The Circus in Winter Read Online Free PDF

to be both solid and liquid, malleable enough to be poured into impossibly shaped molds and solid enough to withstand any force. After an hour, she was soaked through and flung herself onto the mat, panting.
    Not for a single moment had Jennie forgotten her audience, and so she was not surprised when she heard a smattering of applause from behind the juggling pins. In his zeal, Porter's hand must have nudged the pyramid, which came crashing down around him. By the time the clatter subsided, Jennie was mostly dressed, wrapping a scarf over her wet hair. Cheeks flushed, she checked herself in a broken mirror that hung by the door, and speaking to the glass, said, "I'm ready when you are." Tiptoeing through the pins, an abashed Porter took her hand.
    Evening was setting in. The low-hanging, scalloped clouds foretold heavy snow, and slivers of ice stung their faces as they rounded the corner of the practice barn and walked into a wall of wind. Slowly, they climbed the hill to Porter's mansion.
    "That was magnificent, Miss Dixianna," Porter said.
    "Thank you, Mr. Porter."
    Dropping her hand, he wound his scarf over his mouth. "Dixianna," he said, speaking through wool. "A curious name. I've always wondered, where did you come by it?"
    "It was my mother's name," she said, looking away at the snow glowing blue in the changing light.
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    JENNIE'S FATHER , Slater Marchette, was lucky to have survived the war with the Yankees, but he came home forever changed. He left a hard board of a man, but returned to his water oak-shaded shack in the Alabama bayou as soft as oleander, a sap given to weeping and hand holding. Slater hugged his wife and daughter so tight they lost their breath, and all that night, the house shook with his fierce love. After dinner, he danced and stomped, and once Jennie was sent to bed, he rocked the floors and walls, shouting his wife's name over and over.
    Slater spent six months walking home from the war, carrying nothing in his haversack but scroggling apples and an unblemished Confederate battle flag, which he hung on the wall of his home as if it were a priceless painting. After a time, he found work on a fishing boat in Bonsecours Bay, but came home each night to braid Jennie's hair and kiss his wife's growing belly. The night the baby came, his wife screamed and swore while he filled cook pots with her blood. "Quick," he said to Jennie, "run and get Sister. Tell her your mama's bleeding to death. Hurry."
    Sister wasn't family; she was a conjure woman who lived in a tin shanty just down the shell road. While he waited, he used every blanket, sheet, and towel to staunch the blood. When Jennie and Sister finally arrived, they found Slater awash in red, his wife blue-white and draped by the flag—the only piece of cloth left in the house.
    Sister clasped her leather-lined hands. "I don't understand. It didn't stop." She explained then that there was a verse in the Bible with the power to stop blood. "Only a few know which one it is. You say the person's name and read the passage." Sister looked at Jennie, then at Slater. "What your wife's name?"
    Through tears, he said, "Annie. Anna Marchette."
    "That explains it then," Sister said, shaking her head. "Your daughter said her name was Dixie Anna. That's what I told God."
    "A pet name," he cried.
    Jennie had never heard him use any other.
    Slater Marchette buried his wife, his darling Dixie Anna, under a shell mound with the baby still inside her. Jennie was six.
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    SO, JENNIE became a walking phantom, the living receptacle of unlived lives. Porter ate dinner that night with three women: his star acrobat, Jennie Dixianna; her mother, Anna Marchette; and (at long last) his wife, Irene. She walked through the halls of his mansion as if she'd always lived there with him, and for the evening, he allowed himself to believe that Irene had never died at all, that this woman moving familiarly from room to room was Irene, and that this was just another night in