All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

50

She didn’t write.

A few days later, I rode with Strangler to Hawkins, and pretty soon I was helping out with the carnival. Helping Strangler, actually. Kind of an assistant. He paid me for the work. It wasn’t much, but it was money, and it was my own money. I was a carny and I loved it.

Thing is, though, we got to Hawkins, and I went to the little post office there every day, and no letter ever came.

I had Mrs. Carson’s address, and I wrote Jane when we moved on to Texarkana. I told her to address my mail to the Memphis post office, general delivery. That was our next stop.

When we got to Memphis there was a letter for me from Mrs. Carson. She wrote that Jane had moved on. I felt like my insides had fallen out of me.

Moved on?

That wasn’t quite what I had hoped for.

The carnival wound up into Missouri and even Kentucky, before coming back down along the edge of Oklahoma. When we got there, Strangler bought a car, and he let me borrow it. It was an older car, but it ran fine. I drove on across Oklahoma to where Mrs. Carson lived.

It was a pretty burnt-out state, the dust still blowing, the grasshoppers still eating. I had a little money saved up now, so I stopped and got gas and ate at cafés, and even stayed a night in a boardinghouse. All things considered, it was a pretty comfortable trip compared with the one I had taken with Jane and Tony.

But, I got to be honest, it wasn’t as much fun.

When I got to Mrs. Carson’s, I went up to the house and knocked, and she was glad to see me, and Tony was too. He told me he had been going to school, and he loved it, and had only been in two fights.

I thought that was pretty good.

Jane didn’t write them often, Mrs. Carson said, but the last time she had written, she had sent a letter for me. She said Jane wrote in their letter she figured I’d show up there eventually, and would they give it to me.

I didn’t open it right away. I ate supper with Mrs. Carson and Tony, and then I had coffee with some pie, and Tony had milk and a lot of pie, and then me and him went out on the porch swing and sat there in the soft night watching the fireflies flit about.

Tony said, “I miss Jane, but I got to say, Jack, I like it here.”

“Mrs. Carson is a good woman.”

“She’s like a mother, I think. I didn’t really have one that mattered, so I don’t know what one is supposed to be like. My mother is out there somewhere with a Bible salesman. But Mrs. Carson, she seems to like me.”

“Sure she does.”

“She said she’s going to adopt me.”

“I’m glad you’re happy,” I said.

“Yeah, but you don’t look so happy,” he said.

“I guess I miss Jane too,” I said.

“She liked you,” Tony said.

“Not enough,” I said.

“It’s just the spirit in her,” Tony said. “She’s got lots of spirit. You can’t hold that spirit down. It was hard for her to leave me. She tried to explain it to me, but she couldn’t. But she didn’t need to. I knew she had to leave. I don’t like it, but I knew it was coming.”

I smiled at him. “You’ve grown up a lot in a short time,” I said.

“You think?” he said.

“I think.”