Turn of the 20th century

The Turn of the 20th century is the historical world Mike enters at the Fryeburg Fair, crossing from the present-day lakeside into a fairground where Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops are alive onstage. The passage makes the era more than a glimpse backward: it becomes a place of participation, marked by a threshold Mike fears to cross and a performance he cannot resist. A gold-headed cane in the lake establishes the temporal impossibility of what he is about to witness, while the fair’s sounds, crowds, and vivid physical detail make the past feel insistently present.

Historical Setting and Temporal Clues

Mike recognizes that he has arrived at a time before Royce Merrill was born. The Boston Post cane lying on the lake bottom confirms the displacement: it belongs to Royce, whose phone-answering days are over, yet Royce would not be born until 1903. Sara and her Red-Top family, by contrast, are present in the world Mike hears around him; Sara died in 1901. These mismatched timelines make the cane a concrete marker of the gap between the era Mike has left and the one he is entering.

The fairground also announces its period through its built environment and public spectacle. The Washburn place, later known as the Bricker place to Mrs. M., is absent. In its place, broad wooden stairs climb the eastern slope of The Street toward Japanese lanterns and music. At their top stands an arch bearing the signs “WELCOME TO FRYEBURG FAIR” and “WELCOME TO THE 20TH CENTURY.” The welcome is both literal and temporal: the fair offers entry into another historical moment.

The Fair as a World in Motion

Before crossing the arch, Mike hears the fair before he can see it clearly. A sideshow barker advertises the Snake-Woman, the Dog-Faced Boy, a Human Skeleton, a Human Gila Monster, the Bearded Lady, and the Killer Martians. The calliope, the bell at the top of the strength-test post, the crack of .22s at the shooting gallery, and the lowing of a prize cow fill out a soundscape of attractions and competition. Fried dough, grilled onions and peppers, cotton candy, manure, and hay bring the fair into sensory focus as Mike moves toward the music.

Inside the grounds, that abundance becomes a route through the fair’s ordinary entertainments. Mike passes the shooting gallery, ringtoss, penny-pitch, the corn-roasting pit, and Freak Alley. He sees the Handmaidens of Angelina dance while a turbaned performer plays a flute; nearby, the Ghost House promises painted specters, though the children inside are laughing and squealing. A Test Your Strength pole ranks its challengers from “BABY NEEDS HIS BOTTLE” to “HERCULES!” A young red-haired man removes his shirt to show his muscular torso as a carny offers him a hammer. Mike also passes a quilting booth, a Bingo tent, and a baseball pitch. The scene’s lively catalog gives the past the texture of a crowded public place rather than the stillness of a historical image.

The Arch and the Change from Observer to Participant

The threshold is not merely decorative. People crossing it from either direction shimmer, become gauzy, and disappear; briefly, Mike sees the bones beneath their laughing faces. Farmers appear on the fair side in the same fashion, leading him to understand that a barrier separates the fair from The Street. The crossing seems dangerous: Mike fears dying or vanishing, but more particularly fears being unable to return and spending eternity as a visitor to the fair.

Sara is what draws him through despite that fear. As Mike steps under the arch, he feels a tingling and hears a sighing as if from a million distant voices, though he cannot determine whether they express relief or dismay. What changes is his relation to the past. On the lakeside, the fair’s aromas have been sweet, evocative, and nostalgic; on the other side, their smell becomes rough and immediate, with sausages, frying beef, and boiling chocolate. The difference, as the scene frames it, is between looking through a window and actually being there: Mike has moved from observation into participation.

Sara and the Living Performance

The music provides Mike with a destination and intensifies the pull of the historical world. Before he reaches the stage, he hears Sara singing “Jimmy Crack Corn.” Later, the Red-Tops swing into “Fishin Blues,” and Mike contrasts their playing with a performance he had heard from a boy in Castle Rock: this version makes that earlier sound seem old and slow. The music is not presented as a preserved folk artifact. Sara sings a suggestive, energetic boogie to farmers gathered before the stage, and Mike’s account stresses the live performance’s heat and movement rather than treating it as a quaint remnant.

Mike passes through the fair in a trance, scarcely registering its attractions because his attention is fixed on the stage at the base of the Ferris wheel. There he sees eight or perhaps ten Black performers, with Sara at the front, wearing a guitar and strumming hard as she sings. She is alive and in her prime. She throws her head back and laughs at the October sky. The sight fulfills the desire that carried Mike under the arch: he has come not simply to learn that Sara once lived, but to see and hear her perform.

The Past Opens to the Present

The crossing does not remain Mike’s private encounter. Kyra calls after him and runs through the fair’s strollers and gawkers. She wears a white sailor dress with red piping and a straw hat with a navy-blue ribbon, and clutches Strickland. When she reaches Mike, she throws herself toward him, confident he will catch and lift her; he does, then catches her slipping hat and pushes it back onto her head. The moment places a child from Mike’s present inside the historical fair, turning the arch’s uncertain boundary into a passage through which the story’s living relationships can follow.

The temporal episode therefore joins two kinds of evidence: the unmistakable signs that Mike has entered a world earlier than his own, and the embodied immediacy of a fair that surrounds him with noise, smells, performers, and crowds. The cane points toward the impossible chronology; the arch makes that chronology traversable. Most consequentially, Sara is no longer a name attached to the past but a living performer Mike can witness, while Kyra’s arrival shows that the past can also contain the present. The era functions as a threshold where historical distance collapses into encounter.