The Circus in Winter Read online

  That night, Pearly shared all she had with Bascomb. They told each other how they'd gotten from where they started (cotton fields, both of them) to where they were, drinking rum from tin cups, staring into a warm fire with money in their pockets and the world to see. When they retired to her tent, Pearly shared her cot, drawing him into her voluminous softness. It seemed a small price to pay—a shaved head and a few moments of benign humiliation each day—for this new life he'd been blessed enough to walk into, and he rejoiced to think he might never empty another honey bucket in his life, nor would his children, if he played his cards right. As he lay next to his Zulu Queen, the Boela Man listened to the night, sounds he knew by heart—bugs and birds and dogs—followed by the call of elephants and lions. Together, they made a music that stirred him, and Bascomb wondered if he'd unlocked a dimly remembered past deep inside.

  Bascomb married Pearly within the year, and Hollenbach rejoiced: Circus marriages were a great boon for business, and this one, like the union of Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren, was voluntary. The Boela Man and the Zulu Queen were married over a hundred times: the first time in a small church, and then again and again and again during the big show. The bride and groom entered the hippodrome astride elephants, attended by Bengal tigers—a magnificent opening spectacle with fifty native dancing girls and fifty jungle drummers in bone necklaces. Problem was, Hollenbach didn't employ a hundred Negros. Some colored roustabouts were called in from driving tent poles for the spec, but the rest were white circus people in blackface.

  They waited for children. Bascomb joked with Pearly, suggesting that perhaps her makeshift Fertility Dance was actually the opposite, an accidental Curse of Barrenness. Finally, in the thirteenth year of their marriage, Pearly bore a son they named Gordon, royal prince of the Boela Tribe of African Pinheads.

  Chapter the Second

  How Gordon Bowles Game to Know More

  Than He Ever Wanted to Know about Elephants

  GORDON LOVED elephants. From his voracious reading, from pestering elephant handlers, he knew that the African elephant has bigger ears, more toenails, and a different trunk tip than the Asian elephant. He knew female elephants spent two years pregnant, and that their nipples were between their front legs. He knew they ate 150 pounds of hay a day, plus an occasional watermelon for dessert. Walking trunk to tail, they had his mother's brand of lumbering grace, a proud and floating fatness. He admired the dexterity of the elephant's trunk—part nose, part hand—a versatile appendage which could also be (depending on the circumstances) cowboy lariat, swath-cutting scythe, water bucket, showman's hook, lightning bolt, mother's hand, flyswatter, trumpet, crane, or exclamation point. Sometimes, a trunk could be a billy club, a loosely held weapon capable of knocking the wind—even the life—out of a man.

  He favored an Asian elephant, a bull named Caesar with gold balls on the tips of its tusks. Caesar's trunk, Gordon believed, was a third and more powerful eye, a cable that closed the incredible distance between its head and the earth under its feet. On the road, troublemaking boys often threw handfuls of whatnot into the elephant stalls: peanuts mixed with coins and bottle caps. Caesar could sift and sort with its trunk—suck up the peanuts, deposit the money into the pockets of the keepers, and blow the bottle caps back in the boys' startled faces.

  Gordon grew up in Pullman cars and the sideshow tent, but he spent each winter in a kind of normalcy, rising from a trundle bed each morning in a bunkhouse. His parents, Bascomb and Pearly, nursed coffee at the kitchen table, flames licking logs in the fireplace. Some mornings, he pretended this was a different life—a cold winter morning in Kentucky or Ohio or Pennsylvania, perhaps—the life he might have lived if his father had only turned Hollenbach down that day in Paducah. But then the chow bell would ring, calling them to the cookhouse for breakfast, and in the distance, he'd hear a lion roar good morning. Elephants ambled by on their way to the river for a bath, and so Gordon knew he'd risen at the winter quarters of the Great Porter Circus, which had purchased the Hollenbach menagerie and properties not long before he was born. This was Lima, Indiana, hometown of proprietor Wallace Porter, who had a sweet spot for children and allowed Gordon unlimited access to his private library and elephant barn. All summer, Gordon longed for November, the time when his family let their hair grow (Pearly had finally consented to shaving her head for the sake of family solidarity) and packed away their leopard-skin robes. In the winter, he could talk to his parents without having to grunt, amuse himself without having to throw sawdust. He longed for cold and snow the way schoolboys long for summer—winter freed him from the circus.

  BE WARNED. This isn't a pretty story.

  In the spring of 1901, an outbreak of influenza hit Lima and the winter quarters, sending many to their beds, including Gordon. In a fevered haze, he heard the commotion of April 25—the arrival of wagons, men yelling, horses galloping, guns firing. A knock on the door. Voices whispering in the kitchen. His mother stroking his arm, telling him not to worry. There'd been an accident. In the afternoon, Gordon awoke from a nap and heard his mother in the next room saying, "What will become of Nettie? Poor woman with a brand-new baby." They're talking about Hans Hofstadter, he thought, the ill-tempered elephant trainer who sometimes shooed him out of the animal barns with a pitchfork. He had a wife, Nettie, and a newborn son, Ollie.

  "Porter will keep her on somehow, I'm sure," Gordon heard his father say. "Can't say as much for that elephant." They rehashed what they'd heard: Hans Hofstadter was dead, beaten and drowned in the river by a bull with gold-tipped tusks. His assistant, Elephant Jack, had arrived in the midst of it, a helpless witness to Hofstadter's attempts to escape. To atone for his tardiness, he'd taken the first shots at the offending elephant—Caesar. Out of ammunition, Elephant Jack had called for reinforcements; they were out there now, putting the elephant down.

  At suppertime, Gordon pretended to be asleep when his parents checked on him. As soon as they left for dinner at the cookhouse, Gordon dressed quickly and snuck outside, following the sound of gunfire he'd heard in the distance. Caesar's path was easy to follow—a broken fence in the camel lot, enormous footprints heading toward a stand of trees. The toppled elephant lay on its side in a fallow field surrounded by a posse of men holding lanterns, guns, and rope. (Gordon wondered why they'd brought rope—to catch it? To hang it?) They stood shifting on their feet, crunching the frozen earth beneath them. Elephant Jack was recounting what he'd seen at the river. Hofstadter tossed ten feet in the air, his slow swim back to shore, and Caesar's final trick—holding the struggling keeper underwater. Gordon peered around the men's legs and saw Caesar, head and body bullet riddled, eyes shot out and crying blood.

  Gordon recognized some of the men from the winter quarters, but some were unfamiliar, local farmers who'd volunteered, he thought, not so much to protect their homes, families, and livestock from a rampaging animal, as to have the opportunity to act like big-game hunters. Now that it was done, the hunters stood contemplating their kill, discussing, estimating, speculating: the number of shots fired ("somewheres around two hundred," a man said); the amount of strychnine ingested, concealed in three cored apples ("enough to kill five or six horses," said another); the length of the unsheathed penis lying like a dead snake on the ground ("Three feet," Elephant Jack said, slicing it off with his knife. "Good leather for tanning"); and the value of Caesar's sawed-off tusks ("five thousand bucks, give or take a few hundred"). Gordon tasted bile in his mouth and swallowed hard.

  The men then turned the discussion to cause and effect. What made the elephant turn on Hofstadter after many years on the road together?

  "A few weeks ago," one handler said, "I saw a wet spot on the side of his head." This musky oil meant Caesar might have been in musth—a condition not unlike a dog in heat—which produced in male pachyderms a powerful, dangerous want.

  "Hofstadter'd been down for a week with this flu," someone else said. "Maybe the sickness changed his smell. Spooked the elephants?" Gordon heard
affirmative grunts around him.

  "A week chained up in a smelly barn probably didn't help matters any," the general agent, Colonel Ford, said, cutting an angry glance at Elephant Jack. During Hofstadter's convalescence, the assistant had been free from the keeper's watchful eye and had neglected his duties—he'd thrown new hay on top of moldy old, failed to remove the leg irons once a day to exercise the elephants.

  The reporter from the Lima Journal pointed to Caesar's lolling tongue with the toe of his boot—the pink flesh marred by black circles, the exact circumference of a lit cigar. "Hofstadter enjoyed a cigar," someone said. Nobody said anything, which told Gordon that it was the correct explanation. Hofstadter had instigated his own brutal demise.

  Gordon looked up and prayed for Caesar's enormous soul. Did elephants go to heaven, he wondered, or did they return to the land from which they'd been taken as calves? Maybe they went home in the holds of magic ships, like the ones that brought them from Africa and Ceylon and India. He felt a nudge at his shoulder. A Negro handler named Sugar offered him a swig from a bottle of whiskey. Gordon expected it to taste good, like liquid butterscotch. Instead, he gagged on the first sip—flames burned his mouth and throat, then embers glowed in his stomach. It wasn't the same fire, not a cigar's orange coal, but it was all he could stand to know of Caesar's pain.

  During all the commotion, no one noticed Elephant Jack stuff his hand deep into his pocket. No one saw him make a fist around his cigar. No one had ever caught him in the elephant barn during his benders—he was a simple man, but a mean drunk, given to torment and torture. Either way you look at it—the week of neglect or the cigars—Hofstadter's death was on Elephant Jack's head. He knew it, but he stared at the ground and kept it to himself.

  The article written up by the Lima Journal reporter made no mention of Elephant Jack's dereliction of duty, nor the cigar burns. The headline read:

  ELEPHANT IS KILLED

  CAESAR IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE

  Pays the Penalty for the Murder

  of Hans Hofstadter with his Life

  Elephant Jack Pursues the Beast

  to the Fields and Shoots Him

  Chapter the Third

  How Verna Bowles Learned about

  the Relative Nature of Beauty and Truth

  LIKE A LOT OF people, Wallace Porter went belly up in 1929. The years that followed were thin and mean, and finally in 1939, he had to sell everything to the Coleman Bros. Circus, who opted not to renew the contract of the Boela Tribe. It was no great matter. Three years earlier, Pearly's heart had burst like an overfilled balloon, old Bascomb was in failing health himself, and Gordon (a reluctant performer but loyal son) was more than ready to leave the tribe. Like many other retired circus people, the Bowles men moved into Lima and bought a house. Every day, Bascomb sat on the porch swing like a lifeless dog, his dull eyes watching cars pass by. Try as he might, he couldn't come to terms with his stagnant life.

  He died soon after.

  Gordon married Mimi, a woman large in spirit and small of frame, a former vaudeville dancer who gave lessons in town. In the last months of her pregnancy, Mimi had to carry her enormous belly around like a rock in a sling. Their daughter, Verna, was a fourteen-pound baby.

  Mimi died soon after.

  By the time Verna was born, the Great Porter Circus was long gone, but the stories remained. Her father saw each empty barn and corn-stubbled field as a historical monument, marked Something Happened Here. Always, he spoke of Lima's days gone by with great solemnity, even sadness. Verna felt that for every story he told (and there were many), there was another just behind it, one he'd never tell. He kept the past divvied up inside—the one he spoke of, stored in a red and gold music box that played cheerful calliope music, and the past he hid in a padlocked black trunk, stashed in a rarely used closet of his heart.

  Verna bore no resemblance to her pretty, petite mother. She cursed her nappy hair and stout body. In the fifth grade, she bloomed to a whopping size 34DD, and her breasts laced themselves with stretch marks. Ashamed, Verna developed a slump-shouldered stoop and went on crying jags in the bathtub. Her father, bless his heart, did what he could to make her feel better. He said, "Verna, honey, there isn't just one kind of beauty."

  In aught nine, he said, the Congolese Women toured with Porter's circus. While on African safari, some frog named Guy Farlais had stumbled upon a remote tribe of nearly naked Congolese who, lucky for Farlais, spoke a kind of French. The women had lips like duck bills—from infancy, girls of the tribe wore saucers in their lips to make them bigger and more beautiful. Farlais promised the chief untold riches if he'd lease twenty women to him for a tour of Europe and America. He billed them as "The Greatest Educational Attraction of All Time!" and made a tidy profit for himself and Porter.

  When the Congolese Women first saw the Boela Tribe's black faces, they'd gestured wildly toward the horizon, speaking in a strange tongue Gordon couldn't understand. They cried a lot, especially when they saw Porter's one African elephant, Sambo. Stroking his bristly hide, the Congolese tugged on the elephant's chains, sending a plaintive wail into the sky. They missed their children back home ("nearly a hundred of the little monkeys," Farlais laughed). Each night, they danced and sang before boarding the circus train. The Congolese taught the Boela Tribe this number; Porter loved it and called it "The Ceremonial Hunting Dance," but Gordon called it "The Lost Child Dance"-—African mothers calling to their children far across the ocean.

  "Those women must have been some kind of ugly." Verna said.

  "Not to their husbands," he said matter-of-factly. "It's like how Chink men likes little feet, so if they wants their daughters to find a good husband, they bind up their toes till they can barely walk. I seen some once. Mrs. Ching. Her family was acrobats that trouped with us. Had feet curled up like fists, but she wasn't nothing but proud." He thought this a better example of cross-cultural beauty than the Hottentot Venus—in her tribe, women hung weights from their privates, stretching them like earlobes until the skin flapped at the knees.

  "Whatever happened to them? The Congolese."

  Gordon shook his head. "Porter sent 'em home. Eventually. It's a horrible thing, taking things away from where they belong to put money in a man's pocket." His eyes were far away.

  Verna never told her father this, but sometimes she wished that the Congolese had been forced to stay. Maybe in the sideshow, she could have been "The Ugliest Congolese Woman!" Maybe there, standing next to saucer-lipped women, she could have been beautiful.

  HER FATHER worked for Ollie Hofstadter (son of Hans the elephant trainer), who'd opened his own business, Clown Alley Cleaners. After school, Verna met her father at the store, and every day Mr. Ollie said, "There's my big gal, the spitting image of her grandmother," like it was a compliment to be compared to Pearly (Verna had seen pictures). But even his insensitivity couldn't keep her away from her bedroom window on summer nights. That's where Verna sat listening to the snatches of stories floating up to her from the porch below, where her father and Mr. Ollie often sat passing whiskey between them. One night toward the end of a bottle, Mr. Ollie took a familiar story (his short-lived clowning career) all the way to its never-before-spoken end—the night he killed his best friend, Jo-Jo the Clown.

  Their act was pretty standard. Big guy (Jo-Jo) terrorizes little guy (Mr. Ollie). Tables turn. Little guys gets revenge. Laughter! They'd done it hundreds of times, but that night they were drunker than usual, so drunk that Jo-Jo forgot to put on his wooden wig. When Mr. Ollie struck Jo-Jo's head with the hatchet, he felt not the familiar stick into the wooden wig, but rather a sickening give. Jo-Jo fell into the sawdust. Laughter! Clowns emerged with a stretcher to carry Jo-Jo away, but they'd grabbed a prop stretcher by mistake—they lifted the poles, leaving him on the ground. Laughter! The spotlight followed Mr. Ollie as he ran across the center ring crying, tripping on his big, floppy shoes. Laughter! Applause! He waited for the band to play Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever," the circus emerg
ency song that would prompt the ushers to clear the tent, but instead, they broke into "Strike Up the Band."

  Mr. Ollie sighed. "It was all my fault."

  "Now, he was drunk, too," Gordon said.

  "Still." A long pause. "Whose fault was it my father died?"

  Another story she'd never heard before. Verna heard ice tinkling against glass, then another long swig. The two men on the porch were quiet for a long time.

  "I know he died down at the river, but no one would tell me much else," Mr. Ollie said. "My momma never spoke of it, except in these nightmares where she talked to him in German."

  "What'd she say?"

  Mr. Ollie sighed. "I never learned German."

  Silence. Finally, Gordon told him. Like this:

  Hofstadter arrived the morning of April 25, 1901, still sick from flu, smelling of sweat and camphor. Elephant Jack, his assistant handler, was nowhere in sight—sleeping off an all-night drunk. He'd taken a vacation in Hofstadter's absence, and the barn stank of moldy hay and dung. The elephants tugged on the chains eating at the flesh of their tree-trunk feet, a sign he'd neglected to remove the leg irons each day and walk the elephants around the paddocks. Their trunks swung hypnotically, heads rocking back and forth, the malady of boredom. Hofstadter chomped an unlit cigar in his furious jaw. Unlocking the chains, the keeper hustled the elephants out of the barn to the river for a bath. He was standing on the bank when, out of the blue, Caesar picked him up with his trunk and tossed him ten feet into the air. Hofstadter landed with a smack in the middle of the river. His head struck a rock, and that was it.

  "It was quick," Gordon said. "He didn't feel no pain. It was bad luck is all. A hoodoo."