Can’t speak but you can sing, then, is it? he asked.
The rest of the circus sang around us.
I looked at him, all the terror I’d felt close but not as close, while he held me, and I enjoyed the sensation, new and thrilling, to be up in the air in his arms.
It’s nothin’ to me, he said. We’re none of us made right for this world. But we’re still here, aren’t we? And then he set me down.
§
Any relations, then? the boss asked, as we sat with my contract and he named my terms.
I shook my head no, the grief again, like a low bell knocking. I bit my lip.
None at all? I shook my head again. Well, every circus story begins by someone’s grave. Welcome, he said. You’re a natural. Sign here.
Even if you weren’t an orphan, Ernesto said to me, as he led me to the food tent, you’d probably pretend to be one anyway.
When you joined, you were always asked if you had family. If you said yes and the family wasn’t a circus family, they usually didn’t take you. And if it was a family that had rivalries or blood vengeance with another circus family, the answer would be no also.
If the boss still has it somewhere, the contract reads, in careful script, Lilliet Berne.
§
Later that night, after I’d been fed and shown to a cot in Priscilla’s tent, I lay awake, unable to sleep. I took my hands out and touched my throat, as if that could tell me what had happened.
My throat felt the same. But as I lay there, I tried to speak again and could not.
There was only the same low sound, a scratchy whisper.
It was as if I had two voices now, the one strong and clear, the other turned to ash. As if the voice that could speak had been punished for the pride of the one that could sing.
The gift and the test.
I couldn’t tell if this meant I’d been forgiven. I only felt haunted, right down in my throat. No ghostly hands there but perhaps a single phantom finger, pressing in.
A warning.
If my voice had a curse, I was sure it was this one.
Of course, the one I did not believe in is the one that came true.
Six
THE SETTLER’S DAUGHTER, then.
I rode into the ring dressed in their buckskin cowgirl costume with my raccoon coat and rabbit hat, all while the Iroquois made the war calls of several tribes, his own included. I circled twice, firing gunpowder blanks from the rifle, then stopped and stood. While I balanced on the horse’s haunches, I directed the audience like a conductor, singing my round. This done, I dismounted with a backflip and chose a young man from the crowd, handing him a paper rose and leading him to the center of the circus tent, where clowns dressed as parents and priests waited and married us in front of the singing audience.
By the time I reached Paris, I’d been married this way a hundred times, in Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
In the first month, whenever the announcer told the story of the girl “captured by the Indians as a child and raised in their wild ways,” who spoke no English except a song she’d learned from her mother, I felt as though each time I sang, my mother was listening, watching.
There was no name I could take that would hide me from her, I knew. But as I sang this more, it soon became the song I sang for the show, and it reminded me of her less and less.
My speaking voice had not returned, and the singing voice stayed, which felt like a truce or a sacrifice, depending on the day. I feared that one day it might switch, and I’d wake and find a normal girl’s voice there, the singing voice gone—and find that I was done. While the circus became like a family to me very quickly, I always knew it was a family I’d auditioned for, and I could see that if I was to be injured or the crowd tired of the act I could be left behind. You might get to repair costumes, or take tickets, or cook, but only if there was an opening.
No one ever mentioned the previous girl in my spot. No one ever told stories of her, or why she’d left, or said if she was even alive. I thought of her sometimes, as I had her tent and her gun, after all, and her horse. If Mela missed her, he had no way to show me that I could see. He, like the rest, gamely trotted out his paces.
For all I knew, it was her ghostly hands at my throat.
So it was I sought to make Flambeau my teacher. She, or he, as I was to discover, was our barker and stood by the entrance, blowing gouts of fire into the air and then exhorting the fascinated crowds to come inside.
The first few times I watched him practice, I didn’t recognize him and wondered who the young man was breathing fire in the yard. He didn’t wear the enormous wig for all his rehearsals. He wasn’t young anymore, but the fire had made his face as smooth as a woman’s—all the hair burned off, so he never had to shave, though he could never grow a beard. I thought he was new, like I was, and didn’t mind that he ignored me at first, as I was too fascinated by the fire, and for that alone, I wanted us to be friends. He didn’t acknowledge me until after several days he said, very suddenly, You want to do this? And I recognized his voice.
He held out the jar of pétrole he used. I nodded my head. It was all I wanted.
You don’t want to do this, he then replied, laughing, putting out his palm to stop me. Don’t want to ruin that pretty face! You need your eyelashes to bat at the men in the audience!
It seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world, though, much more beautiful than my eyelashes. To tip your head back, hold the torch to your lips, and let out a stream of fire. I could close my eyes and see it, the bright yellow tongue in the dark, blue right near my lips. The very best trick, my favorite, was the ring of fire. I hoped to use it in my act. I hoped I could learn to blow a ring I could leap through from the horse’s back. Horses hated fire, after all, and if I did it this way, they’d never see it, I told myself. It was a stupid idea, but I loved it all the same.
You don’t want to do this, he would say again and again the first month. But still I came.
It was Flambeau, then, who taught me to smoke cigars. They were my practice. Smoking a cigar required you to keep the smoke from your lungs. Breathing in the fire was the death of the fire-breather, a terrible, painful death as you choked on smoke and your own blood. The ring of cigar smoke was to be a ring of fire someday. And so I kept at it as practice and learned how to blow smoke rings, practicing for my ridiculous, impossible act, but also to someday join him if my voice ever vanished and left the circus before I did.
Until my departure from the show, I never left the confines of the tent village wherever we were. Some days it was as if the world shifted around us in the night, the foreign cities each time nearly as nameless to me as the men I picked from the ring to meet me beside the clowns.
The Cajun Maidens adopted me and taught me my falls and tumbles, how to walk on my hands, how to understand their mixture of French, Russian, Spanish, and English. They gave me a knife to wear on my thigh, a dagger. They called it a circus dowry, and they never took theirs off except when bathing, and even then they set them on the edge of the tub, and soon I was the same.
I pulled it out of its sheath at night, testing the edge.
The knife came with lessons on how to use it. If a man was attacking me, I was to cut for the places they’d have to hold shut—the underside of a wrist, the throat—not to try to stab for the heart first, they said.
The heart is a difficult target, Priscilla said with a smile. Laughter came from her sisters as she said it. But everyone forgets to protect their hands. This is a mistake. A grim satisfaction crossed her face. Also, you may not want to kill them, she said. But only teach a lesson. And then she paused. But it may be you want to kill them, and there was more laughter.
For your future husband, said the circus matron. To give to him however you might choose. She winked and patted her own.