Dedication
For Kristi
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
“Babe, put that dang runt pup down and get over to the store! Someone come to see you! Come all the way up the mountain from Boise, so don’t keep him waiting!”
“Ain’t giving up,” Babe called out to her father, gently nudging the puppy’s tummy. She hoped her big, clumsy thumbs didn’t break anything inside. “He’s got life somewheres inside and I’m finding it!” Babe had found the pup’s mama, a starving stray mutt, hiding in a deserted mining shack earlier that week. Her two other pups were beyond saving, but this one still had some struggle inside.
Babe blew her warm breath into the pup’s face and stroked his wet black fur. “Come on, come on. Breathe.” She ignored her father’s boot steps coming closer. The small mama dog looked up with pleading eyes as her tail tapped lightly on the bed of straw.
“Now!” her father growled.
Then came the sweetest sound—snorts of puppy breath as the newborn squiggled in Babe’s hands. The mama inched closer, sniffing. The pup sniffed back, head bobbing as he nosed around for his mama.
“Look at you,” Babe whispered down to the pup, so tiny in her large, cupped hands. “You ain’t no bigger’n a runt rabbit.”
Her father stepped closer, stealing the lamplight.
“Babe!” He tugged on her long thick braid. She ignored him and yanked her braid back.
“Here’s your baby,” she said softly, placing the pup next to the mama’s face. “He’s all you got, so take good care of him.” The mama licked and nudged more life into him.
“Girl, I told you to ditch that ugly dog or I’ll do it! Just like I did all them other strays you dragged home! Can’t be dragging home every worthless stray you find! You’re thirteen and . . .”
“Fourteen, Pa. Turned last month.”
“Time you growed up!”
“Criminy, Pa, you been saying ‘time you growed up’ since I was three. How much more ‘growed up’ do you think I can be?”
“Don’t want none of your lip!”
Babe stood full up, her knees creaking like an old woman’s. Her father took a step back. Her shadow cast looming and dark over him, forcing him to crane his head up to look at her—his little girl, his giant.
His face stayed hard. “Put something clean on, and then get over to the store.”
“Ain’t got nothing clean.”
“Didn’t I have a new dress made just a year ago?” he demanded.
“Outgrew it just six month ago.”
“Well, at least wash up. You smell like a barnyard.”
“Seems fittin’, since I live in a barn,” she mumbled.
“No lip!”
“I don’t want my picture tooken, Pa.”
“Who said anything about pictures?”
“Ain’t it always when you want me cleaned up?”
“It’s different this time.” He stepped back out of her shadow. “Now, shake a leg! We got important comp’ny.”
As soon as he turned to leave, Babe pursed her ample lips, lifted a leg, and gave it a shake. “How’s that?” she said to the barn door. Her breath showed in the chilly morning air. “You warm enough?” she asked the mama dog. She pulled off her shawl and snuggled it around the dog and her pup, then closed the stall door. With a push and a pull, she moved a wagon against the door to hold the dogs in safe and sound and away from her father. She looked down at them, smiling at the dog murmurs between mother and babe.
“Don’t you worry none. Ain’t letting Pa get rid of you. Your Babe’ll figure something out.”
She shared her room in the barn—the only room large enough to give her standing, walking, and breathing room—among harnesses, saddles, barn cats, rats, and bats. She poured water into a bowl, soaked a rag, and ran it around her face and hands, then ran a jackknife under her fingernails. The bottle of lemon verbena stared up at her. It had been given to her, along with other “lady things,” by a committee of churchwomen. Their “lady things” seemed to be their cure-all for the “unlady things” in Babe’s life . . . her huge and awkward size, her rage at the constant teasing and taunts, her fights, her punishments, her dismal future.
A mirror hung nearby on a nail, but she kept it reflection-side in. She wondered why she even bothered. Washed up and smelling like a garden didn’t mean anything was going to be different this time. “Ain’t gonna make me pretty or small or smart, or make folks take to me,” she mumbled. She turned her gaze to the row of newspaper clippings, mostly yellowed and curled up, tacked on the wall in order of date, her escalating ages, and her escalating sizes. She learned early on: when you’re a spectacle, curiosity comes calling. Two dollars for a photograph, but if it was for a newspaper, her father charged a buck extra.
Pointing her finger along the headline of one of the clippings, she read it out loud, slowly and sounding out the big words:
LITTLE IDAHO GIRL ISN’T SO LITTLE
AMAZING GROWTH SPURT
P. T. BARNUM? HAVE YOU MET THIS GIRL?
Also tacked to the wall was her birth certificate. It reminded her that she, Fern Marie Killingsworth, was born on January 2, 1882, weighing seven pounds, six ounces, and was once perfect and perfectly normal. Right as rain, she whispered each time she looked at it, putting her thumb alongside her two tiny ink footprints. Her thumb was three times as long now, not counting the lump of a wart on the end. Yes, right as rain—for the first three months.
Then it all changed.
A bell clanged in the distance. Nine o’clock. Time for the kids who weren’t giants to go to school.
“Baaaaaabe!” her father screamed out across the street as though answering the bell. “Get your fat rear over here!”
Babe clenched her jaw and swallowed the temptation to scream back. Instead, she muttered, �
�Great. Now the whole dang town knows I got a fat rear.” She grabbed her coat off a nail and trundled out of the barn. Some boys, on their way to school, spotted her, and she ducked back into the barn. Didn’t need their taunting and laughter. Neal, Idaho, was a mining town—tough, poor, and played out—and it seemed to attract bullies of all ages, shapes, and sizes. Babe was a constant, ripe target. At least the mud pies and horse apples the boys slung could be slung back. But the girls were sometimes worse than the boys, slinging their snippy teases and taunts. . . . How could she forget that rope-jumping song they made up?
Fat Babe Sprat
Et just fat
If you tell her that
She’ll squarsh you flat
How many kids did Babe squarsh . . . ?
One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .
Babe had stepped in, grabbed the rope and gave it a tug, yanking the two twirlers clean off their feet and tripping the jumping girl. Grunting and growling, face growing red, she pulled and pulled the rope until it frayed, then snapped in two. Then she tossed the pieces high into the trees. The girls screamed, cried, tattled. Of course.
Those pieces of rope, dangling—nah-nah-nah—in the treetops, was the last straw. She was dismissed from third grade for not being a “good fit.” Or not fitting good. Which was fine with Babe. Being full adult-man size by the time she was eight, Babe and school didn’t “fit” very long anyway. Her desk and chair had been set back as far as they could make it, but she still didn’t fit. The time she stood up fast and brought up the whole hooked-together row, spilling out two little girls, she figured it out. Babe didn’t “fit” anywhere.
That was the birth of the beast, that day when she’d been asked to leave school for good. The beast inside the beast, she called it. Something that roiled deep down—a gnawing pain that doubled, then tripled in size, just as she had, and then exploded. That day, the enraged beast overturned another row of desks, pulled down the schoolhouse curtains, and slammed the door so hard, a hinge broke loose.
Once the schoolboys were gone, Babe pulled her skirts up through her legs, hitched the hems into her belt, and slogged across the street. Her men’s boots laced up to the knees made a sucking sound in the thick, spring mud. A warm Chinook wind had blown in, melting the February snow and turning the streets into streams of mud and slush.
A fancy black-and-red wagon with yellow lettering scrolled along the side was hitched up in front of her father’s mercantile store. Her face hardened. “’Nother dang circus,” she growled as she walked around the wagon, carefully approaching the two horses with soothing words and gentle pats. She’d been spooking horses since she was six.
“Well, hello, Babe,” a woman said from the sidewalk. “What’s all this?”
“’Morning, Miz Frazier,” Babe replied. “Reckon it’s a circus wagon.”
The woman read aloud, “‘Professor Renoir’s Collection of Oddities, Curiosities, and Delights.’ My, how fancy. You finally leaving us?” The woman adjusted the scowling toddler on her hip. The child gripped a partially gnawed cob of corn.
Babe looked at the corner entrance to her father’s store, then back at the wagon. “Might could be.”
“Well, everyone knows that’s the best thing for a girl the likes of you,” Mrs. Frazier said. “Harold, quit kicking!” The child went to her other hip. “I’m sorry. You scare little Harold.”
Babe smiled weakly. “Sorry.”
“Well, good luck, dear!” Mrs. Frazier said, continuing along with her morning errands.
Babe watched her walk away and dodged the corncob that her little brat Harold tossed at her.
Just then, the store window opened and her father appeared. “If maybe you could honor us with your presence, missy!” Slam! The window crashed back down.
Babe released a long, heavy sigh, gave each horse a nose pat, and climbed the steps up to the elevated boardwalk. Looking at the town around her, her eyes roamed from the high bell spire of the school; her father’s run-down barn; the tired, lopsided bustle of Mrs. Frazier as she trundled along the sidewalk; and then finally the store.
Maybe it would be different this time.
2
“A hundred down, fifty in three months, and that’s my last offer,” the man said, looking Babe up, looking Babe down. He scratched his goatee and mustache so much Babe wondered if he also offered a flea circus in his show. “And that’s a far sight more than I’ve paid for any other act, Mr. Killingsworth.”
“Well, Professor Renoir, I got to reckon she’s cheap at twice that price.” Babe glanced at her father. That wasn’t pride in his voice; it was greed. While the men dickered, she took in this visitor: his shiny black suit was patched in places, his high-top boots had worn-down heels, and his dirty starched collar was pinned, not buttoned, down. The fruity smell of his hair pomade wafted up toward the rafters.
“How old is she?”
Mr. Killingsworth looked at his daughter, eyes squinting. “Fourteen, I think.”
“In your letter you said seventeen. What state is this? Idaho? What’s the legal age of consent here? Don’t need the authorities after me.”
“She passed consent four year ago,” her father said.
“Consent to marry at ten?” Renoir barked. “Good Lord!”
“What difference does it make? She ain’t marrying, and I can sign for her. I’m her pa, and I’m legal, even if she ain’t. She’s a bony-fied giant, and they don’t grow on trees. And she can read and cipher some. She ain’t no lost cause. She’s a giant.” He grinned like he’d just sold a salted silver mine to a wide-eyed flatlander.
Read and cipher some? Babe read that eagerness in his voice and she ciphered this was the fifth time her pa had tried to sell her off. Two chautauquas, one minstrel show, and another traveling circus. She examined this Renoir from the corner. Sort of handsome. Talked good. And all that money! Best offer by far.
“Come over here, Babe, so’s Professor Renoir here can see your size full up. Quit stooping in that corner,” her father said, tugging at her sleeve. Babe jerked her arm away. “Don’t you look at me that way, girl!” Then, to Renoir, “She’s always a bit cantankerous in the morning. Once she gets her belly full, she’s more come-at-able.”
Babe stood now in the center of the room, where the beams were higher and she was able to stand up to her full height. Renoir walked around her, fiddling with the tip of his black goatee. “She is big, I’ll give her that. Does she talk?”
Babe opened her mouth to speak, but her father beat her to it.
“Does she talk? Of course she talks! And she sings some, too! Babe, sing that one about Winsome Winnie from Winnemucca.”
Once again, she opened her mouth but was stopped.
“Don’t need a bawdy singer,” the carnival man said, cutting her father off. “I need a strongman, uh, strongwoman act. I run a carnival, not a burlesque show. In fact, is there a Mrs. Killingsworth? Women have different opinions about what becomes of their daughters. Even ones like this.”
“Her ma died after Babe was born.”
“And who can blame her, huh?” Renoir said. The men chuckled together.
“Ain’t my size what killed her!” Her voice boomed in the confines of the room. They stopped laughing and looked up at her. “I was birthed right as rain. She died of fever of some sort. Tell him that’s so, Pa.”
Father and daughter locked eyes. So seldom did they ever discuss her mother, the right-as-rain birth, the lingering death, who knew what was behind her father’s chilly expression?
Renoir broke the uncomfortable silence. “Shall we get back to the issue at hand?” He took a circle of glass hanging from a ribbon around his neck, placed it into his eye socket and looked down at the papers.
“Of course, Professor Renoir, of course,” her father said. “Let’s talk about her care.” Now came the groveling, the backing down, the upping of the ante. This was the best part. “Naturally, Babe here deserves nothing but the best. And, say, here’s some
thing—she’s still growing! No telling how big she’s going to get! What do you weigh now, Babe?”
Babe felt her jaw tighten. Her fingernails cut crescents into her palms. “Three-forty-two,” she answered, looking down.
“There! You see? Why, she’s up four pound in just two week! We have to weigh her on the livestock scale down at the butcher’s,” he went on, shaking his head and grinning. “How tall’re you this week, Babe?”
She walked to the grow plank propped in the corner. Floorboards creaked under her no matter how lightly she tried to step. The sign on the grow plank read:
HOW BIG WILL BABE GET?
PLACE YOUR BETS
“Six foot, nine inch,” she said, feeling the latest notch carved there . . . but she ciphered from her rising hemlines she was about a half inch taller. If this kept up, soon she’d be able to go back east and look the Statue of Liberty eye to eye.
“And strong? Babe, show Professor Renoir how strong you are.”
If only she had a dime for every time she’d been asked to put her strength on display. There was a bin of wood next to the potbelly stove. Grabbing a handful of kindling, she stared at her father, snapped the bundle like it was a teacher’s hickory stick ruler.
“See there? I seed her carry a crippled colt over her shoulders like it was a newborned lamb. I tell you, if you don’t sign her, someone else will. I’ve writ to P. T. Barnum, you know.”
Renoir itched his chin again and studied the notches, inch by inch, on the grow plank. “Well, bona fide giants are rare,” he said. “Tell you what, I’ll add another fifty to the pot. That’s two hundred. One fifty today, but the last fifty comes only when I know how she’ll work out. I usually know within three months. Not every freak takes well to being put on display. Had a bearded woman go stark raving mad and nearly killed a boy who displayed his backside to her without the benefit of trousers.”
The two men had their laugh like they knew something she shouldn’t. She knew all about bare backsides and teasing and taunting and wanting to kill someone on account of it. She got teased and taunted anyhow, why not get cash money for it?
“Whereabouts you go with your carnival show?” Babe asked.
“Well, we have several circuits. All around the country during different seasons,” Renoir answered. “We don’t normally run this far north in the winter, but the weather’s been fair and folks just love coming out for a carnie—uh, carnival—no matter what the weather.”
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