Chapter 1

1910
Gravitas, Wisconsin

     To call Gravitas a town would be doing it a favor it didn’t deserve. It was barely a place in-between two places that were actually on the map, two places so important they needed a highway between them. That highway did what most highways do, it crossed another one, and that other road led to a bunch of farms in every direction. I grew up on one of them. It only made sense to put a feed store and a granary and a post office at that very intersection between those bigger towns. The granary at the intersection was called the Gravitas Granary because it was once owned by a Greek guy named Gravitas who went back to Greece. Soon there was the Gravitas General Store where you could buy clothes made for you by someone else, the Gravitas Barber Shop where you could get someone else to cut your hair or even shine your shoes, and the Gravitas Diner where you could get someone else to cook your food. My daddy thought these establishments were a waste of money because any damn fool who couldn’t make their own clothes or cut their own hair or shine their own shoes or cook their own food didn’t deserve to live.
     That’s how daddy talked. There were a lot of people in his eyes didn’t deserve to live, but his favorites were the local busybodies coming round our farm trying to tell him how he should do his business or raise his family. My main memory of my daddy is him chasing varmints away from our home with his shotgun. That’s what he called them. Varmints. I wouldn’t make this up.
     My mom and dad called me Joshua so that’s what you can call me. 
     My ma was Valerie and she was from Switzerland and that’s all I know about her. She didn’t talk much about the old country. Most people called her Val, and she ran the house while daddy ran the farm.
     The only thing you could call my daddy other than Mr. Porter was ornery. He fought against the granary being built, then used it more than anyone else. He even fought against the school and lost, thank God. When they finished construction of the Gravitas Schoolhouse he tried to stop me from going. Weren’t no government folk going to take his boy away from his chores just to learn a bunch of junk he didn’t need to know. I missed a lot of school at first. Ma finally won that battle just to get me out of the house because I was pestering her so. I don’t know how momma put up with my daddy. Weren’t nowhere she could send him, but she could just send me to school.
     One day my daddy sent me to drop off a load of fresh alfalfa at the granary, get money for it, then go to the feed store and pick up a whole bunch of special chicken feed. I’d done it before so it weren’t no challenge.
     It was about fifteen miles both ways and I was taking my time because it was such a beautiful day. It was summer, the horse was lazy, I was lazy, and in a few months I would be sixteen years of age and a freshman at Grover Cleveland High School which was about 25 miles away in one of those towns that was actually on the map. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. New people, maybe a girl, someone different from Maisy or Dortheen or any of the other chicks around here. I call ‘em chicks cause they remind me of chicks, but they was really girls.
     I got to the state highway and took my usual right. For some reason there was a ruckus, a whole bunch of people gathered around the feed store where there was this funny, smooth talking guy in a fancy suit who was giving quite a speech about something he called the marvel of the century. Somebody mentioned the new century started only ten years ago and somebody else shouted out everywhere but here and everyone laughed because they was right. Looking around Gravitas, I couldn’t see nothing or nobody that hadn’t been there at least ten years. Didn’t look like no new century to me.
     This guy in the suit wasn’t like anyone I’d ever seen before. He sure wasn’t from around here with his fancy clothes and strange way of talking. He stood in front of his wagon which he parked in the empty lot next to the feed store. He explained that he was actually on his way from one town to another when he broke a wheel in Gravitas. It was going to take a day to fix so since he was here anyway, he’d do us all the big favor of setting up his Kinematographic Theater. It was like one of them gospel shows where everyone got their souls saved only there weren’t no preacher, just a big tent with some chairs and a machine he called a projector, which looked sort of like a lantern with a crank on the side. He set it up at the back of the tent and he said it was going to do something we wouldn’t believe, it was going to make living pictures on the wall of that tent.
     I’d seen those cartoon flip-books that the little girls had in school but they were for little girls. This guy was acting like it was a gift from God Almighty or something. From now on, he said, you could read a book, or if you felt like being sociable you could gather with some friends for a meal, take in a play, attend a concert, or maybe even go to a theatrical presentation of projected photographs that moved. Sounded pretty stupid to me till I remembered I’d seen something like it at the circus, sort of a magic trick. Well shoot if I don’t like magic tricks. Though I knew I was dawdling and I shouldn’t oughta dawdle, I filled my daddy’s cart with feed, strapped it down, and hung around anyway to see what was going to happen next.
     This guy in the fancy suit waited for the sun to go down before he started projecting. He was using the side of the tent for a screen and you could see it from outside and damned if it weren’t pictures that moved but it was sort of fuzzy and you couldn’t read it because the words were all backwards so I wanted to get in the tent to see it right like. The man in the suit asked me for a nickel, just a nickel, so I searched my pockets and realized I had spent every penny of daddy’s money at the feed store. I was forbidden from getting my shoes shined or eating at the diner or buying anything so it didn’t even occur to me to save five pennies for the ride home.
     Buck turned out to be a nice guy and all. His name was Buck. He said to call him Buck Fifty since that’s what he needed to break even. I didn’t know what he was talking about. When Buck saw me get back in the cart to go home, he came up and said “Where you going, farm boy?”
     I didn’t think he meant nothing by it. I was a farm boy, so I said “Back to the farm, city boy.”
     He thought that was funny. He must have guessed I didn’t have a nickel because the next thing he did was offer to let me in for free if I’d help him out some. I said sure, he held open the flap, and I walked right into the tent for the show. 
     There was a light shining from the Kinematographic projector and you could stick your fingers in it and make a dog that looked like he was barking which I thought was pretty entertaining but everyone else didn’t and asked me to stop. I sat right down front and suddenly it weren’t no screen no more but a window into another world and in that world I was sitting somewhere in some other place, some town with a lot of people who were walking around. There were lots of carts and horses and them new Model T automobiles on the street. The buildings were real tall and the title said New York City and I could read it now because I was facing the right way. I sat there watching these people in the city and it’s like I was there, just sitting somewhere, looking out at the real world, but a different real world, a world where things were not what they seemed, a strange and jerky world where something was missing. I know it sounds stupid but it took me a while to realize what it was. There weren’t no color. Didn’t matter. Color would have been too much.
     Then it changed to somewhere else, I think it was Paris cause there was this building in it called the Eiffel Tower and right away it felt like I was really there, sitting at a café with all these people walking around even though I knew I’d never been to France. Man, these moving pictures were something else. I was enjoying the tarnation out of them.
     Suddenly there was this crusty old coot sitting around a campfire telling stories. I guess his name was Isaiah because the title said “Isaiah’s Tall Tales of the West” and it was about some bad guys like pa told me about. I’ll never forget it because a bunch of cowboys? They was putting handkerchiefs over their faces because they was planning some sort of robbery. They jumped on their horses and rode away just like I do when I jump on my horse and ride away so I was thinking like them could-a been me.
     Then the picture changed but it was still the same story. How did they do that? Weird. Now it’s like I was sitting in the middle of some railroad track somewhere and there was this train off in the distance and they was robbing it and I could see it coming. I know they tell me I must be wrong but I swear I could hear that train coming too, the rhythm of the engine, the ground shaking, my mind playing tricks, the train getting closer and closer till I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t know what kind of magic this was or how it worked or if I was really in another place, far from home, seeing things as they really were, or if was I just sitting in a tent somewhere with a magic window projecting me into another world and maybe I could climb into that world or maybe even things from that world could show up in this world, just come bursting from the screen, a bunch of Parisians or, more likely that train that just kept getting closer and closer and like if I were there on those tracks, this would be just about the time I’d jump out of the way so that’s what I did thinking damnation I wish I hadn’t sat in the front row I’m dead for sure.
     I ran screaming up that aisle and out of the tent and the guy in the suit just laughed and laughed saying Hey, buddy boy, it’s all right, it’s just an illusion, it ain’t real, come on back in, check it out. He let me back in only this time I sat at the back with my head down.
     After that first show I stuck around and asked Buck how it worked. He showed me the film and the sprocket holes and all the little pictures and how the lantern projects them one at a time. Then he told me about the persistence of vision which was really a wonderful thing that they never brought up in school. He was a good teacher because I remember he said that everything we look at stays in our eyes for a bit, so if you see a bunch of pictures moving fast it looks like you’re seeing only one picture that moves. I think I understood what he was talking about because when you look at the sun, which you shouldn’t, and then close your eyes, which you’ll have to, you can still see it there under your eyelids. Like Buck said, vision can be persistent.
     I asked him how they took that picture of that train coming at the camera without somebody getting killed or nothing and he explained to me that they actually dug a hole in the ground in between the tracks and they put some guy in it called a cameraman and he sat there cranking away at the camera like Buck was cranking away at the projector. Then the train just ran over that cameraman and he stayed there, right in that hole, cranking away, till that train was behind him. Risked his life if you ask me, just so he could get a piece of film for Buck to charge people a nickel to see.
     I asked him if the people in his pictures were real and he said yeah but some of them were actors. I didn’t know what an actor was other than somebody who got their picture taken. 
     He let me sit through three shows and I just kept watching and watching. Turned out the work he wanted me to do was turning the crank on the projecting device when his arm got tired. At first it was hard to get it to go at the 20 frames per second it was supposed to run at, but I couldn’t help myself. I just kept speeding up and slowing down the cranking and it was the funniest thing I ever saw, people jerking around and walking fast, then I’d slow down the fast stuff and speed up the train, but never stopping, like Buck said, or the film would burn. I couldn’t stop laughing and the audience liked it too, especially at this one part where they were showing a scene from some Shakespeare play, I think it was A Tale of Two Cities. 
     It was a love scene that turned into a fight scene that turned into a love scene again. You were supposed to read all these titles to know what they was saying to each other but you didn’t really have to because you could tell what they was saying just by the way they was looking at each other. This guy was dressed up and rich and clean shaven except for a little mustache that he must have spent a lot of time on. He was really angry-like and I didn’t know why because the title went by too fast. 
     The lady with him was so beautiful, her skin so white, her hair and nails and dress were the prettiest I’d ever seen. I could look at her forever if that guy weren’t yelling at her. What was his problem? How could he treat her that way? Why wasn’t he treating her like the princess she obviously was because when she started crying, actually crying, you just wanted to go up to her and say hey baby, it’s all right, nothing’s gonna get you, I’ll protect you, let me hold you my precious and protect you from all harm forever and ever. 
     It wasn’t long before I realized I was feeling something I’d never felt before. Either I was getting sick or I was in love. I figure about four seconds was all it took. It was true love, I guarantee it, because after all it’s only true love sets you on your way, like a cannon, straight from the heart, and I was on my way. I couldn’t believe such beauty could exist. She was perfect, my heart’s unknown desire come to life in a magic lantern show.
     I used to look at pictures in them magazines but I didn’t give them much thought as far as who was better looking because I figure you got no choice as far as what you look like, but she was different. I could see beyond her bosom, which I admit was the second thing I looked at after her face, and into her heart, which was right there between them. It was fine.
     I asked Buck who she was and he said Ashley Welles. I said it out loud for the first time. Ashley Welles. Well what do you know? Tarnation, I said, she’s got a name, she’s a real person. Buck said that was debatable since she was an actress and all but I didn’t care. I was so happy she wasn’t just a lightning image from a Kinematographic projector but an angel right here on this earth. I asked him where she was and he looked on the film can which came from a studio somewhere in a place called Hollywood which he said was in California, all the way at the other end of the United States. If that’s where Ashley Welles was, I knew that’s where I wanted to be.

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