Chin sat up to work more at this conversation. His braid fell forward on his shoulder and he picked it up, held it in his hands, examined it while he tried to concentrate on what Burke was saying. Drunkenness had obliterated many of the hard edges of Burke’s words, leaving only the open sounds, the singing. Chin was used to dealing in foreign languages. But liquor imposed a second translation. He had to decipher the drunkenness just to get to the foreign tongue.
‘Strutes,’ said Burke impenetrably. ‘Struth. You can’t teach, my pet. You can’t be ornamental. There’s little chance you’ll marry. It’s not a gallant thing to observe, but let’s be honest. Unless you’ll marry her, Chin. I’d do it myself, but I’m in love with another. Heart’s pledged. Godswash.’ His voice gained intensity and then faded on the last indecipherable word. Chin’s breath quickened nervously. Miscegenation was illegal in Oregon. Racial suicide, they called it. In Washington? He couldn’t remember. He decided to pretend he had understood none of Burke’s words, but even as he made the decision, he heard Burke go on. ‘No. No,’ Burke was saying. ‘Please, forget I asked. I promised myself I wouldn’t ask.’
Burke’s eyes flowed with drunken tears. When Chin’s uncle drank, he turned a bright red color all over his face. He became noisy and posturing, like a rooster. When Chin drank, he filled with a hollow kind of laughter, arising from nothing, aimed at nothing. If he emptied himself of it, nothing was what remained inside. Often he laughed so hard he was unable to speak. He had never seen anyone who became moist and abject like Burke.
‘Let’s have no lies between us.’ Burke sniffled loudly. ‘No dissembling. No cunning. No deceit. The truth is that no one has had much luck educating these children. I didn’t tell you that, Chin. I concealed the fact. Now I lay it bare. With an adult, there’s been even less success. I could work twenty years and only manage to teach her to dress and feed herself. Maybe one or two words you or I might understand but would have to be explained to anyone else. Maybe she’d be able to comb her own hair. I can’t take the responsibility for condemning her to that kind of life. A life in the darkness of a few small rooms.’ Burke wiped at his eyes and nose.
‘It would be a sin,’ he whispered. ‘I know that. I know that. And one more sin will be one more than I can rid myself of. The little mermaid – you mustn’t tell a soul. I made her for Harold. The top half is monkey. I sort of shaved the fur from it. Added human hair and the breasts. The bottom is just salmon. I was proud of the work, at first. God forgive me. Time and care made her as seamless as one of God’s own creatures, and I took a reckless pride in that. It seemed a good joke and a little money on the side. I didn’t expect the face to turn out that way. Does it haunt you, that face? Tell me she won’t haunt you. And then imagine how she haunts me, her father. I’m afraid to sleep sometimes.
‘I shouldn’t have done it. The study of nature is a kind of holy worship and I’ve created a perversion, a false idol, a sin against the mind of God. No. Tomorrow,’ said Burke, ‘you and I will take Sarah Canary as deep into the forests as we can and then lose her. We will find a lovely spot with a stream and a water ousel’s nest and a host of wildflowers come spring. Anemones and the like. Let her return to the happy, natural life. Let her return to the fellowship of the deer and the wolf. Let her return to freedom and to the God she already knows.’
‘It’s very cold,’ said Chin.
‘Sarah Canary can handle that. Sarah Canary can curl into a hole until the weather turns warm. She can catch fish with her hands and find the early berries. She’s as comfortable in the woods as any creature. Aren’t you, my angel? Aren’t you, my pet?’ Burke directed his whisper over Chin to Sarah Canary’s sleeping form. Sarah Canary had covered herself with Chin’s blanket completely. No part of her face or her hair or her feet could be seen.
She was still that way at dawn. The rain was quiet and steady outside, but Harold had arisen early and appeared to be gone for good. The mermaid was no longer lying by the wall and neither was her blanket. Harold’s own blanket was gone as well.
Chin stretched, rose, and began the fire for breakfast. Burke’s eyes were gummy with sleep and regret and his face sagged. He stirred the porridge, looking with longing at Sarah Canary’s still form. She was drawn into an impossibly tiny ball beneath the blanket. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t take her out in the rain,’ he said. ‘Although it would make it harder for her to follow us back. Wipe out the scent of our tracks and all.’
Chin began to eat his own bowl of mush. It was tasteless, but it was hot. He felt hungry and hopeful. He was pleased that Harold was gone. He was pleased that Burke was wavering. Perhaps B.J. would marry Sarah Canary, should such a thing be required. Perhaps he could leave both B.J. and Sarah Canary in Burke’s care and consider his duties fulfilled. Perhaps he could still catch up with his uncle in Tenino.
‘Wake up, Sarah Canary,’ said B.J. ‘Wake up and have breakfast.’ There was no response. B.J. ladled a bowl of porridge out and carried it into her corner. ‘Sarah Canary,’ he said. He leaned down, gently folding back the edge of Chin’s blanket. The black face of the mermaid stared up at him. ‘Oh, God,’ B.J. cried, dropping the porridge, which overturned and spilled onto his shoe. ‘Dear God.’ He threw Chin’s blanket back over the little creature and covered his own face with his hands. Outside the wind came up again. Chin heard its high voice and its low voice and all the unidentifiable voices in between. Women’s voices, contrary and confused, but all of them somehow parts of one another.
iv
The magnificent Tom Thumb Wedding was P. T. Barnum’s gift to a country whose sensibilities were being bludgeoned by civil war. It alleviated the scandal created when Tom allowed the cockney courtesan Cora Pearl to carry him off to her bedroom, balanced in one hand on a silver dish like a Christmas pudding.
America had lost her sons. They had killed one another. Or they had died of disease and neglect far from their homes. America didn’t even get to keep her slaves. Surely, the survivors deserved a little oddity now and then to take them out of themselves.
Fortunately, there was no shortage of oddities. During one of Barnum’s circus performances, a giantess was run over by a chariot and fatally crushed. Barnum shrugged. ‘Oh, there is another waiting for the place,’ he told his horrified companion, Major James Pond. ‘It is rather a benefit than a loss.’
There was always another giantess, another bearded woman, another human skeleton, another slave, another soldier. They had names sometimes. The oddities often had first names: the Dog-Man Lionel; Nellie, the armless wonder; Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children.
Fiji Jim was really Ruto Semm, an ordinary Fiji Islander, lured with his wife to the United States by an unscrupulous manager who later abandoned them. Ruto spent the rest of his life trying to earn the money to return home and finally died of pneumonia in a top-floor tenement after saving a drowning swimmer off the coast of Rockaway Beach.
The Ugliest Woman in the World was Julia Pastrana, referred to by Frank Buckland as ‘the female nondescript.’ Darwin examined her and wrote: ‘This woman had a strong beard, a very hairy body, particularly on the forehead and the neck and, a phenomenon of particular interest, an irregular double row of teeth in the upper and lower jaw which gave her a prognathic appearance and a simian profile.’ Julia fell in love with her manager. He married and impregnated her, inviting much of Victorian society to attend the birth. The child was delivered, also abnormally hairy. Neither mother nor child survived. But Julia lived long enough to whisper her own epitaph. ‘I die happy,’ she said, ‘for I know that I have been loved for myself.’ Her grieving husband immediately sent for a taxidermist, had both bodies stuffed, and exhibited the pair all over Europe.
In 1704, Nicolas Sauvage made an engraving to commemorate Johannes Palfyn’s dissection of a stillborn pair of Siamese twins, who were, of course, not called Siamese twins until Chang and Eng Bunker rose to international prominence. ‘God is Marvellous in All His Works’ is Sauvage’s title, so Howard M
artin, the author of Victorian Grotesque, reminds us that the word teratology, used now to refer to the study of monstrosities, once meant tales of the marvelous, in an earlier age when monsters were marvels.
7
The Wild Woman Performs in Seabeck
The power to contain
Is always as the contents
But give a Giant room
And you will lodge a Giant
And not a smaller man
Emily Dickinson, 1873
In 1873, the residents of Seabeck, Washington, and the men in its outlying logging camps faced an unusual choice. The great magnetic doctress, Adelaide Dixon, was scheduled to speak in the schoolhouse at the very hour that, halfway across town, in the upstairs parlor of the Bay View Hotel, the Alaskan Wild Woman was being exhibited, fresh from her triumphal engagement in Port Gamble. One show only.
Adelaide had scandalized Philadelphia and Boston and St Louis less with her belief that women and men should enjoy a variety of sexual partners than with the underlying suggestion that women should, in fact, be enjoying sex at all. Adelaide often said so explicitly. She even said that when women did not enjoy sex, men were to blame. But the Alaskan Wild Woman had been raised in the Yukon by wolves since infancy and, though she now wore clothes and slept in a bed with pillows, nothing would break her of her canine compulsion to howl at a full moon. Entertainment of this caliber rarely came to Seabeck. If only, the residents thought, there were some way to see them both.
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.