American Follies

by Norman Lock

  Silence descended on the parlor car. Elizabeth was asleep; her chin rested on her bosom. I noticed dribble at her lip and felt ashamed for her and of myself for having stared. Susan was gazing intently into her palms, as if she could read her fortune there or discover the stigmata of a martyrdom she both feared and wanted. Margaret was drawing figure eights—or if you prefer, the symbol of eternity—on the plush seat with a fingernail. I felt the inertia of a limed bird after its surrender to the bird catcher’s stratagem, when it realizes in its tiny brain, flustered heart, and hollow bones that its life is no longer its own. I turned my tired eyes to the window.

  I was mostly unaware of the scenery, though I can tell you about the ditch. It seemed an unending ribbon running parallel to the tracks just beyond the ballast stones. It flickered like a moving picture showing images of sky blue water fleeced with clouds and a stagnant fen green with scum. Hardscrabble trees grew beside it—blackthorn, willow, swamp ash, scrub pine, and sumac. Finding little nourishment in the stony ground, they were stunted, their leaves dusty or sooty from locomotive smoke. I don’t recall having seen a man or a woman along the way. I lie—I remember a tramp holding a pot, his arm thrust out at an impossible angle. I guessed it had been broken by a minié ball or an accident and left to mend on its own. What else? An old boot. Where, I wondered, is its fellow? And where is the man or woman who wore it? I remember a muskrat slinking into the weeds as the train thundered past, a cat and its empty eye socket, a dead dog lying half in, half out of the ditch water, and an egret standing on one leg, its white plumage miraculously unsoiled.

  The land itself was beyond my ken. By land, I mean the America that had not yet been deeded to Cornelius Vanderbilt and his fellow barons. From my window, I could see nothing that didn’t belong to them. In my mind’s eye, which has the power to roam the farthest stars, I could picture nothing that they had not papered over with documents of ownership, bonds, and shares to keep them fat. Sitting in that railroad car, I felt detached from the wide world and blind to its beauty. I was a carrot waiting to be pulled up from the dirt into the light of day, to strike a mad figure. I was mad! I could say that my journey was an inward one; moreover, there might have been something in it touching on the theme beloved by writers of bildungsromans. This much I knew: I was riding on the Barnum Special, heading west to a place that existed, for me, only as a thought, an unpleasant one at that. And you were waiting for me there, dear son.

  We marked time as people do who find themselves between events—great or not, it doesn’t matter. They occupy themselves with the same vapid amusements whether they’re waiting for the rain to stop or a battle to begin that is likely to deliver them into a surgeon’s hands, or an undertaker’s. We played cinch and jubilee in the desultory way of the bored. Our wits and appetites were dull. We played cards, ate and drank of Barnum’s plenty while savoring nothing, and read the newspapers that greeted us each morning with news of the towns we had passed in our sleep. (Did Gallagher say the journey would take three days and nights? Surely it took twice as long.) The clowns caught the papers on the fly, using the catcher crane arm attached to the side of their car. I would close my eyes and pretend to be asleep, but I could not shut out the sound a train makes rolling over tracks, the slap of pasteboard cards, the rustle of newsprint, and the music of Margaret’s small fingers wandering over the keys of a melodeon furnished by our benefactor. I overheard conversations that went by fits and starts and seemed of little import to the speakers. I mean, they had no stake in what was said, as if they were acting in a play—and not a well-made one.

  “I bid hearts!”

  “Did you? I had no idea!”

  “Your mind is not on the game, Elizabeth.”

  “My thoughts are scattered today. It is today, is it not?”

  “It could not be otherwise.”

  “Wonderful thing, a Pullman car.”

  “Margaret, that note was sour.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I dislike the melodeon. The word promises a sweetness the music betrays. It can sound like a man at his last gasp.”

  “Or a woman, to be fair to our sex.”

  “The bid was spades!”

  “You’re unusually peevish today, Susan.”

  “My corn kept me awake all night.”

  “That reminds me of ‘The Princess and the Pea.’”

  “I hated fairy tales as a child.”

  “My father resented me for having been born a girl.”

  “Oh!”

  “Does your corn pain you?”

  “My corn? Elizabeth, I have a toothache! I never said a word about corns.”

  “Oil of clove is just the thing for a toothache, but, alas, I have none.”

  “I’ll ask Gallagher next time he’s awake.”

  “Strange people, the Irish. My father detested them. The Cadys were finicky.”

  “The notes are all wrong, Margaret!”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “The Daughters of Lost Causes is hosting a costume ball at the Abbeville grange.”

  “I would rather hear a kazoo played by a monkey than a melodeon!”

  “Margaret, do you know ‘Watchman, Tell Us of the Night’? In younger days, I was an Episcopalian, for the sake of the children.”

  “Organized religion is bosh.”

  “Men say ‘bollocks.’”

  “They call the place where we piddle a ‘cunt.’”

  “Equally vulgar are twat and quim, although the latter could be the name of a fruit preserve.”

  “Twat has an ugly sound.”

  “Susan, never before have we uttered such indecencies! What is wrong with us?”

  “The train is cursed. Margaret, will you never get it right?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “What are you thinking, Elizabeth? The last bid was hearts!”

  “I feel giddy. I hope I’m not about to have a fit.”

  “A rapture would be just the thing to help us pass the time.”

  “What game are we playing?”

  “Cinch! We’ve been at it for days.”

  “Will this infernal ride never end?”

  “How many days, do you think, from Heaven to Hell?”

  “Does Sir Isaac have anything to say on the subject?”

  “If it weren’t for the newspapers beside our plates each morning, I couldn’t say with any certainty that we were making progress.”

  “I read this morning that Lilian Heigold was hanged for striking a man.”

  “Whatever will poor Fred do now?”

  “Become a widower, drink too much, and go fishing.”

  “I wish I knew a few feminine arts.”

  “Such as?”

  “Knitting. I could watch the purl stitches growing under the needles and know for a fact that I was making headway.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if the train is moving. One feels motion in the spine, the back of the neck, and on the posterior, which coarse people call ‘buttocks’ and butchers ‘hams.’ I feel no such pressure.” “We must not forget the child!”

  “There is nothing we can do until the journey ends. Then you will see me act!”

  “Elizabeth is an accomplished actor, or should I say ‘actress’?”

  “I’ll make the dust fly and short work of our enemies!”

  “That fly sitting on the plate of mackerel bones, does it feel movement?”

  “There are more important questions to be asked.”

  “Gallagher! Will the man never wake?”

  “When he does, it will be with a regular katzenjammer.”

  “I’m at your service, ladies. I was saving my energies for our assault on the capital of hatred and intolerance. And for your information, Mrs. S., I’ve not touched a drop since yesterday, when Phineas T. Barnum’s magical spring did the unthinkable and dried up.”

  “Yesterday was when, exactly?”

  “Why, yesterday, naturally!”

  “How lon
g until we reach Charlestown?”

  “Charlestown came and went.”

  “Nonsense! I would have noticed.”

  “Mr. Barnum arranged things to minimize distractions.”

  “Who is the man in the caboose?”

  “There’s no one in the caboose, Miss Anthony.”

  “When the train rounded a horseshoe curve this morning, the caboose came alongside us, and I saw a man sitting by the window.”

  “I expect you imagined him.”

  “He waved to me!”

  “A trick of the eye caused by sunlight on dirty glass.” “The sky was overcast.”

  “All the more reason to disbelieve your eyes.”

  “I declare there is no making sense of it!”

  I shook off my drowsiness and spoke for the first time since breakfast, “How did my baby get from Zarephath to Memphis?”

  “After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the blacks no longer needed the Underground Railroad. The Klan took it over and uses it to send agents north and smuggle contraband south. Martin was sent to Memphis in a crate of incendiary pamphlets printed by your husband to incite white violence against the negroes.”

  “Franklin would never do such a thing!” Furious with Gallagher, I could have brained him with one of his empty bottles.

  “Anarchists will do anything to achieve their ends.”

  “I suppose Mr. Dode is at the center of this plot against Franklin,” I countered, as though wringing vinegar from a rag.

  “If you’re referring to Mr. Fischer, he has uncovered a number of your husband’s un-American activities. He’ll swing for them, I assure you. For your information, madam, the Secret Service does not plot nor seek to harm innocent men.”

  “And women?” asked Susan, incredulity ironing some of the wrinkles from her face.

  Gallagher shrugged. “Show me an innocent woman.”

  “Dreadful man!”

  Gallagher picked his teeth with his sheriff’s star. Elizabeth, Susan, and Margaret fell to musing. I set aside the lies told about Franklin as unworthy of consideration and thought instead of the man in the caboose: So Susan saw him, too! Lulled by the lullaby of the rails, the party of malcontents shortly closed their eyes. I left them to their dreams or reveries and walked back to the clown car. Standing on its little porch, I put my ear to the door and heard not so much as the dying echo of a pratfall, a laugh, or the weeping in which clowns sometimes indulge when they think they’re alone. I opened the door. The car was empty. Only pots of greasepaint remained to prove that clowns had once been there. Where had they gone? I asked myself. Did they get off the train at Charlestown as we slept inside the enchanted space Barnum had created for us? Without their assistance—feeble as it would have been—what chance have we against the Klan?

  I started for the parlor car, when I remembered the reason I had left it. I went to the door of the caboose and knocked. No one answered, yet I was aware of a presence on the other side.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  I could hear someone faintly breathing.

  “Is it you, Mr. James?”

  Whatever reply there may have been, it was drowned by the roaring in my ears.

  Afraid, I rejoined the others. Their eyes were closed, their chins nesting in their collars. I would say nothing about the vanished clowns or the person whose labored breathing I had heard.

  We pressed on to Memphis!

  No Country for Circuses

  ON THE EASTERN BANK of the Wolf River, ten miles shy of Memphis, the train balked. It had come to a gradual stop, as though the last lump of coal had given up the ghost in the firebox, its gritty atoms rising into the noonday air. Beneath the trees, a dusky light seemed to sway.

  “What the devil is the matter?” demanded Gallagher, his red nose out of joint.

  “Won’t budge,” replied the engineer, who hailed from New Hampshire, where words are not wasted on the obvious.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Try again.”

  The engineer shrugged in despite of all fools who refused to accept the vagaries of the mechanical world. He reengaged the valve gear, but the iron wheels spun helplessly, unable to get a grip on the rails, which might have been greased, for all the progress the leviathan made.

  “Like I said, she won’t budge. She’ll go backward right enough.” He demonstrated, and the train rolled a few yards in the direction of Charleston.

  “How very odd!” exclaimed both Elizabeth and Susan.

  “Why in blazes won’t it go forward?”

  “Don’t want to,” said the engineer. Years of locomotion had made him indifferent to the affairs of a universe governed by machinery and timetables. His attitude toward them was one of resignation, like that of a cowboy unsurprised by a cow’s-plat on his heel.

  Exasperated, Gallagher kicked one of the ponderous wheels and then hopped on one foot while he held the other, like a man in a music hall sketch who has stubbed a toe. (What a funny piece of business Mr. Ashton, the Posturing Man, could have made of it!) “Damn it to Hell!”

  The engineer chortled. He took out a bandanna and placed it daintily on the iron seat of the cab and, opening his lunch kettle, took out an apple and a turkey leg.

  “This is no time to eat!” shouted Gallagher.

  The engineer consulted his pocket watch, said that it was indeed time, wiped his greasy hands on an oily rag, and went about his lunch.

  “What’re we to do?” asked Susan.

  “We will go on!” said Elizabeth firmly.

  “Don’t expect me to carry you when you can’t take another step!” said Susan irritably.

  Elizabeth glowered and would have pounced had Gallagher not said, “In their big shoes, the clowns will never make it through these woods.”

  “The clowns are gone,” I said.

  “That settles it! We go back to New York.” He turned to the engineer. “When you are done stuffing your tripes, locomote us to Grand Central.”

  The engineer began to reply, choked on a bit of apple skin, spat, and said, “Okay.”

  “I hope you choke, you miserable son of Adam!” said Susan. If her words had been a razor, they would have shaved the engineer’s cheeks in a trice and then lingered deliciously at the bristles on his throat.

  Gallagher spun round on his boot heels, which made a pleasant gravelly sound, and started toward the parlor car. “Ladies, shall we go?”

  “Not without the baby!” thundered Susan.

  “You can’t leave us here!” fulminated Elizabeth, as she had done for our sex since Seneca Falls, when she declared, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman.”

  “As Mr. Barnum’s agent, my obligation is to his property. In that you both insist that you are no man’s property, you are on your own.” He doffed his Stetson and then, smirking, settled it back on his head with an insolent snap of the brim.

  “We won’t go back without the child!” vowed the suffragists. My heart in my mouth left no room for words. I could do nothing but nod vigorously in assent.

  “Margaret, will you come?” asked Gallagher. “You’re a circus employee. Your duty is to Mr. Barnum.”

  “No, I won’t!” She was standing on a hill of clinkers, an elevation that increased her physical stature, if not her moral one, which, being superlative, would not admit of enlargement.

  “What can a midget accomplish against a Grand Cyclops?” Having drunk his courage dry, Gallagher was a man without gumption.

  “What did David do to Goliath?” asked Margaret as she picked up a stone and threw it at the special agent. A red wound blossomed on his forehead.

  “Mr. Barnum shall hear of this!” he cried, waving his fist. Then without another word, he climbed aboard the parlor car. The locomotive let off steam, jolted into reverse, and headed east—the caboose in the vanguard, carrying its mysterious passenger.

  Can it be Franklin? I
wondered. Did he become a fugitive from the law after committing some outrage against capitalism? I tried to imagine my husband on the run. No, Franklin is not the stuff of which anarchists are made. He’s in San Francisco, looking for a job.

  We walked on beside the tracks, Margaret with a difficulty that the shortness of her stride and the sharp stones underfoot could not entirely explain. She seemed to droop the closer we got to Memphis. Elizabeth noticed her weariness and brought our little sorority to a halt.

  “We should rest,” she said, obedient to the maternal instinct with which she was amply provided.

  We sat on a sandstone column that had fallen into a field of jimsonweed, called “the Devil’s snare,” circled by thorn bushes, dark and bristling.

  “Margaret, maybe you should have gone with Gallagher,” said Elizabeth gently.

  Susan gave her no chance to respond. “I don’t trust him, and I don’t much care for Barnum or anybody else who employs one of Pinkerton’s men, who are nothing but thugs for hire!”

  “I belong with my friends,” said Margaret simply. “Though I’m so tired, I could shut my eyes and sleep for days and days.”

  “We’re not wanted here, especially you, Margaret, for the same reason the train balked,” I said. “With the suddenness of a revelation, I understood the cause of both her weakness and the locomotive’s recalcitrance. “This is no country for circuses.”

  “You may be right,” said Elizabeth thoughtfully. “Margaret, perhaps you should wait here until we return with the child.”

  “If I go on awhile longer, I’ll shake off this listlessness.” But she did not shake it off; we had not taken fifty paces before she had to stop. “I can’t take another step. Forgive me.” She closed her eyes and crumpled onto the ground like a half-empty sack.

  Just then, a black man called to us from an opening in a dense woods of honey locust trees. He was tending a fire. A pot was hung from a notched stick above the flames. He was beckoning us with his hand. We helped Margaret to her feet and to his fire as her head bobbed back and forth.

  “The little lady appears all in,” he said kindly. He was one of those negroes who could have been any age from sixty to one hundred. His bald head was as polished as a lucky chestnut. The veins on the backs of his hands reminded me of roots. His eyes were overcast by cataracts.