This Side of Jordan

by Monte Schulz

  Then one of the deputies approached the fallen gorilla and poked the carcass with the toe of his boot. He holstered his revolver and walked carefully around the perimeter of the beast whose blood soaked the dirt. He paused at the gorilla’s head, then bent down for a closer look. He frowned. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  He leaned forward and undid two buttons poorly hidden in the fur at the neckline.

  “Looky-here, Tom!” he called to his partner.

  Then the deputy slipped off the head of the fallen beast, exposing the ashen lifeless face of Chester Burke. “Why, this ain’t no gorilla. It’s just some fellow in a monkey suit.”

  One morning in early October, Alvin Pendergast sat in a prairie grass meadow watching the old trucks and painted wagons of Emmett J.

  Laswell’s Traveling Circus Giganticus load up along a narrow dirt road that led west beyond the woods to a farther country. He had packed his own suitcase in the upper dark of the boardinghouse and left by the back door without saying a word. He brought three apples and a handful of crackers in the pockets of his coat and ate one of the apples while he sat there. His brown Montgomery Ward suitcase lay beside him in the damp switchgrass. Except for the spare cash-money Chester had neglected to collect from the dwarf, the farm boy believed it contained all he owned in the world.

  Half a year ago he had left home for fear of being put in the grave, woefully ignorant of life. He had thought to escape somehow the relapse of consumption that raced through his blood by going away where nobody he laid eyes upon would judge him according to the prognosis of his decay, where each day would be a clean slate upon which brave new adventures would be written. Instead, some secret corner of his heart longed for familiarities unaffected by disease: a bee-swarmed path behind Culbertson’s lumber shanties, goodnight melodies from his daddy’s radio set, that old signalman on the Burlington railway staggering along the tracks at six o’clock each evening with a load of hootch in him, the damp Illinois corn wind in autumn. Guarded mercies too numerous to evade. Six months of sneaking in and out of these strange towns had left him lonely and tired, reconciled to worsening nightsweats and a malignant guilt. On the wooded path back to the boardinghouse after Chester’s death at the circus, Alvin had asked the dwarf about the disposition of the gangster’s departed spirit, if he knew where such sinners reside in the afterlife. The dwarf explained that their late companion was a moral imbecile whose criminal passions had consigned him forever to a lightless Hades, incapable of inflicting further pain and misery on fellow souls yet held slave by his habitual desire to do so. He would thirst but never drink, complicit in his own agony. There is no peace for the wicked and the damned, the dwarf assured Alvin, and left it at that. They were free now, their torment resolved, and that would have to be enough. He refused to utter another word on the subject. What he had failed to clarify was what Chester’s fate meant for Alvin, to where the farm boy’s own spirit was tending, shamed as he was by unforgivable behavior all this past summer long. Contrition was meaningless; what’s done was done. How was he supposed to live out what days remained him now, infected body and soul? That secret corner of his heart provided the answer: He would go back home to the farm where he belonged, after all. He would take up a tin pail and fling oats to Mama’s chickens and sweep potato bugs off the porch after supper and help old Uncle Boyd dig that ditch along his driveway and repair Uncle Henry’s barn floor and fill a bushel peach basket for Aunt Hattie and another for Auntie Emma and learn to whistle a dandy ragtime jig outside Granny Chamberlain’s window where autumn’s shadows are thatched with maple branches and moonlight, for it was she who told him once that the answers to all life’s riddles are found within a box of tricks hidden up in this good earth, God alone knows where, and nothing of truth is revealed until all our days here have run their course. Some tomorrow he would put on his work-clothes at dawn and breathe the field smoke of burning cornstubble and share another dinner plate of fried catfish with Cousin Frenchy and tell his sisters a pretty swell bedtime story; and when his own time came, be it sooner or later, he would go to his rest, safe at last in the bosom of his family.

  Alvin left the chewed-over apple core in the thick grass and wiped his hands on the back of his trousers. Most of the circus wagons were loaded. Rumbling truck engines spewed exhaust into the cold morning air. He saw the dwarf on the road by the great steam calliope, a black derby hat on his misshapen head. Rascal carried a flat wooden box under one arm as he left the circus caravan and crossed the road down into the grassy meadow toward the farm boy. A chilly breeze rippled through the autumn maples, scattering old dried leaves all about. The farm boy smelled burning ash on the morning air. He picked up the cheap matting suitcase and began walking toward the wagons. The first couple of trucks started rolling forward. Fifty yards from the road, he met the dwarf who told him, earnestly, “They were quite disappointed.”

  The farm boy set his old suitcase back down in the wet switchgrass. “You know I didn’t promise nothing.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I ain’t got an act like you. I’d be shoveling manure like some hick.”

  The farm boy kicked at a muddy clump of grass. His fever was gone for now, but he still felt tired. Up on the road, another truck engine roared to life.

  “Why should our endeavor be so loved, and the performance so loathed?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  Rascal smiled. “My dear Josephine asked me to give you this.”

  He handed Alvin the wooden box.

  “What is it?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Alvin undid the brass latch that held it shut. Inside the box he found a polished steel throwing-knife with a leather handle.

  The dwarf told him, “It’s a souvenir from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show where my very own Josephine performed the treacherous Wheel of Death on two continents. She risked her mortal life for six dollars a day and meals, and when the show closed, a Pawnee warrior by the name of Gideon White Cloud gave it to her in celebration of her extraordinary courage. Josephine wishes you to have it in appreciation of your own.”

  The farm boy took the knife out of the wooden box and rolled it over in his fingers. “Ain’t you ascared no more?”

  “Of course I am,” replied the dwarf, “but when there’s no peril in the fight, there’s no glory in the triumph. Fear is bravery’s stepchild. Hiding under the floorboards of my bedroom last spring, I’d resigned myself to the sorry prospect of scavenging and disrepute because I was ignorant of the steadfastness of hope. Auntie always imagined me incapable of sorting out my own affairs and too weak of heart to seek my way in the world without her constant guidance. She mistook my natural hesitancy for cowardice, and perhaps her stingy opinion informed my own ridiculous behavior these past few years. Well, no matter, because, you see, what I’ve learned since crawling out from under that tacky old house is that we needn’t be children to fix our sights past tomorrow, or the day afterward, and be brave enough to call that our rightful place.”

  A dark flock of sparrows sailed over the meadow toward the morning woods as the farm boy thought about Hadleyville and how big the sky looked west of the Mississippi. “We seen a lot.”

  The dwarf grinned. “Oh, but there’s so much more.”

  Up on the road, the pipes of the gilded calliope shrieked and steam rose into the hazy morning sky. Flanked by a few last scrambling roustabouts loading on, the painted circus caravan had begun moving.

  “You won’t change your mind?”

  The farm boy shook his head. “There ain’t much sense in it.”

  He squeezed the knife handle tightly, kicked harder at the clump of grass. What’s done was done. Somebody rang an iron ship’s bell mounted atop one of the circus wagons. The clanging echo shot out across the autumn meadow.

  “My friend, you’ve been a wonderful traveling companion. Perhaps one day we’ll find each other in another circumstance more fitting our best ambitions. You know, Uncle Augus
tus always told me the journey provides its own possibilities.”

  “I hope so.”

  The dwarf reached into his back pocket and took out a small shiny-black arrowhead. “This is a token of my own admiration. I dug it out of a beaver dam on the Belle Fourche River on my first excursion out West and have held it for luck ever since. I want you to have it.” He handed the arrowhead to the farm boy. “Thou art now the favorite of fortune.”

  Alvin smiled, deeply touched by both gifts. “Thanks.”

  “Well, good-bye, my friend.”

  “Good-bye.”

  They shook hands, the farm boy and the dwarf, then parted as the autumn wind swept out of the east, chasing fallen leaves across the meadow.

  Alvin Pendergast watched Rascal hurry away through the damp switchgrass, watched until the dwarf joined the long caravan of rolling circus wagons heading to another horizon.

  Then he, too, started for home.

  THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK THOSE WHO WALKED WITH HIM, THESE MANY YEARS.

  STEVEN ALLABACK, MATTHEW J. BRUCCOLI, WYLENE DUNBAR, KAREN FORD, BILL HOTCHKISS, STERLING LORD, SHELLY LOWENKOPF, DENNIS LYNDS, GARDNER MEIN, DAVID MICHAELIS, STUART MILLER, JODY MILLWARD, JANE ST. CLAIR, PHILIP SPITZER, DAVID STANFORD, SID STEBEL, GINGER SWANSON, GEETS VINCENT, BARBARA ZITWER.

  AND GARY GROTH, WHO SAW IN MY WORK WHAT I HAD HOPED WAS THERE ALL ALONG.

  LASTLY, MY WIFE AND FAMILY, IN WHOM THE MEANING OF THIS BOOK IS FOUND.