Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (26 page)

He went out into the Pavilion. The transportation crate loomed in the middle and off to one side was Jumbo’s bulk. The elephant stirred as he approached, and the trunk caressed his face when he stooped.

“
Look, old man, this won’t do,” he said. He sat down beside the vast head, the straw crinkling below him. Overhead through the skylight, the night stars were bright as diamonds. He leaned back against the knobbed plane of the top of Jumbo’s head, and the elephant gave a low soft rumble of pleasure at the contact.

“
You can’t lie here forever,” he said. The elephant rumbled again. Matthew sighed.

“
Barnum’s offering me five times my wages here to travel with you,” he said. “America. It’s a frightening thought, but an alluring one. I’d have to leave the other elephants here. Alice, for one.”

He could hear the elephant’s breathing in the darkness, a great rush of straw-scented air, regular and rhythmic.

“
You’re my success story, you know,” he went on. “The largest elephant in the world. Who would have imagined a sickly little thing like you turning into that?”

He laid his arm along the elephant’s side, exploring the deeply grooved skin. To the south, a hyena’s whiny warble sounded from their enclosure.

“
I’ll do it,” he said. And sighed.

He didn’t want to, but with Matthew urging him on Jumbo entered the crate, trumpeting once to show his indignation before he went in. Sixteen matched Percheons pulled the cage through the streets towards the docks. Word of Jumbo’s departure had spread, and thousands lined the streets, following the team. Matthew stared forward, ignoring the crying children.

The thirteen ton crate was swung aboard their freighter, the
Assyrian Monarch
. Crowds filled the docks. From his vantage point, Matthew could see a blond five year old whose father had lifted her onto his shoulders to see. Tears glinted on hr face but she waved a small flag in her hand, imprinted with the elephant’s outline. Gulls circled overhead, watching for stray food, and two artists stood where they could see it all, trying to catch the scene on sketchpads.

Barnum, standing beside Matthew as they watched the crate’s progress onto the ship, rubbed his hands together.

“
Worth every penny,” he said. “You know they charged me for the freight they can’t ship because of Jumbo? And steerage passage for 200 emigrants. I’m in the wrong business. But it’s all advertising. There’s a banquet on board tonight and I expect you there.”

“
I want to settle him down,” Matthew said.

“
Sure, sure, see him settled. I sent up fruit for him. And a bushel of candies. I hear he has quite the sweet tooth. But come to the banquet. All sorts of lords and ladies there, all to say goodbye to him. I sent a tux along to your quarters.”

“
I won’t know how to act,” Matthew said in a sullen tone.

Barnum clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll do fine.”

Despite his fears, Matthew was able to take to the sidelines during the banquet. At the head table with the Captain and the scowling Prince of Wales, Barnum led toast after toast, drunk in the best French champagne. “To Jumbo,” he cried, ignoring the English nobility’s dark looks.

Beside him, a woman said, “Is he well? Are his quarters sufficient?”

He turned and recognized her, again in her gray dress. A pearl necklace rested around her throat, surprisingly opulent against her olive skin.

“
You again,” he said. He was a little tipsy from the unaccustomed drinking. “Are you traveling with us?”

“
Yes,” she said.

“
Come tomorrow and I’ll show him to you.”

“
I’d like that.”

“
Tell me your name this time.”

“
Miss Laxmi.”

There was plenty of food, and a boy who shoveled his droppings as fast as they fell. Despite the swaying deck beneath Jumbo’s feet, he did not feel queasy this time. He ate the sugary candies delicately, one by one, so small he almost could not taste them.

When he smelled Matthew, he rumbled his greeting.

“
Got a friend,” Matthew said, producing a handful of peanuts. Jumbo began to alternate between them and candies.

The woman touched his side near his foreleg. “So big,” she said. “A magnificent ambassador for his race.” She smelled comforting, like grass and hay in the sun.

“
Careful,” Matthew said. “I’ll get jealous.”

“
Of me or him?”

As she touched his skin, Jumbo raised his head, looking at her. His trunk touched the side of her face in return and she half-closed her eyes. An odd tension filled the hold, lingering in the air. As Matthew watched, the massive elephant slowly bent his legs, kneeling down as though bowing before her. Smiling, she whispered something.

“
I’ll be damned,” Matthew said. “I never taught him that trick.”

Her hand lingered on the wrinkled skin, each fold thick enough to swallow her slender finger. “Perhaps he is preparing for life as a performer,” she said, her voice low and husky with a sorrow Matthew did not understand.

Later, Matthew and the woman sat together on the freighter’s rear deck, watching the trail from the ship, moonlight gleaming on the frothy waves.

“
Twenty years I’ve been with that elephant,” Matthew said. He’d liberated a bottle of Barnum’s champagne. The cork came away with a pop and spray and he offered it to her. She took a sip and laughed.

“
It’s like drinking fizz,” she said.

He chuckled at her. “You can’t tell me you’ve never drunk champagne before.”

“
I haven’t,” she said. “Really.”

He loved the way the light played on her dark hair. “Laxmi. That’s not a European name.”

“
You may call me Gaja, if you like,” she said. “And no, it’s Indian.”

He studied her. As though the words had evoked it, he saw the subtle but apparent exotic cast to her face, the almost slant of her eyes. He took another drink to give himself time to think.

“
That bothers you,” she said.

“
No,” he said. “No, it doesn’t.”

She shrugged. “No matter,” she said. “This can only happen here, between worlds.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
The Old World and the New. Right now we’re in neither.”

“
I don’t know what you mean,” he said helplessly.

She looked out across the water, watching the moonlight drifting on the waves. “Imagine there was once a goddess,” she said. “The world is changing, and no one believed in her anymore. Which was a relief, actually. No one asking to win at dice or father sons or find gold hidden beneath their doorstep.

“
But the goddess found herself looking at the humans in another light. She found that they had taken one of her favored creatures and made it an animal like any other, to be slaughtered for goods to sell.”

Her dark eyes regarded him. “For a god and a mortal to touch is perilous in any world. Do you understand now why we have so little time?”

She was pulling his leg, he figured. Flimflamming like Barnum. He drew her close and tilted her face to his. “Then we should make the most of it,” he said and kissed her.

Thousands met the ship when they arrived on Easter Sunday. April in New York didn’t seem that different from London. The sun shone in a watery blue sky, and danced on the water as the ponderous crate swung ashore. Cheers went up as Barnum ceremoniously swung open the massive door and when Matthew led Jumbo out, a shout came from the crowd. Children waved pennants, each printed with Jumbo’s likeness, or had stuffed elephants tucked under an arm. The air smelled like a circus—peanuts and popcorn vendors vied with men selling sausages or meat pies. Matthew looked for Gaja, but saw her nowhere. As though she had vanished.

“
We’re taking him to my Hippodrome Building,” Barnum shouted in his ear over the crowd’s clamor. “The circus opens there tonight. See the team of ponies pulling the steam calliope? Fall in behind them.”

The buildings here seemed taller than London’s, and there was a cold edge to the wind that blew through the scarlet coat Barnum had made him wear. Like London, the air was full of coal smoke and the smell of people living too close to one another. The parade moved along the street and the delighted faces made him feel better about the tears that had accompanied Jumbo’s departure. He looked again for Gaja, but she was nowhere to be found. He didn’t know that it would be years before he’d see her again.

Barnum stood in the center ring of the Hippodrome in a dazzle of torchlight. Next year, he thought, he’d bring in that new invention of Edison’s and make the inside of the tent shine as though it were daylight. To his left a tiger’s angry scream rent the air. It was a windy night, and the canvas tent roared like a windjammer under full sail.

“
Ladies and gentleman!” he shouted as the other rings stilled. “I direct your attention to the center ring! It is Barnum and Bailey’s greatest pleasure to present to you one of the wonders of the world! I give you the towering monarch of his race, whose like the world will never see again! I give you…Jumbo!”

The elephant was bedecked in spangled harness, stepping slowly, enjoying the roar of applause as Matthew led him around the ring. The other circus elephants were lined up around the ring and at a signal, they backed onto their hind legs, sitting with their front legs up, and let out a unified trumpet of acclamation. In their center, the smallest elephant, Tom Thumb, knelt to stand on its head. Jumbo glowed in the light like a fairy tale figure, so brilliant and bedazzling that he took the crowd’s breath away.

“
That elephant cost me $30,000 all together, and every penny well spent,” Barnum gloated in his trailer as he thumbed through the receipts. “Pulled in $3,000 a day in the first three weeks. They’ve even named a town in Hardin County after him.”

“
He’s a champ, all right,” the accountant said, totting up figures.

“
Drinks a bottle of beer every night with his keeper. I’m thinking about having a special mug made in his shape. It’d sell, all right, but the Temperance folks would pitch a fit. I’m having a special train car made for him, with his picture painted on the sides so whenever the train pulls into the station, the people will know to come.”

The best thing about the circus was getting a chance to sit around with the other elephant keepers. Some of them had been in the business longer than Matthew. He liked the easy camaraderie, the friendship of men who knew how to figure out whether or not a tiger would take to flaming hoops, the ways to keep fleas from spreading, or the best method for lancing a boil on a baboon’s ass.

Every Thursday was poker night, and they sat around the table playing with dog-eared cards and drinking beer and swapping stories.

“
Used to have a little elephant, dainty as could be, named Siri,” Joe D’Angelo said. The cigar in his mouth puffed, sending up blue smoke around his dark face, mounted with a beaklike nose. “You know what she’d do? Give her an apple or an orange and she’d put it on the ground, tap it dainty as you please with her foot, then pick what was left and rub it all through her hay, like she was flavoring it. What a sweetie she was—real little lady. Hit me with two cards.”

“
I had an elephant used to cry like a baby if he made a mistake,” George Arstingstall said.

“
Go on, I never seen an elephant cry.”

“
He did,” George insisted, throwing his cards on the table. “I’ll pass. Yell at him and there he’d go, crying away. Tears as big as a china cup.”

“
They’re strange critters,” Joe said. “Gotta admit them Indians, the real ones, are onto something when they worship them. They got a god called Garnish, got six arms and an elephant trunk. Got a straight.”

“
Beats my hand,” Matthew admitted.

“
All sorts of elephant mysteries,” Joe continued. “I had a friend who said he’d met the Queen of the Elephants in human form. Walking around like you or me. Said you always knew her because she dressed all in gray. Your deal.”