Chapter 3

Rosie lay in the bathtub in Josephine's tent, letting the hot water soak the tension from her muscles. (And given that several hours of her working day were spent having knives thrown at her, her muscles were quite tense indeed.) Josephine had let Rosie know on the first day of her employment that she was welcome to use the bathtub any time, as long as she fetched and heated the water herself and scrubbed out the tub afterward.

"The men in the show," Josephine had said, "are content to rinse themselves off with cold water straight from the pump. They make fun of me hauling this bathtub everywhere I go. But there's something about a woman that makes her want a hot bath. I'd let Wilma use the tub, too, but I don't think she could fit more than her right leg in it."

So now, after three days on the road, Rosie lay in the tub in a tent which was currently pitched in a little town in North Carolina.

Josephine was on the other side of the Oriental screen, letting Rosie have her privacy and reading one of the fat Victorian novels she favored.

"Do you mind if we talk?" Rosie called through the screen.

Josephine set down her book. "Of course not. I'm glad for the company."

"I was just wondering... that story about your mother being frightened by a boar, causing you to be born with hair on your face... that's hogwash, isn't it?"

"Some of it is," Josephine laughed. "A lot of the stories show folks tell about themselves are pure hogwash. Colonel Peanut isn't a colonel. Al wasn't raised by alligators in the Everglades any more than you were. And as you well know from taking your meals with her, Wilma doesn't eat six whole chickens a day. People like a good story to explain what they see and make it interesting, so we try to give them one."

"Well, your story is good," Rosie said. "Even if it isn't true."

"My story is truer than some. I was born in the backwoods of Kentucky, and my mother and father did believe that I looked the way I did because Mother had been frightened by a boar when she was carrying me. But of course, the very idea is... as you said, hogwash. But it's not hogwash that this idea was very real to my parents, and that my mother was so frightened of her hairy little baby that she refused to put me to her breast. My father pitied me enough to feed me cow's milk so I wouldn't starve. But he acted out of pity, not love."

Rosie, who had been adored by both her mother and father since the day she was born, could not conceive what it would be like to grow up without the security of parental love. "How sad," was all she could say.

"Yes, it was sad," Josephine said. "Mother and Father insisted on keeping me away from my sisters and brother, all of whom were normal, as if I had a disease they could catch. I was hardly ever allowed in the house. I slept in the barn loft, and Mother would leave me biscuits or cornbread from the night before when she came to milk the cows in the morning. She always made her feelings for me quite clear: I was a mistake of nature, a beast instead of a human, that I had been cursed by God, and that no one would ever love me."

A tear slid down Rosie's cheek. "How could a mother talk that way to her own child?"

Josephine sighed. "In her mind, I was not her child. She was kind to the other children. They never wanted for anything. Unfortunately, there are limitations to many people's ability to love, and my mother was one of those people. When I was thirteen, my beard grew thicker, and the problems with my mother grew worse. Once, she tried to shave me, but the stubborn hair started growing back within just a few hours. Finally, one day my parents came to me in the barn carrying a washtub, a cake of soap, and a new dress. They told me to wash and dress—they were taking me to town."

"Were they taking you to a doctor?"

"No," Josephine said, with a humorless smile. "They did not have your kind heart, Rosie. And of course, I was afraid because they had never taken me anywhere, and I knew they hadn't just got the sudden urge to treat me to an ice cream soda at the drug store. As it turned out, they were taking me to the carnival. They introduced me to a pudgy, good-natured man named Samuel Perkins, then they said, 'You want her for your show? If you pay us'—and they quoted an amount—'you can have her.'"

Rosie could not believe what she had just heard. "They sold you?"

"Just like a cow at the market, yes. But as it turned out, being under Samuel Perkins' care was not a bad thing. He was kind-hearted and took a liking to me. Soon I was calling him Pop, and he had legally adopted me. He was an educated man. He spent three hours every day tutoring me, teaching me to read and write and do figures. You see, up until that point, I'd never had any education at all. But I was a quick learner, and soon I left behind the McGuffey's Reader and moved on to Charles Dickens. Pop gave me a good education. Better than most girls get."

"Which is why you don't talk like you're from the backwoods of

Kentucky." Rosie was amazed that Josephine, who had never been to school, had achieved such a remarkable level of sophistication.

"Pop taught me how to speak properly, how to play the violin. Taught me all about the carnival business, too. When he died, I was twenty-five years old. He left the whole show to me. As far as I know, I'm the only woman in the country who's running her own show."

"So your story has a happy ending."

"Does it?" Josephine said. "Is it happy that I had to lose the one person in my life who ever gave me anything like love, just so I could make a little money? I would give up every penny I make if it would bring Pop back."

Rosie felt like ducking her head underwater and disappearing. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that the way it sounded—"

"No, I'm sorry," Josephine said. "I didn't mean to snap at you. Sometimes, though, I get in the grip of this melancholy and can't wrest myself from its control. Cheer me up, Rosie. Tell me about your life."

Rosie told all the funny stories she could think of: how her brother had once tried to help her pull a loose tooth by tying one end of a string to the tooth and the other to the doorknob and when he slammed the door, the doorknob came off, but the tooth didn't. She told the story of her grandmother going out in the dark and falling over a cow, which then ran through the pasture with her still lying over its back. She didn't tell Josephine about her mother's drawn-out death or about the years she had spent caring for her lonely father. She wanted to hear Josephine laugh, to bring some light into a life that had known so much darkness.

After Rosie finished talking, Josephine took out her violin and played a lovely, light melody she said was by Mozart. When the tune was through, Josephine said, "Rosie?"

"Yes?"

"Isn't your bathwater getting cold?"

Rosie looked down and saw goosebumps on her milky skin. She laughed. "It's freezing! But I was enjoying your company so much I didn't notice."

After Rosie had put on her dressing gown and was about to excuse herself to go to her own little tent, a melodious but gender-less voice from outside called, "Guess who-o?"

"Come in, Billy," Josephine said. Billy was the real name of the sideshow's top-grossing act, "Harry/Harriet," the half-man/half-woman.

When not wearing the costume that made him/her look female on one side and male on the other, Billy dressed in a plain white button-down shirt and trousers. Billy would have looked like a smooth-skinned young man, were it not for the fact that one side of his/her hair was clipped short, while the other side was long and curled. "It's not just me," Billy said. "It's the whole crew." Wilma, Stanley, and Tennessee Tom, who had to duck to get in the doorway, followed behind him. "Guess what? We found out where the bootlegger in this burg lives," Billy said. "We sent Al in to deal with him."

As if on cue, Al appeared, wielding a bottle of whiskey. Rosie had already discovered that when the folks from the show wanted something from the "normal" world, be it a bottle of aspirin or a flask of whiskey, they would send "Alligator Al" to get it. In a long-sleeved shirt and trousers, Al's reptilian skin was completely hidden, so he wouldn't attract the same stares and harassment as his colleagues.

"Well, aren't you clever?" Josephine laughed. "I know I've got some glasses around here somewhere." She rummaged under her cot and produced an apple crate filled with glasses, cups, and dishes cushioned by newspaper.

"I swear, it's untelling what all she keeps under that bed," Billy said. "She's got a whole library's worth of books under there."

Josephine handed them each a glass, and Al made the rounds filling them. When he got to Rosie, she protested, "I'd better not."

"You'd better, too," Al said, filling her glass anyway. "It'll steady your nerves after all those knives I threw at you today."

Rosie had never taken a drink of alcohol before—both of her parents had been Temperance—but she felt in this situation, it would be rude not to. The whiskey tasted strong and bitter like medicine, and it burned going down, but it left a nice, warm glow in her belly.

"Your eyes are watering, honey," Wilma laughed.

"Oh, it's just a little stronger than I'm used to," Rosie said.

"I know what you mean, hon," Wilma said. "I'm not much of a drinker either. You'd think as big as I am, that I could put it away and not even feel it. But one little drink, and I get silly, then sleepy. Tom's not much of a drinker either, but little Stanley over there can put it away like both of his legs are hollow."

Rosie found that the more she sipped, the less she minded the taste. Soon she was feeling cozy, comfortable, and curious about the unusual people around her. "I'd love to know," she said finally, "how you all ended up in this show."

"Put a drink in a normal one, and that's always what they ask," Billy said. "It's like they all write for the same newspaper or something."

"I'm in the show," Al said, draining his glass, "because it beats working for a living."

"Hear, hear," several of the others said, laughing.

"A few years back, though," Al said, "this do-gooder came around and had me convinced my skin was the way it was because I was sick. 'These carnival people are just taking advantage of you,' she said. 'Come to this hospital and get cured of your disease, then you can have a normal life.' So I went to the hospital and laid in bed for weeks, only to have them tell me there wasn't no cure for what I had. But they still wanted me to stay there on accounta being 'sick.' Finally I said, 'I ain't sick; I feel just fine,' and I walked right out of that hospital and went back on the road."

"There's no place for us to go except the show if we want to earn a living," Tom said. "My back gives me so much trouble from being so tall I can't do regular labor. And I've got a wife and two kids to support."

"With me, it was different," Wilma said. "I just got sick of my husband. He told me I was so fat I ought to join a carnival, so I left him and took his advice." She laughed uproariously, so Rosie did, too.

"I've worked regular jobs before," Billy said. "But it's always the same. It doesn't matter if I'm washing dishes in a restaurant or picking apples in an orchard, sooner or later the other fellows will start going on about how soft my voice is or the way my hips sway when I walk. Women's work might be better, but I can't quite pass for a regular female. So here I am. The people I work with leave me alone, and if other people are going to stare and make fun, they at least have to pay me for it." He leaned in close to Rosie. "You know, a lot of the performers you see claiming to be he/shes are grifts. But I'm the genuine article. I was born with a little something extra." Billy poured another glass of whiskey. The bottle was almost empty now. "And if I drink enough of this stuff, I just may show it to you."

Rosie blushed furiously, and Josephine interceded, "No more vulgarity, Billy. You're in mixed company."

Billy grinned. "Even when I'm alone, I'm in mixed company."

"What it seems like to me," Al said, "is that it's obvious why all of us are here except for you, Rosie."

"That's true," Wilma said. "The normal people who have joined up with us in the past have mostly been on the run... from the law or a bad situation at home. But here you are, a pretty girl with good manners from a nice family, choosing to spend your time with the likes of us."

Rosie knew that there was an implied "why?" at the end of Wilma's speech, and she was expected to answer it just as much as if it had been said out loud.

But what could she say? True, she was "on the run" in a sense— on the run from a man she didn't want to marry. But there was more to it than that, wasn't there? As meek as John was, she could have just politely declined his proposal, and while he would have been hurt, he would have been nothing but polite right back to her. Was her decision to join the show really about running away from John, or was it about running toward something else?

All she knew was that even though she grew up surrounded by people who loved her, whom she loved back, she had always felt different. Not the kind of different that everybody notices immediately, like Josephine's beard, but an on-the-inside difference that only she noticed. Inside her there had always been a longing, a longing made no less intense by the fact that she didn't know exactly what she was longing for. She just knew that the obvious path—husband, home, and children—that seemed to satisfy all the other girls would not be enough for her.

But what would be enough? Rosie still didn't know, but she did know that in the past few days, living on the road, being a part of the show, and becoming fast friends with Josephine, she felt closer to happiness than she had ever been before.