Ada Demion
10. Jonathan had his heroes. Buffalo Bill was not one of them. The following letter speaks for itself.
April 4, 1899
Dear Buffalo Bill,
What do you do each day? I can guess. I’ll bet you get up in the morning and stretch and yawn and then reach for your rifle and point it out the window and kill a grazing buffalo that has come a little too close to your cabin for his own good. And then you make yourself a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and hot cakes and sausage and while you are chowing down, you look up and there is another buffalo all tangled up in your clothesline and you shoot him in the head because, why, he’s all tangled up the clothesline, will you lookit! And you go down the lane to visit with your friends Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane and’Ol Doc Grubbs and along the way you just happen to kill a buffalo or two, because they were getting just a little too close, if you want the truth of it. And when you finally reach your friends you all go prancing about together in fancy plumey hats and you decide to have a picnic — a buffalo-killing picnic. And you eat a devil egg and blam! blam! Did you see him topple? Tasty egg, Jane. Blam! Blam! And then later you play some baseball and you slide into home plate and everybody is still cheering while you get up and run over with your baseball bat and beat a nearby buffalo into a motionless fur mound. And that night you go to the theatre to see a hootchie kootchie show and a buffalo comes out on stage. And you jump to your feet. “What’s that buffalo doing up on that stage!” you say. “This is no buffalo show! This is a hootchie kootchie show!” And you shoot the buffalo right between the eyes. And it falls over dead and you sit back down and say, “Somebody get that dead buffalo off the stage! On with the show!” And on the way home that night, you guessed it. A buffalo comes out of nowhere. And then another and another. It is a whole herd that is crossing the road and you wish that you had more ammunition because you can’t kill as many of them as you’d like, and you are gnashing your teeth and saying to your friends, “Why it’s too danged dark! I’m only crippling them, Gawd-darnit! Oh well. A crippled buffalo is better than a happy, healthy frisky one.” And when you get home and go to sleep, I think I know what you dream of. Do I have to say?
When they are all gone, Mr. Bill, what will you do? What will you do then, I wonder?
Your friend,
Jonathan Blashette.
(PS. I am eleven and I have three legs. And I wish that you would go to Florida and kill alligators for a change.) JBP.
11. Jonathan knew the moment he met Mr. Grund that his life was about to change forever. In Cordell Glover’s monumentally flawed, indolently under-researched, and offensively over-embroidered biography of Blashette, Three Legs, One Heart: The Story of Jonathan Blashette, (Fairhope, Alabama: Hollon House, 1989) — from which I have drawn sparingly and only when other sources are in full corroboration — the biographeraster provides us with a ludicrously contrived, yet too deliciously accoutered description of the arrival of Thaddeus Grund to the town of Pettiville that pivotal autumn afternoon of 1900 for me not to include at least a paragraph or two for your amusement:
“The train was late. Oh it was late all right, and everybody knew it. The crowd that had gathered at the station shifted from leg to leg, in one great concerted sway of impatience, like an enormous beast with many heads and twice as many legs hungry — hungry for what? — the beast only knew this: that a banquet awaited one of their number. The young twelve-year-old, the one they called “Jonathan” or “Triple Threat” or “Spare Shoe.” And the beast sniffed. Sniffed and snorted loud and without apology. They could all smell it; the pungent odor of fate, of a destiny materializing. Grund was Pettiville-bound and bearing a wheelbarrow full of cash. And they smelled the cash, the people did, with nostrils opened and stretched clean and wide by the sweet perfume of fame and fortune. The boy was brought to the edge of the platform, held aloft, as a distant whistle announced the iron horse’s arrival. As the steam folded back like a great wet curtain and the locomotive pushed through, chug-a-chugging into the Pettiville station, the crowd itself whistled and tooted and tossed the boy high into the air, ready to deliver him to a future of assured acclaim. The tracks sang out and the men and the women and the little ones with two legs, each sang out as well. The train slowed and stopped, and the man who would mold young Jonathan’s future like a potter of brash fate, with muscular, knowing hands, stepped down from the train and smiled and tousled the boy’s dusty brown hair. And a cheer went up. And tears flowed down the excitement-rubied cheeks of Addicus and Emmaline Blashette. Tears of loss, for, yes, the child would be taken from them within hours, but tears, yes, also of joy for what the future might hold for this most special child. And the crowd parted and made way for Addicus and Emmaline and Jonathan and their evening guest, the spangled showman Thaddeus Grund, to climb into the festooned barouche that would transport the foursome to the Blashette farm. To talk of a future bright, of a destiny held in the hand and grasped firmly and kissed and sniffed and stroked with tender anticipation.
It was a night the boy would always remember.”
The train, in fact, wasn’t late. It was on time. And no one had gathered on the platform but Addicus and his farmhand Bill Boils. Jonathan was off picking apples for a “last meal” lattice pie. To be sure, Addicus was aware that Thaddeus Grund’s Traveling Circus and Wild West Show was popular and successful, and might provide ample income for the struggling Blashettes, but Emmaline’s resistance had diminished the ebullience of the welcome. The three men rode back to the Blashette farm in a rickety buckboard, in funereal silence. Emmaline wasn’t even around when her husband and his showman guest arrived. She had ventured off to Inspiration Creek where she wept in protected solitude for the future of her special child.
4 UNDER THE BIG TOP
1. “Hello Mr. Diary.” Biographers of Jonathan Blashette are indebted to their subject for a couple of reasons. From the first week of his employment with the Grund Circus, Jonathan put down his thoughts and impressions and a detailed listing of each day’s activities in a diary — a habit to which he would hold for the rest of his life. We are indebted to Jonathan, as well, for carefully maintaining this collection of diaries, and for entrusting them to the perpetual custody of the Pettiville Library and Interpretive Center to which he also bequeathed the rest of his voluminous papers and many of his personal effects. This institution offers researchers unrestricted access and extensive assistance, including, even, a daily refreshment hour of tea and “biscuits,” and the occasional neck massage.
In a bizarre sense, it is almost as if Jonathan anticipated me in particular. It was as if he knew of my special affinity for Mint Milanos and Malawi tea, and the fact that I can always do with a good neck rub.
In a codicil to his will Jonathan writes:
“I have few secrets. Most who know me know this. I should be flattered if some future researcher or biographer found this life important enough to write about. I know that it was an odd one, to be sure. But then isn’t each life unique in its own way? Delve if you wish into the eclectica of my existence on this planet and marvel at the incongruities, as I myself have marveled over them. That a country boy with three legs would grow up to hobnob with nabobs alongside “jest plain bobs” and girls who bob their hair, and guys named Harry and hairy French guys named Guy, and I better stop here before my heirs begin to question the compos of my mentis!