We began saving our nickels and dimes the day after the posters went up on the telephone poles. We hunted bottles along the highway’s edge until our hair was thick with dust. We stole old car batteries from behind garages and sold them to the itinerant scrap dealer who drove up and down back lanes in his green Ford truck. We peddled George’s fish fillets to the campers. One pound of pickerel fillets for fifty cents. Our share was a nickel. We cut grass. When we relaxed at the beach or the park, we had terse, distracted conversations.
“Elephants. There are always elephants.”
“And tigers.”
And lions. And clowns. And women, although we weren’t really sure where women fitted in. We were in grade seven and wouldn’t have thought of women except for the poster. On it, there was the picture of a woman on horseback. There’d never been a circus in town before, so we took our knowledge from the Saturday matinees.
“And snakes,” Gerald said. Big snakes that wound around women’s bodies. We said we didn’t believe him, but he was a year older and his father had been in the navy during the war and he knew things the rest of us hadn’t even dreamed of. That night I had nightmares about a monstrous snake trying to swallow me, and all the reassurances I’d received from endless Tarzan comics in which he regularly killed anacondas with his hunting knife didn’t come to my rescue. High-wire acts, I said. That was the comic books again. Archie went to a circus once, and he and Veronica and Betty watched acrobats flying through the air with death-defying bravery.
The circus was going to be in the big field directly across from my parents’ house. The field was a square block of flat grassy land, where during the long summer evenings we played rugby or baseball.
All over town, in pickle jars or in the bottom of socks, nickels and dimes and quarters were piling up. Every day, without planning it, coming from swimming at the big dock or from fishing for perch, we gathered before the one large, full-colour poster that hung in Bjarnason’s store window. Here the lion was caught in mid-leap, the white horse trotted boldly (the girls who infrequently joined us were more interested in the lady bareback rider in a short white dress, with feathers in her hair). I even took to stroking the days off the calendar, drawing an χ through each day as if to say thank goodness that is over.
In the evenings, when we’d finished playing baseball or football, a peculiar silence would fall over us, as if, collectively, we were all imagining how the field—which had always been just as it was, flat, covered in grass, edged on three sides with ditches from which the occasional muskrat emerged, marked in one corner with a chicken-wire backstop and our wooden bases-would become transformed. It seemed impossible. There was nothing there now, except us and the swallows chasing mosquitoes—the easy silence as we waited for our mothers to call us in to get ready for bed.
No one knew where it started, but on the day before the circus was to arrive, a rumour ran among us like a grass fire, whipped this way and that, confirmed and denied a hundred times. The circus would hire kids to help them set up the tents. They would pay with tickets to the matinee.
“The freak show,” Robert said. “That’s what I want to see. They’ve got two-headed babies and a lizard man and a bearded woman.”
The circus vehicles were already parked on the field when I woke up. Just outside my bedroom window there were elephants—well, one elephant—and he was being used to help set up the tents. I couldn’t wait for breakfast. I dressed and ran across the field to offer my services. Others were there ahead of me, but I still got a job pulling ropes tight. Three or four of us would heave on the rough hemp while one of the men drove a peg into the ground.
Secretly, we watched for the clowns, the bareback riders, the magicians, the performers, but they were nowhere to be seen. Three horses were tethered to the side of a truck. There were dogs. Three lions in cages. There was a dwarf. I stared at him so hard I walked into a large crate. We weren’t much help but we were given yellow tickets anyway. By noon, five tents had been set up and all the feverish activity stopped. The circus people vanished into their trailers.
The matinee was wonderful. The tent put-er-uppers were hardly recognizable in their costumes and their makeup. They glittered with sequins as they rode and strode about the ring. The acrobats flew back and forth as recklessly as anyone could ever have hoped. Before the end of the afternoon performance, I would have sacrificed parents, house, baseball games, everything, to run away with the circus. When I stumbled home, it was not so much individual scenes that filled my head but a whirling, ever-changing pattern of colours. It was like trying to remember having looked into a kaleidoscope and not being able to recall individual patterns but intense, confusing colour. At supper time, I was frantic with the fear that my father would be late from work and that we would miss the evening performance.
By the time we got to the circus, the crowd was bigger than any I’d ever seen before. You could tell the farmers in from the country with their families. The men were burned brown with a band of white skin where their hair had been cut. The boys wore freshly pressed checked shirts. The women wore dresses and the girls wore blouses and skirts with crinolines. Even the fishermen had squeezed into suits in which all the fold marks could be seen.
After the show, my parents wandered away to visit the rest of the circus, to talk with everyone they knew.
Just inside one tent a table had materialized, and on it, a man with a checkered vest was manipulating three walnut shells. He kept revealing and hiding a pea and challenging anyone to find it. The men were standing, suspicious, in a semicircle, and behind them there was a semicircle of their wives. No one came forward until one of the boys who worked at the fish shed put down ten dollars. There was a stir. Wages were a dollar an hour, and most people who worked for themselves didn’t make that. Ten dollars would buy a week’s groceries. The man behind the table moved his hands back and forth, switching the shells, revealing the pea then hiding it, but never so fast that I could not see where it was. Finally he stopped, and the boy pointed to the middle shell. The man turned over the shell, and there was the pea. He passed over ten dollars. With that, one of the farmers stepped forward, and he won a dollar. Another won two dollars. The farmers pulled worn bills from their pockets, bills they had been hoarding all winter for seeds and tools, and their eyes never left the shells. I was going to put down my five dollars when my grandfather caught my hand and shook his head. It’s there, Bill, I said. I saw it. When the shell was turned over it wasn’t there, and my grandfather dragged me out of the tent.
I saw it, I said. It wasn’t there, Bill said, it was between his fingers. The Mounties should put a stop to it.
The Mounties, I realized, were standing at the back of the crowd, watching. We watched them watch the game until they turned around and walked away.
I had seen everything there was to see in the tents and, out of curiosity, threaded my way among the trailers, being rewarded by a glimpse of a clown taking off his makeup, of a trainer prodding the lions into separate cages. At the back of the farthest tent, I discovered a narrow stage. Beneath a single light that hung from a pole, a woman dressed in a red costume covered with sequins and feathers was pacing back and forth. A barker, a short fat man wearing a checked jacket and white pants, was calling her the hootchie-kootchie queen, and every time he said it, a narrow man who needed a shave would bang on a drum and the woman would wiggle and shake and slide one shoulder out of her top or lift up her dress. Miss Veronica, the barker said, had acted on the London stage, had been at the Old Vic, had played Ophelia, Desdemona, and now had consented to come all the way to Canada to share her many talents. She was, I thought, glamorous. She had high-heeled red shoes, a dress that shimmered like jewels, dark hair piled high with feathers, rings on every finger. A dollar to see the dance of the seven veils, the dance that drove King Herod mad, an opportunity to understand temptation, just in here, the barker called. After all the men had gone in, I offered the drummer a dollar. He was also the ticket taker.
He started to wave me away, but the barker said, let him in, he might learn something. The space was small and crowded and smelled of sweat and anticipation and there was a raised stage so Miss Veronica’s feet were at the level of the spectators’ waists. The barker played a guitar and the ticket seller was transformed again to a drummer. Miss Veronica began to dance, undoing buttons and wiggling suggestively. In a couple of minutes she was down to what today would be considered a modest two-piece bathing suit. That’s the hootchie-kootchie, the barker said, but those of you who want to know the secret of the seven veils will pay three dollars more. All will be revealed. A number of men groaned and complained loudly but no one left. The drummer took their money; he gave me his thumb for the doorway.
Outside, I skirted the tent until I found a small rip. By standing on tiptoe I could see Miss Veronica. As the music started again she began to twist and turn, and one coloured veil after another floated through the air. After a time she took off her top and held it up to a round of applause. As the men shifted about, I saw her breasts, the first I remembered seeing except for women nursing babies in our kitchen, and then there was a silence from the men and she held up the bottom of the suit. I couldn’t see anything more because of all the men in the way, but the music became faster and louder and Miss Veronica appeared and disappeared from my view and then the guitar player threw something to her. Now, Miss Veronica will demonstrate her own special talent for you, he shouted, then went back to playing, and she did something that made all the men laugh but I couldn’t see what it was, then one of the men yelled, I’ll give you twenty bucks to teach my old lady that trick, and she grabbed his hat and threw it back to him, then the music stopped and the drummer pulled a curtain in front of her. Some of the men groaned, but the barker said, there’ll be another show in one hour.
I’d read about Salome and the seven veils at Sunday school, but I’d never thought of it before as being done by a real person, and I felt a sudden sense of shock and wondered if it had been like this, crowded with men, noisy and hot. That night I dreamt of Salome, though in my dream she was not the silent, decorous young woman illustrated in my Bible storybook, but Miss Veronica, and while she danced, a tray was brought in. When it was turned toward me, it was not the head of John the Baptist but mine, and I jerked from sleep, crying.
In the morning, the circus was gone. They had vanished as secretly as they had come. My mother and father were already up, and I heard my mother comment on how the circus had disappeared, leaving no trace, and my father said, yes, they knew how to make a quick exit. I slipped outside looking for souvenirs, but there weren’t any, only deep ruts gouged into our baseball diamond and, where the animals had been chained, piles of shit already covered with flies.