The Ordways (34 page)

“After that, Topsy brought the ring sections and the seats were laid up, and by then it was dinner time, hers as well as ours. And after dinner the sideshows and the midway stalls were put up, and it began to look like a circus, and to smell like a circus, with the fresh sawdust and the sweat and the animal odors and the dust in the air and the cotton candy being spun and potato chips and doughnuts frying in the wire spiders and—well, the way a circus smells. The performers were getting into their costumes and on the sides of the vans mirrors flashed in the sun while the clowns put on their paint and everybody was tense and curious to know how big and what kind of a crowd we would draw. None was more interested in the gate than I was. It didn't matter that the day before I had been just as hopeful, and there had been no sign of Will or Ned. This was today, and a new town.

“My head used to reel with looking at so many faces. Not that we drew such great crowds, but it was more people than I was used to at one time, except once a month on Saturday afternoon in Clarksville. And these were all strangers. After a time I began to fear that I had forgotten what the man I was after looked like. Especially as, Will being a rather common type, as I've said before, so many men did remind me of him. Fortunately he was not the type to come up and say, ‘I don't like the way you're staring at me'—though I did have that happen a couple of times. And sometimes it would seem I was seeing Ned in every little cotton-headed boy I looked at. I had not seen him for some while, remember, and it got to the point that I would sometimes have to sneak a look at the photograph I carried of him, and compare it to some little boy I'd seen coming through the stile ahead of his folks, so as to know whether or not to get ready to jump the man standing at the window of the ticket wagon counting out his money.

“The first thing everybody did was come to see the elephant. I would stand beside her trying to see over the faces in front to catch sight of Will or Mrs. Vinson among those in the back before either of them should recognize me. Meanwhile I had to answer questions. ‘Yes, ma'am, that is right, there is a secret elephant burial ground where they all go to die. Yes, sir, live to be around a hundred and twenty-five to fifty. No, sir, never forget a thing.' And then the little blank cannon went off that announced the performance time and for me it was another day like the one before, another town with no sign of what I was searching for, and I would have to begin thinking of tomorrow and hoping it would be different. Then the show was over and the people went home happy and the seats had to be dismantled and stowed away and the tent taken down and folded (Topsy being put to work again: she pulled up all the stakes with her trunk) and the sideshows and all the stalls, and at last we pulled away, leaving just a ring of sawdust that made a pale circle as evening came on, like a pond in the moonlight.

“A sight more pathetic than a rained-out circus, unless it be an ice-cream cone melting on the sidewalk, I don't know. I had been with Dickey Bros. less than a week when we had our first rainy day. We'd gone through all the work I've described, plus a lot more that I haven't mentioned, while the clouds piled up and blackened overhead all morning. We just about had the tent up when it began to drizzle. ‘Maybe it'll blow over,' we said as we put up the sideshows, all of us drenched to the skin. By performance time it was sweeping across the lot in waves and sputtering on the hard-packed ground like grease in a skillet. The tent shuddered and shook. The canvas began to sag and water gathered in the dips and the streamers hung down limp as union-suits on a clothesline and the walls of the sideshows flapped and showed that they were only made of painted muslin stretched on laths. Soon the grounds were muddy as a hog wallow. A few country folks splashed around the booths, but we drew a small house that afternoon and the show fizzled out like a damp firecracker.

“After hauling down and folding the wet tent and getting packed and off the lot we had twenty long miles to make that night to get to our next stand. It was then that I first learned to appreciate that term ‘mud show.' Dickey Bros. traveled in a dozen wagons (plus the one my joining the circus had added to the number), tall, heavy enclosed vans with heavy-duty wheels, drawn by those big Clydesdales—underfed and rawboned like everything else, animal and human, connected with Dickey Bros. To draw the biggest wagon of all, Topsy's, took six of them. On the best of roads and in good weather our top speed was about four miles an hour. That night we had a taste of what we were in for right away. One wagon got stuck in the mud before we were even off the lot: Topsy's. Gross weight with her in it of that wagon was close to ten tons. She climbed the ramp, the driver whipped up the team, the wheels turned half over once, and sunk up to the hubs. Not even those six big horses, damned near the size of elephants themselves, could pull it out. We had to uncouple three more span of horses from other wagons and harness them to the six already there and get out in the rain and get our backs against the wagon while more of us pushed on the spokes of the wheels and strained and slithered around in the mud and grunted and cussed and threw brush under the wheels and brought poles to lever it with. That was the beginning. It rained nearly every day for the next three weeks and I reckoned once that I had helped push that seven-and-a-half-ton elephant and that oneton wagon for three hundred and some odd miles.

“Why not have brought Topsy out and made her walk? you may ask. Why not, in fact, have hitched her to one of the wagons? So we did. The first time was one night, or rather morning, around two a.m., when we bogged down on a back-country road miles from nowhere and tried with all the horses and all the men and made about one hundred yards in two hours, and decided at last to let Topsy pull her own weight. Even then, Red was against it, and sure enough, we no sooner had her out than she raised her trunk and sniffed and set off cross-country. She pulled up about fifty feet of the barb-wire fence at the roadside, pulled up wire, posts, and according to Red the postholes as well, stopped long enough to eat all the apples in a farmer's orchard, then moseyed on down to the millpond that she had gotten wind of, knocking down six or eight apple trees, not out of any mischief but just because she couldn't see them. She drank about half of that millpond, then when she had slaked her everlasting thirst she got in to take a bath in what was left. We threw rocks at her and she threw them right back at us. She squealed and trumpeted and squirted us and sprayed herself and frolicked about, and all the while the farmer, who had been roused from bed by all the hullabaloo and come running out with his shotgun, stood threatening to shoot us if we didn't get that elephant off his property that minute. She was the playfullest old idiot around water, you couldn't help but laugh, and me being amused made the farmer all the madder. Around six o'clock Topsy decided she had had enough and started to climb out. She couldn't make it. The banks were too steep and too slippery. She managed to hook her trunk around one tree and got about halfway out, then the tree came up, roots and all. We finally had to bring down the main tent cable and fourteen horses to haul her out. After that episode it was a good while—more than a week—before we got desperate enough to let Topsy out again. Meanwhile the rains came down and the crowds stayed away and the roads ran liquid and our transportation problems multiplied. Our own particular problem, Red's and mine, could have been solved only by a span of elephants—the East Indian kind, maybe—to draw Topsy with.

“Back-road bridges were never built to carry the likes of Topsy. One morning around six o'clock, after being on the road all night long, we came to one that looked too flimsy to support the empty wagon, let alone the elephant. We had lost so much time that night and fallen so far behind schedule that the rest of the show had gone ahead to get started setting up, leaving me and Red to follow with Topsy. We came to that bridge. Being late and worn out and having no idea where the nearest bridge was nor any reason to expect that it would look any stronger than this one, and the creek being shallow and only about twenty feet wide, we decided to swim Topsy across it. Red got on the far side to call her and coax her out, if necessary. She didn't need any coaxing. I led her out, she lifted her trunk into the breeze, waded across the creek in two strides and up the bank and past Red, who was not even watching her but seemed to have his nose in the air too, and set off down the road at about forty-five miles per hour. By the time I got across the bridge she was five hundred yards down the road with Red about a hundred yards behind, and gaining steadily on her, while I brought up the rear. In time Red caught up, passed Topsy's tail and then her mid-section and drew up alongside her nose, and for the next hundred yards or so it was a dead heat. Then Red went ahead. ‘'Attaway, Red!' I yelled. ‘Head her off! Turn her! I'm right behind you!' But Red never even turned himself, he just went out in front and kept on going until he had taken a hundred-and-fifty-yard lead. He turned around once then to see how far ahead he was and put on another spurt. Very shortly, however, he commenced to fade. He was winded and Topsy closed the gap. She caught up with him, and again it was neck and neck for a stretch. Then Red fell back alongside her middle and back to her tail and Topsy passed him and took the lead. When she reached a certain point she turned off the road, struck across the field, and headed for the woods. I caught up with Red, who was still giving it all he had, and I started to slow down, for I was pretty winded myself. ‘Run!' he panted. ‘Catch her! Damnation! There won't be a drop left!' I ran. Crossed the field and into the woods. To trail Topsy there wasn't hard, she had cleared a path. But by the time I got there it looked like Red was right—
there
being this moonshiner's still in the woods—and Topsy had already drunk all of the current run and was starting in on the open vats of mash, and if we had been much slower she would have found the bottled stuff. Judging by the wet level in the drum where the finished stuff dripped out of the still, she had drunk between eight and ten gallons. There was nothing to be done but camp there and wait for her to come to. Took her thirty-six hours to sleep it off. What a hangover that elephant woke up with! Matter of fact, we were all three in pretty sorry shape. We brewed black coffee all around and choked down a hair of the dog that bit us and on Wednesday, traveling by night and day, we managed to catch up with the show, all of us still looking mighty seedy, five towns further on. Red and I got back on keel after about a week but poor old Topsy was never the same again, never recovered from that last big toot she went on. She was entirely too old to be carrying on that way. Besides, that whisky was enough to kill anybody. Real rotgut. Her digestion was upset and she went off her feed. She developed the shakes, her eyes were bleary and bloodshot. Finally she caught a cold—elephants are highly susceptible. She had all the symptoms, magnified: runny nose, sneezing, coughs, fever, and worst of all, constipation. Epsom salts, castor oil, prune juice, Black Draught, Milk of Magnesia, Fletcher's Castoria, Syrup of Pepsin, we tried them all, by the bucketful. Finally we gave her an enema—no use. She just dragged around, and at last, in the town of Zodiac, old Topsy came to the end of the line. She was a long way from home, I was thinking, a long way from that secret burial place where all elephants go when they feel the end is near. And that led me to wonder just where we were going to bury her, when out came Mr. Dickey to see how his star attraction was faring. No sooner had he heard the sad news than he said, ‘Raise a tent over that animal.' No sentimentality to that man—he was show business all the way. We had posters printed up and fanned out around the countryside posting them on sides of barns and picket fences and telegraph poles, and people came from miles around. ‘
DEAD ELEPHANT. LIMITED ENGAGEMENT
,' the posters said. Luckily there had come a cool snap, and the weather held, and Topsy held, and we did the best five days' business during all my time with the show, though in my own case it still didn't draw Will out. At the end of those five days the weather took a sudden shift. It was perfect circus weather. Out came the sun we had been praying for and not a breath of wind was stirring. After about one hour of it the entire population of Zodiac was down on us. They came out carrying guns and wearing bandanas over their noses—looked like a townful of desperadoes. ‘Get that thing out of here, and be quick about it,' they said. By then the sky was clouding over with turkey buzzards. We all fell to digging in shifts but by the middle of the afternoon the temperature had risen to the high seventies and our hole still not nearly big enough for one of those East Indian ones, if Topsy had been that kind, much less for her. We were all wearing bandanas by then too. Meanwhile the citizens of Zodiac were cocking their guns. ‘Men, this won't do,' said Mr. Dickey. ‘We've got to find another way out.' So we all sat down, some distance out of range, and discussed the problem. ‘If only we could find a dry well,' somebody suggested. ‘Dry coal mine, you mean,' said somebody else. Another was for putting her in her wagon and going down along the road until we found some place to dump her. ‘That's seven and a half tons of dead weight you're talking about loading into that wagon,' someone else pointed out. One fellow suggested setting up a cannery, cooking Topsy, and selling it for dog food. But it seemed we had waited too long for that. Somebody else was for stalling the local men till dark, then pulling out, but it was plain that they had already thought of that one too, and now had their guards stationed all around, within sight, but out of smell, or as near to it as you could get. Well, I hadn't said anything and they all turned to me. I had nothing to offer. As a matter of fact, however, I was the one who found the solution. I can't take any credit for it, though.”

“How is that? If you solved the problem, Grandpa, then why can't you take the credit?”