Among the Wonderful (48 page)

Behind him They Are Afraid of Her sat on the floor facing the window.

“What are you going to do? Have you considered telling Barnum, or the police?”

“No. What would they do?”

“Well, that thing is Barnum’s property, and it was stolen.”

“Then she’d be punished.”

“But it might scare off the Absarokee.”

“No, no.” Thomas dismissed my suggestion with a cringe.

“Thomas, you can’t just hide up here. The band —”

“I won’t leave her like this. She needs me here.”

“Does she? She doesn’t exactly look like she’s crying on your shoulder.”

“She needs me, Ana.” Thomas lowered his voice. “I’m going to speak to them.”

“Who?”

“The Absarokee.”

“But they just shot someone.”

“It’s the only thing I can do. Her people won’t listen to me.”

“Do the Absarokee speak English?”

“I’ll find out.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea —”

“Good night.”

He closed the door softly.

Tai Shan was not in his room, and neither was Maud. I wanted their opinion on what to do about Thomas, but in the end I returned to my room alone.

In order to manage the members of Barnum’s upcoming Congress, I must keep a registry. I had obtained a ledger, wherein each performer (or should I call them participants?) would give his name and a description of himself, including rate of pay. I could start with the newcomer, the one who slept by the side of that cage.

Later, as I lay in bed, the murmuring of the protesters outside the museum lulled me comfortably as if their cries were waves lapping the sides of some great ark. They stayed late each evening, sometimes sounding more like a celebration, singing hymns and shouting prayers, than the band of righteous hypocrites that they were. Didn’t they have some better cause to promote? Didn’t they know it was exactly Barnum’s strategy to keep the museum in the papers?

I woke later than usual. I was afraid I’d missed breakfast so I hurried across the gallery. I was into the stairwell before I realized that something was different: The Absarokee camp had disappeared. I walked back. Their corner was empty. Only the newcomer remained, wrapped in blankets beside his draped cage, with Gideon curled up on the floor next to his stool, also asleep. The Sioux sat in a circle eating food and talking. I turned back toward the apartments.

This time Thomas didn’t answer my knock so I opened the
door myself. They were both on the bed. The blankets had been thrown off and the sheets were in such disarray it looked as if they’d been fighting. Thomas squatted on the mattress wearing a ridiculous nightshirt with puffed sleeves. He hovered over They Are Afraid of Her, who was obscured from my view until Thomas shifted his position to regard me. He clutched one of her arms.

“How did they do it? How did they do it?” His was the compulsive voice of a parrot. “I told them nothing!”

I came to the bedside. The woman was dead. Thomas scrutinized her arm again. He pushed up the sleeve of her nightgown and examined three rows of parallel scars near her shoulder. He looked dumbly at the skin. He rolled her body slightly to one side to look at her leg. She had the same scars above her knee. Three rows, like dashes across the plain of her flesh.

“Thomas! Stop that.”

“How did they do it? There is no wound, Ana.”

“Thomas. Stop. Come here.” I reached for his arm but he slapped me away. They Are Afraid of Her’s eyes were still open, her ashen lips ajar.

“I talked to them last night because I thought it would help but they would not speak to me. They just stared, Ana. It didn’t help …”

I did not try very hard to pry him away from the body, but I cradled his shoulders with one arm. He leaned into me, still clenching They Are Afraid of Her’s arm. “We can’t know what is between those two tribes, Thomas.”

“They came in here. I locked the door and held her, but that didn’t matter. I fell asleep and they got in. How? Why did they kill her? How did they do it without hurting her?” His voice had reached a level of hysteria. Someone walked by outside and Thomas leapt up, standing on the bed, almost to my height.

“They’re gone, Thomas.”

“She’s
gone.”

Across the room, the pile where she’d hidden the heart looked exactly as it had when Thomas showed it to me.

“It’s gone,” he whispered.

“That’s what they came for.”

“Yes.”

I straightened the sheet around They Are Afraid of Her and closed her eyes, grimacing at the cold putty of her skin.

Tears now streamed down Thomas’ face.

“Will you come now? It’s time to tell her people,” I coaxed.

“Those aren’t her
people,”
Thomas hissed, wiping his face with a corner of bedspread. “I have nothing to say to them.”

I lifted him from the bed and placed him gently on the floor in a gesture that felt natural in the moment but would have been bizarre in another circumstance.

“Then you stay here and pick out a dress for her to wear.” I pointed him toward her pile of things. “When you are finished, come downstairs and find me. All right?”

Thomas wept and nodded. I left the room.

“She’s dead.” I spoke directly to the grandfather, who was eating his breakfast from a wooden bowl.

“We are aware,” he replied. One of the men beside him burped.

“You are aware?
Did the Absarokee give you a report on the murder before they left? Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Why? You yourself said she is dead. There is nothing to do.”

“Where did they go?” I jerked my head toward the empty gallery behind me.

The grandfather shrugged and lifted the bowl to his lips.

“Why did they kill her?”

The old man drank his gruel then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He regarded me. “I don’t think you have time for that story. I don’t think you can understand it.”

“You are a terrible old man,” I managed to say. “I know they killed her because of that … thing. That heart.”

“Like I said, it’s not your story.” The man turned from me and retreated into the tent.

I had been standing in my booth only a few minutes when
Thomas started playing on the balcony. At first, the sound resembled music, but the chords stumbled. Not out of clumsiness, I was certain of that. Thomas was too good for that, even in his current state. A recognizable melody hovered at the edges, but it was as if randomness, instead of measurement, structured the sound. A lilting phrase was knocked away by a pounding cacophony from the lower register. Bars of a familiar waltz tipped into an unrecognizable storm of half notes. It was precarious music, unsettling and hypnotic. I left my booth and stood in the balcony doorway.

These sounds sputtered out of him and he played in his shirtsleeves. The two other musicians stood in the opposite corner of the balcony, banished and looking as if a wind had swept them there. I leaned against the door frame to listen. Thomas watched the sky, as if he were totally removed from the movement of his arms.

The protestors circled below us with their useless signs, keeping up their vigil against the museum like a wake of vultures beside a mountain of carrion. Beebe and Miss Crawford were not among them today, but I had seen them often, flushed and triumphant, walking around and around, caught in the eddy of their own righteousness.

“You won’t get rid of us with that racket,” one of the sign-carriers shouted from the street. “We are not so easily dissuaded of our convictions!”

Thomas’ song soared. Two disparate melodies converged. I walked to the railing and leaned over the edge. Several people below stopped walking and turned their faces upward.

“You should be ashamed,” I called down. “Why don’t you go home?”

“Barnum’s Congress is an abomination! It must be stopped!”

Thomas finished the song and pushed himself away from the piano with a look of disgust. Whether the expression was directed at the protestors, his instrument, or the failure of love to prevent the death of They Are Afraid of Her was a mystery. He stood at the railing for a moment, clutching it with both hands as if we rode the swell of an oceanic storm.
He brushed past me, walking swiftly into the gallery, hands stuffed deep in his pockets. I called to him, but he didn’t heed my voice. He disappeared, and I had no doubt that this image of his slumped and receding form would be my last glimpse of him.

Gideon, the ticket-taker’s nephew, swept past as I ascended the stairs and I listened to his steps recede below. Each of my steps jolted my spine with an ungodly spasm and I envied and loathed the boy’s speed and lightness. Who would tend to me when I could no longer move, when my limbs petrified into brittle boneposts? Who would massage my legs and tell me of the world once I was confined to bed? Would my decline be a swift avalanche into the abyss or a bumpy, horrified ride down a long and gentle slope?

In the beluga’s gallery the stranger had awakened. He crouched with his back to me, rolling up his blanket. Gideon’s tipped stool was still rocking nearby on the floor.

I hurried to my room for the registry; this newcomer would be the first official member of the Congress and as manager of Barnum’s human menagerie I would duly catalog his details.

As I made my way back to the stranger, Barnum himself appeared in the opposite corner of the gallery and strode toward me; we converged upon the man.

As far as I knew, Barnum had never been sighted on the fifth floor, not even, Maud had told me conspiratorially, when his wife and daughters had resided here. Barnum grinned broadly as he approached. I thought he might break into a run.

“We were beginning to think you’d been struck by the
exotic sleeping sickness we’ve been reading about in the papers!”

“Phineas.”

In one graceful motion the stranger rose and swiveled to reveal a sharply planed face half obscured by a dense gray beard. The overhanging contour of a misshapen fur hat shadowed his brow, but not enough to hide the man’s strangely light blue eyes. “You know very well no such sickness has infected America.”

The stranger pushed back his hat, which I now saw was made from the skin of a deer’s head. The animal’s face had been crudely molded above its wearer’s, but its visage was half melted and grotesque. The man wore buckskin trousers and shirt. His hair was long and matted, and his voice bore just a trace of a New Englander’s inflection.

Barnum embraced the man, slapping his shoulders and laughing. “Adams! At long last we meet again!”

“Indeed,” said the man, chuckling.

“Miss Swift, may I present Mr. James Adams, whom I like to call James the Baptist for all his wandering. He’s come to us straight from the wilds of the Sierra Nevada.”

“No locusts where I’ve come from, but wild honey aplenty,” murmured the stranger.

“Miss Swift is one of our biggest attractions,” Barnum gestured to me ambiguously.

“I should think so,” replied Adams.

“She is also one of my personal assistants. Miss Swift, I’m sure you’ve heard of Grizzly Adams,” Barnum went on. “Tamer of a hundred bears, not to mention countless mountain lions, panthers, and eagles of the air.”

“I have not,” I replied. “But I’m glad to make your acquaintance.”

“Indeed.” Mr. Adams tied his bedroll with a length of frayed twine and pulled a soiled handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt.

“What do you think of my enterprise, Adams?” Barnum addressed the museum with an upturned hand. “A verifiable Pandora’s box, wouldn’t you say?”

“Lucrative, I’m sure.” Adams squinted, looking around the gallery. “Perfect for the city right now. John Scudder’s old place. A good location.” Adams continued bundling his belongings.

“That’s it?” Barnum laughed loudly. “That’s all you have to say about my great ark?”

Adams laughed along with the showman, and their laughter went on a bit long. I could not see what was funny. When Barnum finally stopped laughing he looked a bit disconcerted.

“There’s no doubt you’ve outdone yourself, Phineas. It’s your most beautiful dream. I just wouldn’t bother bringing it west, is all I’m getting at.” Adams chuckled again to himself. “You’ll need more than a tiny whale to impress the folks out there.”

Barnum snorted. “The good people of the Territories have as much reason to gawk at a bearded lady and Tom Trouble’s arm as the Vanderbilts!”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, sir. But you shouldn’t worry. You’ve got a bottomless treasure chest right here in New York. No need to expand it westward.”

“Because of the missionizing? Is everyone already converted?” Barnum’s voice had grown somewhat cool. “I cannot
bear
the thought.”

Adams laughed and shook his head. “There
is
quite a currency of souls, but I’m referring to something else altogether. These are people who walk out of their cabins at night and see great curtains of green light moving across the sky. They see hundreds of whales sporting off the shores of their coast, singing in otherworldly tones. They see Indian canoes lashed high in the treetops and child-priests who lead whole clans of men, speaking the language of dreams and prophesying on the tidelands. No museum contains these things, Phineas. These wonders are out walking the earth, to be encountered unexpectedly. If they were in museums, no one would ever see them because no one has the time and no one has the money to spend on such a place. Your business feeds on leisure. Believe me, Phineas, I mean no offense by telling you. I
am a peddler of entertainments myself, as you well know. And what I’ve learned is that the Territories are not the America you and I know. And if you don’t believe me, just take a peek under that tarpaulin. For you, it’s only a dime. Not you, Miss. You’ll have to wait like the rest of them.”

Barnum smiled awkwardly as he placed a coin in Adams’ palm. “Still up to your old tricks.” He took a few steps toward the tarpaulin. “I thought you left your beasts at the stables in Brooklyn. Didn’t they have room for this one?”

“Most all of them are there, but this one stays with me.”

Barnum daintily lifted the cloth and leaned under it for a look. Then he jumped back with force, tripping over himself and then Gideon’s abandoned stool. Adams did not move to save him from falling.