Hob Broun - Odditorium

“Was I ill?”

“Looked the picture of it to me. That’s why I let you rest this late.”

Mrs. Daigle left the room but came back five minutes later with a breakfast tray: a segmented grapefruit topped with honey, two slices of dry wheat toast and a mug of some dank herb tea. Tildy dabbed grapefruit juice on her eyelids. From nape to skull, she ached.

Lucien had refused all nourishment. He seemed aware only of large shapes. His friend sat by with a jar of pale green salve that she applied now and then to his chest; and when his wheezing built into an “Oh Jesus,” she would repeat after him. Little hands curled against her throat, she turned to face his daughter and told her not to worry, that it would be soon.

It was a sticky hot day, but Tildy went out in it anyway. She took a long, circular drive on back roads where she could run at 25 with nobody behind her. On the way home, driving into the sun, she nearly struck a black dog that leaped out from some hedges; a little girl came screaming out of the driveway and threw a stick at the car. After that she stopped at an air-conditioned bar and without really thinking about it, downed four straight-up bourbons.

Tildy had no sense of how tanked she was until she got back to the house. Swaying through the kitchen, she embraced Joby Daigle and asked her to spend the night.

“You got the shivers and shakes all on you, that’s all right,” she said, patting Tildy on the shoulder. “You’re entitled.”

Tildy backed away, stood by the screen door looking out. “It’s not that I’m afraid. Not about … Maybe it’s this house in the dark. I hear things.”

“You gonna be fine. We’ll have a little fruit salad, play some bid whist if you like. S’posed to cool off later on. We’ll make it on through till mornin’, long away as that must seem to you. And maybe there’ll be peace by then. Did I mention Lucy turned his back on dinner? He was all drawed up in a knot. Like his face was tryin’ to meet with his knees.”

Tildy pushed the screen door, let it smack shut. Then she did it again. “He’s getting himself ready to go. Is that what you think?” Mrs. Daigle didn’t say anything. “I do too.” She pushed the door again and dodged the backswing as she stepped outside.

But there was no cooling off as the night wore on. Tildy fanned herself with a paper plate. Mrs. Daigle told a long story about a canoe trip she’d taken with her husband in the spring of 1962. Mr. Daigle had been bitten by a turtle. The refrigerator kicked on and made an intermittent noise like someone chewing aluminum foil. Outside, a tow truck, or something like it, went by with its yellow flashers going. Mrs. Daigle recalled the first time she had given Lucy a bath and how he’d tried to pull her in there with him. Tildy wished she had some more whiskey.

Somewhat later, after the brushing of teeth and the distribution of pillows, they went in for a look at the old man. Slack-jawed, pale tongue jutting, he was only half asleep with the sheet bunched around his middle. Slowly, one by one, his fingers rose and fell as though he was doing a piano exercise.

“You go on ahead, child,” Mrs. Daigle said. “I’m gonna make one last try, see if he’ll take a little somethin’ with tea.”

Tildy was first up the following morning. On her way to put on the kettle she peered into her father’s room, saw his face waxen and gray, and knew it was over. She awoke Mrs. Daigle, who wept vigorously but quietly. Then she dialed the police. They promised an ambulance within the hour.

“I hope you know,” Mrs. Daigle stammered, “you was the only thing in this world he’d admit to lovin’.”

What Tildy did not know was that less than twelve hours ago, wanting only to deliver both Lucien and his daughter from further pain, Mrs. Daigle had administered to him, along with the tea, three seeds of the castor bean plant. The seeds contained an extremely toxic substance, called ricin, that brought on circulatory collapse.

The ambulance driver wanted to know where he was supposed to take the body and Tildy didn’t know what to tell him. She got out the Ville Platte yellow pages, phoned the mortuary with the largest display ad, and asked what they were charging for a no-frills cremation.

That upset Mrs. Daigle no end.

“You can’t do it. That man done lived his whole life in the light of the Church. He held on to that faith all the way through, even when he seen there weren’t goin’ to be no miracle for him. He’s jes got to have the rites. And a proper burial.”

“He’s dead now. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You ain’t meanin’ what you say. Grief can cloud the mind.”

“If you want to say some words over him, go right ahead. But he was my father and he stays with me.” At a low trajectory, Tildy flung herself between the long-ago death and the one newly fetched up; Harlene’s floating blue doll-face, Lucien’s drawn mummy mask. She had only one offering to make. “When I blow this town, I won’t be coming back. And I’m not going to leave him behind.”

Tildy followed the ambulance into Ville Platte and completed arrangements for what Mr. LeBeau, the funeral director, referred to as “high temperature carbonization of the remains.” At the house that afternoon, she received a call from a real estate agent to whom it seemed Mr. LeBeau was in the habit of supplying information on new vacancies. He wanted to find out her asking price. Tildy said she would not object if he went ahead and got what he could for the place, and gave him her address and phone number in Florida.

Lucien came out of the oven the next morning and Tildy was on her way. Benny and the girls were waiting on her in Lydell, but she was pointed in another direction. They could all go hang. She was headed on home with her daddy riding beside her in a burnished canister of bronze.

STRAINED THROUGH LOW WOOLPACK clouds, sunlight was still intense. It penetrated the dusty windows of the house like a flashlight shined into a laundry hamper. The house was a squat bunker of lime green cinder blocks planted carelessly amid scrub. Tildy was seldom on time with the mortgage payments. From the rear, looking out the kitchen door across the parched yard to a chicken coop now serving insectiverous beasts as cabaña and snack bar, it was easy to believe the world was flat. The overwhelming suggestion was of landlocked terrain, of a desolate outback where old buckaroos went to die.

Gibsonton had been a winter home for circus and carny people since the 1920s when a cookhouse operator named Eddie LeMay pulled off the road one evening just as the sun was setting over the Alafia River. He liked what he saw. “This is it, honey,” he told his wife. “Get out the bedrolls.”

There wasn’t much there at the time: a few shacks, a path through sweetgums to the river, strangler figs growing over everything like flowering pythons. But joined by a handful of colleagues the following year, Eddie persuaded J. B. Gibson, a Tampa land speculator who owned the riverfront where they were squatting, to put in a drainage system and sell off a few lots. The next year a large family of Italian acrobats moved down, and a deaf old man with a pet elephant, and two contortionist sisters who’d once spent a long weekend with P. T Barnum at a spa in Red Bank, New Jersey.

Each year since, from late October to Thanksgiving, the folks have streamed into Gibsonton — pitchmen, palm readers, barkers, animal trainers, jointees, “human oddities”—to take up residence in their cottages and housetrailers until it’s time to go back on the road again in spring. The pace of life is languid, the atmosphere blasé. A man with a pair of miniature legs sprouting from his chest can walk down the street without drawing a second glance, and the town’s postmistress, now retired, weighs just over eight hundred pounds.