“Missus Pelham.” He dropped her hand. “Picked a pretty day to come out see the show.” He waved his hand as if indicating not only the surrounding fairgrounds—the livestock tents and permanent exhibition buildings, the small neat grandstand above the harness-racing oval and the clawed field of the ox-pull, the thrum of the afternoon crowd, the smell of food fried or sugared or both, the giddy quaver of children’s voices set free, the cries of stock and fowl from the tents—all this but also the day itself, his hand rising to include the sweep of sky, the dry hot air of late summer. As if it were all that and not himself she’d come to see. As if he were ancillary, even merely an accident.

“I heard you was here,” she said, not diverted. “I haven’t seen another colored person since eighteen and sixty-five. I know there’s a family down to Grafton and some others up round Burlington. Likely some I haven’t heard about. But I haven’t seen a one of em. Where you from?”

“I seen you out in the tent, figured you wasn’t just after watching me bend iron. I been doing that the last year or two. Before that, Brooklyn, New York.”

“I mean before that.”

“Uhh,” he said. “Down home.” He spat. They began walking along the backside of the midway, the tents of the freaks, among them Siamese twins which were nothing more than a pair of Holstein calves floating in a tank of liquid in eternal embrace. Stepping around tent pegs, chairs with the seat caved or gone where the performers rested or took air or privacy between appearances. They hadn’t talked about it, they just walked, walking as they did the slow outer perimeter of the fair, the hidden backside. Once moving the boy loosed himself from his mother and went ahead, staying in sight but darting in and out of the ropes, up close to the freaks before veering away, not looking back but seeming to know his range.

Walking, she reached and touched the roped scarring of his back. “Seems to me, you too young to have that.”

His voice still almost amiable he said, “Some of us, ain’t never too young. You, you left there and likely think everything changed overnight. And look at you. You was in the house. You was in the house all right.”

She said, “We was town people. Wasn’t but four of us, colored anyhow.”

He looked down at her then. “Your mama must’ve been a pretty girl.”

“They was evil everywhere, town or farm.”

He nodded, walked on a few feet and said, “South Carolina low country. Rice, some indigo still then, cotton on the higher ground. I was in the field time I was six—seven.”

“My people come up from the same place, North Carolina. I never seen it but down along the coast. Big rice country there, the home place.”

“Your people.”

She looked at him. “Both sides. All the same thing, comes to me.”