Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [70]
When I closed my eyes and tried to imagine her, I saw a woman with ice-ravaged skin, soaking in a bath of cinnamon-scented water.
I could not remember her as I’d known her.
I stayed in bed as Lollie spread glitter through her hair and across her skin, and during her performance that night. I watched the lights bobbing up and down through my window.
Later, Lollie brought sandwiches to me that I let dry up on their plates. When she came in and out of my compartment, she did not make a sound.
“I think I am dying,” I whispered to Lollie as she moved through the room.
“Yes, I know,” she said. “But you aren’t. You are a strong girl, Tessa. You are stronger than she was, even.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The circus played in Kansas City for only three nights before moving on. On the third night, after the last show, the roustabouts swarmed around the tent and tore it down. From the train car, I watched the big top fall like a cake just out of the oven. I had my small sack of things with me in Lollie’s compartment, but everyone else seemed to become part of a military operation—tearing apart makeshift camps, pulling in lines of laundry stretching from the train windows to the trees outside, dismantling the tents and booths in the midway, compressing everything into the trucks the sideshow traveled in or onto the circus wagons that would be hoisted from the ground to the flatcars using ramps and rigging. They had it down to a science: when those trucks and wagons were packed tight, I’m not sure a penny could have traveled from one end of the car to another without getting stuck somewhere.
It would be the last time I would sit around on a night like that, not knowing what to do with myself. Everyone pitched in, even Lollie and her brothers and Flying Geraldo. I heard voices everywhere and watched, fascinated, as the whole miniature city outside my window folded itself up under the moonlight and disappeared. The Ferris wheel collapsed and the lights popped off and the train shifted and expanded like a living thing.
Less elaborate, the midway took half the time to tear down, and, one by one, the sideshow trucks—some of them plain, others draped in banners and painted with lurid advertisements for the performers inside—roared off into the darkness.
I was lured out of the train car into the night, despite myself, just as they were loading the menagerie back onto the flatbeds. The whole night was filled with voices and the scratching and squealing of wagons being pulled across metal planks. By then most of the cars had been loaded back onto the train—filled with the equipment, the tents and big top, the cookhouse, the seat wagons and stock cars, all stacked before the performers’ cars, which varied wildly in size and quality—and the only thing left was to drop the menagerie tent and roll the animal’s cages back onto the flatbeds, too. No one even seemed to see me as I slipped from the steps to the ground.
The roustabouts shouted and pulled while others scoured the lot for anything left behind or started piling into the cars. The menagerie was the most difficult part to load, out of everything, and other men stepped forward to help push and pull up the wagons with the big cats and then lead in the two elephants, who strained the ropes so badly I