The Snake-Oil Dickens Man

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 (#ulink_5bbff4a7-d952-506f-b4fd-562c9ef7db57)

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?’