The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg

by Rodman Philbrick

  While we unload gear and get ready for the show, the two men who drive the other wagons approach the army camp on foot, and let the recruits know where we are, and what might be expected of us.

  Me and Minerva are in charge of setting out the lamps and torches for when it gets dark and putting up the banners and flags.

  A warm wind lifts the silky banners and makes it look like the words are dancing on air.

  FLEABOTTOM’S MIRACLE ELIXIR!

  THE TOTALLY TATTOOED LADY

  FROM CANNIBAL ISLAND!

  THE TALENTED TUMBLING

  BRILLO BROTHERS!

  THE AMAZING PIG BOY!

  The really amazing thing is, I can’t wait to see the show, and I’m in it.

  WHEN THE LAST BLUE TWILIGHT finally fades from the evening sky, soldiers begin to arrive in groups of two or three, whispering to one another and laughing quietly. They’re not supposed to be here, watching a medicine show, but are meant to be back in their tents fast asleep.

  “One evening is all we spend at any encampment,” Mini explains, covering up her tattooed arms with long, puffy, clip-on sleeves. “Folks like us, traveling kinds of people, we must keep moving or the law will catch us.”

  “What we’re doing, selling bottles of medicine, that’s against the law?”

  “Not exactly,” she says uneasily, not meeting my eyes. “It’s more that strangers are never truly welcome, not for long.”

  When the show begins, we’re inside the main wagon — Mini, because she’s putting on her long sleeves, and me, because I’m the Amazing Pig Boy and can’t show my face until the end.

  Peeking out through the canvas, I watch as Professor Fleabottom claps his hands and leaps up on a little wooden platform that tips down from the side of the wagon.

  His hat is tall, his knee-high boots are polished like black glass, and the buttons on his coat are five-dollar gold pieces that glow like little suns in the light of the oil lanterns.

  “Good evening to all you brave gentlemen! Welcome to the Caravan of Miracles! May Almighty God bless the Union Army and deliver it from losing, time and again! With all you new recruits being trained to kill your fellow man, surely victory will soon follow! And to help you along the way, to ease the woes and pains of the battlefield, and the pinch of bedbugs in your soggy tents, and to improve the taste of the insects that infest your food, and, frankly, to give you courage when most needed, I, Professor Fenton J. Fleabottom, honored graduate of ancient universities in the Far East, have perfected a certain strong elixir. An elixir that will lift your spirits and put the gleam back in your eyes! An elixir containing a sure cure for what ails you! An elixir that will, from the very first sip, deliver you from evil, and place you in the soft, motherly bosom of mankind!”

  A murmur comes from the crowd of young soldiers, and many raise up their hands, as if to grasp at invisible bottles.

  “Patience, young heroes! Patience! Patience! The elixir goes on sale following the show, and not a moment before. Have no fear, there’s plenty for everyone! Now, if one of you good fellows will hand up that banjo, I will demonstrate how a single dose of Fleabottom’s Miracle Elixir cured my rheumatic joints, improved the dexterity of my digits, and clarified my ears. Listen and be amazed!”

  The professor then commences to flail upon the banjo. It starts out as a sad and mournful tune, a slow version of “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys,” but then he starts speeding things up and really making that old banjo ring. The soldiers begin to clap along, some of them singing, and just when you think the song is done, Mini slips behind him and somehow takes the banjo from him and keeps strumming without missing a beat.

  How the men cheer! Mini gives them a wild grin and plays a lot of high plinky notes that sound like metal sparks exploding from fireworks, and then somehow she and the professor are both bashing at the banjo, Mini with her fingers on the frets and Fleabottom plucking the strings with hands that move so fast his fingers are blurred.

  I never heard anything near so exciting as four-handed banjo, and it’s all I can do to stay in the wagon instead of leaping out and joining the crowd. When the song finally comes to an end, Mini and the professor hold hands and take a bow, and the soldiers erupt in applause.

  In Pine Swamp, that trick with the banjo would be good for a year’s worth of entertainment, but the Caravan of Miracles is just getting warmed up. Before the cheering stops, two wild men leap out of nowhere, juggling flaming torches and whistling between their teeth.

  The Talented Tumbling Brillo Brothers are the bearded guys who drive the other two wagons. Mini told me their true name isn’t Brillo, which is something the professor made up, but they really are brothers and can tumble about like chipmunks and juggle anything that comes to hand — flaming torches, then some wooden buckets, then bricks, then boxes and bricks, and even three small chairs.

  At the end they grab a small soldier from the crowd — a drummer boy not much bigger than me — and they juggle him, much to the amusement of his friends.

  After the Talented Tumbling Brillo Brothers take their bows, Professor Fleabottom resumes his place upon the stage.

  “Gentlemen! As the great Roman warrior Marc Antony once famously said, ‘Lend me your ears!’ For I have a tale to tell. A curious tale of woe. A tantalizing tale of tragedy. A strange tale that begins in the great north woods of Maine, where the bear and the moose frolic in pine forests whose feathery tops reach near enough to Heaven. In forests dark and dense, where the wolves are as black as moon shadows, and white men’s feet have yet to trod the ancient earth. In just such a place a rare and unusual creature was recently discovered by a band of kindly Indians. The Indians found, cowering and snarling in one of their traps, a creature the ancients called a chimera. A hybrid creature, part human, part hog. Half boy, half pig. Do you not believe? Do I sense emanations of doubt? Are there skeptics among you? Then, gentlemen, prepare to be amazed. I give you … the Amazing Pig Boy!”

  His mighty voice ringing in the night, the professor lifts high his lantern as the crate is trundled out of the wagon.

  In the crate are three squealing, frightened little pigs. Three pigs and me, and I’m squealing, too, and snuffling my dirty nose around the slats of the crate and baring my teeth and pretending I’ll bite any hand that strays too near.

  “Stand back, gentlemen! Back, I say! Be warned, the creature bites! Last week it chomped a hand clean off at the wrist! It has bitten off noses, ears, and once took the last eyeball from a one-eyed sailor!”

  I’m naked except for a pair of skimpy drawers, but it don’t hardly matter because I’m so caked with filth that none of my skin shows through — it’s like wearing a dirt suit. Mini helped me stuff leaves in my hair to puff out my ears, and glued a little curly tail on my backside. When she held up a little mirror, to admire our work, I nearly screamed.

  The savage beast in the mirror wasn’t me. It couldn’t be, could it?

  Fact is, I’m scaring myself half to death. Not just because I’m so filthy and ferocious looking, but because it’s fun being a pig boy.

  I like wiggling my glued-on tail.

  I like baring my teeth and squealing like a trapped animal.

  I like scaring soldiers who are twice as old as me, and who leap back like frightened children when I snap at their fingers.

  It’s fun to be amazing, to be the star of the show, to have everyone watching you — even if you have to act like a pig. And before long, I really do feel more animal than human.

  “Watch out there, he’ll take your hand off!” cries a young soldier, backing away.

  My brain is screaming to be let out of the crate, so I can bite all my tormentors. But instead of screaming words, I’m screaming pig noises.

  “Rage, you poor creature!” the professor bellows, gesturing with the lantern. “Rage at the tragedy of your existence! Rage and squeal against the indignity of your fetid prison!”

  He turns to the astonished crowd, putting a hand upon his heart. “Gent
lemen, I ask you this: A half-breed creature, a thing neither one nor the other, is a thing such as this, endowed with a soul? When it dies, will it meet its Maker, or shall it return to the dust? A man has a soul and an animal does not, this we have been taught. But what of a half man? Has it half a soul, or none at all?”

  The soldiers get real quiet. Only thing making noise is me. Oink, oink, oink.

  “Only God knows the answer,” the professor announces, very grand and solemn. “Take this poor creature away!” he says, calling for the Brillo Brothers. “Hide it from human eyes! Gentlemen, there is no cure for the Amazing Pig Boy, but be assured there is ample cure for each and every one of you!”

  The Brillo Brothers throw a rug over my crate and sling it back into the wagon.

  As Mini hands out the bottles, the professor’s golden voice booms into the night.

  “Gather round! Fleabottom’s Miracle Elixir will cure what ails you! Satisfaction guaranteed! One dollar the bottle, boys! A dollar well spent! And for each that buys a bottle, a glimpse of the Totally Tattooed Lady from Cannibal Island!”

  Back inside the wagon, a bucket of soapy water awaits, so that I may clean up and become human again. Lifting the canvas, I glimpse the soldiers upending the elixir bottles, their eyes glazed in the lantern light.

  Even covered with pig filth, I can smell the “medicine” we’re selling.

  I know that smell.

  Whiskey.

  Professor Fleabottom’s Miracle Elixir is just plain whiskey.

  WHEN I WAS NINE YEARS OLD, Harold snuck me to the state fair in Skowhegan. I say snuck because old Squint forbade us going, on account of the evil influences common at fairs. Meaning, I guess, that folks have fun, and that can’t be good, not so far as Squint was concerned. In his opinion humans were best when miserable, and so he had worked at being miserable his whole life, and in his generous way tried to make as many people miserable as possible.

  The Skowhegan fairgrounds being some distance away, Harold persuaded one of the Pine Swamp farmers to carry us there in the back of his vegetable cart. Wouldn’t you know the cart threw a wheel and we ended up walking most of twenty miles. I kept wanting to turn back, on account of my feet hurting, but Harold wouldn’t let me give up.

  When we got there, it was worth it. I’d never seen so many people in one place. Most every tent and booth had food to sell. Fried dough with sugar frosting, and hot doughnuts with cinnamon sprinkles, and roasted beef and chicken wings, and pickled eels and herring, and sugared this and honeyed that, and even though we didn’t have money, we ate our fill of what others left behind.

  Ate so much I got sick, but I didn’t care — I kept right on eating!

  There was harness racing around a big dirt track, with folks screaming and waving tickets, and exhibitions of fine carriages and farm equipment, and draft horses hauling tons of stone from the quarry, and prize livestock, and late at night a special tent where women danced in their underclothes and showed their bare ankles.

  That’s where I first smelled whiskey breathing from a crowd, outside the dancing-girls tent. We was forbidden to enter, of course, being only boys, but stationed ourselves outside because some of the men were so drunk they needed help to walk and paid us a penny to assist them to their wagons, so’s they wouldn’t have to sleep in the mud.

  That’s where I learned that whiskey makes men stupid, there at the Skowhegan Fair.

  Makes men stupid in New Jersey, too. Draining their bottles of “medicine” like it was water and they was dying of thirst. Some stand swaying, others fall to their knees. Some laugh at nothing, others weep for their mothers, sick for home.

  It don’t seem right to me, getting soldiers drunk, but Professor Fleabottom says I must get used to it if I have any hope of finding Harold.

  “These boys, every last one of them, they’re all replacements. Do you know what a replacement is?” he asks me. When I shake my head he says, “It means that in a few weeks they will take the place of those who have died in battle, or from disease, and many of them will perish, too. The elixir gives them courage, if only for a little while.”

  “Some are puking, sir.”

  He shrugs. “They’ll puke on the battlefield, too. War is an awful thing, Homer. Whiskey is just whiskey. We serve a purpose whether you know it or not.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tonight they saw the Amazing Pig Boy and got a little drunk. Before the summer is over they’ll have seen the elephant, and many will have seen the grave.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Seeing the elephant” is soldier-talk for fighting in a battle.

  I’m praying Harold never sees the elephant.

  WE HIT THE ROAD HARD for two long weeks. Each day putting miles of dust behind us, and every night setting up not far from some army encampment or other, and then packing up and fleeing when the show is over. Sometimes I ride with the professor or Mini, other times with the jugglers. The jugglers — Bernard and Tallyrand, that’s their real names — at first seem full of jokes and pranking. But after a while I come to understand they’re worried they’ll be swept up by the draft if they stay in one place too long.

  “Nothing to fear, brother,” says Bern, as we plod along the road, heading south. “The army gets us, we’ll juggle cannon balls. Or catch bullets in our teeth.”

  “More likely in our brains,” says Tally, rolling his eyes.

  “We have brains?” says Bern.

  “Small ones,” says Tally. “Not smart enough to think, just dumb enough to juggle.”

  Tally don’t only juggle, he’s also the caravan cook, and a mighty good one, too. He can cook potatoes six different ways, and fry up chicken in a deep iron skillet, and he makes a thing called womper that’s like beef stew inside a crust. My favorite, though, is eggs, sausage, and biscuits. That one’s good not only for breakfast, but any time of day or night.

  One time the brothers have a hankering for a late-night snack of pork chops, and Tally asks would I mind giving up one of the little pigs that share my crate.

  “Over my dead body!” I tell him, my ears getting hot. “Would you fry up Bernard, just because you were hungry? You leave my friends alone!”

  Bern chuckles and shakes his head. “Told you he’s thinkin’ like a pig. That’s why he’s so convincing.”

  “That and the tail,” says Tally.

  PROFESSOR FLEABOTTOM proves to be as good as his word, asking after Harold at every army camp we visit and trying to determine where he might be posted. Most of the soldiers we meet are from New Jersey or New York, but twice we come upon troops intended for Maine regiments.

  Much to my disappointment my brother is not among them.

  A grizzled-looking, Portland-born sergeant tells us that many of the new recruits are promised to the 20th Maine, to replace those felled by an outbreak of smallpox. He spits about a quart of tobacco juice in one squirt, wipes his beard with his sleeve. “After beating the Union at Chancellorsville, Lee has left Virginia and headed north,” he says. “That’s what we hear. Nobody tells us nothin’, a-course, so it’s mostly rumor and lies.”

  “Indeed?” the professor says, sounding very interested. “General Lee comes north?”

  Robert E. Lee is the wily old Confederate general that’s been winning most of the battles ever since the war started, and even the toughest Union men speak of him with respect.

  The sergeant squints at the professor. “Could be,” he says. “What makes you so curious? Wouldn’t happen to be spying, would you?”

  The professor laughs and slaps his knee. “Good one, sir! I may be hanged for a rascal, but never a spy! No, no, sir, our curiosity is perfectly innocent! We ask because this orphan boy is looking for his brother. Claims he was illegally sold into the army at the tender age of seventeen.”

  “Was he now?” The sergeant studies me with his squinty eyes.

  “Yes, sir, my uncle said he was twenty and swore him in for replacement and kept the money. That swear was a dirty
lie. Harold ain’t but seventeen.”

  “And what do you aim to do, little fella, supposin’ you do find him? He’s been swore in, you said so yourself.”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “But find him I must.”

  The sergeant gives another suspicious glance to the professor, then jerks his chin at me. “Try Pennsylvania, vicinity of the Potomac River. Any men mustered in the last few months, that’s likely where they’ll send ’em, in preparation for the battle to come. And, son?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Keep your head down. Soon enough the air will be thick with lead.”

  That night I can’t sleep for worrying about Harold. He’s so strong and brave they’ve probably given him the flag to carry into battle. First thing those Confederates will see is Harold coming over the hill, waving the Stars and Stripes, and every secessionist rifle will have eyes for him.

  I imagine General Robert E. Lee on his gray horse, shooting at Harold with his fancy silver pistol, and Harold falling, tangled up in the flag.

  I imagine Harold bleeding on the ground, his face getting paler and paler.

  Harold dead.

  That’s when I get up from my little bunk in the last wagon and climb out into the night, wanting some cool air to clear my head. It’s stupid to torment myself with visions of what might happen to my brother when he gets to the war.

  Nothing to be done but to keep on searching as our little caravan heads west, into Pennsylvania, like the old sergeant said. Find the Maine regiments and explain to the generals that they got the wrong boy, that they must give me back my big brother before something bad happens.

  I’m a few yards from the wagons, doing my business behind a big rock, when the rider comes out of the night.

  Man on a black horse. He’s got the horse’s hooves wrapped in rags, to muffle the sound, and at first I think he must be here to rob us. Why else sneak up on us through the darkest, quietest part of the night?