The Snake-Oil Dickens Man

Other memories are of equally doubtful provenance. Sometimes I think I remember the stage coach in which I know I travelled from Cairo but I know that can hardly be as I was still a babe in arms when I was taken away and installed with my mother at Merriweather’s Particular Hotel.

Within sight of the town, I was sensible, suddenly, of the thunder of hooves. I had been so lost in thought as I approached the church and burial ground that marked the town’s limits that I didn’t hear a thing until horse and rider were upon me and had nearly run me down. The Particular’s chestnut mare with its rider, cloaked and masked for the dust, galloped past. It wasn’t common to see anyone in a great hurry in these parts and I watched until he was out of sight.

III

Before my eyes were opened I was the lowest creature of evolution and I’m sure Mr Darwin would have recognised in me then some hairy antecedent of my present evolvement. My lot was better than that which had lately belonged to slaves and also than that of most new freedmen but I was a child strangely and harshly circumstanced and what might be supportable now, was infinitely less so then.

You will wonder how this came to be and to answer that I must go back to the beginning of all things and return to the smell of the swamp, which might or might not be my oldest surviving memory. There is that and I can summon its noxious vapour even now but what else of that time survives? Not much. The mingling of images and impressions and half-remembered speech that I retain must date from two or three years after I was brought to the hotel as a babe in arms and in what order they occurred I have not the slightest idea. But they are as follows.

I am pulled from my mother’s arms and someone is crying, no, howling and whether it is me or my mother who keens so piteously, I don’t know. This, I now believe, must have been the moment I was taken from my mother to live at the house of Elijah Putnam. A woman’s hands grip my wrists as she teaches me to use knife and fork. She leans across my shoulders, her breasts brushing my neck and her sweet-smelling breath whispers encouragement in my ear and I am grateful. The same woman is talking, loudly enough for me to hear clearly from the top of the stairs on which I sit, ‘Don’t take him away from me, Elijah, he’s all I have.’

And I remember the smoking and acrid-smelling remains of the house in which she died: the blackened doorframe and uprights that still stood among great heaps of charcoal and ashes and the half-burned artefacts and knick-knacks I rescued from the ruins and were my damaged records of a time when I had been happy.

There is the schoolroom, too, in which Elijah Putnam, appearing little different in my memory than he did when last I saw him, strides up and down between the desks. Stopping at my own with much greater regularity than at others, he points out this or that in a book or corrects marks I am making on a slate. There are many schoolroom memories: of reading aloud before the class or standing upon a chair with a sign about my neck that advertises that I am slothful; of my classmates finding me alone one day and taking their turns to cuff me about the ears … Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet ringing in the ears they stung so long ago.

It must have been soon after Mrs Putnam died that I left my room at his house and first slept beneath the roof of the Particular Hotel. My history is quite distinct after this date. After living a relatively ordered and peaceful life with Mr and Mrs Putnam, I found myself plunged into a chaotic world in which my function appeared to be to scrub floors, fetch and carry wash-basins, empty chamber-pots, change bed-linen, polish the boots, help the cook, wait on and clear away the tables, run errands, help Henry with the livery horses, clean the saloon and do any number of jobs, all at once, that would probably have taken three people to get done anywhere else.

I don’t know when I first encountered Merriweather but he seems a part of every memory I have of my new existence at the hotel. My life was quite suddenly, utterly changed. It seemed no stranger to be working my hands to the bone in the role of unpaid factotum to a hotelier than it did to find myself receiving personal tuition from Elijah Putnam, who had retired from his position as schoolteacher and had taken rooms in the Particular, to which I repaired every day.

But it wasn’t the work, exhausting as it always was, that made my days so miserable. I think I could have borne that well and enjoyed some parts of it, too, had I known that Merriweather were not always somewhere about the building, ready to box my ears or make threats of violence that would be directed not at me but at someone else and these I feared more than anything Merriweather might do to me.

I knew that the woman who worked mostly in the laundry and whom I sometimes caught stealing along the corridors was my mother. She cut the strangest figure of the establishment. It wasn’t just her worn-out appearance: she was taller than her posture suggested, her hands wrinkled from her work, rather than by nature, although what age she had then attained was hard to guess. Her clothes were patched and stained and she and they smelt strongly of the wash-house.

What was more extraordinary was the way she carried herself – like a whipped animal. She kept closely to herself and could even sometimes be heard running ahead of footfalls in an effort to conceal herself from any approach. She rarely met a glance and her eyes that were normally cast down were often shielded anyway by the wild mess of lank locks that fell about and often concealed her physiognomy. It could be a shock for a stranger to catch her with her face unobscured and find that she was actually pretty.

I discovered that this was my mother not long after I moved from Elijah’s house to the Particular Hotel. I had been helping Mary Ann, the cook’s girl, to knead the dough. The kitchen was warm with the baking and Merriweather, whom I had already identified as an enemy to children, was playing at cards in the saloon. I was happy to be there with Mary Ann. She wasn’t more than a few years older than I was and had become my only ally in this inhospitable place.

There was fun to be had when Cook wasn’t about and as she was napping, the bread-making had become a great game. Water was splashed and flour was spilt. Just as we were becoming so riotous that Mary was saying ‘Hush, you’ll wake Cook’, I caught sight of a figure in the corner of my eye and stopped everything, fearing Cook or Merriweather had caught us fooling.

But it was the woman I had seen skulking in the corridors. She hastened through the kitchen and out into the yard. Mary Ann looked up from her dough and muttered something like, ‘They hanged the witches at Salem,’ and giggled. I was shocked.

‘Is she a witch?’ I asked. She certainly looked like one.

‘Aye and a terrible one at that,’ said Mary Ann. ‘You seen all them cats in the graveyard?’ I had. There was a whole colony of feral cats there. ‘Them’s her families and she dances nekkid with ’em on dead men’s graves, come a moonlit night.’

‘Has she ever put a spell on you?’ I asked, terrified to find such awful danger so imminent.

‘She sure has. Turned me into a bullfrog one day and I had to hop all the way to th’pothecary, get some help.’

I don’t know if we were overheard or whether chance had played its part but when we looked through the door the woman was to be seen sweeping the back porch.

‘She’s got a broom too!’ I exclaimed, weak with horror.

‘I’m so scared I could just faint,’ said Mary Ann. ‘I never seen her with her magic broom afore. Likely she’ll murder us here or take us with her on her broom and do it in the forest. Oh, Billy, help me!’

‘What can I do?’ I said, scared stiff but unwilling to let down my only friend. ‘Shall I get a gun?’

‘Guns is no good ’ginst witches,’ said Mary Ann. ‘You gotta go right up to them and look straight into their eyes. Then you gotta say, “Listen, witch, to this my spell, get thee gone or burn in hell.” And then you says, “Begone old hag, begone!”’

‘You sure?’ I asked, and Mary Ann said it had never failed yet and the last witch they had, vanished in a cloud of smoke.

From where we had ducked down under the kitchen table, I could see the woman passing and repassing the door, sweeping the fall leaves back onto the yard. I had no doubt that this was indeed a powerful witch who might at any moment look up from her labours and make me into one of the hogs which were then squealing beyond the stoop.

I looked at Mary Ann who was pouting and appearing awfully frightened and I knew what I must do. I emerged from under the table and edged about the kitchen to where the door stood open. I looked once again at Mary Ann who signalled me to go on. Mustering my courage, I stepped out on the porch. There was no one there. Relief flooded my soul. ‘She ain’t here, Mary Ann,’ I called. ‘That witch musta seen me coming and took flight.’

Then the woman, who had been around the side of the house, turned the corner and looked at me. Her hair had been brushed off her face, whose still-youthful appearance seemed ill-fitted to her crone’s hands and stooped posture. Her green eyes were unusually bright and, to me, menacing. There was nothing to do but defend myself. I said something that approximated the incantation Mary Ann had taught me. I don’t know exactly what but it seems to me I called her a witch and an old hag more often than had been prescribed.

She remained where she was, still looking intently at me. I wondered if I had transfixed her and whether at any moment she might disappear in smoke. The spell seemed to be taking hours to work and I said, ‘Get thee gone, hag,’ louder and louder and still she stood there. Maybe in my panic I was finally shouting the words because the next thing I knew, Merriweather was standing by me, looking mightily amused and saying, ‘So you’ve met your mother, have you?’

I hardly need to tell you that I was terrifically shocked at this fantastic revelation. I, the son of that monstrosity? I had known that Elijah and Mrs Putnam were not my natural parents, whom I had vaguely understood were both dead. To find that my mother existed under the same roof and that she was as I saw her was a shock of cataclysmic proportions.

I was revolted but whether by her weird appearance and my newly-discovered relationship to her or by my stupid and heartless behaviour, I was too young to know. Whichever it was, such was the revulsion I felt that I concurred willingly with Merriweather’s dictate that I should at all times avoid her society.

And so, for the first year or so, I saw little of the woman they told me was my mother. I worked as usual, performing the same routine chores and becoming adept at anticipating what needed to be done to keep the business running smoothly. Merriweather let up on beating me and began to lean on me instead. I won’t say I was happy but I was becoming accustomed to my lot. But sometimes, as I performed some mechanical and dull task such as blacking the boots of the guests, I would be unable to stop my mind from returning to that woman and wondering about my own origins. But this was never productive and my curiosity stopped short of breaking Merriweather’s injunction and overcoming my own disgust, to talk to the woman herself. Besides, I had much to occupy me now and the times at which I had leisure to consider the oddities of my birth were few. Increasingly, I found my evenings taken up with the hours of tuition I was receiving from Elijah Putnam.

Boys will accept a status quo easily, especially when they have never known anything different and I don’t think I ever properly questioned why Elijah Putnam had singled me out for special attention at his school. Perhaps I assumed that it was because of the affection I was due as his ward. Nor did I find it strange that upon the death of his wife, he should throw up his position of schoolmaster and move into the rooms on the second floor of the Particular Hotel.

But move he had and even after years of infesting the place, it still looked as if its occupant had never intended these apartments as his permanent residence. There was insufficient shelving for his books and these stood in piles or collapsed in heaps about his chair and on top and underneath of the table. He had a big globe, whose dominant colours seemed to be red and blue. There were several oil lamps, whose wicks it was always my first job to trim and so our sessions of study were never interrupted by the going down of the sun.

What never ceased to puzzle me was why Merriweather was compliant with Elijah’s strange and often inconvenient scheme. Just when we seemed at our busiest and I was hurrying this way and that with dinner or tending to newly-arrived horses, the bell would ring and Merriweather might curse but he would always send me upstairs where Putnam would be waiting, book in hand. I could only figure he was pandering to the whim of his only resident guest.

Elijah Putnam had been a part of my life for almost as long as I could remember and yet I really knew very little about him. It was his gentle wife Rosalie I remembered first and who was, for a tragically short time, my mother. Elijah had been then an indistinct figure backgrounding those days and he only showed an interest in me when I grew a little beyond my infancy.

One day in particular I remember. I have always thought of it as the day he discovered me. I had been sitting by Rosalie as she plied her needle amongst a design that included a small house with roses around the door and flowers in its garden. The fall sun was shining low and yellow gold through the trees that shaded the lawn beyond the window. It was a little after the time we were used to expecting Elijah home from the schoolroom and Rosalie had been remarking his tardiness, when the door swung open and Elijah himself strode in.

She put down her sampler and stood to greet her husband but he ignored her proffered kiss and took me up in his arms, an action that both surprised and alarmed me. He carried me to the window where the rays of the setting sun dazzled me and then he turned my head this way and that and seemed to want to see me anew from every angle. At last he put me back upon the sofa and stood, peering down at me, with his hands upon his hips and his chest thrust out. He was smiling broadly and, because his countenance was more usually of a severe set, the effect was remarkable.

‘Well,’ he said, his thick red hair shot through with the dying rays of the sun, ‘this changes everything.’

IV

And presently I will tell you of how everything changed. As people often remark, it is a curious story. But no doubt you remember a masked rider astride the Particular’s chestnut mare and would rather follow him, because he was fast. When I met up with this man, he was in company with one of the most singular individuals it has ever been my fortune to meet.

The morning had been one of routine as I hurried about from one store to another, settling accounts, gossiping with shopkeepers and chewing the fat and plugs of tobacco with young men of my acquaintance. When I had done all I had to do I availed myself of a little leisure and strolled down Main Street, gravitating towards the environs of Cissy Bullock’s house. It was a striking residence, its clapboarding newly white-painted and its garden still in bloom. It was one of the few larger houses to escape molestation when the Yankees had ridden through the town a few years ago and that only because it became the temporary headquarters of a General Crabtree. Traces of the General’s occupation could still be seen, Cissy had told me, in the cigar burns on her father’s desk and in the light squares of wallpaper against which had once hung some valuable paintings.

There was no sign of Bullock himself so I swung a leg over the picket fence and edged around the corner of the house to the source of the music that floated on the air. Through an open window I could see Cissy sitting at the piano. She had on a pretty lemon dress; her hair, that she usually tied up, was let down over her shoulders and it seemed to me I could smell her soap from where I stood. I never saw any picture that looked half as pretty nor mountain stream look an eighth as pure as Cissy did then as she gave herself up to the music, unaware of my proximity. What torture it was to stand within inches of my beloved. I yearned to make my presence known.

But to have done so would have brought trouble not just for me but upon Cissy herself. Bullock might be anywhere about the house and I contented myself with listening to the nocturne and astonishing myself with the brilliance of her hair and delicate tones of her skin until I heard footsteps in the hall. At that juncture, I withdrew and retrudged through the town, heedless of the puddles and mud, oblivious even to the locomotive that must have crashed over the rails right by me, spitting sparks and cinders as it braked for the junction, where I found it, minutes later.

Our chestnut mare was tied up by the tracks still snorting and breathing hard after her exertion. I was curious about her rider and walked alongside of the train from which folk were alighting and carrying off trunks and I peered through the windows wondering if maybe our guest had ridden hard to make the train and be miles away before we discovered his unsettled hotel bill. The man seemed not to be aboard though I was unsure if I would have recognised him anyway. I only saw him once the night before when he had inquired whether there was a printing shop in town and nothing about his appearance or demeanour had been memorable.

I must have been possessed of more striking aspect than he, as when I turned from the last window I found the man I sought standing before me.

‘Pardon me, but ain’t you the manager of the brick hotel? I’d have knowed that hat anywhere. Mighty fine. Unusual, too.’

I admitted that you didn’t see many like it, any more. Was there something I could do for him, I asked.

‘Well, yes, I think there is,’ said the man, who I now noticed was rangy and tall, with wispy wires of hair that escaped from under his hat like stuffing from a chair. ‘I’m in urgent need to speak to someone in authority at that hotel and who knows this town like the back of his hand.’ I assured him that I was such a man and he took me by my arm and led me back to the mare. A man was standing in a buggy, distributing handbills to a small crowd of people and declaiming about something I hadn’t time to get the sense of. The man at my side said, ‘That’s a very important man, in that air fly. Very important for you and this here town. He’ll ‘spect your best room. It’s free, ain’t it?’

I assured him we had a good room vacant at that time. He mounted the buggy and whispered something to his companion, who wished the dispersing crowd well and turned to me.

‘Your servant,’ said the second man in a voice so rich and deep that I heard in it something of the quality of polished mahogany.

Perhaps you have at some time been in the presence of someone whose whole effect is to make you feel under-dressed, under-educated and under-prepared for the occasion? Such was the case then, as I took in the magnificence of the man who now extended a manicured hand. I guessed that he was perhaps fifty years old but he may have been younger or older. His hair was long but well-groomed and he wore what must have been a new city-style of hat, for we had none such here. His suit fitted him no worse than his skin and he gripped a polished, expensive-looking, leather valise. Something glinted upon his waistcoat as he pulled out and glanced at a fancy silver watch.

When he regarded me again, I was impressed by his deep-set, pale blue eyes, which I can only describe as being like beams that shone right inside my head.

‘I am honoured to make your acquaintance, sir,’ he said to me. ‘This is a great day for your town.’ And, with some gravity, presented me with a handbill on which I read the portentous type: P.T. Barnum. Greatest Show On Earth. Astounding Moral Circus, Museum and Managerie. Prop. Phineas T. Barnum. As Exhibited Before the Royal Courts of London and Paris.

There was more of the same but I was only conscious of my heart thumping beneath my shirt and the dazzling eyes of the man whom I took to be the world’s most brilliant showman, P.T. Barnum.

‘Mr Barnum!’ I breathed with no less reverence than a courtier addressing Queen Elizabeth or the Sun King. The thin man laughed but the other held my gaze and only slowly did his eyes crease and did I discern a merry twinkle. But I thought that he said, ‘Not in person, I regret,’ with no less imposing a manner and in my mind some small doubt still lingered.

‘I am Henri D’Orleans,’ he said. ‘And this, John Wilkes. We are advance agents for Mr Phineas Barnum’s great travelling museum and we are here to make the necessary preparations for its visit to this town.’

‘Barnum’s show, here?’ I said.

‘And very soon. We shall require the services of someone who can show us the lie of the land. We will need certain amenities arranged in advance of Barnum’s arrival. And, of course, we must be shown some place where we can throw up the tents and exercise the animals. I hardly suppose you would know of such a person?’

I did and while I rode the chestnut mare back to the hotel, allowing Mr Wilkes to converse with his partner in the fly, (‘You run along ahead, boy, and tell ’em the Barnum men is coming!’) my mind was churning with the excitement I then felt and that I knew would be shared by all when I told them the great news. Just wait till Merriweather and everyone else heard that Billy Talbot was bringing P.T. Barnum to the Particular!

I expected to create a stir, for the impresario had been much in the news, and a hotel guest who had visited Barnum’s American Museum in New York had been greeted with wheel-eyed amazement when he arrived back in town with his tales of performing animals, amazing automatons, astounding tableaux, panoramas and dioramas of scenes from the Creation to the Deluge, incredible human freaks of nature, rope-dancers, jugglers, ventriloquists and any number of scientific and mechanical marvels of the age. It was entertainment beyond possibility.

P.T. Barnum had been news for twenty years. He had the valuable trick of ensuring that anything he did was of great interest to editors of newspapers. Who in the country had not by then heard of his celebrated protégés General Tom Thumb or the Swedish nightingale, Jenny Lind? His American Museum had been successful far beyond its home in New York and when he mounted the whole shooting match on wheels – because that was how it seemed – it was a magnet, a dollar-attracting lodestone for miles around, wherever it pitched up. Even his setbacks and reverses, his crashes and his fires were big news.

We all wanted to know what he would do next – there was no stopping Barnum!

Chapter Two

I

I RODE THAT poor horse hell for leather back to the Particular and jumped off by the front steps, fully expecting to be received like the messenger from Marathon. I found Merriweather where I had left him and poured out my news in one long and unpunctuated narrative. Merriweather was suspicious and sceptical but Amory said he’d had reports of Barnum’s juggernaut rolling through a neighbouring state and thought it might be due at a city not fifty miles from us the following week. Now he considered it, Merriweather recalled that he had seen a handbill bearing Barnum’s name in the street but hadn’t stopped to pick it up.

I said, of course it was Barnum. They’d only have to look at him to know that. And they could do that now because here was the buggy stopping right outside. Merriweather flicked aside the curtains and peered out. Irving, whose excitement had propelled him into the parlour after me, said:

‘I tell you it’s Barnum hisself!’

‘Barnum don’t look like that.’

‘How d’you know? You seen pictures?’

‘No, I ain’t seen no photographs, but why would he claim to be this Dorlyon?’

‘Well, I heard tell, one time he went and sat in the seats of his own cirkis, jest like he was a reg’lar customer and when they was all applaudin’ and calling out for Barnum, he jest sat where he was and never let on.’