Under the Tents of Our Fathers

Bright phosphorus spotlights scan the cheering crowd. Children hold clouds of spun sugar in one hand and the hands of their mothers in the other. Smiling peanut vendors banter with the crowd. “You, ma’am: hold these for me!”

Down on the floor, clowns hyuk-hyuk and slam their trays of confetti into each other’s tomato noses. A unicycle carves the Lord’s Prayer in sawdust around one ring.

In another ring, an elephant with a star on its forehead performs final communion on state prisoners strapped with ribbons to wired chairs. The benediction moves a third of the crowd to tears. Ash falls from the rafters on their heads.

The third ring holds an unexpected sight: a marriage between a man locked in a clear box filled with water and another man in front of an X-ray machine. A skeleton key illuminates his stomach. Timpani set the tent to a pulse. Grandfathers hold their grandchildren high, strong arms like stones.

Turning in his bed, pausing the story, Grandfather’s bleary cataracts hold my eye, “Behold paradise, little one. Things don’t get much better than a three-ring circus.”

As each act concluded, clowns sob over empty pie tins and bright confetti fade in dust. A switch is thrown and elephants turn their eyes from the broiled husk body. A new husband struggles to breathe, the other heaves, regurgitating a key to slip into the nuptial lock. A baby sees the beautiful chaos of the world from the arms of his grandfather.

###

My grandfather told me these stories whenever I pestered him: the traveling circus and all it brought with it. The parrots that would preach revival sermons, the Spirit moving young bodies to exaltation in the sweat-humid tents. As his breath teetered, he’d speak of justice carried out. Pregnant women who leaned into shotguns, felling gangs of deadbeats, men who carried themselves by what their firsts could do to bodies. “Back when the world made sense, back when a man could feel something.” Grandpa seemed sad. I sat there in the folding chair at his bedside. The room was soupy with medicine and his breath.

His funeral was circus themed. Pies baked for the wake painted the wall. As mourners passed the open casket, grandfather’s face had to be cleared of red noses to pay respects.

“He was one of the best.” A hand fell on my shoulder. A man with a gaunt yellow face and long cigarette hanging from his mouth like a lizard’s tongue looked down at me with glazed eyes.

“You knew him, then?”

After a pause, a cleared throat: “I’m Bill. He was my trapezist.”

###

Instead of sleeping, I thought about the funeral and lizard-tongued man who knew my grandfather. My grandfather hadn’t just taken me to the circus; he’d been a part of it.

I got up, wandering down the hall to the bathroom and stood looking into my eye in the darkness—a flicker of shadow behind me. I left the bathroom without turning around.

###

It was back. I spotted the flyer on my walk to school the next day, pasted against the light pole. “CIRCUS. SMITH FIELD. ONE NIGHT ONLY. WONDERS BEYOND THE STORIES OF YOUR GRANDFATHERS.”

###

I wanted to prepare for what I might see. The stories woven by my grandfather, sick on his rolling bed in the kitchen. Those memories kept me warm as I went through his old papers in the boxes under his bed near his childhood keepsakes. I now pored over them as though they held the secret to eternity. Brittle newspapers covered the kitchen table. Pouring myself a glass of buttermilk, I began the process of understanding my grandfather’s past.

It was incredible that such a thing could exist. The Elephantine Court exacted international justice. Treaties brokered between warring tribes, new constitutions written. Those three rings saw the birth of more millionaires than the hospitals of Beverly Hills. Here in the local newspapers, utopia traveled by train car.

My grandfather, curled and stunted as he was before death, there in black and white, flying above each continent. In the photos, a man’s face grinning beside his—long features, oiled black hair, long cigarette hanging from his smile, a young reflection of the man I’d spoken to at the funeral.

I spent half the night looking for a throughline, the story of the circus’s dissolution. An accident, I’d assumed. An act gone wrong, a true criminal pardoned when he should have been exorcised. A clown who cried instead of laughed. There wasn’t a damn scrap indicating anything related to the circus’s disappearance. I finished my carton of buttermilk and went out for a walk. Frustrated, unaware of the time, save for the absolute blackness of the sky.

The suburbs were stained-lamp yellow, like an old undershirt by the streetlights. I kneaded the newspaper scraps over and over again in my mind, but nothing came from it.

Snap snap snap snap.

A warm wind flipped a tarp covering a hole in a neighbor’s roof. Bright eyes shone from overgrown lawns, cats, or raccoons, probably. The rich, ripe smell of trash and meat became dirt in the air. I looked at my watch, thinking I’d call my dad to ask about Grandpa. 4:07 AM. I’ll call tomorrow. Maybe.

###

After waking from a dreamless sleep, I poured a cup of buttermilk and I went back to the newspapers. Again, I read through the stories, looking for any evidence of the circus’s collapse, but the papers lauded sold-out shows, boosted rural economies, the magician and his husband marrying night after night. The key always coming back up. I turned a page over. The obituaries were smudged and I’d not looked too closely before, focusing instead on the solidarity between the United Clown Workers Union and the Magician’s Guild with the miners’ strike.

A name: William Heartlock, Ringmaster, dead at 55. Beloved by crowds worldwide. A smile that could build a better world.

The date was the most recent of the pile. The picture of the man showed a gaunt face, happy eyes, puffing a cigarette. Grandfather never mentioned even being in the circus, but in all his tales, the circus existed like a natural ecosystem, controlled only by its interactions with itself. No divine hand, no Ringmaster.

###

The night of the circus, the town stirred like it had shaken off a terminal diagnosis. Storefronts out-of-towners would guess to be abandoned, sold out of costume jewelry and red lipstick. Old Bill’s Diner was cracking so many eggs that Old Bill had to get in his station wagon and drive to the market in Julian to keep up with demand.
The town became a different world. The immaculate crimson tent rose from the barren cornfield on the edge of town; farmer Smith was dead of shingles last winter. The soft hum of organ music tumbled its way into the town’s bloodstream.

“You’re wearing that to the circus?” said Mabel, who herself was dressed like she’d starred in Gone with the Wind: her corset could choke a kitten, her hair in curls like golden fingers.

I’d just turned 18 last month and had hit a growth spurt right before that. My closet didn’t catch up so quickly, you’d say. Anyone who’d seen me at the funeral would recognize my ankle-tickling boyhood church pants and snug dress shirt. It was the circus. Mabel’s words wouldn’t get me down. I was on my way to live my history.

###

The dusty walk out to Smith’s field, for few drove in those days, had the crowds follow the rusted fence line between the granary and the railroad. Tonight the wind howled, and a whining trumpet welcomed neatly dressed children, hair combed or put back in stately pigtails. Hobbling elders (who may have been those children, running toward the tents a lifetime ago) and smiling couples followed slowly behind. I carried a folded picture of my grandfather in my pocket.

The tent was filled with the rich smells of exotic manure and burnt sugar. An elephant placed its foot on an ancient Bible and swore an oath. Clowns solemnly buttered down the chains of their unicycles. A magician knelt, whispering to a teary-eyed partner, ring extended. It was like the stories. It was all the same. My chest buzzed, enchanted through and through.

Illuminated in a bile-colored spotlight, a man in a tailed suitcoat conducted the affairs of the circus, whispered along with the oath, grimaced as he pricked his finger on the tooth of the unicycle crankset, laughingly said, “Yes, yes, forever yes” to nobody. The Ringmaster, a stinking cigarette perfectly balanced between his teeth.

###

I had the perfect spot in the wooden bleachers encircling the ring, and I could see everything.

“Say, lad, take one of these.” A sweating vendor held out a fizzing beverage. “On the house.” He smiled, stained brown teeth and gaps winking, but not unkindly.

“Obliged.” I took the drink.

“I’m sure you can meet them after the show is over,” a father said to his son who had elephants in his eyes.

The torchlight dimmed and the Ringmaster stepped up to a microphone. He lifted his hands, and the crowd hushed.
“Welcome one and all to the Circus of Your Grandfathers. Today you will encounter wonder, love, and religious jubilation here in the tarps of our circus. I am your ringmaster this evening, William Heartlock.” A cry rose up from the crowd and a few wilted roses were thrown.
I didn’t see how it could be, but there standing in a living ovation was the dead man from Grandpa’s newspapers. The same man who touched my shoulder at the funeral. The tent echoed with darkness and children’s excited whispers. A single light moved to the ring containing the elephants.

In the light, I could see now, there were no starred crimson headpieces. Instead, haggard beasts entered the spotlight. These were not the noble arbiters from the stories. Sharp lines of dried blood painted their flanks. A man in a funerary jacket lay strapped to the board. It was Thomas McPhinny, the town drunk, usually to be found asleep on any covered porch. Scrawled in grease paint crowning McPhinny was a single word: Gluttony.

I sipped my drink and a spike of adrenaline cut through my veins: the bitter taste of crabapples and crushed medication. It was nothing like the court I’d heard so much about. I searched the dusty ring for a gavel or some semblance of divine justice as the elephants stepped, crushing the silent man. Lungs exploded before he could cry out, and pink droplets splattered on the crowd: McPhinny pulp within his skin. Again and again, until the trial concluded. A trainer in a bailiff uniform pulled what remained away. A few claps resounded in the tent. An elephant halooed, its eyes jaundiced and weepy.

The tent was dark, my head foggy. A body buoyed peacefully in the newly lit circle, limp and face down in a locked box of water. Another man clutched furiously at his throat, arteries blue, face shattered. My sight tinged nauseous green, the crowd around me swayed, watching, saying nothing. I tried to stand, but my legs locked. A single thump of the drum brought my attention back to the show.

Clowns, oddly dressed, as if they’d put on their makeup only minutes before and in the total darkness of the tent, swung wildly at one another with metal rods, railroad spikes, and farm tools. One clown was a child, wearing a velvet jacket; another was an older man in starched and clean denim overalls; another was a woman in a rotund dress, bonnet covering powered white hair, curled into small fingers. Mabel.

Two proper clowns circled closely on unicycles, creating a boundary for the ring. I wanted to leave. My palms were weeping sweat, my church clothes clinging to my body like frightened children. The circus created this terrible show from the town itself. I couldn’t move to stop it.

The elephants avoided eye contact, scraping purple-stained feet against the sawdust. Two tuxedoed bodies lay posed as if by an altar, side by side, faces pale and bloodless. Mabel, with her foaming pink mouth, swung her threshing fork haphazardly, like a drunk prize fighter, alone now in the ring.

In the crowd, each man, woman, and child grasped their cups, crow eyes looking down on the figure of William Heartlock bowing, again and again.

“It is an honor to be back, performing once more.” As the light dimmed, I caught the skin around his face tightening, the sharp corners of his skull. His eyes glanced toward the tent’s roof. In the twilight of the tent, I saw a familiar silhouette, a trapezist, swinging in the air. The atmosphere was hazy with roasted peanuts, sulfur, and rot. The show went on.