Chapter 6
I came home first time in a week and offered Bly’s poem to Dannyboy beside me on the porch, him with his whiskey me with my stories, but he did not reach for it and it occurred to me if gypsy was faith I would assume his lost but the gypsy it’s like quicksand and tightens with struggle. Same as the carnival. Its grip returned carneys who had fallen in love and they didn’t fall a second time away but found love or its illusion in the carnival fair enough.
I won’t be back for some time I hollered the next morning, my words a gypsy surprise, which means they surprised even me.
Aye! Dannyboy’s voice from the shore.
I left him worrying over his rods and reels, sorting the tackle, fussing wth the nets, not watching me but watching me, too. When I turned from Rabbit Hill to the lake his boat was moving in gusts as he worked the ores, the motion he said helped him think and I wondered what was bothering him, what chaos he was working out, for Dannyboy dealt in chaos, my father said, and it kept him afloat.
My thoughts were on the carneys, none of whom had returned yet, none had been called as Alice put it, so I supposed love or death had them but when I remembered the years, the decades, I supposed it would be death, for the life of a carney was never a long one, always a risk, a gamble, no nourishment, little rest.
I remember offering Sled an apple once and he said he’d never had one bare.
Bare? I asked.
No candy.
When I write about the carnival, forgive me if I am repeating myself I know this I do, I write too fast so there are words get by without consideration, opinions and feelings often trite for I trust you do not care my hunger the colour of my shirt how much tread remains on my shoes yet these things make it through. I do not travel backwards to delete because the sentences require velocity lest all of them crumble.
The apples’ flesh sometimes rose other times white or yellow which matches my button-down shirt, the shoes on my feet worn, reminding me of Vidal’s old ones curved like they were that he gave to the clowns when the long packages containing new ones arrived from Italy at intervals, the beautiful leather, with a shine he carefully maintained, seeking daily his long reflection in the deep blue leather.
The velocity can become centrifugal and the sentences gain no ground, zero breadth, and they Ferris, my words silly and concerned with crunching apples from different trees all the way to the gates which felt so far and then suddenly I am there, the September wasps interested in my sweet breath, the air of apples.
A white truck zooms from the gates and another pulls up almost immediately, blue this time, and it may come as a shock to you because I am told by Dannyboy my writing perhaps gives you ideas of a different era, but the driver rushed to the gate and placed a long Amazon box over it and onto the carnival ground.
It came to my head in a small gypsy jangle that the box contained perhaps a pair of maracas. I went through the gate, picked it up not heavy not light and silent, so my guess incorrect.
The label read Vidal Deline, Carnival A-Go-Go.
I’d been thinking of Vidal all the morning, since I declared the carneys dead, and the gypsy in me – and sometimes I am glad it’s only half because I don’t know if I could stand more – but the gypsy in me knew something, I got the jangle. I didn’t say anything to anyone not even to myself but my heart lurched at both the vans in case from either he unfolded, my eye to the gate slammed all day, and it wasn’t until dinner Bly said suddenly across Ella’s stew I don’t know who that was in the white van but it occurs to me now that she might have been looking for you.
I said Jane’s name before the sentence was finished.
Bly squinted and said half-mouth not a drop of gypsy but blessed just the same.
One Two and Three across the table chose then to put down their spoons, do rae me, and lift two each long wooden blue maracas. We have a new bit Two said from beneath his chin and the air under the tent suddenly tinted with dusk, the wasps and monarchs sank, and to the gorgeous loose beat like waves, Alice gathered her skirt in one hand and danced in her beautiful sweeping way. I couldn’t make out the words, perhaps they were not words, but the harmony was exquisite, and when Mosey stood up to tango beside Alice his chair screeched – but soon again the sound came, closer this time – it was Neptune coming from the forest. Radio and the other monkeys, white rabbits only, came in from the gathering darkness.
Bly stood and faced the gates, her both eyes level and open, no squint, a rare thing.
The Winds she bellowed are turned.
