Summer 1935
On tour with Sax & Tebow
Isabelle hated Lucky from the start. She tried everything to prove he didn’t know what he was doing with the horses, but she couldn’t trip him up. She swore that she, Doc, Virgil, and Wyatt could “hardly function” without Janey, who’d gone to recuperate at her parents’ in Milwaukee. She railed that it was inappropriate (“if not unacceptable”) to have a Black groom for the prize show horses.
Tebow, though, said it made perfect sense from a budgetary standpoint, and that she ought to be happy. The roustabout crew could function a man short for a couple months—anyway, Lucky was still getting up early to help with setup, so his old crew wasn’t even fully a man short—and did Isabelle really want to do all the work of caring for Doc, Virgil, and Wyatt by herself, including mucking out their stalls, their section of the railcar?
Finally, Tebow said, if Isabelle didn’t stop fussing, he was going to change the billing and possibly the order and content of the acts to make Jacqueline DuMonde the headliner, and Isabelle merely Jacqueline’s “older sister.” No more would Cecily simply warm up the crowd for Isabelle. “I’ll bet little Jackie could even handle the big horses now,” Tebow told Isabelle, implying that maybe Isabelle wasn’t needed anymore, maybe “Isabelle DuMonde” was passé, washed up at the age of twenty-seven.
Someone other than Cecily must’ve overheard him, because Cecily didn’t say a word, but rumors started to fly. “A miracle she’s lasted this long, really,” people started to whisper, about Isabelle. Of course, no one truly believed Tebow would do it: take his darling Isabelle off the headline, even if, in what seemed to be developing as the general view, she deserved it.
The circus made three more stops in Missouri, then crossed into Iowa—Ottumwa, Oskaloosa, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo. In Waterloo, Tebow came to Cecily with a yellow envelope full of the snapshots she’d taken, freshly returned from Kodak. He’d already chosen the best ones, he said, and sent them off to Life with a letter telling all about Jacqueline DuMonde and the Sax & Tebow Spectacular (a moniker he’d just invented). “Hang on to these copies,” he told her. “We may need them.” He didn’t say for what.
Privately, in her bunk, on the night of her fifteenth birthday, which went unremarked by anyone, Cecily studied the images she’d managed to capture. Madame Genevieve with her snake twined around her shoulders; a laughing clown; Wyatt looking handsome in his feather headdress. Maybe there was a chance Life would like them, she thought.
Then, without admitting even to herself that she was doing it, she sneaked the one of Lucky—serious-looking in profile, gazing into the distance, sledgehammer in hand—out of the stack and slid it into Pride and Prejudice, along with her Saint Jude prayer card.
A lot of things seemed impossible, more so even than usual, of late.
Cecily would’ve sworn she’d come to terms, years ago, with never finding her mother. But, still—it was reflex, really, in Iowa—at the sight of any pretty, dark-haired young woman, she’d feel a tiny leap in her heart, a surge of hope, which she’d just as quickly slam down, reminding herself ruthlessly each time: Madeline would probably look much older now, and the chance of ever finding her was a seed pearl swirling down the drain of a huge town swimming pool, if it wasn’t already long gone.
Anyway, this season, Cecily had other things on her mind, things she preferred to think of—or, at least, felt helpless not to think of. Primarily: there were two times a day when she could hope to have a short stretch of minutes alone with Lucky. This was during the performances, when she’d lead Prince back to the stable tent after their act, at the same time that Isabelle was leading Doc, Wyatt, and Virgil toward the Big Top and the ring. Prince expected a great deal of attention, love, grooming, and carrots in reward for his performance, which Cecily, in the past, had typically administered on her own, as Janey had always gone to help Isabelle.
Fortunately, Isabelle had announced that she didn’t need or want Lucky’s help, so Lucky stayed with Prince and Cecily. It was a quiet time in the tent, with hardly anyone around, especially during the evening show, with the draught horses and their handlers out tearing down the menagerie and sideshow tops and hauling them back to the train. Anyway, with the Arabians all sold off, their riders and grooms long gone, the stable tent was half empty all the time.
“Where are you from?” Cecily asked Lucky.
“Around,” he said. “You?”
“Same.” She grinned.
He laughed. “All right, then. Little farm in Alabama. Left out on my own when I was eleven, though.”
“Oh!” She told him about the orphanage in Chicago, Tebow coming to buy her when she was seven years old; the box her mother had checked on the form.
“Are you joking me?” Lucky said.
“No, are you?”
He shook his head.
“Why did you leave home when you were only eleven?”
“Stepdaddy trouble,” he said. “Anyway, no way was I gonna get stuck in that sharecropping life. My mother had sent me to school to make sure I wouldn’t, but my chances were looking doubtful to me.”
“Oh,” Cecily said, as if she understood about all that, which she didn’t. “Where did you go?” She imagined he would say to his aunt’s house in Memphis.
“Rode around awhile. Ended up in New York City. Harlem. Then, when it got bad there, five years ago, I left out. Been traveling ever since.”
Cecily took this in, currying Prince. She felt she wanted to know everything about Lucky, every little detail of everything he’d seen or thought or done in all the years leading up till right now, and the feeling left her tongue-tied, as if she had too many questions to choose only one to ask. Finally, she said, “I’ve never been to New York City. What’s it like?”
He gave a quick grin. “Music coming out of every door. People dressed to the nines, you know? Sharp suits, white hats. And the poets—man.” His smile faded. “But that was before. Before people got desperate and things got dingy and mean.”
Cecily understood, then. “You’re a poet, aren’t you? That’s what that little note I found was?”
He shrugged and took a carrot out of the bucket to feed to Prince. “My grandma back in Alabama,” he said, and it was as if he was telling a secret. “Every year, on my birthday, she would make me a cake fifteen layers high. Fifteen thin little layers, you know? Cookin’ each layer separate on top of the stove in her little old hoecake pan. Now I don’t know how she came up with the money to do it. She must’ve saved all year.”
Cecily’s heart squeezed, hearing the homesickness in his voice, and imagining how much his grandma must have loved him, to save her money all year for a special cake for him. The wonder of a cake fifteen layers high was hard to imagine, and, again, she couldn’t seem to find the right words—not to convey the sweet pain in her heart at the thought of it, nor of all the birthdays he’d missed since leaving home at eleven, nor of the fact that no one had made her a birthday cake in all her life, at least not that she could recall. “What kind of icing?” she asked.
That quick grin again. “Chocolate. Spread on the layers warm.” The words themselves, staccato at first and then drawn out in his gentle accent, sounded like poetry, to Cecily.
As the weather warmed and the Sax & Tebow Spectacular crisscrossed the cool green hills of southern Wisconsin, stopping in any town that had a flat field big enough to contain them, Tebow announced it was time to become more spectacular, to better fit the new name. “It’s all our necks on the line here,” he said. There’d been no response from Life; he was starting to think the package had been lost in the mail. “We may have to send in those copies!” he told Cecily. Her stomach lurched slightly, because she knew she could not (would not) part with the picture of Lucky. Would Tebow notice it was missing? Maybe not; he was so distraught lately.
Then, one morning in the stable tent, he said he wanted Cecily to join Isabelle’s act; to stand on Isabelle’s shoulders as the Percherons cantered round the ring.
Cecily exchanged a glance with Isabelle. Sure, they’d talked about this back at the start, when Cecily was about half as tall, but—was he actually losing his mind now?
Isabelle was clearly wondering the same thing. “We can’t add something like that mid-season,” she snapped. “That would require weeks of practice. Months! With safety equipment, which we don’t have here. And the boys won’t like it, anyway.” By the boys, she meant the horses. “When would we even find time to rehearse?”
“We’ve got to give the people something they can’t stop talking about,” Tebow insisted. He turned to Cecily. “You willing, kid?”
She glanced at Isabelle, who cocked her head. Cecily swallowed. Her mouth felt dry. “Sure!” she said, because, ever since Tebow had paid Mrs. H. for her, she never had gotten over thinking he might someday decide she just plain wasn’t worth it.
Cecily stood on her right foot, wobbling atop Isabelle’s left shoulder. Isabelle, with iron grips on Cecily’s ankle and right arm, stood wobbling atop Wyatt’s back.
“That’s right!” Tebow shouted, clapping once loudly. Wyatt, fortunately, did not startle. “Now pose!” Slowly, Cecily lifted her left leg like a railroad crossing arm out to the side, then raised her left arm. Her standing leg trembled with strain.
Isabelle was trembling, too, pulling on Cecily’s arm to counterbalance Cecily’s lean. “Goddamn it, you’re heavy!” she spat from below. “Count of three, down!” She counted, then pushed Cecily off. Cecily landed, jarring her knees, her feet sending up a tiny cloud of dust.
“We’ve got a long way to go!” Tebow said, and Isabelle shot Cecily a weary look, gave a tiny shake of her head, as she slid down off Wyatt.
“Let’s take five,” she said, massaging her shoulder as she walked away. Cecily rubbed her arm, which hurt where Isabelle had been grabbing her. She saw Lucky, then, standing in Prince’s stall, watching her with his brow furrowed. She shot him a glance, trying to tell him not to worry, but his frown deepened, and he shook his head, almost imperceptibly.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she asked him later, during the afternoon show, when they were alone in the tent.
A tiny smile, as he curried Prince. “Suppose it’s not up to me to decide.”
She moved closer to him, her hand on Prince’s warm flank. “The circus is in bad trouble. We’ve got to save it.” She put a finger to her lips, to indicate he should tell no one. He gave her a skeptical look. Everyone knew that nobody was getting paid; that, if it wasn’t for the promise of three squares a day and the knowledge that, out on the road, pickings were slimmer than slim these days, half the workers would just plain walk away.
Cecily felt vaguely chastised; on the defensive. She took another step closer. “Anyway, I have to do what Tebow tells me. Besides, Isabelle’s my sister. I mean . . .” She looked up into Lucky’s eyes. Why did she want to trust him with all her secrets? She didn’t know. “Not really, but she’s more like a sister than most real sisters could ever be, I’m pretty sure.”
He cocked an eyebrow at that, which made her laugh, made her want to forget every trouble.
“Are you going to write me a poem?” she ventured.
He stopped the motion of currying and looked at her in a way she couldn’t decipher, then smiled slightly and picked up the motion again. “Huh. Let’s see.”
“Or maybe we could write it together! I don’t know much about poetry, but I read a lot. I love words. Maybe you could teach me how to use them to write a poem.”
A few strokes of the curry comb, her heart in her throat, and then he asked, “What do you want it to be about?”
She laughed. “A boy who’s inscrutable?”
He gave her his smile, at that. “No, I think it’s about a girl.”
She pointed her chin and smiled back. “What’s this girl like?”
“Well, headstrong,” he said slowly, currying. “Pretty much fearless. You’d call her a fool, if she weren’t so smart.” He shot Cecily a grin to tell her he meant no offense, and she put her fists on her hips to say there was some taken.
“A fool?”
He nodded. “Sure. But, if you thought that, you’d be the fool. See, she gets devoted to the wrong people, people that don’t deserve it, but that’s just because her heart’s wide open enough to swallow the whole world.”
Cecily took a slight step back, feeling accused.
Lucky went on calmly. “And she’s so fearless, it makes other people scared for her. They start thinking they want to protect her, put her in their pocket and carry her around, ’cause she seems so small. Truth is, though, she doesn’t really need anybody. She’s doing just fine on her own.”
Cecily wasn’t sure anymore that this was a story about her, but Isabelle was leading Doc, Wyatt, and Virgil into the tent, so Cecily went quiet. Prince nudged her, wanting a carrot, and she whispered to him, “Patience, love,” though her eyes were still on Lucky, who was filling a bucket from the hose and not looking at her at all.
“The first thing you gotta think about when you’re writing a poem is the way each word sounds,” he said, in their quiet time during the evening show. She’d insisted she was serious about learning how, and even that he let her take notes in the little notebook she knew he carried around in his shirt pocket. (He said he never let anybody touch his notebook, and she said, “But I’m not just anybody, am I?” He rolled his eyes, fished it out, and handed it over, along with a stubby pencil.)
“What do you mean?” she said now.
“Listen,” he said, then carefully pronounced: “Exquisite.”
She smiled. “Are we talking about the same girl we were talking about this afternoon?”
He grinned. “Write it down,” he said, and, as she did, he added, “Sanguine.”
“How do you spell that?”
He told her, then said, after a beat, “Oblivious.”
She looked up. “Oblivious!”
He grinned. “Has a nice sound, doesn’t it?”
She pointed her chin. “Incandescent,” she said, in opposition.
He shook his head slowly and gave a low whistle. “Good one.”
“Applies, too, doesn’t it?”
He laughed, as she added it to the list.
Then, she said, “But how do we put them all together, into a poem that describes this girl?”
“The first line’s always the hardest.”
“I think it should have a boy in it, too.” She glanced up. “One who isn’t afraid to sleep out on a flatcar underneath a cage of pacing tigers just so nobody will bother him, and who’s carried four particular books with him for a thousand miles.”
He’d told her these things about himself, and he was grinning. “Maybe more like three thousand.”
“Tell me the name of your books again. Maybe they need to go into the poem.”
He shook his head a little, but ticked them off on his fingers. “The Weary Blues, Home to Harlem, Harlem Shadows, As I Lay Dying.”
“They all sound so sad!” she said, as she wrote the titles down. When she looked up, something in the soft way he was looking at her made her say, “About this girl.” She swallowed, gathering her courage. “What if it turned out that she did need somebody?”
He cocked his head.
“I mean, what if there’s somebody she’s devoted to who does deserve it?”
He took a step back. The look on his face was very serious, but she couldn’t tell what it meant. “I’d say she’d best start learning how to be careful,” he said, and turned away.
She felt a prick of sadness, watching the square of his shoulders from behind as he grabbed a pitchfork and started moving hay. She glanced down at the notebook in her hands, deliberating for only a second before she flipped a few pages back. In his familiar handwriting, she saw:
Exquisite
Bittersweet
Would I give my life to reach you?