Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  Wilton was a sandy-haired, apple-cheeked young man like a character in a novel by Dickens. He also seemed a cultured sort who voluntarily attended opera and ballet, and Tom Thumb thought that a deadly combination for judging American audiences. The whole proposition now filled Tom Thumb with terror. The closer he got to seeing the $187,500—and his twenty grand along with it—go over to some Scandinavian Four-flusher, the more the little General was convinced that it was the last they were going to see of any part of it. Something terrible was going to happen. Nothing Tom Thumb had learned about Jenny Lind since Lavinia’s amazing revelation offered the slightest assurance about doing business with The Swedish Nightingalemore like buzzard, Tom Thumb feared.

  At two o’clock Lavinia tried to come up to the pilothouse. She had not eaten since the night before, but she was growing more uncomfortable, with good reason. The sea had been boiling up all day, the cloud cover lowering almost down to the top of the waves. They had left Antwerp at midnight, ghosting past Vlissingen in the Netherlands two hours after dawn. The wind had been westerly, mild, but it had been picking up all day, the eye shifting around to the south, coming in over their port beam. All day long Captain Ross had his crew of two dousing sail, so that by the time Lavinia appeared at the foot of the companionway, the little boat was flying only a storm jib. Lavinia was not much interested in the sea, but she had heard enough from Tom Thumb to know that so little canvas up meant that the weather was bad, no matter what anybody could tell her to calm her nerves.

  “Look lively, boys!” Tom Thumb shouted. “The lady’s trying to get up the companionway!”

  One of the sailors, a redheaded Irishman named Murphy, reached down for Lavinia’s arm, and then, steadying himself against the rolling and yawing of the boat, lifted her smoothly to the top of the locker aft in the pilothouse where Tom Thumb stood with a view of Captain Ross at the wheel, the whitecaps splashing over the cabin trunk, and the bow digging deep into the foamy, bright green sea, only to rise up again over the next tossing twelve-footer, pointing again and again at the fierce, blackening sky. The imminent storm extended so far in all directions that the horizon had become a ribbon of light so brilliant it was blinding. Lavinia took Tom Thumb’s arm, and steadied herself against the bulkhead with her other hand.

  “It looks awful!”

  “It could blow over! We could get very little of it.”

  “I don’t think so. I came up here to see what was going on. Now I know.”

  The wind picked up, putting the starboard gunwale in the water. Murphy battled his way outside to ease the sheet and let out the storm jib, righting the boat.

  “Are we halfway?”

  “Not even a third!” Tom Thumb shouted. “We have more wind than we need, but we’re sailing into the current. We’re not making five knots. How are they doing down there?”

  “What you’d expect. Eng is sick, and so is Anna. Joe said he was going to sleep it off in your cabin.”

  He and Tom Thumb had to share a cabin on a boat as small as this.

  “Drunk in the morning, eh?”

  “He only had a couple,” she said.

  “He’s a goddamned dwarf! How many does he think he can have?”

  Captain Ross and the two crewmen heard him, and laughed. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Captain Ross said. “If we start to go down, the first thing over the side would be that big woman, if I could figure out how to get her out of the hatch again without a block and tackle.”

  Which was how they had put Anna Swan aboard at Antwerp, in a sling suspended from a rig bolted to the dock. From the moment she had stepped from her oversized carriage, Anna had hidden her face in her hands, as if that would keep the crowd that had gathered in the darkness from ever recognizing her again.

  “That’s not nice, Captain,” Lavinia said.

  “I suppose it isn’t—but you don’t have to worry. The three of you teenie-weenies don’t make up a quarter of her.”

  A wave crashed against the pilothouse. “It’s raining now, Captain,” Murphy called. “We’re right in the middle of it.”

  “I think I’ll go below,” Lavinia said. “Looking at it doesn’t help me.”

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  She shook her head. Murphy lowered her down the companionway again, and Tom Thumb strained to see that she got back to her cabin safely. In these seas little people were especially vulnerable to broken bones, including necks and skulls.

  “I didn’t upset her with what I said, did I?” the captain asked.

  “She didn’t like it, but that’s not why she left. She was getting a little green around the gills.”

  “You’re as good a sailor as they come, General. I thought it might have to do with your size, but she gets sick just like a full-sized woman. The other fellow, too, but he drinks. It’s hard to tell if he’d be better or worse, sober.”

  “He’s lousy either way,” Tom Thumb said.

  “Well, he’s a nasty drunk. Smooth on the outside and the ladies like him, but I’ve been seeing his kind all my life, and big or small, they’re all the same.”

  “Ireland’s full of that type,” Murphy said. “All charm and romance until they’re drunk, and then charm and romance the next day.”

  “I wish you could convince her,” Tom Thumb said.

  “Women are the last to get wise,” Captain Ross said. “I watched him when you boarded last night, the smooth-talking little bastard. What makes some people think they can flatter and lie through life? The booze will get him, though—it always does.”

  “How bad do you think this storm is going to be?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, General. As for me, I’m getting a little nervous.”

  At last Tom Thumb could admit to himself that he had been growing ever more afraid since the middle of the day.

  At three o’clock they struck the storm jib and sailed at almost three knots on the force the wind exerted on the rigging alone. The waves rose higher, steering becoming that much more difficult. The wind shrieked through the rigging, and at times the boat seemed to roll completely onto its side. The waves marched steadily out of the eye of the wind, which Captain Ross now kept at their port quarter. It rained steadily. At any moment an unexpected random wave could dismast them, or pitch-pole them down into a trough, where they would surely take on water and sink. The thought of dying at sea made Tom Thumb feel queasy, but he waited until nearly five o’clock before asking to be lowered down the companionway, lest any of the ship’s company think he wanted to check on Lavinia and Gallagher. He wanted to look in on all of the troupe, but it was Lavinia he wanted to see.

  Down below, the tiny gimbaled kerosene lanterns were adjusted low, the flames so small he could hardly see the swinging of the lamps themselves. In the shadows Anna Swan was braced against the back of the settee, her huge legs stretching across the full width of the sole of the salon, her feet set against a locker. Everywhere belowdecks was the smell of human sickness. Anna looked conscious, but not as if she wanted to be disturbed. All she wanted was deliverance. Given what she went through every day of her life, she did not need him to remind her that, with her weight, she had to be careful how she pushed against the bulkheads.

  In their cabin Chang and Eng were lying side by side on the lower bunk, neither one of them looking very well. Neither of them looked at Tom Thumb either: when they were like this, the two of them disappeared into their own woebegone world.

  When Tom Thumb knocked on Lavinia’s door, it occurred to him that Joe Gallagher could be on the other side—Captain Ross had suggested nothing less, after all.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Come on.” She had a blanket over her; he could hardly see her in the light of the one small swinging lamp. “I was hoping you’d come down. We’re going to be all right, aren’t we?”

  “Sure.” He waited until the motion of the boat carried him to the bunk. “Captain Ross says this happens all the time in t
hese waters. Half the weather in the world comes together here, I’ve told you that.”

  “I’m scared, Charlie.”

  “It’s all part of seasickness. It’s a bad storm, all right, but the crew has seen worse—sailed through worse, in smaller boats, all of them.”

  She took his hand. “There’s no point in getting up, is there?”

  She hated the idea of missing anything. “No,” he said, “there’s nothing to see.”

  She closed her eyes. “You always take care of me, Charlie.”

  “I try.”

  “I’ll be all right.” That meant she was going to sleep. She trusted him—she thought he knew a lot. One thing he believed he had over Joe Gallagher was that Lavinia loved everything about the world General Tom Thumb, her Charlie, had shown her. She thought he was perfectly at home in it, comfortable and happy. “You’re always a gentleman, Charlie,” she used to tell him all the time, when they were first falling in love.

  He waited until the boat’s motion could carry him to the other side of the cabin, and then he let himself out. Being with her had made him forget the danger they were in. He liked to think he had reserved his decision on God—appropriate enough, he thought, for a man sentenced to spend a lifetime looking others in the kneecaps—but he did not want to think he was headed for oblivion, not so ignominiously, certainly not so soon. He was afraid, all right—now he knew he was afraid.

  Gallagher had locked their cabin. Tom Thumb had a key, even if the darkness and the rocking of the boat made getting it in the lock difficult.

  The smell of sickness—and liquor, Tom Thumb realized suddenly—was much stronger in here. The lamp was out. He struck a match, figuring Gallagher had grabbed the lower bunk and a route would have to be found to the upper. No, Gallagher was up there. Tom Thumb shook out the match, his finger tips smarting. The boat rolled again, and threw him onto the lower bunk, where his hands skidded through something cold, wet, and sticky.

  It took him a moment to understand what it was, and in the moment after that, in the darkness, soiled with a drunk’s vomit, General Tom Thumb lost all control. He screamed! He stood up on the bunk, punched upward—and hit his hand on solid wood. He grabbed at the sideboard and tried to pull himself up into the upper bunk.

  “Get down from there, you pig! You damned disgusting pig! Get down from there!”

  “What? What the hell ya doin’?”

  Gallagher was still drunk, or drunker than ever! Tom Thumb punched at him, swinging his arm up over the sideboard, grabbing at Gallagher’s jacket.

  “Hey, cut it out! Hey!”

  The boat heaved back. Tom Thumb had Gallagher’s jacket, and suddenly Gallagher came flying over Thumb’s head and crashed down on the cabin sole. Tom Thumb was down on top of him, wiping his hands on Gallagher’s back.

  “You goddamn pig, you took the good bunk after you threw up in the other! You couldn’t tell me? You couldn’t clean up after yourself? You’re nothing but a goddamn drunk!”

  Joe Gallagher groaned. “You broke my arm! You broke my arm!”

  “What?”

  “It’s broke! My arm is broke! I’m going to die because of you!”

  Tom Thumb almost giggled. Gallagher was wailing like a baby! Tom Thumb climbed over him and got to the bottom of the companionway. The sea was more violent than ever.

  “We’ve had an accident down here!”

  Captain Ross appeared out of the gloom above. “What kind of accident?”

  In the salon, Anna Swan moaned.

  “The other guy fell out of his bunk. He says his arm is broke!”

  Captain Ross chuckled. “Hell of a time to break a man’s arm, General! Is the bone sticking out?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, Lavinia. Joe fell out of his bunk.”

  “My arm is broken! And I didn’t fall! He pulled me out of the bunk on purpose.”

  She moved to look at his arm but lost her balance and fell against him. He yowled and shrank back.

  “Tell him to get up here!” Captain Ross yelled.

  “What did you do to him?” Lavinia cried.

  “He pulled me out of the bunk while I was asleep, that’s what he did,” Gallagher cried. Murphy reached down from the pilothouse to try to grab Gallagher by the broken arm and Gallagher recoiled.

  “Give me the good one,” Murphy grunted.

  Gallagher still looked like a man afraid he was going to die. Lavinia pulled at Tom Thumb’s shoulder.

  “What did you do to him? I want you to tell me now!’

  He held out his hands. “He got sick in the lower bunk and then left it there for me. I put my hands in it. Who was supposed to clean up after him? I was hitting him when he fell out of the bunk—no, I’m not going to lie, because I’m not ashamed. I pulled him out, just as he said. I’m sorry he didn’t land on his oversized head!”

  Lavinia was staring at him in horror when from above Gallagher let out a tortured squawk. Tom Thumb clambered up the companionway, pulling Lavinia after him. Captain Ross’s face glowed with suppressed mirth. Murphy was flushed with embarrassment.

  “Well, look at his damned twisted arms, Captain, and tell me which one is broken and which isn’t!”

  It was true. Gallagher’s arms were so misshapen normally that you could not tell if they were broken or not. The fact was, Tom Thumb still didn’t know which arm was broken. Now white water crashed over the pilothouse, and the starboard gunwale plowed deep into the foam. Lavinia clawed at Tom Thumb’s coat to keep her balance. She could see the expressions of the men—there was no doubt about the danger they were in. Another wave rolled at them, a thirty-foot churning mountain. Captain Ross spun the wheel into it. The ketch climbed up to the top—and plunged fifty feet down the other side, spinning like a child’s toy. When Tom Thumb looked around, Murphy was holding Gallagher by the collar in mid-air, Gallagher kicking for a foothold on the locker, holding his left arm.

  “You midgets get below!” Captain Ross roared. “Strap yourselves in your bunks! Murphy, put that one on top of the locker and pray he don’t come down and break his other damned arm while you’re helping them down the companionway.”

  Tom Thumb was stung. “Send him below! At least I know what’s expected of me up here!”

  Captain Ross’s eyes bulged with rage. “The man can’t tend to himself! If I don’t tend to him, I’ll have to answer to Her Majesty’s Commission! Now you go below, or I’ll slap you in irons!”

  Murphy hefted the humiliated Tom Thumb down the companionway. Where was the justice? The sea had thrown Gallagher out of the bunk—or had done most of the work. Gallagher was the one responsible for his own misfortune, having violated the absolute minimum standards for common sense and decency. It wasn’t his misfortune now anyway, it was Tom Thumb’s, for Lavinia took advantage of the boat’s rolling to push past him and into her cabin. He moved quickly and was able to block the door with his foot.

  “Look out or I’ll break your leg!”

  “How would you like to put your hands in that stuff? The only reason he got sick was because he was drinking.”

  “Everybody’s sick on this boat. Even if he was drunk, that wouldn’t give you the right to break his arm!”

  “I didn’t! He fell out of the bunk!”

  She glared. “That’s not what you said. You were hitting him. You don’t deny it.”

  “You’re looking for an excuse,” Tom Thumb muttered.

  “What did you say?”

  “You’re looking for an excuse! That’s what I said! I’ve been watching you! You can’t stay away from him! He’s just a drunken bum, but you’re like a moth around a flame!”

  She ground her teeth. “I thought you were done with that. You told me you were done with that. But you’ve been walking around with dirty thoughts in your head. You’ve been thinking those things while we’ve been together. You keep away from me. You have a dirty mind and it makes me feel cheap. I don’t want to see you any more.” She closed
the door and locked it.

  A wave knocked Tom Thumb into a bulkhead, numbing his nose. He couldn’t tell if it was bleeding. Nothing would surprise him now. What had happened to him in the last five minutes seemed like a dream—a nightmare. He wasn’t going to believe that Lavinia meant the things she had said. He’d made a mistake, lashing out at her the way he had, but that had come out of the emotion of the moment, nothing he had planned in advance.

  The same with her—it had to be. She would calm down. If Tom Thumb could have planned anything, it would have been to keep his mouth shut.

  He hit his head getting into his cabin. The storm was getting worse—there was no limit to how bad a storm at sea could get. And Tom Thumb had to spend possibly his last night on earth surrounded by the sick, drunken smell of the man he hated most.

  The storm lasted all night, screaming and shrieking its worst in the black hours before dawn. The ketch went over not just on its side, but twenty degrees beyond the horizontal, so that the masts and the top of the pilothouse were deep in the water. Tom Thumb had never seen such weather. Everybody was screaming. He checked on Anna Swan, then Chang and Eng, but Lavinia’s door remained locked.

  “It’s me—Charlie,” he called. “Are you all right?”

  “They told you to strap yourself to your bunk,” came the muffled reply. “Don’t go looking for trouble.”

  For the next four hours the boat was heeled over so far that Tom Thumb could not climb to the lower bunk, much less the upper. He fell asleep where he sat, with his back against the bulkhead.

  In the morning the master of a passing fishing vessel informed them they had been blown north of Norwich—but that they could consider themselves lucky, because wreckage was being sighted everywhere, wreckage and corpses, surging restlessly toward the shore. With no damage and a favorable wind, Captain Ross and his crew did not get inside the Thames Estuary until well after dark, and had to drop anchor almost within view of the London docks. They were exhausted. Gallagher’s arm was as big as a rye bread, and no one doubted that he was in real pain. Murphy kept him in a stupor with gin broken out of ship’s stores. Lavinia took care of Anna Swan, who, confined as she was to the salon, needed a bucket for her various personal needs. Anna was hungry and could not eat and fell to weeping uncontrollably again. Sweeping past Tom Thumb’s cabin in silence, Lavinia brought food to Chang, who was able to eat only while Eng slept.