Nobody said anything for a long time, and during that silence I felt as heavy as lead inside. Joey was right. We were not Lonnie’s kids; we couldn’t go on eating food that he paid for, promoting him to the job of being our dad when he hadn’t asked for the honor. I had to face it: If there was no job for me at the carnival, Joey and I would have to start moving along on our own again. I wondered how begging would be around Baton Rouge.
Then to my amazement Pete Harris gave me a job. He had the look of a man who was doing a thing against his better judgment and finding it more than a little painful. He said, “I’m goin’ to take you on, kid. You’re pretty good. If you can learn to ballyhoo as well as you play, you just might be a good attraction.” He paused and turned toward Joey. “I’ll give your brother five dollars a week with grub and sleepin’ space for the two of you. That okay with you boys?”
It was more than okay. It was wonderful, an offer to make the likes of us delirious. Our faces must have shown our joy, but Pete Harris didn’t look joyful. He glanced at Lonnie, and I saw him shake his head slightly with a smile that looked grim rather than happy. Then he told us to come on outside and he’d show us where we could bunk for the night. He said he’d get me ready for work the next morning.
We followed him out to a tent on the edge of the meadow where there were dozens of cots lined up in long rows. “Men and boys sleep here,” Harris told us. “A few have their families in boxcars out on the sidings—most don’t have families at all—at least not here. I’ll put you boys together down here at the end. The two dwarf men will be your neighbors. Edward C. is a fine little guy; Blegan is rattlebrained and gossipy as an old woman, but you don’t need to pay any attention to him. They’ll show you where the grub tent is in the morning. You come where you found me tonight, and I’ll get you ready for work.” He sighed as if he were tired and extended his hand to Lonnie. “Glad to have made your acquaintance. I’ll do right by the kids—long as I can. Like I told you, I just don’t know ...”
Lonnie had to leave us. He would drive most of the night to make up the time he’d lost in finding the carnival and Pete Harris for us. I was sorry for the delay and told him so, but he insisted that it didn’t matter. “I wanted to see you with a job before I left you,” he said as we walked back to the truck with him. “This is not exactly great, but it’s a job. Maybe it will lead to something better—a guy can never tell.”
We stood leaning against the big wheels of the truck. That truck had come to seem like home. I hated to give it up.
Lonnie handed me a scrap of paper with the name Lon Bromer written on it. I hadn’t known his full name before. Underneath was a street address in Omaha, Nebraska. “This is where I live when I’m home,” he told me. “I’ll be back down here in a couple of weeks if I’m not laid off. If I make it back, I’ll look you up. If not, let me hear how you’re getting along.”
“I’ll do that, Lonnie; I sure will,” I answered.
He stood looking at us as if he didn’t quite know what to say. When he spoke, his voice didn’t sound natural. “I’ll have you two fellows on my mind. If you ever get into a real jam, you let me know. I’ll be ready to help you best lean.”
We shook hands, and he climbed up behind the wheel. As the truck moved away, he waved to us and Joey put into words what I secretly felt myself. He said, “If I was a little kid, I’d start bawlin’ and run right after that truck.”
I couldn’t say much of anything. It didn’t occur to me to tell Joey that he was still a little kid. Somehow I knew better.
We didn’t feel any interest in the sights of the carnival after Lonnie left. It had been a long day, and the hard cots Pete Harris had assigned to us felt comfortable and good to our tired bodies. I lay awake for a long time trying to make myself realize that I was very lucky. Five dollars a week with food for Joey and me and a sheltered place to sleep meant a streak of luck that would have seemed impossible only a week before. It didn’t matter that the carnival was a strange and bewildering place or that I was scared. It was nothing, I told myself, compared to the fear of cold and hunger which Joey and I had just experienced in Nebraska. That was true, certainly, but a fear of strange people was different. I couldn’t explain it, but somehow I had felt more confidence alone with Joey as we scrounged for survival than I did that night in the midst of a crowd of people busy with the business of providing pleasure. “You don’t make good sense,” I told myself as sleep began to close in on me. I dreamed in what must have been the early hours of the night because I was aware of the monotonous music ground out by the merry-go-round, music that gradually receded and became the hum of big tires on a concrete road.
The dwarf men woke us the next morning. They were strange little people with old faces and bodies no larger than a five-year-old child’s. One of them clambered up on Joey’s bed and began to beat him with tiny wrinkled hands. The other, a much quieter and more dignified little man with a great hump on his back, stood at a distance and looked at us with grave interest.
“Get up if you want breakfast, you new guys,” the noisy one squeaked at us. He wanted to know our names, where we were from, what our act was. His questions rattled out, one after the other, and yet I don’t think he was really interested in any answers. He did, however, seize upon my statement that I played the piano.
“Oh, great,” he yelled shrilly. “Pete Harris needs a piano player like we need another cut in wages. Pete Harris is a fool, a crazy old fool, and you are a crazy young fool. You’d better find another job. You won’t be playin’ a piano here very long—not with box office receipts slidin’ off to nothing.”
“Why can’t you behave yourself, Blegan?” the second little man asked sharply. “Pete asked us to bring these boys to breakfast—he didn’t say anything about giving them a lecture.” He extended his hand to me. “My name is Edward C. Kensington. Don’t pay any attention to Blegan; he’ll be a pest for a while and then lose all interest in you. I’ve seen it happen before.”
Blegan was, in fact, something of a pest, much like a chattering, irresponsible monkey and apparently having little in common with Edward C. Kensington except for the matter of size. He pattered after Joey, plaguing him with insistent questions. “Why aren’t you home with your mama, little sweet child?” he asked.
“I’m an orphan,” Joey answered shortly, and he very pointedly ignored Blegan’s further questions. When we were dressed, we walked with Edward C. Kensington to the breakfast tent while Blegan scampered ahead of us, turning occasionally to come back and ask a question which had been answered five minutes before.
At the tent there were fifty or more people seated on wooden benches at long, narrow tables. Here Blegan found his wife who had just arrived from the women’s sleeping tent. They embraced lovingly and sat close together, eating from the same cereal bowl until an argument started and their shrill anger could be heard all through the tent. A few people laughed; others shrugged and paid no attention to them. We tried to ignore them, but when they upset the cereal bowl and splashed us with its contents, Edward C. Kensington led us to a place farther down the table near quieter neighbors.
“You’ll find lots of pleasant people here in spite of the bad impression you’re getting from those two,” Edward C. Kensington told us. “We carnies are not a bad sort, really. Of course, the circus people rather look down their noses at us, but we can’t be bothered by that. Some of the finest people I know are carnies—people like Emily. You’ll meet Emily soon; she’s very dear to those of us who appreciate quality.” He sounded prim and a little pompous, but we liked him. He asked us to call him Edward C.
“The C stands for Courage,” he said, smiling at Joey. “Many times the pain in my hump has been so bad, I’ve needed to remember that my middle name is Courage.” He turned to his breakfast again, and his voice took on a brisker tone. “Well, now, enough of that. Plenty of other people in this world have their woes, too. Take that fellow at the table opposite us—that is Ellsworth, the man with flippers
instead of arms. The man feeding him is Gorby, the sword swallower. They travel together. Never say anything more than ‘Good day’ to any of us. Very reserved gentlemen.
“Then there is Madam Olympia, the obese lady.” Edward C. coughed delicately behind his hand. “She has a rather remarkable appetite. Never passes the platter to anyone; just empties whatever is on it to her own plate and pushes the empty platter aside. A little joke among us—not kind, I’m afraid, but we grab at a chance to laugh whenever we can.”
He helped Joey to a serving of scrambled eggs and grits from one of the platters that was being passed down the length of our table. “We eat well here,” he said. “Pete Harris wants us to be well fed. He makes Emily come here for breakfast because he knows she starves herself at home so that her children can have enough. She isn’t supposed to have meals here—people living outside the grounds are paid something extra so they can feed themselves. Emily gets the brunt of some snide remarks from a few of the others, but Pete sees that she has breakfast every morning whether other people like it or not. He looks after Emily. She’s a very special person around here.”
“Is Emily a performer?” I asked, not particularly interested, but aware that Edward C. was expecting me to carry on at least a part of the conversation.
He was greatly amused at the question. “Emily is the most popular performer in the carnival,” he told us. “In fact, it’s Emily who is holding this show together. She wasn’t trained for this sort of life. She has just mapped out an act through her own ingenuity, and it’s a good one. You’ll see. You’ll meet her before long.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt nervous and scared inside, and wished that Edward C. would not feel it necessary to tell us about any other people at the table. I would have liked for him just to be quiet a while.
He wasn’t, though. He wanted to tell us that one of the men at the end of the table was a former bank teller and was now in charge of a shooting gallery, happy to get the job when the banks closed. A young-looking woman beside him had been a high school teacher, but had lost her job when it had been discovered that she was married. One job to a family had been the rule for school teachers, so now she was operating a roulette wheel. Edward C. didn’t know what her husband was doing, probably nothing, since he had been a car salesman when times were such that cars could be sold. The wild man from Borneo who was carrying on what appeared to be a civilized conversation with his neighbor was, according to Edward C., a Cajun from the bayou country who had never been out of the state of Louisiana.
“We’re a motley crew, we carnies,” Edward C. said, and then interrupted himself with a happy shout. “There she is—there’s Emily.” He jumped up on the bench and waved toward the opening of the tent. “Here we are—over here, Emily.”
She was a tall woman wearing a clown’s costume of bright colors with a wide white ruff around her neck. Her shoes were great, flapping triangles of red leather, the toes extending a foot or more beyond the edge of her balloonlike trousers.
She came straight to the place where we sat and shook hands, first with Joey and then with me. “Pete asked me to find you and say ‘hello.’ I knew, though, that you were in good hands as long as you were with Edward C.”
She seemed to me to be the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I couldn’t have described her at first; her hair, her eyes and mouth and smooth white skin, all combined to give an impression of beauty just as color and light and shadow and texture combine to make a picture beautiful long before the details are apparent. After a minute, I became conscious that her short hair was neither red nor gold, but a blend of both, that it lay in shining half-rings close to her head. I realized that her forehead was very wide and smooth, that her eyes were almost purple and shaded by long, thick lashes.
I must have stared at her too long. There was a quiet chuckle from Edward C. “Why are you so surprised, Josh? Haven’t you ever seen a beautiful clown before?”
Joey was not so dazzled as I was; he had light words for Emily. “I didn’t know ladies were ever clowns,” he said, smiling. “I wouldn’t think they’d like to make themselves ugly.”
“They don’t, Joey,” Emily answered. “But they like to eat occasionally. And to see that their children eat. So when they get a chance to make some money at the business of clowning, they forget that they’d rather look pretty.” She buttered a piece of toast and bit into it hungrily. “You must get acquainted with my boys,” she said, again addressing Joey. “The oldest is about your age. The other two are eight and five. Sometimes they forget that I’m their mother. When they see me on the grounds, they call me Bongo, just as the other kids do.”
“Should I call you Bongo?” Joey asked.
“It would be better. You see, no one outside the gates knows that I am a woman. Carnival and circus crowds think of all clowns as men. They might not like a clown named Emily.”
Her voice was beautiful, and I loved beautiful voices in women. It had the quality of a little bell, I thought, and I longed to get at the piano to see if I could find the notes that would let me express Emily’s voice in music. I was afraid that I couldn’t, but I wanted to try.
Edward C. was speaking to Joey. “Emily’s the greatest attraction of the carnival, Joey. People bring their children back night after night because of Bongo—”
“And the caterpillar,” Emily interposed, “and the merry-go-round. We three—I don’t know which of us rates top billing.” She turned to me again. “You’ll be playing and bally-hooing outside the girlie-show, Josh. Those ladies at the table off to the left are the dancers. It’s a gyp-show—you’d just as well know it. People pay a dime and expect to see either some pretty girls or some beautiful dancing, and they see women who are no longer pretty and dancing that is only third-rate. It’s a gyp—Pete will admit it, and a lot of people will complain to you about it. But the dancers have to eat, too, you know. They’re not very good, but then I’m not the funniest clown in the world either. There isn’t a performance on the grounds that is really top-notch. But Pete keeps us, and we limp along. At least we have a little food each day. A lot of people would envy us for that.”
I nodded. “I know all about being hungry—and grateful for a job,” I said.
She put her hand on mine, and her eyes were full of kindness. “I know, Josh. Pete has told me what he learned about you from the truck driver. Pete wants very much to help you and Joey.”
“He seems like a very kind gentleman,” I said. But I wasn’t thinking of Pete Harris as I spoke. I was looking at the oval of her face and the gentle concern in her eyes. There was a kindness and a sweetness about her that made me forget everything in the world except the fact that she was there beside me. The thought came to me suddenly and clearly: This is what it means to be in love. I love someone who is kind and beautiful. I love someone who is a clown.
She was talking about Pete Harris when I became conscious of her words again. “He is a good man,” she was saying quietly. “He has his weaknesses, but he’s good. You can count on Pete if you play fair.” She turned and smiled at the dwarf man. “Isn’t that so, Edward C?”
He puckered his mouth until it was like a tiny rosette in the middle of his face. “You and I know it is so, Emily. The boys will realize it, too, when they’re better acquainted with him.”
Emily said nothing more. She picked up her fork and began to eat the food Edward C. passed to her. She did not look up until the dancers came by. One of them spoke to her; the others didn’t look in her direction. A woman with bleached, harsh-looking hair looked at me and smiled. She said, “Hi, there, big fellow.” Another woman gave the speaker a disgusted look. “Don’t tip the cradle, Florrie. Let Pete Harris and his clown take care of the kid.”
Emily’s face didn’t change expression. She said, “You’ll find all kinds of people here, Josh. You’ll have to play by ear for a while. You’ll have to be very careful.”
When she noticed that Edward C. and Joey and I had finished our meal, she asked
us to wait until she’d finished eating. “Pete wants me to trim your hair before you start on your job,” she said. “I’m kind of an expert at barbering. There are three redheads at home who have to be trimmed every so often. I’m getting pretty good at the job.”
So we waited, and then with Edward C. striding beside me and Emily walking hand in hand with Joey, we went into one of the tents where she draped a towel over my shoulders and worked on my hair with quick sure snips of her scissors. She trimmed Joey too while she was at it, and then leaned back in a chair and regarded us with satisfaction. “You both have well-shaped heads—that’s very important for men. More important in my mind than height or width of shoulder.” She put her hands up to her own short hair and pulled it vigorously as if she were trying to lessen a tightness of her scalp. “You can go to Pete now. He’ll tell you what you’re to do today. I’m going to rest here a bit before I put on my makeup.”
“You’re tired, Emily. Your eyes show it,” Edward C. said gently.
“I’m always tired, Edward C. I won’t know how to behave if I ever find myself rested again.” She smiled and gave us a little wave as if she were anxious that we get going.
“Emily is overworked,” Edward C. told us as we walked along. “It’s too much. A clown act is exhausting in itself. Besides that she has the boys to care for and the anxiety about all the tomorrows ahead of her.” He shook his head. “I worry about Emily. I’m so fond of her.”
It was a bright, warm morning, the third of December, and as beautiful as if it had been the third of May back home. There was a general bustling about as workers prepared for the opening of the gates at eleven o’clock. People in charge of concessions were getting their equipment set up; kegs of lemonade, cartons of cotton candy and pink taffy, loads of dolls and toys, were being set out in the various booths. Men were inspecting the machinery that kept the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel operating, and performers were going around with costumes folded over their arms. Some of them were sitting in front of a tent with needle and thread, repairing damages made to their clothing the night before. Joey and I seemed to be the only ones who didn’t know our way around.