Four delighted creatures stood there, in that strange but somehow wonderful place that day—Bobby Bilbum, Kate Begley, Ben MacCarthy (even my inner voice said, Aaaah!), and Jerry the Giraffe. Within seconds a fifth called out for attention, squealing and scrabbling. Bobby opened the lowest door and out hurtled a small pink pig who began to paw Bobby’s dungaree legs.
“This is Sydney,” said Bobby. “Sydney is Jerry’s constant companion—when I’m not. And sometimes we all sleep together, don’t we, Sydney.” He held the pig close to his face and Sydney began to kiss and lick Bobby—who then handed Sydney to me.
I knew pigs; Mother scrubbed hers every two days with a long-handled yard broom; and I knew how to calm them, because I had often helped her deliver litters of a dozen and more. Sydney relaxed in my arms at once and Bobby Bilbum squealed in delight.
“This augurs well. Sydney likes very few people, oh my dears! We shall have such fun.”
Puzzlement began to cross Kate’s face like a frowning cloud.
“How would all this work?” she began to ask, but didn’t get far—because Jerry the Giraffe, who had eyelashes like back satin fringes, reached down and curled a long tongue across her right cheek. She stood; she all but froze. And then she began to blush.
“That,” she declared, “is one of the nicest things that has ever happened to me.”
I see now that I made a note on the margin of my private journal later that day—the single word healing. That remains my impression of that first encounter with Bobby Bilbum and “them”—it had a healing tone.
God knows I needed it. The train journey from Florida had been a slow, painful blur of loneliness, self-chastisement, and fighting off self-pity. So hurt did I feel at my own hands that I couldn’t even begin to assess what had happened.
And yet—would I ever have a moment as huge again in my life? I had seen my wife, had caught my breath at her beauty—not undimmed but richer now, and I loved her, loved her, loved her. But I’d learned that another man had replaced me, and that perhaps my parents had conspired against me. How could I come to terms with all that?
No wonder I was looking for anything that would heal me, anything at all—and at least I fared better than Kate, because Venetia was still alive. Under the word healing I now find that I scribbled another note, one of Kate’s sayings: “Where there’s Life there’s Hope.”
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I wish I could tell you more about Jerry the Giraffe. I wish I could tell you that he and I had long conversations—because I swear to God that he seemed fractions of time away from such a capability. And in those conversations, we’d have discussed his ancestry, in the wide-skied veldt of Africa, and he’d have told me how his grandparents would find the sweetest leaves on the tallest trees, and bend them down for him. I wish I could tell you that every now and then he’d turn to me and say, “D’you know what my biggest fear is, Ben? I dread getting a sore throat, and I’d love you to make some of that black currant jam gargle that your mother used to give you when you were a child.”
You have no idea how close Jerry and I came to such chatting. You have no idea how often I felt that he was dying to talk to me, ready to say, “Ben, leave Venetia or Kate or any girl that you want, leave her to me. I’ll flutter these eyelashes at her, and she’ll be ours like a snap.”
Yet, if I can’t tell you about these chats that Jerry and I had, I can tell you other wonderful things about him—not to mention his relationship with Sydney, and Sydney’s relationship with me.
Did you know, for example, that if you stroke a giraffe’s coat, it will after a moment feel much silkier than you’d expect? At first, it felt not unlike hide to my hand—as, indeed, I hoped it would; and then, as Jerry and I became closer, he felt much silkier.
And how long was that tongue? I have no idea. My guess is, when Jerry became a full-grown adult (he was eight months old when I met him), it could reach to a foot. In Kansas, I often put a delicious ball of leaves on the porch table just to see Jerry stalk over and flick the tongue out to get it.
He was growing, Bobby said, at about an inch a day, and had only recently stopped weeping.
“You mean real tears?” said Kate.
“A thug in the audience shot a dart into his mother at the circus. She died of a heart attack. My brother owns the circus.”
Bobby patted Jerry, and Jerry licked Bobby—and licked Kate, who was now smitten, and who reached up and put her arms around Jerry’s neck. In my arms Sydney grunted and gave a little wriggle of pleasure.
I wandered off a little to look back and gain some objectivity on this unexpected scenario. Kate and Bobby entered a deep conversation; Sydney wanted a number of extra kisses; a sense of healing did indeed begin to flow over me.
As to how all this might yet work I couldn’t begin to imagine—and had less of an idea when I strolled back and Kate told me, “If a giraffe hasn’t been weaned right, you have to provide twenty gallons of fresh milk for it every day. Jerry was only four months old when his mother died. He should have been with her for two years. He’s eight months now.”
I asked, “How tall will he grow? How old will he get?”
“Bobby said he can go up to twenty feet, and if we look after him correctly we could get him to maybe twenty-five or thirty.”
The use of “we” hadn’t escaped me—I had experience of Kate’s “negotiations” and I sensed that this “deal” had been done. How did I know? As you’ll have gathered by now, when Kate truly wanted something she never consulted—she went after it with a purpose blind to all other considerations—such as how she’d get a giraffe halfway across the United States.
“What does Jerry eat?” I asked.
“Fruit,” said Bobby. “And hay and grass and stuff like that.”
Kate said, “Sixty pounds of food a day. I can tell you anything you want to know about giraffes. I’ve been reading about them all my life.”
My inner voice had something to say to that: So maybe you can tell us where you’re going to get sixty pounds of grass and fruit and twenty gallons of milk a day as we drive a couple of thousand miles to Kansas—not to mention when we get there.
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Let me pause here for a moment and help you, Ben and Louise, to take stock. The year was 1946, and since I was born in 1914, I was, as I’ve said, thirty-two years old. By most standards of the time, I could consider myself too young for what I’d already been through, and most of it had been unexpected and impossible to predict. What had happened to me, and the things I’d done and the places I’d been had no precedent in the life from which I came. No ancestor had been recorded with such adventures; no emotional unhinging such as I’d known had ever been endured by somebody of my kin.
You have to look at that, said my inner voice to me one day around that time, as I mulled these thoughts. You have to look at why such events occur in your life; why what happens to you happens to you, so to speak.
My inner pest went on to say, If you’re to cope with the breathtaking error you’ve just made by turning your back on Venetia without exploring any possibility with her, you’d better grab any straw of help that comes your way.
So—I took a measure of comfort from the unusualness of my life thus far. In my eighteenth year, that is, my final year at school, I had belonged to a class of twenty boys. Since we’d all left school, none of them, not one, had been living a life a tenth as exciting as mine. Now it seemed as though I might be about to travel across America with a darling giraffe, a charming little pink pig, a fat man with a pigtail and no other hair of any kind, and a war widow who could tell the future and find missing people using a needle, thread, and a map. In my tact and newfound kindness I didn’t ask Kate whether she’d deployed her pendulum in recent times to search for Charles Miller.
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August 1946
From inside Jerry’s tall trailer, Bobby fetched three folding chairs and opened them in the sunshine. We sat with our backs to the trailer doors, and from time to tim
e Jerry’s warm tongue would curl down the back of my neck. Once or twice I had to hold up Sydney so that Jerry could lick her too—at which Sydney would shimmy a little and settle back into my arms with a tiny contented snort.
As in the past, Kate had shared none of her plans with me—the transport, the length of the journey, the feeding en route, what she intended to do when she got there. Now she seemed relieved at the prospect of Bobby traveling with us. It occurred to me that if she had him she didn’t need me—but I needed her.
You’re rudderless now, said my irritating voice. You have no anchor either. This is the best you’re going to get.
Bobby, who looked fifty but might easily have been thirty, had the gift of assumption. It can be enviable, that confidence; useful too; it allows you to go through life more or less unchallenged. As he now did, and began to lay out the route.
Neither Kate nor I questioned him. We didn’t ask him why he was traveling. We didn’t ask him how he could afford to drop everything, close his house, and come to Kansas. We didn’t ask him if he intended to stay out there.
It’s not that we didn’t want to—he never gave us the chance. As we sat there, he launched into the journey’s details—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas; to Lebanon, Kansas, he believed it would take near to thirteen hundred miles and that would be about two weeks. He believed that we shouldn’t rush, because Jerry and Sydney had delicate constitutions, and so had he.
“I’m a natural observer of life,” Bobby Bilbum intoned, “and here we have an odyssey of natural observation taking us across this great land. I myself have often traveled such roads, and I have always found them rewarding.”
Kate fidgeted, caught between looking back over her shoulder at her new love, Jerry, and trying to get a question asked of Bobby.
When he stopped for breath, she finally made it. “How will we arrange the food?” she said. “People won’t be used to feeding giraffes out there in the countryside.”
“Au contraire, my dear,” said Bobby. “Every place in which we stop for the night will have had the habit of feeding all kinds of animals.”
“Is there an American habit of keeping giraffes as pets?” I asked.
“Not at all, dear boy. But the route we shall follow is my brother’s old circus route, and I have traveled it many times.”
“Will we be meeting his circus?” Kate asked.
“I fear not,” said Bobby, “I fear not,” and I knew instinctively that we had encountered a mystery, which, large or small, might not be shared with us. Bobby felt like a man with many such mysteries.
He declared that it should take at least a week to prepare for this journey. In answer to our inquiries, he laid out a plan—of acquiring food and an additional trailer; of identifying the towns where we’d be stopping; of writing letters ahead, or, for the nearer states, sending telegrams, to secure accommodations with which he was familiar, and where the animals and ourselves could be assured of safe and good accommodation. And he had to close down this existence of his—“At least for some time,” he added.
For a man who seemed chaotic in his living arrangements, Bobby proved a true surprise—he had the organizational gifts of a four-star general. I watched him closely, and became so intrigued by his gift of effectiveness that I found a tactful way of asking him.
“Bobby, you have a talent for this road organization, haven’t you?”
I said this as I leaned against the wall in his stark kitchen, and I made sure that he saw me looking all around the disturbingly unconventional house.
“You’re saying to yourself, Ben, how can it be that a man who has no furniture, who can’t control his appetites, whose life is lived beyond the reach of his neighbors and their society—how can it be that such a man could be trusted to get a caravan of exotic animals and even more exotic people halfway across this great continent?”
I must have blenched or fidgeted or made some giveaway spontaneous movement.
“Don’t worry, Ben, I shan’t flinch with pain. In fact, you have liberated an answer in me that I have wanted to hear myself say aloud for some time.”
Among his many pies, Bobby had a favorite—apple and strawberry, with some rhubarb to give it edge. He cut a wedge that would have chocked an aircraft’s wheels and took his mouth to it, the cream whiskering his smooth cheeks. He chewed, his eyes aflame like a man who has love in his heart, and when he had motored through the pound and a half that the slice must have contained, he settled his ruby lips and delivered his explanation.
“Dear boy, when you travel with me to Kansas, you will see in me a creature without whom the world could not have happened, without whom the United States of America could never have been discovered or united. This creature stands as the criterion of Man’s endeavor. Without such a being, and you may be one yourself, the cave would still be our home, the jawbone of a donkey still our plowshare.”
He had become an orator, with an audience of one young Irishman and a small, wriggling pig.
“I refer to the figure of the traveler, the creature so restless that when he feels the world drawing in upon his shoulders, as though the walls of this room were to move inward to us right now—when he feels that vile constriction, he knows it is time to find the mountains. And the riverbanks. And the quiet corners of the lakes. And the little dusty towns where even when it rains they have the siesta.”
And now Bobby began to pace up and down.
“This figure, the traveler, he knows what power the road gives him—the power of never being owned, the power of discovery for himself. No matter that legions may have been there before him; it is the freshness of his eye that matters. To move, to travel, to find the point of the compass whence comes the freshest wind, and to turn one’s face upward to that wind—that is the shape of my spirit.”
Hand on heart, Bobby stood before me now, his other hand on my shoulder.
Sometimes—if not always—we have to depend on others to tell us the truth of ourselves. Bobby Bilbum, with his wobbling stomach and a jowl big as a briefcase, and his elegant, orotund speech, captured for me the essence of why I’d liked the road around Ireland. It had nothing to do with the outer world; it had to do with the landscapes within me, and my own mountains and rivers and lakes. No wonder I’ve so loved my Wandering Scholars. They understood the inner terrain that we all have—and the need to travel it.
I wrote down as much as I could remember of Bobby’s speech (it was much longer than I have quoted), and I relayed it to Kate.
“The Safety of Princes comes from Kings, Ben,” she said. And her reliance upon greeting-card sentiments told me how much pressure she felt at this brave new adventure. Nor did I understand at all what she meant.
I’d been watching her during that week of preparation, and I now didn’t like too much how she seemed in her spirit. Her grooming, her care of her clothes and hair—nothing wrong with any of that, but she seemed to speak to herself much oftener, muttering, arguing.
Though we lived in the same building as I had shared with her during our days at the waiting pen, she had taken an extra room next door, and I slept in there, on a makeshift bed of two armchairs. Twice in the first week I woke to hear noises from that room. The first night I heard Kate pacing, walking, and talking; if I hadn’t known better I’d have wondered if she had a visitor. On the second night the sounds had an upsetting familiarity—the same kind of sobbing that I’d heard for the first time one night at Lamb’s Head.
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Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas—that was the way that we went, as the song says. We took two days to pack, including a crate with a hinged door for Sydney, to which she took as to a luxury suite.
In our last act, before Bobby closed the doors of his house and locked the gates of his “estate,” as he called it, we walked Jerry into the wagon. He had plenty of room, and an ingenious structure of vertical curtain-rods enabled Bobby to make the roof of the cart a little higher every day as Je
rry grew.
Bobby drove; Kate sat beside him; I beside Kate. The truck, though now painted a bright cherry, had done circus duty, and flakes of red and yellow road-show paint peeked through here and there. It had also been fitted for sleeping, and the bench seat on which we sat folded backward in sections. Once we had cleared New York, I took advantage of the comfort and slept.
That Bobby Bilbum had some kind of road plan in his head soon became apparent—even though he followed no map of any kind. When I later assembled the journey, I made the following list of major “destination points,” to use Bobby’s term, and they add up to as near a straight line westward as he could have followed; Newark, New Jersey; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Wheeling, Ohio; Richmond, Indiana; Hannibal, Missouri, and St. Joseph, Kansas. His driving system, if I may call it that, entailed getting the truck to a steady forty miles an hour and holding it there, no matter what happened all around him.
In New Jersey, he swung carefully off the road. He took the truck down a narrow road, which became a deserted lane by a lake, and in the lights I saw the flash of water.
“Here,” Bobby said, “our caravan will rest. Please stay with dear Kate while I address the creatures.”
Kate didn’t wake, and I opened the satchel that Bobby had given us. It contained a bottle of milk and two sandwiches; we would eat and drink nothing else on the road except milk and sandwiches; we bought the milk in little country stores miles from anywhere, and the bread and the meat for the sandwiches.
When I’d finished eating, I eased from the truck and went to find Bobby. He and Jerry were standing side by side while Jerry, front legs splayed wide as a door, drank from a creamery urn that came up to my waist. From the crate, Sydney began to grunt, and I reached in, put on her collar and leash, and took her out.