Spring 1935
On tour with Sax & Tebow
The first time Cecily saw him, she was nearly fifteen years old, and she was up in her bunk in the cupola of the rattling caboose late one April moonlit night as the Sax & Tebow train began groaning slowly out of the yard at Clarksville, Tennessee. She didn’t know what had made her sit up—as suddenly as if she’d heard a mystery sound, though she hadn’t—toss off the blanket, and get on her knees to look out the cupola window, which she had cracked open to let in the spring air, despite the layer of soot that would form on her blanket by morning.
He was running out of the woods, a heavy-looking knapsack slung over his shoulder. Along the length of the train, a dozen ragged men were emerging like fleas off a dog in a bath, but this one, young and tall and wearing a newsboy cap, was the closest to Cecily, and he’d caught her eye, besides. His long legs stretched as he ran. His worn boots kicked up dust. He was clearly aiming for the flatcar loaded with wagons, several cars ahead of Cecily’s caboose. Would he make it?
She held her breath, hoping so. The train was picking up speed. Another man trying for it was grabbed by a cop and yanked to the ground; another bull chased after two more, shouting.
The young man flung his knapsack onto the flatcar. His arms and legs pumped. He leaped for the side, grabbed the upper rail—a split second passed where he was likely to be killed—and then he was on! He pulled himself up and disappeared, probably crawling underneath a wagon to hide.
Cecily let out her breath and, after a moment, lay back down, feeling oddly satisfied, as if she’d had some investment in the outcome, though why she’d imagine that, she did not understand.
Tebow’s hair and mustache had gone gray, though Isabelle said he was “only” forty years old. (Ancient, in other words, thought Cecily.) Isabelle said he was trying everything to keep the circus “afloat.” That was why they’d gone on tour earlier than ever this year—Tebow and Sax had added fifty stops to the usual schedule. Though, so far, Cecily had overheard, operating costs were still outstripping what they took in at the gate. Circuses all over the country had shut down in recent years, what with the hard times, and those that were still in business had mostly transitioned to traveling by truck rather than train. It was said to be the modern way, but Tebow said the very idea was “inglorious” and “stank of desperation,” and he didn’t think it would save money, besides.
It was a “miracle,” Isabelle said, that he’d managed to keep them all going this long. But they’d been out on the road just three weeks so far, and the workers hadn’t been paid in two, and the performers had gotten only half their salaries in cash, the rest written up as IOUs.
Some folks were disgruntled, muttering at meals (which, admittedly, were far less extravagant than they’d been even last year) that this couldn’t go on much longer. Cecily, though, wasn’t bothered, at least not in the short term. Her entire time with the circus, she’d only ever taken two or three dollars per week of her fifteen-dollar, then twenty-dollar, weekly salary. It wasn’t as if she had any time or place to spend more than that. Besides, money had always been a bit meaningless to her, since she’d always had a place to stay and three squares a day guaranteed. At the end of each season, when the IOU column was added up and Tebow paid it out, Isabelle had always taken the bulk of Cecily’s earnings and put them into an account in the Bank of Sturgeon Bay near Sax’s farm in Wisconsin. “Think of it as your trust fund, kid,” Isabelle said, whenever she showed Cecily the handwritten bank book with the numbers filled in. Of course, what Cecily had earned in her first years with the circus had been lost when the bank failed, early on in the Depression, but she’d accumulated quite a lot more since then. And this year, so far, in the IOU column next to her name in the ledger was written $51.
It crossed her mind for the first time to wonder—would Tebow ever be able to pay that, much less what would accrue in the coming weeks? What would she do if the circus failed and the IOUs were rendered meaningless, the way the bank had failed and lost her earnings before?
She decided there was no point in worrying about things she couldn’t control. Anyway, she had maybe two thousand dollars in the Bank of Sturgeon Bay, and she was pretty sure she could live on that for a long while. Also, it was insured now, so couldn’t be lost, thanks to FDR—or so Isabelle had explained and Cecily had accepted as true.
Of course, she had no idea how she’d live on her own if the circus failed—where she’d go, what she’d do. It was too disconcerting even to think of her circus family falling apart and scattering to the winds, so she stopped allowing herself to imagine it. Sax & Tebow couldn’t possibly fail, and that was that.
In Lexington, a photographer came to take new publicity shots of Isabelle with Doc, Virgil, and Wyatt, Mavis with the tigers, Cecily with Prince. “Show more leg!” Tebow yelled, pacing. The forty-four Arabian horses and their riders were gone—too expensive—and the seal and the orangutan had died last winter. Two zebras, both camels, and Tebow’s beloved Blanco had been sold. The dream of getting an elephant was long gone. Harrison West and his lion, plus his Fat Lady wife, Ursula Eve, had gone to work for Seils-Sterling, Paul Giacometti and his liberty horses for Al G. Barnes. The brass band had been let go to save on salaries, the bandwagon sold to a collector; Buzz Gerberding at the calliope provided all the music now. Two years ago, Catherine LeGrande had been dropped from the sky by her husband, Buck, breaking both legs and a collarbone, and in the aftermath of the accident Buck had, by all accounts, lost his mind. All in all, Sax & Tebow traveled with ten fewer railcars than in the past, which saved on per-mile charges, but also meant they were that much less of a spectacle on arrival. (“Still better than arriving by truck,” Tebow would spit, when questioned.) Cecily and Prince always brought up the rear of the parade, and she’d see the people who lined the streets standing on tiptoe, peering into the distance behind her, as if asking, That’s it?
“It’s up to you now!” Tebow shouted, as Cecily smiled and posed, smiled and posed.
Afterward, the photographer, who’d taken a liking to “Jacqueline DuMonde,” presented Cecily with a Brownie box camera. “It’s just an amateur thing. Cost a buck, is all,” he said. “Take it and have fun.” As Cecily turned the heavy thing over in her hands, she was relieved to stop worrying for a moment about money, or the dead orangutan or the absent lion or the ghost of Catherine LeGrande twirling above in gauzy blue, or all the things that people had seen slip through their fingers in recent years, like sand.
Three mornings later, Cecily hopped down from her bunk the minute the train came clanking to a halt in Evansville, Indiana, and soon went out (incognito: slacks, a cardigan, a cap and kerchief) into the rising day with her camera. Tebow, who’d seen the gift of the Brownie being presented, had given her the assignment, suddenly envisioning selling her snapshots to Life magazine. “‘A girl’s-eye view of the circus!’” he’d proclaimed. “‘Inside the mind of a girl bareback rider!’ Brilliant!” A feature on Sax & Tebow would change the direction of all their fortunes, he’d said, promising he’d pay to have her photos developed, then select the best ones to send to Life.
So, as daylight rose and men hauled the wagons down off the train and hitched up the work horses, while others paced out the tent sites in the field near the great bend in the Ohio River and pounded stakes coded with colored streamers to mark where each tent would be raised, and unloaded giant rolls of canvas and began spreading them across the damp ground, Cecily skulked around, trying to capture the activity in the low light of the rising dawn. She found she didn’t mind not being in the spotlight, at least for a few minutes, for a change.
And then she saw the young man.
It had been at least two weeks since she’d watched him jump the train—how she recognized him, she wasn’t sure, except there was an unmistakable grace to the way he moved his long limbs—and at least four years since she’d heard Tebow tell Isabelle that he was going to fire all the white roustabouts and hire only Black men from then on, because he could pay them half what he had to pay whites, and the two wouldn’t work together, anyway. Isabelle had raged, saying Black men traveling with the circus would make them seem low-class, not to mention put all the women in danger. None of this made sense to Cecily, and Tebow had held firm, citing economics.
The young man’s skin was the color of an old penny, and he was pounding in a tent stake with a crew, seven men wielding huge sledgehammers in a choreographed dance, creating a song of wood on metal. She guessed he was no more than seventeen, and that he was bigger and stronger already than he’d been two weeks ago, and that he’d had to learn quickly the rhythm and flow of the pounding.
Had he jumped the train in search of a job, or just in search of a ride out of Clarksville? If the latter, then events had overtaken him—but that was true for many of the people who traveled with Sax & Tebow, Cecily knew.
She snapped a picture of him with the crew. And then another—just of him in profile, his long legs still for a moment, the hammer at rest in his hand. And then the crew hurried on to the next stake, and none of them noticed her at all.
The third time Cecily saw him, she was leading Prince through the maze of tents in the back lot to line up for the parade. It was the eighth of May, and the circus was in Springfield, Ohio. She was wearing her short sapphire costume, tiara, and satin slippers. All around was the typical bustle of the performers gathering, straightening costumes and headdresses and getting the animals ready to go, and Prince was walking with his usual careful dignity, letting nothing bother him.
Suddenly, he reared up, whinnying, jerking back from Cecily. She cried his name, but he reared again, now yanking the lead from her hand. Oh, God, if he ran away—
There was a flash of motion in front of her, low to the ground. It was the young man, lunging to pluck a snake from the grass and hurl it far away, out toward where there was no one. Quick as that, he was up again and had hold of Prince’s lead and was pulling gently to get Prince to settle down, saying in a calm, deep voice, “Hey, boy. Hey. It’s all right. I got you.”
Prince shook his head and ran a small circle three times around Cecily and the young man, who calmly raised the rope over Cecily’s head each time, as if the three of them were in some strange dance. Then, Prince stomped his foot, blew out air, shimmied out a bit more nerves, and leaned toward the young man, who began stroking Prince’s chest with a gentle force that seemed to settle the pony further. “That’s right, boy. Just a little-bitty ole grass snake. He wasn’t gonna harm no one. That’s right.”
Cecily’s fear and alarm were shifting to jealousy and anger: the young man had seemingly stolen Prince’s affection and absolute trust in one fell swoop. “Thank you,” she snapped, heart still pounding. She held out her hand for Prince’s lead.
The young man handed her the rope, tugged his cap brim, and smiled. It was an extraordinary smile, bright and yet mysterious, that both arrested her and made her want to run. There was a look in his eyes of knowing things he would never tell her. “You’re welcome,” he said.
As he turned away, he pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe his forehead, and a tiny, folded piece of paper fell out.
She watched him walking away, glanced around at the people passing, and, when she was sure she wouldn’t be noticed, she led Prince forward, snatched the paper out of the mud, and stuffed it down the front of her dress.
She waited till she could sneak back to the caboose after the parade to pull it out and unfold it.
On it, written in pencil—the handwriting was crooked, unmistakably (Cecily thought) a young man’s—was:
Medicine show Blues/Hot Snoot sandwich
Aunt Mary Orr, 330 Beale St, Memphis
What is the feeling you feel when you finally belong somewhere /
how do you
Recognize it?
It made little sense, but sounded important. And he probably needed his aunt’s address, besides. Cecily would have to figure out a way to get this little paper back to him.
She had never paid much attention to the lives of the roustabouts, but now she carefully observed their routines. They ate after the performers and other staff, except at breakfast, when they ate first, having been up working since 3:30 or 4 a.m., while the performers slept in. They lived in a bunk car near the middle of the train, just behind the flatcars that carried the wagons. They worked all morning, setting up, and slept during the afternoon show, if they could find a quiet spot among the hay bales. Then they worked late into the night to tear everything down and get it back onto the train. There were more than fifty of them, and they tended to stick together with their crews, traveling in small groups of six or seven.
The circus made stops in Cincinnati, Versailles, Seymour, Bedford, Bloomington, Odon, and Robinson, and Tebow sent Cecily’s film off to Kodak for developing, ordering two copies of each print with instructions for them to be sent to him in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, fourteen stops down the line. “You’ve got to spend money to make money,” Tebow said, but he didn’t buy Cecily any new film. Maybe taking pictures was just another thing that was going to slip through her fingers.
Meanwhile, she was no closer to getting the young man’s note back to him. She asked Isabelle, “If you had to get a message to a roustabout, how would you do it?” Isabelle lifted an eyebrow and said Cecily had better not have a message for a roustabout.
So Cecily was on her own. It was that way more and more these days, seemed like. Isabelle had grown increasingly peevish in recent years, after Tebow had put her in charge of managing a peep show that played in a back-row tent, off the midway and behind the tents of Madame Genevieve, the snake charmer, and Fredric Roseau, the sword swallower, unadvertised except by “whisper of mouth,” as Isabelle liked to describe it. Ticket sellers would search out men roaming alone in the crowd “with a certain look in their eye” and tell them in secret tones of the wonders on offer for the low, low price of fifty cents, “just over yonder, just back of beyond.”
Isabelle was always complaining about “the girls,” arguing with them and Margie about their tearaway costumes—just how much could or should be torn away was constantly in debate—plus keeping a hawk-eye out for new “talent” in every town they went to, because rarely did a peep-show girl last more than three months, and Isabelle tried to keep at least five on hand at all times, or it didn’t make for much of a show, she said. “At least their job doesn’t require the amount of training that yours did,” she told Cecily, with a short, humorless laugh. Then she shook her head. “Though, God, what I wouldn’t give for one true professional.”
Effingham, Mattoon, Champaign. Isabelle wasn’t staying overnight in the caboose these days; it was just three short steps through the vestibule to Tebow’s private car, and the two had stopped any pretense of secrecy in recent years. Anyway, it wasn’t as if they were the only pair in the circus living together without benefit of a legal marriage. The older Cecily got, the more she’d discovered that almost everybody had someone they paired up with, at least from time to time. And some who’d been living as married couples throughout Cecily’s tenure with Sax & Tebow, like Little Red and Lorraine LaPointe, weren’t actually married at all.
Cecily found it lonely to travel through the nights in the caboose by herself, and she had no idea why Tebow continued to pay for it. “You’re my special little star; I’ve got to have you well rested,” Tebow had said with a grin, earning a glare from Isabelle, but Cecily could hardly believe that was the whole story. The circus had a lot of stars. She guessed Isabelle must have simply put her foot down about keeping it, but why? It just made the other girls think that Cecily believed herself important, when Cecily would’ve been glad to live in the bunk car with them, because maybe then she’d have found at least one friend.
Besides, when she was with other people, she was invariably Jacqueline DuMonde: savvy, sassy, on top of the world. When she was alone, she was just Cecily again, as lonely and small as she’d ever been.
She took to leaving her few things—books, cardigan, satin slippers, empty Brownie box camera—scattered about the caboose, even in the kitchen area, which always before she and Isabelle had kept impeccably tidy. She did not exactly realize: this was simply to get Isabelle’s attention; to try to get Isabelle back. “If things aren’t a hundred percent shipshape, that’s the first sign everything’s about to go to hell,” Isabelle had always said.
Now, though, Isabelle would raise an eyebrow at the clutter if she came in, but not say a word. It was as if she’d stopped caring altogether, or at least had more important things on her mind. Then, on a pretty May morning in Decatur, Cecily was sitting on the step of the caboose putting on her shoes when the newest peep-show girl, who couldn’t have been more than a year older than Cecily, came out of Tebow’s car, dark hair mussed, wearing last night’s sparkling costume, carrying her high-heeled shoes. She moved in a way that said she did not want to be seen or heard, and she was evidently so focused on achieving that goal that she didn’t look up to notice Cecily at all.
Cecily—puzzled, at first, and then alarmed—was watching the girl walk away across the open field when Isabelle came out onto the vestibule in her robe with a cigarette. She narrowed her eyes when she saw Cecily; when she saw that Cecily had seen the girl.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Isabelle snapped. “You have no idea what all I’ve had to do to save you. The sacrifices I’ve made.”
Cecily blinked back tears. It seemed as if Isabelle had decided to hate her for things that Cecily had never asked for or done; to blame her for everything that had ever gone wrong, or was about to—whatever that was.
And Cecily grew lonelier still, as the days heated up across the rolling green land.
In her bunk, years before, Cecily had constructed a bookshelf with a gate fixture across it that kept the books from falling out while the train was in motion. She ordered books throughout the winter from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, and, before the circus set out in the spring, carefully selected those she’d bring along for the season. Her shelf was only two feet long, so she had to pick ones she wouldn’t mind reading again and again. She was currently rereading The Red Pony, and she’d been using the young man’s note as a bookmark. Every night, before she extinguished the lantern and went to sleep in the lonesome caboose, she read it like a prayer.
She began to wonder: What was the feeling you felt when you belonged somewhere?
Whatever it was, she was sure she had never felt it. Would she recognize it?
She pulled out her Saint Jude card and asked for help finding a way to return the young man’s note to him. If anything had ever seemed impossible, it was that.
She lay awake nights, trying to think of a way. She could not, of course, go anywhere near the bunk car where the roustabouts slept. Besides, even if she hoped to slide the note under his pillow when the car was unoccupied, she’d have no way of knowing which bunk was his, and, even then, it could go to the wrong person, because the men were assigned two to a bunk. She could not go near the young man in sight of other people—it simply wasn’t done—and she couldn’t go anywhere where she might find him alone, even if she knew where such a place might be.
Just in case, she carried the note with her everywhere. But two weeks passed, and she was no closer to solving the problem of how to get it back to him. Her little bunk was getting hotter and hotter as the summer warmed. She kicked off her blanket and slept fitfully, waking with a thin film of soot covering her nightgown and skin.
Then, the same day that the Sax & Tebow train crossed the broad Mississippi to arrive in Hannibal, Missouri, two things happened. First, Janey, while leading Doc down the ramp out of the train, tripped and fell and broke her ankle. Later that same morning, as Cecily left the cook top after lunch by herself, intending to go check on Prince, she saw the young man. He was alone, too, by some miracle, and stepping into a thick line of trees alongside the field. Probably going to try to catch a nap. She looked to make sure no one was watching, then hurried after him.
In the cool shade of the trees and brush—overhead was thick with the sounds of birds singing, insects buzzing, the rustling of leaves—she couldn’t see where he’d gone. She took another step in, and a branch cracked under her foot.
His head poked out from behind a tree. When he saw her, his mouth went sideways; his eyes narrowed with suspicion.
She unfolded the note and held it out so he could see. “I just wanted to give this back to you,” she whispered. “It fell out of your pocket when you helped me with Prince.”
At that, he frowned. “That was weeks ago. Miles and miles ago. You been hanging on to it all this time?”
“Yes. I couldn’t figure out how to get it back to you.”
He smiled, then—that bright, mysterious smile. “Guess you’re not as hoity-toity as you pretend to be.” He came over in three long strides and took the note from her hand. He was at least ten inches taller than she was.
“I’m not hoity-toity at all!”
He laughed and held up the note, and she liked the curves of his mouth and the soft, knowing brown of his almond-shaped eyes. “Thanks for this,” he said, turning to go back behind his tree.
“Wait! Wait, please.”
He turned.
“What do you think is the feeling you feel when you finally belong somewhere?”
He blinked slowly, as if he was recognizing her actual existence for the first time. “If I knew,” he said, “I guess I wouldn’t have written it as a question.” His slight Southern accent was not a Tennessee one, Cecily knew that much for sure, and it made her wonder how he’d ended up in Clarksville; where he was really from.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Well, Miss Jacqueline DuMonde.” He said the name in a way that made her almost ashamed of it; at least, she was ashamed that he knew who she was, when she hadn’t known him. “My name’s Moses Washington Green. But most folks call me Lucky.”
Somehow that all made perfect sense to her. Anyway, she liked the sound of it. “My real name’s Cecily,” she blurted, then felt her face heat up. She couldn’t believe she’d said it out loud. “Almost nobody knows that,” she cautioned.
He cocked his head, as if wondering, just as she was, why on earth she would’ve told him such a thing. This, oddly, made her just rush on. “But you can call me Cecily, if you want. Just don’t let anyone hear!”
He nodded. “Well, good,” he said, like none of that made sense to him at all.
“I saw you when you first hopped the train, back in Clarksville,” she said, as if that could explain.
His eyes widened for an instant, but he quickly composed his face, cocked his head a little again. “Well, it is good to meet you, Miss Cecily DuMonde.” She had never thought of merging those two names, and she liked the sound of them together, as, again, he turned to go.
But she had so much more to talk to him about—she knew that for sure, too, even if it also made no sense.
“I know you’re good with horses,” she blurted.
He stopped and turned to look at her, and she saw then that he was even better with horses than she’d understood, just from the patient way he held his head.
“I don’t know if you heard, but our groom, Janey, she just broke her ankle this morning, and Isabelle’s beside herself saying what’re we gonna do without her. If you go to Tebow and tell him you’ll do the job for the same price as you’re working now, or even just a little bit more, I bet he’ll put you in it, at least till she’s better. It’s for Prince and Doc and Virgil and Wyatt. Tebow won’t want to hire anybody extra because of the money, but we’re really going to need the help. You should go right now, before someone else thinks of it.”
A pause, with him just looking at her. She felt strangely out of breath.
“You gonna try to get me into trouble?” he said.
“No! No, I just—I don’t have many people I can talk to. I’m an orphan and, well, I’ve been here such a long time now—more than half my life, almost—and I’ve almost forgotten I was ever anything but Jacqueline DuMonde, and I think the story of my life has got to be so much more than this, this on-and-off-the-train without ever actually getting anywhere, and I used to almost think it was fun, but maybe I’m tired of it, or else I just wish there was someone who really saw me, all the questions I have and my dreams, like the things you wrote in your note, you know? Destinations. Not my sequins that make me look as if I’m ‘hoity-toity’ or a ‘star,’ which I’m not—” She stopped herself, again unsure why she’d told him all of that, or even where it had come from.
“I don’t much have anyone I can talk to, either,” he said, and, when he turned and walked back deeper into the woods, she thought it would be the last time they ever talked, that he was gone for good.
But, half an hour before the evening show, Tebow brought him to the stable tent and introduced him to Isabelle as the substitute groom. The young man—Moses Washington Green, Cecily thought, with a secret little thrill she did not understand; and then she thought, Lucky—quickly took over fitting the horses with their headdresses. Isabelle fussed and fumed that he wasn’t doing it right, that he couldn’t possibly be capable, but Doc and Virgil and Wyatt warmed to him right away, and Isabelle noticed a rip in the hem of her red sequined skirt that required Margie’s immediate attention, so she had no choice but to leave Lucky to it.
Cecily, in her sparkling blue costume and readying Prince for the show, privately thanked Saint Jude for Lucky’s presence in the stall beside her, though she had to wonder if Janey’s broken ankle had truly been necessary.
But, then again, who was she to question God’s plan?
She’d had to pretend she didn’t know Lucky, of course. And that Isabelle was so up-in-arms about him certainly wasn’t good, when Cecily had been hoping to get back into Isabelle’s good graces somehow.
Still, when no one was looking, Cecily walked by and winked at Lucky. He was filling a water bucket from a hose and gave a slow nod back, in acknowledgment, without changing the unreadable expression on his face. If anyone had been watching, they wouldn’t have noticed a thing. But Cecily felt the earth tip slightly on its axis—though, again, it was hard to understand why.