Durga, the fat lady, a half ton of matriarchal earth goddess, who dressed in flowing silk and would listen to any problem and provide counsel and solace and Bavarian chocolate;
Jeta, the skeleton, outfitted, always, in a navy singlet, so shy that the nightly Promenade could reduce her to tears;
Milena, the hermaphrodite, proud and testy, with a wit as sharp and fine as a German scalpel;
Antoinette, the pinhead, who adored gingham dresses and piano music, and who tended to wander if not properly supervised;
Marcel and Vasco, Siamese twins who loved and squabbled by the phases of the moon and who once passed a full year without speaking to each other — though today, neither can recall the source of their argument;
Kitty, the elegant, delicate, raven-haired dwarf, with just a touch of the femme fatale, of which she was mostly unaware;
And Chick, the chicken boy, the conscience and spirit of the freak clan, with his patchy coat of feathers and the hard cartilage that formed a beak of a mouth. Chick, the boy without a past, whose mother had given him to Tedeo Bluett to raise. The chicken boy whose spirit was so pure and whose soul was so wise that his tenure in this foul world was forever problematic. With a tendency to fugues and trances, with a notion of a long-lost father, with his tender love for the dwarf, his Kitty, and a knowledge that his destiny lay beyond the borders of Old Bohemia, in the legendary country of Gehenna.
We know little about the chicken boy’s origins. And, as usually happens in the absence of fact, legend has descended to fill in the gaps. Chick himself will not dignify the legends with discussion. But late at night, walking in the woods or huddled in a trailer with his beloved Kitty, he sometimes allows himself a nip of analysis and a shooter of speculation. Tedeo Bluett has told him the same simple tale from the start.
The troupe, stranded outside of Worgl when a show had fallen through, was camped on the edge of town, on a bluff overlooking the River Kalda. It was a season of recession and grippe and people were not venturing to the theaters. Troubled by another bout of worry and insomnia, the ringmaster had taken a walk to clear his mind. He was thinking that night of getting out of the circus business altogether. Selling the Goldfaden to Herman Nevi or Kalli Kraus or one of his other competitors. Lost in thought, stumbling through the fog, a young woman’s wailing suddenly startled him. He made his way toward her cries and found himself on a slimy jetty that protruded into heaving winter waters. And at the end of the rocks, he found her.
She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years, he told Chick. She was hysterical and distraught and, beyond this, Bluett would say, somehow he knew that she was the saddest creature he had ever encountered. This is a bold statement for a circus man to make and it is the one part of the story that Chick has never doubted. The girl was dressed—hidden was the word that Bluett used most often — in the kind of flowing, hooded cape that had been fashionable many years previously. Beneath the cape, she wore a serving girl’s frock, the tattered uniform of someone’s maid. A washerwoman-in-training, was Tedeo’s initial guess, but when he saw her face peek out from the hood, he knew he was wrong. No, even in this hysterical state, with her hair tangled and matted by the spray, this one was a beauty of rare breeding and grace.
Her crying ceased when she saw Bluett approaching on the jetty. But she was silenced for only a moment.
“Don’t try to stop me,” she screamed over the wind.
And Bluett knew that she meant to throw herself into the chop.
He halted and held a hand up, both to reassure the girl that he understood and to block the water blowing into his eyes.
The girl looked from the ringmaster to the river, as if suddenly unsure of her next move. And that was when Bluett saw she was holding a package, something the size of a bread loaf, wrapped in a rapidly decomposing newspaper — what he would later discover to be a medical tabloid known as The Journal of Physical Abnormality.
“Please,” he yelled over the screeching winds, “let me help you.”
With this, the girl threw back her hood. And even in the darkness, Tedeo Bluett could see that she had eyes as striking as the emperor’s emeralds.
“You want to help me?” she asked, her contempt cutting through the gale. “Get him to Gehenna.” And with that, she tossed the bread loaf at the ringmaster and threw herself off the rocks.
Instinct born of a lifetime in the circus caused Bluett to go down on one knee and catch, perfectly, the tossed burden that he understood, at once, to be something other than a loaf of bread, something alive and moving and making sounds of its own. Torn, he ran to the jetty’s end before allowing himself to inspect the creature in his arms. His eyes swept the water but there was no sign of the jumper. He called out to her but knew, as he called, that it was futile.
Then he peeled back the news wrap and took his first look at the child inside.
“I have lived a life in show business,” he would tell Chick over the years that followed that night. “I have trafficked all my days in spectacle. I come from a people who have made their living mining the most curious parts of this astounding world. But in all my time, in all my travels, I had never seen anything like you.”
IT WAS THIS very chicken boy, born into tragedy and mystery, who drew the bulk of the “normal” performers’ wrath. Too innocent and pure-hearted for his own good, Chick had become the crowd’s favorite absurdity, a creature whose deformity could not camouflage his deep sense of compassion and truth. That Chick was a religious seeker, given, rumor said, to prophetic dreams, made him only more suspect and, ultimately, despised by the rest of the Goldfaden troupe.
During the final tour with the Bluett show, the freaks’ popularity peaked. It was in the city of Smetano that the problem came to a head. The audience had been impatient all week and even the master showmen had trouble commanding full attention. During Magda Zhilinski’s neck twist there had been catcalls, genuine boos and hisses, though Magda had performed perfectly. When Grendal Romain attempted to put his horses through the synchronized folk dance, the music could not be heard above the crowd’s impatient grumbling. But the last straw was heaved on during Shoshone McGee’s knife-throwing exhibition, when someone yelled, “Bring on the freaks!” and the crowd cheered at an inopportune moment — causing McGee to nick, for the first time, his latest wife’s inner thigh.
At this, McGee’s long-seething rage boiled over into murderous rebellion and the Goldfaden troupe revolted en masse. They issued Bluett an ultimatum: Choose the freaks or choose the rest. One or the other. To share a stage with these blunders of God was one thing. To be upstaged by them was something else entirely. Something evil and unnatural and, finally, intolerable.
That Bluett was not a stupid man goes without saying. He had the savvy of a fifth-generation showman. True, the freaks were his finale, the most popular attraction of the whole circus. But their act consisted of nothing more than a ten-minute parade. And you cannot book a tent with ten minutes of deformity. As a climax, the freaks were gold. As a beginning and an end and everything in between, they were death.
And so, on a cold autumn night, when a harvest moon blasted the forests with blue light and the fog rolled in cold and wet, Tedeo Bluett banished the freaks from the only home that most of them had ever known. To his credit, he paid them a month’s wages and let them keep their costumes.
The freaks were dumbfounded. By and large, these were not wily individuals. Most had been coddled throughout their lives, tended and managed by Bluett like prized sheep. They were not idiots but they were all spoiled to a greater or lesser degree and had little sense of how to take care of themselves in the wider world.