by Mark Slouka
The fifteen pounds we made that week—a princely sum—we put in a purse I had sewed into the inside of my shirt. It was late September now. On cold mornings the coal smoke made everything look as though it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser. The costers by their coffee or potato stalls stood a little closer to their coals now. Inspired, like ants, by the approach of winter, the armies of want now combed the city for every gap-toothed comb and crushed bonnet, every cracked spittoon. Our one fortnight of prosperity had been followed by two of increasing desperation. Despite our best efforts the money we had saved dwindled away—penny by penny, shilling by shilling, pound by pound.
Yet again it was Jack Black who showed us the way. A ready market existed, he told us, for all the “pure,” or dog dung, we could collect. The tanyards in Bermondsey, he said, used it for purifying the leather for book covers and kid gloves and such, rubbing it into the flesh and grain of the skin to remove the moisture; they would pay ten pennies a stable-bucketful, sometimes more, depending on the quality.
And so, for a month or more, we were pure finders, scouring the streets at first light, carefully mixing a bit of mortar from old walls into the mixture to give it the desired quality, finally wending down to Lamont and Roberts’s or Murrell’s or Cheeseman’s before the offices closed at dusk to sell our take.
Strange to think how familiar this world was to us once: the tanyards where we sold our pure, the back-door office at Murrell’s with the candle on the shelf (a thumb stub, no more, drowning in its wax), the little hedgehog of a man who would always poke about in the bucket with a piece of wood he kept standing against the wall, as though expecting to find a brick. Every day, after we had bought our bit of bread and pennyworth of herring, we would walk out to a space between the back fences and add as much as a shilling to our savings.
It was on a windy early morning in mid-October, when the yellow flames of the coffee stalls lay sideways like miniature banners and the costers stood hunched with their backs to the dust, that I found myself thinking, less than a third of the way through our daily route, about how much further we had to go. Midway down Blue Anchor-yard I had to rush into a back alley and, praying no one would happen out at that moment, relieve myself against the wall.
Less than half an hour later it came again. We rushed into another alley. Holding on to the side of an old wagon, my legs trembling, I let the water pour out of me while my brother, squatting beside me, held me up. Just then, with the harsh scrape of metal against metal, a small window in the building over our heads was thrown open. A woman cried out. We looked up just in time to see her cross herself and disappear.
Unable to make it to the tanning yards, we hid our half-bucket of pure behind a fence near our lodging house, covering it with whatever refuse there was to be had. Somehow we made it past the woman in the office, through the kitchen and into the nearly empty bunk room. Every half hour or so my brother, who could do nothing but lie beside me in the darkness, would drag me to the buckets, then back to our blankets, laid out on the dirt. Eventually the light outside the small, dusty window began to fade. Then it was dark.
They wanted us gone. Though at any given time fully half the residents might suffer from some manner of complaint, true illness had always been cause enough for eviction. And though it was cruel, it wasn’t without reason: Disease brought into the close quarters of a boarding house would spread like fire through tinder.
I had no strength left to fight or argue; curled up on the floor or staggering to the bucket, I seemed to draw inside myself. The voices around me grew faint, then disappeared for stretches of time altogether. It was my brother who saved us, arguing from the floor where he lay next to me, helpless—bargaining for our lives. We would pay double if they let us stay. We would pay a penny to anyone who brought us food, another to anyone who offered to help us to the buckets, a half a shilling to anyone who fetched a doctor.
In many ways it must have been worst for him. He could do nothing. Though healthy and strong, he could neither work nor go for help. Lying beside me, hour after hour, he could not so much as relieve himself without first having to wake me. Having roused me sufficiently, he would have to stand me up, then drag me, half-unconscious, across the room, then lower me, floppy as a rag, down to the bucket next to his, and then, finally, answer nature’s call, all the while trying to keep me from collapsing forward or sideways (inevitably spilling the bucket’s contents) before he was finished. A pretty picture we must have made, the two of us—bound together, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death take you both, amen. But so it had always been, and so it would be. Illness, like love, made our prison visible, revealed the bond for the iron ring it was—the symbol and substance of our arranged marriage. The same strip of flesh that had cost me my one chance at happiness would jealously drag us down, together.
As the fever took hold I babbled and tossed till the residents threatened to throw us out on the street. For a while I was back in Muang Tai as the palms thrashed and scraped in the wind; we were in our boat again. Ha Lung called out to us from the shore. I was so glad to see he wasn’t dead. He was holding something out to us, something I couldn’t see. It was wound between his arms, like bands of light. I realized it was a length of gray intestine.
He disappeared around the curve. A black-haired painter was standing before his easel. He waved us along irritably as we slowly drifted through his painting. And suddenly she was there, brushing my wet hair back from my face. “My love,” she whispered. I tried to speak but no sound came out. I wanted to tell her everything, to explain. Her face, her voice, were as familiar as my own. “Please don’t think badly of me,” she said. “I looked everywhere for you.”
Something was wrong. There was a tickle, an odd burr inside her voice. The touch of her fingertips along my temple disappeared. A heavy hand now lay across my forehead. “I looked everywhere for you,” I heard her say again, her voice falling back into some place I couldn’t follow, changing, by some uncontrollable alchemy, into something heartbreakingly unfamiliar to me. “Can your brother hear me?” it said. And then: “I represent the interests of Mr. Phineas T. Barnum, sir, and our first task, I believe, is to get you to a physician.”
PART FOUR
I.
And so, properly cleaned and restored, we were brought (vomiting all the way, for the passage was rough) to the happiest land in the world—the land of Sabbaths, as Charity Barnum once called it. Delivered from Egypt, we stepped out onto the wooden docks of Canaan. Around us, men of all ages and races were scrambling over mountains of boxes and barrels, pulling on ropes, tying down canvas. Standing in a quiet eddy, we took it all in: the smell of vinegar and wood, sand and stone; the man wrenching at a horse trapped between piles of lumber, the three bedraggled gulls standing on the roof of a shack advertising COLLIN’S INVIGORATING ELIXIR. We looked up. Far above us, thrusting like bayonets against the white December sky, was a tilting forest of masts, leafless and black as though ravaged by fire. We had never seen so many ships. In the distance, the webwork of rigging gave the air a woven, spidery quality, as though the world we had found ourselves in, seen rightly, were nothing more than foolscap.
And, indeed, at times it would seem as though this world we had found ourselves in was just that: a blank page on which anything might be written, any, even the wildest narrative ventured—and if believed, made true. Or true, at any rate, by the definition of truth that seemed to hold sway here: If they believe it, it’s true; if they buy it, it’s real. For this, we were made to understand, was the promised land of puff, the happiest place in the world for quacks and schemers and frauds. And floating above this Elysium of liars whose depths no plummet could ever sound, forever trolling for suckers, was none other than Phineas T. Barnum.
Years later, long after we had left his employ, we would read about him (and little Charlie Stratton and Anna and some of the others we had known) in the newspapers. Barnum, we heard, had just acquired a pair of long-necked camelopa
rds (as giraffes were called then), or a red-lidded albino child that had never seen the sun. He had built a house in Connecticut encrusted with Turkish towers and minarets. He had bought a thousand acres aligning the railroad tracks to New York and hired a man to plow the fields with an elephant. And so on.
And it seemed to me then—I can’t speak for my brother—that even Phineas T. had served a purpose; that without him we might never have found the will to be anything more than freaks. Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories.
Barnum’s representative returned from England with a learned pig, a dwarf woman, a white Negro, a two-headed calf, and us. We outdid them all. We were bigger on Broadway than we had ever been in Piccadilly, more popular in Boston and Philadelphia than we had ever been in Paris. “The nigger’s the worst suck I ever had,” Barnum complained to his friend Moses Kimball, in a letter found and given to us by a friend, “and the calf shits so I can do nothing with him, but the twins will draw, I tell you.” He went on: “They’re an unlikable pair, I’ll admit, much inclined to take on airs and question expenses and talk about what we are doing, but I’ll have them down to their old level soon enough. They’re worth the aggravation. Give me a fortnight, and I’ll have the community ravenous for them. And when the public maw is ope, my dear Kimball, then, like a good genius, I’ll throw in, not a ‘bone,’ but a regular tid-bit, a bon-bon, and they’ll swallow it in a single gulp.”
The maw opened, the good genius threw us in. Three years later, to pursue the alimentary metaphor to its natural conclusion, we emerged, properly masticated and digested at last—as celebrities. We had clothes, we had money—and the airs to go with them. It was time to go. We could have stayed, of course—allowed ourselves to be cycled through once more, passed like a pearl through America’s second stomach, puffed and sold and consumed again; indeed, if one thing seemed certain, it was that the Almighty Audience—a fatted ox with the head of a lion and the soul of a barnyard chicken—would always be up for another serving. We chose to leave, instead. Some appetites can make you uneasy.
But if the public’s hunger seemed insatiable at times, it was as nothing compared to Barnum’s; after all, if the masses paid to see 161-year-old Joyce Heth, “Washington’s Slave,” or “the Feejee Mermaid,” a dried-up monstrosity consisting of the tail of a fish, the body and breasts of a female orangutan, and the head of a baboon (a thing with all the appeal of a giant piece of hair-covered jerky), it was because their appetite had been artificially stimulated. Barnum’s was real. His was a shameless, a prodigal gluttony. Gorged and stuffed to surfeit, glutted to the gills, he hungered for more.
“I must have the fat boy,” we heard him bellowing once from the back of the museum on Ann Street in a voice that must have shaken the guests and rattled the windows of Astor House across the way. “I must have him, you hear?”
And he got him, just as he would get all the other sad, triple-chinned seven-year-olds that followed over the years—“the Carolina Prodigy” and “the Baby Goliath,” “the Great Wisconsin Boy” and “the Infant Hoosier Giant”—each one, in turn, ceremonially escorted up the steps of the American Museum (and out of whatever childhood might have remained to him) by his proud, diminutive mother. No, whatever Barnum’s failings, excessive self-restraint was not among them. He got them all—“albino beauties” and “dog-boys,” African sloths and Nile crocodiles, “man-monkeys” and musclemen. He got “shaking Quakers” and German midgets, twelve-fingered flute players and horned Ethiopian comedians. He got Madame Josephine Cloffulia, whose dark, virile beard extended a full five inches, and who was never seen in public without the brooch containing the portrait of her bearded husband. He got a four-and-a-half-foot-high, twenty-six-year-old armless man named Mr. Nellis, who could fire a pistol and play the violin and cut out paper valentines with his feet. And, of course, he got us.
I disliked him from the moment I saw him—a sentiment shared, for once, by my brother. I disliked the bushy hair, the well-fed face, the pork-sausage fingers. I disliked the air of self-importance—the almost suffocating atmosphere of self-regard that filled the room. Most of all, I disliked the calculating I sensed taking place behind that pasty brow, those quick little eyes, those bunched and meaty cheeks—the ceaseless, machinelike calibrating and recalibrating of opinion and tone, the parrying and probing for weakness, the constant figuring and refiguring of the probable odds of success.
More than any other man I ever met, Barnum had an instinctive, almost doglike nose for power. Those greater than himself he flattered instinctively and shamelessly; those he deemed below him he bullied or ignored. He could turn on a dime—wheedle and whine one moment, bare his teeth the next. Worse yet, he could be charming, with an irrepressible, childlike enthusiasm and a hearty, booming laugh that made him difficult to hate. A connoisseur of the varieties of human desire, he could set the table to suit the guest, and have him signing on the dotted line before the second course. Meeting him, one had the distinct impression, above all, that this man would do anything to win; that it mattered supremely to him; that everything in him was trained, like a cannon, to his purpose.
“Of all the sons of bitches in the world,” Gideon once said to me, “the worst are the ones that can make you laugh right after they’ve stuck a fork in your chest.” I disagreed. I said the worst were not the likable ones but the ones who knew what you wanted. The ones who could align themselves with your needs. These were like a river—benign enough, even useful, so long as you happened to be going their way. But try to turn and they’d roll right over you. This was Barnum.
He saved us, I suppose, or, more accurately, his representative in London did. By the time he found us on the floor of the boarding house off Parson’s-court, we were down to our last ten shillings. I was more gone than here. Barnum’s man arranged for everything. We were transported to decent rooms, bathed and fed. A regular physician attended us. In less than a month we were on our feet. Passage on a steamer had already been purchased, we were told. We signed a preliminary contract, designating Phineas T. Barnum as our exclusive representative; details to be worked out on our arrival in New York. We were in no position to argue. We sailed a week later with a single carpetbag between us. Our possessions, besides the few necessities that had been bought for us, consisted of two English novels and a miniature jade Buddha. My brother had sold his watch and our father’s knife that last week in the boarding house. The Buddha would have been next. The novels had survived because they were worthless.
It was not until late in the spring of the following year that we met again the man who had found us—a Mr. Timothy O’Shay, a tall, dignified gentleman in whiskers who nonetheless gave the impression of having, at some earlier point in his life, seen a ghost and been marked by the experience for life. His hands, in particular, seemed to have registered the shock; quick and nervous, they would periodically sprint away like runaway children, rising halfway to his head or quickly picking a hair off his tongue before he could manage to bring them under control; these actions he would attempt to cover over, like an embarrassed parent, by casting attention elsewhere, by laughing loudly or suddenly growing irritated over some matter that until then had gone unremarked.
We were sitting in the cool dimness of Barnum’s drawing room in the back of the museum, waiting, as usual, for him to decide that we’d waited long enough. From the front of the building, sounding deep in shade one moment, filled with sun the next, came the din of Broadway: hooves and carriage wheels, shouts and oaths, bits of songs and laughter. Now and then a particular voice, no louder than the rest, would rise and we wo
uld hear the words, perfectly clearly, as though the city had momentarily disappeared or the speaker sat beside us, invisible, in the leather chair by the grate. “Masie? Too tight a wicket for me,” said one with a laugh. “Turn him, you fool!” bellowed another. “The vexations I’ve had with that darky, I can’t begin to tell you,” a young woman’s voice complained to some unseen companion.
It was partly to cover these voices that came in from the street (it felt vaguely indecent to sit there listening to them) that we asked him how he had come to find us.
“Purely by chance, really,” said O’Shay, taking a deliberately casual sip of port. He scowled, an expression that seemed to come naturally to him. “Of course I had heard of you. Everyone had. Mr. Barnum had even instructed me, on leaving for the Continent, to try to find you. But nothing had worked. Thieves and scoundrels, when they heard I would pay for knowledge of your whereabouts, claimed to have seen you here and there, but nothing ever came of it.”
As he spoke O’Shay’s right index finger, seeing its opportunity, had begun drawing quick little circles along the inside rim of his glass. Noticing it, he quickly placed the glass on the table beside him. “Of course, one never knows with these people,” he continued, quickly sitting back in his chair and waving his arm in an expansive gesture meant to suggest the generally unaccountable rabble just outside the walls. “It was because of one such mongrel that I—”
“O’Shay?” It was the imperial summons.
Our companion leaped to his feet as if kissed by a tack, one hand automatically jumping to his hair, the other to his waistcoat. “Yes, Mr. Barnum,” he called, looking about for his coat and cane. “Coming, Mr. Barnum.”