Sarah Canary (14 page)

‘I can’t,’ said B.J. ‘I can’t hold it steady enough. Am I here, Chin?’

‘Yes,’ said Chin.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

Burke guided the glass to B.J.’s mouth. He tipped it and the liquor ran down B.J.’s chin. ‘I can’t swallow,’ said B.J.

Chin turned again to the little figure whose face expressed such anguish. She must have died in terror. So much terror that she had, in fact, become terror; her facial expression was more vivid to Chin than her strings of hair, her tiny, exposed breasts, or even her unexpected tail. He turned away, queasy, the whiskey shifting in his stomach. He remembered the promise he had made to Tom, to show him something never seen in the world before, and how Tom had imagined it would be something beautiful like striped horses. Would Tom have been satisfied with this? Would anyone want to go to his death too soon after seeing such a face?

Harold spoke softly. ‘ “Where the winds are all asleep,” ‘ he said.

‘ “Where the spent lights quiver and gleam,

Where the salt weed sways in the stream,

Where the sea beasts, ranged all round,

Feed in the ooze of their pasture ground;

. . . Where the great whales come sailing by,

Sail and sail, with unshut eye ...”

‘Poetry,’ he said. ‘Matthew Arnold.’

‘I’m sorry to have woken everyone.’ There was a quiet hysteria in B.J.’s voice, a quality Chin recognized, even in as short a time as he had spent in the Steilacoom asylum. It was a tone of voice by which any patient there could be identified. Yes, I’m crazy, it said, but I’m no trouble. Yes, I’m crazy, but look how quiet I am. ‘Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen. Let’s all go back to sleep now. I liked the poem.’

‘I don’t suppose you’re familiar with a book called
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
Of course, you wouldn’t be.’ Burke stood, staring sadly down at the mermaid. ‘Curious volume. Authorship something of a mystery. But it attempts to explain the monstrous in nature. Uses the metaphor of the railroads — you’ll be interested in this, Chin. The idea is that the embryos of all animals begin on the same main line but take a turning off at some point. Evolution happens because an embryo stays longer on the main line. Monstrous births occur when the turning is taken too early. You get these mixes, like the duckbilled platypus, which is something halfway between a bird and a rat. And this mermaid.’

‘The mermaid is mine,’ said Harold. ‘Burke bought it from a ship’s captain in San Francisco and I bought it from Burke and came here to collect it. I plan to exhibit it. It’s none of your business.’

B.J. returned to his spot on the floor and curled up on his side. ‘Did you want the blanket?’ Burke said.

‘Not anymore. Cover it up again.’

Sarah Canary lay back down in her corner. Chin returned to his spot. He was awake a long time, thinking of Sarah Canary and the mermaid and of Tom. He was never aware of having fallen asleep, but he must have done so, because Burke woke him with a whisper toward morning. Burke had obviously spent the night with the whiskey bottle. His hair pointed in a variety of directions and his eyes expressed the same energetic confusion. The slurring of his speech made him spit on Chin while he talked. The quieter he tried to make his words, the more he spit.

‘I’m giving her up,’ he said. On the ‘p’ a drop of whiskey landed on Chin’s left hand. It was filled with tiny yellow bubbles. Chin drew his hand across his sleeve. ‘My darling Sarah Canary,’ Burke shook his head. ‘My angel. I
have
to give you up. B.J. is right. If you were a man, it might be different. Then we might convince ourselves you had a profitable, productive life ahead. Work. Philosophy. Contemplation. But what can a woman expect? A woman of your age. A woman who can’t even eat prettily.’ Chin wiped spittle off his cheek with one hand and pushed back the hair that had come loose at the sides of his face. He was surprised at his own sense of disappointment. He had not said to himself that perhaps Burke would take Sarah Canary and relieve him of responsibility. He had not said to himself that perhaps Sarah Canary would be safe with Burke. But clearly he had thought it, somewhere deep and unheard inside.

Chin sat up to work more at this conversation. His braid fell forward on his shoulder and he picked it up, held it in his hands, examined it while he tried to concentrate on what Burke was saying. Drunkenness had obliterated many of the hard edges of Burke’s words, leaving only the open sounds, the singing. Chin was used to dealing in foreign languages. But liquor imposed a second translation. He had to decipher the drunkenness just to get to the foreign tongue.

‘Strutes,’ said Burke impenetrably. ‘Struth. You can’t teach, my pet. You can’t be ornamental. There’s little chance you’ll marry. It’s not a gallant thing to observe, but let’s be honest. Unless you’ll marry her, Chin. I’d do it myself, but I’m in love with another. Heart’s pledged. Godswash.’ His voice gained intensity and then faded on the last indecipherable word. Chin’s breath quickened nervously. Miscegenation was illegal in Oregon. Racial suicide, they called it. In Washington? He couldn’t remember. He decided to pretend he had understood none of Burke’s words, but even as he made the decision, he heard Burke go on. ‘No. No,’ Burke was saying. ‘Please, forget I asked. I promised myself I wouldn’t ask.’

Burke’s eyes flowed with drunken tears. When Chin’s uncle drank, he turned a bright red color all over his face. He became noisy and posturing, like a rooster. When Chin drank, he filled with a hollow kind of laughter, arising from nothing, aimed at nothing. If he emptied himself of it, nothing was what remained inside. Often he laughed so hard he was unable to speak. He had never seen anyone who became moist and abject like Burke.

‘Let’s have no lies between us.’ Burke sniffled loudly. ‘No dissembling. No cunning. No deceit. The truth is that no one has had much luck educating these children. I didn’t tell you that, Chin. I
concealed
the fact. Now I lay it bare. With an adult, there’s been even less success. I could work twenty years and only manage to teach her to dress and feed herself. Maybe one or two words you or I might understand but would have to be explained to anyone else. Maybe she’d be able to comb her own hair. I can’t take the responsibility for condemning her to that kind of life. A life in the darkness of a few small rooms.’ Burke wiped at his eyes and nose.

‘It would be a sin,’ he whispered. ‘I know that. I know that. And one more sin will be one more than I can rid myself of. The little mermaid - you mustn’t tell a soul. I made her for Harold. The top half is monkey. I sort of shaved the fur from it. Added human hair and the breasts. The bottom is just salmon. I was proud of the work, at first. God forgive me. Time and care made her as seamless as one of God’s own creatures, and I took a reckless pride in that. It seemed a good joke and a little money on the side. I didn’t expect the face to turn out that way. Does it haunt you, that face? Tell me she won’t haunt you. And then imagine how she haunts me, her father. I’m afraid to sleep sometimes.

‘I shouldn’t have done it. The study of nature is a kind of holy worship and I’ve created a perversion, a false idol, a sin against the mind of God. No. Tomorrow,’ said Burke, ‘you and I will take Sarah Canary as deep into the forests as we can and then lose her. We will find a lovely spot with a stream and a water ousel’s nest and a host of wildflowers come spring.

Anemones and the like. Let her return to the happy, natural life. Let her return to the fellowship of the deer and the wolf. Let her return to freedom and to the God she already knows.’

‘It’s very cold,’ said Chin.

‘Sarah Canary can handle that. Sarah Canary can curl into a hole until the weather turns warm. She can catch fish with her hands and find the early berries. She’s as comfortable in the woods as any creature. Aren’t you, my angel? Aren’t you, my pet?’ Burke directed his whisper over Chin to Sarah Canary’s sleeping form. Sarah Canary had covered herself with Chin’s blanket completely. No part of her face or her hair or her feet could be seen.

~ * ~

She was still that way at dawn. The rain was quiet and steady outside, but Harold had arisen early and appeared to be gone for good. The mermaid was no longer lying by the wall and neither was her blanket. Harold’s own blanket was gone as well.

Chin stretched, rose, and began the fire for breakfast. Burke’s eyes were gummy with sleep and regret and his face sagged. He stirred the porridge, looking with longing at Sarah Canary’s still form. She was drawn into an impossibly tiny ball beneath the blanket. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t take her out in the rain,’ he said. ‘Although it would make it harder for her to follow us back. Wipe out the scent of our tracks and all.’

Chin began to eat his own bowl of mush. It was tasteless, but it was hot. He felt hungry and hopeful. He was pleased that Harold was gone. He was pleased that Burke was wavering. Perhaps B.J. would marry Sarah Canary, should such a thing be required. Perhaps he could leave both B.J. and Sarah Canary in Burke’s care and consider his duties fulfilled. Perhaps he could still catch up with his uncle in Tenino.

‘Wake up, Sarah Canary,’ said B.J. ‘Wake up and have breakfast.’ There was no response. B.J. ladled a bowl of porridge out and carried it into her corner. ‘Sarah Canary,’ he said. He leaned down, gently folding back the edge of Chin’s blanket. The black face of the mermaid stared up at him. ‘Oh, God,’ B.J. cried, dropping the porridge, which overturned and spilled onto his shoe. ‘Dear God.’ He threw Chin’s blanket back over the little creature and covered his own face with his hands. Outside the wind came up again. Chin heard its high voice and its low voice and all the unidentifiable voices in between. Women’s voices, contrary and confused, but all of them somehow parts of one another.

~ * ~

iv

The magnificent Tom Thumb Wedding was P. T. Barnum’s gift to a country whose sensibilities were being bludgeoned by civil war. It alleviated the scandal created when Tom allowed the cockney courtesan Cora Pearl to carry him off to her bedroom, balanced in one hand on a silver dish like a Christmas pudding.

America had lost her sons. They had killed one another. Or they had died of disease and neglect far from their homes. America didn’t even get to keep her slaves. Surely, the survivors deserved a little oddity now and then to take them out of themselves.

Fortunately, there was no shortage of oddities. During one of Barnum’s circus performances, a giantess was run over by a chariot and fatally crushed. Barnum shrugged. ‘Oh, there is another waiting for the place,’ he told his horrified companion, Major James Pond. ‘It is rather a benefit than a loss.’

There was always another giantess, another bearded woman, another human skeleton, another slave, another soldier. They had names sometimes. The oddities often had first names: the Dog-Man Lionel; Nellie, the armless wonder; Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children.

Fiji Jim was really Ruto Semm, an ordinary Fiji Islander, lured with his wife to the United States by an unscrupulous manager who later abandoned them. Ruto spent the rest of his life trying to earn the money to return home and finally died of pneumonia in a top-floor tenement after saving a drowning swimmer off the coast of Rockaway Beach.

The Ugliest Woman in the World was Julia Pastrana, referred to by Frank Buckland as ‘the female nondescript.’ Darwin examined her and wrote: ‘This woman had a strong beard, a very hairy body, particularly on the forehead and the neck and, a phenomenon of particular interest, an irregular double row of teeth in the upper and lower jaw which gave her a prognathic appearance and a simian profile.’ Julia fell in love with her manager. He married and impregnated her, inviting much of Victorian society to attend the birth. The child was delivered, also abnormally hairy. Neither mother nor child survived. But Julia lived long enough to whisper her own epitaph. ‘I die happy,’ she said, ‘for I know that I have been loved for myself.’ Her grieving husband immediately sent for a taxidermist, had both bodies stuffed, and exhibited the pair all over Europe.

In 1704, Nicolas Sauvage made an engraving to commemorate Johannes Palfyn’s dissection of a stillborn pair of Siamese twins, who were, of course, not called Siamese twins until Chang and Eng Bunker rose to international prominence. ‘God is Marvellous in All His Works’ is Sauvage’s title, so Howard Martin, the author of
Victorian Grotesque,
reminds us that the word
teratology,
used now to refer to the study of monstrosities, once meant tales of the marvelous, in an earlier age when monsters were marvels.

~ * ~

7

The Wild Woman Performs in Seabeck

The power to contain

Is always as the contents

But give a Giant room

And you will lodge a Giant

And not a smaller man

Emily Dickinson, 1873

In 1873, the residents of Seabeck, Washington, and the men in its outlying logging camps faced an unusual choice. The great magnetic doctress, Adelaide Dixon, was scheduled to speak in the schoolhouse at the very hour that, halfway across town, in the upstairs parlor of the Bay View Hotel, the Alaskan Wild Woman was being exhibited, fresh from her triumphal engagement in Port Gamble. One show only.

Adelaide had scandalized Philadelphia and Boston and St Louis less with her belief that women and men should enjoy a variety of sexual partners than with the underlying suggestion that women should, in fact, be enjoying sex at all. Adelaide often said so explicitly. She even said that when women did not enjoy sex, men were to blame. But the Alaskan Wild Woman had been raised in the Yukon by wolves since infancy and, though she now wore clothes and slept in a bed with pillows, nothing would break her of her canine compulsion to howl at a full moon. Entertainment of this caliber rarely came to Seabeck. If only, the residents thought, there were some way to see them both.