The Toynbee Convector

Grandfather shut his eyes again but it was too late. The cousins rose up behind his gaze. “We’re fools!” said Tom. “Why bother with old times! New is right there! That girl! Yes?”

“Yes!” whispered Cecy. “Listen! I’ll put Grandpa’s mind over in her body. Then bring her mind over to hide in Grandpa’s head! Grandpa’s body will sit here straight as a ramrod, and inside it well all be acrobats, gymnasts! fiends! The conductor will pass, never guessing! Grandpa will sit here. His head full of wild laughter, unclothed mobs while his real mind will be trapped over there in that fine girl’s head! What fun in the middle of a train coach on a hot afternoon, with nobody knowing.”

“Yes!” said everyone at once.

“No,” said Grandpa, and pulled forth two white tab lets from his pocket and swallowed them.

“Stop him!” shouted William.

“Drat!” said Cecy. “It was such a fine, lovely, wicked plan.”

“Good night, everybody,” said Grandpa. The medicine was working. “And you—” he said, looking with gentle sleepiness at the young lady across the aisle. “You have just been rescued from a fete, young lady, worse than ten thousand deaths.”

“Beg pardon?” The young lady blinked.

“Innocence, continue in thy innocence,” said Grand pa, and fell asleep.

The train pulled into Cranamockett at six o’clock. Only then was John allowed back from his exile in the head of that robin on a fence miles behind.

There were absolutely no relatives in Cranamockett willing to take in the cousins. At the end of three days, Grandfather rode the train back to Illinois, the cousins still in him, like peach stones. And there they stayed, each in a different territory of Grandpa’s sun-or-moonlit attic keep.

Tom took residence in a remembrance of 1840 in Vienna with a crazed actress, William lived in Lake County with a flaxen-haired Swede of some indefinite years, while John shuttled from fleshpot to fleshpot, ‘Frisco, Berlin, Paris, appearing, on occasion, as a wicked glitter in Grandpa’s eyes. Philip, on the other hand, locked himself deep in a potato-bin cellar, where he read all the books Grandpa ever read.

But on some nights Grandpa edges over under the covers toward Grandma.

“You!” she cries. “At your age! Git!” she screams.

And she beats and beats and beats him until, laughing in five voices, Grandpa gives up, fells back, and pretends to sleep, alert with five kinds of alertness, for another try.

The Last Circus

Red Tongue Jurgis (we called him that because he ate candy red-hots all the time) stood under my window one cold October morning and yelled at the metal weathercock on top of our house. I put my head out the window and blew steam. “Hi, Red Tongue!”

“Jiggers!” he said. “Come on! The circus!”

Three minutes later I ran out of the house polishing two apples on my knee. Red tongue was dancing to keep warm. We agreed that the last one to reach the train yard was a damnfool old man.

Eating apples, we ran through the silent town.

We stood by the rails in the dark train yard and listened to them humming. Far away in the cold dark morning country, we knew, the circus was coming. The sound of it was in the rails, trembling. I put my ear down to hear it traveling. “Gosh,” I said.

And then, there was the locomotive charging on us with fire and tight and a sound like a black storm, clouds following it. Out of boxcars red and green lanterns swung and in the boxcars were snorts and screams and yells. E

lephants stepped down and cages rolled and everything mixed around until, in the first tight, the animals and men were marching, Red Tongue and I with them, through the town, out to tine meadowlands where every grass blade was a white crystal and every bush rained if you touched it.

“Just think, RX,” I said. “One minute there’s nothing there but land. And now look at it.”

We looked. The big tent bloomed out like one of those Japanese flowers in cold water. Lights flashed on. In half an hour there were pancakes frying somewhere and people laughing.

We stood looking at everything. I put my hand on my chest and felt my heart thumping my fingers like those trick shop palpitators you buy for two bits. All I wanted to do was look and smell.

“Home for breakfast!” cried RT and knocked me down so he got a head start running. “Tuck your tongue in and wash your face,” said Mom, looking up from her kitchen stove.

“Pancakes!” I said, amazed at her intuition.

“How was the circus?” Father lowered his newspaper and looked over it at me.

“Swell,” I said. “Boy!”