572
PARTISAN REVIEW
erie and the sad exciting music of the calliope? I bought you a paper
bird on a stick and here it is, crushed in this loft, to
try
to
tell
you
something, to try to tell you, even then, that you were lost in Charity
and that you had to get away, like me. Remember when I lifted you
up on that big elephant, you little scared thing perched on that
enonnous back, you shook and cried and got so excited you almost
fainted and Aunt Malley had to run to buy some lemonade and throw
it in your face. We were going through the world in Bailey's Pasture
that night, my own world, and I wanted to tell you then that I would
never see you again and that the world was like this circus, stall by
stall and dazzling Ferris Wheel, and lights and tights, whirling and
gleaming and screaming and twisting on a sawdust floor. Then I
took you and Malley home and slipped away again, back to the
circus; and met a trapeze man with thighs in black tights; and stayed
and went away with the circus early that next morning.
As
we rolled
away in our gay wagons, the last thing I saw of the house where you
lay sleeping was the wheel turning over it, and the only one in that
whole house that I cried for was you, Boy 0 Boy.
"In San Antonio I left the circus and took secret tap dancing
at Hallie Beth Stevens' Studio of the Dance, sang out in front of a
chorus of tapping girls, had a cane and a hat, and strutted singing
'You've Got Me in the Palm of Your Hand' .... not before chickens
in a Charity henhouse but a real clapping audience.
"The rest I needn't tell you. Bailey'S Pasture was my revelation.
"They treated me as though I was a freak in Charity, and I
know it was just jealousy and envy. They blamed it on my mother
your Granny Ganchion because she dressed me like a
girl
when I was
little and called me 'Foille.' But it was more than that. Right away
I learned what I was and went on like that, what I was, and
used
myself for that, made no bones about it .. . and can't say the same
for most of the rest of Charity who don't know
who
they are. What
matters if it got me death?
"But
if
you're going to start calling names, I can tell you a few
things about Brother Ramsey in the church who knew me all my life
and even preached my funeral sennon, and who taught me a lot of
what I know. Everything in this world is not black and white, as little
Charity thinks-there are shades in between; and I can tell some dirt
on Jim Lucas and Mimi Day Calkins-sitting there in the Pastime
