The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg (14 page)

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. “Gentlemen, 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.

W
HEN
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.

W
E 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.

P
ROFESSOR
F
LEABOTTOM
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.”