The Fall of the Year

by Howard Frank Mosher

  IT WAS CIRCUS DAY in Kingdom Common. The dawn sky was reddening quickly, though the lurid strip of crimson along the horizon was caused in part by the Canadian forest fires that had been burning out of control two hundred miles to the northeast for the past two weeks, creating in that quarter of the night sky a glow like embers. The wildfires had suffused a haze over the entire Kingdom, through which everything took on a slightly illusory quality.

  At the same time, though it was now mid-July, there had been a sharp frost overnight, and those of us drinking our early morning coffee at the hotel could look out and see, on the glaze of frost on the green, the faint reflection of the red dawn sky.

  “That could almost get to be discouraging,” Bumper Stevens said, meaning the summer frost.

  “It’s the sky I’m more concerned about,” Doc Harrison said. “Red sky in the morning, circusgoers take warning.”

  “Today will be just fine, Doc,” Father George said. “Look at Blackhawk.”

  Everyone’s eyes moved across the common and up the one-hundred-foot-high granite clock tower of the courthouse. Above the clock was a lookout with four tall paneless windows, one in each side of the tower. Some twenty feet above the lookout, looming high over the tallest elms on the common, was the copper weathervane, set in place half a century ago, of the fabled thoroughbred Morgan pacer Blackhawk, mane and tail flying. Today Blackhawk’s head was into the north, from which quarter both the recent run of good weather and the filmy haze of smoke from the Canadian fires were coming.

  “His nose never lies,” Father George said, and everyone nodded.

  That, at least, was a relief. For in those years in Kingdom Common, when the circus came to town, we all prayed for good weather. Now it only remained for the Slade Bros. Last Railway Extravaganza and Greatest Little Show on Earth to arrive in the village. It was due at any moment.

  The circus handbills promised wonderful things. See the grand, free, mile-long parade and the Four Horses of the Apocalypse! See the Bestiary of Antipodean Rarities! See two three-ring performances! In fact, the Slade Bros. Railway Extravaganza was a shabby little affair. A couple dozen dingy blue-and-yellow circus wagons chained on rusty flatbeds, a few boxcars, and two faded Pullman sleepers that had formerly belonged to the Santa Fe Line, pulled by a single, grimy, snub-nosed diesel locomotive that limped into town every two or three years for a one-day stand on the common, then departed, leaving a trampled ring in the outfield grass of the baseball diamond where the Big Top had been pitched and a sad litter of crushed lemonade cups, popcorn boxes, and hot dog wrappers.

  My job for today, as Father George had explained it the night before, was to chaperone Kingdom Common’s seventeen-year-old tomboy and self-declared daredevil, Molly Murphy. Until three years ago, when her parents were killed in a railroad wreck on the trestle a mile north of town, Molly had lived in one of the half dozen shanties near the trestle, an area known as Irishtown. After she was orphaned, Father George had arranged for her to go to the convent boarding school in Memphremagog. For almost as long as I could remember, she had wanted to run away with the circus—which was just now pulling into town, with Molly herself waving from the cab of the locomotive.

  “Are you responsible for this redheaded she-hooligan?” the engineer said to me a few minutes later in the rail yard. “She stood smack on the trestle outside of town and flagged me down. Refused to budge an inch. Animals all shaken up, performers thrown out of their berths, not to mention my old ticker here. A person could go to jail for that.”

  Molly laughed and vaulted out of the cab. In her baseball cap, jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, she looked like a boy with a ponytail. “How’s my best friend and future intended this morning?” Molly called out to me. And she ran up and gave me a big hug. “I can still pin you in ten seconds flat, Frank.”

  I laughed. “You’re too big to wrestle now.”

  “Am I big enough to marry yet?”

  Ever since she was a tiny girl, Molly had declared it her intention to marry me, though the idea of Molly Murphy marrying anyone was inconceivable.

  To the engineer she said, “I’m not going to jail. I’m going to join your circus.”

  “Yes, sir,” the engineer said. A gaunt man of about fifty, he wore a denim jacket, a red bandanna, wrist-length gloves, and a blue-and-yellow cap that said Slade Bros, over the bill. He appeared more weary than angry. “Flagged me down and swarmed up into the cab and insisted on riding into town in the circus train,” he said. “You don’t get killed by a locomotive, little missy, I imagine you’ll wind up in the penitentiary.”

  The engineer made it sound as though winding up in the penitentiary might be rather desirable, causing Molly to double over with laughter.

  “I’m Frank Bennett,” I said. “This is Molly Murphy. She’s wanted to join the circus since she was five.”

  “Four,” Molly said.

  “Well, Frank Bennett, here’s a word of advice from an old railway circus hand. Tell your redheaded best friend and future intended here not to be jumping in front of no more locomotives. It will cut short a circus career quicker’n anything.”

  When Molly and I next caught up with the engineer, he was pounding with a gloved fist on the door of a boxcar just in front of the circus train caboose. Out of it stumbled a couple of dozen roustabouts and tent riggers, men with unkempt oily hair and dark, pocked faces. A few minutes later there emerged a tall man in a blue shirt, a yellow vest, and a blue-and-yellow-striped straw hat. Under his terse directions the roustabouts bridged the gaps between the flatbeds with wooden planks and began unchaining the circus wagons and rolling them forward and down a ramp off the lead car.

  While the performers slept on in their Pullman cars, a dusty half-grown elephant and four Appaloosa horses, white with gray speckles, pulled the tent and pole and the cook wagons from the railway siding over to the common. All this was done with a minimum of conversation, but a great deal of cursing and spitting and scowling, under the direction of the tall circus master in the jaunty straw hat, who, when Molly approached him on the green, turned out to be none other than the train engineer who’d wanted to send her to prison.

  “Mr. Slade?”

  He gave an abstracted nod.

  “I intend to go to work for you,” she said. “I can do any job you’ve got. Bareback rider, aerialist, head clown, whatever.”

  “Big Top in center field,” Slade called out to the roustabouts. “Cook tent this side of second base. Midway in left field, carousel by home plate.” He thrust a collapsible canvas bucket at Molly. “Here, Missy. Run this full of cold water for Rudyard Hefalump.”

  Molly dashed to the water spigot behind the backstop and filled the bucket for the undersized elephant, which watched the circus master narrowly out of malicious little eyes, waited until he wasn’t looking, then filled its trunk with water and played a great arcing jet full in his face.

  “Hosed down!” Slade exclaimed in a strangely satisfied tone of voice as he wiped at his face with his blue-and-yellow handkerchief. “Even my elephant’s hand is set against me this morning. I suspected when I billed this town that it was a mistake. What’s all this haze and smoke in the air?”

  “Forest fires up in Canada,” I said. “We get it nearly every summer.”

  He nodded. “Hop to, gentlemen,” he told the tent riggers. “There’s a major conflagration headed this way.”

  The riggers set up the dining tent, open at the sides like a pavilion, then, with the help of the horses, dragged the three center poles of the Big Top onto the outfield grass and spread the vast blue canvas tent with yellow stripes out over them. It lay there on the common like the biggest parachute in the world. How many side stakes did the Big Top have, Molly wondered. One hundred and eighty, if she must know. How long were the center poles? Sixty by God feet, Douglas firs shipped east from Washington State to the tune of $535 apiece. Was Rudyard an African elephant or an Indian elephant?

  “See what I mean?” Slade said to me.
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  “About what?”

  “Redheads. When they aren’t throwing your locomotive off the tracks they’re beleaguering you with questions. Don’t never marry one. I did once and it was the worst mistake of my life.” He turned to Molly. “Indian,” he said.

  “Where are the other Slade brothers?” she said.

  “Who, Brother Beeb? Up yonder.”

  “Up yonder?”

  “Canvas coliseum in the sky.” Slade jabbed his thumb upward at the hazy zenith, in commemoration of the passing of Brother Beeb.

  “What did he die of?”

  “Too much circusing,” the remaining Slade brother said. “That will do it every time.”

  Underfoot the frost was evaporating. In spots the grass was already dry. As more Commoners ambled over to the green to watch the setup, the riggers hitched Rudyard to the free end of a three-inch-thick hawser attached through a massive pulley to the top of the center pole. The Four Horses of the Apocalypse were separated into two pairs and hitched to hawsers connected to the two other poles. At a command from Slade, Rudyard and the horses plodded off in three separate directions. Majestically and magically, the Big Top billowed up and outward, taking shape before everyone’s eyes. This was always a great moment on circus day, and, viewed through the haze from the forest fires, the scene had a certain anachronistic and dreamy grandeur, like a fair on a medieval green. Molly squeezed my hand hard and sighed.

  We were immediately jolted back to the present by the staccato clanging of riggers driving side-flap stakes with sledge hammers until it sounded as though the last railway circus was laying its own tracks across the common. From the rail yard, Rudyard and the Four Horses were pulling wagons containing the animals, the midway concessions, the sideshow tents, and the Bestiary of Antipodean Rarities, as well as two flatbed wagons, like hay wagons, upon which reposed an old-fashioned steam-driven calliope and a merry-go-round with painted wooden mythological monsters instead of circus animals.

  By now the performers were beginning to drift over to the dining tent from the gold-striped Pullman cars. Molly jumped back from the path of a yellow forklift driven by a tattooed man with a black eye patch. Riding on the forks was the largest woman I’d ever seen.

  “You lot lice keep outen the way,” the tattooed man snarled as he went careening past, but the colossal woman, who had long blond hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks like a doll, smiled at us and waved.

  “Beautiful Giantess from the Hippodrome of Grotesqueries,” Slade explained. “Tips the scales at ten hundred and fifty pounds, wonderfully good-natured, good draw for the barker’s ballyhoo. Plays the calliope like a concert pianist.”

  Molly’s eyes shone with delight at Slade’s circus lingo. It was plain that she loved everything about the strange and embattled world of the Last Railway Extravaganza.

  “Back some years ago,” Slade was telling us, “when the Flying Zempenskis come on board, I and Brother Beeb had to go out and purchase a higher tent.” He nodded toward the Big Top. “Holey old spread of canvas, bought it off the Adam Forepaugh outfit that went bust in Skokie in ’57. Why come, the Flying Z’s needed more clearance for their trapeze act.”

  “I intend to join that trapeze act,” Molly said.

  “The Zempenskis will be gratified,” Slade told her.

  I laughed. But Slade looked up at the Big Top as if fearful that it might collapse at any moment. “This is a failing operation,” he said. “In the meantime, we may as well slide over to the eating tent and have some breakfast.”

  Breakfast was steak, eggs, bacon, oatmeal, ham, mountains of toast and pancakes, and oceans of hot strong coffee, all served on scarred wooden tables with fold-out benches. The lean Slade brother heaped up his tin plate with some of everything and ate like a trencherman rather than a man on his last legs from too much circusing.

  “Yum,” Molly said. “I wouldn’t mind a breakfast like this every day. You ought to see what they feed us up at the convent school.”

  “You could say yum and not be too far off the mark,” Slade said. “Other side of the coin, beefsteak beefsteak beefsteak, three times a day, seven times a week, adds up.” He pushed back his straw hat, which made him look momentarily younger. “Di-fugalties,” he said. “They did for Brother Beeb. Soon enough they will do for me.”

  For all of his animadversions on redheaded hooligans, Slade seemed to have taken a paternal shine to Molly. “Look around, girlie, without staring at nobody. Note that the performers eat by theirselves. Grotesqueries chow down together. Animal trainers have their own table, same for the clowns. Riggers and roustabouts feed last.”

  “That’s not fair, Mr. Slade. The riggers do all the work.”

  “Life ain’t fair,” Slade said happily. “No, it is not. Where’s my fire eater? Stole away by King Cole Amusements. Cat man’s serving out a stretch in Macon for statutory with a cracker gal, redheaded, naturally, looked a hard-bitten thirty if she was a day and turnt out to be fifteen. Saddest joey clown I ever employed, another Emmett Kelly when it come to sweeping up a spotlight, jumped ship for R, B and B in Sarasota last winter. Here’s my bread and butter coming in now. Flying Z’s. Don’t stare.”

  A slim, dark-haired young man, an older man with silvering temples, and a women with platinum hair came into the dining tent and sat down at a nearby empty table. All three wore dark warm-up tights. The two men looked like weight lifters. The woman, though middle-aged and almost as ruggedly built as the men, was astoundingly good-looking. As they ate they talked quietly in a Slavic-sounding language. Instead of ham and steak and eggs they had cold cereal and brown bread.

  Molly watched the newcomers intently. “They can’t talk English? That’s why they sit off by themselves?”

  “Oh, they can speak English,” the Slade brother said. “Reason they set alone is what I was telling you, circus is the worst old caste system in the world.” He lowered his voice. “Flying Z’s, they’re the aristocracy. They won’t break bread with nobody, including yours truly. It drives this old circus master to distraction, but it’s tradition, and if you’re circus, tradition’s religion. Say you were to come on board? Running a midway concession, say? You’d be at the bottom of the heap. Lower’n the riggers even. How old would you be, sis?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Well, I don’t want to hold out too much hope, hope being by ’n’ large a poor proposition. But if you ever live to be eighteen, there might be something for you on the midway, you promise not to pester the Flying Z’s today.” He lowered his voice. “For one, Count Z and the Countess lost a gal, Young Count’s sister, offen the high wire in Manhattan, Kansas, this past spring. You probably read about it in the rags and mags. Second most terrible catastrophe I ever witnessed under canvas. She was riding a unicycle over a wire with too much sag in it. Gal and unicycle and all plunged forty feet and shot clean through the safety net. Since then the Z’s have been about one more small di-fugalty away from throwing in the towel and striking back to Warsaw.”

  “She was killed?” Molly said.

  “Yes, and don’t you be getting no wild ideas. She was twenty-one, and she’d been in training since she was two.”

  “I can do three flips off the high trestle over the river outside of town, and if I had another fifteen feet to work with I could do four. Isn’t that right, Frank?”

  I nodded.

  “Flying trapeze ain’t no train trestle.” Slade stood up and fished in his vest pocket. “Here’s your passes, good for the matinee only. Keep little sis here away from the Zempenskis, Frank.”

  “What was the worst catastrophe?” I said.

  “Under canvas? Conflagration when Uncle Phineas Slade’s Big Top took fire in Toledo in ’29. Eighty-one circusgoers, twelve performers, five handsome show gals, and thirteen large circus animals incinerated alive. Funeral cortege estimated in excess of forty-five thousand.”

  The brother thought for a minute. Then he shook his head. “Circusing,” he said. “If it don’t get you co
ming, it will get you going. Brother Beeb was here, he’d tell you the exact same.”

  It was hazier now, and the acrid smell of smoke was stronger. In the west an optical illusion of the northern Green Mountains quivered high above the horizon, like mountains in a dream. The sun looked like a red-hot stove lid. I glanced up at Blackhawk, still facing into the north.

  In the meantime, Rudyard and the Four Horses were hauling into the Big Top wagons that unfolded into blue-and-yellow bleachers. The forklift raced past us, carrying the Zempenskis’ rolled-up safety net and trapeze apparatus. The driver glowered at Molly out of his single eye.

  Inside the tent, roustabouts were setting up flood lamps on metal poles. Underfoot, electrical wires as gaudy as tropical snakes ran everywhere. The sunlight filtering through the faded blue canvas tinted everything a strange pale violet, including the Count and the Young Count as they climbed up rope ladders to rig their high wire and trapezes.

  Molly held out her blue hands. “Look, Frank. Magic!”

  I laughed and put my arm around her shoulder. “You love everything about the circus, don’t you, sweetheart?”

  “I do,” Molly said. Then she said, “Frank? Are you really going into the seminary to be a priest like Father George?”

  “Probably. I guess so.”

  She looked at me hard with her intense green eyes. “And we’d still be best friends?”

  “Sure.”

  Molly nodded. “That’s good,” she said. “Because even if you never marry me, I can stand it if you don’t marry anyone else and we stay best friends. Oh! Look.”

  Nearby, the Countess had begun warming up on a small trampoline. In her black leotard, with her heavy blond hair in a ponytail, her fine features, and her sparkling teeth, she looked like a veteran movie actress. But her eyes were remote and expressionless and trained on the faraway distance, as though looking for something she’d given up hope of seeing, something she looked for out of habit alone, in much the same way she did flip after flip on the trampoline, without thinking about what she was doing.