The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb - Melanie Benjamin [44]
I was silent, thinking. My contract was up in April. I hadn’t been home in all this time, and I could scarcely wait until then to see Mama and Papa, and especially Minnie. Her letters arrived as regularly as letters could on the river; they were tear-stained, hardly legible, usually one long, punctuation-free plea: “Please come home, Sister, Sister, come home I miss you what do you look like now are you still as small as me please come home.” I did not want to be stuck here in the South if war did come. I so longed to see my family, to tell them of my adventures, to assure us all that it had been worthwhile to leave.
I also did not want to be away from the reach of Mr. Barnum, who was most definitely in New York, still running his American Museum.
“All right,” I agreed, sipping my cold, weak coffee. “I’ll try to talk to him, although I warn you I don’t know how much influence I’ll have. But I’ll do my best to convince him.”
“Hurray for Vinnie!” Billy Birch cried out, throwing his knife into the air. Mr. Deacon caught it with an expert flourish and swallowed it neatly, his hand disappearing into his mouth. His throat moved, as if he were truly swallowing it, then he showed us both hands, which were empty. He gulped and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, then made as if to go; with a sly grin, he turned back to us and produced the knife, which he had neatly hidden up his sleeve.
We all applauded, everyone happy, everyone united. Despite the threat of war, at that moment it felt as if we would remain untouched, in a protective bubble, just a happy little band of performers.
Little did we know that this was the last time we would laugh together like this.
“C’MON, VINNIE, MOVE YOUR ASS. AT LEAST THIS ONE DIDN’T cancel.”
I hurriedly grabbed my cloak, leaving Sylvia in our room to read by the sputtering oil lamp. Then I followed Colonel Wood down the hall, in such a hurry that it wasn’t until we were off the boat that I remembered I had quite forgotten my reticule.
“Oh, wait!” I called after him, turning to go back and get it.
“Move your ass, I said—we’re late!” Without breaking his stride, Colonel Wood grabbed my arm; he practically dragged me through the raucous crowd, much louder, much angrier, than any I had ever seen.
“But I forgot my reticule!”
“Such a goddamned lady. ‘I forgot my reticule!’ ” He mimicked me cruelly, while still dragging me so that my slippers skimmed the ground; my arm felt wrenched from its socket. “We’re late, and I’m not going to lose a penny of this because you forgot your damn reticule. This has been one hell of a day.”
For it turned out Billy Birch was correct: Nobody cared a whit about coming aboard our boat this day. The box office was scarce; the few people in the audience hardly paid any attention to the stage at all, so we did only one show. The rest of the day we stood along the deck, me on my steps so that I could see over the railing, watching the excitement on the shore. People running to and fro, pamphlets being handed out, guns firing up in the air, high-pitched yells that would later become the famous Rebel cry of the Confederacy. Strange flags, flags I’d never seen before, were flying everywhere; they were blue, with a white star in the middle. “Secesh flags,” said Billy Birch miserably. “They’re going to secede, they’re all going to secede, just you wait.”
“How?” I didn’t completely understand. “How can they do that?”
“They just can. States’ rights and all. But Lincoln won’t let ’em, he vowed to preserve the Union, and so there’ll be bloody hell to pay.”
“ ‘Hell to pay’! Imagine, fighting right here in our own country! How horrid!” Yet my pulse raced at all the history I was witnessing. If the South was going to secede and take that first step toward war, how thrilling it was to be there when it happened! I couldn’t wait to tell my family all about it when I got home.
But first I had to get there, and the effect of all this excitement and