I decided that between this retarded whore freak and the riffraff who stood in line to fuck her some really important sacrament was taken, some means of continuing with hope, a ritual oath of life which did not wear away but grew in the memory of her around the bars and taverns of the mountains, catching her image in the sawdust flying up through the sunlight in the mill yards or lying like the mist of the morning over the clear lakes.
On the other hand it was common knowledge in the carney that fat ladies were the biggest draw.
I got along with all the freaks, I made a point to. It was as if I had to acclimate myself to the worst there was. I never let them see that I had any special awareness of them. I knew it was important not to act like a rube. After a while they stopped looking at me with the carney eyes and forgot I was there. Some, the Living Oyster for instance, were taken care of by members of their families who lived with them and probably got them their jobs in the first place. There was about them all, freaks and family, such competence that you almost wondered how normal people got along. There was a harmony of malformation and life that could only scare the shit out of you if you thought about it. The freaks read the papers and talked about Roosevelt, just like everyone else in the country.
But with all of that they lived invalid lives, as someone in the pain of constant hopeless bad health, and so their dispositions were seldom sunny.
The Fingerlings were mean little bastards, they were not really a family but who could tell? They all had these little pug faces. They used to get into fights all the time and only the dwarf could do anything with them. They used to torture Wolf Woman. What she had done to arouse their wrath I never knew. They liked to sneak up on her and pull out tufts of her hair. “That’s all right,” they screamed, scuttling out of her way. “Plenty more where that came from!”
And every day the rubes paid their money to see them and then went off and took a chance on Fortune’s wheel.
I had great respect for Sim Hearn. He was the owner of the enterprise. He was pretty strange himself, a tall thin man who walked with a stoop. Even the hottest days of the summer he wore an old gray fedora with the brim pulled way down, and a white-on-white shirt with a black tie and rubber bands around the sleeves above the elbows. He had stick arms. He was always sucking on his teeth, alighting on a particular crevasse with his tongue and then pulling air through it. Cheeup cheeup! If you wanted to know where Hearn was on the lot, all you had to do was listen. Sometimes you’d be doing your work and you’d realize it was you he was watching, the cheeup cheeup just behind your ear, as if he’d landed on your shoulder. You’d turn and there he’d be. He’d point at what he wanted done with his chin. “That,” he’d say. He was a stingy son of a bitch even with his words.
I was fascinated by him. Sucking his teeth and never speaking more than he had to gave him an air of preoccupation, as if he had weightier matters on his mind than a fifth-rate carney. But he knew his business, all right. He knew what towns to skip, he knew what games would go in one place but not another, and he knew when it was time to pull up stakes. We were a smooth efficient outfit under Sim Hearn. He’d go on ahead to find the location and make the payoff. And when we drove into town he’d be waiting where we could see him sitting behind the wheel of his Model A with one arm out the window, the rubber band around the shirt sleeve.
His real genius was in freak dealing. Where did he get them? Could they be ordered? Was there a clearing house for freaks somewhere? There really was — a theatrical agency in New York on lower Broadway. But if he could, Sim Hearn liked to find them himself. People would come up to him and he’d go with them to see what was hidden in the basement or the barn. If he liked what he saw, he named his terms and didn’t have to pay a commission. Maybe he had dreams of finding something so inspiring that he’d make his fortune, like Barnum. But to the afflicted of the countryside, he was a chance in a million. I’d go to work one morning and see some grotesque I hadn’t seen before, not necessarily in costume at show time but definitely with the carney. Sometimes they didn’t want to display themselves in their own neighborhoods. Sometimes Hearn’s particular conviction of their ability was lacking or maybe he hadn’t figured out how best to show them. They required some kind of seasoning, like rookie ballplayers, to give them their competence as professionals. One would be around awhile and disappear just as another would show up, I think they were traded back and forth among the different franchises of this mysterious league.
But when a new freak was introduced, that evening everyone would shine, the new one would tone them all up in competitive awareness, except for Fanny, secure and serene in her mightiness.
4
Herewith bio the poet Warren Penfield.
Born Indianapolis Indiana August 2 1899.
Moved at an early age with parents to southern Colorado.
First place Ludlow Consolidated Grade School Spelling Bee 1908.
Ludlow Colorado Boy of the Year 1913.
Colorado State Mental Asylum 1914, 1915.
Enlisted US Army Signal Corps 1916.
Valedictorian US Army Semaphore School Augusta Georgia.
Assigned First Carrier Pigeon Company Seventh Signal Battalion
First Division, AEF. Saw action Somme Offensive
pigeons having the shit shot out of them feathers falling over
trenches blasted in bits like snowflakes drifting through the
concussions of air or balancing on the thin fountain of a scream.
Citation accompanying Silver Star awarded Warren
Penfield 1918: that his company of pigeons having been
rendered inoperable and all other signal apparatus including
field telephone no longer available to him Corporal Penfield
did stand in an exposed position lit by flare under enemy
heavy fire and transmit in extended arm semaphore the urgent
communication of his battalion commander until accurate and
redemptive fire from his own artillery indicated the message
had been received. This was not true. What he transmitted
via full arm semaphore under enemy heavy fire was the first
verse of English poet William Wordsworth’s Ode Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood as follows
quote: There was a time when meadow grove and stream the
earth and every common sight to me did seem apparelled in
celestial light the glory and the freshness of a dream. It
is not now as it hath been of yore — turn wheresoe’er I may by
night or day the things which I have seen I now can see
no more endquote.
So informed Secretary of Army in letter July 4 1918, medal
enclosed. Incarceration US Army Veterans Psychological
Facility Nutley New Jersey 1918. First volume of verse
The Flowers of the Sangre de Cristo unpaged published by
the author 1918. No reviews. Crosscountry journey to