The Circus in Winter (12 page)

"Charles," I said. "Give him some food. Bread. Do something."

"What do you want me to do, Grace? We need all our food."

"Make him go away then," I said.

So Charles threw my hairbrush hard against his back, but the brush just glanced off and floated away.

He sighed. "I can't make him leave. Maybe he'll go by himself."

But he didn't. The baby wailed in my ear, and the elephant bellowed all day long and shivered the house and I couldn't look out the window at his eyes all afraid of cold and death. The elephant's trunk poked around the windowsill, like a tongue licking the corners of a mouth. Towards noon, Charles remembered a straw tick mattress in another room, slit it open, and fed the straw to the elephant out the window; but there wasn't much and the elephant just wailed louder when the straw was gone. By five, bitter cold water almost covered his back. Both the elephant and the baby stopped crying, and then there was only the silence of waiting and the steady thump of current against the house.

Charles stood at the window. "He's just standing there with his head down. He knows it won't be long."

And about the time the sun went down, the trunk slipped off of the windowsill, and I got up, too, and watched the elephant sink down into the brown water. There wasn't a splash, just a swallowing up and a big spray of his last breath of air.

I kept Mildred away from the window all that time. There are some things children shouldn't see, even as babies. People think they can carry on in front of their babies as if they aren't even there, like they won't remember. But they do, because it's like planting a kernel that one day explodes and the memory comes rushing back and fills their heads with revelations of things long forgotten. See, I don't think that we live just once. We live when things first happen and every time we remember that first time, we live it again.

I thought the elephant had floated away in the current, and I imagined his gray bulk bumping off underwater trees, a rollicking tumble, head over tail in the brown water. But the darkness outside and the thick brown water shrouded the elephant completely. He sank below our window and never moved, and when the water finally receded, he would still be there, stiff and cold and so big that, even lying on his side, he was almost as tall as Charles. With our team of horses, Charles had to drag the elephant far enough away from the house so that we could burn him.

But right then, I didn't know that the elephant's body was under my window because the sky was dark all the time, gray and brown, the same as the water that was all around us. Everything flowed, sky and water and time itself, so you couldn't tell the difference between each day, or even where the water ended and sky started.

The second or third day, a log floated in the front door and started banging away at the piano. Charles laughed at first and said the old piano had never been in tune anyway, but after a couple of hours of the
bang-bang-bang,
he stopped making jokes. The piano was only partly covered by water, and the log, pushed in a steady, thunderous rhythm by the current, struck the keyboard in random chords. Every hour or so, the current shifted the log to a different set of keys and a new song banged out to the beat of the river.

Finally, Charles said, "I'm going to float the piano out the front door. I can't stand the racket."

But I cried and said, "Don't. I'm too weak to help if you get into trouble. We'll put little pieces of cloth in our ears and it won't be so bad."

The earplugs worked for Charles and me, but not for the baby. She kept pulling them out and wouldn't stop crying long enough for me to feed her and give her something to take the place of the tears. The water continued to rise, lapping against the pictures hung on the downstairs walls and coming slowly up the stairs. Then the bangs and chords changed and the sound came from underwater, so it sounded like you were swimming in a pond, listening to someone playing piano on the bank while you were underwater. Charles and I took out our earplugs, and even though the plunking was muffled, Mildred still cried, wailing, gulping air and tears.

That night, the sound of the underwater music drifted into my sleep and I dreamed I was playing the piano in our sunken house, moving my arms and fingers through the sluggish Winnesaw. Charles stood beside me, clapping the beat of the current on top of the piano while Mildred squirmed out of his arms and floated up and up, her white baby gown trailing like wings behind her.

I sat straight up in bed then, awakened by Mildred's screams. I shook Charles awake and told him about my dream.

He rubbed his head. "Maybe we're going crazy. From the din."

"We can't stop the noise and we can't make her sleep."

"Well," Charles said, "there's the brandy."

He got a bottle of apple brandy down from the closet and soaked his handkerchief in it and stuck it in Mildred's mouth, rewetting the cloth every few minutes, and she sucked enough of it to finally fall asleep.

Some days later—I say it was two, but Charles always swore it was only one—we were awakened by calls of "Hello in there" coming from outside our window. The rain had stopped, and Wallace Porter had sent some of his roustabouts on a raft made out of the side of a circus wagon. Charles rigged a rope with the sheets and lowered Mildred in her cradle, then me, then climbed down himself. And wouldn't you know that as we rounded the front corner of the house, we heard the piano shatter blessedly apart and watched it float in pieces out the front door. Charles and I cried and hugged each other, pointing to the piano shards and laughing like crazy people, which I suppose we were, from no food for days. We sat there on the raft, listening to no rain hammering the roof, no baby crying, no piano plunking, no elephant bellowing, just the miraculous quiet of the current.

The men who saved us were strong from raising tents and sweeping barns, but they had dark circles under their eyes, dead eyes in sad faces that hardly nodded to us before they started heading toward the winter quarters. Charles asked, "What's happened to everything?" But they didn't reply, so Charles grabbed a plank of wood and started rowing, trying to keep us on course. I sat at the front of the raft and stared into the muddy water where faces of the dead floated up to say
Help me, please.
But it was too late, I knew, and their faces sank back down into the mud. Some of the faces were folks from town, but some were strangers and I wondered how far they had come down the Winnesaw and how far they would go before they would finally stop and how would anyone know who to send them back to?

Animals from the menagerie floated around us or were snagged in branches, and dogs and cats and cows, too. A horse tried to swim to us, eyes wild and blowing water out its nose. Charles threw a rope around its neck and tried to carry it along, but later the rope was pulling straight down, like we'd caught a big fish, and he cut the line off with his pocketknife.

Something big and gray moved below the surface, so I leaned over, when a big burst of air and water in front of me wet my face and I was looking right into the eyes of Wallace Porter's prize hippopotamus, Helen. She circled us once and sank back underneath the raft. One of the roustabouts stopped rowing and said, "Maybe she will live," and that's all any of them ever said the whole time we were on the raft.

We rowed into the winter quarters and saw Porter's house sitting grandly on an island in the middle of swirling water and most of the animal barns half drowned. The roustabouts set us down on the island and the maids ran down the hill, wrapped the three of us in blankets and helped us toward the house. One woman gave sandwiches to the men, who ate them without speaking and set off again to look for more faces and drag them back to Porter's house.

We found Wallace Porter in his study, which smelled of cigar smoke and whiskey. He was drunk and delirious, talking to God about judgment. When he saw us, Porter wiped his hands down the length of his face and said in a solemn voice that there was food in the kitchen and plenty of rooms to sleep in. I couldn't stand to see him like that, with so much gone, so Charles and I turned and left his study. We ate some soup in the kitchen and gave Mildred some milk and slept and slept. When Charles woke up, he said, "I dreamed last week all over again," and I told him I'd done the same thing.

Finally, the sun came out, and at first, I thought there was no way in heaven that the earth could soak up that much water. I never did think all that water came from the sky anyway, because it seemed like most of it sprang up from holes in the earth, from a China flood many years ago, a slow tide always moving through the earth. Sometimes I think nothing ever stops happening when it's over. Maybe the Winnesaw Reservoir we have now is nothing more than that same flood from 1913, come back to see us again.

When the water was gone, Wallace Porter opened the front door and Charles and I walked with him down the drive and across the field toward the winter quarters. There were no sounds at all, not even birds, and for a moment, I felt as if the only people alive on the earth were those who'd made it to Porter's house. We could barely take a step without moving branches out of our way, walking around uprooted trees, wagons, roofs, barrels. Everything looked as if it had been boiled and burned and tossed in a tornado, settling down like silt wherever it was.

This must be why the animals were scattered over the fields in the strangest poses, their eyes open and looking up at the flat sky. An elephant lay on its side, big chunks of its hide gouged out, but the blood had all flowed away somewhere. A Bengal tiger hung by its hind legs from a tree down by the river, caught up in the branches. We walked into the gorilla barns and found three dead, trapped in their locked cages.

That day, every time I turned away from death, there was another carcass, another body, and I'd start shaking again. But I don't think I was as sad as Porter was when we walked into Jennie Dixianna's bunkhouse and found her pinned to the wall, trapped by her brass bed. Charles and I walked back outside, where we heard Porter crying, moving the bed to set her free.

I whispered to Charles, why didn't she just swim away? Charles had no answer until Porter let us in and we watched him pick up all the empty whiskey bottles scattered over the floor. When his arms were full, he looked around, as if for a trash barrel, and seeing the state of the room, started crying. Her face is still with me, gray like fire ashes, with leaves and branches twined in her hair like she was some kind of brownie or fairy.

Charles carried her body up to Porter's house and I asked Porter what we should do about all the carcasses. He sighed like a man letting go of his last breath. "Burn them. Tell the men to cover them in kerosene and burn them."

Maybe if we'd had one of those backhoes, like the ones they used to dig out the reservoir, we could have buried them in one mass grave and erected a cross to mark the place. But we did what we could. We set all the animals on fire, then closed all the doors and windows in Porter's house to keep out the smell, but the stink of roasted, rotten flesh seeped in through the wooden shutters and under the doors, and none of us could eat for those two days.

When we walked outside again, all the skeletons were charred black in the sun, not an ounce of flesh left on them. No one knows what Porter did with the skeletons, and most don't care, as long as the bones of the past are sunk somewhere for good. Eventually, though, everything is revealed, floating on the water's surface or tossed on its receding shore. Maybe Porter tossed the bones into a ravine covered now by the reservoir, and one day some shiny ski boat will run smack dab into an elephant's ribcage and wonder how in the world that happened. I'll tell you how. Flesh may burn and rot and wither, but bones stay around almost forever.

—or
Don't Fence Me In

STELLA GARRISON
stared at skeleton trees lining the road. A chill wind raised gooseflesh on her arms, but she didn't move to close the cracked-open car windows. It was April 1957. Moving day. She and her husband, Wayne, had lived in Richmond for years, but he'd gotten himself the foreman's job at the power plant in Lima, his hometown. He drove their Oldsmobile with a smile on his stubbly face, his brawny arms and solid hands gripping the steering wheel. In the backseat, their twin sons brawled—again. Stella wondered if they'd spend their lives locked in that embrace, the one they'd once shared inside her.

"Wait until you see it, honey," Wayne said, taking the turns too wide.

"Slow down," she said. "The house isn't going anywhere."

In the backseat, Ray and Ricky yelled, "Faster, Dad." They turned pretend steering wheels and made
vroom-vroom
noises, and Stella turned to shush them. They were nine-years-old and identical physically—blond hair shaved into crew cuts, blue-eyed and thin limbed—but their dispositions were night and day. Ray was the oldest by three minutes, strong and bossy. Ricky was quiet, easily hurt, quick to cry.

Ray made a skidding sound, and Ricky spit out a make-believe car crash. Stella turned again to tell them to be quiet while their dad was driving, but she knew there was no point. She was just as excited to see the new house as they were. They'd been in the car all morning. "How much farther?" she asked her husband.