The Circus in Winter (7 page)

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

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 emergency 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."

"No wonder Elephant Jack took such good care of my momma and me," Mr. Ollie said. "He neglected the animals and spooked them. My mother always told me circus animals is cared for the very best. I guess that wasn't always the case."

"No, it wasn't," Gordon said quietly.

Mr. Ollie thanked him and teetered home.

Later, Verna found her father in the kitchen. "Grilling," he called it—cracking eggs into a skillet with potatoes, onions, and leftovers. Plopping down into a kitchen chair, she felt a whoosh of air from the cushion, the sound of the fat woman settling in. Even alone in the kitchen with her father, she was embarrassed, overwhelmingly aware of her body. She wished, along with her size, she'd also inherited Grandma Pearly's renowned self-assuredness.

Gordon joined her at the table, squirting ketchup on his concoction. Finally, she had to ask him—how old was he when Mr. Ollie's daddy died? He put down his fork. "You been snooping again, girl?" Verna hung her head. "Lemme tell you something. Lemme tell you the truth." Gordon told her. Like this:

Once while playing in the elephant barn, he'd watched Hofstadter put his cigar out on Caesar's tongue with a sickening sizzle. He saw Hofstadter die that day at the river, watched Caesar take revenge—and was glad. Hofstadter hit the water, but he didn't die instantly, like he'd told Mr. Ollie. It took a while. The elephant held a thrashing Hofstadter at the bottom of the river with his feet and tusks. After, Elephant Jack found him underwater, his eyes and mouth wide open, his curses floating helplessly down the Winnesaw River. The bullhook—bent into a sad C—was still clenched in the keeper's angry fist. He saw what came after. Two hundred bullets and seven poison apples. Elephant Jack's knife. Caesar's penis and its intended use. Black circles on a pink tongue.

Yes, yes, yes. All Gordon actually saw was Caesar's corpse—after the fact. But understand: Over the years, he had lost the ability to separate what he'd seen from what he'd heard, what he knew for sure from what he'd surmised. In his mind, he
had
been there, hiding in the hayloft watching Hofstadter brand Caesar's tongue, standing on the banks of the bloody Winnesaw. He saw these things clearly, like photographs in his head.

Verna cried, regretting that she'd prompted her father to open up the dark box. "You don't want to tell Mr. Ollie his dad was a bad man."

"He's my friend. He loves his daddy, and he'd never believe any different anyway." Gordon rinsed his plate in the sink. "Sometimes you run across a man whose granddaddy kept slaves. Just you
try
telling him what my daddy told me about that, what his mama told him..." He couldn't finish. "Time for bed," he said.

The next day, Gordon took Verna downtown to the Lima County Historical Museum. A few months earlier, the local historical society had turned the old Robertson Hotel into a makeshift gallery. He escorted her through the crowded displays of Indian arrowheads, pioneer butter churns, and circus artifacts. Finally, he led her to a raised pedestal in a far corner, upon which sat a large animal skull. Without being told, she knew it was Caesar's.

"Read that horseshit." He pointed to a framed clipping gone yellow with age.

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

She touched a bullet hole on the skull. A voice yelled, "You! Girl! Don't touch that," and Verna snatched her hand back. The woman who'd rung up their quarter admission peered over her spectacles. "You should tell her what happened," Verna said to her father, glancing at the woman.