No one at the carnival ever cried. They played strings instead: violins, a cello, guitars, dulcimers, lutes, banjos. They had an orchestra, and everyone played something. If you joined the Carnival della Strega and couldn’t play a stringed instrument, you soon learned. The orchestra was the social life in the carnival, the freedom, the adventure, the joy, the hope and the despair as well. English and Italian were spoken there with many accents, but all the people spoke the dialect of some stringed music in unison at least once a week. Tatum, who had bought the carnival from the Italian family who still performed on the high wire, rarely gave permission for folks to leave on Sunday mornings to attend church in the towns they passed through, but he insisted on the Sunday afternoon orchestra practice and conducted with great passion, even though he himself could not read music. Hardly anyone could, all of them playing for the most part by ear and teaching each other the melodies of the folk music of their countries, or made something up. Sometimes a group of players who had been together a very long time could simply improvise together and come up with magnificent music, but never the same thing twice.
Those Sundays when they had performances they still got to practice, because Tatum had the wonderful idea that members of the troupe who were not actually costuming up or putting up the tents and cages should perform in small groups for the customers, who stood in line to buy their tickets and then stood in another line waiting to go in and find seats. There were the sideshows, of course, and James himself was one of them, but Tatum thought it added a touch of class to offer musical entertainment as well. When James was still an infant, Tatum allowed Mary to stay with him, watching over him and trying not to look at the gawkers who would have asked her all kinds of questions if they could but catch her eye. But as James grew older, she was required to leave him alone in his playpen set up on a platform and surrounded by mirrors behind high fence, and she played guitar on a little stage with three other women who played dulcimer, fiddle and banjo. They played some country music together, and then each played a solo that she made up on the spot, or a bit of some fancy classical piece that they had learned in the orchestra. The Bavarian aerialist had taught them all bits and pieces of Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Strauss. Later Mary would learn to play the cello, because James told her that he wished he had arms just so he could play the cello, he loved the music of that instrument so much. So Mary, with little talent for it, struggled to learn the art of the cello, and James pretended to love the music she played so badly, because he knew she had done it for love of him; and what a strong and desperate love it was.
James couldn’t play the cello with his legs but he did learn to do many other things with his feet and toes, such as writing and playing a special keyboard that Tatum had bought for him, and as he grew tall, with strong and graceful legs, he spent his days learning these tricks with which to entertain the crowds who came to see the freaks. He did not resent them and as he grew older and wise beyond his years, he talked while he performed his tricks and he had a great humor and a great compassion, and after a while it became apparent that the tricks were no longer necessary, because James could make people laugh or cry with his stories; stories that he made up simply by watching the people who came to watch him. He listened to them, arguing with one another, speaking words of love, lamenting, confiding and dreaming out loud as they stood in line, while he waited behind a curtain to entertain them with his tricks of writing with his feet and playing silly little tunes on the special keyboard. When the curtain was drawn and the people who had waited in line, passing the time in talk got quiet and watched him, he watched them back and tried to put the faces together with what he had heard, not just the voices but the stories. Who looked like she was in love with her sister’s husband? Who looked like he was still angry at his wife by his side? Ah, that child with the tear-stained face must have been the one nagging his parents for a bicycle, the one who couldn’t get quiet, so got spanked instead. A mother told her three-year-old daughter she could cry all she wanted…but James couldn’t hear the rest. He noticed that the child was barefoot and wearing only a sleeveless shirt and the mother wore a jacket in the pre-storm wind, and he said right out loud, calling to her in the crowd in a loud voice, “Can’t you see, she’s cold. Give her your jacket, poor baby,” said James not much bigger, but older, much older, and the woman gave him an evil look and walked away to complain to someone about the freak who was supposed to do tricks and talked to the audience instead.
By the time James was seven, Tatum had the idea of letting him make an act of it, pretend to be a psychic and take money to tell folks about their lives and make some vague predictions about the future. James was good at this and always tried to give a little good advice as well, so he wouldn’t feel so bad about conning the people. He never forgot a face, and if he eavesdropped on some conversation and then tied a face to the talk, he could place that same person the next year and the next, season after season, as they returned to the same towns year after year. He might have made friends of these country people, so easy to please and impress, but he was a freak, so they never really looked into his eyes, too embarrassed that they had looked at him with curiosity, maybe even horror. So they never recognized him as the same armless child they had seen the year before, even though they must have realized, had they thought about it, that there couldn’t be that many like him or he wouldn’t be worth paying money to see.
But such philosophical observations made James laugh, not bitter, and he was the comfort of the Carnival della Strega. The carnival was a world unto itself, and there were marriages and separations and affairs going on all the time among that tight little group, and sooner or later all of them had occasion to go see James and confide in him, ask him what to say to whom, and when, and how, and he would try to guide them in the ways of kindness and listen patiently when they came back to tell him what new trouble they’d gotten into ignoring his advice the last time, and soon he learned just to listen and sympathize, because people did whatever they were going to do anyway. At such times he was usually asked to dispense his forgiveness, which he did, puzzled as to why all these people thought they needed it. The Italian family, whose name was not Strega, which means witch, but Bevilaqua, which means drinkwater, and is not the kind of glamorous or interesting name suitable for a traveling carnival, came to see James most often, either in a group or in couples or individually. There were the father and mother, the mother being the only one in the family who didn’t perform on the highwire, being easily three hundred pounds, and five daughters and the husbands of four of the daughters, the youngest daughter, being only twelve and too young to marry herself, and all of them harbored resentments against each other most all the time, and James had his hands full, so to speak, keeping them calmed down enough to perform. For this alone, Tatum told him he was worth his keep.
The daughters were all richly gorgeous with thick black hair that curled down their shapely backs and long black lashes that curled on their round, red cheeks, and full lips and huge luminous eyes. One of the middle daughters was married to the handsomest of the sons-in-law, but he was also hot tempered and beat her occasionally, whereupon the father would beat him, even though he was a smaller man, but he had his anger of course, and murderous it was, so the son-in-law would leave and then catch up with the carnival in the next town, get drunk with his father-in-law and make up with his wife and the whole cycle would start all over again. The middle daughter was becoming more and more unhappy and less and less in love with her magnificent husband. She told James then that it was too bad he didn’t have arms, because if he did, he would have lots of women in love with him, his kind voice and sweet, deep eyes, and she hugged him and kissed him, and he longed for arms to hug her back. “Why don’t you leave him?” he asked her, and she said she had nowhere to go and anyway they all owed Tatum too much money to leave. James was ten then and learned for the first time that he and his mother, like most of the folks in the carnival were virtual slaves
to Tatum, who claimed that they owed him so much money and everyone was working off a debt that increased daily. He kept the records, and the records always favored him. Tatum paid all the bills, the grocer, the tailor, the cobbler, the doctor, the lawyer, the judge, the bailbondsman, the blacksmith, the veterinarian, the wheelwright, but Tatum never paid his people, and well he didn’t, for if he did, as he was only too glad to point out, their money would be thrown away on the wind and they’d be in even greater debt to their benefactor, as he truly considered himself to be.
This slavery was perhaps not too terrible, as those that did leave the carnival, to marry or maybe because they needed medical care somewhere along the way for an injury or illness and some that served a jail term that Tatum couldn’t wait on, those that did leave the carnival for whatever reason always felt as though they’d fallen off a fast moving train and they’d just live out their lives waiting for Tatum to come through again and pick them up so they could resume their old lives where they’d left off. No one ever seemed to get used to not being in the carnival. It wasn’t the excitement so much as the fact that folks didn’t have to stay any place too long, moving around like they did, they started to feeling forever young, like getting old could only happen if you stayed put long enough for age to catch up with you.
Poor Señora Bevilaqua had to be left behind when her heart got so weak that she frightened them every other night with attacks she knew would be the death of her. Some thought she was trying to get attention from her husband, who was fooling around with a girl his daughter’s age, but she didn’t get it. It was Tatum who showed her uncharacteristic kindness and the rumor was he’d been in love with her a long time and a couple hundred pounds ago when she was a performer herself, but she chose to marry Bevilaqua and they started the show, and then Tatum showed up in their lives and won the Carnival della Strega in a wager that it was further rumored he’d rigged, all this of course, to get revenge for his broken heart. James had heard the story from several of the carnival folks, and it did seem to him that Tatum did show her a tender respect. In fact after they left her in a town not far from Huntington in Lincoln County, West Virginia, it was Tatum who seemed to truly miss her. She took up with a trucker there she met when selling eggs at a roadside stand, and they bought a little house with a cow and some chickens, and she said she was happier being settled and once a year Tatum would visit her and make some excuse why her fickle little husband didn’t, but of course she knew and she regretted the wrong choice she had made a quarter century earlier, which was perhaps just the revenge Tatum wanted after all. Tatum himself had a club foot and suspected that was the reason the señora had preferred the handsome Bevilaqua, whose only impairment was his mind. Of course, to her face, Tatum was the soul of kindness and certainly by then he could afford to be.
“Ah, romance,” intoned James melodramatically to his mother as he recited the gossip of the day. But when James told it, it was beyond gossip and became a wise and true running commentary on human nature, as it played itself out in their insulated little world. Neither James nor Mary would have known where to go had they the choice. No, they would have set themselves down somewhere, a drugstore, maybe, nursing sodas and watched out the window waiting for Tatum to come get them.
Mary had told James many times about his birth and about John Banks, and James got to wondering if John Banks had gotten much money for them. Mary was appalled at the idea, but James said he saw it happen all the time and he figured that Mr. Banks must have gotten something and it seemed a point of pride with James that he thought Tatum had paid a goodly sum for the two of them. He wanted to ask and once even did, but Tatum told him to stop being cute, and that was the end of it.
During the winter months Tatum took the entire crew down south, booking a few performances in Gulf Coast towns, but mostly finding old friends that would help the group survive the winter. Missing her garden while on the road, Mary learned to love the wild lands of the Florida Everglades and the Louisiana Bayou country, and the sounds of large birds squawking above her made her dream of jungles in even further lands. Tatum knew that neither Mary nor James was inclined to run away, or get drunk, or fight, or otherwise get themselves into trouble with the local law, so he allowed them unlimited freedom to explore. What Mary and James liked to do with their limited funds, was ride the streetcars. They’d get on the first one to arrive at their stop, ride it to the end of the line and then take another. They would eavesdrop on the conversations of other passengers and sometimes when they were doing a show, would recognize some of the customers from their streetcar reconnoitering. Usually by dusk, they’d be hopelessly lost and have to find their way back by asking the drivers for directions or even for rides. It happened more than once that a driver, finished with his shift would drive them back to the carnival on his way home from work. Sometimes drivers took them home to dinner and sometimes they stayed with the carnival folks for dinner and in this way, Mary and James made a few friends and drew even larger crowds to the shows. Such far-ranging exploration would have terrified Mary had not James reassured her, and so once again it was the child’s inventiveness and curiosity that benefitted his employer, and Tatum decided to send other members of the troupe out into the towns to drum up audiences, but no one was quite as successful as James leading his timid young mother through the land.
Despite her need for the green of trees and gardens, Mary also was fascinated by the vast expanse of water and the broad sandy beaches along the gulf. All by herself she talked Tatum into doing a show on the beach in Biloxi, and they got permission and camped on the beach and set up the tents, the cages, the carousel, and waited for the folks who came in dribs and drabs and then finally droves, and every year they returned to the beach in Mississippi, where James could lie on the beach and watch the shrimping boats drift by and let his lungs clear up, for every year James got bronchial infections and sometimes a mild pneumonia when the leaves fell in the mountains back home.
Each year they had Christmas in a different place, until the Christmas they spent with a woman in Virginia Beach. She was a painter and believed in the prophecies of Edgar Cayce. Tatum fell in love with her and pretended to be interested in the prophecies and admired her paintings, sincerely in fact. James was eleven when they started spending every Christmas in Virginia Beach, and Mary didn’t mind, even though she missed the traditional setting in the snowy Appalachians because the woman, who had taken the name Dorothea to dress up her given name of Dorothy, was delighted with James. He had already displayed the perception that made folks believe he was psychic, and Dorothea was certain that he was a modern day prophet just like Edgar Cayce. She painted James in many forms and backgrounds, sometimes with the wings of an eagle or the arms of a bear, surrounded by the forest and the sky, and she told Mary that God had marked James in that special way to be an example of the beauty of a gentle spirit to all around him. “After all, when you think about it, what do men use their arms for? For acts of violence and even that word ‘arms’ means not only human limbs but also human weaponry designed to make war, so you see there was a message in James’s birth.” Mary was astounded and said without thinking that she’d wished John Banks would have thought of that, and when Dorothea asked her about John Banks, Mary had no choice but to simply tell her the story, even though it embarrassed her to admit her part in the great con, as some folks had called it. “Why a con? Haven’t I just told you that James is special? Maybe he is the Christ come back to earth to offer comfort and see what progress his flock has made. Why does that shock you? well, if you feel sacrilegious even thinking that, then might I suggest that you take seriously my intuition that James is a prophet with an important purpose here on earth?” So that was a very special Christmas for Mary. And each Christmas thereafter as well, for each year Dorothea presented her with a portrait of James, a small copy of the larger canvas that she would sell to visitors who came to her gallery in her home from as far away as New York Ci
ty and even California; people who came to study at the Association for Research and Enlightenment and were directed to her studio because she was known as a woman of vision.
It was Dorothea who predicted Pearl Harbor, based on her readings of Cayce’s journals and, unfortunately, it was Dorothea who predicted James’s death on the eve of that horrendous event.
“You’re just saying that because he’s so sick, but he gets like this every year and he always gets better.”
“It isn’t the pneumonia, Mary, it’s a dream that I had about James, but in my dream he wasn’t James, he was someone else, and I knew that he was also James. Do you believe in reincarnation, Mary?”
“I don’t even know what that is. Is that something you read about over there?”
“Yes, Edgar Cayce talked about reincarnation but he hasn’t been the only one. I have always known about it. Other religions believe in it and Christians have argued about it. Have you ever heard of Nicodemas? He made predictions about our world just like Cayce has. And he taught reincarnation also. It is simple really, You already believe that the soul doesn’t die don’t you?”
“I guess, I don’t really know. I’m not sure I know what the soul is.”
“Oh Mary, none of us knows for sure, but we feel it, and why should the soul be gone just because our bodies die and decay? Think of it like water, Mary. When water freezes it becomes ice, but when ice melts it doesn’t disappear, it becomes water, and when water gets very hot and turns to steam, it doesn’t disappear, it becomes steam or clouds and steam becomes water again and clouds rain. Why can’t the soul have that kind of eternal existence, taking different forms?”
“No reason I guess, but why are you telling me this? Are you saying I shouldn’t grieve if James dies because his soul will come back? Will I recognize him? You know I can’t live without my son. He is all I have.”
And Mary got very quiet, not able to bear the thought of James dying, not wanting to believe Dorothea, but afraid that Dorothea would say something that would make her have to believe her. She was curious to hear Dorothea’s dream, but afraid as well. And Dorothea, afraid she was losing Mary, pressed on, gently, like talking to a child about death, because Mary seemed like a child to her, even though Mary lied about her age to everyone including Dorothea, because she didn’t want anyone to know that James had been born when she was only 13. Dorothea took her hand, her tiny, childlike hand, and told her about her dream.
It was a quiet uneventful dream really, but it startled Mary. Dorothea dreamed she stood by the entrance of a cave with a woman who had long black hair that hung to her knees and the woman was dark skinned, Dorothea thought she was Indian and told Mary that she had always felt a rapport with Indians and their lifestyle. The woman was trying to coax Dorothea into the cave and Dorothea was afraid, but the woman finally convinced her that she would be safe, and they went together into a room at the mouth of the cave where a fire burned, and there were animals lying about the fire.
They were animals that in real life would have frightened her, but in the dream, Dorothea was not afraid of the mountain lion, the bear or the snake. Then the man came in after them, the man who was older and larger than James, but who Dorothea somehow knew was or would be James, and he told the two women that he had come to the cave to find out what to do, for he was about to die and knew he needed to come back in another form and make amends for mistakes he had made in this life. So the woman spoke to him in a kind of rhyme, which Dorothea tried to remember when she awoke, but she couldn’t remember the rhyme. It had something to do with his arms, and that was how she knew he would come back as James, with no arms, for he had used his arms to do an evil thing and he was sorry and he would pay by being reborn with no arms at all.
Dorothea knew nothing of Mary’s childhood and couldn’t have known how the story of her dream would affect the guilt-stricken woman. “It’s all my fault then,” was all Mary would say and then she left, late as it was, dark as it was and walked the beach to cry and tear her hair, for she was sure that James bore the punishment for her sin and she thought of all the warnings she should have heeded. If only the preacher had talked to her, warned her that if she didn’t do penance for her deeds, her child would. And now she had no doubt that James would die and leave her alone to dwell forever in her guilt and despair. Mary was hysterical and ran into the ocean thinking to die there, but as soon as the waves knocked her down, her body began to fight and she gasped for air and struggled to stay above the thick and angry night waters, and then she felt arms reaching for her and it was Dorothea herself who pulled her out of the ocean, and as they lay on the hard packed sand, Mary cried and lamented, “I don’t even know how to drown, what will I do? I can’t even die.” And Dorothea comforted her like a mother until Mary, exhausted, slept.
They slept on the beach until the dawn woke them and Mary got up with a sick feeling that James had died in the night without her and she couldn’t run fast enough to the house where he lay sick and dying, but still conscious, and Mary was so relieved to be able to say good-bye to him that his death was not the shock it might have been. It was coming on Christmas and Mary promised her son that this Christmas he was in pain but next Christmas would be better, for their Christmases together had always been very special. And James understood her and held her in his deep, sweet brown eyes, fathomless eyes, and Mary drowned her grief and guilt in those eyes, for surely no one had lived such a loving life as her son James, and she listened eagerly thereafter to all the comforting thoughts that Dorothea spoke to her, and she did live.
Tatum paid the funeral expenses and there was a large turnout and the orchestra played beautiful, stately, sad music, and then it was over, her son interred and buried beneath the sand and gravel and dirt in an oceanside cemetery. Dorothea promised to keep it well planted, as Mary would be gone during the spring and summer months. Neither woman knew then that Mary would never come back to her son’s grave.
XIII
Stillbird Page 28
