The Circus in Winter Read online

  Jennie pulled on her tights, her layers of clothes, wishing she had a nice dress to wear to breakfast instead of mannish pants. Deciding to leave her hair loose and long, she left her hairpins on Porter's dresser for him to find later. A maid would probably find them as well, but Jennie wanted to leave a mark, a whiff of indiscretion. She heard a noise from the window and peeked outside. A carriage driver sat stiff-armed at the reins, nose red, breath billowing from his mouth. A foot of snow had fallen overnight, and the horses stood to their fetlocks in heavy, wet snow. Elizabeth Cooper stepped lightly out of the carriage, followed by her daughter, Grace. They visited the winter quarters frequently, Jennie knew. Like a doting father, Porter took the girl on endless tours of the winter quarters to watch the performers, trainers, and animals. Perhaps, Jennie thought proudly, she'd made Porter forget he'd arranged a visit.

  As Jennie descended the stairs, she heard the front door opening and closing, and called out, "How are we this morning!" Halfway down, she stopped. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry. I thought you were Mr. Porter."

  Elizabeth stood frozen in the foyer, her eyes wide. "Excuse me. Where is Wallace?"

  "Checking on the stock, I think."

  Silence. Elizabeth lowered her gaze to her hands nestled in a gray muff. Jennie crossed her arms and propped herself against the newel post. Grace stepped forward. "You're Jennie Dixianna, the acrobat."

  Jennie offered her hand. "That's right. I don't think we've ever met properly. And you are?"

  "I'm Grace. Cooper." She shook Jennie's hand limply.

  "Ah, yes. Your father is a friend of Mr. Porter. Doesn't he run that carriage business?"

  "Cooper & Son."

  "You have a brother?"

  "No."

  Jennie laughed. "Then why would he name his company that?"

  Grace's brow creased. "I don't know, ma'am," she said finally. "I'll have to ask."

  Jennie laughed again, like a string of tiny bells pealing.

  "It was his father's business, if you must know," Elizabeth said. There was no mistaking the look in her eye—bright green jealousy. She grasped her daughter's hand. "Dear, please go find Uncle Wallace for me. He must be down at the barns." Once Grace was out the door, Elizabeth said, "Please tell Mr. Porter that I will be waiting for him and for Grace in here." She walked into the study, closing the door with a restrained click.

  Jennie opened the front door and breathed deeply, letting the cold seep into her lungs. The snowfall the night before had been heavy, but the morning was crisp, blinding blue and white. The sounds of the morning were clean as ice—the squawks of hungry birds in the snow-tipped trees, a lion's roar from the barns. In the distance, she saw Porter trudging up the hill with Grace. He made slow, careful progress, like a man trying to cross a river of ice cracking with spiderwebs, like a man who wasn't sure if he wanted to get to the other side.

  AT NIGHT the water cried. Sister told Jennie that long ago, Spanish priests used baubles and rum to lure the Biloxi Indians to Christ, away from their goddess mother. She rose from the sea, beckoning to her children from atop a mountain of wave and foam, and the Biloxi rushed into the sea to beg her forgiveness. She spread her arms, scooped them up, and took them with her to the bottom of the Gulf. Sister said, "The sea's brimming with failed mothers and their sorry children. All of them crying, and their tears lap the shore."

  Jennie was sixteen when she finally told Sister. All of it. Saying nothing, Sister lit a lantern and motioned for Jennie to follow her into the night. They made their way through fields of sea oats to the site of her father's latest dig—a long trench cut into the beach. In the moonlight, Jennie saw shovelfuls of sand shooting out of the hole to the familiar beat of her father's grunts. Sister picked up a shovel, swung it over her shoulder like a spike-driving hammer, then handed it to Jennie. Sister whispered, "Your mama wouldn't have it no other way."

  Because he stood below her in the trench, because it was dark, Jennie saw no blood, not even the look on his face. "Hear that," Sister said. Jennie heard nothing but the sound of the waves, and Sister said the water had ceased its crying. "Good sign," she said. They tossed everything in the hole with him—whiskey bottles, shovels, tinned meat, his tent and blanket, even the blackened logs from his camp fire—and the earth obliged, swallowing Slater Marchette whole.

  Later, Sister took a pair of scissors to his Confederate flag and fashioned a costume that bared plenty of midriff and thigh. She told Jennie a circus was showing up in Mobile. "A pretty little white girl like you, they'll snatch you up in a minute." When Jennie protested that she had no special talent. Sister opened the thin pages of her Bible and pointed to the verse that had nearly saved her mother's life. "You know this, you can do anything, child."

  She became "Jennie Dixianna" the moment she signed her first performer's contract. Jennie Marchette was a dirty flopsy doll buried deep in the sand.

  WALLACE PORTER visited Jennie Dixianna's bunkhouse that night and found her bundled up with quilts at the fireplace. Porter knelt down and put his head in her lap, massaging her sinewy thighs. He covered the pink bracelet scar with small kisses—in a few months, the Spin of Death would begin and her wrist would be red, always red. "How do you do this, every night," he asked.

  Jennie kissed him softly and quickly, like a butterfly landing and fluttering away. She poured them each a glass of wine. "Some morning you had."

  "Yes." Porter looked at the floor like a guilty boy.

  "I'm sorry if I was the cause."

  "I forgot they were coming."

  "What did you tell Mrs. Cooper?" Jennie asked, but she already knew the answer. She'd heard their angry whispers through his study door.

  "What women you bring into this house is your business. And God's," Elizabeth had said, "but how could you expose my daughter to this?"

  "I haven't exposed her to anything." Porter's tone was soft and soothing, like a man calming his angry wife.

  "What happened here last night, Wallace? Don't lie to me."

  "Nothing at all. Miss Dixianna and I were discussing her contract when the storm started. I couldn't very well send my star acrobat out into the blizzard to freeze to death, now could I?"

  "No, I suppose not. But, Wallace, would you be involved with her? With a woman like that?"

  Porter said nothing for a few seconds. Then, finally, he'd answered. "No."

  Now he was in her bunkhouse, in her brass bed, and after they made love, Porter fell into a fitful sleep, suspended between wakefulness and dreams. He was immobile, his eyes pasted shut so he couldn't see, only feel, Jennie straddling him. Then she spoke, she commanded, although her lips never moved. And Porter answered.

  Do you love me?

  Yes.

  Have you loved Elizabeth?

  Yes.

  After Irene died? In your grief you went to her?

  She came to me.

  She comforted you. Eleven years ago.

  Yes.

  And since then?

  Nothing. Not once.

  He woke before dawn. Jennie was already up, sitting beside him in a red robe. "Good morning," she said. "That must have been some dream you were having last night."

  Porter groaned. "I didn't drink that much, did I?"

  Jennie rubbed his temples. "You were thrashing all around and mumbling about love and secrets." She kissed his forehead. "I hoped you were dreaming of me."

  "I was, I think. I don't really remember."

  Porter left at first light, stumbling out the door like a blind man without even kissing her good-bye, but she knew he would return. Jennie Dixianna remade her bed with fresh sheets, sprinkling them with perfume. Pumping a basinful of water from the spigot, she washed herself in the firelight's glow. Water splashed onto fireplace bricks, sizzled, and disappeared.

  Clean and naked, she took her cedar box down from the mantel and opened it with the key around her neck. Jennie counted the silver (twenty dollars and two bits), polished the rings (worth at least two hundred, she guessed)
, and tallied the paper (five crisp ten-dollar bills). The last she folded into a monogrammed money clip gleaned from a stoop-shouldered drummer she'd met in a St. Louis hotel, the one who'd asked if he could watch her use the chamber pot. Jennie surveyed the remaining contents: A to-do list written in a wife's delicate script." Coffee. Sugar. My laudanum. Your headache powders. Sally's penny candy. Potatoes. "A punched ticket stub. A folded-up family portrait" The Hartley Family, Mendota, Illinois, 1866. "Penciled doodlings of strangers' faces. A priest's Bible. Did it belong to the one who'd wanted to have her in switched-around clothes—he in feather boa, she in collar and robe? Or was it the priest who liked to play with candles? Jennie thumbed through the Bible, smiling at the underlined fire and brimstone passages, and let her finger rest on Sister's secret verse.

  And then Jennie wasn't in her bunkhouse, but back in that rarely remembered Alabama shack. Her past was a black cat that wanted to sit heavily on her heart, but most nights, Jennie kept the cat shooed away. How had it gotten inside? Perhaps it was the flicker of firelight, the opened box, the smell of clean skin. For a moment, Jennie was a little girl again, sitting on her mother's lap, looking down into a cigar box full of mementos (long since bartered or lost). Dixie Anna Marchette was telling her the story of her life one button, one bauble, one pressed flower at a time.

  And then the box in her lap turned to cedar, brimming with paper and silver. It held nothing of her inside, nothing of Jennie Marchette. That girl was long gone. Years ago, the battle flag outfit had turned to tatters, and she'd burned it without a single regret. Instead of personal keepsakes, Jennie Dixianna's box contained the flotsam of men's pockets, the skeletons that hung like ghosts in their back-hall closets. This was her story—a collage of broken glass from a thousand shattered bottles, and each new shard made her stronger and more beautiful. Jennie placed a slip of paper inside the cedar box," Checking on stock. Breakfast at 8. Love, Wallace Porter, "and then she whispered inside. "Wallace doesn't know, and Elizabeth will never tell, but Grace Cooper is his daughter." Tomorrow, she'd ask Porter for a big tin washtub, later a feather mattress, and slowly work her way into a mirrored Pullman. If they failed to appear, Jennie would play her ace. But in the meantime, she closed her treasure chest and locked it for safekeeping.

  THE LAST MEMBER OF THE BOELA TRIBE

  Chapter the First

  How Bascomb Bowles Went from

  Honey-bucket Boy to Pinhead

  "HONEY-BUCKET BOY" is a sickly sweet euphemism for the men (mostly Negro) whose job it was to clean the pots into which steamboat passengers (mostly white) pissed and shit. Bascomb Bowles was such a boy. Born on a Georgia cotton plantation to a slave woman (father unknown), he and his mother moved to the promised land of Paducah, Kentucky, after the War. Having attained her long-cherished freedom, Bascomb's mother promptly died, leaving her fifteen-year-old son to find his own way in the world. He found a job cleaning honey buckets aboard the Bayou Queen, a steamboat paddling up and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. He performed his duties faithfully and well until a steamy August morning in 1875. The Bayou Queen safely in port, Bascomb donned his Sunday best and walked into Paducah to see his first circus, a three-ringer making a two-night stand. The name of the circus was the Hollenbach Menagerie & Highway Hidalgos. In his pocket, Bascomb carried a sandwich wrapped in paper; he didn't know for sure, but he figured the candy butchers and concession stands served only whites. He was right about that.

  But what Bascomb had no way of knowing was this: The circus proprietor, Clyde Hollenbach, needed to expand his sideshow displays from the Dark Continent. P. T. Barnum was at that time making a killing with a new curiosity—a pinhead named Zip, What-is-it? Supposedly, a party of big-game hunters had captured Zip while searching the river Gambia for gorillas. There, they found a new race, Darwin's missing link, naked people swinging from trees like monkeys. But Hollenbach knew it was all ballyhoo, just another one of Barnum's humbugs. He'd recently hired Barnum's disgruntled boss canvasman who'd told him the secret: Zip was actually a simpleminded Negro from New Jersey named Billy Jackson who was born with a small pointy head that—once shaved but for a topknot—appeared vaguely simian. The fellow earned about fifty a week, most of which was sent to his mother. Hollenbach marveled at the ingenuity of the gaff: take a Negro with a funny-shaped head, stick a spear in his hand, drape him in faux leopard skin, and voilà!

  So he searched for his own Zip, What-is-it? and found a likely candidate touring with the Diamond Show, a Sioux billed as the Aztec Princess. Upon further examination, Hollenbach discovered the princess was actually a man, a fellow too feebleminded to unbuckle his belt or unbutton his trousers. The sideshow manager, sick of changing his charge's soiled pants, had taken away his underdrawers and fashioned a large skirt that could be easily lifted and lowered when nature called. The manager shook Hollenbach's hand and said, "The trouble with pinheads is most of them's retardates. If I was you, I'd just find a regular colored and shave their head and nobody'd know the difference anyway. It'd be a lot easier." Hollenbach agreed.

  For weeks, he'd been trying to make a female Zip from materials at hand, namely his Zulu Queen, a black woman of enormous proportions named Pearly. Her "act" consisted of long periods of imperious sitting on a bamboo throne. Once a day, the sideshow lecturer announced:

  "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! AS THE SUN SETS, THE TIME HAS COME FOR AFRICAN ZULUS TO PRACTICE THEIR MOST ANCIENT RITUAL. GATHER ROUND AS OUR ZULU QUEEN PERFORMS THE FAMOUS FERTILITY DANCE!"

  When a sizable crowd had gathered, Pearly would lumber down from her perch and initiate a series of jerking movements that quivered her loose folds of flesh. Despite her willingness to engage in this undignified display, Pearly would not consent to become a pinhead. "My contract say what I gotta do, and that's all I gotta do," she said. "I can read, you know."

  On that August morning in Kentucky, Hollenbach was desperate for a pinhead and miserably hot. He walked heavily, like a man lumbering along chest deep in water. A handful of dark faces dotted the circus midway, but Bascomb's was the first he saw. Mopping his brow, Hollenbach walked right up and offered this perfect stranger a job.

  Since his arrival on the lot, Bascomb had seen quite a few Negros. Roustabouts driving tent stakes to the beat of an old railroad worksong, slopping water into elephant drinking tubs. Down at the railroad siding, he'd even seen the circus version of himself, a young boy emptying the lavatory buckets from the Pullman sleeping cars. "No thank you, sir," Bascomb said to Hollenbach, bowing a little. "I've got me a job already."

  Hollenbach explained he was looking for a star, not a roustabout. "I'll make you famous, boy. How do you pronounce your name?"

  Bascomb hoped this wasn't some sick, cruel joke. "Bowles," he said. "Like this." He cupped his hands together.

  Hollenbach took the cigar from his lips and stared into the air, talking to himself. "Bowles. Bowl-zuh. Bow-uhl. Boo-lah. Bol-lah." Hollenbach snapped his fingers. "I've got it." He raised his silver flask in a toast to himself, took a swig, then pointed at the sideshow banner line of canvas posters. "Ladies and Gentlemen! May I present—Boela Man, the African Pinhead!"

  "Sir, I ain't from Africa." Bascomb paused. "I mean, I never been there." He didn't even want to ask what a pinhead was—it sounded painful.

  Hollenbach clapped him on the back. "These rubes don't know Africa from Oregon," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. Three white men were gathered around a grifter's carny stand, losing money as fast as it appeared from their overall pockets. "All you gotta do is act like you're from the jungle. Growl at the white folks. Scare 'em a little."

  Bascomb nodded. No one had ever given him permission to scare white folks before.

  "I'll pay you ten dollars a week," Hollenbach said.

  Ten dollars a week! And all he had to do was shave his head and wear funny clothes. Hollenbach said his services would be required in the sideshow tent—two shows a day—plus the occasional stint as a rigger during the big show. All circus pe
rsonnel paraded through the tent for the opening spectacles, and he'd be especially needed during the Moorish Marauders of Hassam Ali and Down in Ole Virginny, whose themes required every dark face Hollenbach could muster. He'd have his own berth in the Pullman car for Negro employees—good accommodations, considering some roustabouts slept two to a bunk. Three squares a day in the cook tent. And he'd see the country, not just the same old river towns from a steamboat deck, but any town in that ever-growing web of railroad tracks. Bascomb didn't hesitate to sign the contract Hollenbach offered him—he put his X next to the X on the dotted line.

  Pearly shaved his head, escorted him to the costume tent to be fitted for his African garb, and introduced him to the other sideshow performers, explaining the differences between them. Raju the Sword Swallower and the contortionist Mr. Rubber were working acts. Slappy the Seal Boy was a genuine freak, born with flipperish arms and legs. Koko the Tattooed Lady was a made freak, a woman with a map of the world etched on every inch of her skin. Ching the Human Pincushion wasn't a freak at all, Pearly explained, just a practitioner of an ancient healing technique. Satan's Child was a fake freak, a mummified baby with goat hooves sewed onto its hands, lying in a black coffin. "This is the Pickled Punk," Pearly said, leading him to a glass jar. A two-headed fetus floated in amber fluid, two sets of arms locked in permanent embrace.

  Bascomb touched his topknot, which stuck out like a stumpy tail. "Where will I be?" he asked, scanning the raised platform inside the sideshow tent.

  "Oh probably right next to me so I can keep an eye on you." She squeezed his arm. "I've been fooling these people a long, long time, honey. It ain't hard. Just act like a monkey that fell out the tree, and white people'll eat it up for sure." Pearly chuckled, a wry snort. "Way I see it, a nickel's a nickel. Dollar's a dollar. I'd be a blue bug if that's what they wanted to see, stupid fools."