The Fall of the Year

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “One!” the ringmaster shouted.

  The countess spun again.

  “Two!” shouted the ringmaster and half the crowd.

  In unison the crowd rose. “Three!” they roared as Countess Sophie performed her final revolution and the Young Count, hanging from his trapeze by his legs, catapulted himself out over the ring, reached for her outstretched taped wrists, and plucked her from thin air as surely as a father catches a child tossed over his head for play, while the Common cheered its heart out.

  The spectators continued to applaud as Countess Zempenski and her son dropped lightly onto the safety net and somersaulted out onto the sawdust. There they were joined by the Count and the other circus performers. Even a few smirking roustabouts bent a leg to the thundering applause.

  Only Molly remained silent until, at last, the cheering died down and the performers ran out of the ring. Then, over the last smattering handclaps, over the calliope playing “Under the Hippodrome,” she shouted, “That’s nothing! I can do four full flips, and I will before this day is out.”

  “So she’s given you the slip again,” a very unhappy Father George was saying as he caught up with me on the circus midway late that afternoon. “How the hell did that happen?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said. “Do you know what that damned kid did right after the matinee? She—”

  “Good God almighty, the monkey’s broke loose!”

  It was Slade, rushing toward us, raising the hue and cry for his missing animal.

  “Look!” someone shouted, pointing across the green and up at the courthouse tower.

  Sure enough, the big white-and-black monkey was making its way swiftly up the bittersweet vine clinging to the side of the tower. By the time I joined the gathering crowd on the courthouse lawn, the runaway monkey was already higher than the limp blue-and-yellow pennants on the Big Top.

  In the meantime, the hook-and-ladder truck, driven by Sheriff White, had skidded up onto the lawn beside us, siren screaming. But the ladder, when fully extended, still came up a few feet shy of the roof.

  Slade paced back and forth on the lawn, while the Young Count called for the animal to come down. But the ten-thousand-dollar monkey continued its desperate ascent up the bittersweet vine, from time to time looking down over its shoulder in absolute terror, as if trying to escape not only from the village and the circus but from the earth itself.

  “If it isn’t redheaded scalawags, it’s runaway apes,” Slade said in a distraught voice.

  “Or both,” said Bumper Stevens. Bumper removed his cigar from his mouth and pointed its glowing end at the clock tower. Coming over the ridge of the roof below the tower, clinging to the bittersweet vine for dear life, was Molly Murphy.

  She stood, ran along the roof peak to the base of the tower, paused, leaped high into the vine again, and continued to pull herself up nearly as fast as the monkey was climbing. Her left Ked came loose, and she kicked it far out over the steep slate roof below. It landed in front of the hook-and-ladder, bounced once, and came to rest right side up, like a single shoe in the road near an unspeakably bad automobile accident.

  “Molly!” I shouted with my heart in my mouth. “Come down from there!” But I might as well have been shouting at the monkey, which, high above her in the hazy air, was resting just below the tower clock.

  Here, some ten or twelve years ago, a professional human fly who called himself the Great Zeno had been stymied in his attempt to climb the courthouse tower. Zeno had come to Kingdom Common claiming grandiosely that human hands had not yet erected the structure he couldn’t scale. In his résumé he had alleged conquests of the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Golden Gate Bridge, but after ascending to the uppermost reaches of the bittersweet vine, he’d been stopped in his tracks by the smooth face of the clock. He was obliged to descend in ignominy and return to the town his fee of five hundred dollars.

  Yet a human fly was, after all, a human being, not a monkey, and the monkey, though visibly trembling, when it finally looked down and saw Molly climbing up the bittersweet vine like a monkey herself, made a desperate leap to the long iron minute hand of the clock. It scampered up that to the hour hand, and up the hour hand to a slight foothold atop the black iron XII. From there it sprang to the granite sill of the lookout window in the tower wall. Still trembling, it ducked inside. A few moments later it appeared on the railed walkway atop the tower, where it clung, shivering, to the base of the weathervane in the likeness of Blackhawk.

  To my horror, Molly was at least three quarters of the way up the tower now. Here the bittersweet vine was so slender that the tendrils holding it to the granite blocks were almost too slight to see from below. Yet surely and steadily she crept upward, barefoot now, splayed against the perpendicularity of the battlement-like tower, which seemed to have been built just for this moment. From where I stood, far below, she looked no larger than a small child, pressed against the pink granite made even rosier by the haze in the air. Once she momentarily lost her foothold and slid a foot or so down the face of granite blocks, her legs dangling. A short length of the vine pulled away, and for a dreadful moment, Molly started to sway out from the tower. Somehow she lunged for and found another handhold; but as she did, a chunk of mortar, worked loose over the decades by the vine, broke free and fell to the slate roof below, where it shattered into several pieces with the heart-stopping sound of ice falling onto a hard pavement from a great height.

  Now Molly was testing the vine with short tugs before putting her weight on it. The clock face that had ultimately thwarted the Great Zeno loomed just above her, its hands eternally frozen at twenty of twelve. Meanwhile the monkey had climbed up onto Blackhawk’s back and was clinging there like a jockey riding down the home stretch.

  At this point a new element was introduced into the drama unfolding high above our town. As the monkey, chittering with terror, clung to Blackhawk, and Molly clung to the uppermost tendrils of the bittersweet vine, a blue-clad figure appeared, running up the extended ladder of the fire truck. It was the Young Count, still in his circus tights, rushing to the rescue of Molly or the monkey or both. When he reached the top of the ladder he did not pause at all but simply leaped across the yard-wide space to the roof and sprinted up the slates, only sheer momentum preventing him from slipping backward and plunging forty feet to the steps below.

  Just as the Young Count reached the base of the tower, Molly gave a powerful surge and scrabbled up the last few feet below the clock supported by her toes and fingers alone. She got one hand over the narrow projecting cornice at the base of the clock and pulled herself to her knees, then her feet. Using the VII as a foothold, she followed the monkey’s route up the minute and hour hands. On top of the XII, she reached for the windowsill of the lookout. But, like the monkey, she would have to jump for it.

  She glanced down at the Young Count, now more than halfway up the tower, bent her legs to the degree that her perch, almost flush with the clock face, would allow her to, and leaped for the sill. Just then an unearthly scream rent the smoky air.

  My first thought was that Molly had missed the sill and was already falling. In fact, it was the monkey that had screamed. Molly was hanging by her fingertips from the granite windowsill, now hauling herself by main force up to her elbows, now crouched in the lookout window, and now out of sight, presumably on her way up the inside of the tower to the trap door in the roof and the railed walkway, by whatever means she could find, the wooden stairway from below having rotted away years ago.

  Abruptly the monkey screamed again, a scream more piercing than mill whistle, fire whistle, train whistle. It screamed yet a third time as Molly emerged onto the iron-railed parapet atop the tower, where no man or woman had stood for more than half a century. And thirty feet below, at the uppermost extremity of the bittersweet vine, the Young Count stopped short where Zeno the Human Fly had stopped.

  Now a contingent from the fire brigade came running with the town
’s big white nylon safety hoop with a red circle in the center. They stood on the courthouse steps—Harlan Kittredge, Stub Poulin, Abel Feinstein, and Armand St. Onge—holding the net and looking about as foolish as four well-intentioned firemen can look. What good would the hoop do if Molly fell from the tower onto the slate roof?

  Another murmur rose from the crowd, a concerted suspiration, as Molly started shinnying up the pole supporting Blackhawk. The entire weathervane wobbled as she set one foot on the extended back leg of the famous pacer, and shifted her weight onto the horse. She reached up and eased the monkey onto her back, where it remained, its teeth chattering, as she descended to the lookout, vanished inside, and reappeared at the window, this time with a length of stout rope, apparently left there decades earlier by the steeplejack who’d erected Blackhawk. The monkey still on her back, she lowered herself, with the assistance of the rope, to the clock and down its face to the bittersweet vine. Motioning for the Young Count to precede her, she continued down the vine with the monkey.

  Their descent took perhaps ten minutes. Each time the Young Count reached up to give Molly a hand to step on, she waved him away; when they reached the ridge of the slate roof, she motioned for the firemen, still jockeying around the steps below, to take the safety hoop around to the side of the courthouse, down which she proceeded on the ancient vine. Some twenty feet above the ground, she let go and dropped triumphantly into the middle of the red circle, still carrying the monkey.

  As Molly landed, a great roar went up from the crowd.

  “Upstaged,” said Slade. But he was unable to keep a trace of admiration from creeping into his features as he turned to Bumper Stevens and me and said, “Well, boys, if I could contrive to lug a courthouse with a hundred-foot tower around with me from town to town, I might actually have a place for her.”

  “You were right,” I said to Father George. “I should have kept better track of her.”

  “You bet you should have,” he said bluntly. “However, all’s well that ends well. Did you get her on the 6:04 all right?”

  I nodded. “She’s back at the convent by now—if she hasn’t commandeered the locomotive and headed to Montreal or Vancouver, which I’m inclined to doubt. She seemed pretty well satisfied with her day’s work and willing to go back to the convent by the time she left.”

  Father George and I were on good terms again now, laughing about the events of the day over steak sandwiches and beers in the hotel dining room before the circus’s evening performance.

  “She certainly knows exactly what she wants to do with her life,” I said. “I’ll give her that.”

  “She does,” Father George said. “I’ve no doubt that in another year, after she graduates, she will, too. If she survives that long, of course.”

  He looked out the window at the Big Top and rides and concessions on the green, their brightly colored lights glowing in the settling dusk like Christmas lights. “How about you, son? Do you still know exactly what you want to do with your life?”

  “Sure. The same thing you have.”

  Father George smiled. “You mean spending every minute of your spare time hunting and fishing? Writing stories?” He gestured out the window toward the common. “Playing baseball?”

  “You know what I mean—being a priest. But sure, I want to do those other things, too. You always have.”

  “I have,” Father George said. “And I’ve been damn lucky to be able to. But I’ll tell you something, Frank. The days when a priest could play ball, fish, and hunt are drawing to a close. Even up here in the Kingdom. If I were just starting out in orders now instead of forty years ago, I’d have to live my life differently!”

  “So what should I do? I’ve had my ups and downs this summer, with Foster Boy and even today with Molly. I could have gladly wrung her neck when she started up that damn tower. But I like working with the people of the parish better than anything I’ve ever done.”

  “Your experience with Foster Boy didn’t shake your faith?”

  “Not really. You always told me that the best way to express faith in God is to help other people. I believe that as much or more than ever. But when Louvia and I went to Little Quebec that afternoon—”

  “What about when you went to Little Quebec?” Father George said, smiling again.

  “I met a girl,” I said. “A girl I’ve thought about a lot lately.”

  “Good,” my adoptive father said, to my surprise. “Good for you, son. Keep thinking about her. And as far as this fall is concerned, nothing’s cut in stone yet. Remember that.”

  Relieved that I’d been able to talk about this matter, I ordered another beer, and then we drank coffee and talked about baseball. I had little interest in seeing the circus performance again, but around nine o’clock Father George went home to work on his “Short History” and I ambled over to the green for a final look at the Last Railway Extravaganza and Greatest Little Show on Earth.

  I arrived at the Big Top entrance just as it started to rain. The tent gave off a translucent blue glow, and its pennants snapped in the breeze that had brought the rain. Like a huge beating heart, the whole Big Top seemed to contract and expand to the calliope’s strains of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Nearby, in the slanting raindrops, the roustabouts had already begun to dismantle the midway rides and booths. The mythological carousel rolled by on its wagon, the sphinx and basilisk and Cyclops appearing to grin at me in the rain.

  “Where’s little carrot-top sis?”

  It was my friend the Slade brother, who’d stepped outside the Big Top for a breath of fresh air during the aerial finale.

  “She’s gone back to school,” I said. “I think she figured the evening show would be an anticlimax after her performance at the courthouse this afternoon.”

  “No doubt,” Slade said. “Well, next time you see her, you tell her for me, when she turns eighteen, supposing we don’t go totally under in the meantime, I might be willing to start her out on a popcorn concession.”

  The rain drove harder. I looked around at the wagons heading back through the rain toward the flatbeds in the railyard. The dismantling of the circus had none of the glamour and romance of setting up; the roustabouts were racing the downpour, the train schedule, the next afternoon’s performance deadline. I wandered into the tent out of the rain, past the empty ballyhoo stand, and emerged into the blaring music and lights just as Slade was bowing the performers into the ring for their encore. Two of the riggers were dismantling the Zempenskis’ safety net and rolling it up. Others were yanking up the stakes pinning down the side panels of the tent. Rain gusted in on the spectators crowded onto the bleachers. The whole town seemed packed into the Big Top tonight, standing to applaud the performers.

  As the calliope swung into “Daisy, Daisy,” the Zempenskis ran hand in hand into the ring. At the same moment, one of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse came prancing out into the spotlight. Clinging to its back, flopping from side to side like a cloth doll, was the circus drunk, dressed tonight like a railroad tramp, an old-fashioned bindlestiff in a long seersucker suit jacket, baggy trousers held up by a rope, a red bandanna around his neck, and a slouch hat pulled down over his eyes. It was an odd moment, coming as it did after the Zempenskis’ finale. Some in the audience were already leaving.

  The flopping tramp rose unsteadily to his feet on the back of the Appaloosa and circled the ring once, scattering performers in all directions. He leaped onto the rope ladder leading to the trapeze rigging, still swaying in the top of the tent. As he ascended, casting off jacket and trousers and bandanna, I realized that Count Zempenski was still standing with his wife and son near Slade. The climbing figure pulled off his slouch hat and sailed it out over the crowd—revealing a cascade of bright red hair! A moment later Molly Murphy was standing high above the ring on the tiny platform attached to the center tent pole.

  As the Count started fast up the rope ladder after her, Molly reached out and caught the swinging trapeze. The calliope faded
out. And far below, standing near the circus performers who, like the townspeople, were all gazing upward, the 150-year-old drummer boy and Parsee smiled a wholly evil smile and started his rolling accompaniment to the aerial show.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” Molly shouted, “in a death-defying encore, using no safety net, the Magnificent Molly Murphy will attempt the never-before-accomplished feat of executing four complete midair revolutions off the flying trapeze, into the hands of Count Zempenski the Younger. Count, ascend to your trapeze.”

  Her announcement actually halted the old Count midway up his ladder. After the briefest pause, his son raced up the rope ladder across the ring to the trapeze opposite and below Molly, who now shouted in a triumphant voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. I give you—Flying Molly Murphy!”

  With the rolled-up safety net lying limp in the sawdust and the eyes of all Kingdom Common upon her, Molly grasped the trapeze ropes, swung up into a sitting position on the wooden bar and launched herself out into the spotlight. The drumroll intensified. Molly dropped down to hang from the bar by her hands. The trapeze swung in a wider arc. The vibrating drumroll reached a deafening crescendo, then stopped altogether as Molly released her grip and spun over like a hooked trout, her bare feet brushing the blue roof of the tent.

  “One,” she cried out.

  “Two!” This time, as Molly twirled in the air, a few members of the crowd counted with her.

  “Three!” Molly was plummeting like flaming Icarus, her red hair streaming behind her.

  “FOUR!” roared the circusgoers of Kingdom Common, as Molly completed the unprecedented quadruple somersault.

  The Young Count, flying toward her upside down on his trapeze, reached for her hands. He missed, just grazing her outstretched fingertips. But as she shot past him toward the netless void, he caught, in his iron grasp, one slender ankle, as if they had done the act together a thousand times.