Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [55]
When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the color. A mass of sequined colors coming toward me, sparkling under the sun. I saw the trunk of an elephant, the flash of a trombone, and the whirl of the feathers that drifted from hats, capes, and boas. Children cried out with delight all around me, and I found myself crying with them, rushing forward to meet the parade. Confetti whirled in the air. It did not feel real, any of it. I was caught up in something nearly holy, no longer myself. As the parade and train moved forward, I moved back, as we all did, to clear the tracks and make space. I felt the crowd of people behind me as I moved, the whir of noisemakers spinning through the air. Everything blurred together, and I opened my mouth and shouted, amazed that I could be invisible in the midst of all those people. My head reeled with it. What I saw next were the colors draped across the performers’ bodies, the shocking pinks and oranges and blues. I remember the green and silver of the gilded wagons rolling past, tigers roaring behind the glittering bars.
I followed the procession, once it had passed, as if I were a child in Hamelin. The earth thumped and shook, the sky hung behind clouds of confetti, and people rushed past me while I struggled to keep up. We traveled like this for a half hour—moving until we arrived in a pristine green field with only the occasional dandelion interrupting, where we watched as spikes were laid into the ground and the canvas tents raised up on them. We watched the train unload, the wagons and cages being rolled off one by one. Tears ran down my cheeks, but I didn’t care. I had been waiting my whole life for this, I felt then, even if I hadn’t realized it until I’d met Mary Finn. I thought of all those mornings I had spent hanging from the bar in the window, staring out into the fields as the sun burned into my parents’ backs, imagining that there was something wonderful in the world, beyond what I could see.
Unloading the train took all morning and most of the afternoon, but it felt like the tents appeared magically, within seconds, all on their own; the pounding of the metal spikes and hammers stopped, the tents rose up in the air, and the landscape was transformed completely. This is what the beginning of the world must have been like, I thought, as one by one the banners went up, the tents flapped open, and the talkers took their places outside, shouting out to the crowds to lure them into each show. The midway curled around the big top in a long circle. Behind the field the train stretched out like a shiny snake. The brochures and fliers I had seen in Mercy Library couldn’t begin to capture the excitement of all that hope and desire gathered up in one spot. Like an opal, I thought, everything wonderful ground down and contained within it.
I pressed into the midway with the rest of the crowd, then wandered through the tents and the sawdust. People jostled about everywhere, and the midway was one wonder after another: the sideshows with their flaring banners, the fortune-tellers, the Ferris wheel, the peanut and candy sellers, the booths where you could spin wheels or shoot at lines of bottles to win a plastic trinket. The world flooded my vision and I wanted to stop time, to be able to take it all into me. I couldn’t believe that the line of buildings stretching into the sky, just visible from the treetops, was still Kansas City. Everything about the city seemed dull and washed out, a shadow world next to this one that burst with color and life. Smells came from every direction, making my mouth water. I had never smelled things like roasted