The Ordways (33 page)

The roads were silvered with rime these mornings, and the drainage ditches coated with thin ice. Syrup making was finished and farmers came out to meet him now wearing tow-sack aprons smeared with blood tied round their waists with baling twine. Carcasses of pigs hung head down from the limbs of trees, waxen white, scalded and scraped hairless, their hind legs spread by a singletree and the body cavity standing open red and steaming. Once—the man suffering from an injured wrist—he offered to help. Donned an apron, and as the pig was stuck, slit the hocks and bared the hamstrings and attached the singletree and grabbed the rope and swung the pig up still squealing, and afterwards stayed to supper and shared the backbone and sweet potatoes and the hot fresh cracklin' bread.

After outfitting his wagon, and after another couple of weeks of exploring the byways of Lamar County, where the people hardly spoke, much less read, English, he was low on money. It was the off season and work impossible to find. And even if work could have been found it would have meant an interruption to his search. Remembering the suggestion made by those three traveling salesmen, he invested ten dollars in a stock of cow-bag balm, only to find that just the month before another peddler had gone through and every farmer in the country had bag balm enough to last him for years.
He
had eight dozen half-pound cans of the stuff. Meanwhile among the social orders on whom he now pinned his hopes he was encountering no more encouragement than he had among their betters. It was November. The prairies turned brown and the dry grass sighed in the wind. To the rare trees clung a few discolored wind-vexed leaves. For farmers it was that cozy, indoors, rocking-chair-by-the-fire time, when they came forth only to kick clods, stand with their hands in their pockets. Hunters were to be met now with gun and dog going along the road in the early morning. Ducks down from the north, and sometimes big wild geese, arrowed high overhead, honking, flapping. In the thick smoke from farmhouse chimneys you could smell the sap, and in your homesickness could almost hear it sizzle from the logs. So matters stood when my grandfather came one day to the town of Enloe.

“In for the big show, are you?” asked the first man he met. “Folks been flocking in since before sunup. Was you at the parade? No? Oh, that's a pity! They had the steam calliope going and the girls in spangled tights and clowns turning somersets down the middle of the street. Made me feel like a kid all over again!”

And so:

Dear family [said my grandfather's next letter home],

I have joined the circus. No I am not the man on the flying trapeze nor the wild man from Borneo, who is really from some place called Terry Hoat Indiana and quite a likable old sot. No what they have got me doing is running the shooting gallery on the midway—me that could never hit a bull in the you know what with a paddle! But are you not supposed to be looking for Ned, you may ask. That is what I am doing. The way I was going at it was awful slow so I thought the thing to do is to draw Will to me. Only how? I could not think. Then this opportunity came along and I jumped at it. The circus I mean. Think for a minute. What draws kids like a circus? We play a different town every day. If he is anywhere in this part of the world then with three of them pestering him to take them even if he did not want to go himself it will be hard for Will to keep away. Meanwhile I am making expenses.

Yr. loving husband & father,

Sam. Ordway

P.S. Running the shooting gallery I know now why none of the boys could ever knock over any of those ducks when we tried it at the Red River County Fair. It could not be done with a sledge hammer.

P.P.S. I started this letter three days ago but have been on the run so never got a chance to mail it and already in that time I have lost my job running the shooting gallery. The last fellow that had it before me had let the sights on the rifles get all out of line. Well yesterday Mr. Dickey who owns the circus stopped by my stand to see how my stock of prize dolls were holding out and just to be doing something picked up one of the rifles and shot at a balloon and busted it. But I am still with the show and will tell you about my new job next time I write.

Circuses, in my grandfather's view, were like that purple cow: better to see than be one. “Perhaps you have sometimes considered leaving home and joining the circus?” he asked. I admitted that the notion had once or twice crossed my mind on hot days. “Then listen and take warning from me,” said my grandfather.

He said there had been a boy just about my age traveling with Dickey Bros. at the time, who had run away to join the circus from the very orphanage he had visited in Paris. When that boy learned that he had been to the orphanage, and knew Mr. Marchbanks, he got real homesick, my grandfather said. He had thought it was an awful place while he was there, and had hated old Marchbanks, but now he just wished he was back. He had learned his lesson. He didn't want to be a circus hand any more. What did he want to be? Well, being an orphan, and having his own way to make in the world, that boy had given lots of thought to the choice of a career, and he was being very farsighted about it. It looked like steamboats were going to spell the end of piracy. Cattle rustling, from all reports reaching him, was getting to be just too crowded a field. Stagecoaches would soon be a thing of the past; holding them up didn't seem a very promising line for a young man to go into. There were still banks and trains to be robbed, but for them you needed a gang, and nowadays where were you going to find two or three boys you could trust? All these had had to be ruled out. Now he knew for sure what he wanted to do. That was, to run an orphans' home, preferably the very one that he himself had escaped from. He ought to be real good at that, having been through it himself. My grandfather agreed, applauded his putting aside those other ambitions, and said that having suffered himself as an inmate of one, he would be able to bring to the administration of an orphanage a new broom that would sweep the place clean. Yes, he would certainly make some changes when he took over, this beastly boy agreed. “The first new rule I mean to make is, they have to salute when I go by and stand as stiff as pokers. Any boy caught smoking—confined to quarters for a week. Any complaints about the treatment—bread and water for a month! The girls—I've worked out a whole special set of punishments for them. Oh, they think they've had it tough with old Marchbanks, just wait till they have me to deal with! I know all their tricks. I've played them all myself. Just let one of them try to get out when I'm in charge of things. I'll hunt him down and drag him back by the ear. Yes, sir, it's just what I'm cut out for, and if I ever just get a chance to run away from this awful circus I'm going back and start working my way up to the top of the orphanage ladder.”

My grandfather had traveled with the circus another month after lining up the sights on those .22 rifles, but in his other letters home he never did get around to saying what his new job was. “I didn't want to alarm your grandmother unnecessarily,” he confided to me. Mr. Dickey had been so disgusted he had ordered him off the lot. “You're just not circus,” he explained. My grandfather pled so hard to be kept on in any capacity whatever that Mr. Dickey's suspicions, and therewith his guile, were aroused. Seeing a chance for some captive labor, he offered my grandfather the job as assistant to the circus's elephant handler. His suspicions were confirmed when the offer was accepted. “I pretended to be unhappy about it, but I could hardly keep from laughing. It was like Br'er Rabbit begging not to be thrown in the brier patch. It might be the lowliest job on the lot, but Topsy—that was our elephant's name, Topsy—was what the kids wanted most of all to see, and that would give me a closer look at them than running the shooting gallery ever would. At Will too—in case he should come to the circus. Will was not the marksman type.

“Topsy was an African elephant standing twelve feet high and weighing around seven tons. There are, as you may know, two varieties of elephants, African and East Indian. African ones run about half again the size of Indian ones. For this reason they make a bigger attraction, and so you may suppose that the circus which had Topsy was quite a high-class one. Other considerations enter into the matter. Being bigger, African elephants eat a lot more. They are also more dangerous. So actually they go cheaper on the elephant market. It's like secondhand cars. We couldn't afford Topsy, but we couldn't afford one any smaller. For Dickey Bros. was what is called in the trade—oh, how I came to hate the term!—a mud show. Well, Topsy was not economical, and what she may have been as a heifer I can't say, but by the time I got to know her she was about as dangerous as a Jersey cow. You just had to mind out not to let her step on you, as she had grown rather longsighted. She would no more think of hurting anybody than an iceberg. But you know how women are.

“Red (what his last name was, I never did learn), Topsy's handler, reckoned her age at between fifty-five and sixty. She looked it. She was a mountain of wrinkles and her fur—”

“Fur? Grandpa, elephants—”

“That's all you know about it! They have fur, all right, and every single hair of it is to hair what an elephant is to—well, the point makes itself. The reason you don't know about it is, they shave them regularly. To feel of an elephant in need of a shave is like running your hand over a cut cornfield. Topsy had to be shaved oftener than most, so as to keep her from showing her age; otherwise she would have looked like what in fact she was: a white elephant. Circus people love to fool newcomers, and the first time Red told me we were going to give Topsy a shave he had me believing we were going to whip up a barrelful of lather and use the tent for a hot towel. Actually it was done with a blowtorch. The smell was like a fire in a mattress factory. Twice a day Topsy had to be swept. You put a ladder against her and climbed up on top with a broom and dusted her off up there, then you went down the ladder a rung at a time and swept off her sides. If you have ever painted a barn you will have some idea of it. Once a week she had to be scrubbed down. Every so often she had to be rubbed down all over with neat's-foot oil. What a greasy mess I was when I got done with that job! Then her toenails had to be pared. Let me tell you, nothing is more deceitful in appearance than an elephant. They're bigger than they look. And everything about an elephant is to scale. Water, for instance. Seventyfive gallons a day Topsy had to have. Remember, this was before the days of water mains and running hydrants. Those were the days when fires still had to be fought with hand pumps and bucket brigades. We had the bucket brigades—boys in the towns who earned passes to the show by toting water to the elephant; we had a hand pump too: I pumped it. Then there was the matter of food to be scrounged up. Two bales of hay a day. A sack of mixed grain. A bushel or two of greens and not too rotten fruit. This in addition to the cotton candy and popcorn and parched peanuts and candied apples and pink lemonade and cigars and chewing tobacco and all the other trash that people fed her. And like a chicken, she had to have gravel, roughage. Correction: a chicken needs gravel, an elephant requires paving stones or brickbats or scrap iron or a laxative on that order. (Needless to say, what went in had to come out—in fact, it seemed to me that more came out than went in, for one of my chores was disposing of the product.) In the towns we played all of these items were hard to come by in such quantities, nothing more so than the water. Topsy was not our only animal. In addition to the menagerie (one sleepy old toothless lion and half a dozen flea-ridden monkeys) and the performing horses, we had two dozen big heavy Clydesdale draft horses, and in some of those dry little prairie towns half the population got into the show on passes for hauling water to the circus lot. All the same you couldn't help but grow fond of Topsy. It wasn't her fault that she was so outlandish. I would get awfully impatient with her sometimes, but whenever I did I would just remind myself how much entertainment I had had out of her. There is nothing like an elephant for keeping you from brooding.

“Not that there was much time to brood. For although I have given you some little idea of what was involved in being Red's assistant, the fact of the matter is, that was really just a diversion. I had to steal time away from my duties to look after Topsy. A circus when not on the road, which is most of the time, is either coming up or going down. As the towns we played were only big enough for a one-day stand, we used to wake up (if we had gotten to bed that night) in a new place every morning—though what we saw of them they all looked pretty much the same, our lot being always on the edge of town in some cow pasture that went by the name of the Fair Grounds. Everyone was up at break of day and out of doors for a look at the sky, hoping for fair weather and praying against wind. Wind is the circus's worst enemy. Not only does it make the animals edgy, there is always the fear that the tent might blow down. Early as it was, the lot would already be swarming with boys, for school was let out the day the circus came to town. They used to follow around at our heels like puppies, panting with wonder and excitement and ready to faint with joy if one of us spoke to them. They never knew what sorry low-down rascals some of them were that they idolized. Not all, you understand; but it is true the circus does attract some pretty shiftless specimens. We used to eat our breakfast on our feet outside the cookhouse, a mug of sweet coffee and a cruller, then to work. The first thing to be done was put up the tent. To bring it out of its wagon and unfold and spread it on the ground took all the hands we could muster, including those who later in the day would blossom out as the Bearded Lady and the Alligator Boy. Then the stakes were driven. Then we crawled underneath and raised the outer poles all around. And then Topsy was brought out to do her bit, and from that moment on I, along with Red, was the biggest
human
thing on the lot as far as those kids were concerned. As assistant bullhand (that's right, Topsy was a lady, but around the circus all elephants are ‘bulls'), I was got up in pink pants and a yellow silk sash and a pea-green majordomo's jacket with shoulder boards and gold braid and tassels and a bandolier and a red fez with more tassels. Up close it was all pretty tacky, but you had to be grown to see that. Topsy and Red and I would go inside the sagging tent and pretty soon the quarter poles commenced to rise and then the center pole and the bale rings were raised and the tent tightened like an umbrella and drummed in the wind and the stake ropes stretched and hummed, and then we came prancing out, and sitting up on Topsy's head in my get-up I would think, if Ned could see his daddy now Will Vinson wouldn't stand much of a chance!