Sarah Canary (15 page)

The curtains were drawn and a lantern was lit. The audience consisted only of men, and most of them had been drinking. The maleness of the audience was no surprise. Fathers would not let their daughters attend such unwholesome entertainments. Husbands would not let their wives. The woman stood quietly at the front of the room, dressed all in black. Her hair was tidy but not arranged; her face was pale and somewhat tense. ‘I am very glad you came tonight. What you will see and what you will hear is not something you will soon forget. The woman before you is an enigma,’ the men were told.

‘Women are enigmas to you. She . . .

‘. . . was raised by a she-wolf in a damp, flea-infested . . .

‘. . . bed where one partner is taking pleasure at the expense of the other, shameless as . . .

‘. . . a child who has suckled at the teat of the beast. . .

‘. . . and yet, of course, I need explain the effect of unconsummated intercourse to no woman who is . . .

‘. . . old enough to eat the raw meat for which she still retains . . .

‘. . .an unnatural appetite, you men would have her believe, knowing nothing about her, and denying her a common humanity with . . .

‘. . . the hunters who came upon her, hunched over the body of her “mother”, absolutely and innocently unclothed . . .

‘. . . but she feels what you feel and needs what you need . . .

‘. . . and now you may come forward, gentlemen, and examine her for yourselves.’

‘A lady just lays there,’ a man in the front informed Adelaide hostilely. ‘It’s part of being a lady. I don’t see how it’s my fault. I didn’t make the rules.’

‘Is she just going to stand there?’ someone complained to Harold. ‘Make her do something.’

Men were always being told that women behaved like animals and never getting to see it. No wonder they were upset.

Harold was drinking heavily. The initial draw in each town was unaffected by the audience’s dissatisfactions, but it meant that Harold could only schedule a single show in each location. The unhappiness of the audience followed him now, always a bit behind, but ineluctable as a shadow. As sure as the sun rolled daily from east to west, failure would catch up with him and, eventually, even precede him into town. Harold should have taken the mermaid instead. No one would blame him if she just laid there and did nothing. At least the men could look at her breasts. Even if they suspected the breasts were artificial, no one would be complaining. Breasts were breasts. You couldn’t demand your money back, you couldn’t claim you’d been cheated, if you’d gotten to see breasts.

He was drinking as much as he could afford to, but he had somehow lost the ability to wrap himself in an alcoholic fog so thick his memories wouldn’t penetrate. Last night he had awakened all in a sweat, dreaming he was back in Andersonville, crawling those last fevered feet into the deadline like Jimmy had done. ‘Come on, Harold,’ Jimmy had said. ‘Just a few feet and your problems are over. Just those few feet between hell and paradise.’ The guards were free to shoot anyone who crossed into the deadline. They shot Jimmy, once in the leg, so that he collapsed, bent over his knees, his hands on his ears. The next bullet went through his right palm on its way into his head.

More than 40,000 men had died or were wounded at Gettysburg, and yet the odds of surviving the prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville were smaller than the odds of surviving that battle. But Harold had done it. It made him special. It made him so special he could hardly get through the night. It made him an oddity.

It made him immortal so that death lusted after him, beckoned to him, pleaded with him, made the same promises alcohol had once made. Come on, Harold, said death. Then your problems are over. Stop the dreams, death promised. Or maybe the promise was to dream forever.

‘So give her some raw meat,’ a fat man in the front suggested. ‘Show us how she eats like a dog.’ Harold rolled the end of his mustache between his thumb and index finger nervously. In fact, he had already tried raw meat at an early show in Snohomish. Harold booked the rooms and drew the posters, which made Sarah Canary look a great deal younger than she was, and arranged the transportation, which was sometimes horses and sometimes steamers and sometimes the train, and entertained the audiences and kept Sarah Canary as well as he could out of the earnings. Sarah Canary did nothing. Sarah Canary would not even eat raw meat.

‘Raw meat has been removed from her diet as a part of the process of civilizing her.’ Harold bent his fingers around the neck of a silver flask of whiskey and drank.

‘Make her talk. You said she howls. Make her howl.’

Harold gave Sarah Canary a piece of bread. She took it in two hands and held it in front of her face. She looked more like a chipmunk than a wolf. She didn’t eat it. ‘She’s not hungry,’ Harold said.

‘Notice the canines.’ Harold put a hand into Sarah Canary’s mouth, pulling the lips back to expose her teeth. The men crowded around. She made a small, warning sound in her throat. ‘A growl,’ Harold pointed out. ‘She’s growling like her wolf mother.’

‘She don’t look so wild to me,’ the fat man said. He reached out and petted Sarah Canary’s hair. Sarah Canary was stiff beneath his hand.

Harold drank. He held his flask under Sarah Canary’s nose. ‘The Wild Woman will not touch intoxicants,’ he said. Sarah Canary did not touch the whiskey. Sarah Canary did nothing. ‘The Wild Woman does not recognize herself in a mirror.’ Harold turned the silvered side of the flask to reflect Sarah Canary’s face. On the convex surface, she was all nose. Sarah Canary did nothing. ‘See?’ said Harold. Harold drank. A man with a red beard examined Sarah Canary’s hand. He pushed her sleeve up as far as it went and looked at her wrist. When he let go, her arm fell limply back to her lap. ‘Is anything else going to happen?’ he asked.

‘Her father,’ said Harold, stroking his mustache grimly, ‘was a Russian sailor shipwrecked off the coast of Kodiak Island and enslaved by the Aleuts.’ A chilly breeze came into the parlor through the open door and made the lantern flicker. Sarah Canary’s shadow rippled on the wall behind her like water. ‘He fell in love with a beautiful Indian maiden who shyly returned his affections, until’ - Harold filled his mouth with whiskey, sieved it through his teeth, and swallowed - ‘their love was discovered.’ Sarah Canary’s shadow flickered across the curtains. She shook her hair and it flew about her face, settling back slightly out of place. The men were quiet and Harold thought he felt them mentally leaning forward. He lowered his voice. ‘The sailor was beaten to death with stones.’ He paused to drink and let the pathos of the sailor’s fate penetrate. Killed by savages. And for love. He let them think about it for a moment. ‘The maiden was sent into exile, but her beauty immediately captured the heart of another Aleut, a warrior from a different tribe who did not know her shameful secret and married her. All would have been well had the maiden not been expecting the child of her Russian lover. The birth of the baby would reveal her secret and lose her, she feared, the love of her husband.’

An unkempt man with a smell like ripening cheese put his fingers on Sarah Canary’s face. She made a noise, blowing through her lips like a horse so that he pulled his hand back in surprise. The men laughed. Harold struggled to control a momentary rage. He was trying to build a mood. Sarah Canary was actively undercutting him. She began a series of nonsensical noises, she panted, she moaned. Harold put a hand on her shoulder, pinching her hard but invisibly. Sarah Canary flinched and was quiet. He withdrew his hand. When he resumed her story, his voice was louder. ‘Her time came and the little mother stole away to a cave she had discovered to deliver the child alone. But she was not alone. As she made her way to the back of the cave, she came suddenly upon a she-wolf. The little Indian maiden shrank back in terror. She prepared to flee, but just before she ran, the wolf whimpered suddenly, a sound of such agony, the maiden paused in spite of herself. The wolf, too, was giving birth, but in pain and in terror. The maiden’s heart was touched. She returned, hesitantly, to sit with the other expectant mother, stroking and calming her and calling her
sister.
When the wolf cub was born dead, the Indian maiden sobbed as if it had been her own child.’ Sarah Canary made a series of clicking sounds. There was more laughter. She repeated the sounds. The laughter was louder. Harold’s hands shook on the flask. He turned his back on Sarah Canary.

‘But now her own child was coming. A girl. A misbegotten, hairy, ugly girl.’ The words came out of Harold’s mouth before he knew he was going to say them. Usually the baby was beautiful, at least, Harold was careful to add, in the eyes of her mother. Usually the sobbing maiden entrusted the child to the care of the wolf and slipped back to her husband and happiness. Anger and frustration were telling the story now; Harold was merely drinking and getting out of their way.

‘More wolves came to the cave. Whether they saw the dead cub and blamed the human for it or whether they were merely maddened by the blood of the childbirth is a question we will never be able to answer. In any case, they tore the Indian maiden apart with their pointed yellow teeth. Then they turned to her cub. The she-wolf shielded the baby from the pack with her body. She fought, taking and giving many injuries, until the blood-lust of the beasts was sated and they left her alone with the child.’

Sarah Canary hummed. Sarah Canary trilled. Harold turned with his hand out, striking her with so much force, she was thrown sideways to her knees, where she remained, looking up at him with a face that was bestial in its lack of expression. ‘Or perhaps not,’ he said coldly. ‘Perhaps the woman we have here is the product of a different sort of union. Perhaps the sailor mated directly with the wolf.’ He was aware of the silence in the room again. Sarah Canary made no sound at all. The audience might have stopped breathing for all the noise they made. ‘The show is over,’ said Harold. He turned away from the woman on her knees. ‘Go home now.’

~ * ~

8

Harold Recites Tennyson

Further than Guess can gallop

Further than Riddle ride—

Oh for a Disc to the Distance

Between Ourselves and the Dead!

Emily Dickinson, 1864

It was strongly suggested to Harold that he join his audience in the saloon downstairs, where he could stand drinks for everyone out of the night’s profits. It might make him more popular, he was told. He could use a little popularity, he was told. He was told this two or three times and everyone who told him was wearing a pistol.

Harold returned Sarah Canary to her room, checking the windows and locking the door from the outside. He went to his own room and picked up his own gun, stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. He could feel the cold of the metal even through his layers of clothing. He walked down the flight of stairs, arriving about the same time that the men who had come to see Sarah Canary were joined by the men who had gone to see Adelaide. There was no fireplace; the room depended on liquor and bodies for heat. Harold smelled sweat and cigar smoke and spilled whiskey. His boots stuck to the floor and made sucking sounds as he walked.

Harold could see no way to buy drinks for one group and not for the other. He suspected that when the evening was over he would find the engagement in Seabeck had actually lost him money. His tentative plans had included touring the lumber camps with Sarah Canary. Now he thought it best to put more miles between Seabeck and the next show. He was thinking of heading down to Oregon. Or back to Steilacoom. When he was ready to admit that Sarah Canary was just not going to work out, then he could leave her, leave her somewhere safe, of course, and go back for the mermaid. Had the time come to do that?

‘What do you have?’ he asked Bill Blair, a half-breed Indian who owned the Bay View and tended the bar. Harold had met Blair earlier when he took adjoining rooms in the hotel for himself and the Alaskan Wild Woman.

‘More liquor than you’ll find anywhere else in the Washington Territory,’ Blair answered. ‘Just ask for it. Jersey Lightning, California port wine, grape brandy bitters. Whiskey, of course. Beer. Seabeck is seeing some fat times and I’m full-stocked for it. Sorry the show didn’t go better.’ Blair had not attended the show. Obviously, the men who had preceded Harold into the saloon had already been complaining.

‘Give everyone a drink,’ Harold said. ‘Give me whiskey.’

A shadow passed in the doorway. Harold caught sight of a black dress and a white face. His heart beat twice, very fast, before he realized it wasn’t Sarah Canary. The woman was going upstairs, not down.

‘Miss Adelaide Dixon is on her way to her room,’ Blair observed. ‘Turning in early.’

‘And looking just like a lady.’ Someone behind Harold cleared the phlegm from his throat and spit. Harold turned. A man in kid gloves was seated among the mill workers, stroking a silk plug hat that he held over his lap. He had a white beard and a round face. ‘Which I assure you she is not. No more than I would be were I to put on a lady’s dress.’ A tarnished copper spittoon sat right at his feet and yet he had managed to miss it. The spittle glistened on the floor by the toe of his new shoe. He raised his glass to Blair. ‘I’ll have a Chinee Stinker,’ he said. ‘Made the way they used to make them in the old days when John Pennell, the mad squaw-master, ran Seattle.’

He breathed on the crown of his hat, then made a series of small circles with his cuff, polishing. He turned to Harold. ‘Who is more the lady - the woman who provides it for money but talks about it free, or the woman who talks about it for money but provides it free? My name is Jim Allen, by the way. Clerk at the Washington Mill Lumber Company.’ Jim Allen removed his gloves. He was wearing a fat gold ring with a large opal on his little finger. ‘Thank you for the drink,’ he added. ‘Sit with us?’