Nightmare Carnival

SCAPEGOATS by N. Lee Wood

In the two-window compartment of the sleeping car she and her husband, Max, occupied, “The Amazing Lobster Woman” Mae Wrightson awoke, sleep crumbling as the clacking of rails began to slow. She sat up in the narrow bed, Max still snoring beside her, and pushed the velvet curtains aside with her deformed hands to blink bleary eyed at mist seeping through dead grass, moonlit sky the color of bad milk. As the train curved around a bend, she could make out the engine puffing black smoke, the tips of elephant trunks squirming through the slats of the cattle cars, the rocking of parade wagons atop the flatbeds. All the windows in the sleeper cars were drawn, shutting out the world.

The Bishop had organized his advance banner men well, judging by the sheer number of posters pasted on every barn, water tower, and weatherboard hotel they passed for miles as the fifteen-carriage-long circus train rolled into Ashton. Last season on the big road hadn’t been as profitable as hoped, too many rival shows sucking up each other’s air. This year, the Bishop guarded his small road routes carefully to avoid tipping off competitors. Dukey runs made more money but the pace was exhausting. Mae was glad this weekend they’d at least have two nights of sleep without the clatter of rails beneath them.

Mae drew the patchwork quilt up over her knees and watched the progression of rainbow-bright lithographs roll past: lions and tigers jumped through fiery hoops, grease-painted dogs in organza skirts and sea lions balanced balls on their noses, bosomy girls with tiny corseted waists rode atop white horses. Alastair Kleininger’s clown whiteface flashed a joey-red-lipped grin from the side of a tumbledown hayshed. She felt a pang of sadness at a poster of the circus troupe’s most treasured asset, Madelaine the Elephant, elegantly decked out in her maharaja headgear, with Mischa LeTellier the Half-Boy in the howdah on her back. Mischa had died unexpectedly of apoplexy six months back, having never reached his twentieth birthday, poor boy. There hadn’t been time to modify the poster, or more likely the Bishop didn’t like wasting money on new posters until the old ones ran out.

No one else had ever had quite the same bond with Madelaine as Mischa. The two of them had practically grown up together ever since the Bishop had bought the Asian elephant as a wild orphan, her mother shot in the jungles of Ceylon, the calf shipped over on a steamer half starved to death by the time she arrived in Boston. Barely a teenager, Mischa had signed on with the circus shortly after, and fallen in love with the baby elephant at first sight. He regularly slept in the menagerie top, the elephant’s trunk cradling his legless torso like a child holds a doll for comfort. The bull man the Bishop had hired especially to break her when she was still a calf had appealed to the circus boss to split up Mischa and Madelaine, claiming the half man got in his way, undercut his authority, interfered with her training.

But Mischa and Madelaine had been inseparable even when the little elephant quickly grew into a very large one. Mischa, with no legs, could manage Madelaine better than the bull man with an ankus, using watermelon rinds to reward her when she sat on her back legs and raised her front legs, the buoyancy of a river to teach her to spin. The legless boy had loved riding Madelaine, so the Bishop commissioned a howdah especially built to fit Mischa, intentionally undersized to make Madelaine seem even bigger than she was. The gasps of surprise and fright (and if they were lucky the occasional fainting lady) when Madelaine knelt on her front legs and lifted him with her trunk out of the howdah to the ground used to delight him. Even Madelaine looked as if she, too, enjoyed the applause, the tip of her trunk raised to her bulbous forehead in salute pulling her lips up into an open-mouthed grin. They were happy, they were making the circus money, and the Bishop was content to leave them be.

Madelaine had been the Bishop’s first, and for a time only, exotic animal, soon parlaying his dog-and-pony show into a modestly successful traveling circus, The World-Famous Bishop Brothers Traveling Carnival. If there ever had been a brother, Mae never saw him, and all those who knew the circus master simply called him the Bishop, no one sure what his real name might be. Not that many circus folks ever used real names anyway.

The Bishop grew his circus methodically, attracting enough talent like Eric and Lavinia Malcome, the fire-eater and sword-swallower act, and professional sideshow freaks like Mae and Max until he could finally get rid of the Chinaman. The Bishop had brought the opium addict back with him after the Boxer Rebellion, employing him as a circus geek who bit the heads off live chickens and rats and swallowed them to the shrieks of titillated spectators. The chickens ended up in the kitchen pots, the dead rats tossed out with the night soil.

The Bishop bought out two smaller circuses, bringing in Billy North and his Marvelous Menagerie: camels and llamas, a pair of black bears, three lions and a tigress, two wallabies that had quickly multiplied into ten, a troupe of chimpanzees that worked with the clowns, and sixteen zebras harness-trained to pull the gilded animal wagons along with his miniature ring stock ponies. The dogs, farm animals, and exotic birds Kleininger used in his clown act had their own cages, but their pet rhesus monkey lived in the animal trainer’s car with Billy and his wife.

Billy’s wife, Theresa, a hatchet-faced woman from New Jersey who Mae had never seen smile, billed herself as “The Incredible Jasaleena, Hindoo Serpent Charmer from Bombay,” and kept her trio of immense pythons in a heated cabinet in their sleeper. As well as breeding small lizards for the strolling butchers — concession salesmen who peddled them as circus “bugs” on the midway to small children as pets — she jealously maintained her own flea circus. She crafted elaborate harnesses from hair-thin gold wire to shackle the insects to miniature Ferris wheels and crafted flea horses pulling tiny coaches with flea Cinderellas waving from inside. Fleas in tutus were forced to “dance” to diminutive orchestras by hidden candles heating the bottom of the exhibit until they thrashed about in a frenzy, giving credulous mooches the notion the insects had been trained to play instruments or pull carts. But such treatment took a toll on the performers; replacing the dead fleas with live ones was a routine chore. She dressed the dead fleas up as wedding couples, which Billy sold alongside the souvenir photos of a near-naked Theresa with her snakes draped strategically to maintain her modesty.

A few weeks after Mischa died, Bishop purchased five more elephants along with a sea lion and a team of sturdy draft horses to pull the stock wagons from the train to the setup lot. All of the elephants had been born in other circuses and sold on as soon as they could be separated from the cows. If he’d harbored any illusion that Madelaine would feel a natural maternal instinct for the newcomers, the Bishop was sadly disappointed. One of the calves bawled nonstop and refused to eat from the moment he was unloaded from the train wagon, then lay down and died within a week. The other four fared better, healthy if half Madelaine’s size. But while they performed well enough with Madelaine, even deferred to her, the younger elephants had already formed a tight camaraderie of their own while Madelaine still pined for her lost friend.

Without Mischa, the normally good-natured Madelaine seemed bewildered, turning sullen and uncooperative. North was enough of a professional to know how to balance the carrot with the stick to get the best out of his animals. But not even chaining Madelaine down when she misbehaved and beating her with an ankus until she had to be painted with “wonder dust” to hide her wounds before a performance worked nearly as well as had Mischa’s gentle persuasion — his fingers stroking under her wrinkled eye, a whisper in her ear enough to work miracles. North, exasperated, stalked off in frustration as the big elephant turned her face to a wall and rocked for hours with her eyes closed like a disconsolate child.

Pieter Schmidt, Kleininger’s dwarf sidekick who was shot out of a spring-loaded cannon in a puff of fake smoke into a net a dozen times a week, refused to go anywhere near the elephants, terrified of them. Olga, smallest of the Van der Honigsberg sisters trapeze ensemble, complained the howdah was too tight a fit, her legs cramping. They’d tried the monkey, but Madelaine didn’t react well to the gabbling creature struggling hysterically as it was tied down in the howdah, nor did the monkey adhere to its training discipline, no matter how emphatically it was applied to the screeching animal’s head and shoulders. The Bishop finally conceded defeat, and the howdah remained empty.

The oversized poster of happier days crept past Mae’s window and disappeared as the train rolled to a stop, steam hissing loudly, hot metal clanking. Max stirred, stretching naked arms as vibrantly decorated as the circus posters, his strongman-thick body swathed in tattoos of tropical flowers, foundering shipwrecks and mermaids, exotic butterflies and mythical dragons. A campaign portrait of Charles E. Hughes, Senior, in a cartouche of laurel leaves and a furled American flag, covered half his back. Max smiled at Mae, and blinked out the window of the railcar, scratching his unshaven cheeks.

“I think we’re early,” Mae said.

Max coughed, the sound wet and sticky in his lungs, as he rolled a cigarette and lit it. Inhaling deeply, he left it in his mouth as he pulled on a button-up shirt and drew up his canvas overalls, one strap of his suspenders nearly frayed through. “Best be getting the rousties up for the haul, then.” He shoved his feet, still in the socks he’d slept in, into his boots, banged on the partition separating their compartment from Eric and Lavinia’s, eliciting a drowsy groan from the other side. The Bishop had a team of roustabouts along with employing a few forty-milers and itinerant wobblies willing to work for a meal and a bunk before the circus moved on. But any of the able-bodied performers were expected to muck in as well. Max gave Mae a tobacco-perfumed kiss, then jumped down out of the car to help unload the train and set up for the parade through town.

Mae stripped to the waist and washed her face and chest in the cold-water washbasin, then slipped on her cotton chemise and a skirt before opening the sleeper car window and tossing the contents of the chamber pot onto the tracks. She could hear murmured voices as the rest of the occupants in the married carriage roused themselves from their beds. Mae stepped down onto the wide, sloping rail line, struggling for balance on the crushed stone ballast dotted with optimistic weedlings. Her feet hurt, her equilibrium not good even at the best of times.

The mist was dissolving as the sun rose behind the Great Smoky Mountains, the stink of creosoted sleepers, coal smoke, and animal dung mixing with the aroma of frying bacon and hot corn muffins already drifting from the smokestack of the pie car. The new trio of Negro cooks the Bishop had hired in Ohio bickered with one another in their good-natured sing-song voices. A little pickaninny, the girl no more than two years old, sat on the steps of the pie car eating a slice of bread and jam, but froze when Mae smiled at her before scurrying inside to the safety of her mother’s apron.

“Coffee’s near ’bout ready, Miss Mae,” the head cook said from the open window of the pie car. “I got a sack of treats fo’ you, too.”

“Thank you, Eileen. I’m going to see the Bishop, back in a tick.”

The treats were for Madelaine. Whenever she could, Mae took her bits of carrots and apples, leftover cornbread, or watermelon and celery, then stroked her trunk to calm her down as she’d seen Mischa do. Sometimes she would sing quiet lullabies or snatches of ragtime tunes, or hum through forgotten lyrics of vaudeville songs. Sometimes, not always, the elephant would stop rocking, would explore Mae’s open hand, blowing hot puffs of breath across the claw-like palm as she delicately searched for the last crumbs of bread or apple slices. Sometimes, not always, Madelaine would gently wrap her trunk around Mae’s waist. Then Mae would lean against the elephant’s leathery sides and feel a rumble from deep within that vibrated through her skin into her bones, close her eyes, and imagine distant thunder out over a foreign ocean far away.

Schmidt and Kleininger sat in folding chairs outside the clown carriage smoking and muttering to one another in gloomy German as their pack of yapping dogs bounced around them. The surplus roustabouts, riggers, prop and canvas men who shared the clown car rolled out, yawning and stretching. The girls in the “glamour car” were already squabbling, tempers as usual frayed and high pitched.

Out of fifteen carriages, six were sleepers, the rest either cattle cars for transporting the menagerie animals, or flatbeds to carry the circus wagons. The Bishop had bought English surplus hospital train wagons after the Great War and revamped them into living quarters — one for the single roustabouts and one for the colored workers and minstrel band — providing not much more than a six-foot by three-and-a-half-foot bunk and a battered footlocker. The women-only carriage wasn’t any roomier but it at least had its own changing room and private donniker and the Bishop allowed the spec girls to decorate their individual berths as they liked, fancy curtains and cubbyholes stuffed with feminine bric-a-brac.

Not that any of them were ever satisfied, jealous of the extra space the married couples and those with families enjoyed in their sleepers. Most never lasted an entire season before they bit the grass and took off running. As long as they were pretty and plentiful, they didn’t have to be talented, Max always told her. That’s what separated real circus folk from the greenies. Mae walked past without looking in their direction, and they returned the favor by pretending she didn’t exist.

The Bishop lived alone in his sleeper behind the caboose. Even though the door to his sleeper was open, Mae knocked timidly on the side of the carriage. The Bishop stood at the map table, his back to her, but didn’t stir for a long moment, his attention fixed on his charts. Then he straightened as if awakening from a trance, turned, and smiled. He hadn’t yet shaved or waxed his moustache, the ends drooping limply.

“Good morning, Mae. Come in.”

Mae took his hand to allow him to lift her up the steps into his private sleeper. While the circus train boldly advertised its existence on every car with bright colors and ornate calligraphy, the inside of the Bishop’s car was almost monasterial. His bedroom was closed off at one end of the car, the rest divided into his office and the infirmary. No other decorations adorned his walls, completely bare but for a plain wooden cross.

Maps of train routes were pinned to the plain walls, while all the paraphernalia of a circus train master sprawled across a plain oak table. Dozens of timetables and track connections, tunnel clearance charts, and mileage records balanced with the enormous amount of personal knowledge the Bishop carried in his head: where his competitors were and when, how much talent to hire for how long and how much to pay them to keep bigger circuses from luring them away, what towns offered the best pickings along the best routes.

Most circus folk had two personalities: the one they used in their everyday lives and the one they donned as much as a costume for the paying spectators. Even so, Mae had always found the dichotomy between the Bishop’s personal character and his public performances startling. As ringmaster, the Bishop could assume any accent; a hard Midwestern twang in Cincinnati turned into sugary antebellum Southern as soon as they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. In private, the Bishop rarely spoke, as shy as a virgin schoolboy, and then barely above a whisper with an accent tinged with a faded Highland brogue. But there was nothing soft about the man, nothing effeminate or sentimental.

The Bishop escorted her through to the infirmary. Like the rest of his car, it was functional and austere, with an examining table, a bookcase of medical books, and a medicine cabinet. The air was tinged with the faint smell of phenol, carbolic acid, and chloroform.

“Is it worse today?” the Bishop asked as she sat down and allowed him to peel off the custom-made slippers she only ever took off to bathe or when on display in the sideshow.

“Yes, sir.” She watched him lift up her right foot to peer at it, her feet as ugly and warped as her hands. When she’d been a child, an unscrupulous manager had “enhanced” her feet, breaking the bones and binding them to fuse into even more of a fishtail shape. It increased the amount he could charge the curious and gullible, but left her nearly crippled. She’d had to use canes when she walked down the aisle last year with Max, and was only able to walk without them after Max had massaged her feet every night with Holland’s White Liniment. That hadn’t stopped the rheumatism, however, her feet still so swollen and red the skin had cracked.

The Bishop prodded the lumpy bone underneath the scaly, dry skin gently. “The liniment isn’t helping anymore?”

“It stings real bad when it gets in the cracks.” Which made her cry. Which made Max go white in the face and stand outside to smoke one cigarette after another helplessly.

“Pliny the Elder wrote about physicians in ancient Athens who applied bee stings to their patients, the venom having a therapeutic efficacy for rheumatism.”

Mae stared at the top of his balding head as the Bishop kept his attention on her feet. She had no idea who Pliny the Elder might be, but she was quite certain he would not have been a doctor she would want. Even if she could have ever gone to see a real doctor. “No, thank you.”

“Mmm,” the Bishop said, not fussed. “You should stay off your feet for a while. Cleanliness is vital to avoid infection. Soak them in Epsom salts and leave your slippers off whenever you can. Skin needs to breathe, too.” He set her foot down and picked up the left to scrutinize. “Madelaine seems to like your singing. You have a sweet voice.”

She started, her foot kicking out and almost connecting with his nose, forcing him to hold on more tightly and making her wince. Heat rolled up into her face. “Sorry,” she murmured.

“Don’t be. It’s helping her. Maybe you should ride her; that would keep you off your feet.”

Mae studied him, but couldn’t tell if he intended that to be funny. She decided he was joking, and smiled wanly.

He handed her a bottle of medicinal mouthwash to deliver to her neighbor Eric Malcome — the fire-eaters suffered chronic blisters and ulcers — and helped her down out of the carriage. The train already had been unloaded, poles and canvas piled onto the wagons. With the last of the animals harnessed, elephants decked out, and performers in costume the circus was ready for the grand parade through town to the lot. The site for the circus was a long haul from the railroad loading spur, further than the Bishop would have liked. But it was at least dry, late autumn rains turning most of the town into a swamp. Already a sizable crowd had clotted the roadsides as factories, schools, and shops emptied and closed for circus day.

Ashton wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, just another grubby boomtown in the middle of nowhere with unpaved streets and board sidewalks. The railroads had transformed this once isolated part of the South into a hub serving the supply lines to and from the coal mines and logging camps, the ironworks and textile mills all employing several thousand workers desperate for entertainment and ways to spend their money. Easy pickings for any circus.

Or it would have been, had it not been for the Reverend Leroy Taylor Randall and his Pentecostal tent revival already in full swing by the time the circus arrived on the lot. Although the revival consisted of one pathetically small tent with only half a wall around it, it was packed with parishioners, mostly women and old men, waving arms about and hollering in tongues at the top of their lungs. The preacher, dressed head to toe in funereal black, held a Bible over his head while shouting out scripture in a crow-hoarse voice. A gospel choir behind him clapped and sang while every few minutes he would lay a hand on a random forehead praise the Lord and send someone toppling backward Jesus save me to writhe and twitch like mosquito larvae in an overcrowded pond hallelujah!

The canvas men and the riggers laid out the tents and poles while pairs of gandy dancers pounded spikes with synchronized sledgehammers. The canvas boss walked through the lot demarcating where the midway would form, siting locations for the menagerie top, the big top, the sideshow tent, the cookhouse tents, while sledge gangs tried to ignore both the usual crowds of the curious and the sudden appearance of the preacher and his flock singing and clapping and shouting just outside the ticket tents rapidly going up.

“And the Lord said unto these followers of Satan, ye defiled whores of Babylon, I shalt cast out the sinners, I shalt pour down torrents of rain, hailstones, and burning sulfur and they shalt know I am the Lord thy God!”

“Damned Bible thumpers,” Max said darkly as he buttoned Mae into her lobster costume and arranged the seaweed circlet on her head. “Don’t even quote it right.”

She watched the preacher and his mob through a chink in the sideshow booth, uneasy yet fascinated. But despite the preacher’s ranting and dire warnings, the afternoon show had gone off without a hitch, the midway and the tents packed out, the populace of Ashton happy to divide their patronage between two circuses. The midway continued to offer rides and high-priced junk and carnival fare during the break between shows, while North rounded up the elephants to take them to the river for a much needed drink and cooling down.

The smaller elephants were skittish enough being youngsters, North having to nudge them lightly with the ankus to remind them to behave. Madelaine followed them, docile and patient, ignoring the gawking crowd shoving and jostling for a better view. The afternoon had grown hotter, the humidity stifling. Half the circus company had decided on a swim as well to cool off before the evening performance, forming a mini parade down to the water. A few of the acrobats turned cartwheels and flip-flap handsprings, while Max and Mae and Eric followed Madelaine in the small pony cart, well hidden. They’d find a more secluded spot upstream. The crowd would be too fascinated by the elephants drinking, spraying each other, rolling in the river, to notice them. When they weren’t in their costumes and on display, Mae knew, they might as well have been invisible.

The muddy road down to the river was chock-a-block, women in fancy hats wielding umbrellas to shove their way through gangs of workmen in dirty overalls, Negro farm hands elbowing fat shopkeepers and bankers, children riding on their fathers’ shoulders. Everyone had come to gawp and gape and stare, providing as much a sideshow for the circus company as it was for the spectators.

Eric and Max sat in the rear of the pony wagon, mopping their sweating foreheads while Mae peeped through the wooden doors just behind the driver. She saw the mayor and his family, decked out in their Sunday best, the smallest of his boys trying hard to tempt Madelaine with a peanut held straight out in his chubby hand while his sisters recoiled, squealing in real or pretend fright. To the boy’s delight, the elephant obligingly took the peanut from him, the tip of her trunk as nimble as fingers.

She saw the preacher and his band of female parishioners, a black scarecrow surrounded by scrawny white chickens, still brandishing a Bible over his head, shouting hoarsely. “No true Christian can follow Our Lord Jesus Christ and then be found in a circus, that den of iniquity, wicked purveyors of drinking and dancing, gambling and adultery!” White flecks foamed in the corners of his mouth, while the women around him rolled their eyes in ecstasy.

She saw a man step out from among the worshipers, a half-eaten apple in his hand, the smoke from a lit cigar dangling from his mouth making him squint. She saw him tease Madelaine with the apple, waving it just out of her reach, until she stretched out her trunk eagerly, her mouth opening in anticipation. She saw him grin, switch the apple for his cigar, and toss it into the elephant’s mouth. And laugh.

For a moment, Mae felt the earth hesitate, everything gone still. Then Madelaine screamed, not her normal trumpeting but a cry of pain so deep Mae felt as if her own lungs were on fire. The elephant backed up, swinging her head frantically from side to side, ears flapping. The driver stood and swung his whip at the huge haunches pushing the pony to one side, then jumped off as Madelaine rammed into the wagon, tilting it dangerously. It teetered for a stomach-wrenching moment, then came down hard enough for a wheel to come off and throw Mae through the doors onto the now-empty driver’s seat.

Mae saw Madelaine spit out the cigar, now chewed into shreds, then whack her trunk hard against the man who had fed it to her. The impact threw him several yards, where he landed on his back. Stunned, he was struggling onto his elbows as Madelaine bore down on him, his eyes going wide just before she lifted one massive foot and slammed it onto his head. His skull exploded like a ripe watermelon, bloody brains squirting out in a grisly pulp.

The crowd screamed and ran, barging into one another mindlessly, slipping in the mud. The four young elephants bolted in the confusion, knocking North over as well. An old man, no shirt under his coveralls, white beard stained with tobacco juice, fired a shotgun into the air. As the crowd split away from him in panic as well, he pumped the shotgun and fired it again, this time into Madelaine’s side. She trumpeted, more startled than hurt, lashing out blindly with her trunk, turning around in a circle, mashing the dead body underfoot even further. North had staggered back upright and spotted Mae climbing down out of the wagon toward them.

“Hey, Rube!” he shouted, nearly unheard over the din of the crowd. Instantly, Max and Eric vaulted from the wagon; ride jockeys and riggers and roustabouts alike plowed into the mob, fists flailing. Mae stumbled across the rutted road to throw her arms around Madelaine’s trunk, and felt the elephant wrap it around her so tightly she nearly couldn’t breathe. Blood trickled from the bullet wounds in the elephant’s thick hide, dripping onto Mae’s arms and head. She could feel Madelaine trembling.

“My God, it’s killing her, too!” someone shouted. “Kill the elephant!”

“Round me at twilight come stealing,” Mae started to sing, breathless with fear, stroking the elephant’s trunk. “Shadows of days that are gone. ”

Madelaine exhaled, like a huge sigh from a thundercloud, then lowered her head, her trunk loosening. “Dreams of the old days revealing. ” The elephant stood still, then gently began to rock in time with Mae’s song. “Mem’ries of love’s golden dawn. ”

The Bishop pushed his way through the brawling crowd, his top hat nearly crushed on his head, stopped, and exchanged a look with Mae. She kept singing, low and steady, as the Bishop took it in, all of it, the three of them as isolated in the midst of the riot as had they been in the big top spotlit by banjo lights.

“Kill the elephant! Kill the elephant!” Mae saw the preacher, his black frock flapping around him like crow’s wings as he pumped his arms, the chanting growing louder in anger, his face contorted with rage and glee.

North stumbled into the charmed circle, nose bleeding, knuckles raw, but a glint of wild joy in his eyes that faded as soon as he saw the Bishop.

“Get the chains on her, now,” the Bishop ordered sharply.

Madelaine made no protest as North wrapped foot chains around back legs. “Keep singin’ to her, Mae,” he said.

“Childhood days, wild wood days, among the birds and bees. ”

Madelaine allowed North to chain both her front feet as well, even holding up one leg helpfully to make it easier for him to slip the shackle on, her foot still stained with brains and blood. A cheer went up from the crowd as four uniformed policemen with batons pushed their way through to where Madelaine stood submissively, her trunk now resting limply around Mae’s shoulders, sensitive nostrils blowing hot on her neck.

“Get away from there, miss,” one of them shouted at her in alarm.

She glared back at him, and held onto Madelaine’s trunk, not caring that her deformed hands were in plain view. “You left me alone, but still you’re my own,” she kept singing. “In my beautiful memories.”

“She’s safe enough now,” North said heatedly to the policeman. “So why don’t you calm these folks down before you’ve got more to worry about than this here elephant?”

The Bishop had climbed onto Mae’s wagon, balancing precariously. “Free tickets!” he bellowed. His ringmaster’s voice cut through the caterwauling, greedy eyes turning toward him, the violence ebbing. “Ladies and gentlemen! Free tickets to tonight’s performance under the big top! That’s right, all seats at absolutely no charge for the good citizens of Ashton! Tonight only! Hurry, hurry, hurry! Get them while they last, every ticket absolutely free, yellow, blue, and red, first come, first served!”

That did the trick, the rush toward the nearby circus tents and ticket offices churning up a quagmire in a near stampede.

“You all right there, Mae?” North asked her, unsure whether or not she was a prisoner inside Madelaine’s embrace, his ankus readied in one hand.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine, just go,” she said, then closed her eyes, leaned against Madelaine, and sang softly. “Memories, memories, dreams of love so true. O’er the sea of memory I’m drifting back to you. ”

With the crowd thinned out, the crew and rousties quickly corralled the four younger elephants, who helped push the pony wagon back upright and replace the wheel. It took only a few minutes to get them turned back to the lot, leaving Mae and Madelaine surrounded by skittish police officers unsure of what to do, puffed up with more bravado than authority. North returned with a team of roustabouts carrying more chains, binding the big elephant’s whole body so securely she could barely walk, then led her back toward the circus, where he secured her to a log behind the colored workers’ rest tent, out of sight of the public. The local police stood watch, one at each corner like an honor guard around a coffin.

The big top was packed out for the evening’s performance, the stalls and star backs and blue stringers overflowing. Kiddies squeezed together on straw spread out in front of the general admission seats and still they pressed up clear to the hay bale rings. But it seemed both spectators and performers knew this was not an ordinary evening, the rangy cheering and laughter bordering on thin hysteria. From inside her exhibition booth in the sideshow top, Mae tried to relax, sheathed in her tight costume and going through her routine every time the curtain was pulled back to admit another lot of slack-jawed gawpers, clacking her hands together and waving her feet about in absurd parody of a lobster. She had never expected empathy or pity, long immune to the gasps of horror, nervous giggles, even the occasional lewd proposition made more to impress mates than in expectation of success. But this crowd was subdued, predatory, their eyes small and mean as they stared and sneered, bought a souvenir penny postcard, and left.

Outside, the calliope rattled through its repertoire of screamer music, band organs cranking out paper roll tunes for the carnival rides. Kiddies and women and even men shrieked in delight and fear and excitement. Candy butchers hawked popcorn, cotton candy, toffee apples, and pink lemonade while grinders reeled through their repetitive ballyhoos, right this way folks you can’t afford to miss this absolutely petrifying freak of nature, half price for the next five minutes only, be astounded, amazed, and thrilled, once seen, never forgotten.

It was a relief when Max, tattoos hidden by his oversized bathrobe, finally left the pit where he did his strongman act, and came to get her. The noise of the crowd swelled in the blowoff as they were herded down the midway and out of the circus lot, then evaporated, leaving the twilight air to be filled instead with cicada chittering. She draped her arms around Max’s neck like a sleepy child as he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the dressing top. Once she’d changed out of the lobster costume into more comfortable clothes, he carried her across the eerily quiet midway to the back yard, past the pole wagons, the main cookhouse tent, the spec floats behind the horse tops empty and deserted. The gorilla rustled in his bed of hay and newspapers, “The World’s Most Terrifying Beast!” emblazoned in red and gilt over his cage, drew a torn broadsheet over his head, and curled back to sleep, snoring softly. Flags snapped atop the top poles, a horse nickered, mosquitoes whined in the humid heat. The entire company had gathered in the dressing top, kerosene lanterns flickering shadow puppets on the sidewalls.

Kleininger had already scrubbed off the clown makeup while Schmidt’s whiteface had smeared into the crags and lines of his face, his eyes old and weary. What little muted conversation there was died away as the Bishop walked into the top, still dressed in his velvet vest and tails, glass diamonds in his buttons glittering. One of the rousties quickly fetched a folding chair. The Bishop smiled wanly in thanks as he sat down heavily. He still had the ringmaster’s whip coiled in one hand, dangling between his knees as he rested elbows on his thighs, head hanging. The Bishop sighed, then looked up.

“The mayor of this fine town took a good deal of pleasure in informing me he’s sent telegrams down the wire. Every town between here and the West Coast knows we have a killer elephant. They’re threatening to ban the circus altogether if we don’t get rid of her.”

Mae’s heart sank. “But she’s not. ” she said, so softly she was nearly inaudible. In the hushed tent, a hundred eyes turned toward her, waiting. “That man. Who died. He threw a lit cigar in her mouth, it wasn’t her fault.”

“Doesn’t matter, she has to go.”

“If another circus won’t take her, we can find a zoo who will, can’t we?” For a little man, Schmidt had a remarkably deep voice, his German accent slight.

A few faces brightened with hope, quickly dashed. “If it were one of us, it would be different,” the Bishop said, shaking his head. “We know the life. But she’s killed an outsider. The mayor told me the preacher’s got the townsfolk so riled up they’re planning to drag an old cannon from the Civil War memorial up here tomorrow to shoot her.”

One of the spec girls burst out into loud sobs, clapped a hand over her mouth, and ran out of the tent.

“You can’t just let them kill her,” Mae said, and felt Max’s hand settle on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Mae. I have to think of the entire company, not just one elephant. You’ve seen these people — they’re out for blood, and they’re dead set on getting it, too. If it isn’t Madelaine, who will they go after instead? How about our coloreds, strung up on light poles the way they did in Dumuth?”

The boys in the minstrel band looked impassive, but Eileen squeezed her eyes shut, shaking so hard Kleininger stood up and awkwardly put his arm around her and stared at his bare feet as she crumpled against him.

“You sideshow freaks? Maybe all of us? This entire crazy town is standing between us and the circus train; they’re not letting us go until they get their pound of flesh. This isn’t a discussion about if she has to die. The only thing to decide is how.”

No one spoke for a long time. Then North said, “Can’t shoot her. We don’t have anything big enough to do the job proper.” His lips compressed into a hard line. “And I won’t do it, no.”

“I don’t have enough potassium cyanide to poison her,” the Bishop said.

“She’s too smart for that anyway,” North said. “After today, she’s going to be damned skittish about what goes in her mouth.”

“Jumbo was killed by a locomotive,” one of the rousties said. “Maybe get two railcars goin’ from opposite ends, sort of squash her in the middle?”

The men around him looked sick. The Bishop winced. “Can’t be sure she’d set still in place long enough, too big a risk if she spooked and broke free.”

“I saw Thomas Edison electrocute an elephant at Coney Island some years back,” Eric said, then dropped his gaze as well, as if ashamed to be part of the conspiracy.

The Bishop snorted with contempt. “There’s not enough electricity in this piece-of-shit town and I’m not using our gennies for that.” He glanced at Mae, embarrassed by his profanity in front of women. “Begging your pardon.” He stood up. “These podunk white-trash hillbillies want a lynching. So we’ll give them a lynching. We hang her.”

Even Theresa, who normally had a face carved from stone, closed her eyes, tears running black mascara like molasses.

“The railroad has a one-hundred-ton derrick car in their rail yard they use to load lumber onto freight cars, strong enough to hold her.” The Bishop’s demeanor had hardened, businesslike. “We’ll do one last show tomorrow, then get the whole town away to the loading yard to watch her hang while the rest of you ready the haul. She weighs five tons; it’ll be over quick enough. So I want those trains loaded for the jump like your lives depend on it. Because they do.”

The roustabouts and riggers and canvas men nodded.

The Bishop’s face was bloodless with repressed fury. “All of you. We take this clem town for everything. Cheat ’em, ding ’em, gaff every game, clutch every ride, fleece every damned one of them. I don’t care what it takes, don’t leave them a dime, not a nickel, not two fucking pennies to rub together. We burn the lot, understood?”

This time, the Bishop didn’t apologize for his profanity, jammed his top hat onto his head, and stalked from the tent.

It was the grimmest, and shortest, show they’d ever played, the barrists going through their trapeze and tightrope routine like mechanical automatons, not even bothering with bows to acknowledge the applause. North had the zebras pull the big cats through the ring in their cages, making a show of snapping his whip, tugging on tails to get the beasts to snarl and roar and paw the bars more in uncertainty than ferocity before trotting them back out of the big top without opening a single cage. The clowns and dogs rolled in so quickly behind him the specs didn’t realize they were getting shortchanged, not that it seemed to matter. It wasn’t the circus they’d come to see. The four elephants didn’t even perform, the Bishop having them walk with Madelaine down to the derrick car, trunk to tail in single file, to keep her company.

On the midway, shills and grifters played lightning-fast shell games and three-card monte while nimble-fingered pickpockets drifted through the crowd, lifting money and tickets and jewelry and watches. The mooches patted jackets and rummaged handbags in bewilderment while grinders kept them spinning along like leaves swirling in a rain-swollen creek. The police didn’t even need to be juiced to turn a blind eye, all of them down at the rail yard guarding Madelaine.

In the sideshow, the marks were run through ten-in-one shows in record time, so hastily most weren’t aware there wasn’t actually much to see; Theresa had substituted an assortment of pickled punks and devil babies floating in jars of formaldehyde for her act while she got her small animals safely packed up. If anyone recognized Mae as the woman who had sung to an elephant, there was no flash of surprise in their dull, vacuous eyes.

Then the show was over, and the circus lot emptied in minutes, all of Ashton along with thousands more who had swarmed into town for the execution sprinting to the rail yard at the far end of the town. They poured over boxcars, climbed onto locomotive engines, scaled water towers, shimmied up telegraph poles like a swarm of ants.

Mae knew the Bishop would string it out as long as he could to give the rousties time for the teardown, tents and stick joints and gennies and rides dismantled, the animals herded, the equipment loaded onto wagons and hauled to the circus train as fast as possible.

Mae had accepted a ride in one of the tiny pony carts with an elderly caller. When she reached the derrick, Madelaine had already been chained to a rail, the big elephant shifting back and forth fretfully, head down, trunk hanging limply. A few hundred yards down from the track, a steam shovel hissed and clattered as it dug a deep pit, several dozen railroad men shoveling out a muddy grave.

North strode across the rail yard, big shoulders hunched under a plaid shirt, suspenders hanging off his hips. He helped Mae down from the pony cart, the old caller’s hand on her waist to keep her balanced.

“You shouldn’t have come, Mae.”

“She should have at least one friend with her,” Mae said, surprised herself with how hot her throat felt. North looked away, his face reddening.

The Bishop listened as one of the lot manager’s boys whispered in his ear, then nodded without a word to the pair of rousties standing by Madelaine. One drew a thick chain around the elephant’s neck while the other fitted the end to a steel ring. In the expectant silence, the derrick operator started the winch, drawing the chain up tightly. Madelaine stopped rocking, then — as if she believed this was just some new trick she was expected to perform — she heaved both front feet off the ground and stood upright obediently on her back feet. She lifted her trunk and curled it in a meticulous salute to her forehead, holding her pose as if expecting applause. None came. Mae bit her lips to fight back tears.

The derrick operator kept rattling the chain upward, taking up the slack. Madelaine began to struggle as one back foot slowly lifted as well.

Mae had heard audiences burst into enthusiastic applause when a tightrope walker fell to his death, mistaking it as part of the act. She had heard them laugh and cheer mindlessly when a clown accidentally caught on fire, so badly burned he never worked again. But nothing she had ever heard before matched the viciousness, the sheer brutality in the shout that went up as Madelaine began to buck, her body arching when all four feet came off the ground. The elephant’s mouth gaped open, her tongue as pink as a tea rose. Urine snaked down her back legs, darkening the gray skin, splashing onto the railing. The entire derrick shook as she twisted on the end of the chain while her eyes rolled white under dark lashes. The chains creaked under the strain, a strange crackling and popping as Madelaine’s own weight tore ligaments from her bones. It took several minutes, far longer than Mae had thought possible, before the thrashing grew weaker, the elephant’s body slowly slackening until Madelaine hung limply, only the slightest of tremors as she pirouetted on the end of the chain.

The Bishop let her hang for another half an hour after the last quiver had stopped, and the last of the cheering finally died away, the crowd, bored, melting away. As the derrick operator lowered her body back to the ground and the rousties unhooked her, the Bishop put his hand on the elephant’s head. Behind him, a photographer held up a Kodak camera and snapped a picture. He bleated in protest as Billy North wrenched the camera out of his hand.

“Get out of here before I shove this thing down your neck.” North punched the camera back into the photographer’s chest, growling as the man stumbled away.

There was no one to record the tractor as the same chain that had hung her was hooked to one leg to drag her several hundred yards to the massive pit. She tumbled in, and it took only a few minutes for the steam shovel to pile the muddy earth back into the hole, the tractor tamping it down flat. Mae waited until the machinery had clanked its way back to the rail yard, then hobbled toward the grave. She glanced up in surprise as the Bishop suddenly took her elbow.

“What are you doing, Mae? We need to leave now.”

Guiltily, she withdrew a handful of paper flowers she’d gleaned off one of the carnival stands and hidden under her coat. “For Madelaine.”

“Don’t be stupid, girl,” the Bishop said roughly. “It’s just an elephant.” But he didn’t stop her from placing them on the newly turned earth.

The mayor waited for them by the train, straw bowler hat making a red mark around his forehead. The Bishop helped Mae onto the steps of the married sleeper car, Max catching her by the hands to lift her the rest of the way.

“We’ve passed an ordinance,” the mayor said, “banning circuses in Ashton. We don’t want to see the likes of you back here again.”

The Bishop laughed, the harshness of it making the mayor step back. “You have no need to worry on that account, sir,” the Bishop said. “There’s not a circus anywhere on earth that would ever come within a fifty-mile radius of this. town.”

The Bishop walked to the caboose, and remained standing on the platform as the train pulled out, leaving the mayor fuming in its wake. The conductor blew the whistle in one long, unbroken wail until the last clapboard buildings fell behind, lost in coal smoke.

They put a few hundred miles between themselves and Ashton before the next morning. When they finally stopped in a cornfield far from any station, Mae knocked on the side of the Bishop’s sleeper car. He didn’t respond, so she turned, about to leave, then heard a child crying from inside. She had to lift herself up by the rails and open the door, but was inside before the Bishop could exit the infirmary and block her way. He wore a white apron with sleeves over his suit, blood speckled at the cuffs.

“I’m rather busy at the moment, Mae,” he said. “Can it wait?”

She peered around him, getting a glimpse through the curtain, enough to make her push past the Bishop. A small child wrestled against the straps holding him down to the table, but in that clumsy manner of a patient not yet completely sedated, a linen mask tied across his face and the smell of chloroform in the air. Surgical instruments gleamed from a tray, linen bandages laid out beside a pan of steaming hot water.

“That’s the mayor’s son,” she said, recognizing the chubby boy who had fed a peanut to Madelaine.

“No, no. You’re mistaken. Just another orphan who’s run away to the circus.” The Bishop took her by the elbow firmly, steering her toward the sleeper’s door.

“What are you doing to him?”

“Giving him the future he wants.” It took every ounce of strength she possessed, but Mae shook him off. He stepped back, as if resigned. “Rosie will be big enough to wear Madelaine’s old howdah next season. All that’s needed is someone who can fit into it.”

As the meaning of his words dawned on her, she felt her knees threatening to buckle. “But you’re not a doctor, not a real one! You’ll kill him!”

“Ah, but I am a real doctor. Trained and certified with the best surgeons in Harley Street. I’ve cut hundreds of legs off lads barely old enough to shave while the Chinese fired so many shells we worked nearly blinded by ash and smoke, the fusillades so loud we had to shout to be heard.” His eyes had gone soft, memories turned inward, but there was little mercy in them. “Missionary nurses reading scripture to dying children as the hospital burned around us. Beds soaked with blood and pus and shit while we prayed and cut and prayed and cut. ” He blinked, as if awakening, then smiled at her kindly. “You have to go now, Mae. I’m very busy.”

“Please, sir,” she whispered, pleading. “Please. Don’t do this. What has that poor boy ever done to deserve this?”

He steered her down the steps, making sure she had her footing before he straightened in the doorway of the carriage.

“What have any of us? Everyone pays, Mae. Everyone. There are no free tickets in life. You should know that.”

He shut the door, this time locking it, while Mae collapsed on the broken rock of railroad ballast and wept.