Finley went scooting down towards the ark, letting the end of it drag behind him. They came back to the truck and began unloading the rest of it on the ground.
I was close enough to the yellow trucks to read the signs. They said “Burke’s Shows.” It was a carnival! Going to be set up right on Uncle Sagamore’s farm.
Fourteen
I looked behind them. There was more coming. And some big yellow trailers with “Burke’s Shows” on the side of them. And then some cars. And then a big shiny aluminum house trailer. And then more cars. They was just pouring down the hill from the gate with dust boiling up everywhere. They ran right on past the house and across the cornfield, and when they hit the edge of the timber they stopped and men began to jump out. They took off into the trees.
They’d sure find Miss Harrington now, I thought. It looked like the whole world had turned out to look for her.
I ducked across when there was an open space between cars so I could get through, and ran to where Pop was. He was still waving his arms and motioning to the drivers of the trucks. They was backing them here and there, and as soon as one was in the right spot men jumped down and began unloading the big tents. Other men had axes and was cutting down the little trees and bushes in the way.
“Hey, Pop,” I yelled as I came up, “where did the carnival come from?”
He looked around at me, and went on motioning to one of the drivers. “Careful of them cars, Billy,” he says. “Don’t get run over.”
“But, Pop,” I says, getting out of the way so a truck could swing up past me, “how’d they happen to bring a carnival way out here?”
“Don’t bother me now,” he says. “I’ll talk to you after a while. And you watch out for them cars.”
I was jumping up and down, I was so excited about the carnival. Sig Freed was excited too, and he began running around in big circles, getting in the way.
“Get that dawg out of here before he gets run over,” Pop yelled. “Go on down to the lake or somewhere. You can come back after it’s all set up.”
I could see the gate from here, and when I looked up the hill I saw Uncle Sagamore. He was standing there beside it, with all the cars going past him. I could see some sort of sign nailed up on one of the posts, but this far away I couldn’t tell what it said. I called Sig Freed and we ran up that way to see what he was doing.
When I got a little closer, I could make out the sign. It said “Noonan Farm. Parking $1.00” Uncle Sagamore was standing across from it, on the drivers’ side of the cars, with a flour sack. Every time a driver would turn out of the road and in through the gate he would hand Uncle Sagamore a dollar. Uncle Sagamore would drop it in the flour sack and wave for him to go on.
It seemed to me like a dollar was pretty high to pay for parking way out here in the country where there was thousands of acres, and I wondered why a lot of them didn’t just drive on down the road and pull off somewhere further along. Heck, they only charged fifty cents at most race tracks.
Then, when I got up to the gate I saw why they was all turning in. The road going on past was blocked. Uncle Sagamore’s truck was broke down right square in the middle of it less than a car’s length past where our ruts turned off through the gate. It looked like he had tried to turn it around and had got lodged between the trees growing up on both sides. It was jammed in for fair, with the front axle against a stump on one end and the tail-gate between two trees on the other. And on top of that, one of the back wheels was missing, like he’d had a flat tire and started to change it. There just wasn’t any way you could move that truck without cutting down the trees on both sides or taking it apart and carrying it away in a wheelbarrow.
And they couldn’t get out of the road anywhere back the other way for at least a hundred yards. There was solid