Nightmare Carnival

Mae stripped to the waist and washed her face and chest in the cold-water washbasin, then slipped on her cotton chemise and a skirt before opening the sleeper car window and tossing the contents of the chamber pot onto the tracks. She could hear murmured voices as the rest of the occupants in the married carriage roused themselves from their beds. Mae stepped down onto the wide, sloping rail line, struggling for balance on the crushed stone ballast dotted with optimistic weedlings. Her feet hurt, her equilibrium not good even at the best of times.

The mist was dissolving as the sun rose behind the Great Smoky Mountains, the stink of creosoted sleepers, coal smoke, and animal dung mixing with the aroma of frying bacon and hot corn muffins already drifting from the smokestack of the pie car. The new trio of Negro cooks the Bishop had hired in Ohio bickered with one another in their good-natured sing-song voices. A little pickaninny, the girl no more than two years old, sat on the steps of the pie car eating a slice of bread and jam, but froze when Mae smiled at her before scurrying inside to the safety of her mother’s apron.

“Coffee’s near ’bout ready, Miss Mae,” the head cook said from the open window of the pie car. “I got a sack of treats fo’ you, too.”

“Thank you, Eileen. I’m going to see the Bishop, back in a tick.”

The treats were for Madelaine. Whenever she could, Mae took her bits of carrots and apples, leftover cornbread, or watermelon and celery, then stroked her trunk to calm her down as she’d seen Mischa do. Sometimes she would sing quiet lullabies or snatches of ragtime tunes, or hum through forgotten lyrics of vaudeville songs. Sometimes, not always, the elephant would stop rocking, would explore Mae’s open hand, blowing hot puffs of breath across the claw-like palm as she delicately searched for the last crumbs of bread or apple slices. Sometimes, not always, Madelaine would gently wrap her trunk around Mae’s waist. Then Mae would lean against the elephant’s leathery sides and feel a rumble from deep within that vibrated through her skin into her bones, close her eyes, and imagine distant thunder out over a foreign ocean far away.

Schmidt and Kleininger sat in folding chairs outside the clown carriage smoking and muttering to one another in gloomy German as their pack of yapping dogs bounced around them. The surplus roustabouts, riggers, prop and canvas men who shared the clown car rolled out, yawning and stretching. The girls in the “glamour car” were already squabbling, tempers as usual frayed and high pitched.

Out of fifteen carriages, six were sleepers, the rest either cattle cars for transporting the menagerie animals, or flatbeds to carry the circus wagons. The Bishop had bought English surplus hospital train wagons after the Great War and revamped them into living quarters — one for the single roustabouts and one for the colored workers and minstrel band — providing not much more than a six-foot by three-and-a-half-foot bunk and a battered footlocker. The women-only carriage wasn’t any roomier but it at least had its own changing room and private donniker and the Bishop allowed the spec girls to decorate their individual berths as they liked, fancy curtains and cubbyholes stuffed with feminine bric-a-brac.

Not that any of them were ever satisfied, jealous of the extra space the married couples and those with families enjoyed in their sleepers. Most never lasted an entire season before they bit the grass and took off running. As long as they were pretty and plentiful, they didn’t have to be talented, Max always told her. That’s what separated real circus folk from the greenies. Mae walked past without looking in their direction, and they returned the favor by pretending she didn’t exist.

The Bishop lived alone in his sleeper behind the caboose. Even though the door to his sleeper was open, Mae knocked timidly on the side of the carriage. The Bishop stood at the map table, his back to her, but didn’t stir for a long moment, his attention fixed on his charts. Then he straightened as if awakening from a trance, turned, and smiled. He hadn’t yet shaved or waxed his moustache, the ends drooping limply.

“Good morning, Mae. Come in.”

Mae took his hand to allow him to lift her up the steps into his private sleeper. While the circus train boldly advertised its existence on every car with bright colors and ornate calligraphy, the inside of the Bishop’s car was almost monasterial. His bedroom was closed off at one end of the car, the rest divided into his office and the infirmary. No other decorations adorned his walls, completely bare but for a plain wooden cross.