The Emerald Circus

  The Lord only knows how long the storm played with the little yapper, tossing him up and down, spinning him around, before finally flinging him into a coal bin some five counties away.

  Henry posted a twenty-dollar reward for anyone who found the dog, which was nineteen dollars more than the animal was worth and five dollars more than Em said he should post. The woman who owned the coal bin sent a note but she declined the reward, which was both Christian and silly of her, one and the same.

  The twister had watered Toto well and the coal bin woman had combed out his long silky hair. He was a good deal prettier than he’d been in some time. But he was also dead as could be, and no amount of weeping and snuffling and flinging guilt around that little farmhouse for days, like a baseball going around the bases in a game of pepper, was going to bring him back.

  Rand had taken a course in taxidermy when he was still in high school, so he volunteered to skin, stuff, and mount little Toto for Dorothy. I was the only one who thought that a bad idea.

  “More than likely scare the bejeebies out of her,” I said. But to show I was a good sort, I made a little cart out of an old piece of oak I had lying about, too small for a table or anything other than a serving tray, which the wife didn’t need. I sanded it down and shaped it a bit, and put on some wheels from a soapbox car I’d scavenged a while back. Then Rand mounted the dog on that.

  Now, Rand hadn’t done any taxidermy in years so the dog didn’t look very alive. The glass eyes were ones he took from a moth-eaten goose he’d mounted on his first try at taxidermy in high school. But Dorothy took to that stuffed dog like she’d taken to the live one, and pulled it after her everywhere she went, using the plaited leash I’d made for Toto when he first came to the farm.

  You squinted your eyes some, it looked like the dog was following her around. And now it didn’t need much maintaining. That pleased Dorothy as much as it pleased Henry and Em.

  So maybe she wasn’t the only queer one in the family. After that, I kept my opinions to myself.

  3.

  We went on like that for three years, and the only thing to change was that Dorothy began to grow up. Grew a little prettier, too, the gap in her teeth closing so it looked more like a path than a main highway.

  And then when she was thirteen, after years of near-misses with cyclones, the farmhouse was hit big. Other houses in the county had got flattened in those years, and one little town was just plain wiped off the map. People got parceled out to relatives or they moved to the East Coast, or the West and we never saw them again after that. But for some reason, Henry and Em’s place had been spared year after year.

  The big hit began just like the last one, except I was cleaning out the pigpen. Rand was working on Henry’s plow, which had developed a kind of hiccup between rows, as had his old plow-horse, Frank. Henry and Stan were out checking on fencing and they came roaring back, Henry shouting, “In the cellar! Everyone. It’s the biggest twister I’ve ever seen and it’s heading right this way. I’m going to let the horses and cows out into the field.”

  We piled in one on top of another, Henry coming in last.

  About a minute later, Stan noticed that Dorothy wasn’t with us. We found out much, much later that she’d gone under her bed to pull out that little dog on wheels. She hadn’t played with it for a couple of years. Too grown up, I’d guess. But she wasn’t about to have Toto taken from her again.

  Well, we kept the trapdoor open for her till the wind hit, howling like a freight train running right through the center of the house. And then Henry reached up and slammed the door down.

  That left Dorothy under her bed, the dog on wheels clutched in her arms. Which, under the usual circumstances, might have been just fine.

  But there was nothing usual about this wind. It was a killer. Should have had its name on a reward poster. It was that bad.

  It just lifted up the little house and carried it away. Henry had never gotten it back on the cinderblocks but that didn’t seem to matter. Off that house flew, with Dorothy in it. And we never saw the house again.

  We sat cowering in the hole, in the dark. Me, I wondered about my wife and her mother and our chickens but there was nothing we could do except sit while that wind fretted and banged and gnawed around the house.

  When the noise was finally gone, and Henry lifted the trapdoor, the light nearly blinded us. We were expecting to find ourselves in the house, of course.

  “Lord’s sake,” Em whispered, as if the wind had taken her voice away, too. “There’s nothing left.” She was too shocked to weep.

  But surprising us all, including himself, Henry began to sob, though the only word he got out, over and over and over again, was “Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy.” Who would have guessed he loved that little child so.

  They posted notices all the way to Kansas City, that being the direction the wind had been tracked. And Henry even hired a private detective to search for her. But she was as gone as if she’d never been.

  In less than a week, there was a four-room house-raising that all the neighbors attended. One room was set aside for Dorothy. The neighbors brought pies and hot-pots and cider. We men got that new house up and tight in a day, and I did a lot of the inside woodwork, including the bed frames. It felt good to be doing what I loved best for once, being a woodman again.

  The newspaper covered the house as it went up, taking some close photographs of the hearth I made, with carvings of the little dog on wheels. I got calls from all around the state for work after that, and my wife and I set a bit of money aside. Not in the banks. We didn’t trust the banks any more than Henry did, so we bought land instead. I did really well for almost a year, and then some newspaper reporter wrote that I didn’t have a lot of polish, meaning—I think—I couldn’t make small talk with the customers. But other people thought it was a judgment on my furniture-making, so the work dried up after that, and I was glad to get my old job back with Henry.

  The five of us often sat after the day’s chores were done, in front of the hearth. Fire lit, cider in hand, we’d talk about where Dorothy might be now.

  Em thought maybe she’d married, because she’d have been sixteen, close to seventeen. “Maybe to a lawyer,” she said, “her memory all blowed away by that wind, or she would have sent us an invite. Maybe even to a doctor.”

  Henry shook his head. “That girl was bound to be a teacher. She read books.”

  Stan and Rand said, “Bank teller.” Stan added, “Bank manager soon enough.”

  Once in a while, I would wax a bit fanciful. “Balloonist,” I said once, “flying through the clouds.”

  Henry always laughed at my fancies, a slow laugh with little happiness in it. “I think she’d have had enough of flying through the air.”

  None of us said she was dead. But we all knew that was the most likely.

  Em put it this way, “I hope wherever she is, she’s treated well. She never did a hurtful thing to anyone.”

  It was as close to an epitaph as any of us wanted to go, but it was a good one.

  4.

  I have to say this about the predictable life: it’s easier on the body, easier on the soul. We worked the seasons on the Gale farm, we drank cider and talked a bit at the end of the day. Months turned into years.

  My mother-in-law went from difficult and cranky to forgetful and cranky. When she became bedridden, my wife took care of her as if she was a colicky infant, the only one we ever had.

  I hoed, cleaned pigsties, walked the plow on occasion, anything Henry asked me to do I set my hand to. I rarely thought about working wood unless it was to mend fences. I mean, what was the point?

  Then one afternoon, in late autumn, after the chores were all done, we five were sitting watching the fire. We’d grown silent with the years and with the predictability of our lives. None of us seemed to miss the old conversations. If Dorothy was still alive, she wasn’t interesting enough to talk about anymore. Or we’d run out of what-ifs, which is the way stories get start
ed. In the living room, the only thing contributing to the conversation was the fire, spitting out snappy one-liners none of us tried to top.

  There was a knock on the door. I wondered briefly if someone had come to tell me my mother-in-law had died, so I stood up to see. No use letting Em have to come face-to-face with that particular announcement. She’d been worn down by enough bad news in her life. I wasn’t going to let her be bothered by mine.

  As I walked out of the room, for the first time in months the others all began to speculate. Their ideas followed me into the hallway. Police? Twister? Telegram? Doctor’s assistant?

  When I opened the door, standing there was a tall, pretty young woman, her hair in a short bob. Unlike the local farm girls, she wore careful makeup on her face. It enhanced her odd beauty. The women in Kansas City, the two or three times I’d been there, used makeup as a weapon or as a disguise.

  She smiled at me with strong, evenly spaced teeth. If she hadn’t been carrying the little dog on wheels, along with a satchel, I wouldn’t have known her.

  “Dorothy!” I cried out, my voice carrying back into the living room where suddenly everything went silent—even the fire.

  “Come on in,” I said, as if this was an everyday visit, as if it was my house to invite her into.

  She entered, looking around in wonder. “Golly!” is all she said.

  It took me a minute to remember that this wasn’t the old farmhouse she recalled. “The neighbors all helped to build it after . . . after . . .” I hesitated.

  “After I was blown away.” So she had remembered. I wondered why it’d taken her so long to get in touch. I mean it had been seven years after all.

  Before I could ask, the hallway was as crowded as the cellar-hole had once been. Everyone was touching Dorothy, her hair, her shoulders, her hands, saying her name in soft wonder.

  I pulled back, not trusting this part of the story. Could such a glamorous creature really be our Dorothy? And why had she returned, why now?

  They drew her into the living room, where the fire had resumed its one-sided conversation, only this time everyone ignored its snap.

  “Where have you been, Dorothy?” Rand was the only one innocent enough to just come right out and say it. “All this time?”

  Her next words surprised us. “Why, in the Emerald Circus. The performers heard a huge crash near their Missouri campsite, and found me, under a tree, pieces of wood scattered all around. My memory was as shattered as the farmhouse. All my clothes blown away but my shoes. The little people got to me first.”

  I refused to dignify her story with questions, but no one else had the same reaction.

  “Little people?” asked Em.

  “Dwarfs, used to be miners in Munich. Though they don’t like to be called so,” Dorothy said. “Just little people.”

  “Oh,” said Em, “the clowns who run around through the audience. I’ve seen them. You did, too, Dorothy,” she said. “We went to the circus once. Together.”

  Dorothy got an odd look on her face “I don’t remember.” It turned out to be something she was to say many times over the next weeks.

  If Dorothy was to be believed, her life in the circus, her seven years, were like a dream. Little people. A freak show full of oddities. Wire walkers. A lion who jumped through hoops. Dancing dogs. Bareback riders. Even an elephant.

  “And yet,” she’d add quickly, “all just people. Like you, like me.” Then she laughed softly. “The dogs, the horses, the lions, the elephant—not them of course.”

  Well, of course circus folk are just people, I thought, only not like us at all. Though I didn’t say it out loud.

  Dorothy had become part of the show, dressing in tights and a fitted bodice, silver shoes.

  “Tights! Land sakes!” Em said, her hand on her heart as if she was going to faint.

  Dorothy even got to wear a blonde wig.

  “Think of that!” Henry put in.

  Her toenails were painted gold.

  “Real gold?” asked Rand.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Stan said, pounding a fist into his brother’s shoulder.

  At first Dorothy had just walked around the ring, smiling at the folks in the audience, turning and turning like a whirligig. But all the while, when it wasn’t show time, she practiced wire-walking with the Italian acrobats, the Antonioni Family, until she was good enough to become part of their act. They even wanted her to marry their son, Little Tony, and carry on the family tradition.

  “But I told them I was too young and besides, I wasn’t the marrying kind.” She smiled at Uncle Henry. “I knew that one day I would remember where I came from and want to go back there.” She opened her arms and turned around and around, like she was still performing. “And here I am.”

  “Here you are,” Henry said, grinning.

  But I wondered if it was true.

  All of it.

  Any of it.

  Dorothy stayed, taking her turn at the house chores, gathering eggs, making lunches, cooking soups, plucking chickens. The usual. She seemed content.

  But then, about a month later, she convinced Stan to get a bunch of strands of strong wire, which she braided together. Then he stretched the wire from one part of the pigsty fence all the way across to the other, nailing it down hard on each end.

  We watched as she climbed onto the fence, wearing overalls and a silver shirt. Those little silver dancing slippers on her feet.

  The piglets looked up at her squealing, but the sow seemed unconcerned.

  I was probably the only one who thought we were going to be picking her out of the pigpen, covered with mud.

  She started off cautiously, one small slippered foot after another, testing the tightness of the wire. But after about three steps, she walked as if going along a wide asphalt road. Even stopped in the middle to turn like a whirligig, arms wide open, before lifting one leg high in the air behind her.

  “Arabesque,” she said, as if that was an explanation.

  When she reached the other side of the pen, we all broke into applause.

  So the wire-walking at least was true. I told my wife Amelia about it and she insisted on coming over to watch the next time Dorothy did it, which was every Saturday after that. Amelia watched Dorothy on the wire with an intensity she’d never shown for anything else, then turned to me saying it was a homey piece of magic and she wanted to learn it. I put my foot down. Something I rarely ever do. I didn’t fancy her falling in the mud. It would have been me having to clean her up. Somehow, at our ages, I didn’t like the sound of that.

  5.

  About three months after that, I was coming back for lunch from where I’d been fixing fences—the prairie wind just devils the wires. I was heading to the cabbage field to give the cabbages a good soaking. Suddenly I noticed a figure standing at the farmhouse door, just fixing to knock. I could only see her from the back, but she looked to be a blonde-haired, shapely woman. In fact her hair wasn’t just blonde, but an ashy white-blonde, a color you don’t see on a grown woman unless she spends a lot of time at the hairdresser’s.

  “Pardon me, miss,” I called, wondering who it might be, guessing she was there to visit Dorothy.

  She turned and I got the shock of my life, because she was sporting a beard. Not just a few face hairs, like some women get in later life. My mother-in-law has them sprouting from her chin and from a mole on her cheek. But a full beard, kind of reddish color, the bottom half of which was tied off with a pink bow.

  A bearded lady, by golly, I thought. Freak show standard. I’d always figured they were just regular women in makeup. Or a womanish man dressed in female clothes. This one had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen—an eerie color really.

  “Are you looking for Dorothy?” I asked, to cover my embarrassment.

  “Dottie, yes, is she here? It’s where I dropped her off some months ago,” the bearded lady said. “She hasn’t written since . . .”

  “She does that,” I said nodding. “We didn’t hear
from her for seven years.”

  “Well, it took her all that time to remember,” she told me.

  I thought that made for a convenient memory, but said nothing.

  She held out her hand. “Ozmandia,” she said.

  “Circus name? Last name? ”

  She smiled, her teeth pearly above the beard. “Actually, Shirley Osmond, so you’re kind of right either way.”

  The door opened and Em looked out. It took her a moment to put it all together. Then her hand went to her heart. “My word . . .”

  “I’m a friend of Dottie’s,” Ozmandia said, but even as she said it, Dorothy pushed past Em and threw herself into the bearded lady’s arms.

  “Ozzy!” she cried. “I’ve missed you so.”

  “Little bird,” the bearded lady said and kissed Dorothy full on the lips, the way a man might do. Then she drew back and looked at Dorothy critically. “You’ve gained some weight. It might make you too heavy for the wire but it suits you.”

  “I’ve been practicing.”

  “She has,” said Em. “And performing.”

  “Then no potatoes,” Ozmandia said. “No bread. No starch.”

  “What’s starch?” Em asked. The only starch she knew was what she ironed with.

  “I’ll make a list,” Ozmandia told her.

  She turned to Dorothy. “We’re starting again next month. Barnum and Bailey have bought the old man out.”

  “No more Mr. Wizard?” Dorothy said. “But it’s his circus.”

  “He’s retiring to Florida,” said Ozmandia. “For what they paid him, he can afford it. Him and that elephant.”

  “Will you stay awhile?” Dorothy said, speaking to her circus friend as if the rest of us hardly mattered. And indeed, probably we didn’t.

  “Just tonight, Baby Bird,” Ozmandia said. “I’m getting around to everyone.”