When Calvin had been with the carnival for ten months the show took to the southland, and the day they pulled into Atlanta he helped raise the tents and then told the foreman he had to go away for a few days and he took a bus and sat in the back until it arrived in Justin.
Sarah had died several years before and he had already cried for her, but he wanted to see where she was buried. But he couldn’t find his grandmother’s grave. When he sought out the preacher that night the man grumbled because he was tired from a long day of picking peaches, but he got a flashlight and came with Calvin and searched until he found the grave, small and unmarked and—what Sarah had never been in life—in the charity corner.
The next day Calvin hired a man to help him. There was no open plot next to his mother but there was one not too far away, and he and the other man dug a grave. They moved his grandmother. The box in which she was buried crumbled some when they lifted it, but it was in surprisingly good shape after two years in the wet red clay. He stood there that evening as the preacher rolled the fine-sounding biblical phrases into the darkening sky. Somewhere high, high up, a bird hovered proudly. An eagle, he decided; but totally different from the captive carnival bird that had died. This one moved so free through air it owned that as he watched it he began to cry. He realized that by relegating the old nigger lady to a pauper’s grave, Osborne Justin, attorney, town clerk, elderly practical joker and inheritor of certain traditional roles, had had the last laugh after all. Calvin left money with the preacher to pay for a stone and then he took the bus back to the carnival. He never used his middle name again. From that day on he was simply Calvin J. Priest.
When the American economy fell apart he was twenty-two years old. He had seen the country, its width and its depth, the giant cities and the sleepy little towns, and he had found that he loved it desperately. He knew it was a country that didn’t really belong to him, but seventeen hundred dollars of it did, wrapped securely in the brown sock.
The market crashed while the carnival was beginning its autumn southern tour, and as businesses failed and corporations fell the deepening of the depression could be read in the dwindling attendance at each performance, until in Memphis, Tennessee, the show performed to eleven people and failed.
He got himself a room there and spent the fall season trying to figure out what he was going to do next. At first he just loafed. It had been a dry summer and he spent lots of his days fishing with a pitchfork and gunny sack, an art once taught to him by a roustabout from Missouri. He would go to the exposed bottom of the receded river and violate the dry cracked upper mud until he came to the rich wet underneath, where the catfish had buried themselves like fat black jewels until the winter rains. He harvested them like potatoes and lugged the bag full of horned pout home to help his landlady skin and clean them, and she fried the sweet white meat and the whole boardinghouse ate and sang hosannas to his skill with rod and reel. At night he lay in his bed and read in the newspaper about white men who used to be millionaires jumping out of the windows of skyscrapers, while he put his hand into his pocket and stroked the money like a man absentmindedly touching his sex, trying to decide whether to go North.