In the end what drew me into that other world was Sara Tidwell. I had to see her with my own eyes. I had to watch her sing. Had to.
I felt a tingling as I stepped beneath the arch, and there was a sighing in my ears, as of a million voices, very far away. Sighing in relief? Dismay? I couldn’t tell. All I knew for sure was that being on the other side was different — the difference between looking at a thing through a window and actually being there; the difference between observing and participating.
Colors jumped out like ambushers at the moment of attack. The smells which had been sweet and evocative and nostalgic on the lake side of the arch were now rough and sexy, prose instead of poetry. I could smell dense sausages and frying beef and the vast shadowy aroma of boiling chocolate. Two kids walked past me sharing a paper cone of cotton candy. Both of them were clutching knotted hankies with their little bits of change in them. ‘Hey kids!’ a barker in a dark blue shirt called to them. He was wearing sleeve-garters and his smile revealed one splendid gold tooth.
‘Knock over the milk-bottles and win a prize! I en’t had a loser all day!’
Up ahead, the Red-Tops swung into ‘Fishin Blues.’ I’d thought the kid on the common in Castle Rock was pretty good, but this version made the kid’s sound old and slow and clueless. It wasn’t cute, like an antique picture of ladies with their skirts held up to their knees, dancing a decorous version of the black bottom with the edges of their bloomers showing. It wasn’t something Alan Lomax had collected with his other folk songs, just one more dusty American butterfly in a glass case full of them; this was smut with just enough shine on it to keep the whole struttin bunch of them out of jail. Sara Tidwell was singing about the dirty boogie, and I guessed that every overalled, straw-hatted, plug-chewing, callus-handed, clod-hopper-wearing farmer standing in front of the stage was dreaming about doing it with her, getting right down to where the sweat forms in the crease and the heat gets hot and the pink comes glimmering through.
I started walking in that direction, aware of cows mooing and sheep blatting from the exhibition barns — the Fair’s version of my childhood Hi-Ho Dairy-O. I walked past the shooting gallery and the ringtoss and the penny-pitch; I walked past a stage where The Handmaidens of Angelina were weaving in a slow, snakelike dance with their hands pressed together as a guy with a turban on his head and shoepolish on his face tooted a flute. The picture painted on stretched canvas suggested that Angelina — on view inside for just one tenth of a dollar, neighbor — would make these two look like old boots. I walked past the entrance to Freak Alley, the corn-roasting pit, the Ghost House, where more stretched canvas depicted spooks coming out of broken windows and crumbling chimneys. Everything in there is death, I thought . . . but from inside I could hear children who were very much alive laughing and squealing as they bumped into things in the dark.
The older among them were likely stealing kisses. I passed the Test Your Strength pole, where the gradations leading to the brass bell at the top were marked BABY NEEDS HIS BOTTLE, SISSY, TRY
AGAIN, BIG BOY, HE-MAN, and, just below the bell itself, in red: HERCULES! Standing at the center of a little crowd a young man with red hair was removing his shirt, revealing a heavily muscled upper torso. A cigar-smoking carny held a hammer out to him. I passed the quilting booth, a tent where people were sitting on benches and playing Bingo, the baseball pitch. I passed them all and hardly noticed. I was in the zone, tranced out. ‘You’ll have to call him back,’ Jo had sometimes told Harold
when he phoned, ‘Michael is currently in the Land of Big Make-Believe.’ Only now nothing felt like pretend and the only thing that interested me was the stage at the base of the Ferris wheel.
There were eight black folks up there on it, maybe ten. Standing at the front, wearing a guitar and whaling on it as she sang, was Sara Tidwell. She was alive. She was in her prime. She threw back her head and laughed at the October sky.
What brought me out of this daze was a cry from behind me: ‘Wait up, Mike! Wait up!’
I turned and saw Kyra running toward me, dodging around the strollers and gamesters and midway gawkers with her pudgy knees pumping. She was wearing a little white sailor dress with red piping and a straw hat with a navy-blue ribbon on it. In one hand she clutched Strickland, and when she got to me she threw herself confidently forward, knowing I would catch her and swing her up. I did, and when her hat started to fall offi caught it and jammed it back on her head.
‘I taggled my own quartermack,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Again.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘You’re a regular Mean Joe Green.’ I was wearing overalls (the tail of a wash-faded blue bandanna stuck out of the bib pocket) and manure-stained workboots. I looked at Kyra’s white socks and saw they were homemade. I would find no discreet little label reading Made in Mexico or Made in China if I took off her straw hat and looked inside, either. This hat had been most likely Made in Motton, by some farmer’s wife with red hands and achy joints.
‘Ki, where’s Mattie?’
‘Home, I guess. She couldn’t come.’
‘How did you get here?’
‘Up the stairs. It was a lot of stairs. You should have waited for me. You could have carrot me, like before. I want to hear the music.’
‘Me too. Do you know who that is, Kyra?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Kito’s mom. Hurry up, slowpoke!’
I walked toward the stage, thinking we’d have to stand at the back of the crowd, but they parted for us as we came forward, me carrying Kyra in my arms — the lovely sweet weight of her, a little Gibson Girl in her sailor dress and ribbon-accented straw hat. Her arm was curled around my neck and they parted for us like the Red Sea had parted for Moses.
They didn’t turn to look at us, either. They were clapping and stomping and bellowing along with the music, totally involved. They stepped aside unconsciously, as if some kind of magnetism were at work here — ours positive, theirs negative. The few women in the crowd were blushing but clearly enjoying themselves, one of them laughing so hard tears were streaming down her face. She looked no more than twenty-two or -three. Kyra pointed to her and said matter-of-factly: ‘You know Mattie’s boss at the liberry? That’s her nana.’
Lindy Briggs’s grandmother, and fresh as a daisy, I thought. Good Christ.
The Red-Tops were spread across the stage and under swags of red, white, and blue bunting like some time-travelling rock band. I recognized all of them from the picture in Edward Osteen’s book.
The men wore white shirts, arm-garters, dark vests, dark pants. Son Tidwell, at the far end of the stage, was wearing the derby he’d had on in the photo. Sara, though . . .
‘Why is the lady wearing Mattie’s dress?’ Kyra asked me, and she began to tremble.
‘I don’t know, honey. I can’t say.’ Nor could I argue — it was the white sleeveless dress Mattie had been wearing on the common, all right.
On stage, the band was smoking through an instrumental break. Reginald ‘Son’ Tidwell strolled over to Sara, feet ambling, hands a brown blur on the strings and frets of his guitar, and she turned to face him. They put their foreheads together, she laughing and he solemn; they looked into each other’s eyes and tried to play each other down, the crowd cheering and clapping, the rest of the
Red-Tops laughing as they played. Seeing them together like that, I realized that I had been right: they were brother and sister. The resemblance was too strong to be missed or mistaken. But mostly what I looked at was the way her hips and butt switched in that white dress. Kyra and I might be dressed in turn-of-the-century country clothes, but Sara was thoroughly modern Millie. No bloomers for her, no petticoats, no cotton stockings. No one seemed to notice that she was wearing a dress that stopped above her knees — that she was all but naked by the standards of this time.
And under Mattie’s dress she’d be wearing garments the like of which these people had never seen: a Lycra bra and hip-hugger nylon panties. If I put my hands on her waist, the dress would slip not against an unwet-coming corset but against soft bare skin. Brown skin, not white. What do you want, sugar?