no one who’d ever seen him wrestle a big bulky farmer’s corpse into a bag and down a winding back stairway doubted his raw strength. His length of arm alone was enough, I thought, to ring that bell. Up shot the weight and up and up, triggering lights and sirens and bells, all the way to “Almost But Not Quite.”
“Tee-hee,” said the green girl. “Close. But close don’t count except in horseshoes.”
“Don’t speak to High Sheriff that way,” Welcome told her sternly. “Can’t you recognize an elected official of the county when you see one?”
“Rigged piece of crap,” the sheriff sputtered. “He’s got it fixed so’s that weight won’t go all the way to the top.”
“You think Mr. Kinneson’s invention here is rigged, Sheriff White?” Reverend Andrews said.
“Certainly it is. You don’t know these outlaws around here the way I do, Andrews. They’re so crooked they can’t lay straight in bed.”
The minister looked at Welcome. “Is this machine rigged, Mr. Kinneson?”
“It’s a rig-put-together,” Welcome said obscurely. Then, to clarify, “From spare parts.”
“I see,” Reverend Andrews said, taking the mall and ringing the bell so quickly yet with such apparent effortlessness that it was a moment before I realized that he had done it one-handed!
Sheriff White scowled, took his gunbelt and hat from Bumper, and melted into the crowd moving down the midway. “Jesum Crow!” Royce St. Onge said. “I want to shake your hand, Rev. Why the hell—I mean, why the heck—ain’t you playing ball for us this summer?”
“He probably thought the team was just for ‘white folks,’” Charlie said sarcastically.
“Shoot, Charlie K, Stub didn’t mean nothing by that,” Royce said. “Old Rev here knows we didn’t mean nothing by that, don’t you, Rev? Shake hands with the man, boys.”
Stub Poulin was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He reeled and staggered and held up his hand. “Shake hands with Rev, boys,” he hollered. “I just did. See? The black don’t come off.”
“Come on,” Royce said to Stub, and pulled him off down the midway. “He’s drunk, Reverend. He don’t mean nothing.”
“He was drunk,” Charlie said lamely to the minister.
But Reverend Andrews only shrugged and said in that faintly ironical way, “Maybe so. But as an old air force friend of mine used to say, he was sober before he got drank, wasn’t he? I’ve seen enough of your fair, Charles. I’m going home.”
“Hey, hey, hey, Paris comes to New Hampshire,” yelled the barker, a fat, bald, one-eyed man in a filthy T-shirt.
“This ain’t New Hampshire, dummy. It’s Vermont,” Bumper Stevens shouted from the crowd of men pushing up near the platform in front of the tent.
“It ain’t Vermont, neither,” somebody else yelled. “It’s Kingdom County.”
The one-eyed barker seemed to enjoy this repartee. “Paris comes to King’s County, then, boys. It don’t matter. Inside of that tent you’ll think you’ve died and went straight to heaven. Speaking of which, here she is right now, the star of the Paris Revue, Heaven Fontaine. Step out here, honey, and show these boys what you got. Don’t be shy, now.”
Heaven Fontaine, when she appeared on the rickety platform in front of the Paris Revue tent at the far end of the Kingdom Fair midway, did not appear to suffer from shyness. She was a big, strapping, hard-featured, middle-aged woman in a red bathrobe slit all the way up her thigh. With her was a somewhat younger version of herself, whom the barker introduced to the crowd as Heaven’s sixteen-year-old sister, A Little Piece of Heaven, though even from the back of the crowd I could tell that this chunky little tart was closer to thirty than sixteen.
“And inside the tent, boys, we’ve got something very special tonight, which except to say her name is Saint Catherine and she’s hot off the streets of downtown Montreal where she got her grammar school, high school, and college, I won’t say another word.”
Heaven Fontaine swayed mechanically to the blaring burlesque music. Little Piece jounced and bounced beside her like a stout windup doll with a perpetual grin, not even pausing in her vigorous gyrations when she brushed her hair away from her sweaty face.
In the meantime the adjacent Club California was making a competitive bid for business with a younger barker and two skinny blondes in spangled scanty costumes. “Red-hot ramble, long and strong,” the barker snarled into his microphone, strutting up and down the platform in front of the girls in his shiny black leather jacket and dusty engineer boots. “They strip to please and not to tease.”
“Hey, hey, hey, Paris comes to King’s County, Ver-mont,” chanted the barker of my show, though a man in the middle of the crowd yelled that the closest Heaven Fontaine and Little Piece had ever been to Paris was Paris, Maine.
This was what Nat and I had been waiting for. This was the show we intended to see. But how? We’d already determined that sneaking in through the back of the tent was next to impossible. It was pegged down every foot or so to prevent just such incursions.
To complicate matters, Elijah Kinneson was standing off to the side of the crowd, handing out religious tracts he’d printed up the previous week at the shop. If he saw me “navigating” around, he’d certainly report me to my father and there would be hell to pay.
“Say, what youse two up to?”
It was Little Piece, standing just behind us in the shadows. “You boys want to see what-all goes on inside?” she said in a teasing voice. “Five bucks apiece and I sneak you in through the truck.”
I was flat broke, had been within twenty minutes of hitting the midway earlier that evening.
My heart fell as Nat shook his head. “Don’t have it,” he said.
Little Piece shrugged. “How much do you got?”
Nat grinned. “Five dollars for us both.”
Little Piece licked her bright red lips thoughtfully. “Tell youse what. For that, one can see the show. Hurry up and decide which. I got to get in there.”
“No deal,” Nat said. “Both of us or neither of us. Double or nothing.”
“Gimme the fiver,” Little Piece said quickly.
I would have forked the money over before she had a chance to change her mind. Nat knew better. “When we get there,” he told her.
“Okay, smartie. Follow me.”
We detoured out around the crowd of men now lining up in front of the barker’s stand for tickets. As we passed Elijah, I scrunched down, but I was quite sure he saw me anyway.
We slipped in between the side of the Paris Revue tent and the adjacent Club California, and Little Piece led us up a set of portable steps and through the side door of the show truck. We followed her into a narrow passage between a tiny gas stove and sink, past a cot and two bunkbeds, and past a curtained-off section where Little Piece paused to shout, “Show’s about ready, honey,” she turned to us and hissed, “Saint Catherine. She ain’t no saint, I’ll tell you that, and she ain’t from no ritzy Montreal nightclub. We picked her up by the side of the road last night on our way down here from Canada, walking the roads like a common tramp. Hollywood! That’s all she talks about. Hollywood and being in the movies. Dumb little French bitch! Says she’s a performer, though, and that’s good enough for us. Gimme that five-spot now.”
We had pushed through another curtain into the rear section of the track. The wide metal tailgate jutted out into the tent, forming an impromptu stage illuminated by two or three harsh spotlights fastened to the tent poles. Nat gave Little Piece the five-dollar bill and she gave us a shove.
A Stranger in the Kingdom Page 18