The Circus in Winter Read online

  Jennie played cards with a sweet, demure bluff that masked her skill. This sleight of hand had taken her far in life and was perhaps her greatest talent, more so even than her acrobatic act, the Spin of Death. To all appearances, she looked dainty, frail, and reticent, but once she entered the hippodrome and threw off her Johnny Reb robe, her mettle was clear to see—lanky sinews wrapped tight over hard bones. But also, Jennie possessed that certain magic that makes men reach out their arms, grasping as though blind for the fragile handkerchief dipped in rosewater dangled before them.

  "Well boys," she said, "Let's see, how about seven-card stud? Aces wild, and what do you call those kings with the knives in their heads?" Jennie's eyes widened as she scanned the table.

  "Suicide kings," Porter answered.

  "Oh, yes. I always forget that."

  Each time she took a gulp of the fiery whiskey offered her, she crinkled up her face in disgust. And kept on drinking. Jennie cooed her way to winning a large portion of the pot and called it beginner's luck. In the lantern light, her blond hair glistened like flax, and as the hours passed, the men's eyes drooped while hers flashed dark diamonds. When the rising sun poked fingers of light through the holes in the walls and under the door, Jennie Dixianna sat triumphant behind a pile of gold and silver coins, a shimmery film of sweat on her face. George Cooper tipped his chair back to smoke a cigar, winking at Wallace Porter as he turned to escort Jennie back to her bunkhouse.

  "Where did you learn your cards?" Porter asked, his eyes straight ahead, a smirk on his lips.

  "What do you mean?" Jennie asked, puzzled.

  "I'm on to your little secret. You hide it well, but you're not an amateur." He was smitten with admiration.

  Jennie gave a small, knowing laugh. "I've seen a good bit of this country, Mr. Porter. You pick up useful tricks. I won't apologize for that."

  In a flash, she'd turned the tables and put him on the defensive. "Yes. Well," he said. Jennie was looking at him frankly, all the falseness she'd displayed in the card game gone.

  They stood at her stoop, shivering in the early morning cold. Hans Hofstadter stomped by on his way back to his bunkhouse next door and glared at Jennie. He'd lost a good bit of money that night and, more than likely, was not looking forward to telling his wife, Nettie. Hofstadter entered his bunkhouse, and a second or two later, they heard a metal pot flung against the wall. Then the screaming in German.

  Jennie pouted. "That's just fine. I'll not get a wink of sleep."

  "Are they that bad?" Porter said. "I've heard stories from the men."

  "Worse. I must find another place to rest my head." Jennie placed her black-gloved hand on Porter's arm. She looked past the winter quarters to Porter's mansion sitting on the frozen hill in the distance.

  "Oh," he said, and stepped back.

  Jennie took her hand away with a laugh. "Good night, Mr. Porter. Good morning. Whichever you prefer." She raised her skirts and stepped into her bunkhouse and, with a heavy clunk, shut the door in Porter's red face.

  WHEN ASKED, Jennie Dixianna said she'd been born in a swamp and had walked out of the water, wholly made, draped in moss. "I am an American Venus, delivered from the gods," she said. There were grounds for believing her.

  Her act was a variation of the Spanish web. First, she climbed a rope, which slithered snakelike between and around her legs as she rose higher. At the top, she fastened a small loop tightly around her wrist, held the rope at arm's length, and posed in graceful relief. The finale of her act was a series of full swings high above the hippodrome. The ringmaster announced:

  "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! HIGH ABOVE THE CENTER RING, MISS JENNIE DIXIANNA WILL NOW PERFORM HER FAMOUS SPIN OF DEATH! TONIGHT, SHE WILL ATTEMPT TO BREAK HER RECORD OF FIFTY TURNS, POWERED ONLY BY THE STRENGTH OF HER ONE DAINTY ARM. COUNT ALONG WITH ME AS JENNIE DIXIANNA TRIES TO BEAT HER OWN WORLD RECORD!"

  Jennie suffered from chronic rope burn on her wrist, a constant open sore that, when not in the ring, she hid with her long black gloves. Every one of her performances broke the wound open and left the rope stained red. Audiences gasped and cheered when Jennie descended from the rope, hand over bloodstained hand. The circus people feared that she would wear her flesh all the way down to the bone, and that one night, she'd fall from the sky, leaving nothing in the spotlight but her hand still clenching the rope. Doctors said she'd die, not of a bloody fall, but of gangrene. They prescribed poultices and foul-smelling salves. Jennie scoffed at them all. "I can stop my own blood, and every night the flesh of my wrist grows back," she said to the astonished circus people, who half believed her. Surely, they thought, no mortal could withstand so much pain.

  Jennie Dixianna could have been as young as eighteen or as old as forty, and depending on the quality of light, she looked anywhere in between. She never revealed her age, and some of the circus people believed she cast spells and swallowed bitter pills to change her age at will. Sometimes, Jennie took a lover—a wagon painter or calliope player—and during the brief time of their affair, Jennie's appearance would soften or harden to accommodate the shape of the man she'd taken. These men walked around the winter quarters in a drunken stupor, hardly eating, stumbling through their duties until she tired of them and banished them from her bed. The circus people grilled these lovers for her secrets. Does she stew up potions? Does she sleep human sleep? What does she eat? But these men never spoke of her, neither fondly nor harshly, and for months afterward, they moped about, shaking their heads, cleansing themselves of her charm.

  Jennie Dixianna knew about Wallace Porter's dead wife. A year earlier, he'd held a boisterous Christmas party in the mansion, the first time his friends, business associates, and circus employees all commingled. Jennie wandered into the study and saw Irene's portrait over the mantel—a small woman white to near translucence with black moon eyes, steady and sad.

  "The rosy cheeks are a bit of painterly license, I'm afraid. She was dying, even then." A woman stepped into the room, her fairness shimmering in the firelight, a young girl standing in the folds of her burgundy velvet dress. "I'm Elizabeth Cooper," she said, her chin jutting. "My daughter, Grace. My husband and I are friends of Mr. Porter."

  Jennie introduced herself and offered her hand, but Elizabeth ignored it, fussing with the lace bow in her daughter's blue-black hair. Jennie turned her gaze back to Irene's quiet and determined face. "She died some time ago I understand," she said.

  "Yes. It was quite a blow to our dear Wallace. I don't know that he's ever gotten over it."

  Jennie smiled. "Perhaps it's time for Mr. Porter to stop mourning her," she said, and left the room.

  Since then, Jennie had spent many nights darting from shadow to shadow, following Porter on his solitary sojourns around the winter quarters. "Checking on the stock," he always claimed, but his dark-rimmed eyes told a different story. She saw the pain in them, in his stoop, his gait. While others felt sympathy for him, Jennie felt only disdain. She wore her wound like a talisman bracelet, a secret treasure. Surely, Jennie thought, much could be gained from a man so weak of heart.

  But the night of the card game, Jennie discovered that Wallace Porter could not be won the usual way. He'd seen through her simpering and believed he'd found her truest self, but Jennie was layered like an onion, skin over skin over naught. With a flick of her festering wrist, she could be any woman at all: mother or shrew, whore or lady, sister or siren. She knew what sort of woman Wallace Porter desired. He wanted a ghost. It was no trouble, really. She'd played spirit made flesh before.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER the card game, Jennie watched Wallace Porter sneaking into the practice barn a few minutes before her usual arrival time. He'd been doing some checking, the circus people told Jennie. Playing cards with the roust-abouts, asking about her without seeming to ask about her. No doubt, he'd learned that she didn't practice the Spin of Death during winter, preferring to use those months to rest her weary arm and let her wrist heal. Instead, each afternoon she performed a regimen of stretches and
acrobatic flips to stay supple.

  When she opened the practice-barn door, she felt Porter's presence immediately—in the corner amid a tangle of unicycles and bicycles, crouching behind a wall of juggling pins stacked into a pyramid. After stoking the iron stove, she hung her overcoat on a nail and changed her mud-clogged boots for a dainty pair of dancing slippers stuffed in her coat pocket. She stretched close to the stove, her smoky breath drifting around her shiny face. Slowly, layers of clothes fell away—sweaters over shirts, pants over pants—until Jennie Dixianna appeared wearing nothing but a pink leotard snug as flesh. She hurled herself headlong down the length of the practice mat in a flurry of flips and twists. When she practiced or performed, Jennie felt herself to be both solid and liquid, malleable enough to be poured into impossibly shaped molds and solid enough to withstand any force. After an hour, she was soaked through and flung herself onto the mat, panting.

  Not for a single moment had Jennie forgotten her audience, and so she was not surprised when she heard a smattering of applause from behind the juggling pins. In his zeal, Porter's hand must have nudged the pyramid, which came crashing down around him. By the time the clatter subsided, Jennie was mostly dressed, wrapping a scarf over her wet hair. Cheeks flushed, she checked herself in a broken mirror that hung by the door, and speaking to the glass, said, "I'm ready when you are." Tiptoeing through the pins, an abashed Porter took her hand.

  Evening was setting in. The low-hanging, scalloped clouds foretold heavy snow, and slivers of ice stung their faces as they rounded the corner of the practice barn and walked into a wall of wind. Slowly, they climbed the hill to Porter's mansion.

  "That was magnificent, Miss Dixianna," Porter said.

  "Thank you, Mr. Porter."

  Dropping her hand, he wound his scarf over his mouth. "Dixianna," he said, speaking through wool. "A curious name. I've always wondered, where did you come by it?"

  "It was my mother's name," she said, looking away at the snow glowing blue in the changing light.

  JENNIE'S FATHER, Slater Marchette, was lucky to have survived the war with the Yankees, but he came home forever changed. He left a hard board of a man, but returned to his water oak-shaded shack in the Alabama bayou as soft as oleander, a sap given to weeping and hand holding. Slater hugged his wife and daughter so tight they lost their breath, and all that night, the house shook with his fierce love. After dinner, he danced and stomped, and once Jennie was sent to bed, he rocked the floors and walls, shouting his wife's name over and over.

  Slater spent six months walking home from the war, carrying nothing in his haversack but scroggling apples and an unblemished Confederate battle flag, which he hung on the wall of his home as if it were a priceless painting. After a time, he found work on a fishing boat in Bonsecours Bay, but came home each night to braid Jennie's hair and kiss his wife's growing belly. The night the baby came, his wife screamed and swore while he filled cook pots with her blood. "Quick," he said to Jennie, "run and get Sister. Tell her your mama's bleeding to death. Hurry."

  Sister wasn't family; she was a conjure woman who lived in a tin shanty just down the shell road. While he waited, he used every blanket, sheet, and towel to staunch the blood. When Jennie and Sister finally arrived, they found Slater awash in red, his wife blue-white and draped by the flag—the only piece of cloth left in the house.

  Sister clasped her leather-lined hands. "I don't understand. It didn't stop." She explained then that there was a verse in the Bible with the power to stop blood. "Only a few know which one it is. You say the person's name and read the passage." Sister looked at Jennie, then at Slater. "What your wife's name?"

  Through tears, he said, "Annie. Anna Marchette."

  "That explains it then," Sister said, shaking her head. "Your daughter said her name was Dixie Anna. That's what I told God."

  "A pet name," he cried.

  Jennie had never heard him use any other.

  Slater Marchette buried his wife, his darling Dixie Anna, under a shell mound with the baby still inside her. Jennie was six.

  SO, JENNIE became a walking phantom, the living receptacle of unlived lives. Porter ate dinner that night with three women: his star acrobat, Jennie Dixianna; her mother, Anna Marchette; and (at long last) his wife, Irene. She walked through the halls of his mansion as if she'd always lived there with him, and for the evening, he allowed himself to believe that Irene had never died at all, that this woman moving familiarly from room to room was Irene, and that this was just another night in their long and happy marriage.

  In the sparkling candlelight, Porter swirled scotch in his crystal glass and read aloud the letter he'd received that day from old Clyde Hollenbach. After Porter bought Hollenbach's circus, the old showman and Marta, the Fifteen-Fingered Lady, had settled on the beach in California." Two children, "Hollenbach wrote," twenty fingers. All is well. "They toasted Hollenbach's jolly circus family with red wine. After dinner, they listened to Strauss on the Victrola and floated across the room, staring with far-off eyes over each other's shoulders, moving together flawlessly by mere touch.

  Then they retired, undressing wordlessly, back to back. Porter blew out the lamp, and they climbed under the chaste white sheets and turned to each other without passion.

  HALF-ASLEEP, Jennie heard a voice say, "You are my sweet, my little Dixie Anna." It was her father, back from the boat, smelling of fish, sweat, and whiskey. In a minute, he'd start plaiting her hair while her mother fried mullet, and after dinner, when they thought she was asleep, the house would start its swaying. Jennie felt his hands, then more. She kept her eyes screwed shut, held onto the image of her mother smiling. She was twelve now, not six.

  One day, her father got so drunk he fell off his boat into the Gulf waters. After swimming to shore, he decided a change in vocation was needed, a job conducive to benders. So, he bought spades and shovels and went out each day in search of the pirate Jean Lafitte's hidden treasure. Legend had it that Lafitte had spent one winter hunkered down nearby in a secluded shanty, hiding from the Spanish navy, and as a precaution, had buried a fortune in the sand.

  By now, Jennie was the man and woman of the house: cook, farmer, laundress, härterer. Sometimes when she was hungry, she went down the road to Sister's. There was always food on the stove, and Sister paid Jennie to collect ingredients for her conjure balls and charm bags—horse hairs, fire ashes, snake skins, cedar knots. People came from as far as Mobile and Pensacola to buy them. Jennie tried to save the money for winter—stashed in her mother's keepsake cigar box—but more often than not, her father would return from treasure hunting hung over and empty-handed, find the money, and buy himself another drunk. She'd begun wearing her mother's old dresses, and at night, her father buried his head in her calico lap for consolation. Sometimes, when blind drunk, he came home a buccaneer, one of Lafitte's Black Flag men, and called her Veronica, his Creole mistress. "I gave you the map," he'd say, giving her a teeth-rattling shake. "Tell me where it is!" He'd rip her dress open, drag her by the hair before he fell on top of her. He always cried, during and after. Jennie never cried.

  WALLACE PORTER made love in the dark.

  Jennie was careful that first night with him. Barely moving while his lips traced her cheeks, she imagined herself dead, a cold body under examination. She could not imagine herself a virgin and strike a pose of timidity, because she could not remember ever being so pure. Jennie knew that to work her bed magic on Porter would send him reeling, and later, he would feel ashamed and blame her for driving out the animal in him. This had happened with other men who left before morning, and always, she awoke to find everything from their pockets heaped on her dressing table: silver coins, fraternal rings, watches, and (sometimes in their haste to leave her) wallets stuffed with bills, calling cards, even tintypes of their families. Jennie kept this bounty locked in a cedar box, her wintertime savings account. She wore the key around her neck. In his sleep, Porter touched the key, but Jennie moved his hand from her throat to her breast
.

  At daybreak, Jennie woke up alone in Porter's bed. Out of habit, she looked over to the dressing table and was relieved to find it just as it had been the night before. On the pillow next to her, she saw the note." Checking on stock. Breakfast at 8. Love, Wallace Porter. "That he'd signed his note so formally, with first and last name, made her laugh. She pictured him chewing on his pen, Love, Wallace staring at him from the white page and at the last minute scrawling Porter as an afterthought. Jennie rose from the bed, folded the note, and tucked it into her pants pocket where she hoped Porter might find it later, peeking out like a secret sign between them.

  Jennie stood shivering before a full-length mirror, but her skin warmed with quiet heat the more she looked at herself. She was a stomach sleeper, and so knew that what she saw in the mirror—taut legs and buttocks, a cascade of blond hair—was what he'd seen that morning. To see herself head to toe was a rare treat. On the road, Jennie applied her makeup with the aid of a small mirror mounted into the lid of her Saratoga trunk. No full-length mirrors were allowed, since glass of any kind was a liability in railroad travel. When they made stands in cities, Jennie frequented department stores, not to shop, but to see herself fully. Standing before Porter's looking glass, she decided that what she wanted from this man was her own private Pullman car with her name painted boldly on the side for all America to see. Inside, it would be lined floor to ceiling with mirrors, and before each of her performances, she would stand in the middle of her car, costumed and beautiful, and know before she stepped into the ring exactly what the crowd would see. Jennie Dixianna was a star, one who suffered for her brightness, and she saw herself as deserving not only of her own railcar, but also of the power of prophecy.