The gift and the test.
I couldn’t tell if this meant I’d been forgiven. I only felt haunted, right down in my throat. No ghostly hands there but perhaps a single phantom finger, pressing in.
A warning.
If my voice had a curse, I was sure it was this one.
Of course, the one I did not believe in is the one that came true.
Six
THE SETTLER’S DAUGHTER, then.
I rode into the ring dressed in their buckskin cowgirl costume with my raccoon coat and rabbit hat, all while the Iroquois made the war calls of several tribes, his own included. I circled twice, firing gunpowder blanks from the rifle, then stopped and stood. While I balanced on the horse’s haunches, I directed the audience like a conductor, singing my round. This done, I dismounted with a backflip and chose a young man from the crowd, handing him a paper rose and leading him to the center of the circus tent, where clowns dressed as parents and priests waited and married us in front of the singing audience.
By the time I reached Paris, I’d been married this way a hundred times, in Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
In the first month, whenever the announcer told the story of the girl “captured by the Indians as a child and raised in their wild ways,” who spoke no English except a song she’d learned from her mother, I felt as though each time I sang, my mother was listening, watching.
There was no name I could take that would hide me from her, I knew. But as I sang this more, it soon became the song I sang for the show, and it reminded me of her less and less.
My speaking voice had not returned, and the singing voice stayed, which felt like a truce or a sacrifice, depending on the day. I feared that one day it might switch, and I’d wake and find a normal girl’s voice there, the singing voice gone—and find that I was done. While the circus became like a family to me very quickly, I always knew it was a family I’d auditioned for, and I could see that if I was to be injured or the crowd tired of the act I could be left behind. You might get to repair costumes, or take tickets, or cook, but only if there was an opening.
No one ever mentioned the previous girl in my spot. No one ever told stories of her, or why she’d left, or said if she was even alive. I thought of her sometimes, as I had her tent and her gun, after all, and her horse. If Mela missed her, he had no way to show me that I could see. He, like the rest, gamely trotted out his paces.
For all I knew, it was her ghostly hands at my throat.
So it was I sought to make Flambeau my teacher. She, or he, as I was to discover, was our barker and stood by the entrance, blowing gouts of fire into the air and then exhorting the fascinated crowds to come inside.
The first few times I watched him practice, I didn’t recognize him and wondered who the young man was breathing fire in the yard. He didn’t wear the enormous wig for all his rehearsals. He wasn’t young anymore, but the fire had made his face as smooth as a woman’s—all the hair burned off, so he never had to shave, though he could never grow a beard. I thought he was new, like I was, and didn’t mind that he ignored me at first, as I was too fascinated by the fire, and for that alone, I wanted us to be friends. He didn’t acknowledge me until after several days he said, very suddenly, You want to do this? And I recognized his voice.
He held out the jar of pétrole he used. I nodded my head. It was all I wanted.
You don’t want to do this, he then replied, laughing, putting out his palm to stop me. Don’t want to ruin that pretty face! You need your eyelashes to bat at the men in the audience!
It seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world, though, much more beautiful than my eyelashes. To tip your head back, hold the torch to your lips, and let out a stream of fire. I could close my eyes and see it, the bright yellow tongue in the dark, blue right near my lips. The very best trick, my favorite, was the ring of fire. I hoped to use it in my act. I hoped I could learn to blow a ring I could leap through from the horse’s back. Horses hated fire, after all, and if I did it this way, they’d never see it, I told myself. It was a stupid idea, but I loved it all the same.
You don’t want to do this, he would say again and again the first month. But still I came.
It was Flambeau, then, who taught me to smoke cigars. They were my practice. Smoking a cigar required you to keep the smoke from your lungs. Breathing in the fire was the death of the fire-breather, a terrible, painful death as you choked on smoke and your own blood. The ring of cigar smoke was to be a ring of fire someday. And so I kept at it as practice and learned how to blow smoke rings, practicing for my ridiculous, impossible act, but also to someday join him if my voice ever vanished and left the circus before I did.