By Elizabeth Wiley

An Oklahoma county fair, in case you’ve ever wondered, pretty much comes down to strippers and livestock and sad-eyed freaks and Jesus, all of it thrown into a deep fryer and scooped out hot and dripping. It was a lot going on for a town where normally nothing did, but the fair always made me dizzy. Not just the Scrambler and the Bullet or the drooping strands of yellow lights, but more like the spirit of the place.

Mama didn’t see it that way. She called this annual traveling road show an atrocity and said the rides were half-bolted together by half-wit vagrants, which was true enough. And yet each November it seemed like we ended up going anyway, just like everybody else in town. What else is there to do once football is over and basketball hasn’t yet started?  She did at least insist we go on Thursday, when the crowd wasn’t as big and the trash wasn’t quite as trashy. Tickets were half-price the first night too, which was probably her real reasoning.

But what Mama said went, so we showed up on a Thursday, just as it was about to get dark. For the first few minutes, when the haze of daylight still lingered, I could sort of see what she’d meant. Because if you looked at it closely, the fair wasn’t much. The carousel squeaked and the man selling candy apples had dirty fingernails and the prizes in the midway were made out of paper and tin. Kevin and Daddy headed straight for the livestock tent. Mama went to the baking competition, which was sort of a torture for her since the oven in our trailer didn’t even turn on, forcing her to make whatever she could on the cooktop. And I found myself alone to wander the midway, alone and unfettered for the first time in my life.

When the barkers called out to me that their games were sure-things, guaranteed prizes, I shook my head, then stopped to consider the strippers. How they looked straight up in the air as they bumped and ground, their eyes unfocused, their thoughts evidently far away. The freak show next door was three dollars to enter, a whole buck more than the strippers, and it also had a teaser on stage. A lump of a man sitting in a tub of water, dubbed the octopus boy, although it seemed to me that he was neither a boy nor an octopus. He was just some lonesome creature in a big Kmart plastic wading pool, staring up just like the women had been, looking at the same stars. I turned to follow their gaze, but the sky above me was empty. What were they staring at so hard, these strippers and these freaks? Were they beholding something I wasn’t yet privy to?  It disturbed me, their palpable despair, like they were nothing but a bunch of penned-up hunting dogs, and I was thinking that maybe I should have gone with Mama. Even studying a hundred identical cherry pies would be better than this.

The third tent, where they held the revivals, already had drawn the biggest crowd. It was sitting in a clump of grass instead of a clump of dirt and the tent was listing left, precarious, as if whoever had put it up had either not known what he was doing or had entirely too much faith in Jesus. I hesitated in front of it, just as they were raising the flap and the people started moving forward. Maybe they wanted salvation more than they wanted freaks and strippers, or maybe it was just that this show was free. Hard to say.

The preacher started by rolling out a boy in a wheelchair and a low rumble rose among the benches. We may have been poor and country, just a middling sort of Thursday night crowd, but even we were onto sorry tricks like this. Anybody can pretend to be lame and then stand up and stumble around like a zombie. The preacher seemed to sense the mood of his audience because he moved through the opening miracle pretty fast and then walked to the middle of the empty stage. Big dramatic pause, and then he asked, “Is there any child of God who has come here tonight seeking healing?” 

Maybe a half-dozen hands shot up, and after carefully scanning the faces of the afflicted, the preacher called on a man in the back. His hand wasn’t up because he didn’t have a hand. He had raised a stump in the air and the crowd fell silent. This certainly upped the ante. You can fake paralysis, but you can’t fake a stump. I mean, part of me was questioning because part of me always is, and part of me was thinking that if this guy was really a faith healer, he’d have given octopus boy some legs by now and maybe saved those poor depressed strippers. Turned them into—well if not saints, at least something like lunchroom ladies, something solid and normal. Because if I’d spent months rolling through the Midwest with this caravan of misery I certainly would’ve done a better job of attending to my own brethren.

But I was evidently the only one thinking this. Everyone else seemed impressed. The crowd parted for the man with no hand to pass, people practically stepping on each other in their haste to get out of his way. There was some chitchat between the two of them, if memory serves. The man told the preacher he’d lost his hand in a combine accident, which won him even more sympathy among the spectators, most of whom had experienced their own unhappy moments with farm machinery or at least knew somebody who had. The preacher called for the Good Word and a boy about my age appeared on the stage, pulling a pulpit which bore the biggest Bible I’d ever seen, the pages as broad as a Rand McNally Road Atlas.

The preacher asked the man to touch the holy book. He tried to reach with his good hand, his only hand, but the preacher stopped him. “Show God the hurt,” he said. “The part of you that’s broken . . . that’s what the Lord wants you to bring forward first.” 

The man laid his stump into the fold of the Bible and the preacher began to pray. Pray and sort of sing, going back and forth between those two, and from the rear of the tent we could hear a new voice, much higher, joining with the preacher’s and rising in power. A woman dressed in white came walking forward from all the way outside, beyond the flap, and I swear she had a harp. Not a big one like you see women straddling at those fancy restaurants in Vegas but a little hand-held harp and she was plucking it. Her voice broke just a little in the high range, but she wasn’t half-bad. Good enough to carry your average church choir through a Christmas pageant, so of course we looked toward her—how could we not?—and the preacher said “Glory,” and when we turned back, the man had grown himself a hand. Or something had happened, for he now was waving five perfectly normal-looking fingers in the air, slow and steady in a big arc, while tears of gratitude ran down his cheeks.

His act wasn’t an immediate success. Gullible as we surely were, there were some among this Thursday night crowd who started calling out at once that maybe he had just switched hands. But he held up the other one too, making them fall to silence. And then someone ventured it was a false hand, one of those plastic kinds you can buy from a Halloween store, so the preacher instructed the man to descend the stage and walk among us, extending the palm of friendship. I still wasn’t sure. I knew enough to know the woman with the harp was a diversion and that they had done some kind of trick in that instant we all looked away, but the man, now moving slowly through the crowd, still weeping, shaking hands with each person he passed, scared me. I stood up from my bench and whirled around, all of a sudden feeling like I needed out of this tent and wondering where Daddy and Mama and Kevin had gone. 

But just there, right in my path, was a boy. The one I’d just seen on stage, pushing out the giant Bible. He looked like a younger version of the preacher and I realized he was probably his son. Before I could even say pardon, the boy leaned toward me. For a crazy second, I thought he was going to kiss me, but his lips passed mine and he brought them instead to my ear. Whispered, in a voice so breathy that I shuddered, “Twins.”

He pulled back. I stared at him. “Identical. Papa found them outside Cincinnati,” he said quietly. “One of them got his hand cut off in a brewery but other than that they’re just the same, so he starts to thinking . . . send the broken one out to blend with the crowd and hide the whole one in the base of the pulpit. Fools the rubes every time.”

I didn’t know that I liked him calling my neighbors rubes. It felt like just another way of saying I was a rube but he was probably right. The preacher and the harpist were passing a basket among the crowd and it seemed that the people in this tent were more than happy to pay their beer money or maybe even their power company money for a little more Jesus, which is quite a marketing accomplishment when you consider that we all got plenty of Jesus for free every Sunday morning, probably more than any of us particularly needed. The ability to sell Jesus in Oklahoma is not unlike the ability to sell snow to Eskimos or sand to the Arabs. It takes skill. 

“Time to go count the offerings,” the boy said, ducking his head apologetically. “But after that I got 43 minutes till the next show. Will you meet me? By the snocone stand?”

I was still trying to sort it out, how the handless man had seemed local but obviously wasn’t, and how that was the advantage of doing a stunt like this at a county fair, where everybody knew somebody but nobody knew everybody. I tried to think if the preacher had asked his name, and I believe that he did, but I don’t think he asked him what town he was from because that was the sticky point, wasn’t it? The man couldn’t have claimed to be from any real specific part of the county or somebody would have known they didn’t know him and a handless man is hard to hide in a small town. So that preacher had to ask him his name and how he’d hurt himself but be careful to ask him nothing else, and I guess that was my first encounter with the notion that would someday rule my life. That all men are really twins, with half of them broken and half of them whole, and they keep changing places so that a woman never knows, day to day, which one she’s dealing with.

“My name’s John Mark,” said the boy. “And I only told you about the twins because I can tell you’re special,” and maybe this all sounds like the start of a bad joke, but you have to remember that in 1963 Dusty Springfield hadn’t yet showed up to warn me about all that sweet talking and back walking. So I met John Mark by the sno-cone stand twenty minutes later, just as he’d asked. I let him take my hand and pull me behind the row of tents, away from the bright lights and the screams of the riders. He led me step-by-step deeper into a cornfield while his daddy whipped the good people of Ottawa County into a frenzy of repentance.

He asked me if I believed in love at first sight, if I thought it was possible for God to lead two people together, to bring them against all odds to the same spot in this big dark world. When I said I was a good girl, he’d come right back with “and I’m a good boy.” His fumbling, his uncertainty, convinced me this was true. John Mark faked his virginity as if it was blindness or a palsy of the legs. Something the Good Lord himself had brought us together to cure.

“We’re leaving town day after tomorrow,” he said, when it was over. It hadn’t taken long and it hadn’t hurt as much as I’d feared and it had even been fun, sort of, once I’d gotten over the shock that yes, he really meant to do that and yes, I really meant to let him. We were walking back toward the light of the midway by then, him still holding my hand, stroking my knuckles with his thumb. As we passed the sno-cone stand and snapped his fingers at the guy working there, which I see to be an obnoxious thing now, a half-grown boy snapping his fingers at a fully grown man. The sno-cone man didn’t ask me what kind I wanted, he just started drizzling cherry over the mound of shaved ice and then grape. It’s just what I would have asked for if I’d known to ask, but back then I didn’t know it was possible to mix two sno-cone flavors, to confuse your tongue that way. The same way I never would’ve guessed it was possible for a good girl to give herself to a complete stranger in a mowed-under cornfield and feel absolutely no regret about it. To feel, instead of the shame and pain she’d been told she’d feel, positively exhilarated, cleansed and holy. More saved and chosen on that Thursday night than she’d ever felt any Sunday morning in church, but you know what they say about God. He moves in mysterious ways.

John Mark didn’t get a sno-cone for himself. He took a slurp of mine as he passed it to me, probably more to keep the juice from sloshing out of the mouth of the cup than for any other reason, and then he gave me a kiss, cold and sticky, right on my forehead and went off again to take the money from the seven o’clock show. Because it would seem that the timing had worked out just perfect. That it took him exactly as long to deflower me as it had taken his daddy to save a tentful of souls and clear them out to make way for the second batch. 

The fairground felt a little emptier now, with a surprising part of the crowd streaming toward the revival tent. Without much else to do, I followed. He was back on the stage, the man I now thought of as John Mark’s daddy, and the handless man was once again in the crowd, standing off to the side. I felt proud of myself as I nudged my way into the congregation, which was at least twice as big and loud this time. Proud of myself for understanding more of the world than I’d understood even an hour earlier, and I made a vow to look harder this time, to not be distracted by the angel, to be watching at the pivotal moment where the healed twin slipped out of the pulpit and the wounded twin slipped in.

“Where’d you get that?” Kevin had worked his way through the crowd to my side.

“At the sno-cone stand. Where you think I got it?”

He was looking at me intently, as if maybe he was sensing some kind of difference. If anybody could, it would’ve been Kevin. “In the truck,” he reminded me, “you said that you were gonna save your money for rides and not eat anything.” “I changed my mind,” I told Kevin, and then I saw that Mama and Daddy were in the tent too. Daddy was standing in that way he sometimes did, with his legs apart and his arms folded across his chest. Not sure about this whole thing. Just waiting to be convinced, 99% sure that he wouldn’t be, but Mama was completely into it. Even though the show had barely started, even though the preacher was still with wheelchair boy, Mama already had thrown her hands in the air and closed her eyes. She was swaying, drunk on the Holy Spirit, which everybody knows is the worst kind of drunk a woman can be, and a few minutes later, when the man pulled his hand from the crease of the Bible, whole and holy, Kevin said “shit,” loud enough for several people around us to hear. But nobody shushed him. They were all thinking shit too, even those without the honesty to purely state it. So all that was left for me to do was hang back. Bite a hole in the bottom point of my sno-cone and suck the last little bit of goodness out, then toss what was left of the empty glittery ice toward a trash can. I missed, but I didn’t go fetch it and try again. This was the fair. Trash was part of the bargain and sure enough, no sooner did the healed man start walking through the crowd until John Mark was back to claim me, grabbing my hand and leading me into that same darkness, the path more familiar this time.

And I was happy to go with him, even though once you’ve seen a show, it’s easy to spot the con. You know exactly when to look.

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Elizabeth Wiley has published four novels under the name Kim Wright, including Last Ride to Graceland, which won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. She teaches at Charlotte Lit, a novel writing program, and manages Getting Bolder, a YouTube channel for senior creatives.