The sun was halfway up the sky when I woke the next morning, stove up like a old man with the rheumatism. Floyd was busying around the stance with buckets and brushes. He had already hitched up Buttermilk, driven to the village, bought paints, and come back.

I was still rubbing my eyes when Floyd put a wide paintbrush in my hand. “Daylight’s burning,” he said. He didn’t seem too concerned with my bone misery. He pointed to a big pot of deep red paint he had just mixed up. Then he pointed at the wagon box, which still had the faintest outline of a phrenology map poking through the brown cover paint.

“Let’s get a fresh coat,” he said. “It’s time we took the old feechie act back on the road.”

The misery went straight out of my bones, just like that. I let out a whoop and nearbout fell into the paint pot, I was so eager. I went to slapping paint all over the wagon and all over my own self into the bargain. Floyd was as chipper and talkative as a schoolboy.

“When I seen Orris’s pitiful act yesterday, I had nearbout decided it was time for us to dust off the old feechie act,” Floyd told me. “No sense letting other show people get all the goodie out of our scare.” He give the wagon box another swipe or two of red paint. “Then I heard about the rustlers’ running scare last night, and I knew the feechie scheme had takened hold in earnest. It’s time we stop feeding the feechie scare and let the feechie scare start feeding us.”

When the first red coat was dry to the touch, Floyd pulled out the yeller paint and begun painting back the words that used to be on the wagon: AMAZING! ASTONISHING! LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN!

It felt like my old self was coming back, taking shape right there on the side of the wagon box.

In the old days, Floyd had painted a blackwater swamp on the side of the wagon, but this time he painted a great green alligator so long it had to curl its tail to fit on the side panel. Its big red mouth was open wide, lined with a hundred white teeth as long as your finger. And here’s the best part: setting astride this great alligator was a feller that looked like me, mud coated and scowling and looking perfectly terrible. And circling my head was the words, THE WILD MAN OF THE FEECHIEFEN SWAMP!

The other side showed me rassling a alligator just as big—and winning too! I believe those was the two prettiest pictures I ever seen.

The Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp. I had never seen the Feechiefen Swamp with my own eyes. Alligators I had seen, but I never had rassled one. But still, them pictures felt truer than the other things I’d been the last few years—Ugliest Boy in the World, turkey dancing master, phrenologist’s assistant. In my earliest memories, I was Perfesser Floyd Wendellson’s feechie. For half my life that’s who I thought I was. Going back to it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

A week later we put on the first performance of the new feechie act. Floyd waxed his mustaches again and put on his shiny black hat and shiny black coat, and we trundled off to a tiny village called Scuffle Bluff. Floyd figured it would be better to work out the tangles in the countryside, far from the River Road.

He was right. It was kind of a mess.

Things was good at first. We rolled into Scuffle Bluff just like old times, with Floyd on the wagon seat and me shut up in the back. Sitting there in that box, with the feechie mud caked all over, it all come back to me, as natural as if playing the feechie was what I was made to do. I felt feechie again, just like when I was little, when I actually believed I was a wee-feechie. This, I thought, this feels like honest work again.

I peeped through the knothole. A crowd gathered plenty quick—not the biggest crowd I ever seen, but probably as big as a tiny place like Scuffle Bluff could muster. They was interested enough, but not especially merry. There was a seriousness in their faces that I didn’t remember from the old days.

The crowd got good and quiet when Floyd stepped onto his footbox and launched into his patter. But he had put his footbox in the wrong spot and was standing spang in front of my knothole. All I could see was the back of his coat. I couldn’t see the crowd.

It had been almost three years since I’d heard it, but I still knew Floyd’s palaver word for word. It confused me, then, when he went off the script. His old patter was all about whipping folks into a frenzy, giving them that little thrill of a feechie scare. But this crowd didn’t need no help getting scared of feechies. There wasn’t any smart alecks giving Floyd a hard time or denying that he had a genuine feechie in his box, so that made things a little trickier for him.

There may not have been any smart alecks, but there was plenty of audience participation. Folks started asking questions long before the question-and-answer time was supposed to start.

“You aint going to let that creature out of his box, are you?”

“What do you mean bringing a feechie into a respectable village like Scuffle Bluff?”

“I heard they eat younguns. Does this one eat younguns?”

Floyd usually did fine talking off the top of his head, but he was off that day. “Of course he don’t eat younguns!” he said, and his voice didn’t have the cool showman tone I was used to. The patter was busted all to flinders, so I just concentrated on listening for my cue—“He’s perfectly harmless, I assure you.”

“Listen here,” Floyd said, “I’m just trying to bring a educational program to your village—”

“Nobody asked you to bring us a eddication program!”

“Especially not one that eats younguns!”

“He don’t eat younguns!” Floyd hollered. The wheels was coming off his wagon. I hoped he would get to my cue so I could get on to the next part of the show.

Floyd kept hollering to make hisself heard over the rumblings of the crowd. “Listen, folks, there’s no danger here. My feechie has been tamed and subdued.”

“We don’t want no feechies in our village, wild or tame either one!”

“He was raised in captivity!” Floyd hollered. That was a new one. He took a step back toward the wagon.

“It’s time you got out of Scuffle Bluff,” said a voice that was real gruff and real close. “You and your feechie too.”

Floyd’s shiny coat mashed right up against the wagon box and blocked out every bit of light that come through the knothole. His voice got high and reedy. “Ladies and gentermen!” he hollered. “Calm yourselves! You’re in no danger from my feechie friend. He’s really quite harmless, I assure you!”

There it was. The cue at last.

I give a roar and a shout and went to bust out the top of my box. Floyd whirled around, and I could see something like terror in his eyes, and he jumped up and flammed the box lid back down on me. I figured that was just part of the new and improved routine, so I grunted and squawled and busted the top off the box. Flung Floyd right off into the sand by the footbox, which was an accident, but it made for good theater.

And didn’t that excite the crowd? They went to hollering and pushing and shoving one another, trying to get out of my way. I stood up on the corner of the wagon box and “ooolie-ooolie ooolie”-ed and beat my chest like a wild man. I was so full of myself I thought I was going to bust.

The good people of Scuffle Bluff went to screaming and crying and swirling around like waterbugs. I jumped off my wagon box right into the middle of them, and I swung one of the gals around like we was at a barn dance, and I made faces at the younguns and waggled my arms up over my head. Which didn’t calm folks down one bit, I don’t mind telling you.

Behind me I could hear Floyd hollering, but I was so deep into my character I don’t reckon a brace of cowdogs could have brung me to my senses just then. I shinned up a post holding up the porch of the general store and got up on the roof just as agile as a squirrel.

Oh, it felt good to be a feechie again! From up there I could see the whole crowd bumping and pushing, some of them running, a few of them wallering on the ground. I put my thumbs under my armpits and cock-a-doodled like a rooster, then I done a back-over flip right there on the roof of the store. It was a show I was putting on that day and no mistaking.

I was just about to jump to the next roof over when I seen the crowd parting and Floyd coming right down the middle, hopping he was so agitated. Picture a head louse traveling down the part of a dandy’s hair, and you got the idea. When he got close, I noticed a knot on his forehead where I’d knocked him down jumping out of the wagon box.

Floyd was a few steps away when a rock from the crowd come sailing over Floyd’s head in the general direction of my skullbone. That cheered the crowd up considerable. They give a whoop of joy, and I noticed that some of the old boys was squatting down to find more rocks they could fling their own selves.

It made me wrathy. My eyes went squinty, and I was just about to fling down on them villagers when Floyd went to hollering at them.

“For shame!” he said. “Be civilized! Can’t you see the poor creature is terrified?” He turned toward me and give me a look that said, real clear, Wipe that glare off your face and look scared … unless you want to get us both killed.

So I unsquinted my eyes and made them wide and put my knuckles up to my mouth to show how terrified I was.

Floyd spoke to me real gentle and reached a hand up toward me. “Grado,” he said. I’d just about forgotten that Grado was my feechie name. “Grado, you come to Perfesser. Perfesser aint going to let them bad people hurt Grado.”

“Say, stranger!” one of the villagers said. “Whose side are you on—our’n or their’n?”

Floyd didn’t pay the man any attention. He had handled hostile crowds before, and he was starting to get things under control again. He still held his hand out to me.

I always hated that part of the act, when I had to go gentle and lay by my feechie ferociousness. For just a minute I thought about maybe not going gentle, but clambering over the other side of the roof and scrambling to the Tamside Forest and going feechie for good.

But I didn’t. I climbed down real sweet, and I let Floyd lead me back to the wagon box. The villagers give me some ugly looks, and a few of them shook their fists at me, but I just took it. It was some pleasure to me that I had made such a convincing feechie.

Right that minute we left Scuffle Bluff wanting more, and we was quick about it.

“Live and learn,” Floyd always said. And we definitely learnt things at Scuffle Bluff. When it come to feechies, folks didn’t need much help getting whipped into a frenzy anymore. They was pretty close to the edge of it already.

With the feechie scare roaring full blast, we had to make some adjustments to the show. For one thing, Floyd had to quit saying he used to live among the feechiefolks in the Feechiefen Swamp. He was afraid folks might take him for a feechie sympathizer. He started telling folks that he’d caught me in a trap on the edge of the swamp. Also, he quit letting me run free among the crowd. He kept a rope tied around my waist, and whenever I got close to a villager with my monkey motions, he hauled in on it and dragged me back.

The rope was a good plan. I could be good and scary—which was what the audience wanted to see—but at the same time, I wasn’t scary enough to cause a riot. The crowd knew Floyd could haul me in and put me back in the box if I got too wild. In some ways, having the rope around my waist give me the chance to do my best work: I could turn loose every bit of feechieness inside of me and leave it up to Floyd to haul it in when he needed to.

We spent about six weeks in the upland villages through the late summer. I done some of the best acting of my career. Word of Perfesser Floyd Wendellson and the Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp spread, and crowds got bigger night after night.

We begun to hear of other feechie acts that had popped up—not just Orris and Melvern, but others too. Nobody put on a show like me and Floyd though. We was the premier feechie act in Corenwald.

I wanted to stay and work the upland villages till they was played out, but Floyd was in a hurry to head south. “The real money’s in Tambluff,” he said. “The fall stock market is almost here. We aint going to let them copycat acts cash in bigger than we do. This is my feechie scare, and I mean to reap the harvest.”

Even without the stock market, you couldn’t ask for a better place to put on a feechie show. Tambluff had got as big as Middenmarsh and was maybe a little bigger. And it was only a few leagues from Bayberry, where the feechie scares always seemed to start back in the old days.

Tambluff was Corenwald’s biggest stage, and we was ready for it.