Spring and Mr. Barnum

SPRING was an exciting season in Illinois in the years around 1886. Theoretically it began in March, but that month was a discouraging one. We would have a few warm days and Father would hopefully start taking down the storm windows. He would generally get as far as the spare room when the snowflakes began to fall. Lazily at first, then in a thick swirl, and in a few hours we would be deep in a blizzard.

Once more the streets were buried in snow and the horse plough carved its clean deep path, just as if winter were beginning, not ending. Across the street the Beatty yard was an unbroken white expanse, and the two Indian mounds down by the river, which had begun to look like ordinary little brown hills a few days before, were again aloof and mysterious.

By April Fool’s Day, though, we were definitely tasting spring. That first day of April was a difficult twentyfour hours for me. The line between a lie and an ‘April Fool’ was never quite clear in my mind. For three hundred and sixty-four days we children were kept strictly in the paths of truth. Suddenly on the three hundred and sixtyfifth day the whole thing was thrown overboard. It was very confusing.

The windflowers came in April. On the first warm cloudy day, Father would decide to go fishing. We children would draw lots to see who would go with him.

There was a bluff on the river road between Rockford and Oregon that was so beautiful with swaying windflowers that it made your throat ache to look at it. While Father fished, I would climb laboriously up to the top of the bluff and gather a basketful. Their delicate pale colors were folded in a furry silver sheath, as soft to touch as a baby kitten. When I had room for no more, I would sit down, trying not to crush any of the lovely things, and look below me at the thread of road and the brown river beyond. The air was soft and the gray sky seemed almost to touch me, I sat so high on my flowery throne.

When it began to rain, Father called me and we ate our lunch in the shabby covered buggy. Then I curled up on the old leather seat and took a nap while Father fished on and on. It was a perfect day.

The first of May brought some hot days — a foretaste of the prairie heat in store for us. It was then that Mother would rather grudgingly give the word for us to take off our winter flannels: long-sleeved shirts and longlegged drawers — not pliable, like the wool we wear nowadays, but thick and scratchy with many washings. I was bitter about that underwear — not only because I had to wear it all winter, but because I was the last girl in my class to take it off.

‘Got yours off?’ was the constant query at recess when the weather warmed up. I don’t know why we thought it necessary to ask. The drawers bulged above our boots and the first button of the shirt was always in sight.

The high spot of the spring — yes, even remembering May Day with its feverish hanging of May baskets — was the arrival of Mr. Barnum’s Circus.

I must have been about eight when I suddenly realized that our family never went to the circus. The parade went right by our house, for the tents were put up in the vacant lots above the cemetery on Main Street, and I had felt rather smug in past years, looking down on the crowds lining the curb, from the vantage point of our porch. If, after a last screech from the calliope, we ran down Church Street, we could see the parade all over again when it turned from Main Street into State.

I suppose until I was eight I had thought that the parade was all there was. Certainly it was exciting enough to satisfy anyone. Ravishing ladies on horseback, flashing with jewels, handsome men in plumed hats, white satin coats and shorts, all looking to my uncritical eyes born to the purple, so easily they rode and so haughty were they.

The day the posters were put up that spring I was eight, the school fairly seethed with excitement. There was to be a holiday on Circus Day. My sister Mary and I raced home, our school bags banging against our fat legs, to tell Mother about it. We found the family at the dinner table.

‘There is n’t going to be any school Circus Day,’ I said happily, settling myself next to Mother.

There was a painful silence, and I looked up from my stew (with dumplings) wondering what I had said that was wrong.

‘That’s nice,’ said Mother. ‘We might go on a picnic.’

‘Picnic! Why, Mother, it’s Circus Day! We go to the circus.’

‘Not us,’ muttered Alice, who was older than I.

‘Why not?’ I wanted to cry.

‘Because we’re minister’s children,’ she said loudly.

Just then the door burst open and Uncle Will blew in like a strong north wind.

‘Well, Frank,’ he roared, ‘are you or are you not going to let these poor children of yours go to the circus this year?’

‘I’m afraid not, Will.’ Father looked very unhappy. His liberal soul must have rebelled again and again at the restrictions imposed on him by a few narrow-minded parishioners.

‘The same old pussycats, I suppose,’ thundered Uncle Will, pacing the room like one of Mr. Barnum’s own lions.

What was the use of dragging in pussycats, I thought. We were talking about circuses. But Father took Uncle Will over to the study, his refuge from the cocked ears of a large family.

Alice explained to me, after Mother had gone to the nursery, that minister’s children were not allowed to go to the circus. It was supposed to be immoral. The ladies on the trapeze wore tights, for one thing. I reminded her that it was next to impossible even to hang from the apple tree properly in skirts, and anyhow we saw the posters of the ladies, which was exactly the same.

‘They can’t stop us from looking at posters,’ Alice said defiantly.

It might have ended there, for we were not allowed to tease for things, if in the mail the next day there had n’t come a very nice letter from Mr. Barnum to Father, with a family pass.

‘Would it take us all in without paying anything?’

‘Yes,’ said Father.

‘Well, why don’t you stay home, Father? Because you are the minister.

And then, you see, Mother would n’t even have to take any money.’ It sounded jumbled, but it was clear in my mind and quite logical. I loved Father dearly, but after all he was the one who had chosen to be a minister. As for the money side, naturally he would hesitate about taking five children to the circus. But a Family Pass!

Father shook his head. ‘No, my dear, I’m afraid not.’

While Mary and I were playing paper dolls on the sitting-room floor a few days later, the door bell rang. We looked at each other in dismay. If it was a caller for Mother we should have to pick up all the paper dolls and go to the nursery. We heard a man’s voice ask Nora for Father, and when she asked his name he said, ‘Mr. Barnum.’

Nora threw a shawl over her head and ran over to Father’s little stone study. We could see her from the long French window in the sitting room. We crept softly to the portieres and peeked into the parlor. Yes, there the great man sat: Mr. Barnum — with his circus, no doubt, down at the depot waiting to be unpacked. We thought he looked nice. He had a bald head with a fringe of hair and his eyes twinkled — much jollier-looking than some of Father’s deacons.

Pretty soon Father came across the grass and in by the front door. We sat, as quiet as mice, and listened to the two men. Father seemed to enjoy Mr. Barnum, for they talked for a long time. As to the circus being immoral, we distinctly heard him say ‘a moral spectacle’ and ‘as educational as a trip to Europe.’ Father thanked him for the pass. We listened anxiously to hear if he said he would use it, but he did n’t. Father almost never changed his mind about decisions.

The day before the circus I took the pass to school and told about Mr. Barnum’s call. It had seemed, when I had first thought of it and asked Father, a kind of compensation for not going to the circus. But it was a hollow sort of pleasure, and I returned the pass to Father soberly.

In the night there was a heavy tramping of feet on the road, which woke me up. I crept to the window and knelt there, shivering a little in my flannel nightgown as the cool spring breeze flowed over me. The elephants were thudding up the street, their great trunks swaying. Once there was a long piercing howl from one of the strange beasts shut away from my sight in its cage. I stayed until the last gilt coach, with its great heavy wheels, and the last weary horseman, drooping over his saddle peak, had gone by me up the street. There was a feeling of strangeness in the air, a smell of dust and animals mingled with the clean odor of the lilacs under my window.

Finally, trembling with cold and excitement, I crept back to bed to the sweet warmth of a sleeping and philosophical Mary. But my heart was heavy within me. Mr. Barnum’s circus had come to town.