Ross Gilfillan - The Snake-Oil Dickens Man

‘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.’

‘Kinda thing he might do, then?’

‘Sure is. Exactly so. He’s checking us out, making sure this town’s the one for his show. Looking over this hotel too, I reckon.’

‘Appears the part, I must say,’ said Merriweather. ‘Fancy clothes. And what’s that on his finger? A diamond?’

‘P.T. Barnum ain’t the man to wear paste,’ said Irving.

‘Well, Barnum or no Barnum, it don’t do to keep customers waiting,’ said the hotelier and hustled Irving out the door. Then he checked himself in the glass, sent me about my work and made his own regal entrance.

II

I didn’t see Mr D’Orleans again until dinner-time but I could tell the impression he was creating from the orders that were being sent to the kitchen. Mary Ann and the cook were preparing for dinner like it was Thanksgiving at the White House. I had come to help out but finished up only getting underfoot and Mary Ann loaded me up with a great bundle of bed-linen and sent me spinning across the yard towards the wash-house. My mother was there, as she always was, stirring sheets and shirts in the big copper tub. She said, ‘Lo, Billy,’ but she kept on stirring, her hair all over her eyes, as it ever was.

‘You all right, Ma?’ I said, for I had taken to using this appellation and from that you may deduce that my relationship with her had considerably improved from the day I had attempted to exorcise her from the back stoop.

‘I guess I am,’ she said.

‘Don’t look it, Ma,’ said I, ‘Merriweather getting at you agin?’

‘That man,’ she said.

‘He ain’t beat you again, has he?’ I said. ‘Because if he has …’

She stood up from the wash-tub and straightened herself. Whenever she did this I was surprised to see how much taller she was and how proud she could appear when she didn’t stoop and wasn’t so timid and servile.

‘You listen to me, Billy,’ she flashed, ‘I don’t want you meddling with nothing that happens ’twixt Melik and me; ’taint none of your business. Someone’s going to get hurt if you do that. Understand me now.’

Anger and burning frustration flared like foxfire, as it always did whenever I tried to touch upon the roots of things and asked why Merriweather was so blamed keen to keep us both at the Particular.

I said, ‘I don’t know that I do understand, Ma. It’s awful hard when he threatens you. He does it to keep me in line. What if we was both to go away from here? What then?’

‘Some things jest ain’t possible,’ she said, with grim simplicity, ‘and that’s one of ’em.’

‘I wish I could change your mind.’

‘Don’t worry yourself over me. Merriweather ain’t so bad.’ She plunged her arms into the water and began to pummel one of his shirts. ‘Any case,’ she said, ‘where could we go? Here, I got shelter and food.’

She paused a moment and then said, ‘But you’re getting to be an ejucated fellow, Billy, I can see you gotta look out for something better.’

I couldn’t tell her the nature of the threats Merriweather had made against the eventuality of my deciding to quit him and his hotel, so I let the matter drop and helped her with the laundry. After we had done, I said maybe we could talk more when I came to see her later. My mother occupied a room in a lean-to behind the wash-house and I had taken to visiting her for an hour; not mainly for conversation, because she wasn’t one for that, but to teach her to read and write. But it was beginning to look like she was either word-blind or quite as stupid as Merriweather said and the worst of it was, I could never seem to make out which. As I left the shed, she said, ‘T’aint just Merriweather, Billy!’