Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (29 page)

This disturbance being rare, I murmured into my pillow: “Hush, dear.” When she did not cease, I raised my head a little, hoping to rouse her by my own movements. “Wake up, Kathleen.” My voice must have been weak—I sleep soundly and wake with difficulty—for the tossing and the whispering did not stop.

I had resolved to bear it out when her whispers grew clearer. “Gone and gone and gone . . . days and days . . . will it never end? Oh will it never end?”

“Kathleen,” I said, still not quite willing to open my eyes, “please . . . ”

Fingers like dead grape vines brushed my shoulder. “
I’m so hungry.
”

Without warning, the fingers dug hard and deep into the dent at the corner of my collarbone. I cried out. Now fully awakened, I rolled to confront Kathleen—

—only to see the corpse of the Queen of Sheba lying beside me in her place, staring at me through long-dried eye sockets and grinning with long yellow teeth!

Needless to say, I screamed—from the depths of my chest, with all my breath. Before I knew it, half a dozen performers crowded into my room, some with candles, most in bedclothes . . . and myself, in bed in my nightgown with the sheets to my chin, with no corpse beside me and no explanation for why I had awoken nearly the entire hotel.

To my equal shame and relief, Mr. Prince pushed through the gathering crowd, all bombast and authority; and when he asked what disturbed me, and I sheepishly admitted it was naught but a dream, he cleared out the room as efficiently as he might have cleared out sneak-ins from beneath the tiered seating. Soon we were alone.

“See here,” he said, “you’re sensible, Alice, and a good rider. I’ll forgive a night terror or two. Only don’t make a habit of it.” As he closed the door he added, so that only the two of us could hear, “And when Kathleen comes back, tell her for God’s sake to be more discreet. Our reputation is poor enough as it is.”

He had spoken of what I had noticed but dared not acknowledge: Kathleen was not here. I had never heard her voice, never felt her touch. Yet I was never alone.

I lit a candle, and lay on my back for the rest of the night, cruelly and inescapably awake.

Well before dawn we were roused for the journey to the next town. (Kathleen was back by then, indecently tousled and wholly immune to my cold shoulder.) We dressed mechanically and met in the dining room for breakfast—more sleep-dogged than usual. Before I sat Mr. Whitman approached me privately.

“I hear,” he said, “that you had some trouble this past night.”

“A very little,” I said. The long night and terrible shock must have worn on my nerves, because I added, “I suppose you rushed to my aid only to find a silly girl having a bad dream.”

He cleared his throat. “I did not, in fact,” he said. “At the moment you—ah—alarmed the troupe, I was suffering some alarm of my own.”

“Speak plainly,” I snapped.

He licked his lips. “You saw her too?”

I did not answer. I did not need to.

Billy entered the dining room. His eyes were sunken in his face. The chandelier man called to him: “Hi! Billy! Are you hungry?”

Billy skittered like a foal. “What’d you say? G—d—, I never want to hear that word again!” He took his place at the table looking sullen.

“H’m,” said Mr. Whitman.

“Hungry,” I said, raising a hand to my mouth. “She said—”

“‘I’m so hungry,’” he finished.

My own appetite vanished. I saw the same sentiment reflected in Arthur Whitman’s face. “Oh, what have we done?”

He said nothing; and between his troubled silence and Billy’s sullenness, breakfast was solemn indeed.

As always, the crewsmen had gone on hours before to set up the new site—leaving us to a long drive in the dim morning. We stopped at the town borders to clean the wagons and change into our costumes. Then the band played, the wagons aligned, and we made the grand entree.

Nowadays you may find entertainment on any corner, but then we offered the brightest a country farmer might hope to see. Sleek showhorses; painted carts; gay music from the bandwagon; sequins shining on our costumes. Mr. Whitman, already “corked,” gamboled along, a living caricature. There were many difficulties in circus life, many inconveniences. But so few people know the heaven of wholehearted applause.

We rode through town to the lot and directly to the tent. The audience followed. While Jones the treasurer sold tickets and we prepared for the performance, Mr. Prince had several of the workers set up the tent and coffin of the Queen of Sheba.

It was to be our first day to display her, and Mr. Prince fairly bounced with anticipation. After much agonizing, he assigned Jones the treasurer to sit outside her tent collecting dues in between shows. Shame upon us all! We even used poor Harry Collins’s sign, and charged the price he had set.

We all took turns sneaking to visit Jones outside his tent, and by the end of the day it was clear: the Queen of Sheba was a tremendous money-maker. The town may not have been a wealthy one, but curiosity is a powerful force against financial discretion. Hundreds paid their half-dime to see the Queen. “No wonder those penny-showmen are so keen to follow us!” Mr. Prince cackled, when Jones had counted the take. “If this keeps up she’ll earn us an elephant.”

Despite my weariness, I dreaded the setting sun. As Kathleen and I settled into our hotel I begged her to stay the night. She agreed, in her own fashion (“Sure I’ll be stayin’ the night, what do you take me for?”). Small comfort, but I took it to heart.

Dark fell. Sleep hovered over me. The Queen of Sheba seemed further away, less clear in my memory. I let my eyes flicker shut, relaxed into steady breath . . .

. . . and woke—in a terrible turnabout—to the sound of a piercing shriek from not so far away.

Almost before Kathleen and I were dressed enough to investigate, Mr. Prince came knocking with the news. I had rarely seen him so serious. “Jones is dead,” he said. “His poor wife woke to find him—” He broke off, whether for propriety or the sake of his nerves.

“Was’t his heart that killed him?” asked Kathleen.

“Ah . . . ” said Mr. Prince. “The cause of death is not . . . immediately obvious. That is to say . . . ”

“Poor coot was dried up like a winter potato,” said Billy.

He sat across from us in the wagon, bouncing with every rut in the road, and though the sun had yet to rise, for once none of us tried to sleep.

“How’d ye get in see him?” said Kathleen, eyes bright.

“Don’t be prurient, dear,” I said. It was no use, of course. I gave Billy a look from beneath my eyelashes to let him know I didn’t truly want him to stop telling his tale.

“Got there first,” Billy bragged to Kathleen. “So’s no one could keep me out. There was Mrs. Jones in her night-cap and Jones laying there—and I about half didn’t know him—because Jones never was
that
thin!”

“
Thin
,” I said.

“Skin and bone,” said Billy. The grin faded from his face. I suppose that was the moment the realization truly struck him. “Skin and bone.”

Kathleen shivered and leaned on my shoulder. “Will we be havin’ another funeral?”

“Play out the play,” said Mr. Whitman, in his deep glum voice. He sat not too far from Billy but I had not thought he was listening. “Jones and the new widow have been left behind pending their journey home. I believe Mr. Prince has arranged for a casket and transport. We, of course, will do as we do.”

“Can’t even take a day off when your treasurer dies,” said Billy in disgust.

But missing a day off did not trouble me as much as did Billy’s description of Jones’s corpse. I could not shake from my mind the memory of my nightmare—or else vision.

I had heard the pleas of the Queen of Sheba.

And Jones died looking very hungry.

The treasurer managed a thousand vital tasks, but none of them to do with the performance itself, so his absence did not prevent us from putting on our usual show. (It did, however, make us mutter to one another about when and whether we would have our pay.) Mr. Prince himself sold tickets. He ordered the chandelier man, who managed our lighting, to sell showings to the Queen of Sheba.

I would like to tell you that we outdid ourselves with every show, but in truth every day brought a fresh audience—so our acts rarely varied. The audience left; the take was counted; the tent was dissembled, the center pole discarded. One variation tonight: the next day being Sunday, the crew did not leave immediately for the next town, but stayed the night. We did not perform on Sundays. Public opinion did not allow it.

We woke early intending to go to church (a matter of piety for some, a matter of appearance for others). At breakfast, however, I noticed that one of our number was staring at his plate rather than emptying it: the chandelier man, who had spent the previous day with the Queen of Sheba. Mr. Whitman caught my gaze. He had noticed too. As soon as possible he took the man aside. I carried on gay conversation with the others, ever watching from the corner of my eye. When Mr. Whitman came to beg my company, I excused myself immediately and followed him to a quiet corner.

It had cost Mr. Whitman much patience and some of his whiskey before the chandelier man gave up his story, but when he did, it went like this:

He (the chandelier man) boarded with one of the drivers. The driver, we all knew, was a stout little man fond of drink and food, a chewer of tobacco, and he liked to carry some bread or an age-wrinkled apple with him, as he said, “to carry him to breakfast.” This he kept beside the bed. Both men fell asleep quickly. (Circus folk always did; sleep we found more scarce than gold.) Sometime during the night, the chandelier man woke to the sound of weeping.

(“I heard no weeping,” I said. “I did,” said Mr. Whitman.)

In the dim light the chandelier man saw a slim figure by the bed. He would not reveal who he thought it might be, but he was not alarmed until it laid a hand on his arm. The fingers, he said, were tough as wood, rough as bark. It leaned its face down and whispered—

“I’m so hungry,” I said, at the same time Mr. Whitman did. He nodded gravely.

Only then did the chandelier man begin to see the face—or understand whose it was. He said his heart went mad in his ribs. He told Mr. Whitman of a gaping mouth, eyes sunk so deep they might not remain in their sockets, hollow cheeks, flaking skin. They stared at one another for some moments. Then the chandelier man—rigid with fear—cried:
“Hungry, are you? Why—have a bite!”

And he lunged across the sleeping driver, snatched up the age-wrinkled apple, and hurled it at the Queen’s gawping face.

The Queen’s mouth closed with a hard snap. Like the last wisp of smoke from a dead candle slipping through a window, she vanished.

The chandelier man barely had time to recover before the driver, who had seen nothing and knew only that he had been lunged upon in the middle of the night, started a large quarrel over what was going on and why they were both unpleasantly awake. To compound matters, the driver’s apple could not be found. As of breakfast it did not seem that the chandelier man had been forgiven.

Mr. Whitman and I regarded each other for a somber moment. Then he said—as a barbecue-goer remarking on the mild weather—“I’m beginning to believe we have a problem on our hands.”

He startled a laugh from me; then, a scowl. “You’re suggesting—”

“I am,” he said quietly.

“It’s preposterous.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Miss Monroe, please listen. For all my songs and japes in the ring, I am a scientist at heart. To link these recent events to our new acquisition . . . I admit it is preposterous. But I fear that not to do so may be far worse.”

I stared at him: Mr. Whitman, the droll Easterner; Mr. Whitman, the blackface jester. “I won’t be made a fool, Mr. Whitman.”

Again he grew quiet. “I would never presume.”

I have known a man or two who thought they might slide the wool over a pretty girl’s eyes; I have also been fortunate to know sincerity. Mr. Whitman radiated it. And something else: something far more convincing. In his sincerity I detected restrained but genuine fear.

“You sound as if you may have a plan,” I said.

“I do,” he said, his countenance clearing to hear me come to his side. He nodded his head toward the others in their Sunday best. “I’m afraid it will make heathens of us for a day.”

I tossed my head. “I am a lady rider with a traveling circus,” I said, in a haughty voice that, following my intent, made him laugh. “I can hardly be worse.”

In the space of ten minutes we became both heathens and criminals: ignoring the church bell in order to hitch two horses to our smallest wagon and abandon our employer with the corpse of a Queen hidden beneath a quilt. I, who traveled almost without ceasing, felt the old thrill of the road rise anew. It must have been the illicit aspect that excited my sensibilities; that, or the freedom. I traveled daily. But I always traveled where someone else demanded I go.

Mr. Whitman explained himself as we drove. The Queen’s nocturnal appearances, he said, had too much in common to come from our individual imaginations. He and I had only discussed the phrase “I’m so hungry” among ourselves; Billy, as far as he could ascertain, never admitted hearing it to anyone, though he reacted strongly enough to the word that morning. The chandelier man, then, had not heard it from us. Either we four had invented the phrase independently or it had a common source.

“As for poor Jones,” he added, “who can say what he might have seen or heard?”

“Billy said he looked thin.”

“Thin as a starveling,” he said.

So Mr. Whitman determined the validity of his—our—visions. Jones’ death, and the chandelier man’s apparent near miss, convinced him of the danger. Those performers who spent time near the Queen became the objects of her wrath. To him the course seemed clear. The Queen of Sheba must be gotten rid of. And who would know how to do so but the original proprietor?

“But,” I said, coloring, “the proprietor—Mr. Collins—is dead.”

“So is the Queen,” he said. “The fact has failed to quiet her. And Mr. Collins is not yet in his grave.”