Like the time Lohny Pemberton tried to get me to pull my underpants down.
Although I knew it was wrong, I might have done it anyway just to show off the lavender ones I had on, the ones with Thursday on them, but it was Friday and Lohny would say I was dumb for wearing the wrong day. But I’d done it on purpose. The Thursday ones were my favorite color so I’d worn them two days straight, putting the clean Friday ones in the laundry hamper so Grandma wouldn’t catch on. Somebody came out of the house and let the screen door bang shut. Grandma hollered after them to not be letting that door slam and Lohny took off like he got shot. And he might have if Grandpa had known what he was up to.
I had a bunch more sins to worry about.
I’d rolled dried corn tassels in a piece of dampened husk and smoked the pretend cigarettes, coughing and hacking at the harsh scrape of smoke in my windpipe. Sometimes Sissy and I stayed up all night gambling with real playing cards. I’d lied when I didn’t need to, claiming I’d already brushed my teeth instead of saying I was fixing to. When I spilled Vonnie’s Blue Waltz perfume, I denied knowing a thing about it even though Uncle Ed, who’d served in France during World War I and had a picture of himself in Paris with a French girl to prove it, said the whole house stunk like a French whorehouse. Grandma said she wouldn’t allow him to be a corrupting influence.
But I was already corrupt.
My face flushed every time I thought about what I’d seen at the carnival, and I thought about it most of the time. To tell the truth, I worried myself sick about the particulars of that peculiar body. Was it called a he or a she? How did it sound when it talked? Would it have a husband or a wife? Would it be a mommy or a daddy? Which bathroom did it use?
I still called the man-woman it in my head.
Although I knew in my heart that was wrong, I didn’t know what was right. Grandma might know, but I couldn’t ask without telling on myself, and Vonnie refused to talk about it at all. Thinking about it made me uneasy, so I decided to put it out of my mind, and for the most part that worked. An occasional image resurfaced, not of what I’d seen, but of something else, some disturbing thing I could not name. Confusion and shame and a vague sadness writhed in me like a tangle of fishing worms.
From my bed I watched the beacon wag an accusing finger across the dark heavens outside my bedroom window. I got on my knees and said, “Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”
I had crossed some line that was invisible, and it was too late to turn back.
A picture in my brother’s geography book showed a map of the world in ancient days. There were known countries and continents—the rest of the map had the words BEYOND THERE BE DRAGONS.
There was no warning sign, no caution light, no line drawn in the sand.
I had wandered into dragon territory.
23
Mr. Pursley’s World
Grandma didn’t know about the carnival sideshow, but she still noticed I was acting a little mopey. Vonnie too. That wasn’t like us at all.
“Piano lessons!” Grandma announced, after luring me and Vonnie and Mother to the table for just-baked molasses cookies. “It’s high time these girls had piano lessons. They need something to get them out of the doldrums, and I expect that’s just the thing to do it.” Grandma said if Mother bought the piano, she’d finance the lessons from her butter-and-egg money.
Although I campaigned hard for dancing lessons, Grandma wouldn’t hear of it. “You don’t need to be wringing and twisting around calling unnecessary attention to yourself.”
“How come playing the piano isn’t calling attention?”
“That’s a cat of a different color. You’d be playing for the glory of the Lord.”
No matter how I pleaded my case, she could not be persuaded. Grandma most likely had visions of me and Vonnie playing duets at Sunday services, her nodding up at us from the front row. “My oh my, Sister Cales, that was a fine rendition of ‘Whispering Hope,’ ” the church ladies would say. Mother shopped the classified ads in the Raleigh Register until she spotted a Baldwin upright advertised cheap. When it took its place at the far end of the dining room, even our untrained ears could tell it needed work, so she found a man to come tune it.
When he saw our piano, he let out a whistle. “That’s a mighty fine piano you got yourself. You gals been playing any piano rolls?”
“No sir, not a one,” I answered, although I didn’t have the faintest notion what a piano roll was.
“Well, I’m going to show you how to play this piano without ever taking a lesson. But you’ll have to wait until I finish the tuning, and it’s sounding like that could take a fair amount of time.”
We watched him plunge his arms deep into the works of the piano, fiddling with pins and strings and tuning hammer until each key sounded perfect.
When he finished, he called us over.
“You got yourselves a player piano,” he said, sliding two small panels back to reveal a hidden compartment. “Stick a piano roll in there and the song will play itself as long as you keep pumping them big pedals. They’s a bunch of rolls in the bench—let’s load her up and see how she sounds.”
The man clicked a
