The Circus in Winter (11 page)

May 21. Radford, Virginia. Population 4,000. Found an empty lot on top of hill, one-half mile from town. Rain and thunderstorms all day. Miss Stella Hobzini lost her balance in the tandem horse race over obstacles and fell from her saddle. She hurt herself severely and had to be carried to her dressing room. Parade at 12 o'clock. One bandwagon, mounted people and elephants only. One show. Attendance good. Traveled forty-three miles on N
W. Overall, show going well. Will write more later, [unsigned]

***

HERE ARE A
few things you should know about the above correspondence:

1. The second letter is a copy of the May 21 entry in "The Great Porter Circus Route Book," a daily record kept by the Colonel for business purposes.
   
2. A comparison of the Colonel's letters to his wife and his route book entries reveals this method of correspondence had been his practice for years.
   
3. Mrs. Colonel had always suspected as much, but the diligence it took him to copy his entry twice had always satisfied her as a kind of romance.
   
4. Despite their mutual promise to "write more later," during the 1904 circus season, this brief exchange between the Colonel and Mrs. Ford constituted the sum total of their communication.
   
5. Neither one noticed.
   

 

WHEN FALL CAME
, Jeremy returned with a sketchpad full of Jennie Dixianna. "I watched her a great deal this season," he explained to Mrs. Colonel. "I wanted to capture her act and her passion." Mrs. Colonel tried to smile when she saw the cream-colored pages full of the blur of Jennie's act, but covered her mouth when she saw Jennie Dixianna's bare back as she soaked in a washtub. Jeremy's voice was level. "Miss Dixianna was kind enough to sit for me a few times. I found it very helpful. I think the Colonel will be pleased with the results."

The next week, he worked on the west wall almost constantly, and for the first time, the Colonel took an interest in Jeremy's work, offering suggestions and praise. Like the painting of Alberto Coronado, Jennie Dixianna was represented more than once. Climbing the rope to do the Spin of Death. The Spin of Death itself. Standing in the sawdust, her ruby bracelet thrust in the air, receiving applause after her Spin of Death. "I'd like to bring her here," Jeremy said one day, "for a final touch up."

On the appointed afternoon, Colonel Ford burst into the house a half hour before Jennie arrived to change his shirt. When Mrs. Colonel walked into the living room with the tea tray, she found Jennie seated between Jeremy and the Colonel, laughing with her head thrown back, one hand on the Colonel's knee and the other on Jeremy's. Mrs. Colonel plunked the tray down on the table and sat in a nearby armchair. After listening to the three of them chatter about the last season on the road, Mrs. Colonel rose from her seat. "Gentlemen, I think Miss Dixianna has business to attend to?"

"Yes, of course," Jeremy said, taking the hand of Jennie Dixianna, helping her rise from the couch. Colonel Ford reached for her other hand, but when he caught Mrs. Colonel's stare, he touched his pipe instead. Jeremy and Jennie mounted the stairs that led to the bedroom.

The Colonel and Mrs. Ford munched cookies and sipped tea in the darkening room. Neither rose to light a lamp nor spoke a word. For the next half hour, the house was completely still until they heard the steady thrump and squeak of the bed above their heads. They lifted their eyes and studied the ceiling together. Mrs. Colonel sobbed into her cupped hands, but the Colonel did not rise from the sofa to comfort her, nor did he charge up the stairs and stop what was going on. He clenched his pipe between his teeth and spat out the word "whore," which only made Mrs. Colonel cry harder.

 

NO WOMAN
sets out to make a fool of herself, but it still happens. All the time. A girl marries but forgets why. She wants to remember, but her husband has forgotten as well. They grow apart. A new man appears. Suddenly, she remembers love; it is a bird inside her heart that flies out the top of her head. Then, she remembers lust; it is a bird inside her womb that flies out between her legs. Her need for this new man makes her do foolish things, and the man knows this. He isn't worthy of her loyalty, her love. He is weak, lured away by money and a scheming temptress. For the first time in her life, the woman understands why someone might commit suicide, because there are days when her humiliation is so total it seems only death can take her far enough away from it.

Sometimes the woman dies. If she lives, sometimes she leaves her husband, but not always. Sometimes he leaves her. It's the same old story, but as often as it's been told, only one version ends with walls like those in the house of Mrs. Colonel Ford.

 

DESPITE HER PLEADING
, the Colonel refused to let her paint over the murals. "We spent a small fortune on these walls," he told her. "You get what you pay for in this life."

A few weeks after Jeremy Trainor disappeared from the winter quarters, Mrs. Colonel snuck into her bedroom and caught the Colonel dancing in front of Jennie's wall, his arms outstretched, eyes closed. Despite his wide girth, the Colonel still waltzed as smoothly as he had the night of the cotillion, when she'd refused to dance with him until she could no longer bear his ardor.
You are the prettiest little thing here,
he'd whispered in her ear.

Mrs. Colonel knew the form he envisioned before him was Jennie's and not her own, but she moved softly into her husband's outstretched arms and matched his step. In that brightly painted bedroom in Indiana, many miles and years away from that night in Virginia, the Colonel and Mrs. Ford swayed to a lost song, weeping together at how little difference time made.

—or
Nothing Ever Stops Happening
When It's Over

TWO MILES OUTSIDE
Lima, the Winnesaw Reservoir sits, a big brown puddle of river water, backed up and stagnant. I've seen it in spring, all that Winnesaw lapping against boat docks and half-submerged trees. The trapped reservoir water still smells of river, and I cannot help but think of the Flood of 1913. It's the same water probably. Surely in all this time, the river has run its course and found its way back here to our dam, the way old elephants return to their own boneyard to die.

The Winnesaw River nearly broke its banks every year, which was maybe why we weren't expecting it in 1913, the year the rains came so fast there wasn't time to sandbag the banks. We were living out by the winter quarters then, me and my husband, Charles, and Mildred, who was just a week or two old. Charles was doing work for Wallace Porter, building his circus wagons and animal cages, sometimes cutting curlicue designs on the staircases of Porter's mansion.

Porter had been friends with my parents, so I knew about his wife, his great love, dying on him. He said he'd never marry again. He was small and bone thin, the kind of thin people turn when they stay up all night worrying and forget to eat for days at a time. He had tiger eyes, tan and gold and green, but they were rimmed by dark circles, so the eyes sunk in and you caught yourself sometimes leaning forward to look into the hollows. His eyes were the only sad thing about him though, because he carried himself like a gentleman, all poise and polish, right down to his voice, which was the same for respectable folks like my parents as for the gypsies and strange rabble who ran his circus, the circus he bought with the money after he'd sold the biggest livery stable business in northern Indiana.

Understand, I lived through the Flood of 1913, but also I was living near the winter quarters, where I could hear the animals screaming, where, after the waters went away, all the carcasses rotted in the fields where they'd settled, like the gray open-eyed fish you'd find in a dry creek bed.

In 1913, Porter practically owned the town. He bought about a hundred acres along the Winnesaw River, built a bunch of barns for all those animals, and built himself a mansion on the top of a hill with white columns and stained glass windows. Since his wife was gone, Porter lived up there all by himself, except for the maids and butlers, of course. Some said that at night he'd go down the hill to the winter quarters and play poker and drink with the roustabouts, or sometimes they'd find him in the barns, watching the animals mate. He said to Charles once that he was just making sure that the mating was getting done, that things would keep on going. Charles even heard that sometimes Porter would get all hot and bothered watching those animals and he'd pay calls on the star acrobat, Jennie Dixianna, who had a bunkhouse all to herself.

Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. It was never any of my business, but I believe what Porter told me once. "Grace, what I always wanted was to have many children, to scatter my name like those proverbial seeds in the wind, but God didn't make that possible for me, so I'm just going to make something on this earth really big and put my name all over it."

Most people simply buy a company or make a doodad and go about making a name for themselves that way, but Porter was different. Around here, people use that word
different,
like a slur, but he was the better side of different.

I came from money, but I married for love, so Charles and I didn't have much. Our rented house was awful plain, so Porter loaned us some old furniture from the bunkhouses, a ratty davenport and a stained mattress. Charles stayed up late into the nights, making us chairs and a headboard by the light of the kerosene lamp. A few weeks later when I found out Mildred was coming, he carved a cradle, and after she was born, he painted it sunflower yellow. The rains started while I was still weak and shaky from the birth.

The rain never let up, not for a whole week. At first, the water covered the backyard, creeping up the back steps, one by one, and then spilled its way through the door and into the kitchen, where I was standing at the sink. The water rushed in like the tide, but instead of soothing me, the cold Winnesaw grabbed my ankles with frozen hands, sending icicles shooting up my legs. Charles found me there, shrieking, holding my nightdress up out of the water. He carried me upstairs, sloshing in his big boots through the living room while I cried for him to save the only nice things we had, my mother's books and my photographs, which were floating around the feet of the kitchen table. Charles piled sandbags around the doors, but it didn't do any good, so he brought up all the food and blankets and the soaked things. I placed the books and photographs on the bed and watched them swell and curl while Charles rocked Mildred in her yellow cradle.

After the second day, when the water was a quarter way up the wall on the first floor, Charles and I saw a dinghy across the widening river set out from Brown's farm. Charles waved a shirt out the window, and the two men inside the boat waved their hats. But the river was churning brown rapids and an uprooted tree tossing in the water capsized their boat. They grabbed the tree and went floating on by us. Charles and I watched them from the bedroom window and neither of us said anything.

That night, the animals screamed. Lions and tigers were roaring to be let out of their cages. The elephants blew their high-pitched cry through their trunks. Over the pounding of the rain, I heard water lapping against the house, as if we were on a boat going down the Congo River, and in the jungle on either side of us animals were clawing each other's backs in the darkness. We heard men yelling, and although we could not make out the words, the tone of their fear and their frantic attempts to get the animals free echoed in the night. I got out of bed and opened the window to pitch-black and saw jewels in the trees, the yellows and greens of squirrel eyes and possum eyes and snakes, too, blinking into the river that wouldn't stop coming.

I slept in fits and starts, and when I opened my eyes at sunup, I saw what looked like a snake climbing over the windowsill. I screamed and woke Charles, who walked to the window with a shoe, but then he laughed and told me to come see. A big bull elephant from the winter quarters had stuck his trunk in the window, and when he leaned against the house, his shivers sent vibrations running through our feet. The water covered his legs and was starting to come up his body, and his eyes, brown like a horse's and fringed with long lashes, kept looking at us, like we were at fault. Until then, I realized, his life had been one of show and strain in return for human kindness and some hay. I couldn't stand to see him look at me, pleading. I sat back down on the bed and took Mildred up in my arms.