THE HART BROTHERS RAN A SMALL, LOOSELY ORGANIZED WAGON-SHOW. The entertainments included a magician, ball-pitching games, a trained dog, some Shetland ponies, and several extravagant though brief melodramas. The juggler, the Snake Woman from Borneo, and a fat-lady named Miss Fairy May Turnbow were regulars, while other acts came and went. Three or four medicine men tagged along with the show, selling worm-syrup, nerve-food powders, sluggish-liver remedies, and purifying tonics. The show set up alongside agricultural fairs, staying a few days at each one. Since it was festival season, the crowds were enormous. Greenberry let groups into the tent every fifteen minutes. He had changed his remarks to fit these crowds, leaving out the medical details and the historical comparisons.
Christie tried to be indifferent to the chomps and gapes of the curiosity seekers trailing past her babies. She pretended to be invisible. She stared right through people, or she sewed while they swarmed in. Or she sat nonchalantly reading one of Greenberry’s newspapers. That was what she liked to do best, she decided. She told James this was his big chance to improve his reading, but he just grunted when she passed him the paper.
They traveled slowly through Mississippi and Arkansas towns. Greenberry paid their room and board, so they did not need much spending money. Christie kept five dollars sewn inside her waist, and they had some spare change. The accommodations varied in quality. Greenberry insisted he was doing all he could for them, but one time they lodged with a shopkeeper above his store, and another night they had to sleep in the same room with an old woman dying from stomach trouble. Their meals were plain and often tasteless, when the cooks were too saving with meat. Christie and James ate fat-soaked greens and boiled cabbage, potatoes, and turnips, with hard cornbread and meager bits of pork. On several days they could not get any pork at all, and James declared he felt weak without it. Even though his impatience with Greenberry McCain grew, James did enjoy talking crops with farmers at the fairs. He learned a great amount about cotton and peanuts, which folks at home didn’t raise. And he befriended a black-and-white spotted dog who followed the wagons. He called the dog Jubers.
The news from home whirled through Christie’s mind like leaves scattering in the wind. Amanda wrote that Christie’s letter in the Hopewell paper caused a stir—everybody was still proud; James Culpepper’s barn burned with all his tobacco; Arch broke his foot falling off the porch, playing too rough; Nannie was so smart she was learning the letters in Jewell’s blueback speller.
In a village in the Ozarks, Greenberry joined them on the porch of their boardinghouse. He blew cigarette smoke out at a peaceful lake view. They had just eaten supper, and James had his feet propped up on the porch railing. He grunted when Greenberry sat down, but he didn’t speak. Christie didn’t want to talk to Greenberry either. He was always pretending something was much better than it was, and he didn’t seem to notice the things that were actually good—like the pretty lake held by the hills as if it were a giant handful of water. He had just praised the boardinghouse cook for her home cooking (burnt cornbread, pie that wasn’t sweet enough). Christie concentrated on her embroidery.
“Believe I’ll head on out to the revival,” Greenberry said.
“Good,” James said. “I can tell you need some religion.” He was teasing, but with a cutting note in his voice.
Greenberry said, “They’re already stomping and shouting down there.”
Christie could hear the singing from a tent-revival meeting down the road, and she wondered fleetingly if Brother Cornett might, by chance, be preaching there. She hadn’t heard any preaching on their travels, but she hadn’t missed it.
“Did I ever tell you I could have made a preacher?” Greenberry said.
James grunted. Christie said, “No.” She remembered what he had said early in the trip about his inclination toward the seminary.
He puffed on his cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly, as if calculating his words. “Funny. I was called to preach. I was cutting timber one spring when I was a boy—oh, I was a big boy, not married yet, but not a man either—and I sawed down this big old tree, and just as it was about to fall I heard the voice of the Lord coming out of it.”
He paused for a moment, waiting for Christie and James to ask him what the voice said. When they remained silent, he went on. “It said, ‘Greenberry, what are you cutting down this-here tree for?’ I looked up and all I could see was light. It seemed to take an awful long time for that tree to fall, and in that time I felt every question and every doubt I ever had. My mind went through my whole life in those few seconds, the way they say a person’s whole life passes before his eyes at the moment of death? By the time that tree landed, I had been through every question. It was like the Lord was questioning me, pinning me to the ground. And I didn’t have a good answer for why I was cutting down that tree. I’d cut down hundreds of trees in my life. There wasn’t nothing to it. Trees are in the way. You have to cut them down before you can farm a lick, so why He asked me, that was a mystery. I thought He meant for it to mean something, and I keep looking for the answer, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
“It must mean something,” said James. “The Lord wouldn’t ask a stupid question.”
Christie wondered whether the Lord might have been teasing Greenberry. Or maybe somebody was playing a joke on him, she thought, remembering the family story about her great-grandfather Thomas Wilburn’s call to preach. “So did you start preaching when you heard the call?” Christie asked.
“I thought about it. I thought I would, but things got in the way.”
“What things?”
“Temptations.”
He laughed, then grew serious. He said, “I must tell you, James and Christie both, that I have never in all my days of traveling been so proud to associate with anybody as I have with you fine people. It’s just the saddest thing to see, and you can tell how people feel about those darling little babies. They come in with tears in their eyes. Christie, you have done a valuable service. It chokes me up to have to show those little babies, and I can’t even imagine what you folks went through.”
On the lake some geese were landing, honking loudly. The sun was setting. James stood up and stretched, turning his back on Greenberry. Christie snipped her thread and put away her needle. She had finished embroidering Nannie’s pinafore.