“Damnation!” Peabody hopped back. “We’ll need to rid you of that habit.”
The boy blinked. A rasping sound escaped his lips.
Peabody’s face softened, a twitch of his cheek betraying a smile. “Do not worry yourself, lad; we’ll get along famously. In fact, I am relying upon it.” He wrapped a hand around the boy’s arm and pulled him to standing. “Come. Let’s show you about.”
Afraid but fascinated, the boy followed.
Peabody led him to the green and gold wagon where a neatly hinged door opened onto a well-appointed room with a desk, piles of books, a brass lantern, and all the makings of a comfortable home for a traveling man. The boy set foot inside.
Peabody looked him over. “You’re dark enough to pass as a Mussulman or Turk. Here, chin up.” He bent down, hooking a finger under the boy’s jaw for a better view of him. The boy flinched. “No, you’re too wild for that.” Peabody sat heavily on a small three-legged chair. The boy wondered that it didn’t break under the man’s weight.
He watched the man think. The man’s fingers were clean, nails trimmed. Different from the boy’s. Though his size was frightening, there was gentleness to him, the crinkles around his eyes. The boy scurried close to the desk where the man sat, listening to his rumbling.
“We haven’t done India before. India,” Peabody said to himself. “Yes, an Indian savage, I think.” He chuckled. “My new Wild Boy.” He reached down as if to pat the boy’s head, but paused. “Would you like to be a savage?” The boy did not respond. Peabody’s brows lifted. “Can’t you speak?”
The boy pressed his back to the wall. His skin felt itchy and tight. He stared at the intricate ties on the man’s shoes and stretched his toes against the floor.
“No matter, lad. Yours will not be a speaking role.” The corner of his mouth twisted. “More a disappearing act.”
The boy reached to touch the man’s shoes.
“Like those, do you?”
The boy pulled away.
Peabody frowned, an expression discernible by the turn of his moustache. His sharp eyes softened and he spoke quietly. “You’ve not been treated well. We’ll fix that, boy. You’ll stay the night, see if it settles you.”
The boy was given a blanket from a trunk. It was scratchy, but he enjoyed rubbing it across his temple. He huddled against the man’s desk, pulling the blanket around him. Once during the night the man left and the boy feared he’d been abandoned, but a short time later the man returned with bread. The boy tore into it. The man said nothing, but began scribbling in a book. Occasionally his hand would drift down to pull the blanket back over the boy’s shoulder.
As sleep overtook him, the boy decided he would follow this man anywhere.
In the morning Peabody walked the boy through the circled wagons, keeping several paces ahead, and then waiting for him to follow. When they came to an imposing cage affixed to a dray wagon, Peabody stopped.
“I’ve thought on it. This will be yours; you’re to be our Wild Boy.”
The boy examined the cage, unaware of the other eyes that looked from their wagons, watching him. The floor was scattered with straw and wood shavings that kept it warm in the evenings — a good consideration, as the boy would be barefooted and naked. On the outside of the cage hung lavish velvet curtains that Peabody had liberated from his mother’s drawing room. The curtains were weighted by chains — to close out the light, Peabody said — and rigged with pulleys. Peabody demonstrated how to surprise an audience by snapping them open the moment a Wild Boy defecated or committed an equally abhorrent act.
“It was the previous Wild Boy’s, but we’ll make it yours.”
The boy took to the act. He enjoyed the cool metal against his skin, and the act allowed him to observe as much as he was observed. Faces gawked at him, and he stared back without fear. He tried to understand the rolls women wore their hair in, why their hips appeared larger than men’s, and the strange ways that men groomed the hair on their faces. He jumped, crawled, scrambled, ate, and voided where and how he pleased. If he did not like a man, he could sneer and spit without repercussion, and would be rewarded for the privilege. He experienced the beginnings of ease.
Without the boy’s knowledge, Peabody studied and tailored the act, learning the intricacies of the boy’s disappearing, perhaps better than the boy himself understood. If he left the child in the cage for the length of a morning, the boy would crouch low to the floor, his breaths would become shallow until his chest barely moved, and then, quite suddenly, he would vanish. Peabody learned to slowly raise the curtain on the disappeared boy.
“Hush, fine people,” he instructed, sotto voce. “No good can come from frightening a savage beast.”
Lifting the curtain was enough to rouse the boy from dissipation. As spectators drew in close to what they presumed was an empty cage, the boy revealed himself. The abrupt appearance of a savage where there had been none made children shout; beyond that, the boy needed do little more than remain mute and naked to drive a crowd to frenzy. The boy found his new life pleasing. He discovered that if he made his penis bobble or flaunted his testicles, a prim woman or two might swoon, after which Peabody would draw the curtain and declare the act successful. He began searching for ways to frighten, hissing and snarling, letting spittle drip from his mouth. When Peabody patted his shoulder and pronounced, “Well done,” the boy felt fullness in his stomach that was better than food.
* * *
Though the Wild Boy cage was his, the boy did not sleep in it. Beneath the sawdust and hay lay a hidden door; after the curtains were drawn he undid the latch and climbed into the dray’s box bottom, where a wool blanket was stored for him; from there he made his way to Peabody’s wagon, where a change of clothing was kept for the prized Wild Boy. Peabody would sit at the far end of the wagon chewing at his pipe while writing and sketching by lantern light, occasionally pausing to give a conspiratorial look.
“Excellent take, my boy,” he’d say. “You’ve got a certain flair. Mayhap the best Wild Boy I’ve had. Did you see the missus faint? Her skirts went over her head.” His belly shook as he clapped the boy on the back. The boy understood that the man liked him. He’d begun to recall words from a time before the woods, words like boy, and horse, bread, and water, and that laughter was good. The more he listened to Peabody talk, the more language began to knit.
Peabody spoke differently to the boy, with a quieter voice than he used with others. The boy did not know that within short weeks of their acquaintance, Hermelius Peabody had begun to think of him as a son.
It began when Peabody did not want the boy to spend an unseasonably cool night in the Wild Boy cage. Perhaps the boy’s thinness inspired pity, but Peabody decided offering the boy a warm place to sleep was a good business investment and would reflect well on his soul. The boy curled up on a straw-stuffed cushion, the same cushion on which Peabody’s son, Zachary, had once slept. Something inside Peabody shifted. Zachary had set out years before to make his fortune, leaving Peabody proud but at a loss. He looked at the sleeping boy and realized his latest acquisition might fill that space. When the boy woke he was greeted by a pile of clothing that was to belong to him. The knee britches and long shirts were no simple castoffs; they had been Zachary’s.
In the evenings, the boy sat on the floor of Peabody’s wagon, listening, picking out names, places, acts. Nat, Melina, Susanna, Benno, Meixel. Peabody schooled him little in social niceties, as he deemed them useless, instructing instead in showmanship and confidence born of understanding an audience. At first the boy did not want to know about the people who looked at him through his bars; he was pleased that the cage kept them at a distance, but curiosity sprouted as Peabody made him watch other acts, the tumbler, the bending girl, and the strongman.