The next six weeks was the best I ever spent with Floyd. We went from one end of Corenwald to the other building roaring machines in the woods and swamps near the villages and towns, shooting feechie arrows, and generally scaring the britches off the villagers. Everywhere we went, the air was thick with feechie talk—even when we turned north and went into the Hill Country, far from the swamps of Corenwald’s south and east. It was beginning to look like me and Floyd was the only two people in Corenwald that didn’t believe in feechiefolks.
Bluemoss is deep into the Hill Country. Me and Floyd debated whether even to put in a roaring machine so far away from the swampy, sandy country where the old-timers always claimed they seen feechiefolks.
Of all the old stories about feechiefolks, there aint a one that concerns itself with the Hill Country. The woods just aint as feechiefied up there. The trees aint covered in graybeard moss. The rivers run clear and swift in narrow little valleys and shallow gorges. It’s pretty country in its way, though I miss the swamps when I’m up there. The mosquitoes and yeller flies aint so ferocious, and the waters is empty of alligators, which is nice if you don’t like alligators. But there’s plenty of bears and panthers and wildcats and wolves.
In the Hill Country, you’ve got water and you’ve got land, and they mostly mind their own business and keep to theirselves—not like the south part of Corenwald, where the water and the land get so mixed up you about don’t know where the one stops and the other begins. In the spring floods, the rivers below the falls don’t know where to stop. They just spill out over the bottomlands and make broad, shallow lakes where cows and sheep was grazing just a few days earlier. And the fish come out of the river channel by the thousands to root around like hogs on the flooded forest floor, gorging theirselves on earthworms and drownded forest bugs that they can’t get in the river. It’s why the fish is so much bigger—and happier, I believe—below the falls than above.
What I mean to say is that it was right nice in the Hill Country—and the folks who lived up there thought it was oh so much better than the sandy, swampy regions down south—but it just didn’t feel homey to me. It was a fine place to visit, though, and even more so in the dead of summer, when it was so hot in the flat part of Corenwald.
Things was pretty lively in Bluemoss when we rolled up. Looked like the whole village was outside milling around. When we got closer, we could see why. There was a tent set up in the square—one of them open-top tents that lets in the sunlight but keeps folks from looking in unless they’ve paid their admission.
And out in front of the tent, standing on a peach crate, waving his arms, and bouncing up on his tiptoes, was Orris, the old huckster who used to sell gold-mine shares. He had found him a tall black hat and a plum-colored piratey-looking frock coat with a split up the back. His white shaggy hair spurted out in every direction under the hat and waved like a spray of pine needles every time he shook and bobbed his head.
“Ladies and gentermen!” he sang. “Prepare to be amazed! You aint ever got this much astonishment out of one small copper coin in all your life!”
Ever so often a roar come out of the tent and the canvas shook and a villager come running and hollering out the side exit. Still, there was a line of folks waiting to give Orris their copper coin and see what was inside.
Orris kept up the patter without taking a breath. “Ladies and gentermen! If you aint flabbergasted, then come get your copper back! A feechie, live and in person, aint something good folks like you gets to see every day! Just one copper for a gander at a real-live feechie!”
Floyd and me give each other a look. Orris had jumped our claim.
Three more Bluemossers give Orris their money and disappeared into the folds of canvas. Orris didn’t even leave off his patter while he took the folkses money and let them in.
“If you don’t believe me, step right here, give me a copper, and see for yourself if this aint the most genuine feechie you ever seen. Captured by alligator hunters just outside Turtle Perch on the edge of Bayberry Swamp!”
Another roar come from the tent, and three or four boys and girls come tearing out the exit flap—just to Orris’s left—screaming and giggling, not sure whether it was terrifying or funny.
“Oh, I aint saying he’s happy to be here, ladies and gentermen,” Orris went on. “I reckon he’d tear us all to pieces if he could. But he can’t. He’s in a cage of the stoutest bamboo. It aint the least danger. So pull out your copper and step right up!”
He opened his arms toward the crowd, inviting them to step right up. That’s when he noticed Floyd and me in amongst them. He looked a little green around the gills then, and he stopped and swallered a couple of times. He busied hisself taking money from a couple more villagers and picked up his patter again, but not with the same kind of enthusiasm, I noticed.
Floyd motioned to me, and we got in line with the villagers waiting to pay their money and see the feechie. Orris kept pattering, eying us all the while, and the feechie kept roaring and shaking the canvas, and all around us folks was debating whether they believed the feechie was real.
“They might be skeptical,” Floyd whispered to me, “but they’ve all got their money purses open.”
When we got to the front of the line, Floyd stood in front of Orris with his hands on his hips and looked him straight in the face.
Orris snorted a nervous little laugh and said, “Why, hello, Floyd. I wasn’t looking to see you all the way up here.”
Floyd squinted him straight through. “I don’t reckon you was,” he said, real quiet so none of the villagers could hear him. “You got some kind of perfessional discount for me and my boy here?”
Orris heh-heh-heh-ed a few more times and said, “Of course, Floyd, of course. Y’all just step right in and have a look.” He opened the flap for us, and we stepped through the canvas.
Inside there was a bamboo cage, and inside the cage was Melvern, the Ugliest Boy in the World, slumped over on a stool. Except for some animal pelts wrapped around his middle, he wasn’t wearing no clothes. His bare skin was slopped all over with grayish mud that made his teeth and the whites of his eyes look extra white. Even his hair was coated in mud—not plastered down, but sticking out in spikes all over, with sticks and leaves dried into it. But I knew it was Melvern.
Sometime in the last six weeks, Orris must have come behind us in Greasy Cave and recruited Melvern. And I don’t imagine he had to work very hard at it. Melvern was so hot to find a job in the show business, I bet he pestered every showman who come to town.
He may have been the Ugliest Boy in the World, but his wasn’t a feechiefied kind of ugly. He wasn’t wiry like feechies is supposed to be. He was soft in the belly, and his arms put me in mind of sausages. It burnt me up for Orris to show so little concern for the standards of the trade.
Melvern looked more bored than ferocious, though he shot some pretty hateful stares at a passel of younguns throwing peanut shells at him and teasing him.
“Say something, feechie boy.”
“You aint even scary.”
“I’m gonna get my copper back.”
That got him. He jumped up off his stool like somebody had jobbed him with a poker, and he went to roaring and rattling the bars and beating his chest. The younguns lit out from there, and in a hurry too.
That left Floyd and me alone in the tent with the Ugliest Boy in the World. We stared him down.
Floyd made a face like he smelled something bad. “You’re the worst excuse for a feechie I ever seen,” he told Melvern. “Orris ought to be ashamed of hisself, passing you off as a feechie.”
Melvern didn’t pay Floyd any mind. He just smirked at me. “We meet again,” he said.
That chapped my hide. Everybody in the feechie trade knows you aint supposed to speak when you’re in a feechie costume.
Floyd jobbed a finger through the bars and spoke through gritted teeth. “This is my feechie scare,” he said. “I’m the one thought it up, and I’m the one been doing all the work.”
I cut Floyd a sideways look. He’d been doing all the work?
Melvern looked at Floyd kind of dull eyed and slack. Then he went back to his stool and slumped down on it again.
“And I aint going to let you and Orris throw it all away.” The way Floyd paced up and down in front of the cage, you’d a thought he was the one inside it. “Look here, boy,” he said. “At least try to carry yourself like a feechie. At least try to show a little perfessionalism. Get off that stool! Quick movements! Holler, ‘Ooolie! Ooolie! Ooolie!’ every now and then. You don’t want to make a laughingstock of the feechie trade!”
Melvern looked at Floyd like he was a crazy person and said, “Who’re you supposed to be, old man?”
Floyd got real haughty. “Who am I supposed to be? Who am I supposed to be? I’ll tell you more than who I’m supposed to be, young man. I’ll tell you who I am. I’m Floyd Wendellson. I’m the man who nearbout invented the feechie trade!”
The boy in the cage begun to smile, and then he begun to laugh. “Floyd Wendellson,” he howled. “I’ve heard that name. You the washed-up showman Orris been telling me about.”
About that time, Orris stuck his worried-looking head in the tent and said, “Everything all right in here?”
Floyd whipped around and give Orris such a look that I’m surprised the old man didn’t fall out right there on the spot. Both of Floyd’s hands clenched into fists, and he hollered, “Washed-up showman? Washed-up showman? At least I aint a …”
He didn’t finish that sentence. He had already taken a step toward the tent flap and was going to be wrapped around Orris in about two more steps. Not seeing what good a rumpus would do just then, I jumped on Floyd’s back and rode him to the sawdust.
“Hold on there, Floyd,” I said. “Hold tight.”
Floyd was furious. “Get off me, you deer tick! I aim to give this white-haired fool the whipping he’s asked for!” Floyd flopped around like he meant to whip me first if he had to, and Orris took that opportunity to remove hisself from the tent.
“Hold on, Floyd,” I hollered. “Hold on! If you tangle up with Orris out there in front of everybody, you just going to look as ridiculous as he does. We got to do this a different way.”
Floyd thrashed around a little more, but I hung on to him until he begun to see the reason in what I was saying. “All right,” he said. “All right. I believe you right about that.”
So we stood up, brushed the sawdust off, and headed for the exit flap. On our way out, I give one last look at the Ugliest Boy in the World; he had mashed hisself against the far corner of his cage to get as far away from Floyd and me as he could, but when I turned around, he stuck out his tongue.
When we come out the exit flap, the line to get in was even longer since Orris hadn’t let anybody in. Floyd and me both cut sour looks at Orris, who did his best to go on with his patter without paying us any mind.
I didn’t know what our next move was going to be, and I don’t know that Floyd knew yet hisself, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter.
The next move got decided for us.
We was well away from the tent when I heard a man’s voice calling out, “Hey, it’s the feechie expert from Middenmarsh! Perfesser Bertie!”
Aster, Basel, Osbern, Arch, and Wiley pushed through the crowd to get a better look at us. Their dogs just about knocked down a whole family of villagers in their efforts to follow their masters.
“It’s the feller we’ve been telling y’all about!” Aster fairly hollered. “He knows all there is to know about feechiefolks!”
“He called this here feechie business months ago!” Basel chimed in. “Back when nobody even believed feechies existed, this man told us there was feechie trouble coming.”
Floyd smiled at the drovers like he was glad to see them, but there was more smile in his mouth than in his eyes. He looked ready to change the subject. We didn’t need people pointing out how he predicted the feechie scare.
“We told you about the feechies shooting up the Middenmarsh Stock Market …” Osbern said to nobody in particular.
“About a hundred times,” said a old lady.
“In the last three months, y’all aint told us anything else,” said another one.
“Well, these two, the perfesser and his boy, was there too.”
“It was the perfesser here who explained what was happening,” said Arch. “He’s a sure-enough feechie expert.”
“He lived with the feechies in the Feechiefen Swamp!” Aster said. He puffed up proud for knowing such a famous man.
From Middenmarsh up to that day, Floyd hadn’t been ready yet to declare hisself a feechie expert, but now he didn’t seem to have any choice.
He stood up straight. “That’s right, ladies and gentermen,” he said, real loud and clear, using his show voice. “I’m a feechie expert.”
Everybody ooooohed and ahhhhhed.
“I been all over Corenwald these last few months,” Floyd said. “I’d been hearing reports that feechiefolks been coming out of the swamps and into the civilized parts of the island.”
The line in front of Orris’s tent rearranged itself into a big half moon around Floyd, with the drovers and their dogs in the front and the rest of the village jostling behind them.
“At first I didn’t believe what I was hearing,” Floyd said.
A smart aleck in the back hollered, “What kind of feechie expert don’t believe in feechies?”
“Oh, I believed in feechies,” Floyd said. “I always believed in feechies. I just couldn’t believe they would be so bold as to come out of their swamps and forests and onto our farmlands, onto our roads.” Here he took a long pause. “And to the edges of our very villages!”
I heard a stifled scream in the crowd, and a farmer on the third row fainted dead away.
“Friends, me and my assistant here have been investigating. We been separating fact from fiction. Every stone-tipped arrow shot into a farmer’s wagon, every stone-tipped spear jobbed into the soil at a crossroads, every mysterious sound from the forest that’s kept a farmer and his wife awake at night, we’ve gone and looked into it. We’ve interviewed the witnesses. We’ve examined the evidence.”
“And what did you find out?” asked a woman with a baby on her hip.
“We found out that it’s true. The feechiefolks is on the move. And not just down south in the swamps either. We been finding feechie signs all the way up here.”
The low moaning started right about then, with some howling sprinkled in. Say what you want about Floyd, but the man had a gift. The way he worked that crowd was masterful, and it was all spur of the moment. Floyd hadn’t planned on making this speech.
He raised his hand for silence again, and the moaning and the howling got quieter, with just a choking sob here and there. “But then I started hearing other rumors,” Floyd said. “I heard there was somebody trying to profit from the fact that folks was starting to believe in feechiefolks again. I heard there was a charlatan on the loose in Corenwald. This feller, I heard, dressed a boy in muskrat pelts, slopped him with mud, and called him a feechie. This feller, I heard, was charging folks a copper to look at the boy, like he was a freak at a circus sideshow.”
Folks started booing and hissing like snakes.
“This feller didn’t mind taking advantage of folkses legitimate fears of feechiefolks!”
More booing. The crowd was hanging on every word coming out of Floyd’s mouth. “This feller,” he said, “is this feller!”
With a big, swooping motion he flung his hand out toward the tent flap where Orris had been standing on his peach crate. Every face that had been turned to Floyd whipped around to glare at Orris.
Only Orris wasn’t there. He had ducked into the tent while Floyd had the crowd’s attention.
“Get him,” somebody hollered.
“Get our money back!”
The crowd surged toward the tent like a wave at the beach. The folks in the front went through the flap. The folks behind them just knocked the tent down. Poles clattered and broke, and the canvas collapsed over the cage and on top of the folks that had run in first. Everybody rassled around in the pile, uncovering theirselves from the canvas and getting covered back up and pushing one another and hollering, and every boy and dog in the village joined in the fun, confusing things into the most spectacular discombobulation I ever seen before or since.
Orris and his fake feechie boy, meanwhile, was long gone. They must have slipped under the back panel of the canvas and run into the woods while Floyd was speechifying; the bamboo cage was already empty when the first villagers run into the tent.
Orris and Melvern had left their audience wanting more.