The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb - Melanie Benjamin [35]
Naturally, I was never part of this kind of mischief. But when bullets were fired toward the boat, they were not particular about their target; I clasped my hands about my ears and ducked, but I heard my share of bullets whistling by my head, anyway. Fortunately, none of us ever came to peril, although once Colonel Wood found a bullet hole squarely in the middle of his silk top hat.
The safest place for any of us was onstage, in front of an eager crowd; that silver lining that Mr. Barnum would one day talk about. To see the joy on plain, work-worn faces as I sang, to hear the delighted laughter when I told a funny story—that was where I felt truly at home, loved, safe.
Although my fellow performers did not always feel quite so loved! Western audiences were swift to show boredom or displeasure with an act that did not measure up. Tomatoes, apples, masticated wads of tobacco—all were thrown freely at the stage at one time or another. None, however, were thrown at me.
Why I was never so threatened, I can only ascribe to the peculiar effect I had upon most people, even those who could not refrain from remarking upon my size. Far from wanting to cause me harm, the audience seemed, as one, to desire to shelter me from it. This behavior was so marked, so pronounced, that some of the other acts tried to convince me to appear with them.
“C’mon, Vinnie,” the plate spinner, in particular, would beg. “I been hit with so many tomatoes lately I’m turning red! Just step out onstage with me, please? I’ll pay you, say, a dollar a week?”
I smiled but declined. I couldn’t appear in every act!
There was one person, however, who did not desire to shelter me from harm—one person, in fact, who seemed to go out of his way to cause me grief. And that was Colonel Wood.
“Move your tiny ass, Vinnie—if I catch you being late for an entrance again, I’ll boot you from here to kingdom come,” he would snarl, kicking at me with his dirty shoe. This was something he became very fond of doing, just as I became very fond of jumping nimbly aside to avoid him.
Or—“I’m sick of your uppity airs, Miss Uptight Yankee. Why don’t I just throw you in the boiler; you’re so little, I bet nobody would even notice you were missing,” he would growl, taking a swig of his jugful of whiskey. “Slap me on my own boat, in front of my own people, the hell you did.” That, of course, had been my fatal mistake; on his boat, he claimed his title of “Colonel,” placed it on his head like the gaudy hats he wore, and never let anyone forget it. Woe to anyone who challenged him—especially in front of an audience.
“Never thought I’d live to see the day when a dwarf would be the biggest draw on my boat. God Almighty, what idiots these rubes are,” he would slobber after he was well and truly in his cups. Once drunk, he had a tendency to fall asleep in the oddest places; you never knew, in the morning, when you might stumble upon his drooling, snoring form sprawled all over a staircase or curled up among a coil of ropes on the deck—or even, more than once, leaning against the door to my stateroom.
The first time I discovered him there, bile rose in my throat until I feared I might contribute to the puddle of vomit in the hallway at his feet. I uttered a swift prayer of thanks for the presence of Sylvia in my room, and couldn’t fall asleep that night until she had moved my trunk against the door.
But the fact remained that I made the man money; knowing this, I could not completely believe that he would ever actually harm me. As the months went by, and 1858 passed into 1859 and then 1860, as the Banjo drifted up and down the river, its company so oddly detached from the ever-escalating political