A Stranger in the Kingdom (23 page)

Just before I shut the hearse door, Mason leaned over toward me and lowered his voice. “I don't care what old Zacker thinks, Jimbo. Brother Charlie's one smart cookie. I wouldn't mind working with him one day. Tell him I said so, will you? Tell him I might be in to see him about the matter myself in a day or two.”

“All right, gents, here we go. The cow in first place has a tad more overall
dairyness
than the others. We've got a very close placing here between number two and number three, but two walks more correct on her hind legs. Four has a more refined head than five, five's udder is firmer attached than six's. Six has an ab-so-lute-ly
classic
neck. . . .”

Bumper Stevens, decked out in a cowboy hat and a pink shirt and a black string tie, strutted slowly along the row of handsome Jersey cows, the long cord of his microphone trailing behind him over the dewy grass. After every sentence or two, he paused so that Armand St. Onge, sitting up in the judge's stand with a second microphone, could translate what he said into French. It was still so early that the brand new American and Vermont flags high above the white cattle barns hung limp with dew; but already several hundred spectators were crowded along the freshly whitewashed board fence surrounding the open-air grass ring, listening intently to the results of the first cattle class of the day.

It was judging day—Saturday, the last day of the Kingdom Fair—and the day Nat Andrews and I had been planning for since the afternoon the previous week when we lay in the sand near the B and M trestle and decided that we would sneak into the girlie show.

Kingdom Fair, in the early 1950s, had what my father called a split personality—a bucolic and wholesome daytime personality, and a tawdry but equally marvelous nighttime personality. Toward midmorning, after the family milker class of the Jersey judging, at which Bumper grudgingly awarded another blue ribbon to Kingdom Cool Ruthie, Nat and I joined my mother to tour one of my favorite daytime purlieus, the long dairy barns. Each barn—Jersey, Ayrshire, Holstein, Guernsey—had a welcoming festive atmosphere, with gaudy bunting tacked above stalls emblazoned with the names of farms, and displays of intertwined cedar boughs and sap buckets crammed with black-eyed Susans and buttercups. Outside, the temperature was already up in the seventies. But the animal barns remained as cool as our root cellar at home.

From the dairy barns we ambled over to the horse stables to see the nervous, slender-legged sulky pacers and the treetop-tall workhorses with gigantic feathered feet as big around as peach baskets. From there we went to the cacophonous fowl shed, where Mom's huge gander Leroy had already been designated Grand Fowl of the '52 fair. Then we spent a whole hour in my favorite building of all, Floral Hall, which was a cornucopia of color and fragrance containing every conceivable kind of early-summer garden and farm produce that can be grown in northern Vermont, in addition to a three-tiered baker's window display of homemade breads and pies, strained clover honey and comb honey, rectangular blond blocks of pure maple sugar, quilts and comforters as bright as an October hillside, paintings by local artists, and more than one hundred categories of cut flowers.

“You know, James,” Mom said with a conspiratorial laugh, “I'm so happy you and Nathan are willing to indulge me in this little excursion. Your father would come here with me if he absolutely had to. But he really hates anything that has to do with farming, and I couldn't bear to ask him.”

“Well, I like all this,” I said truthfully enough, though I think what I liked best about the daytime fair was being with my mother, who never made educational seminars out of our small expeditions, but just enjoyed them. I even felt somewhat conspiratorial myself; and when
I
thought of that other secret, the secret Nat and I shared, and our “camping trip,” a scary thrill went up my spine.

Around noon we climbed up to a sparsely occupied section high in the grandstand and opened the wicker picnic basket Mom had packed the night before; boiled ham sandwiches on homemade bread, a fresh garden salad, baked beans, pickles, sharp cheese and crackers, raspberry pie, and chocolate cake!

“Have you noticed?” Nat said with his mouth full. “This is the only place on the grounds where everyone seems to be just sitting still?”

My mother nodded and smiled. “Time doesn't entirely seem to stop here, Nat, but everything slows down in a way I like. I could sit here all afternoon.”

“Me too,” Nat and I said together.

I had never seen my friend so relaxed. Maybe, in the crowd, he found an anonymity he'd been looking for. Maybe the bustle reminded him of Montreal, or maybe the old-fashioned exhibits and events coincided with his idea of the way authentic country ought to be. Whatever it was, Nat, like my mother and me, loved the fair at first sight, belittled nothing, couldn't get enough of it. Yet reflecting now, I wonder if it might not have been being with my mother, or any gentle, motherly woman, that Nat really liked.

Except for the loudspeakers announcing the intermittent sulky races it could almost have been a hundred years ago. In between the trotters and pacers, the workhorses were brought out of the barns to pull buckboards and high old delivery wagons with elegant stenciled lettering. Then the track was swept smooth by a farm truck trailing a half dozen freshly cut birch saplings with their leaves still on, an outlandish broom of the woods that amused us all to no end.

Around three, Mom told us to have a good time camping out and left to get ready for her part in the Grand Saturday Cavalcade, in which most of the animals shown at the fair were led or driven by their owners in a wondrous procession twice around the racetrack in front of the grandstand—hundreds of dairy cattle, scores of riding horses with richly tooled saddles and working horses with great hammered silver harness trappings and jingly brass bells, strutting tom turkeys, herds of sheep caparisoned in brilliant yellow and blue and red mantles like miniature medieval war steeds, flocks of chickens and ducks, and yes, Leroy the Gander, the Grand Fowl of the Show, being led on a string by my proud, pretty mother.

By the time the cavalcade ended, the afternoon was well advanced. “Well, Nat,” I said, “how about hitting the midway?”

“Okay,” he said. “Excelsior!”

Despite all the wonderful things we'd done and seen so far on that wonderful day, despite the far more exciting thrills we anticipated for the night ahead, I was as eager as a ten-year-old to get over to the rides and games. For at Kingdom Fair or any fair, the midway is the one place where you don't just see the events. There, with luck and a receptive frame of mind, you can temporarily become a part of them.

 

Early dusk was the best time to walk along the midway. The strings of colored lights glowed softly and invitingly, and looking in at the game booths always reminded me of strolling home through the village with my father at Christmastime and looking in house windows at the beautifully lighted trees. Fried food smells clung agreeably to the cooling air. The pitchmen had their second wind after the heat of the day but weren't frazzled and irritable yet, the way they'd be at the end of the night.

“Step right up and give it a try, you can't win a prize by walking by,” they chanted over the blaring midway music. Of course Nat and I couldn't win anything by playing those age-old rigged midway games, either, but that didn't keep us from trying. We tossed a lopsided baseball into a slanted bushel basket that bounced it back out every time. After five attempts, Nat finally managed to knock over three weighted milk bottles with a softball. I tried twice to cover up a red circle with five silver disks and left plenty of red showing both times. Nat had his palm read by a gypsy woman with a monstrous gold hoop in one ear, and we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl and octopus until the whole fair began to spin slowly away from me and I barely escaped being sick.

Then Charlie showed up with Reverend Andrews, whom he was giving his long-promised grand tour of the fair, and insisted that Nat and I join them on a battered old carousel with a glorious menagerie of carved wooden circus animals with chipped and faded trappings but an eternal stately prance. Next we visited the Freaks and Wonders of the World Show. Here, for fifty cents apiece, we saw a tattooed lady sticking pins up her nose, a sword swallower and fire eater, a contortionist who nonchalantly folded his legs behind his head and smoked a cigarette, and for an extra quarter, a real live geek who turned out to be none other than Titman White, whom Charlie had gotten off the hook in Ornery Ordney Gilson's murder trial. He was sittting in a tom burlap loincloth, painted all over his body with stripes like a zebra, in a pen with a few sick-looking garter snakes draped around his bare feet. Every so often he would grab one of them and stick its head in his mouth and pretend to bite it off. Nat took one look and left the tent, but Reverend Andrews kindly told Titman that if he was looking for part-time work, he'd hire him to cut the cemetery grass on a weekly basis.

Bumper Stevens and Mason White were standing nearby and overheard the minister's offer.

“Say, Mr. White, which would you rather be, a Presbyterium preacher or a stud horse?” Bumper said loudly in his stagy minstrel-show voice.

“Why, I don't rightly know, Mr. Stevens,” said Mason, who always played Bumper's straight man at the annual blackface show. “Which would
you
rather be?”

“I'd much rather be a Presbyterium preacher, Mr. White.”

“Why's that, Mr. Stevens?”

“Use your head, Mr. White. Breeding season's longer for the preacher.”

“Let's clear the hell out of here, Reverend,” Charlie said angrily. “Not all the freaks seem to be in the freak show.”

On the way out of the tent we met Royce St. Onge, Stub Poulin, and two or three other players from Charlie's team on their way in, laughing and drinking beer. Stub yelled, “Hey, here's Charlie K!”

When we brushed by fast, Stub turned and called after us, “What's the matter, Charlie? Ain't you got time for us white folks tonight?”

We rejoined Nat outside the tent and started back up the midway the way we'd come. But before we'd taken five steps a gong began to clang. Simultaneously a siren shrieked out. Thirty feet above our heads a sparkling burst of colored lights erupted.

For a moment I thought a ride had blown up; but it was nothing of the kind. All this uproar was only my cousin Welcome's latest invention, which he'd just unveiled the tallest and strangest high striker I'd ever seen, announcing the first winner of the evening.

Every country fair has a high striker—also known as a hammer-and-bell—the strength-testing machine where young huskies try to impress one another and their girlfriends by ringing a bell at the top of a sort of gigantic vertical yardstick by sending an iron weight shooting up it with a post mall. But no other fair I've ever seen has boasted a high striker remotely like the one my cousin had been working on in secret that summer. Besides its spectacular pyrotechnics and fire-engine sound effects, it was twice as high as most others and equipped with more elaborate lights and mirrors and slogans than a cross-country eighteen-wheeler. Astraddle the top was a life-size tin replica of an alien-looking green girl with two green antennae, called Marsha the Martian, between whose shapely emerald legs the iron weight momentarily disappeared when a customer rang the bell.

Reverend Andrews laughed and shook his head. “Only here,” he said.

“My lord!” Charlie said in genuine awe. “Welcome, you have outdone yourself with this gorgeous artifact. She's a true work of art.”

“I imagine she is, Cousin,” Welcome said as a crowd gathered around the high striker. “Have a whack, Jimmy?”

I hefted the mall. It was heavier than it looked, but I heaved it up over my head and let fly at the spring-weighted platform. The weight zipped up to the line on Marsha's knees marked “Sissy Boy.” She made a rude noise, the crowd laughed, and I retreated in ignominy.

“That's not very polite,” Welcome said to the green girl. “You were little once too.”

“I'll give her a go,” said Royce St. Onge. Royce sent the weight speeding up to her thigh—“He-Man”—but no farther.

“Judas priest, will you look at this contraption, now, Mr. Stevens,” said Sheriff White, who had come to see what the noises were about. “Only a Kinneson could come up with something this outlandish.” He peered up at the slot between Marsha's legs. “Why, this is ob-scene, to boot!”

“I bet you could ring the bell, High Sheriff,” Welcome said. “Give her a whirl.”

“Try her out, Mace,” an onlooker chimed in. “Big tall fella like you ought to drive that bell clear up in her gullet.”

“Nope, boys, not when I'm in uniform. Hat and gun here would get in the way.”

“Take them off,” Charlie said in a needling voice.

Standing back in the crowd beside Reverend Andrews in his baseball cap and sweatshirt, holding a half-full bottle of beer, my brother looked like any other fairgoing workingman.

“Come on, Sheriff,” Royce said. “I'll hold your hat and gun for ya.”

“Well, now.”

“All in good fun, Sheriff. Might get you an extra vote or two this fall.”

“All right, all right.” Mason took off his hat and gunbelt and handed them to Bumper. “You hold on to these, Mr. Stevens, if you will. Reach me that mallet, there, Welcome.”

Now, although Mason White was as skinny and awkward-looking as Ichabod Crane, no one who'd ever seen him wrestle a big bulky farmer's corpse into a bag and down a winding back stairway doubted his raw strength. His length of arm alone was enough, I thought, to ring that bell. Up shot the weight and up and up, triggering lights and sirens and bells, all the way to “Almost But Not Quite.”

“Tee-hee,” said the green girl. “Close. But close don't count except in horseshoes.”