The Tears of Squonk,
and What Happened
Thereafter
By GLEN DAVID GOLD

Revenge is a sport best played by those
whose memories
are long-and that
made her a dangerous
foe, indeed.

 In late March 1916, a week before the Nash Family Circus came to Tennessee, their spotty poster advertisements clung to the sides of buildings throughout the railroad town of Olson. Olson was best described as sleepy, save for the constant rattle of the railroad yards; it was not at all a place for murder. And the Nash Family and their hired performers seemed anything but evil.
The posters, stock images dated and fading already, promised tame acts. A horseback rider here, a clown there, a roaring lion, and finally a pair of juggling clowns pasted next to each other to lend some small company. Taken together, they looked as forlorn as the orphans who sometimes stood outside the tent and imagined far greater attractions than those that ever actually wheezed through their paces under the single, patched canvas big top.
The talents of the Nash family clowns were generally tepid. Some of the horses had been remarkable in their youth, true, but they were tired—granted, only half as tired as the acrobats, who mostly daydreamed of returning to Germany when the war was over. No, what the Nash Family Circus had to offer was the moral backbone of its patriarch, Ridley Nash.
Nash had been in the circus business since 1893, when the traveling carnival had been born. A cook in Chicago, and a splendid mimic of the world's cuisines, he had made the daily meals at the international pavilions at the Columbian Exposition. He had been so impressed by the clean family entertainment, he purchased his first wagon then and there, on credit, from a dealer in the dry goods pavilion.
By 1916, he was referred to as "Colonel" Nash, which dismayed him privately, as he had never served in the army, and he felt the term disrespected those who had. Still, it was the custom among traveling circuses to have a faux colonel at the helm, and so he bore it manfully.
Among the Nash Family Circus posters was a broadside of printed text which Nash had set himself. He insisted that every word be true, beginning with "A Moral Entertainment," and ending with "23 Years of Dealing Squarely with the American Public." In between were other promises, such as "8 funny clowns," and if the eighth clown was under the bottle that night, to keep the count honest, Colonel Nash donned the red nose and let himself be hit with the slapstick.
At the center of the broadsheet was a woodcut of an elephant, Mary, billed as the third-largest elephant in captivity. She was seen in a headdress and cape, with an indication by her side that she stood twelve feet at the shoulder.
The elephant was indeed the third-largest in captivity, and she stood exactly as high as the Colonel claimed, and one morning had been measured three inches taller, but the Colonel kept the smaller number, as he could count on it being verified.
The posters he'd designed to showcase the elephant were for many years treasured, not for their moral authority, but simply for how Mary was shown both head-on and from the side. Nash felt this presented her headdress and cape squarely, to use his preferred term, but more than one spectactor to her final performance commented-— before spiriting away a copy of the broadsheet—how prescient the Colonel had been in showing her as if she were posed for a police blotter's mug book.

 The morning of Mary's last day, roustabouts swung sledgehammers along the stake line, and ring-makers were leveling the field exactly forty-two feet in all directions from the center pole, which was erected by a line often men chanting as they had since the days of Dan Rice, "easy, easy, easy, PULL."
The sky was iron gray with clouds, and the humidity brought an odd smell, something rusted and cruel, from the train yards, which surrounded and dwarfed the town. Tiny Olson sat in the shadow of Wildwood Hill, the top of which was a graveyard for freight cars. In the town, the parade band attempted in vain to tune their ratty instruments, and beyond and above them was the hulking, distant silhouette of Ol' 1400, the McKennon Railway's hundred-ton train derrick, which was used to snatch trains off the track and then drop them, helpless as baby turtles, onto the scrap heap.
The parade was a chance to show the town just a little for free, to build anticipation for that evening's show. At eleven AM, the brass band was fully engaged and marching: the scruffy and heartbroken Nash children, plus two pony boys and a mule skinner who had some legitimate use for the slide trombone. Next were the three acrobats who normally did handsprings in the street, but because of the mud, they rode on the back of a flatbed cart pulled by goats, and made a human pyramid at one end, tumbled down, then reassembled at the other end.
Next came the eight funny clowns, most of whom seemed, at eleven AM, not so much funny as wrestling with philosophical discontents.
The sole clown of merit was Squonk. When he and Mary had joined the Nash Family early in the season, the Colonel billed Squonk in the programs as "Joseph Bales, portraying Squonk the Clown," in the spirit of full disclosure, but Bales, a trained artist who had studied in Europe, was furious. "Nash," he said, folding his arms, "I'm a trained artist. And when I studied in Europe, we didn't give away our names, not for the world." Bales argued that pantomime, makeup, false nose, and floppy Bibleback shoes were all poetics, in the Aristotelian sense, intended to preserve mystery. Grudgingly, mostly to keep the temperamental Bales at ease, Nash—who wasn't quite sure about the Aristotelian reference, though it sounded impressive—billed him from then on, in entirety, as "Squonk."
That morning, Squonk—in his dunce's cap and bloated single-piece checked suit with three yellow pom-poms down the front— seemed to be everywhere at once, miming the trombonist's slide and puffed-out cheeks, then threatening to topple the human pyramid. In what warmed the crowd as a rib-tickling lampoon (though it lacked the same effect on his peers, who glared daggers at him), Squonk became stern with the other clowns, tutting their performances. He showed them the proper way to toss a child into the sky, lofting and catching a small girl and handing her a daisy all in one motion as smooth and delicate and transparent as glass.
But this was just the warm-up for the big finish. At the head of the parade, two front-door men began to wave their arms, standing as if to block the side streets. They cried out, "Hold your horses! Here comes the elephant!"
The crowd fell to a respectful hush, as there was something glorious and humbling about seeing, once a year at most, such an impossible beast. Some regarded the bizarre mix of parts—trunk, tusks, huge ears—as evidence of the existence of a bounteous and clever God. Nash, who was swayed by the God argument, also spent stray moments here and there staring Mary in the eye, sensing within her a wonderful intelligence. Squonk wrote out a quotation for him to use during his pitch: "Comte Georges Leclerc de Buffon, famed naturalist from France, tells us the elephant 'by his intelligence makes as near an approach to man, as matter can approach spirit.'"
Hence the warning about horses. Elephants would tolerate being chained to a freight car and stuck with a hooked pole, and forced to stand on their hind legs and trumpet. But they would not tolerate horses. The mere fact of horses drove them into an atavistic frenzy. The eye clouded over, almost as if musth, the elephant madness, had invaded the brain.
When the street was thought to be secure, Squonk loped forward, dropping all of his humorous antics. His years of European training rushed to the forefront. His rigid posture, his head tilted upward, arms flourishing gracefully, indicated that behind him stood a magnificent work of art known as an elephant. The crowd produced a kind of applause that was at once awed and hesitant.
Mary walked slowly, trunk held forth in a question mark that tilted left and right as she marched through the muck. She wore a sequined headdress, and a long cape with a Shakespearean ruff. There was a kind of knife-scarring on her ear, an M, made to indicate her name (elephant theft was rare, but costly). The more educated patrons of the circus, upon seeing the outfit, and the M, understood at once how fitting her name was. They would murmur, Queen Mary, as the ground trembled with each step.
Bales had trained Mary in a unique manner—she was never humiliated into squirting water at the crowd, or balancing a ball with her trunk. He was more demanding, more of a martinet than that. Mary performed ballet.
Thus the Nash broadside included mention of Mary's dynamic performances for the crowned heads of Europe (citing, as per Bales's resume, Carlos II of Spain and Sophia of Greece, since Nash was aware that "crowned heads" was an unacceptably vague term that invited suspicion). The crowd at the parade was there to see ballet, and, had the show at Olson gone as had every other performance that season, Mary would have indulged them with one simple motion, a curtsy, that would have guaranteed a full house that night. It was such an indescribable gesture that most members of every previous crowd were driven to sputter to friends, "You have to see it—you just have to see it."
Alas, at 11:15, as the town clock was striking the quarter-hour, Mr. Timothy Phelps, senior director of the McKennon Railway, arrived at the parade via the narrow alley between the Second National Bank and Tannenbaum's hardware store. He appeared mounted, with exquisite form, on his English saddle-backed horse, Jasper.
What happened next was so terrible, so simple, so unbelievable, that townspeople's memories could never have been trusted to relay it accurately. In fact, the story would surely have been demoted to the realm of folklore were it not for a single motion picture camera.

The Pathé Prevost Camera, the camera of choice for professionals, had but one drawback: If the camera fell over and struck a hard object, the film stock tended to explode into flames. An amateur filmmaker named Alexander Victor was experimenting that morning with acetate "safety" film. He'd ridden the rails of the American South, tinkering with improvements in the optical range finder, and shooting endless locomotives in transit, train-crew razorbacks waving at the camera. Today, he had alighted on the circus parade, which was ideal to him for its interesting motion.
He hand-cranked his camera on the sidewalk, directly across from the alleyway. And so local memories, hazy in other details, are precise in this regard, all of them, no matter where they were that day, recalling it from the same vantage point. Their memories took on the scratched negative, the variable speed and mysterious lighting of amateur film. Mary broke from the parade route, trotting left with an almost magnetic attraction to Jasper and his rider, scattering to the four winds the townspeople between her and her quarry. Standing next to the brick wall of the bank, Phelps and his horse—rather a greyish smear in the frame-by-frame dissection of the scene—nervously paced back and forth, but couldn't make up their collective mind, and then Mary, headdress and cape buffeting with each step, was upon them. It was as if she needed to scratch an itch against the rough bricks, one quick flex of her shoulder, forward, then one slower, luxurious kind of return back, and horse and rider were no more.
This was horror enough. But next, camera still rolling, citizens of Olson sepia blurs crossing the foreground, Mary lowered one front foot to Phelps's back, as if holding the corpse steady, and then she wrapped her trunk around his neck. The next motion was fluid, like drawing a reluctant cork out of a champagne bottle.
There was pandemonium in the streets, people unsure of exactly which direction constituted proper fleeing, and Alexander Victor's film ends with a man in a bowler hat running his way, his vest and watch fob suddenly filling up the screen, and then, blackness.
Nash, rooted in the mud, hadn't seen exactly what happened, but tried to calm the situation, his clear showman's bellow ineffective. He saw the village blacksmith run forward and withdraw a pistol from his apron, which he proceded to empty at Mary's flank. The bullets made small pockmarks in Mary's hide, and she flapped her ears in concern, but she continued walking and there was no further outcome.
Squonk stood paralyzed, his jaw wavering, in the middle of the street. He removed his pointed, conical hat, and lowered his head. He put his palm over his eyes as Mary, his friend and companion, approached him and gingerly reached out her trunk for the apple she always received at the end of every parade.

The rumor that the show must go on was one started by patrons and furthered by newspapermen who liked how it sounded. Many a circus folds without a second thought, and Nash knew, at noon, and at one o'clock and at two o'clock, that there would be no performance that night. He had returned Mary to her freight car, and put most of his men around it to guard her. When a group of townspeople approached, excited as boys invited to their first dance, and armed with rifles, pistols, and sticks of dynamite, Nash stopped them himself. Nash had expected them, and had been girding himself all afternoon to tell a lie. It was the first lie he knowingly told the public.
"You can't kill an elephant that way," he announced.
His tone was so authoritative, so dismissive, he wondered where his voice was coming from. He sounded as if he were reciting Leviticus. "A gun, even a stick of dynamite, that will in no way pierce this beast's hide."
The men of Olson exchanged glances. There was a problem at hand, but some of them were known to be clever, and it was only a matter of time until someone yelled, "Electricity!"
Nash shook his head. "Edison himself attempted that once and failed. It just made the elephant angry." His second lie.
This caused murmurs, and Nash knew where this would go, a building kind of frustration and impatience. As soon as one man was telling the rest he could call his cousin in Frazer, who had a cannon from the War Between the States that might still work, Nash stopped them. He found himself saying, more of a circus man than he'd ever been, "We will settle it tonight, gentlemen. We will not leave this town without settling it, publicly, fully, and demonstra-bly." He wasn't sure why he added that last word, but it seemed to hold promise to the men, who, upon being assured that Mary would die somehow, turned, and walked away, holding their pistols or their rifles forlornly.
So the Colonel sat in his wagon, which was parked atop its brass brake shoes in a swampy depression nearest Mary's freight car. He was unsure of what to do. His elephant had killed someone—apparently done so with vigor, though he hadn't seen it, and continued to have his doubts. There was a very reasonable demand for vengeance. The idea of having a murderous animal in his charge made him feel ill. But what made him feel worse was the deeper source of his lie to the townspeople: if Mary were killed, he could never pay off his loan.
The finances of a circus were as arcane and toxic as the combinations of Ural Mountain herbs the property men used to jazz up the Sterno squeezings they swilled on long winter evenings. There were loan-outs, buybacks, reverse repurchase agreements for contracts based on projected earnings. In short, Nash only owned Squonk and Mary's contract because he had guaranteed a bank in Chicago $8000, payable in installments through the end of the summer season. He had paid off $1500 so far. There was no way he could now make up the balance, and for him, financial responsibility was the basis of modern civilization. He had never pitted that belief against his belief in animals' basic nobility, and when the two forces rubbed together like this, the friction upset him.
At three o'clock he called Joseph Bales into his wagon to see how best to proceed. Bales entered with his head hung low, and when Nash began to speak—he began with an overall statement of how he still believed in the intelligence of the elephant, and was about to discuss whether female elephants perhaps fell under the sway of musth—Bales interrupted him. "Hanging," he said.
"Pardon?"
It was a conversation Nash would recall, helplessly, without conscious effort, many times for the rest of his life. The specifics were worn away, but the general feeling of dread was quite solid.
"Mary committed a crime," Bales said. "She should pay. By hanging. It would be poetic."
Usually Bales spoke in sentences forged from many dependent clauses welded together by sarcasm. Tonight he sounded like a different person. Determined, a man who has made the right choice quickly, begging for no time to reconsider it. He leaned forward and pointed with one articulated, bony finger, out the window. And there, on the hilltop, was the hundred-ton railroad derrick, looming just like a gallows.
Nash shook his head, but said nothing. Bales stood, put his hand on the door handle, and as a way of departing, jammed his hat down upon his head. His back was shaking, shoulders quivering. Then, determined, he whispered, "And it would be more poetic, still, in the deepest sense—poetic justice—when we charge admission."
When the door closed, Nash stared after it, his own eyes welling up. A terrible taste came into his mouth, a vile copper flavor, exactly like that of a penny.

That night, the whole town of Olson turned out on Wildwood Hill. Also present were the whole towns of Softon, Burroughs, Myers, and Carmel, over two thousand people, each of whom had paid the exorbitant sum of two dollars for the privilege of standing among the train wreckage to see an elephant hanged.
Nash himself elected not to attend. That an animal would be done such violence broke his heart. Just before dusk, he returned to Mary, who stood chained in her freight car, and looked her one last time in the eye. He saw within the same intelligence and kindness he had always seen. The longer he stood, the less he could forgive himself for taking the financially responsible way out of this. He retreated to his bed for the rest of the sleepless night.
Alexander Victor set up his camera, to no great effect. Even by the kerosene-fueled pan lights, with their reflectors and occasional flashes, there was not enough light, through the silt and smoke drifting over the excited crowd, to see anything more than vague shapes, suggestions of some tribal ritual.
Wildwood Hill was a gentle slope of about two hundred feet, with spiraling rails and a footpath, terminating in the antediluvian detritus of trains gone extinct. There were men and women and children walking gaily up the path, finding good vantage points surrounding the final length of railway track. The derrick's wheelhouse, belching diesel smoke, sat atop a power plant the size of a locomotive. And extending from the wheelhouse, at the midpoint of its iron belly, was a kind of mechanical trunk: a muscular crane with a superstructure of steel girders, and at the end of it, a dull steel hook.
At seven o'clock, the doors to Mary's freight car were thrown open and she was led by torchlight along the pathway to the hill. The crowd, upon seeing her at a great distance, cheered for a while, but as her stride was stiff and slow, and the circular pathway uphill quite long, they soon lost their appetite for cheers, and fell instead into muted conversations.
When she finally appeared, it looked at first as if Mary would pass toward the derrick without trouble, but when she came upon the crowd, she froze solid. Some swore that she seemed to eye the steel hook, but perhaps her psychology was more simple than that. She was usually led to perform at this time of night, and yes, she was wearing her headdress and cape, and yes, there was a cheering crowd.
But no tent. And the tenor of the crowd, for a creature that lived on emotion over reason, must have frightened her.
She shied away from the path, and it took several quick pokes of the elephant stick to keep her from retreating. Still, no power in the world could get her to go forward to her fate. Long minutes passed this way, with the crowd yelling out its disappointments, until resolution came from an unlikely source. A figure fought his way through the shoulder-to-shoulder overalls. It was Joseph Bales, out of his uniform. No makeup. Woolen jacket, beaten work trousers, a derby. From his occasional missteps and slurred speech, it was apparent he had ladled out applejack for himself from the canned heat wagon. If you looked closely, you could see a fine tapestry of broken capillaries around his eyes, which he wiped at with the back of his sleeve.
Mary immediately reached out her trunk for her friend, who patted her gently. "This way," he said, and walked several steps toward the derrick. She followed, but then stopped, and nothing, not all the pats and praise and reassurances in the world, could get her closer to the hook.
Bales tried to smile at her, but failed. Just as the crowd began again to grow unruly, he held out his hands to his sides, palms out, as if trying to stop a fight. He put his head down, and let out a sigh of awful resignation.
When he next raised his head—plainface or not—it was Squonk the Clown who looked up, light and limber as a dishrag. He did a mild leap, from foot to foot, and then back again, then once forward, once back, and then he pointed back at Mary. Understanding passed through her, and she, too, put her feet outward, then back. Then she stepped to the left, then the right, then turned around in a full circle. The audience let out a lusty cheer—Mary was doing her ballet!
The pas de deux was based on Plastikoff's La Chauvre-Souris Dorée, a rare work in that it celebrated not courtship, but daily love, the often-pale and unnoticed emotions that pass between a man and wife. When Squonk performed a saut de I'ange, Mary, who could not of course jump with all four feet in the air, nevertheless responded by extending one leg behind her, and her opposite forward leg straight ahead, in a perfect arabesque.
She did not notice that, far overhead, the crane was swinging into position.
Finally, Squonk performed a series of assembles sur la point, jumping with his legs together, turning in midair, going up on his toes, springing again, with a kind of grace that would seem unrepeatable until Mary followed him, shuffling in a circle like a trolley on a turntable. For her big finish, she did exactly what she'd done a thousand times before—rear legs slightly crossed, lowering herself until she was almost belly to the ground, and dropping her head as if in supplication: a perfect curtsy.
And that was when Squonk stepped forward and slipped the hook into the chain around her neck.
She startled backward, but it was too late. Gears far away, deep in the power plant, began to grind. Mary stood up herself, shaking her head like a dog shedding water. And then her forelegs were lifted off the dusty ground. She walked on her two legs, balancing, and the turbine whined awfully as something seemed to slip, and she started to return to the earth—briefly, though—as the crane applied inexorable force, she was pulled upward again, and her rear legs were removed from the earth, too.
All around, on the tops of dead scrap, of passenger cars stripped bare, of tankers gone to rust, the men and women and children lost their ability to cheer. An elephant is not meant to leave the ground, and the sight is sickening, a kind of rebuke to the natural order—fossils found in a churchyard, a rainfall of salt cod in the desert. There was a hush under the smoldering pan lights. Mary's stubby legs kicked in the air, and then, just once, after long moments, the eye startled wide in recognition of what was happening. The trunk sprang straight, a quick and disappointed half-strangling trumpet, and then she went limp.
No one knows for certain how long the elephant hung over Wildwood Hill. A man schooled in night photography offered to let people pose with the corpse, but there were no takers. There was a general call toward Squonk, and then confusion, then realization: He was gone. He had probably turned away the moment the crane began its work. He was never seen again.

A year passed. Then another. The Nash Family soldiered on, barely, sending in cash to cover a good portion of Mary and Squonk's contract, and then making small monthly payments. There was no longer a big finish to the Colonel's circus. Instead, Nash added a trained chimpanzee who, dressed in a toga, rode in a chariot pulled by two basset hounds. He also added a castaway from the Sparks circus, Captain Tiebor, who had a team of sea lions he claimed were college graduates. Nash dutifully wrote that into his new broadsides, and if that absurdity troubled him, he said nothing about it. He still claimed to offer a moral entertainment, though there was no longer a chronological measure of his dealing squarely with the American public.
In winter, 1918, the family went off the road for a season. Nash went alone to a rented ranch-style hacienda in an unincorporated valley not far from Los Angeles, California. His idea, expressed vaguely to the family he left behind, was to find new talent associated with the motion picture industry—perhaps some tumblers or wild animal acts were dissatisfied with the life behind the camera, and perhaps they truly wanted to see the world.
But the words seemed hollow to him, and in their letters, no one asked him how the quest was going. Since Mary's hanging, Nash had been directionless. He knew no one in Los Angeles or its environs, which he found lonely and strange—acres of olive groves and citrus trees somehow mysteriously kept alive in the desert climate. He halfheartedly visited Famous Players once, but was turned away at the secretarial pool when he couldn't remember the name of the man he was supposed to meet. He spent the rest of the afternoon riding the trolley cars home.
When he cared to think about it in culinary terms, a habit he retained from his previous career, Nash believed there were two types of circus attractions: the sweet and the sour. The sweet consisted of wholesome entertainments that were exactly as presented: the trapeze, the animals, the clowns. The sour were those that relied on fooling people. The India rubber pickled punks in jars, talked up as two-headed babies. The pink lemonade they sold that was actually water the clowns had washed their tights in. They had seemed too easy to keep apart, those worlds, but at some point Nash had crossed a line, and gone sour himself.
One February afternoon, Nash was interrupted in his morning ritual of shaving by a knock at his door. He peered out the keyhole, worried that it might be an associate come to take him back early to the circus; but no, the man on the other side of the door was no one he knew. Wiping away the foam, Nash let him in.
The stranger's face was broken and scorched, with patches of red skin among wrinkles, the expression a perpetual wince, as if he'd spent every moment of his life in hostile weather. His age was impossible to guess. He wore the familiar black cape and hat of a railway detective, which was the main reason Nash had so readily let him in. Unaccustomed to company, Nash fumbled to offer him coffee, which the stranger accepted, announcing at the same time his name, "Leonard Pelkin." Pelkin had once been a railway detective, he continued, but he had retired and was now working privately.
They sat on either side of a galley that had been built into Nash's small kitchen, cramped but breezy, with a good view of the valley over Nash's shoulder. Pelkin took the opportunity to admire it while digging a portfolio out of his knapsack.
"Might I ask you some questions?"
"Certainly."
Pelkin carefully removed a stack of four-by-five photographs. As if dealing a hand of poker, he placed them facedown in a field of five. "It's about a murder," Pelkin said. He cleared his throat, as if he had more to say. Nash nodded, to indicate he was being helpful. Pelkin nodded back, and then took a sip of coffee. He gestured with the coffee cup, toward the photographs. "Suspects," he continued.
Then he turned over the photographs, each making a confident snap as they went faceup.
For a moment, Nash was silent.
"These are murder suspects?" he finally asked.
Pelkin nodded. "Do you recognize any of them?"
"They're elephants," Nash said.
"Look again."
Nash didn't need to look. He was upset, as he felt this was a problem that had been handled long ago, destroying a good part of himself in the bargain.
"I'm sure they're elephants. If you're here, talking to me, then you know why I'd know that."
Pelkin put up a finger.'"One elephant," he said. "Just one."
The five photographs had been taken years apart, the earliest ones streaked and bubbling with emulsion. Each of them showed an elephant in the midst of carnivals or circuses—Nash recognized a wagon from the Sells organization, and a Ringling banner, and, finally, his own sagging big top, whose patches were as identifiable as surgical scars. It was like the sun breaking over a mountaintop.
"Mary," he said.
"Can you indicate where you see her?" Pelkin asked.
"Are you serious? She's the elephant standing before my tent."
"Is that her in the other photographs?"
It was hard to tell. In one, she wore a kind of tiara; in the rest, she was unadorned. "It could be."
"Did she have any identifying marks?"
"Well. Well. She was exactly twelve foot tall. Is that what you mean?"
Pelkin's eyes narrowed. "Twelve foot? Or twelve foot, three inches?"
"No, exactly twelve foot, as per the broadsides." He blew out his cheeks. "Of course, that one morning in Denver, she seemed to be twelve-foot-three."
Pelkin brought his hand down on the table hard enough to make the spoons jump.
"Yes!"
He leaned forward, and said, as if trying to be calm, "Is it possible she was, all those other times you measured her, slouching?"
"I don't understand."
Pelkin eased away. He looked over Nash's shoulder, at the elm trees beyond the window. "Any other marks you remember?" he asked, faintly.
"She had an M on her ear."
"Like this?" Pelkin thumbed through some photographs until he found what he was looking for, and snap, it went down on the table: It was a close-up of an elephant's ear.
Nash nodded. "Yes, except Mary had an M and this elephant has an N."
Weighing that statement with a frown, Pelkin brought out a fountain pen, shook it, then added a single downstroke. "An M like this, is what Mary had?"
"I'm sorry, how many elephants have letters on their ears? Perhaps all of them. I've only examined one up close."
And at once there came forth the bitterness Nash had been trying so hard not to taste. The glimpses he'd had into Mary's eye, the raw mind he'd seen there, how she had been betrayed.
"One elephant, I'm thinking," Pelkin said. "There was an elephant named Nommi, with Ringling, and four years ago she killed a man. I think they just hustled her out the back way in the middle of the night, changed her name, and sold her to you."
"That's impossible," Nash said, but as he did, he brought up the photographs one by one and stared at them. "These are Nommi?"
"One of them is. One is of a Sells elephant, name of Veronica. She was a killer too, six years ago. And the name, see, if you—" Pelkin awkwardly put up two fingers to make a V, and then joined with them a finger from the other hand, which made a backward N. He moved his fingers around, trying to get it right, and then gave up. "Before that, Ionia. That's the one with the tiara."
Nash wanted to tell Pelkin that he was insane, but could somehow not move his mouth to form the words. He had a sickly feeling, one tinged with guilt, as if he himself were being accused.
"The man Mary trampled in Olson, he was on a horse," he said, meaning by this to begin a conversation that would end with Mary being, if not blameless or excusable, than at least understandable: an animal pushed beyond her natural limit.
"Mary didn't exactly trample Phelps, did she?" Pelkin said.
"Well ..."
Pelkin started packing up his photographs, and Nash hoped this meant it was over. But instead, there was a new photograph to study.
It was about eight inches tall, and of such length that it came in a roll, which Pelkin unwrapped. He smoothed it out, then weighted it down at either end with coffee cups.
It was a safari shot. Five men at the center, in white pith helmets, Springfields cracked open across their laps. Native bearers of a tribe Nash did not recognize were to the left and to the right. Some of them covered their faces before the camera, but left the rest of themselves exposed, including the women, a detail Nash dwelt on for a shameful amount of time before realizing what, exactly, he was being shown.
The five hunters were all posing with their trophies: one man atop them, two on either side, two kneeling before them—a half-dozen dead African elephants.
"Oh, my lord," Nash cried.
There were pencil marks around the men's faces, which were half-crinkled in the photograph, hardly recognizable to begin with. Pelkin tapped on the image of one man to the right, whose rifle was jauntily slung over his shoulder. "Timothy Phelps," he said, "when he was a much younger man. The Southern Crescent Railroad, in 1889, took its senior-most managers on safari to the dark continent. Five of them are now dead. Killed by elephants." He picked up his coffee cup; the photo rolled shut. "An elephant."
Nash smoothed out the photo, holding it open himself. He stared until full understanding settled in on him. He felt buoyed by it; he could make sense of this. Almost giddily, he whispered, "Mary's family, then?"
"What?"
"The elephants who were killed here on the hunt. They're Mary's family, aren't they? She's been having her revenge."
There was a rotten silence in the room as Pelkin sized him up, astonished. Not in a pleasant way. At once, the sourness of the circus returned to Nash. Pelkin's look was the kind reserved for the lowest hick, the kind who buys the Fiji Mermaid, the he/she dancer blow-off, the pickled punks and the lemonade, all of it, hook, line, and lead-heavy sinker.
"You think ..." Pelkin grinned. "You think Mary, an elephant, is the mastermind, or something?"
"Well."
"Look." Pointing again into the group of hunters. Toward the left, isolated from his comrades, arms folded, wearing no gun himself, was Joseph Bales.
"Oh! How? How?" Nash paused, helplessly.
"You know him as Bales, right? That's not his name. His name is Bowles. The clever ones, when they change their names, make them similar enough they'll answer to them in their sleep. Bowles was supposed to be promoted, and he wasn't. I hear he was a terrible safari member, made a big fuss about everything, spent hours telling his fellow men around the campfire how uneducated they were. After the safari, he was fired. He went bitter, Nash. How bitter, no one knew. Some bitter guys, they scheme but they don't have any follow-through. They fade. Not Bowles. He went out and became a circus clown, the way some of the really bitter ones do. For the last dozen years, he has been luring these men to their deaths. The day before your circus arrived in Olson, Phelps received a telegram telling him to ride his horse to the parade, as a wonderful surprise was waiting." Pelkin shook his head. "Wasn't so wonderful, in my opinion."
For a great deal of time, Nash said nothing. He felt he should say something, but the specifics eluded him. Pieces of this macabre plot surfaced: Bowles scheming revenge, Bowles becoming a circus clown, alighting on the poetic justice of death-by-elephant. Finally, he said, "Aristotle."
"What?"
"He liked Aristotle," he said, blushing a bit.
Pelkin shrugged, and then wrote Aristotle on the back of one of the photographs. "Any ideas where Bowles might have gone?"
"Why did he kill her?"
"Pardon?"
With no difficulty, Nash was back in the circus wagon, with Bales opposite him, Bales holding back tears—or was he actually crying them?—and determined to have Mary hanged. "He said killing her would serve justice."
"Oh. Yeah, the justice expert. Sure. He was done, Nash. He'd managed to get her out of trouble four times before that. Slipped
away in the dead of night four times, changing her name, changing his name. This time, he didn't need her anymore. He'd killed everyone he wanted to, and this way he wasn't going to leave any evidence behind."
"Hmmph." Nash nodded. "So he betrayed her."
"Sure," Pelkin said. Like most railway detectives, he was terse, but when revealing secrets he took a shameless delight in relaying the horrors behind them. "They were partners. She didn't know the game was rigged until the blow-off."
"I see."
He now wanted Pelkin to depart, as he was beginning to feel a strange and restless feeling, as if impatient for a loved one returning from a long trip. He wanted to throw open the door, look down the drive, and see, bags in hand, himself. He hardly listened as Pelkin snapped out another pair of photographs.
"These men, though, it seems Mary—or whatever her name was at first—she killed them in 1902. That was two years, as far as I can tell, before she met Bowles. It was a pretty fair partnership, I'd say. A good match."
"Yes, yes, I see," Nash said, impatiently. He was beginning to listen not to Pelkin but to a story unfolding in his brain. Mary, an animal, whose impulses were harnessed by a bad man. The tragedy of her life, coupled with the sheer evil of Bowles, made him hurry through the remainder of the interview with Pelkin. He was unsure of all things in the world, save one: He needed to be alone.
The conversation continued for less than five minutes. Pelkin had confirmed the trail was cold here. Abruptly, he shook Nash's hand, and he left.
When Nash was quite alone, he dug out a wax pencil and a sheet of butcher paper, and began to write down all he remembered about Mary, trying to balance the good (her intelligence and, generally speaking, kindness) with the bad—her having murdered people, for instance. He remembered then the salty tracks on Squonk's cheeks— if they had been there at all—and as he thought of them glistening, they enraged him. False, awful, sour, heedless crocodile tears, the worst kind of carny, the lowest of men, working Nash like a sucker.
He wrote long into the afternoon, had a snack, and then began to rewrite everything into a short and morally instructive playlet, which could be performed by a small circus. It was about a wicked clown and the elephant he tricked. When he was done, Nash realized he was about to shop for another elephant, and he made a note to send out wires to Sarasota, where the circus exchange kept track of such requests.

From 1919 to 1924, the Nash Family presented their circus as ever, sometimes lucky enough to adhere to a strict schedule when times were good, other times blowing the route and wildcatting it until business caught on again. The lynchpin of their show was Nash's playlet, a melodrama that featured the impish and terrible antics of Moxie, a clown, and Regina, a luckless and sad elephant suffering fits during which she accidentally murdered people. Finally, she was taken outside, and, as seen in a silhouette projected against the raw canvas tent, hanged until dead.
In his broadsides, and his talking before the performance, Nash explained that every word was the truth, including the hanging, though he had changed the names. It was said that the finale was done in shadow because of its graphic and disturbing nature, which was true, but actually secondary to its function as a special effect. Nash would never really harm the elephant, whom he loved: a second love, the cautious kind. This one was named Emily, and she had credentials so spotless her owner liked to say she could run for the Senate.
The crowds were entertained and disturbed by the spectacle, which was never quite the success Nash hoped. When the flaps to the tent opened after each performance, the crowds were hesitant to leave, and some audience members stayed behind to talk to Nash. There had been rumors, promulgated in whispers by other Nash Family performers, that Mary had killed even before she'd met Squonk. He was an awful man, to be sure, but wasn't Mary herself also guilty? Wasn't the execution, even if facilitated by Squonk, somewhat just? And Bales, did he escape, just like that? Did he kill again? Why wasn't he brought to justice in the end? And though Nash tried to answer the questions, he always grew flustered, as if the audience were missing the point, and he would retire to his wagon for the night.
There is no record of the last performance; it was never truly historical or important. It was unusual, a sort of passion play on a pachy-dermic scale, but though generous in spirit, it was too small a venue—melodrama—to incorporate a serious truth: Just as there are intelligent, wicked men, there are intelligent, wicked elephants. A thing of pure nature is not by necessity a good thing.
Just before the turn of the new century, the story of Mary was determined to be folklore, a confused truncation of the truth, something contradicted by old-time Olsonites, rerouted by oral historians: all a lie, it was now said. There were rumors of an amateur film (long-since disintegrated "safety" film that was no more stable than nitrate in the end)—exactly the kind of red herring "evidence" that indicated an urban legend at play. There had indeed been posters featuring an elephant named Mary, and several years later an odd play about hanging an elephant. But this was a play put on nowhere better than a circus, and it was apparent people had confused this with the truth. An elephant hanged? Papers were composed in the anthropology department of the University of Tennessee about the conflation of lynching narratives with that of an elephant. It was explained that the story evolved from a need to dehumanize the victims, or, in a contradictory interpretation, to enrage the very people who would never lift a finger to protect a fellow human being.
When facing the past, and attempting to do so squarely, it's difficult to understand what is marvelous, what is real, what is terrible, and what points overlap.
But there has been a recent development: Wildwood Hill, long ago surrounded by the blue fencing and tarpaulins of a Superfund site, has been purchased by the petrochemical combine that inherited the land in a deal with the vanished McKennon Railroad. There is a move to cap the area in advance of a toxic waste cleanup, and the first gesture is to dig wells into the hill's core, to test the soil for penetration of leeching chemicals.
Ten yards from the end of the tracks, under debris from six generations of abandoned railroad technology, is an excavation site twenty feet wide and twenty feet deep, scratched out of the clay almost a hundred years ago, and filled in again almost immediately. At the center, among the roots and weeds, the tiny stones and shards of broken glass and metal, lie elephant bones.
Caked with dirt, dark with dried tissues, they also gleam with a necklace of stainless-steel chain, and there is a shroud, once probably red, once likely ruffled and imperial, now as decayed and colorless as the dirt.

note: This story could only have been written with the aid of The Day They Hung the Elephant by Charles Edwin Price.