Reluctantly, talking among themselves, shyly, shyly, as children called on to recite “Hiawatha” or the “Village Blacksmith,” a pair of girls, dressed in skirts of some coarse, transparent cloth like the cloth hung at cottage windows, side by side for company, one adventuresome and one not so, their breasts hung lightly in cloth so that you could see the beginning of the curve, climbed up onto a ramshackle platform, the boards of which gave under their weight, and looked boldly and cheerfully into the crowd, one of them touching the back of her hair to keep it from blowing in the rain wind and holding with her other hand the opening in her skirt. They stood there until the pimp released them with the words that the show was about to begin, about to begin, last chance, your last chance to see these beauties dance, and Coverly followed his father up to the stand and then into a little tent where perhaps thirty men were standing apathetically around a little stage not so unlike the stage where he had seen his beloved Judy hit Punch over the head when he was younger. The roof of the tent was so shot with holes that the lights of the carnival shone through it like the stars of a galaxy—an illusion that charmed Coverly until he remembered what they were there for. Whatever it was, the crowd seemed sullen. Leander greeted a friend and left Coverly alone and listening to the pimp outside. “Burlymaque, hootchie cootch—I’m going to ask these little ladies out here just one more time before the show begins....”
They waited and waited while the girls climbed up onto the plat-form and down again—up and down and the evening and the fair passed outside. A little rain began to fall and the walls of the tent to luff but the water did not cool the tent and sent up only in Coverly’s mind memories of some mushroom-smelling forest where he wished he was. Then the girls retired, one of them to crank a phonograph and the other to dance. She was young—a child to Leander—not pretty but so fully in possession of the bloom of youth that it couldn’t have mattered. Her hair was brown and as straight as a cow hand’s except at the side where she had made two curls. She swore when she pricked her finger with a pin that held her skirt together and went on dancing with a drop of blood on her thumb. When she dropped her skirt she was naked.
Then, in this moth-eaten tent, filled with the fragrance of trampled grass, the rites of Dionysus were proceeding. A splintered tent post served for the symbol on the plate—that holy of holies—but this salute to the deep well of erotic power was step by step as old as man. The lowing of cattle and the voices of children came through the thin canvas walls that hid them. Coverly was rapt. Then the girl picked the cap off a farm hand in the front row and did something very dirty. Coverly walked out of the tent.
The fair was persevering in spite of the rain, which had left a pleasant, bitter smell in the air. The merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel were still turning. At his back Coverly could hear the scratchy music of the cootch show where his father was. To get out of the rain he wandered into the agricultural exhibit. There was no one there but an old man and nothing that he wanted to see. Squashes, tomatoes, corn and lima beans were arranged on paper plates with prizes and labels. The irony of admiring squashes, under the circumstances, was not wasted on him. “Second prize. Olga Pluzinski,” he read, staring miserably at a jar of tomato pickles. “Golden Bantam Corn. Raised by Peter Covell. Second prize, Jerusalem Artichokes …” He could still pick out, past the noise of the merry-go-round and the rain, the music where the girl was dancing. When the music stopped he went back and waited for his father. If Leander had seen Coverly leave the tent he didn’t say so, but they walked to the village where the car was parked in silence. Coverly remembered his feelings at Langely. He had not only jeopardized his own rights—generations of unborn Wapshots were in jeopardy as well as the aged and the blind. He had even endangered that fitting and proper old age to which his parents were entitled and might have imperiled their way of life at West Farm. Everyone was asleep when they got home and they drank some milk, mumbled their good nights and went to bed.
But Coverly’s troubles were not over. He dreamed about the girl. It was a humid day when he woke with a salt fog drifting upriver and catching, like bits of carded wool, in the firs. There was nothing about the morning into which he could escape. The rags of fog seemed to turn his mind and his body back onto themselves and their troubles. He groped among the piles of clothing on the floor to find his worsted bathing trunks. They were wet and smelled of a dead sea—the damp wool felt like a corruption on his skin and, thinking piously of saints and others who practiced mortification, Coverly drew them up over his groin and went down the back stairs. But even the kitchen that morning—the one room in the house that could be counted on to generate light and sense in the overcast—seemed like an abandoned hulk, dirty and cold, and Coverly went out the back door and down through the garden to the river. The tide was low and the mudbanks were exposed and reeking, but not so stinking, it seemed to Coverly, as the damp worsted wrapped around his loins so that, with every movement he made, and warmed now by his own miserable flesh, new odors of decayed sea water were discharged. He went out to the tip of the diving board and stood there on a scrap of potato sacking, warming the skin of his chest with the skin of his arms and looking up and down the cold, fog-hung valley where a little mortifying drizzle had begun to form and drop like the condensation of moisture in some subterranean prison. He dived and swam, shivering, out to the middle of the river and then ran back up through the wet garden, wondering if the joy of life was in him.
The boys took their mother to church at eleven and Coverly got vehemently to his knees but he was not halfway through his first prayer when the perfume of the woman in the pew ahead of him undid all his work of mortification and showed him that the literal body of Christ Church was no mighty fortress, for although the verger had shut the oak doors and the only windows open were not big enough for a child to enter by, the devil, so far as Coverly was concerned, came and went, sat on his shoulder, urged him to peer down the front of Mrs. Harper’s dress, to admire the ankles of the lady in front and to wonder if there was any truth in the rumors about the rector and the boy soprano. His mother nudged him with her elbow when it was time for communion but he looked at her palely and shook his head. The sermon was grueling and through it all Coverly’s mind turned over tirelessly the words of an obscene double limerick about a bishop.
Late in the day, when the family were drinking tea, Coverly went out to the back of the house. He smelled a clearing wind and heard it stir in the trees and saw the overcast rise, the miserableness of that day carried off and a band of yellow light spill out of the west. Then he knew what he had to do and he made his preparations; he washed his armpits and emptied his bank. He had enough money to pay for her favors. He would join the blessed company of men, so lightly screened by canvas from the lowing of cattle and the voices of children. He walked, he ran, he walked again, he took a short cut over the Waylands’ pasture to the dirt road to the fairgrounds, wondering why the simplicity of life had not appeared to him sooner.
It was dark by the time he reached the dirt road and in spite of the clearing wind it seemed to be a starless night. He did not stop or hesitate until he saw at the gates to the fairgrounds that all the lights were out. The fair was over, of course, and the carnival had gone. The gates hung open and why not, for after the cakes and squashes, the kewpie dolls and the exhibitions of needlework had been removed what was there to guard? With so many dark lanes and tree-shaded places not even the most harassed lovers would seek the shelter of the fairgrounds which, tenanted in these times no more than three or four days each year and nearly as old as Leander, breathed out into the night air the smell of rotted wood. But Coverly went on, into the space where the smell of trampled grass lingered in the air, down the ruts of the midway to where, or where as best he could see in the dark, she had gone through her rites. Oh, what can you do with a boy like that?