Circus of the Dead

by Seth Blackburn

  “Take with you this afternoon the warnings to Lot and his wife by God’s very Angels of Retribution; do not look back. Do not look back lest ye be transformed into pillars of salt. Don’t look back into the eyes of the Scourge, for you will be devoured.” The last was not said in a blast furnace voice, but rather a soft (and by the back of the church, nearly imperceptible) voice. I recognized the power of that small voice because it resonated deeply within my core. Over the years, we’d grown accustomed to screams, to violence, but one thing that seemed to ever elude us was mercy. There was mercy in Reverend Joe’s softer voice and we were all humbled in its wake.

  Before our humbling could be fully initiated, Reverend Joe dismissed us, save the men. My father and oldest brother Abe stayed behind while Christopher and I kicked a stone back and forth in the dirt of the street before the church. Neither of us spoke. There was no good (or bad) natured taunting as we each attempted to kick the stone past the guard of the other’s feet. We avoided the other’s eyes as well. We were two young men on the verge of committing sin and we could smell it on one another like the flatulence we often exchanged in the small bedroom we shared.

  Not long after our stone soccer game had begun, Abe and Papa, along with thirty or so other men (a man in our community was considered eighteen years or older) came from the church and into the street. Abe’s face was stolid, which was his norm, but Papa’s face was dour, as though he’d been forced to swallow something he’d found unpleasant to the extreme. The street began to empty in a hurry, men leading their families back to homes and chores. Papa put his arms to the back of his sons and urged us onward without a word.

  My mother, Papa’s wife, had died not long after I had been born (it was common in this new era to die of illnesses once thought benign given the lack of professional medical treatment) and so our dinner, as was common, was a man’s dinner; a loose, stringy pasta made from wheat and a sauce of crushed tomatoes with sugar and salt.

  We ate our simple meal the way I imagined people a century before had. On a crudely hand-carved table lit by lanterns and in silence. It would seem glib to envy those who had lived so long ago with pestilence, drought, the tragedy of World War I and the Great Depression still looming before them like some turn of the century initiation into Man’s modern age. Glib, but not difficult.

  I knew of these things, not from television or computers that could talk to one another (I had never seen any of those devices working—nay I’d never experienced electricity!) but rather from a store of musty books that had once been kept in reverence in the library at the end of town. That grand grey and white building, one of the few that had survived the fire that surely had burned out of control during the Scourge, had been converted to a home for Reverend Joe and his wife. The children would gather there twice a week for Bible studies and we would stare in awe at the high ceilings with windows in the very roof itself. The second floor loft, edged with a fine iron railing, housed the marital bed; a plush, thick mattress that was often offered to those who by lottery were chosen to copulate during the spring months, when it was deemed best to impregnate, the thought being that children born from the winter made sturdier and more practical persons. I had lain on that bed twice myself, once with a woman, the wife of Mr. Tauton, who drilled wells that supplied water for our very existence. He was deemed infertile, as the couple had not yet born offspring. This was the way things went in our new society and there should have been no ill will, but since that evening two springs before, Mr. Tauton seemed to watch me with a cold fire in his eyes. The second time was with a girl my own age. Neither coupling had produced a child so I’d been removed from further lotteries until my eighteenth year when it was hoped that my sperm would be stronger.

  The books, moved from their regal positions, had been sent to the basement where they mouldered and where I discovered them during a morning game of Hide and Seek before studies. I crept into the basement often after that when I knew that Reverend Joe was practicing his sermon at the Chapel and his wife, a tall, sturdy and imposing figure with sharp cheeks and a long, straight nose was baking bread to be used during Communion, and helped myself to a dusty tome, always borrowing and returning. I had a voracious appetite for words and dreamed of one day writing my own.

  The other homes in the town were much less luxurious than the library, as they were made from scrap wood found in wreckage, some boards still bearing the black scorch marks from where they were licked by fire and I often wondered what other memories the wood might have. Our small shack of a home, two tiny bedrooms and a kitchen, might have been assembled from boards that had once lived in a hundred others. What had they seen? What horrors had they witnessed? I often felt as though ghosts peered at me through the same spaces between the boards that sand endlessly found its way through. Were they as covetous of me as I was covetous of those who’d lived a century ago? Was our lamentable existence still better than death? It was no wonder Papa so often called me a woolgatherer!

  Christopher and I waited as long as we could, our frayed nerves making us twitch in our straw mattresses as though tiny jolts of static shocks were playing along our bodies. When the sounds of a distant music floated to us from the still air, (Where was the wind? There was always wind in our dry, gritty world!) we could wait no longer. We rose from our beds, still dressed for the day and crept from our rooms, shoes in our hands. Loud snoring came from the bedroom opposite the kitchen and we stole smiles, knowing our absconding with one another in the night would go unnoticed. Or so we simply believed.

  Out front, Papa sat in his old weatherworn rocking chair, pipe in his mouth. He had not lit the tobacco or we’d have smelled it and crept back to our room as stealthily as we’d left. We each stood feeling foolish with our shoes dangling from fingertips. Christopher’s face crept with a blush of blood as I’m sure my own must have. Once Papa fixed us with his eyes, he struck a match and brought it to the bowl. The harsh tobacco flared briefly and turned to a glowing ember.

  “Come here boys,” he said and his voice was a deep dread within my soul. It had been a long while since I’d disappointed Papa. We approached him with our heads hung low. He puffed on his pipe and the smoke stayed like a haze about our hanging heads. Papa seemed to notice this.

  “Still tonight.”

  “Yes sir,” Christopher answered and his voice was thick as though he were choking on the words themselves. I remained silent, aware that Papa’s rage would flare as simply as his tobacco and my life could change as readily. Papa watched us for a while and then cocked his head to one side.

  “I can hear the circus music. It’s been a long time, most of my life really, since I’ve heard such music.” He listened for a while, head still cocked and then asked, “Is Abe asleep?”

  “Yes sir.” It was I who answered this time; since Papa’s thunderclap of rage had yet to manifest I felt oddly emboldened. There was something different about Papa this evening, something calm and sad.

  All at once, Papa stopped listening to the music and asked, “Do you boys think I’m a fool?”

  Christopher and I found ourselves unable to answer as any courage we may have attained, albeit falsely, left us two stammering children in the angry light of a father’s eyes. When Papa leaned forward in his rocking chair, the old bowed wood creaking and groaning like something alive and regretful of the same, we each took a step back and cried in unison, “No sir!” That seemed to satisfy the man and he leaned back once more and regarded us over the smoldering embers in the bowl of his pipe.

  “I am not a fool,” he said. “Or perhaps I am.” He reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled two pieces of gold jewelry into the moonlight. I recognized these items easily as Mama’s keepsakes. On more than one occasion, as any child is want to do in regard to a lost mother, I’d sneaked into the room Papa and Abe shared and opened the small wooden box Papa kept beneath his bed. Not to pilfer, for I was not a thief, but rather to discover the woman who had borne me, who had given me life even as I h
ad taken hers. There was a ruby pendant that I would hold in the bright sunlight and watch it glimmer like fiery blood. A bracelet, the string long since broken, of pearls, all perfectly round and each milky white. I tasted one of them, let the body of it rest on my tongue. A salty tingle ran through the range of my taste and I fancied it was the sweet perspiration of the woman I’d never known. It was more likely the tang of gritty air—sometimes so resolute that it would line your gums with sand—and not the sweat of my long-dead mother. Still, I had never supped from her breasts and so I let myself imagine it was the taste of her on these pearls and that I could somehow draw her essence into my own being. I was owed after all! The Universe owed me the milk of one loving mother!

  The items in Papa’s hand were a small watch that had ceased ticking at 3:20, whether that was a.m. or p.m. I’d never know, and a pearl ring—a sister to the bracelet no doubt—with a band of white gold.

  “These should be more than enough to get your way around,” he said. “Steer clear of the upper and lower ridges. And of course the main road.” He leaned the opened, treasure-filled palm a little closer and Christopher and I each took something; he the watch and myself the pearl ring which suddenly I had the desire to put against my tongue, but did not do. “Abe and I have duty on the upper ridge, but I’ll give you boys a good ten minutes ahead of us.” When neither of us moved he said, “Be off with you then!” And we went.

  I’d be a true fibber if I said that I didn’t want to stop and ask Papa why he let us go. Why, in fact, he had actually given us such precious admission items. I suspect it might have had something to do with a time before the Scourge. Some lingering memory from his youth, like the stories he would tell about a frozen dessert truck that would slide along the streets of every town in America, whistling its tune like a summer siren, promising icy goodness to any and all. I will never know, of course, because Papa and I never spoke again after that parting.

  The upper ridge, a large dune consistently re-supplied by the winds, was easily skirted by walking a mile west into the desert and then circling to the northeast. The moon, near to full, lit our way, bright as any lantern. Were the moon hiding itself, Christopher and I would have been able to walk the same course, as this was how young boys played, when allowed. The desert, merciless and unforgiving of any mistakes is but another street, another forbidden backyard, another haunted house, for children that live so close by.

  Our strides became longer and faster—mine shorter than Christopher’s but no less intent—as the music grew closer. My breath burned in my lungs as I struggled to keep pace, but I hardly noticed. It seemed as though my feet were pulled forward by that tinkling music, charmed as any snake. When it seemed that the music had reached its utmost crescendo, the lights of the circus came into view and I was stunned stupid. So bright, so alive in the dead of night was this spectacle that my mind could not comprehend the majesty of it all. The whole visage appeared to be on fire with light, blues, reds, greens, yellows and oranges; what a display of beauty! My eyes were drawn to a giant metal wheel with seats for two—a good many filled—and the whole thing spun slowly, reaching every seat to its zenith at one point. Lights exploded from the center in long, straight lines, first red, then white, then blue, then all together. Even as the shouts of glee reached my ears from the riders, I realized I was seeing electric light bulbs! What a feast for the eyes they were. It is near to impossible to describe what one has read about but never seen. Yet there they were, mocking me with their simple ability to spark a colored life.

  Ahead of me, a good twenty paces by now, Christopher realized he was alone and turned, no doubt wondering what had turned his little brother to stone on the hill. I could have been made of stone or salt. We had each heard Reverend Joe exalt upon the tale of Lot’s wife who could not let go of the precious decadence from the city she loved so much. For Christopher and I there could be no decadence greater than what lay before us. Were we standing before the reincarnation of the great city of Sodom once more? I could not say.

  “Gabriel!” Christopher hissed. It was clear to me then that he believed, while only a few hundred yards from the circus gates that he might still be stopped, barred at the last moment by an angry reverend or loyal townsperson. Quite suddenly his fear became my own and my legs pushed forward, faster than ever.

  Together Christopher and I ran toward another world.

  Long before we met the clown, our noses were drowned in cascades of odor. Like water circling a drain before finally slipping into that hole, so did those smells circle our nostrils before running through and igniting the virgin receptors in our brains. There was the pungent stink of animal dung and feed, not unfamiliar but still somehow exotic. Next came the salty air of warm food and the thick, cloying weight of cooking meat. Last, and oh so much worth the wait, the sweetness of foods I’d never before experienced. Like sugar had been melted and became part of the desert’s dry air; the sweetness coated our throats, lined our noses with promises so rich that our teeth ached.

  “You comin’ or what?” The voice was gruff, resonating with the abuse of alcohol and tobacco that had passed over its station in the throat. We saw the clown at the gate, cold, careless eyes staring out at us from white make-up that was beginning to run in creamy rivulets starting at the large brow. Whether it was brotherly instinct or fear I could not say, but Christopher reached out and took my hand. For the same inexplicable reasons, I willingly took his in return. The clown grunted when he saw this and looked as though he were going to speak, and not kindly, when a man and woman passed by us. I recognized them as Mr. and Mrs. Tauton. Mr. Tauton seemed mesmerized by colors of the clown, the red sponge nose, the large black shoes and the bright yellows and oranges of the puffy pants and shirt. Too mesmerized to notice my existence or fire his cold, angry gaze my way. If for no other reason, this was enough to make me glad for the clown. I was no longer afraid and released Christopher’s hand, though I felt the sweat still thick upon my palm.

  Mrs. Tauton passed something to the clown’s hand and he held the item up into the electric light and I saw it glitter. A little mystery went then, a layer of magic peeled away. For I saw then, perhaps by the shift of his neck or the look just beneath his painted face, that the clown was none other than the Fancy Man’s driver. Papa had once told me that as every man grows the layers of mysticism and wonder peel away like an onion until all that’s left is the hardened center on which you must swallow or choke. He said the Scourge had peeled all his layers at once. It was never clear to me what Papa was talking about until then. I understood his example easily enough, but not the experience of it. In that moment, it settled on me and I was mixed with a sensation of pride for my understanding and a simple, unflinching loss. No matter what colors or scents or sounds lay beyond those brightly lit gates, it was all show, all illusion, and knowing that, when Mr. and Mrs. Tauton passed through—the clown appreciating Mrs. Tauton’s figure as she walked—I approached and simply held out the pearl ring. He took the ring, dropped it into a small canvas bag where I heard it clink against fellow pieces and I was into the circus.

  Though the mysticism of the circus had waned some, a keen wonder was still at the helm and my eyes were drawn first to the various cages set up here and there; a fat, complacent tiger, eyes glittering in the white-blue overhead lights watched me through his bars. If I were feeling dramatic, I could imagine he wanted to eat me, though he was most likely concerned with whether or not I was bringing him food.

  “Wow,” I heard Christopher say quietly and followed his gaze to a great grey elephant. The creature seemed as large as our very house and my breath thickened and slowed in my dusty lungs. I’d never dreamed an animal could grow so large. I’d seen many pictures of elephants from books snatched from the library cellar and while I had the knowledge of their size, the experience of the same was much different and with reverence, watched the enormous creature dip its trunk into a barrel of water and drink. When it finally lifted the trunk from the barrel, w
ater sloshed about and the creature seemed to notice us for the first time. A large black eye settled on us and the beast seemed to become agitated, shifting its weight back and forth. I took hold of Christopher’s arm and tried to tug him back and away but he seemed frozen in place and did not move until the elephant raised its tail and defecated, great globs of shit spattering to the ground behind it.

  Toward the center of the setting was a great tent with a formidable line of our townsfolk standing before it. On either side of the line, men and women in white clown make-up and bright silky colors performed tricks of sleight of hand or juggling acts with flaming batons. It was so alive! Our days in the little town where we lived were choked with dust and desperation, our nights no better. The wind of the desert seemed to pick up after the sun went into hiding and the howls of it squeezing through the wallboards and underneath from the floor might well have been the billions of souls torn from their bodies during the Scourge and looking for a new home. On many occasions, I lay in my cot with a blanket pulled over my head, choosing to breathe my own foul breath than expose my innards to an angry, wayward soul. But here in this magical place of music, electric lights, exotic animals and even more exotic performers, I truly felt that life had so much more to offer. Should I, I wondered, think about a different direction in my life once I returned to my creaky cot and hungry souls? There were very few who ever left our town and for all the books I’d read, for all the knowledge sans experience, it seemed that the idea of leaving had never occurred to me before that moment. I might have gone on thinking like that for hours, deciding my future there in the line of the Big Top had the tip of a blazing baton not roared past my face—close enough to feel its heat, close enough to smell the oil used to keep the flame alive, but not close enough to damage the skin of my face or even curl the fine hairs in my nose.