The men around him looked sick. The Bishop winced. “Can’t be sure she’d set still in place long enough, too big a risk if she spooked and broke free.”
“I saw Thomas Edison electrocute an elephant at Coney Island some years back,” Eric said, then dropped his gaze as well, as if ashamed to be part of the conspiracy.
The Bishop snorted with contempt. “There’s not enough electricity in this piece-of-shit town and I’m not using our gennies for that.” He glanced at Mae, embarrassed by his profanity in front of women. “Begging your pardon.” He stood up. “These podunk white-trash hillbillies want a lynching. So we’ll give them a lynching. We hang her.”
Even Theresa, who normally had a face carved from stone, closed her eyes, tears running black mascara like molasses.
“The railroad has a one-hundred-ton derrick car in their rail yard they use to load lumber onto freight cars, strong enough to hold her.” The Bishop’s demeanor had hardened, businesslike. “We’ll do one last show tomorrow, then get the whole town away to the loading yard to watch her hang while the rest of you ready the haul. She weighs five tons; it’ll be over quick enough. So I want those trains loaded for the jump like your lives depend on it. Because they do.”
The roustabouts and riggers and canvas men nodded.
The Bishop’s face was bloodless with repressed fury. “All of you. We take this clem town for everything. Cheat ’em, ding ’em, gaff every game, clutch every ride, fleece every damned one of them. I don’t care what it takes, don’t leave them a dime, not a nickel, not two fucking pennies to rub together. We burn the lot, understood?”
This time, the Bishop didn’t apologize for his profanity, jammed his top hat onto his head, and stalked from the tent.
It was the grimmest, and shortest, show they’d ever played, the barrists going through their trapeze and tightrope routine like mechanical automatons, not even bothering with bows to acknowledge the applause. North had the zebras pull the big cats through the ring in their cages, making a show of snapping his whip, tugging on tails to get the beasts to snarl and roar and paw the bars more in uncertainty than ferocity before trotting them back out of the big top without opening a single cage. The clowns and dogs rolled in so quickly behind him the specs didn’t realize they were getting shortchanged, not that it seemed to matter. It wasn’t the circus they’d come to see. The four elephants didn’t even perform, the Bishop having them walk with Madelaine down to the derrick car, trunk to tail in single file, to keep her company.
On the midway, shills and grifters played lightning-fast shell games and three-card monte while nimble-fingered pickpockets drifted through the crowd, lifting money and tickets and jewelry and watches. The mooches patted jackets and rummaged handbags in bewilderment while grinders kept them spinning along like leaves swirling in a rain-swollen creek. The police didn’t even need to be juiced to turn a blind eye, all of them down at the rail yard guarding Madelaine.
In the sideshow, the marks were run through ten-in-one shows in record time, so hastily most weren’t aware there wasn’t actually much to see; Theresa had substituted an assortment of pickled punks and devil babies floating in jars of formaldehyde for her act while she got her small animals safely packed up. If anyone recognized Mae as the woman who had sung to an elephant, there was no flash of surprise in their dull, vacuous eyes.
Then the show was over, and the circus lot emptied in minutes, all of Ashton along with thousands more who had swarmed into town for the execution sprinting to the rail yard at the far end of the town. They poured over boxcars, climbed onto locomotive engines, scaled water towers, shimmied up telegraph poles like a swarm of ants.
Mae knew the Bishop would string it out as long as he could to give the rousties time for the teardown, tents and stick joints and gennies and rides dismantled, the animals herded, the equipment loaded onto wagons and hauled to the circus train as fast as possible.
Mae had accepted a ride in one of the tiny pony carts with an elderly caller. When she reached the derrick, Madelaine had already been chained to a rail, the big elephant shifting back and forth fretfully, head down, trunk hanging limply. A few hundred yards down from the track, a steam shovel hissed and clattered as it dug a deep pit, several dozen railroad men shoveling out a muddy grave.
North strode across the rail yard, big shoulders hunched under a plaid shirt, suspenders hanging off his hips. He helped Mae down from the pony cart, the old caller’s hand on her waist to keep her balanced.
“You shouldn’t have come, Mae.”
“She should have at least one friend with her,” Mae said, surprised herself with how hot her throat felt. North looked away, his face reddening.
The Bishop listened as one of the lot manager’s boys whispered in his ear, then nodded without a word to the pair of rousties standing by Madelaine. One drew a thick chain around the elephant’s neck while the other fitted the end to a steel ring. In the expectant silence, the derrick operator started the winch, drawing the chain up tightly. Madelaine stopped rocking, then — as if she believed this was just some new trick she was expected to perform — she heaved both front feet off the ground and stood upright obediently on her back feet. She lifted her trunk and curled it in a meticulous salute to her forehead, holding her pose as if expecting applause. None came. Mae bit her lips to fight back tears.
The derrick operator kept rattling the chain upward, taking up the slack. Madelaine began to struggle as one back foot slowly lifted as well.
Mae had heard audiences burst into enthusiastic applause when a tightrope walker fell to his death, mistaking it as part of the act. She had heard them laugh and cheer mindlessly when a clown accidentally caught on fire, so badly burned he never worked again. But nothing she had ever heard before matched the viciousness, the sheer brutality in the shout that went up as Madelaine began to buck, her body arching when all four feet came off the ground. The elephant’s mouth gaped open, her tongue as pink as a tea rose. Urine snaked down her back legs, darkening the gray skin, splashing onto the railing. The entire derrick shook as she twisted on the end of the chain while her eyes rolled white under dark lashes. The chains creaked under the strain, a strange crackling and popping as Madelaine’s own weight tore ligaments from her bones. It took several minutes, far longer than Mae had thought possible, before the thrashing grew weaker, the elephant’s body slowly slackening until Madelaine hung limply, only the slightest of tremors as she pirouetted on the end of the chain.
The Bishop let her hang for another half an hour after the last quiver had stopped, and the last of the cheering finally died away, the crowd, bored, melting away. As the derrick operator lowered her body back to the ground and the rousties unhooked her, the Bishop put his hand on the elephant’s head. Behind him, a photographer held up a Kodak camera and snapped a picture. He bleated in protest as Billy North wrenched the camera out of his hand.
“Get out of here before I shove this thing down your neck.” North punched the camera back into the photographer’s chest, growling as the man stumbled away.
There was no one to record the tractor as the same chain that had hung her was hooked to one leg to drag her several hundred yards to the massive pit. She tumbled in, and it took only a few minutes for the steam shovel to pile the muddy earth back into the hole, the tractor tamping it down flat. Mae waited until the machinery had clanked its way back to the rail yard, then hobbled toward the grave. She glanced up in surprise as the Bishop suddenly took her elbow.
“What are you doing, Mae? We need to leave now.”