Jenny Plague-Bringer(12)

“No!” Juliana jumped back, not wanting to infect her with the demon plague. “I can manage, thank you.”

She climbed up into the straw-littered wagon and sank into a back corner, as far from the family as possible. She drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them.

The three children stared at her. The crippled boy seemed the youngest, but his brother and sister couldn’t have been older than nine or ten years.

“Are you in the circus?” asked the boy with the bad leg.

“Yes,” she told him.

“Are you a clown?” the older boy asked.

“Or an acrobat?” the girl asked, hopping to her filthy bare feet. “I can do flips. Want to see?”

“I’ll burn your hide if you step down from this wagon, Izzy May!” the woman snapped. “Sit back like you were.”

Izzy May quickly sat down beside her brothers, next to a trunk roped into place. The mother sat on another large trunk. It looked like they planned to be away from home overnight.

“I’m nothing special,” Juliana said. “I work a sugar shack.”

“What does that mean?” the girl asked.

“I make cotton candy,” she told them, and the kids looked very impressed.

“Do you have some?” asked the boy with the bad leg.

“Sorry, I don’t,” she said, and the kids immediately lost interest. Juliana turned to their mother. “The next town isn’t a very long way, is it? You’re returning tonight, aren’t you?”

“These can last for days,” the woman replied. “We won’t be back until the Lord sends us.”

“I have to be back for my show tomorrow.”

“Oh, honey,” the woman replied. “If the Lord wants you back here, He will find a way.”

Juliana couldn’t argue with that.

The wagon finally started to move. A train of half a dozen crowded wagons rolled out of town, kicking up a cloud of brown dust from the dry dirt road. Juliana tilted her hat forward to keep it out of her eyes, but the rest of her was soon covered in earth. Her sweat under the hot sun slowly converted it to a thin sheen of mud.

During the long, slow ride, the children peppered Juliana with endless questions about the carnival. She described how cakes were fried and cotton candy was spun, detailed each of the games on the midway from the ring-toss to the rifle-shoot to the test-your-strength. She explained that she did not have her own elephant or giraffe. She told them about each of the characters in the sideshow, except for the attraction behind the final curtain, Juliana Blight. She explained how they jumped from town to town by rail.

In time, they reached the tent of the revival, almost as big as a circus tent, pitched on a grassy pasture by the wide, slow Mississippi River.

People had flocked in from all around, judging by the wagons and tents jammed in on either side of the road. There were even a few automobiles and trucks. The center of the action was the single large tent, from which she could hear pained shouting, music, and stomping. It sounded louder than a tavern on a Saturday night.

Juliana thanked the family for the ride and quickly scurried out of the wagon. She didn’t want the kids following her around, asking more questions about candy, magic tricks, and carnival games, because then she would have to make an effort not to kill them.

She drew her arms in tight around her as she walked toward the revival tent, trying to avoid any contact with the ever-thicker crowd, where people didn’t mind doing a little elbowing and jostling. She hoped her gloves, dress, and headwear were enough to protect them from her.

The revival traveled the same general railroad circuit as the carnival, so they often saw each other’s posters in the towns they visited, though they’d never pitched tent in the same town at the same time. There wouldn’t have been enough money for either group.

Juliana had heard of miraculous healings at this particular revival. Naturally, she’d first assumed that the performances were trickery, either making people feel momentarily better using dramatic stage techniques, or else the healed people were just shills in cahoots with the preacher.

However, she’d heard repeated stories from town to town. An old blind man who could now see, a World War I veteran who’d regrown an ear he’d lost in combat. A woman who’d been coughing up blood, dying of consumption and too weak to walk, who was now well and could take care of her children and work around the farm.

After hearing one miraculous story after another about locals in one town after another, Juliana had begun to believe something magical might actually be happening at that revival. She’d become determined to visit it the next time it passed close to the carnival. With the carnival shut down by local authorities for Sunday worship, it was the perfect time for Juliana to sneak off and see the revival for herself.