Halloween is different at our house. Sarasota is a circus town, for one, and for another the weather is usually still pleasant,
even at the end of October. A large gallery, screened in against mosquitoes, surrounds our house, and my parents liked to do
most of their entertaining out there. Dad took the decorating for Halloween as seriously as Mom took decorating for Christmas.
Perhaps that's why I have such fond memories of the winter holidays.
Dad worked at the Ringling Circus Museum, restoring the collection of circus wagons. He could manage all parts of any sort of wagon, from carving the figures to painting the kaleidoscopic patterns on the wooden wheels.
"I started at the Baraboo works when I was right out of high school. Most of the wagons in the collection now, I worked on when they were new."
I knew Dad traveled with the circus for a time, maintaining the wagons and spectacle floats. Of the years between Baraboo and our house in Sarasota, he did not speak, not while I was a child. I always thought of him as old, because he had a face like a worn leather bag, as if exposed to some harshness almost beyond bearing. At the same time, I always thought of my mother as young, because she so often did back flips along the front gallery. Didn't everyone's mom do something like that?
My earliest memories of Halloween are of Dad taking me out for Beggar's Night. He never acted old, even if I thought he looked it, and Halloween was when I began to hear the word "burned" following my dad around. Something about being with the show during the "fire" years.
The whisperers may have thought I was too young to understand, but Dad could tell I knew something was odd. When we'd gotten home and sorted out the treats, when my costume was put away and I was tucked into bed, Dad would tell me a story about the day the sky caught fire.
"There was once a magical world, full of the cleverest of animals and the people who took care of them. This world existed within the real world, but never in the same part of it. Some midnight you might hear the train whistle, more musical than the usual train whistle. You might feel the magic coming down the tracks with the trains. You might catch the smell of the animals as they marched from the train yards, bringing the magic with them. And when you woke in the morning, you would see the flags on the edge of town, marking the boundary between the real world and this magic world.
"In the real world, there was a war going on. Fathers and brothers and uncles all went off to fight. Sometimes you found out they were never coming back. That was why the magic world kept moving, so the people left behind could step out of the real world for a day, and forget their sorrows.
"But war has a magic all its own, a dark power with an endless hunger. A hunger that wants to devour all that is bright and beautiful, or worse, to turn and twist it until it breaks. Until the good magic goes bad, and lends its power to evil.
"Perhaps that's why the darkness fell on this magic world one day. What should have been light went dark, because of one tiny spark turned to evil. Instead of shining down on the magic world, this spark devoured it. This spark leaped up, and the sky caught fire. From one end to the other of the magic world, the sky burned away. The people who came into that world to find happiness, instead found only panic and pain."
Dad sighed at that point. When I was a few years older and still awake, I would ask him, "Were you there, Dad? The day the sky caught fire? Did it burn forever?"
Then he would smile a sad smile. "It only seemed to last forever, Jake. The worst part was over in a matter of minutes. But it was enough to give me a face like an old scarecrow, eh boy?"
"Nah, Dad." I was always thinking of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, which Mom used to read to me. "You don't look anything like that. Except on Halloween."
Because that's what Dad always did, once I was old enough to go out on Beggar's Night with my friends. Wearing a bit of old burlap tied around his neck with twine, and brown makeup on his wrinkled face to blend with it. He would have straw sticking out of his pant legs, but not out of his shirt sleeves.
At our house, Halloween was different. By the light of a dozen or so jack o' lanterns lining the front gallery, Dad would juggle fire. Mom would set up the record player near the open front window, with the speakers facing out and the volume turned up. As the first beggars began wandering the street, she'd turn on Death March of the Marionettes. When everyone had gathered, she'd change the recording for Peer Gynt. Dressed as the Wicked Witch, she'd grab a flaming torch, mock threatening to burn the old scarecrow propped against a gallery post. Then as the music shifted into Hall of the Mountain King, she'd throw a torch at the scarecrow.
This never failed to draw screams, even from the kids who'd seen it before. Dad the Scarecrow would leap away from the gallery, snatching the torch from the air. Mom the Witch would keep throwing torches, and Dad would start juggling away, until he had six or eight torches whirling at once. Then he'd drop them one by one, into the bucket of water at his feet. With the last torch he'd light the wood in the fire pit. Mom would pass out giant marshmallows, and long sticks to toast them on.
Maybe it was the distraction of building our own s'mores that kept us from noticing that my parents circled the fire constantly, keeping us a safe distance from it. Shadows on the lawn concealed the large garden hose, water leaking from its closed off nozzle. The layer of apples floating in a nearby tub of water concealed the heavy wool blankets soaking in the bottom, just in case someone did get too close to the fire.
I didn't learn about the wet blankets until I started high school. I decided I was too old to go out begging, and would help Dad get ready for the night instead.
"Where did you learn to juggle fire, Dad?" I asked as we prepared the torches.
"Oh, I guess I was a bit younger than you when I took it up. Started out with bean bags, so I wouldn't hurt myself. Your granddad wouldn't let me handle fire until I could manage six Indian clubs without killing myself or anyone within ten feet. Even then I think he only let me 'cause it made your grandma crazy."
Some strange connection went off in my head. "Was Grandma there the day the sky caught fire?"
"You still remember that old story? No. Your grandma liked to keep both feet firmly planted in the real world." Dad was quiet for a minute, then he gave me a look. "The museum is working on a special exhibit. About the fire."
"Oh yeah? I guess that's why the Circus Museum is on the class field trip list this year. We were wondering why it's supposed to be a history lesson. So it's not just because this is a circus town?"
"No, I think it is because we're a circus town. You have to remember the past in order to learn from it. That's the purpose of museums, you know. Sometimes they have to make us remember things we'd rather forget."
"Why?"
"So we'll do our best not to let them happen again."
***
My history class took our field trip on a bright spring day. The Circus Museum was only a small part of the old Ringling estate. We filed past lines of tourists waiting to see the huge mansion, the art museum, and the Italian opera house. We were here for a different kind of history lesson.
In a gallery of posters, some as big as a whole wall, we saw the history of the combined shows, Ringling and Barnum & Bailey. We saw the huge silver cannon, mounted on a truck, from which the Human Cannonball was shot across the big top, and the special bicycles used on the high wire by the Flying Wallendas. There was a gallery of life-sized photographs, interspersed with glass cases holding the costumes of the featured performers.
"Hey Jake, isn't that your dad?"
I looked around the room, but I didn't see my father. Then my pal Sam tugged my sleeve again. "Right there, in that picture."
The photo Sam was looking at featured the sideshow performers. Standing on the ballyhoo platform in front of the huge banners advertising the oddities on display inside the tent, was a sideshow barker. Next to him stood a man in a gray leather suit, juggling fire. The banner behind him heralded Leatherface Lenny, the Elephant Man.
Though it was hard to tell from the black and white photo, Dad's face looked like he'd painted it gray, to match the baggy, wrinkled leather suit he was wearing. On the painted banner he was pictured standing on the back of an elephant, juggling rings, one of which the elephant held in its trunk.
The leather suit itself stood in a glass case, along with a set of juggling rings, their once bright paint faded and chipped. There was also another photo, and another costume. In this photo, Dad's face looked more like the one which stared back at me from the mirror. He was wearing what looked like a sailor's uniform, but you could see the lights flashing off it. In the glass case, we could see it was covered in sequins. There was also a picture of him in a bomber pilot's outfit, with a white sequined scarf, riding an elephant in the opening parade.
"Wow. Dad never talks about the show. There was a story he used to tell me, when I was little, but..."
At that point a small old man with a big old voice appeared in the doorway to the next gallery. "Step up, step up," he barked to us, grinning. "See Leatherface Lenny, the Elephant Man, living circus history! Right here, right now, on the inside! Step right up, boys and girls!"
We filed through the dark, narrow canvas-lined chute. Suddenly it opened out into a huge room, fitted out to look like the old-fashioned big top. Wooden bleachers stood along the canvas sidewalls. Before us was a single circus ring filled with sawdust.
From speakers high above, a recording of the circus band accompanied us as we climbed into our seats. A ringmaster's whistle sounded, and the music ended in a fanfare. Dad walked into the ring with an elephant. As the music started again, the elephant lifted Dad with her trunk. Wearing black leather ballet shoes, Dad stood on the elephant's back. From somewhere under the long, black-sequined coat, a half dozen juggling rings appeared. The music changed, and the elephant began to dance, shaking her head in time to the music and lifting her front feet high. As she turned on her haunches in a slow circle, Dad began turning on her back, in the opposite direction. The lights dimmed, the flying rings glowing in the dark, glints of light from the sequins on Dad's coat and the elephant's harness dazzling all of us. I found myself joining my classmates in spontaneous applause.
The lights came up. The music changed again, and the elephant stopped dancing, raising her trunk high. Dad tossed the rings onto the elephant's trunk and she held them, curling her trunk so the tip touched her forehead. To another fanfare, Dad did a forward roll off her back, landing next to her front feet.
The elephant dropped her trunk so Dad could collect his juggling rings. They disappeared beneath his coat, and his hand reappeared with bunches of silk flowers, which he tossed toward the girls. He even seemed to pull flowers from the elephant's mouth, but I was watching close. He was cleverly covering the fact that he was feeding her a treat.
Dad and the elephant took their bows. The whistle blew, the music changed again, and they left the ring. The lights went very low, leaving us sitting in near darkness while the music kept playing. In the midst of an airy waltz, the whistle shrilled out again, high and long and harsh. causing some of us to jump.
The music jerked out of the waltz and into The Stars and Stripes Forever, something none of us had ever heard a circus band play. A strange, flickering orange light swept slowly across the canvas ceiling, then spread down the walls.
The music stopped abruptly and for a heart-pounding moment all the lights went out. I could hear the canvas sidewalls rustling. When the lights came on again, Dad was sitting on an upturned bucket, alone in the middle of the ring. Beside him lay one of the high wire bicycles. As our eyes adjusted to the light, and focused on what Dad was looking at, we could see that this bicycle was crumpled, as if it had fallen from the rigging high up in the big top. Unlike the bright chrome and red bikes in the museum display, this one was blackened. It reminded me of the steel barrels used to burn trash in.
Dad looked up at our uncertain faces. "Come down to the ring, children. Sit down along the curb. Carefully now."
Getting down from the bleachers was a lot more tricky than getting up them. Slowly, as we gathered to sit along the ring curb, I noticed that the canvas sidewalls now lay in heaps, revealing another display of large photographs. Dad was urging us to lean in closer, though, so he wouldn't have to shout like a sideshow barker. I knew, then, that the story he was about to tell was not the stuff of ballyhoo.
"What happened in Hartford in 1944 is sometimes referred to as the day the clowns all cried. My son Jake knows the story as a fairy tale about the day the sky caught fire. It was the day the big top burned, just as the show was getting started. I was there. I was in my bomber pilot costume, with Rosie, my elephant, getting ready to do our little act. We were off behind the dressing tents, since we had plenty of time to get to the performers' entrance to the big top.
"Then I heard the music change to Stars and Stripes Forever. Everyone on the lot stopped what they were doing, because that music meant there was trouble in the big top, and we had to get there on the double. I started to run with Rosie, to take her back to the elephants' picket line, when I saw the flames shoot up on the far end of the big top. I told Rosie to stop and stay where she was, but Rosie followed me, because she wasn't afraid of fire. She'd been through the menagerie tent fire, two years earlier, and she was tough as nails.
"I ran through the performers' entrance. People were scrambling down from the stands, pushing and shoving, knocking each other down and trampling anyone who fell. The fire was sweeping across the top of the tent, and the heat was terrible. People were trying to go out the same way they'd come in, and they weren't thinking to come where I was. They were trying to cross the tent, but there were cages in the way from the animal acts that opened the show. I stopped a big group of women and children from getting caught in that crush. I steered them underneath the stands, toward the sidewall of the tent where Rosie was waiting. The heat was unbearable, and the panic was getting worse.
"I lifted up the sidewall as far as I could, but only the smallest children could get under. The sides there had been pegged down tight, to keep the kids from sneaking in without paying. But my Rosie was out there. I called to her, and she came and pulled up the stakes.
"I held up one side of the canvas, and Rosie held up the other side with her trunk. The people just kept pouring out, until the fire was right over top of us. I took one last look inside, and I saw a woman under the stands, passed out from the heat. I went in after her just as the stands themselves began to burn. I got her to the sidewall, and someone else pulled her out.
"There was a sound like a hurricane coming in. The rigging gave way, and what was left of the burning top fell in on those of us who were still inside. I thought I was a goner for sure, because the stands were burning above me, and it was so hot I couldn't breathe. Then Rosie reached in and grabbed me with her trunk. She pulled me out and carried me back to the elephant line.
"I didn't think I was hurt all that bad. I helped the other handlers move the elephants away from the fire. It wasn't until I had gone back to my berth on the circus train that I realized I was burned all over. Not from the flames. It was the heat of the fire. My clothes were sooty and stank of smoke, but not burned. Underneath, though, I was cooked like a lobster. Well, by that time we were hearing on the radio that all the hospitals were full up. So I went back to the lot, and got the animal doctor to paint me all over with the same burn ointment we used after the menagerie fire."
One girl raised her hand. She lived up the street from us, and had been to our Halloween revels. Dad nodded to her. She bit her lip, then spoke. "Mr. Simpson? Is it true that three circus people died too?"
"No, honey. A couple of us got hurt, is all. I'll say this, though. A little bit of all of us died that day. I never could go back into the big top again. After my skin healed up, it was never quite the same, so I became Leatherface Lenny, and went into the sideshow. Mostly I just did my regular job of repairing and maintaining the wagons and spectacle floats."
There were a lot of other questions after that, and Dad answered all of them. He walked around the little hippodrome track with us, pointing out details in the enlarged photographs taken at the disaster. One showed flames shooting high above the whole length of the big top, and black smoke filling the rest of the frame, as if the sky really was on fire.
"Mostly," Dad said softly, "it was grownups who died. One hundred, exactly, and sixty-seven children. Something of a miracle, with a crowd of nine thousand in attendance that day. Most of the dead had been trampled in the panic. It was the ones still scrambling over top of the others, when the last of the burning top came down..."
There was a photo of the ruin. Fallen poles, broken bleachers, twisted animal cages in the end rings. The crumpled high wire bicycle fallen in the scorched center ring.
"Someone said it only took ten minutes for the top to burn. What they call a flash over, nowadays. The fire crews kept it from spreading to the other tents, and once the top was gone they put it out pretty quick. They even pulled a couple of kids out alive, who were buried under the crush."
Dad paused again at a photo of the band, on their platform just in front of the performers' entrance. "That Sousa march was chosen as the disaster call because everyone in the band could play it from memory. They launched right into it and kept on playing as the fire came toward them. When they heard the rigging give way, they grabbed their instruments and jumped over the back of the platform, to get out from under the top. Only things they couldn't save were the kettledrums and the organ."
The next photo showed the bandstand after the fire. Looking where Dad pointed, we could see the Hammond B-3 organ, burned black, and the overturned husks of the kettledrums, the skins burned away, in the midst of a heap of charred chairs and music stands.
We saw photos of clowns with water buckets, and the ringmaster standing, staring at the ruin, his top hat clutched in one hand, his red coat and white breeches scorched and smudged with soot.
"Now there's a man, " Dad murmured, "was hurt deeper than any of us there, I think. He'd been with the show forever, it seemed, and was ringmaster way back in 1910 when the big top burned in Schenectady. There was a big crowd that day too, but when he stopped the show and told them all to leave the tent quickly and quietly, why that's just what they did. Not a soul got hurt that day. But in Hartford, there was a panic. That man was never the same, after that day."
Without us realizing, we'd been guided around the full display, When we came to the edge of the stands again, Dad led us underneath them. There was more sawdust there, as well as a bucket of water and a fire extinguisher. Here, though, the canvas sidewall was still up.
"This is how most folks got out." Dad reached down to lift the bottom edge.
It wouldn't budge. "Well shucks," Dad barked. "Hey Matilda! Up stakes, girl!"
There was a shambling, shuffling sound from the other side, then the sidewall lifted easily, and we could see the large feet of an elephant. We all ducked under the canvas to find ourselves outside in the bright sunshine. The canvas entryway we'd gone through earlier turned out to be an actual tent, connecting two separate buildings. We'd just come out through a large loading doorway, covered by the canvas sidewall. Some of my classmates covered their ears as Matilda the elephant greeted us with a loud trumpet.
Dad fed Matilda another treat. "Right, now gather around Matilda here, and let's get a picture for your yearbook."
I'm not sure how it happened, but I was standing next to Dad when the photographer came up. As the rest of the class took their places along Matilda's massive profile, Dad climbed her trunk to perch behind her head.
"Pick him up, Matilda."
Next thing I knew, Matilda's thick gray trunk was wrapped around me and I was hoisted into the air. Even though I'd only just learned of my father's close association with the circus, I somehow felt at home in Matilda's grasp.
***
When Halloween rolled around again, we had those yearbooks. The photo of the freshman class with Matilda the elephant was the envy even of the seniors. On Beggar's Night a fair number of kids had their older brothers and sisters along as escorts, as least when it came time to hit the house at the end of the street.
The house where a cackling witch threw flaming torches at a leather-faced scarecrow. Where the scarecrow juggled fire, then lit a blaze for toasting marshmallows. Where I stood by, a hobo clown with a bucket of water. By then I knew that Dad's act with Matilda, and the talk he gave, were not a regular part of the museum exhibit on the Hartford fire. It was something he only did for school groups.
"I wanted to give them a taste of the magic, as I remembered it. When a grownup goes to something like that, they aren't interested in the moment. They are only interested in their own recollections. But you young ones, you don't have any recollections of the days when the show played under canvas. When it was more than just a three ring show. It was all that, and a carnival, and a zoo, and a congress of freaks. A whole world complete within itself. Used to be the real world was happy to make room for us. After Hartford, I wasn't so sure of that anymore."
We sat on the front gallery of our house, nibbling away the remnants of graham crackers and chocolate bars. The last marshmallows long since toasted, the fire in the pit nothing more than a mound of glowing embers crumbling to ash.
"Maybe," I ventured, "the truth is closer to that story you told me when I was little." I looked sideways at Dad, but in the glow from the jack o' lanterns I couldn't read his expression. "The day the sky caught fire, that was the real world burning away the magic. I kept thinking about that ringmaster, and how different it was from the earlier fire. I think people still believed in the magic, back in 1910, and that made the magic strong. Then the world wars came, and everything changed. That darkness you told me about, it got strong on those wars. I think it broke loose in Hartford, and twisted all the bright and beautiful things you tried to bring there."
Dad's voice was barely above a whisper. "That's why I couldn't go back under the big top. I felt as if I were a target, somehow. But I couldn't let the darkness win, so I went into the sideshow."
"What did stop you, finally?"
Dad's head came up. "Who says I've stopped? Your mother and I might have decided to stay in one place, but that doesn't mean we've stopped."
I thought about the magic in the museum, and the spells cast by firelight in our own front yard. I looked up at the stars, and thought about the fires of creation, flaming out there in the cosmos. I thought about wildfires, and how they cleared out deadwood and debris. How the ash nourished the tired soil. How new life sprang forth in abundance from desolation.
"Dad? Think I might be able to learn to juggle?"
I heard my mother chuckle softly to herself. I saw my father's eyes glow brighter than the fading jack o' lanterns. I felt the magic rise up from the ashes of that long ago fire.
I didn't run off to join the circus, but I did learn to juggle. I graduated high school, registered for the draft on my eighteenth birthday, and found I had inherited my father's flat feet. I was glad for that, because I did not want to join my drafted friends, dropping napalm on villages. I like to build, and since storm-prone Florida has to build and rebuild, I learned to hang drywall, and to do plaster and stucco work.
To do the work, I learned to walk on stilts. Goes naturally with my clown costumes and glow-in-the-dark juggling rings. Dad and I toss them around on Halloween. Our house is still the end of the line on Beggar's Night, and not just for the s'mores, which my wife makes ahead of time in the oven. We have the biggest collection of jack o' lanterns on the street.
Under a canvas canopy on the lawn, beneath electric starlight, three papier mache baby elephants hold up their trunks to catch rings tossed by children. Behind the elephants are replicas of sideshow posters showing the not-so-frightening freaks, like Leatherface Lenny the Elephant Man. The smallest children are steered toward the middle elephant, where a puppeteer behind a scrim manipulates the trunk to catch even the wildest tosses.
Beneath the electric fire in the sky, everyone wins a prize. For one night a year, a small fragment of the old magic world occupies a small fragment of the real world. I watch the faces of the children as they are gathered up and herded home, and hope that little bit of magic will be enough to keep the future bright.
even at the end of October. A large gallery, screened in against mosquitoes, surrounds our house, and my parents liked to do
most of their entertaining out there. Dad took the decorating for Halloween as seriously as Mom took decorating for Christmas.
Perhaps that's why I have such fond memories of the winter holidays.
Dad worked at the Ringling Circus Museum, restoring the collection of circus wagons. He could manage all parts of any sort of wagon, from carving the figures to painting the kaleidoscopic patterns on the wooden wheels.
"I started at the Baraboo works when I was right out of high school. Most of the wagons in the collection now, I worked on when they were new."
I knew Dad traveled with the circus for a time, maintaining the wagons and spectacle floats. Of the years between Baraboo and our house in Sarasota, he did not speak, not while I was a child. I always thought of him as old, because he had a face like a worn leather bag, as if exposed to some harshness almost beyond bearing. At the same time, I always thought of my mother as young, because she so often did back flips along the front gallery. Didn't everyone's mom do something like that?
My earliest memories of Halloween are of Dad taking me out for Beggar's Night. He never acted old, even if I thought he looked it, and Halloween was when I began to hear the word "burned" following my dad around. Something about being with the show during the "fire" years.
The whisperers may have thought I was too young to understand, but Dad could tell I knew something was odd. When we'd gotten home and sorted out the treats, when my costume was put away and I was tucked into bed, Dad would tell me a story about the day the sky caught fire.
"There was once a magical world, full of the cleverest of animals and the people who took care of them. This world existed within the real world, but never in the same part of it. Some midnight you might hear the train whistle, more musical than the usual train whistle. You might feel the magic coming down the tracks with the trains. You might catch the smell of the animals as they marched from the train yards, bringing the magic with them. And when you woke in the morning, you would see the flags on the edge of town, marking the boundary between the real world and this magic world.
"In the real world, there was a war going on. Fathers and brothers and uncles all went off to fight. Sometimes you found out they were never coming back. That was why the magic world kept moving, so the people left behind could step out of the real world for a day, and forget their sorrows.
"But war has a magic all its own, a dark power with an endless hunger. A hunger that wants to devour all that is bright and beautiful, or worse, to turn and twist it until it breaks. Until the good magic goes bad, and lends its power to evil.
"Perhaps that's why the darkness fell on this magic world one day. What should have been light went dark, because of one tiny spark turned to evil. Instead of shining down on the magic world, this spark devoured it. This spark leaped up, and the sky caught fire. From one end to the other of the magic world, the sky burned away. The people who came into that world to find happiness, instead found only panic and pain."
Dad sighed at that point. When I was a few years older and still awake, I would ask him, "Were you there, Dad? The day the sky caught fire? Did it burn forever?"
Then he would smile a sad smile. "It only seemed to last forever, Jake. The worst part was over in a matter of minutes. But it was enough to give me a face like an old scarecrow, eh boy?"
"Nah, Dad." I was always thinking of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, which Mom used to read to me. "You don't look anything like that. Except on Halloween."
Because that's what Dad always did, once I was old enough to go out on Beggar's Night with my friends. Wearing a bit of old burlap tied around his neck with twine, and brown makeup on his wrinkled face to blend with it. He would have straw sticking out of his pant legs, but not out of his shirt sleeves.
At our house, Halloween was different. By the light of a dozen or so jack o' lanterns lining the front gallery, Dad would juggle fire. Mom would set up the record player near the open front window, with the speakers facing out and the volume turned up. As the first beggars began wandering the street, she'd turn on Death March of the Marionettes. When everyone had gathered, she'd change the recording for Peer Gynt. Dressed as the Wicked Witch, she'd grab a flaming torch, mock threatening to burn the old scarecrow propped against a gallery post. Then as the music shifted into Hall of the Mountain King, she'd throw a torch at the scarecrow.
This never failed to draw screams, even from the kids who'd seen it before. Dad the Scarecrow would leap away from the gallery, snatching the torch from the air. Mom the Witch would keep throwing torches, and Dad would start juggling away, until he had six or eight torches whirling at once. Then he'd drop them one by one, into the bucket of water at his feet. With the last torch he'd light the wood in the fire pit. Mom would pass out giant marshmallows, and long sticks to toast them on.
Maybe it was the distraction of building our own s'mores that kept us from noticing that my parents circled the fire constantly, keeping us a safe distance from it. Shadows on the lawn concealed the large garden hose, water leaking from its closed off nozzle. The layer of apples floating in a nearby tub of water concealed the heavy wool blankets soaking in the bottom, just in case someone did get too close to the fire.
I didn't learn about the wet blankets until I started high school. I decided I was too old to go out begging, and would help Dad get ready for the night instead.
"Where did you learn to juggle fire, Dad?" I asked as we prepared the torches.
"Oh, I guess I was a bit younger than you when I took it up. Started out with bean bags, so I wouldn't hurt myself. Your granddad wouldn't let me handle fire until I could manage six Indian clubs without killing myself or anyone within ten feet. Even then I think he only let me 'cause it made your grandma crazy."
Some strange connection went off in my head. "Was Grandma there the day the sky caught fire?"
"You still remember that old story? No. Your grandma liked to keep both feet firmly planted in the real world." Dad was quiet for a minute, then he gave me a look. "The museum is working on a special exhibit. About the fire."
"Oh yeah? I guess that's why the Circus Museum is on the class field trip list this year. We were wondering why it's supposed to be a history lesson. So it's not just because this is a circus town?"
"No, I think it is because we're a circus town. You have to remember the past in order to learn from it. That's the purpose of museums, you know. Sometimes they have to make us remember things we'd rather forget."
"Why?"
"So we'll do our best not to let them happen again."
***
My history class took our field trip on a bright spring day. The Circus Museum was only a small part of the old Ringling estate. We filed past lines of tourists waiting to see the huge mansion, the art museum, and the Italian opera house. We were here for a different kind of history lesson.
In a gallery of posters, some as big as a whole wall, we saw the history of the combined shows, Ringling and Barnum & Bailey. We saw the huge silver cannon, mounted on a truck, from which the Human Cannonball was shot across the big top, and the special bicycles used on the high wire by the Flying Wallendas. There was a gallery of life-sized photographs, interspersed with glass cases holding the costumes of the featured performers.
"Hey Jake, isn't that your dad?"
I looked around the room, but I didn't see my father. Then my pal Sam tugged my sleeve again. "Right there, in that picture."
The photo Sam was looking at featured the sideshow performers. Standing on the ballyhoo platform in front of the huge banners advertising the oddities on display inside the tent, was a sideshow barker. Next to him stood a man in a gray leather suit, juggling fire. The banner behind him heralded Leatherface Lenny, the Elephant Man.
Though it was hard to tell from the black and white photo, Dad's face looked like he'd painted it gray, to match the baggy, wrinkled leather suit he was wearing. On the painted banner he was pictured standing on the back of an elephant, juggling rings, one of which the elephant held in its trunk.
The leather suit itself stood in a glass case, along with a set of juggling rings, their once bright paint faded and chipped. There was also another photo, and another costume. In this photo, Dad's face looked more like the one which stared back at me from the mirror. He was wearing what looked like a sailor's uniform, but you could see the lights flashing off it. In the glass case, we could see it was covered in sequins. There was also a picture of him in a bomber pilot's outfit, with a white sequined scarf, riding an elephant in the opening parade.
"Wow. Dad never talks about the show. There was a story he used to tell me, when I was little, but..."
At that point a small old man with a big old voice appeared in the doorway to the next gallery. "Step up, step up," he barked to us, grinning. "See Leatherface Lenny, the Elephant Man, living circus history! Right here, right now, on the inside! Step right up, boys and girls!"
We filed through the dark, narrow canvas-lined chute. Suddenly it opened out into a huge room, fitted out to look like the old-fashioned big top. Wooden bleachers stood along the canvas sidewalls. Before us was a single circus ring filled with sawdust.
From speakers high above, a recording of the circus band accompanied us as we climbed into our seats. A ringmaster's whistle sounded, and the music ended in a fanfare. Dad walked into the ring with an elephant. As the music started again, the elephant lifted Dad with her trunk. Wearing black leather ballet shoes, Dad stood on the elephant's back. From somewhere under the long, black-sequined coat, a half dozen juggling rings appeared. The music changed, and the elephant began to dance, shaking her head in time to the music and lifting her front feet high. As she turned on her haunches in a slow circle, Dad began turning on her back, in the opposite direction. The lights dimmed, the flying rings glowing in the dark, glints of light from the sequins on Dad's coat and the elephant's harness dazzling all of us. I found myself joining my classmates in spontaneous applause.
The lights came up. The music changed again, and the elephant stopped dancing, raising her trunk high. Dad tossed the rings onto the elephant's trunk and she held them, curling her trunk so the tip touched her forehead. To another fanfare, Dad did a forward roll off her back, landing next to her front feet.
The elephant dropped her trunk so Dad could collect his juggling rings. They disappeared beneath his coat, and his hand reappeared with bunches of silk flowers, which he tossed toward the girls. He even seemed to pull flowers from the elephant's mouth, but I was watching close. He was cleverly covering the fact that he was feeding her a treat.
Dad and the elephant took their bows. The whistle blew, the music changed again, and they left the ring. The lights went very low, leaving us sitting in near darkness while the music kept playing. In the midst of an airy waltz, the whistle shrilled out again, high and long and harsh. causing some of us to jump.
The music jerked out of the waltz and into The Stars and Stripes Forever, something none of us had ever heard a circus band play. A strange, flickering orange light swept slowly across the canvas ceiling, then spread down the walls.
The music stopped abruptly and for a heart-pounding moment all the lights went out. I could hear the canvas sidewalls rustling. When the lights came on again, Dad was sitting on an upturned bucket, alone in the middle of the ring. Beside him lay one of the high wire bicycles. As our eyes adjusted to the light, and focused on what Dad was looking at, we could see that this bicycle was crumpled, as if it had fallen from the rigging high up in the big top. Unlike the bright chrome and red bikes in the museum display, this one was blackened. It reminded me of the steel barrels used to burn trash in.
Dad looked up at our uncertain faces. "Come down to the ring, children. Sit down along the curb. Carefully now."
Getting down from the bleachers was a lot more tricky than getting up them. Slowly, as we gathered to sit along the ring curb, I noticed that the canvas sidewalls now lay in heaps, revealing another display of large photographs. Dad was urging us to lean in closer, though, so he wouldn't have to shout like a sideshow barker. I knew, then, that the story he was about to tell was not the stuff of ballyhoo.
"What happened in Hartford in 1944 is sometimes referred to as the day the clowns all cried. My son Jake knows the story as a fairy tale about the day the sky caught fire. It was the day the big top burned, just as the show was getting started. I was there. I was in my bomber pilot costume, with Rosie, my elephant, getting ready to do our little act. We were off behind the dressing tents, since we had plenty of time to get to the performers' entrance to the big top.
"Then I heard the music change to Stars and Stripes Forever. Everyone on the lot stopped what they were doing, because that music meant there was trouble in the big top, and we had to get there on the double. I started to run with Rosie, to take her back to the elephants' picket line, when I saw the flames shoot up on the far end of the big top. I told Rosie to stop and stay where she was, but Rosie followed me, because she wasn't afraid of fire. She'd been through the menagerie tent fire, two years earlier, and she was tough as nails.
"I ran through the performers' entrance. People were scrambling down from the stands, pushing and shoving, knocking each other down and trampling anyone who fell. The fire was sweeping across the top of the tent, and the heat was terrible. People were trying to go out the same way they'd come in, and they weren't thinking to come where I was. They were trying to cross the tent, but there were cages in the way from the animal acts that opened the show. I stopped a big group of women and children from getting caught in that crush. I steered them underneath the stands, toward the sidewall of the tent where Rosie was waiting. The heat was unbearable, and the panic was getting worse.
"I lifted up the sidewall as far as I could, but only the smallest children could get under. The sides there had been pegged down tight, to keep the kids from sneaking in without paying. But my Rosie was out there. I called to her, and she came and pulled up the stakes.
"I held up one side of the canvas, and Rosie held up the other side with her trunk. The people just kept pouring out, until the fire was right over top of us. I took one last look inside, and I saw a woman under the stands, passed out from the heat. I went in after her just as the stands themselves began to burn. I got her to the sidewall, and someone else pulled her out.
"There was a sound like a hurricane coming in. The rigging gave way, and what was left of the burning top fell in on those of us who were still inside. I thought I was a goner for sure, because the stands were burning above me, and it was so hot I couldn't breathe. Then Rosie reached in and grabbed me with her trunk. She pulled me out and carried me back to the elephant line.
"I didn't think I was hurt all that bad. I helped the other handlers move the elephants away from the fire. It wasn't until I had gone back to my berth on the circus train that I realized I was burned all over. Not from the flames. It was the heat of the fire. My clothes were sooty and stank of smoke, but not burned. Underneath, though, I was cooked like a lobster. Well, by that time we were hearing on the radio that all the hospitals were full up. So I went back to the lot, and got the animal doctor to paint me all over with the same burn ointment we used after the menagerie fire."
One girl raised her hand. She lived up the street from us, and had been to our Halloween revels. Dad nodded to her. She bit her lip, then spoke. "Mr. Simpson? Is it true that three circus people died too?"
"No, honey. A couple of us got hurt, is all. I'll say this, though. A little bit of all of us died that day. I never could go back into the big top again. After my skin healed up, it was never quite the same, so I became Leatherface Lenny, and went into the sideshow. Mostly I just did my regular job of repairing and maintaining the wagons and spectacle floats."
There were a lot of other questions after that, and Dad answered all of them. He walked around the little hippodrome track with us, pointing out details in the enlarged photographs taken at the disaster. One showed flames shooting high above the whole length of the big top, and black smoke filling the rest of the frame, as if the sky really was on fire.
"Mostly," Dad said softly, "it was grownups who died. One hundred, exactly, and sixty-seven children. Something of a miracle, with a crowd of nine thousand in attendance that day. Most of the dead had been trampled in the panic. It was the ones still scrambling over top of the others, when the last of the burning top came down..."
There was a photo of the ruin. Fallen poles, broken bleachers, twisted animal cages in the end rings. The crumpled high wire bicycle fallen in the scorched center ring.
"Someone said it only took ten minutes for the top to burn. What they call a flash over, nowadays. The fire crews kept it from spreading to the other tents, and once the top was gone they put it out pretty quick. They even pulled a couple of kids out alive, who were buried under the crush."
Dad paused again at a photo of the band, on their platform just in front of the performers' entrance. "That Sousa march was chosen as the disaster call because everyone in the band could play it from memory. They launched right into it and kept on playing as the fire came toward them. When they heard the rigging give way, they grabbed their instruments and jumped over the back of the platform, to get out from under the top. Only things they couldn't save were the kettledrums and the organ."
The next photo showed the bandstand after the fire. Looking where Dad pointed, we could see the Hammond B-3 organ, burned black, and the overturned husks of the kettledrums, the skins burned away, in the midst of a heap of charred chairs and music stands.
We saw photos of clowns with water buckets, and the ringmaster standing, staring at the ruin, his top hat clutched in one hand, his red coat and white breeches scorched and smudged with soot.
"Now there's a man, " Dad murmured, "was hurt deeper than any of us there, I think. He'd been with the show forever, it seemed, and was ringmaster way back in 1910 when the big top burned in Schenectady. There was a big crowd that day too, but when he stopped the show and told them all to leave the tent quickly and quietly, why that's just what they did. Not a soul got hurt that day. But in Hartford, there was a panic. That man was never the same, after that day."
Without us realizing, we'd been guided around the full display, When we came to the edge of the stands again, Dad led us underneath them. There was more sawdust there, as well as a bucket of water and a fire extinguisher. Here, though, the canvas sidewall was still up.
"This is how most folks got out." Dad reached down to lift the bottom edge.
It wouldn't budge. "Well shucks," Dad barked. "Hey Matilda! Up stakes, girl!"
There was a shambling, shuffling sound from the other side, then the sidewall lifted easily, and we could see the large feet of an elephant. We all ducked under the canvas to find ourselves outside in the bright sunshine. The canvas entryway we'd gone through earlier turned out to be an actual tent, connecting two separate buildings. We'd just come out through a large loading doorway, covered by the canvas sidewall. Some of my classmates covered their ears as Matilda the elephant greeted us with a loud trumpet.
Dad fed Matilda another treat. "Right, now gather around Matilda here, and let's get a picture for your yearbook."
I'm not sure how it happened, but I was standing next to Dad when the photographer came up. As the rest of the class took their places along Matilda's massive profile, Dad climbed her trunk to perch behind her head.
"Pick him up, Matilda."
Next thing I knew, Matilda's thick gray trunk was wrapped around me and I was hoisted into the air. Even though I'd only just learned of my father's close association with the circus, I somehow felt at home in Matilda's grasp.
***
When Halloween rolled around again, we had those yearbooks. The photo of the freshman class with Matilda the elephant was the envy even of the seniors. On Beggar's Night a fair number of kids had their older brothers and sisters along as escorts, as least when it came time to hit the house at the end of the street.
The house where a cackling witch threw flaming torches at a leather-faced scarecrow. Where the scarecrow juggled fire, then lit a blaze for toasting marshmallows. Where I stood by, a hobo clown with a bucket of water. By then I knew that Dad's act with Matilda, and the talk he gave, were not a regular part of the museum exhibit on the Hartford fire. It was something he only did for school groups.
"I wanted to give them a taste of the magic, as I remembered it. When a grownup goes to something like that, they aren't interested in the moment. They are only interested in their own recollections. But you young ones, you don't have any recollections of the days when the show played under canvas. When it was more than just a three ring show. It was all that, and a carnival, and a zoo, and a congress of freaks. A whole world complete within itself. Used to be the real world was happy to make room for us. After Hartford, I wasn't so sure of that anymore."
We sat on the front gallery of our house, nibbling away the remnants of graham crackers and chocolate bars. The last marshmallows long since toasted, the fire in the pit nothing more than a mound of glowing embers crumbling to ash.
"Maybe," I ventured, "the truth is closer to that story you told me when I was little." I looked sideways at Dad, but in the glow from the jack o' lanterns I couldn't read his expression. "The day the sky caught fire, that was the real world burning away the magic. I kept thinking about that ringmaster, and how different it was from the earlier fire. I think people still believed in the magic, back in 1910, and that made the magic strong. Then the world wars came, and everything changed. That darkness you told me about, it got strong on those wars. I think it broke loose in Hartford, and twisted all the bright and beautiful things you tried to bring there."
Dad's voice was barely above a whisper. "That's why I couldn't go back under the big top. I felt as if I were a target, somehow. But I couldn't let the darkness win, so I went into the sideshow."
"What did stop you, finally?"
Dad's head came up. "Who says I've stopped? Your mother and I might have decided to stay in one place, but that doesn't mean we've stopped."
I thought about the magic in the museum, and the spells cast by firelight in our own front yard. I looked up at the stars, and thought about the fires of creation, flaming out there in the cosmos. I thought about wildfires, and how they cleared out deadwood and debris. How the ash nourished the tired soil. How new life sprang forth in abundance from desolation.
"Dad? Think I might be able to learn to juggle?"
I heard my mother chuckle softly to herself. I saw my father's eyes glow brighter than the fading jack o' lanterns. I felt the magic rise up from the ashes of that long ago fire.
I didn't run off to join the circus, but I did learn to juggle. I graduated high school, registered for the draft on my eighteenth birthday, and found I had inherited my father's flat feet. I was glad for that, because I did not want to join my drafted friends, dropping napalm on villages. I like to build, and since storm-prone Florida has to build and rebuild, I learned to hang drywall, and to do plaster and stucco work.
To do the work, I learned to walk on stilts. Goes naturally with my clown costumes and glow-in-the-dark juggling rings. Dad and I toss them around on Halloween. Our house is still the end of the line on Beggar's Night, and not just for the s'mores, which my wife makes ahead of time in the oven. We have the biggest collection of jack o' lanterns on the street.
Under a canvas canopy on the lawn, beneath electric starlight, three papier mache baby elephants hold up their trunks to catch rings tossed by children. Behind the elephants are replicas of sideshow posters showing the not-so-frightening freaks, like Leatherface Lenny the Elephant Man. The smallest children are steered toward the middle elephant, where a puppeteer behind a scrim manipulates the trunk to catch even the wildest tosses.
Beneath the electric fire in the sky, everyone wins a prize. For one night a year, a small fragment of the old magic world occupies a small fragment of the real world. I watch the faces of the children as they are gathered up and herded home, and hope that little bit of magic will be enough to keep the future bright.