Idabel met this merriment with a dumb adoring smile. Joel could not understand what had taken her.
Unless it was that the midget had cast a spell. But as she continued to fawn over tiny yellow-haired Miss
Wisteria it came to him that Idabel was in love. No, she would not consider leaving, there was a world of
time. «Charmed,» said Miss Wisteria to a suggestion they ride the ferris-wheel, «charmed.»
A rash of lightning rattled the stars; Miss Wisteria’s royal headgear caught fire in this brief tinseled
burst, the glass jewels glittering roselike in the pink lights of the ferris-wheel, and Joel, left below, could
see her white winglike hands alight on Idabel’s hair, flutter away, squeeze the dark as if eating its very
substance. They swung low, their laughter rippling like Miss Wisteria’s long sash, and, rising toward a
new flush of lightning, dissolved; still he could hear the midget’s penny-flute voice purring persistent as a
mosquito above every fairground noise: Idabel, come back, he thought, thinking he would never see her
again, that she would travel into the sky with Miss Wisteria at her side, Idabel, come back, I love you.
So then she was there, telling him, «You can see way off, you can almost touch the sky,» so then he was
aboard the ferris-wheel, alone with Miss Wisteria, and together they watched Idabel diminish as the
rocking rickety car started to climb.
Wind swung them like a lantern; it is wind, Joel thought, for he could see the pennants trembling
above the tents, trash-paper scurrying animal-like along the ground, and over there, on the walls of the
old house where a Yankee bandit had murdered three women, raggedy posters danced a skeleton jig.
The car in front contained a sunbonneted mother and her little girl, who nursed a corncob doll; they
waved to a farmer waiting below. «Y’all better get offen that thing,» he called back, «hitsa fixin to rain.»
Around they went, wind rustling Miss Wisteria’s purple silk. «Run away, is it?» she said, a smile displaying
rabbity teeth. «Well, I said to her, and I say to you: the world is a frightening place.» She gestured her
arms in an arc, and in that moment she seemed to him Outside, to be, that is, geography, earth and sea
and all the cities in Randolph’s almanac: her queer little hands, twittering midair, encompassed the globe.
«And oh a lonesome place. Once I ran away. I had four sisters (Maudy went to Atlantic City as Miss
Maryland, she’s that beautiful), tall lovely girls, and my mother, bless her soul, stood nearly six feet in her
stockings. We lived in a big house in Baltimore, the nicest on our street, and I never went to school; I
was so little I could sit in my mother’s sewing basket, and she used to joke that I could crawl through the
eye of her needle; there was a beau of Maudy’s who could balance me in the palm of his hand, and when
I was seventeen I still had to sit in a highchair to eat my supper. They said I need not play alone, there are
other little people, they said, go out and find them, they live in flowers. Many’s the petal I’ve peeled but
lilac is lilac and no one lives in any rose I ever saw; a spot of grease is all a wishbone leaves, and there is
only candy in a Christmas stocking. Then I was twenty, and Mama said it wasn’t right I shouldn’t have a
beau, and she sat right down and wrote a letter to the Sweethearts Matrimonial Agency in Newark, New
Jersey. And do you know a man came to marry me: he was much too big, though, and much too ugly,
and he was seventy-seven years old; well, even so, I might have married him except when he saw how
little I was he said bye-bye and took the train back to from whence he’d come. I never have found a
sweet little person. There are children; but I cry sometimes to think little boys must grow tall.» Her voice,
while making this memoir, had stiffened solemnly, and her hands folded themselves quietly in her lap.
Idabel waved, shouted, but wind carried her words another way, and sadly Miss Wisteria said: «Poor
child, is it that she believes she is a freak, too?» She placed her hand on his thigh, and then, as though she
had no control over them whatsoever, her fingers crept up inside his legs: she stared at the hand with
shocked intensity but seemed unable to remove it, and Joel, disturbed but knowing now he wanted never
to hurt anyone, not Miss Wisteria, nor Idabel, nor the little girl with the corncob doll, wished so much he
could say: it doesn’t matter, I love you, I love your hand. The world was a frightening place, yes, he
knew: unlasting, what could be forever? or only what it seemed? rock corrodes, rivers freeze, fruit rots;
stabbed, blood of black and white bleeds alike; trained parrots tell more truth than most, and who is
lonelier: the hawk or the worm? every flowering heart shrivels dry and pitted as the herb from which it
bloomed, and while the old man grows spinsterish, his wife assumes a mustache; moment to moment,
changing, changing, like the cars on the ferris-wheel. Grass and love are always greener; but remember
Little Three Eyes? show her love and apples ripen gold, love vanquishes the Snow Queen, its presence
finds the name, be it Rumpelstiltskin or merely Joel Knox: that is constant.
A wall of rain pushed toward them from the distance; you could hear it long before it came,
humming like a horde of locusts. The operator of the ferris-wheel began letting off his passengers. «Oh,
we’ll be last,» wailed Miss Wisteria, for they were suspended near the top. The rain-wall leaned over
them, and she threw up her hands as if to hold it back. Idabel, everyone, fled as down it toppled like a
tidal wave.
Presently only the hatless man stood there in the emptiness below. Joel, his eyes searching so
frenziedly for Idabel, did not at first altogether see him. But the carnival lights short-circuited with a
crackling flare, and when this happened it was suddenly as though the man turned phosphorescent: he
seemed to Joel no more than a hand’s space away. «Randolph,» he whispered, and the name gripped him
at the root of his throat. It was a momentary vision, for the lights all fizzled out, and as the ferris-wheel
descended to a last stop, he could not see Randolph anywhere.
«Wait,» demanded Miss Wisteria, assembling her drenched costume, «wait for me.» But Joel
leaped past her, and hurried from one shelter to the next; Idabel was not in the 10¢ Tent: no one was
there but the Duck Boy, who was playing solitaire by candlelight. Nor was she in the group huddled on
the merry-go-round. He went to the livery stable. He went to the Baptist church. And soon, there being
scarcely another possibility, he found himself on the porch of the old house. Leaves, gathering in a coil,
spiralled hissingly across its deserted expanse; empty rocking chairs tilted gently back and forth; a Prince
Albert poster swept like a bird through the air and struck him in the face: he fought to free himself, but it
was as though it were alive, and, struggling with it, it suddenly frightened him more than had the sight of
Randolph: he would never rid himself of either. But then, what was there in Randolph to fear? The fact
that he’d found him proved he was only a messenger for a pair of telescopic eyes. Randolph would never
bring him harm (still, but, and yet). He let down his arms: it was curious, for so soon as he did this, Prince
Albert, of his own accord, flew off howling in the hoarse rain. And could he, with equal ease, appease
that other fury, the nameless one whose envoy appeared in Randolph’s guise? Vine from the Landing’s
garden had stretched these miles to entwine his wrists, and he saw their plans, his and Idabel’s, break
apart like the thunder-split sky; not yet, not if he could find her, and he ran into the house: «Idabel, you
are here, you are!»
A boom of silence answered him; here, there, a marginal sound: rain like wings in the chimney,
mice feet on fallen glass, maidenly steps of her who always walks the stair, and wind, opening doors,
closing them, wind conversing sadly on the ceiling, blowing its damp sour breath in his face, breathing out
its lungs through the rooms: he let himself be carried in its course: his head was light as a balloon, and as
hollow-feeling; ice as eyes, thorns as teeth, flannel as tongue; he’d seen sunrise that morning, but, each
step directing him nearing a precipice permanent in shadowed intent (or so it seemed), it was not likely he
would see another: sleep was like smoke, he inhaled it deeply, but it went back on the air in rings of
color, spots, sparks, whose fire restrained him from falling in a bundle on the floor: warnings, they were,
these starry flies, stay awake, Joel, in eskimoland sleep is death, is all, remember? She was cold, his
mother, she passed to sleep with dew of snowflakes scenting her hair; if he could have but thawed open
her eyes here now she would be to hold him and say, as he’d said to Randolph, «Everything is going to be
all right»; no, she’d splintered like frozen crystal, and Ellen, gathering the pieces, had put them in a box
surrounded by gladiolas fifty cents the dozen.
Somewhere he owned a room, he had a bed: their promise quivered before him like heat waves.
Oh Idabel, why have you done this terrible thing!
There were footsteps on the porch; he could hear the squish-squish of soggy shoes; abruptly a
flashlight beam
