The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  “Hey, kid,” the man says, and his voice is both soft and louder than the surrounding cacophony. It’s a deepness that cuts underneath.

  “Hello,” Gordy whispers, eyeing the best directions for quick escape. He’s never the most cautious of boys; nevertheless, alarm bells are sounding deep in his nerve centers.

  “To me you look like a lad who needs admission,” says the man in the powder-blue suit.

  “Who are you?” Gordy asks.

  “I’m of no matter,” the man says, breezily, almost singsong. “No matter, no substance, no matter at all. But you needn’t worry. I’m a safe man. Yes, you could definitely say I’m very safe.” There’s something sardonic about the way he emphasizes the word, some hidden meaning, but Gordy can’t imagine what that meaning might be. He edges back toward the crowd, lies: “Listen…I’m going to get going. My dad’s waiting for me just ahead.”

  The man holds up a hand, a cigarette between two long fingers. “Yes, you should go,” he says. “I don’t want to delay you. But I have something I think it might be of use.” Suddenly—prestidigitation!—something appears in the cigarette’s place. It’s a single ticket. A big one, composed of some sort of shiny green foil, seeded here and there with little silver discs.

  No less trepidatious than he’d been before, yet compelled beyond reason, Gordy reaches out and takes it.

  A lottery ticket. A gas-station scratch-off. lucky 21! it howls in green foil curlicue. The highest jackpot is (the ticket exclaims in letters of brightest yellow) a thousand bucks, and sure, this is all the money in the world, but the odds of hitting it will be astronomical. Pointless, Dad would surely say. Dad bestows sad smug smiles upon the saps ahead of him in line at the gas station, buying one or seven or fifteen of those things. Shakes his head as the sap hunches over the counter working away—can’t even wait to get out of the store to start his itch of coin on silver. The weak smile when one hits for five bucks. Dad still smiling weary superiority as he pays and leaves; the sap uses his scant winnings to buy some more of the damn things. Hell of a way to utilize a twenty-dollar bill, is all Dad will say, once they are out of earshot. The things have for Gordy naturally carried all the fascination of any forbidden object, but he’d known better than to ask Dad to buy one. Now, out of the powdery blue, here comes one into his possession.

  Thanks, mister,” Gordy says, looking up from his prize. “But, why di—”

  But the man is gone; nothing left of him but a hint of smoke. Gordy looks to his hand, still clutching the ticket, and it occurs to him…it’s certainly a loser, valueless as an investment—look, somebody’s even started playing it, one disc’s already scratched away—but…it is green.

  With a lurch, the crowd carries him along. It’s reaching maximum concentration at the tent entrance. Gordy can see the man with the megaphone now, standing squat and round as a toadstool on two wooden boxes, gussied up in a string tie and a suit with wide lapels and vertical blue candy-striping matching the tent before which he stands. His bald head is an overripe tomato. His eyes are deep-set caves. His mustache is hard to explain. His eyebrows defy Gordy’s previous experience with eyebrows. This changes everything, Gordy thinks.

  He can sense that this man is the man, the one from the poster, none other than the famous Colonel Karl T. Krane, purveyor of freaks, master of ceremonies, carny barker extraordinaire, and extraordinary—look at him, his corpulence, his roundness, his redness, his striping, his piping ubiquitous blather, his grandiose physical verbosity; his very mustachioed eyebrowitude. And now he’s dancing a happy little dance on his perch, cutting a rug atop his boxes and still jibber-jabbering staccato at the fairgoers who cluster about him waving mostly blue tickets, holding up their children like refugees appealing to the last G.I. on the last helicopter, yet perhaps they would cluster even if he were promising no further distraction than his own fat toe-hopping presence. Why is he still barking if demand has outstripped supply in such dramatic fashion, unless he simply savors the slurry of his own words? He is impossible, disconcerting in his inflection and tone and shape; he oozes exclamation as he prances from foot to foot, exhorting:

  “…SEE the SEE, come on ladies COME on Gents come IN, come in, STEP in, SEE the SEE, BLUE tickets to the SI-ide, ON-ly GREEN TICKETS for entrance, THE HOUSE is FILL-ling up! GET in the house! Don’t be left HOLding the BAG now let me GUARantee you, you DO NOT want to MISS it…”

  And now they are all in a frenzy, arms waving. Gordy squeezes between where he can, looking for the openings, moving toward the front by inches, thinking to himself blindly why are we all fighting so hard for this, nothing but a circus what importance what, what is happening here and in every face he sees, beyond the frantic mask, the same helpless questioning lurking there. This is not a desire to see a circus, to laugh at clowns, to look at freaks. Not desire, but some other compulsion like hope…hope? Maybe. Something different, some transcendent entertainment, some answer to the workaday groan. There are some who resist, to be sure. Some who watch from above, safe in the slowly turning Ferris-wheel cars, smiling smug and benevolent on the desperate press below. But…looking at them, now…no, they aren’t smug, these holdouts. There’s a resignation to them, even despair. Some cry. Others are stoic. In one set of cars a woman is speaking frantically to a man intent on ignoring her. She gesticulates; he leans the opposite way, ostentatious in his inattention.

  The crowd has thinned as the green tickets are admitted; the Colonel is picking up final stragglers. Judging from the numbers who have gained access since the most recent proclamation, there cannot be more than a few seats left in the tent. The Colonel stabs a white-gloved sausage finger into the throng, selecting the last lucky few with tickets. Gordy stands tiptoe, holding up his scratch-off, hoping his ersatz greenie will fool the eye as that short white finger revolves on its voluble armsocket and slows, stops, selects, starts again, turns and slows, rolls and finally—finally! comes to rest, pointing through the multitude, selecting him. The chilling cavities of the round man’s eyes fall upon him, drawing him in. For an instant Gordy wants to duck, to let that horrid gaze fall on another, thinks no no this is a mistake not me not oh no but the compulsion is in him as it is in the rest, and he starts forward. They jostle him bitterly as he makes his way up. Gordy hopes he will not be spat upon; the disappointment and hostility are palpable, he knows what they’re thinking: Dammit. Each selection of another dramatically lessens the odds of being chosen yourself. And…could it be? Yes, Krane’s stopped pointing now. Him—the kid in mustard-and-ketchup—he’s the last one chosen.

  Gordy gives the disappointment of reprobate masses his back and passes into the tent. The entrance leads into a short dark passage, which conceals whatever goodies might wait deeper within, and, Gordy now sees, is guarded to prevent the swarm from crashing in. One guard on each side of the opening. Gordy falls back a step. Little wonder the horde, however desperate, has not bum-rushed the show. Yes, the guards are only little—but what little folks! Breathtaking. Identical tiny men, resplendent in scarlet tunics shot through with black, they bristle with weaponry: knives, chains, hammers, darts, a sword, a metal tube too slight to be a pipe. All of this sheathed and holstered, yet their eyes hold the watchfulness and casual mastery of tigers, of lions. Disinterested faces inform you of the easy ability to put an end to you whenever it might become necessary or convenient.

  The tiny guards swing open like doors to admit him and Gordy enters the short dark tunnel leading into the tent. There is light and noise streaming in where the tunnel turns inward, and when Gordy makes the turn, he is bathed in it and finds himself confronted by the one and only Circus of Breaded Love.

  SPADE

  I don’t want to give the impression of an entirely different history after it all changed. There were similarities—a lot of them. In fact, to compare the two in summary alone, you’d notice it starts out different, but otherwise you’d be hard pressed to know one from th
e other; to see the effects, you’d have to look into the details. It’s not so much the what of history that changed, it’s the why.

  The “why”…that’s pretty important stuff, Father. Discovering the “why’ ” is what we historians do. If the exact same things happen, they’re still different things, if they happened for different reasons. The “what” is usually an easier matter. When it comes to Pigeon Forge I can still give you all that by rote: In the beginning, you had what white folks would eventually dub “the Indian Gap Trail,” a well-maintained path threading the feet of the Smokies, made by local Cherokee tribes around 1300 and utilized by them for the next four centuries to navigate the deepness of forest terrain: for trade, and to make their way to and from the proving grounds of war or the hunt. Sometime around the mid-1700s, the first white folks appeared on the trail, mostly trappers and hermits, and they too, naturally, found it convenient to their needs, and in this way word of it must’ve slowly seeped back to what the white folks had dubbed “civilization.” Certainly sometime before 1783 it was known, because it was in that year that Colonels Samuel Wear and Robert Shields, veterans of the Revolutionary War, heroes of the Battle of Kings Mountain, and co-drafters of the Tennessee Constitution, made their way to it, and it carried them to the banks of the river they would soon dub “Little Pigeon,” and to the spring waters in the shady glen that would later be known as Henderson Springs Hollow. The abundance of readily available water presented suitable catalyst to the minds of the old campaigners for settlement, so Wear established a stockade on one end of their border, while Shield established his own on the other, and between the two, a tiny colony of perhaps two dozen held an outpost, there on the very edge of the known universe. That’s how things stood in 1808, when the Runyan Party arrived, carrying with it some twelve dozen new settlers, among them future town fathers Isaac “Barefoot” Runyan, his wife Margaret Rambo, and the smith, Isaac Love, who established the famous forge and mill that would lend the new colony of Pigeon Forge its permanent name.

  It was at this moment, Father, something happened that no historian before me ever recorded: an altercation between Runyan and Isaac for the very soul of the colony, in which Runyan, supported by Wear, prevailed. It turns out Love was a zealot in the cult of himself, somebody who really believed, deep down, that no consciousness existed but his own, that all others were just projections of his will, and he…well, I already told you about the Rambo letters. Once controlled by its strictures, Love proved a valuable member of the budding society. By 1840, his mill and forge were a thriving venture, allowing new inroads to the nascent town, enough so that Isaac’s son William established Sevier County’s first post office, and there was talk about Pigeon Forge becoming the county seat. But in 1851, John Sevier himself purchased mill and forge, stripped it, relocated it, and left the town high and dry and doomed to further languish into economic anxiety and despair after the Failed War to Preserve Slavery left road and bridge destroyed, rendered field and farm fallow. There was a brief boom as some outside businessmen tried to sell the springs in Henderson Hollow as magically restorative, and, abetted by the paid testimony of traveling mountebanks posing as revival ministers, they succeeded for a spell, bringing in several hundred trusting sheep for fleecing—but the whole cult collapsed on itself when the preacher serving as front-man died mid-sermon while standing hip-deep in the allegedly “healing” pools. The town entered its long invisible time then, a dirt smudge left off most maps until the middle of the century, when two enterprising North Carolina brothers by the name of Robbins transformed it into another roadside attraction—they discovered an abandoned rebel steam engine, refurbished the beast, laid down tracks, and dubbed it “Rebel Railroad,” providing Confederate-sympathetic visitors from the north and elsewhere with what they advertised as “an authentic Civil War train ride experience.” This attempt at what I assume must have been fun proved successful enough to catch the eye of a businessman and NFL franchisee, who purchased it in the nineteen-seventies, added further amusements, rebranded it as a mining adventure, and renamed the whole mess “Silver Dollar City.” This, in turn, proved successful enough to flip to some carnival impresarios from Branson, who decided Pigeon Forge was the ideal spot to recreate in Appalachia what they’d already perfected in the Ozarks. Enlisting fame, they partnered with local-girl-made-good Dolly Parton, renamed Silver Dollar City as Dollywood, and Pigeon Forge was reborn into its present iteration.

  And what exactly is Pigeon Forge now? How to describe it? It’s a long, jagged, spangled strip tearing through the forest at the foot of the Smokies. Smaller streets spread out from the main, leading to above-ground pools and trailer homes and prefab dwellings spilled amidst the trees. But the main drag’s what brings the people: brightly lit, lined with shacks of commerce and diversion—comedy barns, off-off-off-Nashville music revues, arcades, restaurants, buffets, an endless array of souvenir shops filled with miniature tin replicas of world monuments and velvet paintings of dead crooners; with doo-dads and knickknacks; with shirts bearing tasteless slogans and corporate brands; with cunningly shaped ashtrays and beaded change purses; with life-sized porcelain statues of huge-eyed children, or of Well-Scrubbed Caucasian Jesus, or of unicorns; with faux-taxidermied battery-powered singing fish; with retail shrines to the Confederacy—rebel-flag bandannas, rebel-flag oven mitts, rebel-flag dress, rebel-flag stickers, pool balls in a frame painted to form the rebel flag, plush Tickle-Me Stonewall Jackson dolls—and this is only the tip of the iceberg. In Pigeon Forge, if you don’t need it, they’ve got it. They’ve got ten.

  Once you have an anchor like Dollywood, Father, the rest just grows around it.

  But now, see, you’re looking awful confused. See, this is what I’m talking about when it comes down to the differences being in the details. Does Dolly Parton exist here, Father? Was she lost when it all changed? Now I think of it, she must have been. I keep picking up little differences between before and now—feels like that poor Dolly might just be one.

  Never mind; it doesn’t matter.

  The fountain appears to have been the stick in the stream, the key divergent element between the reality before the change and the reality after, the thing that threw the whole mess off-course. First off, as near as I can tell, every human being in the vicinity kept well clear of the fountain, all the way back to ancient times. Thus, no Indian Gap Trail. Thus, no traders telling Wear and Shields where to go. Thus, no settlers at all until the Runyan Party arrived—but there’s the other difference, see. It’s not the Runyan Party anymore in the history books. It’s the Love Party. Love won that altercation instead of Runyan, so Rambo never got to tell of it—a task that fell to Jane Sim, writing it in another century, writing it as a fiction.

  Jane Sim? She was the caretaker of Morris’s captives. She had been Morris’s…wife, I suppose. And an acrobat in his circus. We met her, eventually. I’ll tell you about it by and by.

  It was the fountain gave Love the power. Love’s philosophy likely wasn’t much different from one history to the other. I reckon he always did regard himself as the only person who existed, and all the others only manifestations of his considerable will. It’s just that without that fountain, he couldn’t get a firm enough grip on the people to make his way of seeing the world a commonly held one. And, of course, there was that door beneath. I think that made him crazy—crazier than he could’ve ever gotten on his own, at any rate. Something he sensed from behind it encouraged his delusions and magnified them.

  The Family History of the Loves gave me some of this, but it was dry stuff, all the actuals and factuals. All the interpretation of it, on the other hand…that was in Jane Sim’s book. Once I picked that up, I couldn’t stop reading.

  * * *

  —

  The winter had tried them, as Love had warned. Several perished from sickness, and those stricken by it envied the dead: grippe and ague and fever, bodies drained of natural humors and filled with stench
of pus, guts seized and spilling out, patients first dizzy and hot, sweating flushed atop bedsheets, then huddled shivering beneath them. The winter winds came and piled drifts up against the cabins until they covered the boarded windows. Mountain snow piled above their heads and flooded the ricks holding the firewood. While their women searched for staves dry enough to burn, men hunted and checked the trap lines, beating paths with their arms through thick wetness. They carved narrow tunnels through drifts to connect one house to another until the village resembled a termite colony. They huddled together in cloister around fires and stoves, feeling the weight of solid wetness all about them.

  But the cabins, though crude in appearance, proved well-constructed and adequately sealed, and the food, while unsavory and salted to point of pain, sustained their bodies. The graveyard they planted when thaw finally arrived was a fraction of what it would have been without the autumn exhortations and winter exertions of Isaac Love. Indeed, without his direction, without the strong dwellings and the warm furs and the stores of food, there would have been no graveyard at all, for none would have remained capable of putting a person beneath ground; all would have lain cold atop it. So Barefoot Runyan suggested to Margaret at supper after the afternoon’s grave-digging and mass funeral ceremony, but Margaret made no reply. Ever since the trail she had felt Love’s eyes heavy as January snow upon her. She had feared his jealousy when she took up with Runyan, knowing men such as Love were like wild dogs, unlikely to let fall into another’s mouth meat they marked for their own. But Love had said nothing, broached no objection to the courtship, offered no obstacle to the marriage. Still, in secret moments, she would catch his eyes on her.