The Book of Speculation: A Novel

Peabody granted Amos an amount of time to sort himself out, but after two towns with Amos doing little more than cleaning up after the animals, Peabody pulled him aside. “Work, Amos.” He sat Amos down by the accounts table and mussed his hair, which without the benefit of a head scarf had started to mat.

“Idleness is our enemy and never did fill a man’s purse.” At Amos’s puzzled expression, he added, “Money has a way of changing one’s outlook. We shall find you something. Enterprise, my boy. Nothing leavens the spirit like enterprise.” Beneath the shade of his hat, Peabody’s eyes were tired. Amos knew what would come.

The Wild Boy cage reappeared. Evangeline stood beside him when the velvet curtain was drawn back from the bars. She had only known Amos as the fortune-teller; he’d preferred it that way. He pulled his arm from hers.

Peabody touched a glove to the boy’s shoulder. “For the moment, until we are able to confabulate a vocation for you.”

“Is there truly nothing else?” Evangeline asked.

“Your water act is hardly fit for two,” Peabody coughed. “As it were Amos remains a Wild Boy without compare. He was glorious. It may be enlightening for you to see him at the height of his powers. Quite the thing.”

But desperation made the act fearsome. Women screamed and fainted more than they had before, and the troupe began to give Amos a wide berth. Money came as Peabody had promised, though the draw was less. “The joy has gone,” Peabody said after the closing of a lean show. “The showmanship, my fine fellow, is not what it could be.”

Amos agreed. Vanishing was the only part of the act that was tolerable. When he let his body listen to the breath of the world and fade away, in those precious moments the ache left him; it returned in the dark, when he held Evangeline tightly and remembered Benno’s words.

After Amos was pelted with rotted fruit in Wellston, Peabody spoke to him while still in the cage. Amos drew a shirt over his head to cover his nakedness. Things that had once been delightful—the cold iron bars, the straw against his skin—were now irksome; he missed the intimate work of a seer, and the privacy. He missed the language he used with his teacher, and being looked at without fear. Peabody sat beside him, an air of sorrow about him, unmindful of the sawdust and dirt that clung to his clothing. “I miss her as well. I find there is an emptiness.” He tapped his chest near his heart. “Madame Ryzhkova had an excellent presence about her. But,” he punctuated, pointing to the cage ceiling, “move on, we must.”

Amos grimaced, but nodded. Everything about Peabody always seemed ready to burst, whereas his own insides seemed to be forever shrinking. He touched his cheek to Peabody’s shoulder, then removed himself from the wagon, through the trapdoor, as he had when he’d been a child.

That night he buried his face in Evangeline’s hair and she held him, knowing she had driven Ryzhkova off as surely as she’d murdered her grandmother.

*

Evangeline’s stomach began to round. They did not speak of it until it could not be ignored.

*

“You must teach me,” she said to Amos as they traveled south. She rested her head against his shirtsleeve. In one hand he held the reins of the horse pulling their wagon; with the other he traced Evangeline’s neck. At her question his eyes strayed from the road.

“To read the tarot,” she said. “We would make a handsome pair.”

A wheel sent a stone spinning off into the brush. Roads were never easy except in more worn places outside of New York and Philadelphia, but Amos noted every pit and root now that each bump jostled the swell of Evangeline’s belly. He shook his head. Ryzhkova lived in the cards, the last touches of her that he could not bring himself to clear away. Each time he held them he felt a bit of her old humor, the brush of her crooked thumb on his hand. They were too private to work with, too dear.

“Watching you play savage is unbearable.” Evangeline shifted and began to search through the deck nestled between them on the seat board. “It isn’t you. Perhaps when you were a boy, but not now. It’s watching you dying,” she said, showing him a card with an impaled man. “It kills me, too.”

He looked back to the road, thinking of the things he’d meant to tell her: that he’d dreamt of leaving with her; that he wished to build them a house—have chickens, perhaps a dog, as he’d always liked them. He feared, too, that just as she had come in the night she would one day leave him. Perhaps it would be best if, like Peabody, they continued to move. He’d thought many times over Benno’s words, but did not tell her of it. He could not ask her of her past, not when he knew nothing of his own.

Evangeline tapped the cards together and smacked them against Amos’s leg, demanding an answer.