Charles nodded.
“So little Ira was sitting on the steps right there with his star map,” said Betty. “Suddenly, he looks up at his mother and says one of his stars is missing – winked out in the dark. And he couldn’t have been more upset if it was a lost puppy. So then Milton Hamlin commenced with a lecture. He said stars didn’t just wink out – they went up in a ball of fire, don’t you know – and Ira couldn’t have seen any such thing.”
“Milton was a retired librarian,” said Darlene. “I guess he figured sheer proximity to all those books made him about the smartest man in the world.”
“Turned out later, he didn’t know the first thing about astronomy.” Betty sighed, as though her aggravation with the deceased Milton Hamlin might be ongoing.
“I thought maybe Ira might’ve miscounted his stars. But Darlene had never known him to miscount anything, so she took the boy’s side, and then so did I. Well, Milton was livid. He went on and on about how Ira was just an ignorant little boy, and he had certainly not seen a star go nova. The old fool embarrassed that child no end.”
Betty was warming to her story now, leaning forward to touch his arm and alert him that this was the good part coming up. “Well, the very next evening, Tom Jessop shows up on the porch after dark, with his clipboard and all these official-looking papers. Bless him – he wrote down Ira’s account of that missing star. Tom was dead serious. Asked Ira if he could borrow the star map.”
Betty smiled at Darlene. “Tom was a handsome man in those days, wasn’t he?” She turned back to Charles. “But I’m digressing.”
She rocked a little faster as she picked up the pace of her story. “Milton came out on the porch just as Ira was showing Tom the place where he had last seen his lost star, and the sheriff was writing down every word. Well, Milton laughed at the pair of them, and it hurt Ira all over again – poor little thing. So the sheriff says, ‘You’re right, Ira. Any fool can see that star is gone.’ Now he said that to the boy, but he was staring straight at Milton Hamlin, and it was a look to freeze blood. Milton didn’t say another word – not that night anyway.”
She was rocking faster now. “The following evening, just after supper while it was still light, the sheriff stopped by to tell Ira that his star was coming back. ‘Tonight,’ says Tom, ‘And that’s a promise.’ ‘’
Betty slapped her hand down on the arm of her rocker. “Well, Milton nearly bust a gut laughing over that one. The sheriff stared him down, and you would have thought Tom had pulled his gun on Milton – the old fool shut his face that fast.”
Betty ceased her rocking and pointed to the edge of the porch. “Ira sat right there on those steps. Sat there for hours, watching that empty place in the sky. And Cass Shelley’s little girl, Kathy – she was only six then – she was right beside him. Ira believed in Tom Jessop, and so did Kathy. The kids were waiting – you see?”
Charles did see. He was staring at the porch steps. Even if he lived to be a very old man, he knew he would never lose the image of two small children sitting there, side by side in absolute faith, waiting for a star to come home.
“That very night,” said Betty, “damned if that star didn’t come back – just like Tom Jessop said it would! There it was, and right in the place Ira said it should be. So then Tom, Kathy and Ira were all huddled together on the steps, real quiet, just admiring that star for the longest time.”
He smiled, knowing that Malcolm Laurie would have thought the sheriff a fool to give away this miracle for free. Charles understood what Tom Jessop had done, and how, and why. He was only having difficulty squaring the man who loved children with the man who had used an insane dog to torture Deputy Travis and Alma Furgueson.
“So it was a variable star, an eclipsing binary.” Charles said it softly, in the manner of thinking aloud.
“Why, yes.” Betty smiled with pleased surprise. “That’s exactly what it was.”
Darlene was also smiling. “Tom called the observatory. He was thinking Ira might’ve seen a satellite or a comet. But they told him a dark star had moved across the face of a bright one and hid its light.”
Charles nodded. The eclipse would have been only hours long, but atmospheric conditions could have obscured the star for several days. So the sheriff had used that knowledge to put on an elaborate magic show for Ira and Kathy.
“It was called Algos,” said Darlene.
“But we call it Ira’s star.” Betty wagged one finger to end her story with a flourish. “And that old fool Milton Hamlin was dead within the year,” she said, as if this might be a fitting penalty for humiliating a small child.
CHAPTER 12
His way was brightly lit by headlights from a long line of cars stretching from the highway to the fairgrounds. Though it had been a bit of a hike from Henry Roth’s house, Charles was making better progress than the traffic on wheels. Always ahead of him was the lure of the giant glowing sign, screaming in neon, ‘MIRACLES FOR SALE,’ and casting its red light on the canvas panels of the circus tent.
He passed the dirt parking lot, already filled to capacity, and entered a crowd of people walking toward the tent. A woman shrieked and pointed up to the center pole.
A ball of fire circled over the tent in the trajectory of a lost and disoriented shooting star. Charles recognized the illusion from his cousin’s store of magic tricks. Squinting, he could just make out the guide wire in the wake of the flames.
He remembered a visit to another evangelist’s performance in the different seasons of childhood and summer. One warm night, on an open prairie, Cousin Max had given away the details of this trick to repay the hospitality of an aging minister on the tent-show circuit.
Charles’s smile was bittersweet.
So Max’s illusion had been passed along through the years, handed down from showman to showman. Would he find other vestiges of Max inside the tent?
As he reached the wide entrance, a young man, no more than five feet tall, pressed a sheet of paper into his hand. Charles accepted it with a thank you. It was a schedule of New Church seminars under the headline of Financial Miracles,‘ and it was printed on paper the color of money.
He folded the sheet into his suitcoat pocket and paid more attention to the smaller man. He could not miss the Laurie resemblance in this young face, but that was a common thing in Owltown. The little man was outstanding for his shoes, which were miles too big for him, his overlarge shirt and baggy, rolled-up pants. The ensemble reminded him of the grab bag mix of clothing worn by New York’s homeless people.
Charles held out his front-row pass. The young man seemed mildly annoyed, for his job was handing out papers – not receiving any. His solution to the problem was to ignore it as he handed a green sheet to another man, and then another. But all the while, Charles’s pass continued to dangle in the air just in front of him. “Excuse me?”
“Yes, sir,” said the young man, shoulders sagging a bit in resignation, for this problem showed no signs of going away.
Charles handed over his pass, leaving the man no choice but to accept it. “Malcolm told me to give this to someone at the entrance.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, sir.” He called out, “Uncle Ray!”
Another Laurie face approached them. This was a man with the graying hair and wrinkles of late fifties. “What’s the problem, Jimmy?”
Jimmy handed him the pass, and now the older man turned to Charles. “Well, you must be Mr. Butler.” Ray Laurie’s smile promised everlasting friendship, but it dimmed as he turned on Jimmy. “You should’ve taken Mr. Butler right in and seated him.”
Now the older man grasped Charles’s arm and gestured toward the entrance. “You’ll have to excuse Jimmy. We never give him anything too complicated. He has trouble concentrating.”