The Circus in Winter

by Cathy Day

  The light shone in his eyes now, but Ollie had no way to make it stop. Panicked, he prayed. "My father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."

  "It's Our Father, dear. And you'd know that if you ever spent a day in church."

  "Forgive me my trespasses."

  "Debts," Mildred said. "Debts."

  He saw them now, struggling to get their wings through the opening. "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil because you are with me."

  "Ollie, are you all right?"

  "Please, Mildred. It comforts me."

  She looked at him for a long moment, and then touched his arm. This was an old, old Mildred, the kind-eyed girl he'd met out at the winter quarters. Ollie wondered where the hell she'd been all these years. Mildred reached into the large shopping bag at her feet. "Here," she said, handing him the bullhook. "Are you happy?"

  He gripped it in both hands. "Amen." He shut his eyes.

  "Ollie! Wake up." When he didn't respond, she pushed the call button next to the bed. "No. No. No."

  He felt Mildred lean over him. She was saying something in his ear, something that made her cry, but he couldn't hear her over the squeal of his hearing aid.

  Then the angels were there, fussing with his tubes. Ollie looked out the window at the scalloped snow clouds, the sun trying to shine. And then he wasn't in the room at all, but standing on the Winnesaw River, brushing away snow until he found his father's frozen face looking back at his own. Ollie lay down over his father's body and flailed his arms and legs. And then Ollie was gone, leaving a perfect angel pressed into the snow.

  CIRCUS PEOPLE

  —or

  WLMA, Your Hometown Music Station,

  1060 on the AM Dial

  A LONG TIME AGO —before French fur traders came to cheat the Miami Indians, before it belonged to anyone or even had a name—Indiana was a vast forest, but the land was scraped bare, first by ancient glaciers, and then by pioneers with axes and mouths to feed. There are hills in southern Indiana, but everything north of Indianapolis is so flat that sometimes, especially in winter, it is difficult to tell the difference between the earth and the sky. My mother once told me that if she had to draw a picture of loneliness and despair, it would be Indiana in winter: a wash of gray, a stand of naked trees, and a line of electric poles disappearing into infinity.

  When I left for graduate school, I knew one thing: I needed a horizon that wasn't horizontal. Eventually, I got my wish—a job teaching history at a little college in Pennsylvania. A year later, I bought my first house, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old stone farmhouse in the middle of an apple orchard. Where I live now is a Grandma Moses painting, a rolling valley in the shadows of South Mountain. That's where I am the day after New Year's Day 2000, the day the world didn't end. I'm trying to write a syllabus but staring outside at the snowy hills instead when the phone rings. "Grandpa Ollie just passed, sweetie," my dad says. "The funeral's the day after tomorrow. Can you come home?"

  "One hundred," I say. "He made it."

  Dad sighs. "Sort of."

  It's January, the snowiest month of all in Indiana. Most flights into Indianapolis are canceled, but I manage to get one into Midway, and my dad manages to get there to pick me up. When I hop in the car, Dad sings in his best Jim Nabors." Back home again ... in Indiana ... And it seems that I can see ..." We drive thirty miles an hour on the way down to Lima. Snow blows across the highway, gathering along fence posts like thousands of ghosts. "It's drifting pretty bad," he says, his voice as solemn as the sky.

  "Yeah. It is."

  He punches at the radio, tuning in a weather report. "How's school, Jenny?"

  "Fine," I say. "Classes don't start for another week, so this is a good time. I guess." I clear my throat. "How's Nana?"

  "Mildred's more upset than I thought she'd be." He sighs, then touches my hand. "It's good to see you, Jen. How was that conference you went to?"

  "Fine. San Francisco was great."

  He sings again, his way of telling jokes." I left my heart ... in San Francisco."

  I didn't come home for Christmas because I had to go to the conference. Actually, that's a lie. I could have come home, but didn't. I flew to California early to visit a grad school friend—and went to the beach every day—then I went to the conference. It was the first time in my life I hadn't woken up on Christmas morning under the same roof as my father, and even though I convinced myself at the time that I deserved the trip, that it wasn't a big deal, I still feel guilty just thinking about it. But I don't let my voice betray that guilt—in fact, my tone sounds a tad exasperated. "You know I'm sorry I couldn't be here for Christmas, Dad."

  He sighs. "I just wish I could see you more often, that's all."

  "I know I know I know." If I still lived in Lima, would he still complain he didn't see me enough? Probably. I lean down to tune out the static behind a Ray Charles song. "Come Rain or Come Shine," I think. My dad breathes in swiftly, like he's been startled. "What?"

  He grips the steering wheel tighter. "Nothing."

  "No. What?"

  "Well, it's just that ... Well, you looked like your mother there for a second."

  I hold my breath. I haven't heard my dad talk about my mom for years.

  "We were on this same road. Going to Chicago for our honeymoon. And she was stooped over just like that, trying to tune in the radio."

  "I didn't know Mom liked Ray Charles."

  "She liked any kind of music you couldn't get in Lima." He tells me that back when they were dating, she made him crisscross county roads, looking for the spot where Chicago-born radio signals would come in. He'd make a left, then a right, and the music would arrive. Stop the car, she'd yell, and they'd sit there in the middle of nowhere, listening to a black man sing what sounded to him like a funeral hymn, but what she called the blues.

  I'm afraid to say anything more, afraid it will spook him and he'll stop.

  "On our honeymoon," Dad says, "she just kept saying how strange it was. Sixty miles north of Lima, and it was like a different world. She made me listen to that stuff all the way there."

  What he doesn't say is, Fourteen years later, when she left, she probably listened to the same station all the way to Chicago.

  What I don't say is, Until she left, she told me over and over, " When you get out of this town, Jenny, make sure you find a city that has good radio stations."

  For the rest of the drive, we let the radio do the talking for us, and somewhere along the way, I drift off. He nudges me awake as we pass the familiar sign that greets us at the city limits: WELCOME TO LIMA, INDIANA, CIRCUS TOWN U.S.A.

  NOBODY ASKS YOU where you're from until you leave the place you're from. For me, like most people, it happened when I went to college at Purdue. I had three stories that served as my signature party tricks. One was called "My Dad Is an Undertaker." The title alone was usually all people wanted to hear. Another was called "My Grandpa Was a Circus Clown." This story entailed giving an abbreviated history of Lima's circus past: Wallace Porter, winter quarters, bunkhouses, barns, boom, and bust. My best trick, my best story, was the one called "My Great-Grandpa was Killed by an Elephant" It went like this: "One day, my great-grandpa led his elephants down to the river for a bath, and one of them picked him up with its trunk and threw him in the air"—I flail my arms for effect, sloshing beer—"Then it stepped on him until he drowned. They had to kill the elephant, whose name was Caesar. Its skull sits on a pedestal in the county museum. No, I'm not making this up."

  There was one story, however, that I never told. It was called "I Have No Idea Where My Mother Is." It would have gone like this: "When I was fourteen, my mother disappeared. She took the hearse out for one of her so-called long drives, but this time, she didn't return. The police found the hearse abandoned in a Chicago parking garage, and that was the last sign of her. Poof! Gone. For a year afterward, the Lima Journal kept the story alive. The city dragged the Winnesaw River, just in case. My fathe
r hired detectives to find her. The police even investigated him. But I always knew what he didn't want to admit: she didn't want to be found."

  In Lima, everyone in town knew what happened, but in college no one did. When my friends asked about my parents, I just said they were divorced and I didn't like to talk about it. People understood and didn't press for more. I liked walking around campus knowing that people weren't thinking, "There goes Jenny Perdido whose mother ran off." Instead, maybe they thought, "There goes Jenny Perdido, the undertaker's daughter from that weird circus town." Or maybe they thought, "That girl has a pleasant face." But mostly, I don't think anyone noticed me at all, which is why I went to a big state school. I wanted to disappear like my mother had, melt into the throng, and become whomever I wanted to be.

  THE PERDIDO Funeral Home sits on a quiet side street in Lima. The basement is where my dad works, the first floor has two funeral parlors—one mauve, one blue—and the second floor is the family residence. When I walk downstairs the next morning for Grandpa Ollie's viewing, the foyer is already full, a somber crowd gently stomping snow off their boots. They pause from removing their wool coats and look up at me with kind faces. For a brief moment, I feel panic in the pit of my stomach. What will they say to me? What will I say back? But they clear a path so that I can stand next to Nana and my father. A line forms. People shake my hand, some even lean in for hugs, and suddenly I feel calm, like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be and know exactly what to do.

  "Your grandma tells us you're a college professor. I go to her church, you know."

  "I'm so sorry. I went to school with your dad."

  "Do you remember me? My daughter was in Girl Scouts with you."

  "Jenny Perdido! I used to cut your hair."

  They all know me, I think. What felt claustrophobic at eighteen feels strangely comforting at thirty-two. I count in my head—how many times have I moved since college? Four? No, five. I've become accustomed to my relative anonymity, I suppose. How long has it been since I lived in a place and was known, really known? There are fifty-odd people milling around the mauve parlor, and not one of them is a complete stranger to me. As they introduce themselves, almost every single name seems familiar.

  Even though I haven't lived in Lima for a long time, I still know what happens there. Nana sends me clippings from the Lima Journal, the kind of small-town paper that tells you everything about your neighbors, and then some. I know that someone stole the skull of the elephant that killed my great-grandfather, and that Mr. Barnett, the owner of the B&B Grocery was arrested last month for peddling kiddy porn. My favorite high school teacher, Mr. Flinn, died a year ago—they ran a picture with the obituary, as if anyone could forget his Tweety Bird face. Viola Clark, my softball coach, just published a detective novel, and Shane Stevens, my first boyfriend, fell from a ten-foot ladder and lives in a wheelchair. Nana made sure I knew that Darcy Williams, the girl who stole Shane from me, is on marriage number three.

  The next person in the receiving line is Rowdy Rubens, a former human cannonball who worked as the head trainer at the Lima Amateur Circus. Nana sent me the article when he retired a few years ago, about how back in 1965 the Chamber of Commerce asked him to train some local kids to perform, and he did so for thirty years with no pay. Rowdy is shorter than me, and he looks up through Coke-bottle glasses and says, "Your grandpa was a very funny man. Very funny."

  I nod and say, "I know," even though I don't remember Grandpa Ollie having any sense of humor whatsoever.

  A middle-aged black woman approaches and takes my hand. "I'm Verna Bowles."

  Nana leans over. "She worked for your grandpa down at the cleaners."

  "That's right. That's right. He was real good to me." Mrs. Bowles turns to Nana. "How you doing, Mildred?"

  Nana sighs. "Pretty good, I s'pose."

  "Couple weeks ago I went up to the nursing home to see Ollie. He asked me when my daddy was coming to visit." She shakes her head. "Didn't have the heart to tell him." Then she moves into the parlor.

  "What?" I ask.

  Nana lowers her voice. "Her dad's been dead for a long time. He trouped with your grandpa back in the old days."

  "He was a clown?"

  This time, Nana whispers in my ear. "Sideshow pinheads. The whole family."

  I want to ask what a pinhead is, but before I can, Nana has turned to the next person in line.

  WHEN I WAS A little girl, my mother told me stories about the old days when the circus people lived in Lima. She said they had come from lands far away, where the sun had burned their hair a glossy black and warmed their skin to the color of ripe olives. They roamed the dark forests of Europe for centuries in slow-moving caravans, reading crystal balls and outstretched palms, swallowing fire and swords, twisting their bodies into queer shapes, all in trade for the gold coins that tinkled as they walked. I pictured young circus women dancing around fires in purple veils, and the older married ones stooped over, draped in black and black. I saw vagabond men combing the countryside for a lone pig or sheep for their dark feasts, and a few days later, dumping the boiled bones back in the farmer's paddock, as if to tell him, Thank you. And, of course, my mother said, the night before they broke camp, the music would begin, pipes and reeds and strings luring bad children who dreamed of big cities and blue oceans into their waiting arms, children who were never seen nor heard from again.

  My mother told me that when the old-time circuses traveled in brightly painted railcars across the country, they stopped each night in little places like Middletown, Ohio; Radford, Virginia; Ottumwa, Iowa; Leadville, Colorado. From the railroad siding, the men in the wickey wagon hung kerosene lamps in the trees to lead the rest of the show to the designated lot on the edge of town. For a night or two, the circus people glittered on dangling silver webs and smiled, sitting atop their roaring beasts. When the shows were over, they dropped canvas and, deep in the night, paraded silently back to the waiting train. And always, there was this danger: that in the morning, the towns of Middletown, Radford, Ottumwa, and Leadville would awaken to empty beds, their wayward sons and daughters disappeared.

  My mother told me that small towns tolerate the wanderer because wanderers bring them as much of the outside world as they can bear. A night swarming with circus people satisfies this need for upwards of a year. But small towns don't likewise tolerate the wanderers among them, those who leave on midnight trains, moonlit back roads, or in brightly painted railcars. Like a parent, the town takes this leaving as a sign of failure it can hardly face. And so, small towns tell their children the same story, intoning it over and over again to keep them from leaving: You are lucky to be from a place where nothing bad happens.

  "Don't believe it," she always said. "I want you to leave this place someday. Promise me you will."

  Of course, I told her yes.

  WHEN I FINALLY work up the nerve to approach the casket, I can see that Dad did a good job on Grandpa Ollie, who looks like he's sleeping, albeit in a brown suit. His face looks like his face, not a slightly off wax sculpture. His skin is as mottled as a leopard's coat with a century of age spots. The last time I saw him up at the nursing home, he kept calling me by my mother's name. "Laura," he said, "I'm so glad you're here. I have so many things to tell you." I tried to correct him—"I'm Jenny, Grandpa! I'm Laura's daughter!"—but it made him agitated, so I let him think what he wanted. I took his hand, which was cold and a little blue, and offered to read Soap Opera Digest to him. When I was a kid, we used to watch Days of our Lives together. But he didn't seem to hear me. He said, "Laura, one of these days, I'm going to tell your mother off, but good! That woman hasn't let me touch her in years." I told him, "I know, I know," wishing I didn't. Staring outside, he watched a cardinal perched on the birdfeeder Nana had hung outside his window. "There's a lot of funny business goes on in this place when nobody's around," he said, pointing at the bird as if it was proof. "Every night, them nurses take me to the post office." He started crying, and then I did, too, rubb
ing the tissue-papery skin on his hand. Finally, he fell asleep, so I slipped out the door. An old man stood in the hallway, pissing weakly against the wall. That night, I called Nana and told her what Grandpa had said. "He has good days and bad days," she sighed. "You just never know." I went up to the nursing home two more times while I was home, waiting to see if my old grandpa Ollie would come back, but he never did. I suppose that's why I'm not so sad today, because it feels like he's been gone for a long, long time.

  Someone walks up behind me. It's Nana, and she puts her arm around my shoulder. "How you doing, sweetie?" She looks me in the eye, then stares at a flower arrangement, looking anywhere, it seems, except at the casket we're standing in front of.

  "I'm fine, Nana." I look down at Grandpa, trying to think of something to say. "What did he look like when he was young? When you met him?"

  "Oh, surely you've seen pictures, child."

  "He's pretty old in them," I say. "1 don't even know how you met."

  "Oh Lord." Nana waves her hand, but she still doesn't look down. "I was out at the winter quarters, watching the elephants, and he came right up and introduced himself to me." She tells me she was wearing a fur muff that day to keep her hands warm, and an elephant snatched it off and tried to eat it. "Your grandpa was going to let that elephant do it, too."

  "Oh, surely not," I say, glancing down at Grandpa, who can't defend himself.

  Nana's face softens just the slightest bit. "Well, I guess he just didn't want to get it back for me. He's always been a scaredy-cat around elephants. Since ... well, you know. His dad."

  "I know," I say. I love Nana, but even her apologies come out like put-downs.

  She dabs her eyes with a handkerchief and finally turns to the casket. "I'm really gonna miss you, you old coot." Then she walks away just as the organist starts playing "Amazing Grace," the signal to take our seats.