by Cathy Day
"Only five miles, Stell. And once you see this place," Wayne said, "you won't want to leave."
He rounded another curve and she saw a house—no, a mansion with pillars and stained glass—looming on top of a hill like an ancestral castle, overlooking the river and miles of farm fields.
"Is that it?" she asked, shaking her head in disbelief.
From the backseat, Ray and Ricky said, "Wow" in unison.
"No, no," Wayne laughed. "We're not moving that far up in the world."
He drove past the mansion, and then past barns, paint chipped to the bare wood. CAT HOUSE and ELEPHANT BARN were written above the giant doors. "What are these?" Stella asked.
"I told you about the circus quarters, back in the old days? Well, this is it." He pointed to a yellow barn. "That one is ours."
A barn, Stella thought. They'd never even had a garage.
"The rest of them belong to some farmer up the road. Keeps his tractors there." He stopped the car. "Boys, you have to see the barn. The real estate guy told me Tony Colorado kept his horse Bullet in there winters."
"Who's Tony Colorado?" Ricky asked.
Wayne laughed. "He was like the Lone Ranger, only he wasn't on TV. He was a movie star and traveled around with the circus." Stella remembered him from a silent film she'd seen as a girl—a clean-shaven man in a white hat riding a black horse. When silent movies became talkies, he'd faded from the screen; she'd read in one of her Hollywood magazines that Tony Colorado, the Lone Star Cowboy, was cursed with a high, squeaky voice unsuitable for speaking parts. Wayne turned in his seat to where the boys sat transfixed, staring at the barn. "I met Tony Colorado once, in town at the old Robertson Hotel. Went up and shook his hand." Wayne sighed, waving the memory away with his hand.
He drove through an ornate wrought iron gate. "The guy who owned the circus, Wallace Porter, lived up there," he said, pointing again to the mansion on top of the hill. "Some rich family owns it now, but they're traveling in Europe or something for a year. Can you beat that?" He rounded a bend in the drive and stopped in front of a clapboard farmhouse. Ray and Ricky tumbled out of the car before it even stopped and ran back to explore the barn. The two-story house was painted a peeling white with emerald green shutters hanging crookedly from every window. Ivy clung to the sides of the house like jungle vines, and overgrown bushes blocked the first-floor windows.
"The Realtor told me this used to be Porter's house, before he built the mansion." Wayne helped Stella out of the car.
"Needs work." Stella shaded her eyes from the sun.
Wayne nodded.
"How bad's the inside?"
"Not so bad," Wayne said.
He opened the front door, and Stella stepped inside her new house. She'd pictured sunny rooms with tall windows, but instead of white walls or patterned wallpaper, every wall was a mural, gaudy and bright as a circus sideshow banner line. She walked down the walls, trying to take it all in. Elephants in the study, camels and zebras in the living room. In the dining room, horses grazed in a winter field, colored ribbons and plumes twined into their manes. "This is crazy," she said.
"I wanted to surprise you." Wayne stood with his arms folded proudly across his chest, rocking on his heels and toes. "The Realtor said the workers, the guys that painted those big ... what you call them ... tableau wagons. They must have practiced in here."
Stella said nothing. An old upright piano stood along the wall, the only piece of furniture in the house. She pressed a few keys. Out of tune, of course. Stella shut the piano hard, and the muffled notes echoed. "Why would someone do this?"
"Must have been too big to move," Wayne said.
"I mean these walls!"
"Well, it's sure ... different." There was a note of apology in his voice.
"I hate that word," Stella said, touching the walls. "It's just a nice way of saying something's bad." She noticed that over the years, the murals' colors had become muted and dull, and in the places where the painter daubed too thickly, cracks and fissures worked their way through the paint like tiny spiderwebs.
Wayne shrugged his shoulders and frowned. "What's the matter?"
"I can't believe you bought this place without telling me about these walls."
"I thought you'd think it was interesting."
"It's ugly, Wayne," she said, trying not to yell. "And I hate the circus."
"Who hates the circus?" Wayne snorted.
"I do. You know that." She felt guilty, blasphemous. She'd told him years ago, and he'd stared at her in open-mouthed shock, like she'd just said, "There is no God," or "Communism is a pretty good idea."
Wayne stomped toward the front door. "Well, it's ours now."
She followed him to the barn, a graveyard of abandoned circus equipment. Harnesses, juggling pins, clown props, spangled and fringed costumes, and steamer trunks marked PROPERTY OF THE GREAT PORTER CIRCUS. A steam calliope from the Coleman Bros. Circus, a whip with WARREN BARKER'S WILD ANIMAL ODYSSEY burned into the leather handle. In the corner, an old Overland stagecoach with a missing wheel sat propped up on hay bales, TONY COLORADO'S LONE STAR COWBOY SHOW painted gold on the side. Ray and Ricky had clambered inside to shoot their toy guns out the windows. They fired at imaginary Cherokees threatening to overtake the stage.
Wayne called. "Stella, come over here. You've got to see this." He pointed at the weathered sign hanging over an empty horse stall, which read: BULLET, FASTEST HORSE IN THE WEST. "They kept him right here. Can you beat that?" Wayne said. His eyes were almost misty.
Stella knew it was useless to complain. She was outnumbered. She was home.
WHEN STELLA WAS eight, her father took her to a ragbag circus struggling to stay afloat during the Depression. "You'll love it, sweetheart," he told her as they sat down in the blue star-back seats, waiting for the show to start. "When I was a kid, I couldn't wait for the circus to come to town." The opening spec began—a tribute to "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Her father sang along, so Stella did, too.
The clowns emerged, and everyone laughed. But to Stella, they were white-faced ghosts with bloody smiles, chasing each other through the sawdust with hatchets and guns and saws. Her father tried to explain it was all pretend, but Stella cried anyway. Carrying her out of the tent like a sack of potatoes, he made his way to the ten-in-one, the carnival midway show: ten freaks displayed in pits under one tent. Stella looked into the first pit and saw Lobster Man, a freak with flipper legs and deformed, clawlike hands, which he shook in her face. She wailed louder than before. To calm her down, Stella's father bought her an ice-cream bar and then paid fifty cents so she could ride on an elephant, a baby one lumbering around a never-ending ring. But Stella refused to get on, and the ticket seller refused to give them a refund. Wasting money, now that her father couldn't abide. A spanking followed, a very public one.
Stella's parents spoke to her schoolteacher. Was she like this in school? No, Miss Yardley said, but Stella was a moody child who kept to herself a lot, reading books while the other kids played. The teacher advised fewer books, more chores. "Give her something to do with her hands or she might turn out melancholy. You know, different," Miss Yardley said with a tight smile. Her parents boxed up her books, hid her library card. Her mother taught her to needlepoint. Her father taught her to play "Amazing Grace" and "Nearer My God to Thee" on the piano. When she was big enough, Stella took over the henhouse, feeding chickens and collecting eggs. The cure seemed to work—Stella stopped asking for books and made more friends at school. But her dreams never went away. For years, she was plagued with circus nightmares: Ax-wielding clowns chased her down long hallways, Lobster Man grabbed her with his claws, and a slow, sad parade of elephants marched in chains into a big top from which they never emerged.
THE MOVERS arrived that afternoon. For the rest of the day, Stella let the boxes sit and studied the walls, tracing the murals with her fingertips as if she were reading braille. Wayne knew enough to narrate one of them: the mural in the study. An elephant grasped a small man
in its trunk.
"Is that what I think it is?" Stella asked. "Is the elephant killing that little man in the red shirt?"
Wayne nodded. "I think so. The skull's down at the county museum."
"Whose?"
"The elephant's."
She took her hand away from the wall. "How awful."
But the murals upstairs were a gaudy mystery, startling portraits done in red, yellow, orange, and aquamarine. In the boys' room, big-bosomed women burst from their spangled corsets, their hair done up in white pompadours and red circles of rouge dotting their cheeks. They stood aloft flashy white horses with golden manes. In other rooms, Japanese acrobats tumbled, men walked silver wires, and a man on a flying trapeze blew a kiss across the room to the opposite wall, to a tiny slip of a woman hanging by a bloody wrist.
The house reminded her of pictures from her social studies books—ancient caves and Egyptian tombs. Dark, close places. Walls etched with strange figures and symbols. They told stories in a language she couldn't decipher, and so she was forced to make up her own. The trapeze man and wrist-hanging woman were tragic lovers—he missed a catch and sent her plummeting into the sawdust. The Japanese acrobats saved their money to buy a restaurant in California that made them rich. The family of tightrope walkers perfected the seven-man pyramid, setting world records, but lost their patriarch on a windy day in New York City, forty stories up.
One room, thank god, was blessedly white. Stella guessed the painter ran out of steam before he finished, and she told Wayne it would be their bedroom, the only room in the house where she could put her mind to rest.
STELLA MET WAYNE her senior year at Richmond High School—at a Moose Lodge Halloween party. He was a denim-clad cowboy in a black hat with a gun slung over his hip. She came as Pocahontas, her long dark hair woven into a thick braid that swung behind her like a tail. Wayne was a good catch, a twenty-three-year-old man in steel-toed boots who worked down at Richmond utilities. Her friends were still dating boys with pimples and letterman jackets.
Her parents invited Wayne to Sunday dinner. After the meal, Wayne and her father went outside to smoke. From the kitchen sink, Stella's mother gestured out the window. "Now, he's got a good head on his shoulders," she said in such a way that made it clear she thought her daughter didn't. Stella nodded and continued scrubbing the casserole dish.
By Valentine's Day of her senior year, they were engaged. Even though she was a good student, Stella had never considered college—and no one thought to encourage her to consider it, either. By June, they were married. By the next Halloween (they went as Roy Rogers and Dale Evans), she was pregnant with the twins.
FROM THE WINDOW above her own kitchen sink, Stella watched her boys play cowboys and Indians. Ray yelled, "A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty Hi Yo Silver!"
Ricky waved his hat in the air. "Hi Yo Silver, away!" The boys whooped and hollered, firing their toy guns in the air.
She liked for them to play close by. If they didn't, Stella saw them in the back of her mind, drowning in a pond, walking down the middle of a busy road, taking candy from a convict escaped from Pendleton. When they were babies, she'd slept in the nursery so that every few hours she could make sure they were still breathing. Wayne indulged her at first, but then insisted she stop. "You'll make them nervous with your worry. They'll be fine." He was right, Stella knew, but that didn't stop her from imagining the worst. She did the same thing whenever she left the house. By force of will, she kept herself from going back into the house to check the pilot light on the stove or to make sure she'd unplugged the old lamp. Worry was like a fire inside her that required constant tending to keep it from flaring out of control.
Stella was making a new recipe for dinner: lasagna. Assembling the layers took most of her attention. Then, from outside, she heard a faint moaning. She ran to the window and saw Ricky writhing in pretend anguish in the grass, holding his belly wound as Ray stood over him and continued firing, sounding out each shot between his lips.
Stella yelled out the window, "Ray! You've killed him. Let him die in peace."
It occurred to her then that Ray always played the hero (Red Ryder, the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid) leaving Ricky the role of trusty sidekick (Little Beaver, Tonto, Pancho). Always a pecking order, she thought. She wondered if this was why she preferred Ricky, because she always rooted for the underdog. Stella handed them two cookies out the window. "You know, the cowboys didn't always win."
Ray munched. "How do you know, Mom?"
She smiled. "I learned it in school. Indians got the better of cowboys sometimes."
"Really?" Ricky asked.
"Sure," Stella said. "They just don't show that on TV."
Ricky ran toward the barn, Ray following close behind. She yelled for them to come back, but they ignored her. She returned to the lasagna—she'd check on them in a while.
Lately, they spent all their time in the barn. Even Wayne. He joined them in there after work and became a boy again, surrounded by Western props and circus costumes. Wayne and her boys thought the barn was a magic portal to Arizona circa 1890, but Stella knew Tony Colorado wasn't a real cowboy, just a slicked-up imitation, a counterfeit gunslinger who died, not from bullets or arrows, but from choking on the toothpick in his martini. She'd read that in her magazines, too.
Stella put the lasagna in the oven, humming along to Glenn Miller on the radio to keep her mind off the boys, but finally, she couldn't take it anymore. Inside the barn, she saw Ricky sitting on a hay bale with Ray behind him, a flash of silver in his hand. Moving closer, Stella noticed Ricky's face—wet with tears and a bit of blood dripping from a cut at his hairline.
"What are you doing?"
"Playing cowboys and Indians," Ray said. "I'm the Indian."
"He's scalping me," Ricky said quietly, staring at his shoes.
"What?" Stella cried, then took a breath. "Give me the knife, Ray." He placed his pocket knife in her hand, and she held her apron against Ricky's forehead.
That night in bed, Stella told Wayne, "I want you to talk to them. They think it's all make believe, but it's not."
Wayne rubbed her back. "Don't worry, Stell. They're just boys."
"Boys with knives."
"It was just a little cut. You're overreacting."
Stella turned to face him. "No. I'm not."
Wayne didn't like it when she raised her voice to him. "I'll talk to them. No more scalping. Stop worrying so much. You know how you get."
"What if I'd come a few minutes later?" Stella whispered, but Wayne didn't answer. In her mind, she saw Ricky's face, his eyes, his chest, all covered in blood.
Then from outside her sleep, Stella heard wailing. A she-cat, she dreamed, sore with heat. The cat's crying reminded her of the years she'd spent listening for Ray and Ricky's cries, and then suddenly the sound was not a cat, or a memory, but a real cry—loud as a late-night phone call, stopping her heart cold. The boys never cried out like that, not anymore, so she rushed down the hall, inching along blindly in the dark. Reaching the boys' room, she found Ricky sitting up in his bed. He'd dreamed something, something he wouldn't talk about, so Stella rocked him in her arms, staring at the equestrienne tarts on the walls, wondering how they rode horses with their bosoms hanging out like that.
Ray woke up finally. "What's wrong," he mumbled.
Stella said, "Nothing. Go back to sleep."
"Did the baby have a bad dream?" Ray's voice was sneering.
Ricky pulled away from Stella, embarrassed.
"Don't talk like that to your brother."
"I only asked if he had a bad dream," Ray said. "Geesh."
Ricky crawled back under the covers, and Stella considered picking him up and carrying him back to her bed. But then Ray would want to come, too, and there wasn't room anymore for all four of them, so Stella left the room, pausing outside the door to listen. In a few moments, she heard them struggling with each other in the dark, skin scraping sheet, fists p
ummeling flesh and pillow. It reminded Stella of the last weeks of her pregnancy. She could barely breathe, barely sleep. The baby in her womb struggled, tumbling and turning within her. At night, it kicked her ribs, her lungs, her back. She tried singing, stroking her belly, warm baths, anything to calm the child down so she could get a moment's peace. When she delivered twins, the doctor joked, "Two nations were in thy womb."
She wanted to stop her sons' quiet war immediately, but made herself wait to see if they'd end it on their own. I'll count to ten, Stella thought. Then I'll go in and turn on the light and they'll stop. She stood in the dark hallway, counting slowly to herself. Stella remembered the Bible verse she'd memorized in church long ago: Two manner of people shall be separated from your bowels and the one people will be stronger than the other people.
THE BOYS STARTED school in the fall, and for the first time, Stella faced the house alone. One afternoon she decided to walk into Lima, just to see if she could. But she'd started too late. By the time she got there, the sun was going down, and she had to call Wayne to come get her. She cried all the way home. "I need something to do," she told him. Stella begged him to let her paint over the murals, but he refused, saying they needed the money for real improvements: the roof, the boiler, new shutters. "Maybe you just need a hobby," he suggested.
"What?" Stella asked, unable to think of anything she'd want to add to her day.
"What about the piano?" Wayne said. "I'll get a tuner to come out. Would you like that?"
She sighed. "I don't know."
"Well then, what do you want?"
Stella paused. "I have absolutely no idea," she said quietly.
The next day, the tuner arrived, an elderly gentleman in overalls. "Ephraim Miller, at your service, ma'am," he said, tipping the hat he wasn't wearing. While he worked, the house filled with notes straining to find their correct pitch. Stella served him lemonade, and his eyes scanned the walls. "I've heard about this place," Mr. Miller said.