The Circus in Winter (13 page)

"Not far." Wayne glanced over his shoulder. "Settle down," he said in a low growl. And the boys did.

Stella fiddled with her hands, wishing for something to do—sew or needlepoint—even though she knew it would make her carsick. She hated the idle time of long drives. Nothing to do but sit there. Her mind did funny things when it had time to spare. When she drove or cooked or did housework, her imagination often veered toward tragedy, deaths of both the sudden and the expected variety.
What if I died? What if Wayne died? What if one of the boys died
? From these games of "what if," Stella had discovered much. If she died, Wayne would remarry quickly, within a year or two. If he died, the thought of widowhood did not displease her. If one of the boys died, losing Ricky felt slightly more unthinkable, more catastrophic, than losing Ray. Stella played her cards close to the vest, this last one especially, her preference for Ricky. The glossy ladies' magazines she bought in the checkout line at the market teemed with articles on parenting. They all said that good mothers should love their children equally. But sometimes she pictured love as electricity flowing from her heart to her hand, and Stella wondered if her husband and sons could feel the difference in her touch, a force that manifested itself subtly, invisible to the naked eye.

When they got to Lima, Wayne drove them past the power plant where he'd start work in a few days, then crossed the Winnesaw River. He smiled. "Nice town, eh?"

Stella looked back at the brick storefronts of downtown. It looked like Richmond, like Wabash, like Logansport, like any other town. But she said, "Nice. Yes." In her mind's eye, she pictured another Lima, the one from Wayne's stories about the circus that once wintered there. Stella saw elephants pausing at stop signs, clowns buying sugar at the market, and midgets drinking mugs of beer with their legs dangling from barstools.

She blinked the past away and turned back to the gray asphalt ahead. Their road, "River Road," Wayne called it, was a two-lane highway that shadowed the Winnesaw. The river looked high from the spring melt. Half-drowned trees stood in the water like ladies holding up their skirts. Then the highway turned away from the river, and for a long stretch, there was nothing on either side of the road but newly tilled cornfields. "I'll bet this drifts shut here every time it snows," she observed. "It'll be hard to get into town. Too bad."

Wayne clenched his jaw. "Stop it," he said.

"What?"

"You know what. Please, just let it go."

Stella pretended to be miffed, but Wayne had caught her subtle jab, her scab picking of a weeklong argument. Since they only had the Oldsmobile, she'd wanted to live in town, or at least in one of the new ranch houses in River Hills, a new subdivision sprawling across south Lima, but Wayne had chosen a lonely, isolated farmhouse outside town on the lot of the old circus winter quarters.

He'd bought the house on his own, without her ever seeing it. Frantic, he'd called from the realtor's office. "This one is too good to let go. There's another couple here in the office right now, getting ready to write a check."

"What's it like?" she asked him.

"Two stories. Big, beautiful. I'd have given anything to grow up in this place."

"Can I walk into town?"

There'd been a pause. "Maybe," he'd said. "On a good day."

He'd driven through the city limits long ago, and for the first time, Stella saw the truth: they were miles from town. Every curve in the road, every barn that flashed by, filled her with dread. "I'll be trapped out here," she whispered so the boys wouldn't hear.

"Only five miles, Stell. And once you see this place," Wayne said, "you won't want to leave."

He rounded another curve and she saw a house—no, a mansion with pillars and stained glass—looming on top of a hill like an ancestral castle, overlooking the river and miles of farm fields.

"Is that it?" she asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

From the backseat, Ray and Ricky said, "Wow" in unison.

"No, no," Wayne laughed. "We're not moving that far up in the world."

He drove past the mansion, and then past barns, paint chipped to the bare wood. C
AT
H
OUSE
and E
LEPHANT
B
ARN
were written above the giant doors. "What are these?" Stella asked.

"I told you about the circus quarters, back in the old days? Well, this is it." He pointed to a yellow barn. "That one is ours."

A barn,
Stella thought. They'd never even had a garage.

"The rest of them belong to some farmer up the road. Keeps his tractors there." He stopped the car. "Boys, you have to see the barn. The real estate guy told me Tony Colorado kept his horse Bullet in there winters."

"Who's Tony Colorado?" Ricky asked.

Wayne laughed. "He was like the Lone Ranger, only he wasn't on TV. He was a movie star and traveled around with the circus." Stella remembered him from a silent film she'd seen as a girl—a clean-shaven man in a white hat riding a black horse. When silent movies became talkies, he'd faded from the screen; she'd read in one of her Hollywood magazines that Tony Colorado, the Lone Star Cowboy, was cursed with a high, squeaky voice unsuitable for speaking parts. Wayne turned in his seat to where the boys sat transfixed, staring at the barn. "I met Tony Colorado once, in town at the old Robertson Hotel. Went up and shook his hand." Wayne sighed, waving the memory away with his hand.

He drove through an ornate wrought iron gate. "The guy who owned the circus, Wallace Porter, lived up there," he said, pointing again to the mansion on top of the hill. "Some rich family owns it now, but they're traveling in Europe or something for a year. Can you beat that?" He rounded a bend in the drive and stopped in front of a clapboard farmhouse. Ray and Ricky tumbled out of the car before it even stopped and ran back to explore the barn. The two-story house was painted a peeling white with emerald green shutters hanging crookedly from every window. Ivy clung to the sides of the house like jungle vines, and overgrown bushes blocked the first-floor windows.

"The Realtor told me this used to be Porter's house, before he built the mansion." Wayne helped Stella out of the car.

"Needs work." Stella shaded her eyes from the sun.

Wayne nodded.

"How bad's the inside?"

"Not so bad," Wayne said.

He opened the front door, and Stella stepped inside her new house. She'd pictured sunny rooms with tall windows, but instead of white walls or patterned wallpaper, every wall was a mural, gaudy and bright as a circus sideshow banner line. She walked down the walls, trying to take it all in. Elephants in the study, camels and zebras in the living room. In the dining room, horses grazed in a winter field, colored ribbons and plumes twined into their manes. "This is crazy," she said.

"I wanted to surprise you." Wayne stood with his arms folded proudly across his chest, rocking on his heels and toes. "The Realtor said the workers, the guys that painted those big ... what you call them ... tableau wagons. They must have practiced in here."

Stella said nothing. An old upright piano stood along the wall, the only piece of furniture in the house. She pressed a few keys. Out of tune, of course. Stella shut the piano hard, and the muffled notes echoed. "Why would someone do this?"

"Must have been too big to move," Wayne said.

"I mean these walls!"

"Well, it's sure ... different." There was a note of apology in his voice.

"I hate that word," Stella said, touching the walls. "It's just a nice way of saying something's bad." She noticed that over the years, the murals' colors had become muted and dull, and in the places where the painter daubed too thickly, cracks and fissures worked their way through the paint like tiny spiderwebs.

Wayne shrugged his shoulders and frowned. "What's the matter?"

"I can't believe you bought this place without telling me about these walls."

"I thought you'd think it was interesting."

"It's ugly, Wayne," she said, trying not to yell. "And I hate the circus."

"Who hates the circus?" Wayne snorted.

"I do. You know that." She felt guilty, blasphemous. She'd told him years ago, and he'd stared at her in open-mouthed shock, like she'd just said, "There is no God," or "Communism is a pretty good idea."

Wayne stomped toward the front door. "Well, it's ours now."

She followed him to the barn, a graveyard of abandoned circus equipment. Harnesses, juggling pins, clown props, spangled and fringed costumes, and steamer trunks marked P
ROPERTY OF THE
G
REAT
P
ORTER
C
IRCUS
. A steam calliope from the Coleman Bros. Circus, a whip with W
ARREN
B
ARKER'S
W
ILD
A
NIMAL
O
DYSSEY
burned into the leather handle. In the corner, an old Overland stagecoach with a missing wheel sat propped up on hay bales, T
ONY
C
OLORADO'S
L
ONE
S
TAR
C
OWBOY
S
HOW
painted gold on the side. Ray and Ricky had clambered inside to shoot their toy guns out the windows. They fired at imaginary Cherokees threatening to overtake the stage.

Wayne called. "Stella, come over here. You've got to see this." He pointed at the weathered sign hanging over an empty horse stall, which read: B
ULLET,
F
ASTEST
H
ORSE IN THE
W
EST
. "They kept him right here. Can you beat that?" Wayne said. His eyes were almost misty.

Stella knew it was useless to complain. She was outnumbered. She was home.

 

WHEN STELLA WAS
eight, her father took her to a ragbag circus struggling to stay afloat during the Depression. "You'll love it, sweetheart," he told her as they sat down in the blue star-back seats, waiting for the show to start. "When I was a kid, I couldn't wait for the circus to come to town." The opening spec began—a tribute to "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Her father sang along, so Stella did, too.

The clowns emerged, and everyone laughed. But to Stella, they were white-faced ghosts with bloody smiles, chasing each other through the sawdust with hatchets and guns and saws. Her father tried to explain it was all pretend, but Stella cried anyway. Carrying her out of the tent like a sack of potatoes, he made his way to the ten-in-one, the carnival midway show: ten freaks displayed in pits under one tent. Stella looked into the first pit and saw Lobster Man, a freak with flipper legs and deformed, clawlike hands, which he shook in her face. She wailed louder than before. To calm her down, Stella's father bought her an ice-cream bar and then paid fifty cents so she could ride on an elephant, a baby one lumbering around a never-ending ring. But Stella refused to get on, and the ticket seller refused to give them a refund. Wasting money, now that her father couldn't abide. A spanking followed, a very public one.

Stella's parents spoke to her schoolteacher. Was she like this in school? No, Miss Yardley said, but Stella was a moody child who kept to herself a lot, reading books while the other kids played. The teacher advised fewer books, more chores. "Give her something to do with her hands or she might turn out melancholy. You know, different," Miss Yardley said with a tight smile. Her parents boxed up her books, hid her library card. Her mother taught her to needlepoint. Her father taught her to play "Amazing Grace" and "Nearer My God to Thee" on the piano. When she was big enough, Stella took over the henhouse, feeding chickens and collecting eggs. The cure seemed to work—Stella stopped asking for books and made more friends at school. But her dreams never went away. For years, she was plagued with circus nightmares: Ax-wielding clowns chased her down long hallways, Lobster Man grabbed her with his claws, and a slow, sad parade of elephants marched in chains into a big top from which they never emerged.

 

THE MOVERS
arrived that afternoon. For the rest of the day, Stella let the boxes sit and studied the walls, tracing the murals with her fingertips as if she were reading braille. Wayne knew enough to narrate one of them: the mural in the study. An elephant grasped a small man in its trunk.

"Is that what I think it is?" Stella asked. "Is the elephant killing that little man in the red shirt?"

Wayne nodded. "I think so. The skull's down at the county museum."

"Whose?"

"The elephant's."

She took her hand away from the wall. "How awful."

But the murals upstairs were a gaudy mystery, startling portraits done in red, yellow, orange, and aquamarine. In the boys' room, big-bosomed women burst from their spangled corsets, their hair done up in white pompadours and red circles of rouge dotting their cheeks. They stood aloft flashy white horses with golden manes. In other rooms, Japanese acrobats tumbled, men walked silver wires, and a man on a flying trapeze blew a kiss across the room to the opposite wall, to a tiny slip of a woman hanging by a bloody wrist.

The house reminded her of pictures from her social studies books—ancient caves and Egyptian tombs. Dark, close places. Walls etched with strange figures and symbols. They told stories in a language she couldn't decipher, and so she was forced to make up her own. The trapeze man and wrist-hanging woman were tragic lovers—he missed a catch and sent her plummeting into the sawdust. The Japanese acrobats saved their money to buy a restaurant in California that made them rich. The family of tightrope walkers perfected the seven-man pyramid, setting world records, but lost their patriarch on a windy day in New York City, forty stories up.

One room, thank god, was blessedly white. Stella guessed the painter ran out of steam before he finished, and she told Wayne it would be their bedroom, the only room in the house where she could put her mind to rest.

 

STELLA MET WAYNE
her senior year at Richmond High School—at a Moose Lodge Halloween party. He was a denim-clad cowboy in a black hat with a gun slung over his hip. She came as Pocahontas, her long dark hair woven into a thick braid that swung behind her like a tail. Wayne was a good catch, a twenty-three-year-old man in steel-toed boots who worked down at Richmond utilities. Her friends were still dating boys with pimples and letterman jackets.