Dust
Motes
by Richard Tillinghast
Assumption
by Molly Giles
Hard
to Believe
by Charlie Geer
|
Hard
to Believe
Charlie
Geer
Fifteen years later and the smell of
diesel still lands me in the show’s backyard. I only
worked three months, Florida to Pennsylvania. I can’t
call myself a roustabout, and if I showed up on the lot today
I’d be as green as any FNG day-hire. But for three months
I worked as a roustabout for the Franzen Brothers Circus,
and yes, fifteen years later it only takes the smell of diesel.
My maternal grandmother, Grandmother
Frances, had just passed—followed, the day after her
funeral, by my Uncle Holmes, who took himself out with a .38.
My paternal grandmother had finally decided on tough love,
and Uncle Holmes chose to make it the toughest. She found
him outside Charleston in a bleak, sub-suburban apartment;
and after the authorities had taken care of the dirty work,
my father, my brother, and I dutifully bagged the spent cigarettes
and empty whiskey bottles, the wrinkled magazines and the
abandoned work boots, avoiding as best we could the black
stain left on the carpet. There is nothing about this in my
circus notebook, or any notebook. Uncle Holmes had lived on
the family’s periphery all my life: If he was not in
jail or in the detox ward at the VA hospital, he was off to
the side, smoking. To this day we don’t talk about what
happened to him. We’re awfully good at forgetting certain
things, burying them.
I tended to run from them. Nineteen and restless, I’d
been bumming around the Southwest before being called home
for the first funeral, and considered picking up work in Charleston,
hanging close to the family in its time of grief. But then
came the second, more terrible death, and the family was blown
past grief and into trauma. We had no experience with this
kind of thing, and sticking around felt ill-advised. Anyone
who could get out, the collective daze seemed to say, would
be wise to. When a buddy called to report that he was joining
up with a circus, I saw my ticket out. I was practiced at
coming home, falling back into the motherly arms of Charleston,
and we were all learning just how dangerous that could be.
Continued
in volume 42, issue 3, summer 2006 |
