The Circus in Winter (3 page)

At the edge of the camp, an elephant stood swinging hay into its mouth, rocking back and forth, clanking the chain around its foot. Hollenbach approached its trunk. "This is George, the only elephant left. A good worker. Had to sell the rest. Cost too much to feed." George's skin sagged from protruding bones and Porter stroked the knobbly, bristled hide. One ivory tusk was tipped with a gold ball, the other was broken off, "from lifting tent poles," Hollenbach explained. Porter didn't know anything about elephants, but he knew when a creature was on its last legs. In the war, he'd watched three horses crumple beneath him, one from musket fire, two from starvation and exhaustion. George's sad eye fixed on Porter like a plea, and he had to look away.

Hollenbach led Porter to his private railcar, his name painted in gold on the sides. The car was a modified Pullman done up in red velvet and mahogany, complete with a sleeping berth, woodstove, and armchairs. They passed the rest of the afternoon drinking more whiskey, smoking cigars. Hollenbach confessed there was not even enough money for next month's hay and soon he would have to sell his circus. The silence of the previous weeks had made Porter hungry for the sound of a human voice, even if it was Hollenbach lamenting his financial woes. He kept the thought of Irene—alone and curled in pain—in the back of his brain for as long as he could. The darkening sky said it was after five, and he was waiting for a lull in the conversation to make his departure when there came a loud rap at the door.

"Come then," Hollenbach roared.

The door opened, and a black-haired woman stepped into the light of the crystal sconces. She wore a white dress with a shawl draped over her shoulders and bowed slightly to Hollenbach, then to Porter.

"What is it, Marta? So late."

The woman, Marta, bowed again. "My baby is sick, sir," she said, the English correct, but thickly accented. "He needs a doctor."

Hollenbach sighed and rubbed his forehead. Porter set down his glass and spoke, looking first at the woman's eyes. "I know a doctor. Byrd. Very good, and
reasonable.
"The last word was for Hollenbach, whose head was still cradled in his hand.

"I thought your mother could cure these things, Marta?" Hollenbach looked at Porter. "Her mother knows magic. Chants and such. I had to let our croaker, Doc Miller, go at the end of last season, and Marta's mother has done almost as good a job. Right?"

Marta kept her eyes lowered and clutched her shawl more tightly. "She's been cooking the broths all day. Nothing works for him. I thought you should help." Marta looked up then, her eyes narrowed into slits, and Porter understood that Hollenbach was responsible for the child beyond his duties as an employer.

Hollenbach missed Marta's look, but not her meaning. He kept his eyes on his drink. "How is he? The baby."

"He makes noise when he breathes and will not eat." Marta's voice was flat.

"Well then, tomorrow morning take the baby to this Dr. Byrd, and tell him to send the bill to me." Hollenbach puffed on his cigar and blew the smoke toward her. "Normally, I'd have to deduct some from your month's wages for this, but I'll let it go this time."

She said nothing and was turning to leave when Hollenbach said loudly, "Porter, do you know how our Marta earns her keep?" Marta stopped still, facing the door. "Turn around dear and show my friend your secret." His voice trembled with a subtle menace, but it was the money, Porter decided, not malice making Hollenbach take it out on the girl.

Marta came to him, whipping off her shawl with a flourish and covering her hands. Her eyes were closed as if she were praying. "Lift the shawl and, without looking, take my hands."

Hollenbach laughed. "She's a mystic."

Porter did as she instructed and grasped her fingers. Her hands were wet, but soft, which surprised him, because he'd imagined that the hands of circus people would be rough with calluses and rope burns. Working hands. There was something odd about her hands, too, the feel of them squirming in his, that he could not place.

Marta threw her head back, exposing the curve of her throat. Around her neck she wore a beaded necklace cinched tightly. Porter felt silly but tried to smile. Marta's eyes opened suddenly and she pulled her hands quickly away. "You should not be here. Go home."

Hollenbach rose out of his chair. "Why?"

"The one he loves is very sick. His hands should be taking care of her now."

Porter shook Marta by her thin shoulders. "How did she know this? Have you seen the doctor already? Or someone in town? What kind of game are you playing?" As he shook her, the shawl fell to her feet, and then he saw her hands, thin and blue-veined with gold and silver rings encircling each finger. Porter turned her hands palms up, then palms down. On one, he counted seven, on the other eight. Fingers.

"The extra ones are not mine," she said.

He couldn't take his eyes off her hands. "Whose are they?"

Marta motioned to Hollenbach with a nod of her head. "They are his mostly, but I think they are part in this world, part not. They tell me things to say, and mostly, they are true."

Without even a word of good-bye to Hollenbach, Porter ran out of the Pullman, dodging smoldering fires and canvas tents until he reached his stable and whipped his horse home to the dying Irene.

 

FOR THE LUCKY
, death is a slow, quiet fade. For the rest, death humiliates, leaving us screaming and praying, covered in sweat, blood, and excrement. Dying, the final throes of it, is a messy business. Irene wanted to save her husband from this. So she staved off death, waiting for that window of opportunity when he might leave her alone. The soul is a funny thing. It can be saved and lost, fed and consumed, and sometimes, at the very end, it can be ordered to do our bidding.

In later years, when people asked Wallace Porter what possessed him to buy a circus, he told them, "I'd been to see the elephant, that's why." Those who did not know him well assumed that, like the Ringlings, he'd seen a pachyderm somewhere and been bitten by the showman's bug. Those who'd heard his story about George the elephant's accusing eye believed that he bought Hollenbach's Menagerie as a humane act of goodwill. But others recognized the phrase from the days when gold miners and homesteaders headed West and Union boys headed South. Going to see the elephant meant you were going over the wall, into the cave, across the mountain, into the dark night beyond the firelight's reach. When you returned—if you returned—you said, "I've been to see the elephant." Some things once seen cannot be said, and so we say we've seen the elephant instead.

 

DURING THAT LONG
moonlit ride, Porter didn't pray. He stormed at a gallop to the dark house and saw Irene standing at the bedroom window, waving down to him as she once had, and he thought,
The witch was wrong. I'm a fool running all crazy out here.
He looked up again and saw it wasn't Irene, but the reflection of the moon shimmering in the window. Porter threw open the front door and ran up the stairs.

Scattered on the floor were shards from an amber bottle, its contents already soaked into the rug. The lamp next to the bed had long since run out of oil. Caressing Irene's cold hand, he told her about Hollenbach, Marta and her fifteen fingers, George, and the circus people he had seen. As he worked a brush through her tangled nest of hair, Porter pictured his still-unfinished mansion. For the first time, he saw himself living there alone, floating ghostlike from room to room, visiting the intended nurseries and playrooms full of trunks, broken furniture, dust, and cobwebs. He saw the fields around his mansion gone fallow and brown, the barns abandoned, the tulip poplars bare.

Irene had fouled herself, so Porter placed her slumping form in an armchair while he changed the bedding. He cleaned her with water from the basin, and as he drew the cloth between her soiled legs, he knew he would never have a child, never find the courage to marry again. Irene lay naked on the bed, her skin bluish white, dry, and scaled. He found a jar of salve and rubbed it into her skin. As he anointed her belly, he felt a knot as big as an apple in the pit of her stomach and kneaded it with his fingers, tracing curves and ridges. This apple had been a pea on their wedding day, but Porter had no way of knowing that. He thought:
Instead of a baby, I planted this in my wife's womb, this beast which fed on her blood. It was inside her all the time.
He dressed her in a fresh nightgown, got into bed beside her, and slept.

When he woke, the morning light glowed behind the drapes. Leaving Irene, he watched the sun rise over his land and the Cunningham farm beyond. The sky was cloudy purple, turning pink at the edges, and across River Road, flowed the sluggish Winnesaw. Far off in the distance, he heard the long, slow pull of a train whistle and wondered if Hollenbach and his troupe might be leaving already. No, he remembered. They had horseshoes to tend to, Marta's baby to take to Doc Byrd, and surely Hollenbach was in no hurry to begin a season when each day he would sink deeper into his financial hole.

Porter saw it then, a vision clear as the sun: his name on a dozen railcars, Irene beside him in a private Pullman as they chugged across America, a circus king and queen. She was smiling and squeezing his hand, just as she had two years ago on the wedding train from New York. Then he saw his land overrun by elephants and bears, clowns romping in the grass, acrobats dancing in his trees. In his head, he tallied it up. He knew what price his stables would fetch, but how much would a circus cost? Animals and tents, calliopes and wagons. Circus people, all of them. And barns and bunkhouses to put them all in. Porter parted the red velvet curtains, and sunlight streamed into the dark bedroom. He stood back from the window to show Irene this new life. "Look," he said, almost bowing. "Look at what I'm going to do."

—
or
The Secret to
the Spin of Death

WINTER
is a long circus Sunday, a time for rest.

To fill the cold months, the Great Porter Circus & Menagerie held nightly poker games in the cookhouse of its winter quarters in Lima, Indiana. The wind outside howled across the plains and whistled through the walls. In the corners of the room, snow gathered like dust. The players drank cheap whiskey from tin cups and sat at a round wooden table placed so close to the potbelly stove that it seemed like another player. One February night, the competitors were proprietor Wallace Porter, his friend and local businessman George Cooper, elephant keeper Hans Hofstadter, and this night, a rarity—a woman. High-flying Jennie Dixianna joined the men in a flourish of feather boa.

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.