Sweeter than Birdsong (14 page)

“What was that?” The whites of Cornelia’s eyes showed in the half-light, her nails digging into Kate’s hand. Others around them looked down and jabbered in shrill voices. The brass instruments blared on, their sound adding to the din.

Another sharp report. The platform beneath her groaned and then fell away.

Screams sounded in the blur of motion. Cornelia’s arms held tight around Kate, who clung to her friend as they fell. A shattering boom like a cannon mingled with the shrieks.

They hit the ground hard, the concussion knocking them apart. Pain shot up Kate’s legs and she collapsed on the splintered wood beneath her.

Dazed, she sat motionless, struggling for breath against her corset.

A horde of people sprawled on top of one another, to her right, in the wreckage of the stand. Screaming continued, along with cries of pain. Kate scrambled backward on her hands, away from the heaving pile.

“Kate, thank the Lord!” Mrs. Hanby ran up and knelt by her, hair disheveled, tiny creases by her eyes smeared with dust. “Are you injured?”

“I don’t believe so.” Her voice came out faint—it was still hard to catch her breath.

“Let me help you.” Mrs. Hanby took her beneath the shoulders and raised her carefully to her feet. “There. Can you walk?”

Kate tested a few steps. “I’m all right.” She almost had to shout to be heard in the horrific ongoing clamor. People rushed all around them from the other side of the tent. Most seemed to be running away in panic, though a few stopped to help the groaning victims. She was afraid to look at them too closely, afraid of what horrible sight might print itself on her memory.

“Where are the others?” Kate asked.

“I haven’t found them.” Mrs. Hanby’s reply sheared off. She seemed remarkably level-headed, but her hand trembled as she lifted it to rub her eyes.

Together they edged closer to the mass of wood. Some people were crawling away. At least no one appeared to be buried under the heap.

“Ben!” Mrs. Hanby jumped into the fragmented pile and began to pick her way across. A few yards away, she slipped and her hat fell off.

Kate gasped, then called out, “Mrs. Hanby, be careful!” Ben’s mother paused only long enough to cram the hat back on her head. She clambered a few feet farther, then crouched down.

Kate could no longer see her. She could not remain here while her friends might be injured ahead. A sour taste in the back of her throat made her swallow hard.

She hoisted herself up into the splintered chaos and followed. A man grabbed her skirt, crying for help, blood running down from his scalp and into the furrows of his forehead. She paused. What could she do? She forced down a throb of nausea. “Mary, Mary, stay with me,” he said to Kate, his eyes unfocused.

This was no time for weakness. She knelt and rummaged in her pocket. All she had was a handkerchief, but she gave it to him and helped him press it against the wound. Pity rose up in her and she kept her hands still and gentle against the man’s brow. But as soon as she lifted her gaze to the confusion around them, her horror returned in force, like a gust of wind pushing her off balance, making her fight for every small motion. She dropped the reddening kerchief and had to shake it off before reapplying it to the man’s blood-wet hair.

“Thank you, miss,” a middle-aged woman said as she climbed next to them. “Charlie, do you know me?”

“Mary.” He stretched a hand toward her. The woman took over his grip on the handkerchief and applied more pressure.

Kate stood again and walked on. She grabbed a jagged spur of wood for balance. A streak of pain lanced through her palm—when she turned it upward, a thick, needle-length splinter stuck out of it. Even the pain did not dispel her sense of walking through a dream. It seemed as if it were not Kate herself but some other young woman who grasped the splinter, jerked it out, and continued.

Mrs. Hanby knelt next to Ben, who was sitting up. He was pale, but not bloodied. A warm flood of relief poured through her, dissolving the strange dissociation of the moment before.

But one of Ben’s feet was trapped under the broken planks, from the ankle down. She must get over there to help. Her pulse quickened as she looked for a path across the wreckage.

“Kate!” The call came from behind her. The Lawrences. They stood dusty but apparently unharmed beyond the edge of the collapsed stands while people hurried around them. Thank goodness. Her knees weakened and she blinked back the pinprick of tears. No time for that, not with Ben still pinned in the mess and perhaps hurt.

“Find a doctor,” Kate shouted, hoping they would hear her. “Mr. Hanby is injured.” They seemed to understand, for Mrs. Lawrence grabbed Cornelia’s hand and led her out of the tent.

Kate picked her way across the buckled wood until she reached the Hanbys.

“I can’t get my foot out of the shoe, so that won’t help.” Ben spoke to his mother with the halting rhythm of pain as he tensed the trapped leg and pulled at it.

“How can we manage this?” Mrs. Hanby inspected the tangled pile of boards. They were woven together like reeds in a basket.

“Perhaps if we move this one?” Kate pointed, then grabbed one end of the board and hoisted it with all her strength. It heaved up, but not enough. Mrs. Hanby sprang to the other end and disengaged it from another piece of the stand. They both pulled, Kate straining her arms as her corset bit into her sides, until her end of the plank slid two feet to the side, and Mrs. Hanby did the rest.

Now just the one board remained on top of his leg. Kate went back to him. It was a larger beam, perhaps a support beam. “I don’t think I can lift it,” she said to him. A stab of anxiety made her want to sit down next to him and catch her breath. But she must not.

Streaks of perspiration ran down the side of his face. “Will you bring me a piece of wood about the length of my arm, if you can find one?” he asked.

She nodded and cast about, narrowly avoiding a fall into a hole between boards. There. A plank two inches by four inches, and a couple of feet long. She wrenched at it hard until it came free from the one nail that still held it. At least she could do that much—she carried it over with a tiny surge of satisfaction that vanished at the sight of his pain-whitened face.

“Here.” She poked it at him awkwardly. He inserted it under the board, in a crevice just beyond the tight vertex that trapped his ankle.

He looked up. “Now place your hands next to mine and we will both push on the count of three.”

She did as he said, conscious of the nervous dampness of her hands, hoping they would not slip.

“Wait.” Mrs. Hanby positioned herself next to the wedged foot and laid her hands around her son’s trouser leg, very gently just above the ankle. “In case you cannot lift it out yourself.”

“Good.” He held Kate’s gaze. “One, two . . . three.”

He bore down on the lever and she leaned on it with all her weight.

The beam shifted, only a fraction.

Mrs. Hanby pulled the foot hard. Ben bit his lip and grimaced without sound, but his leg slid out from the trap.

Blood covered the ankle below the fabric of his trousers and smeared his shoe.

Kate’s head swam. “You’re bleeding.”

“Surface cuts, I think.” He shifted to his knees and bore down on the good leg to stand up. “You see?” He looked triumphant through his pallor. Then he tried to step on the other foot and staggered. Mrs. Hanby seized him by the coat and helped him regain his balance.

“Lean on my shoulders and we will walk out of here.” Mrs. Hanby still had to raise her voice over the shouts and pleas for help.

“You are too small to bear my weight.”

“We must leave so we can get you to a doctor.”

“I will help.” Kate walked to them and stood at Ben’s other side. He braced himself on his mother’s support, then hesitantly laid his arm across Kate’s shoulders. The warmth of his half embrace seeped through her daze. It should not be pleasant, under the circumstances, and yet it was, sending a flutter like birds’ wings inside her. He began to limp forward bearing most of his weight on one foot.

Men were heavy. She could tell he was trying not to lean on them, but they strained to support his larger frame. Even after they cleared the wreckage, it was slow going. They were all out of breath by the time they emerged from the tent into the gray daylight. An overcast day had never seemed so friendly and safe—she took a deep breath and felt all the fear of the tent dissipate in a long sigh.

Ben removed his arm from around her. She inched away. She could not look him in the face, and he seemed preoccupied with the dust on his coat.

Mrs. Hanby kept hold of her son, as if afraid to let go. “Ida and Cornelia will come for us with a doctor.”

“What happened?” Kate asked Mrs. Hanby. “Why did the stands collapse?”

“I don’t know,” the older woman said, her brow tightening. “I think the noises were the wood splitting. Perhaps the stomping was too much.”

“They must have been rotten,” Kate said. “Wouldn’t the circus inspect the supports for safety?”

“Whether they did or not, they will claim so,” Ben said. “No one will be able to tell, not with everything in a heap in there. Unless the papers somehow discover the cause and report it.”

“Those poor people inside. We must pray no one was killed,” his mother said.

Ben closed his eyes for a moment. His expression fascinated Kate—so calm, even in pain. What was he saying to God?

“You should sit,” Mrs. Hanby said. “Let us help you over there.” A cut-out log had been fashioned into a public bench a few yards away.

“I can manage.” His skin was drawn and pale as he stood with one foot barely touching the churned-up ground, his shoes crusted with a line of mud above the sole. “Someone else will need the seat more. Too many are injured.”

“No one has come for it yet.” Mrs. Hanby spoke with the long practice of a mother’s persuasion. “You may give it up should another require it.”

But even as she said so, a little knot of three men stumbled out of the tent, cradling an older woman in their arms as if she sat in a chair. Her head drooped to the side; her eyes were closed. They shouted to one another in German, a few fragments audible.
“Das ist gud.” “Ja, da sind.”
One jerked his head toward the log bench and they passed Kate to lay the woman’s limp body on it.

More spectators streamed out: Chinese folk in caps, small children with tears on their cheeks, some brunette, fair-skinned women in humble clothing speaking in a musical language.

Ben let his head fall back and made a strangled sound of frustration.

“Is it your foot?” Mrs. Hanby asked.

“No. I’m thinking of my friend, whom I had planned to meet in Cincinnati.” He and his mother exchanged a look Kate did not understand.

“I will not give it up,” Ben said to Mrs. Hanby. “This may be a mild sprain only.”

What did he mean about Cincinnati? It dawned on Kate that she had missed her opportunity to leave. But of course she could not leave the Hanbys here in such a circumstance. But there might be another way. “What was your errand?” she asked Ben. “Perhaps Mrs. Hanby and I can accompany you.”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

Mrs. Hanby released her grip on Ben’s arm, reached into her handbag, and withdrew a lacy handkerchief. “Turn toward me, Ben.”

He did so, and she gently rubbed the grime from his cheek. He flashed a look at Kate, like a chagrined schoolboy.

Mrs. Hanby balled up the handkerchief and said with perfect calm, “Well, I think I shall go with you, as Kate suggests, just in case you need my assistance. She and the Lawrences will travel back to Westerville and I will go on to Cincinnati with you.” The set of Mrs. Hanby’s chin made her look very like her son for a moment.

“Mother. I hardly think—”

“Someone must go in your place if you have not healed.”

“Please—” Kate rushed it out. “Please let me go with you. I might be able to help in some way.” And what an additional wonder it would be, if she could get all the way to Cincinnati with their help before setting off on her own. Her shoulders tightened— she must not show her agitation, or the guilt winding her up inside like a spring clock.

“My dear, I’m afraid that’s out of the question,” Mrs. Hanby said. “We don’t even have your mother’s permission to take you to Cincinnati. You must go back with the Lawrences.”

Ben spoke up behind Mrs. Hanby. “I don’t think either of you should go, Mother. I don’t think it a safe errand for a woman.”

“I’ve been on such errands since long before you were born, son.” Mrs. Hanby’s tone was dry.

It was all very mysterious. Would Ben have to venture into some unsavory part of town as part of this errand?

The cab drew nearer, the rings on the harnesses jingling.

Mrs. Hanby placed a hand on Kate’s sleeve. “Miss Winter, I do understand. When I was a young woman, I also wanted to see more of the world. But what would I tell your mother?”

“The truth.” If Kate did not hurry, the coach would pull up before she could make her case. “Tell her young Mr. Hanby has been injured and we must go on an errand with him.”

Ben lowered his voice so only Kate could hear. “You don’t know what you’re asking.” He held her gaze.

She flushed and looked down. Her conflicting emotions blurred into a single wild spin like the shapes and colors on a child’s toy top.

“Ben!” a familiar male voice called. Frederick strode out of the tent doorway, apparently unharmed, his father a few steps behind. In half a minute, they crossed the yard.

“Are you hurt?” Frederick peered at Ben’s foot. “You are!”

“It’s nothing,” Ben said.

“What a fright,” Mr. Jones said. “Have you ever seen the like? Thank heaven we’ve all been spared. Or, mostly.” He looked at Ben with regret.

If Kate did not seize this chance, she would lose any opportunity to escape. She must hazard everything, now, while the situation was dreamlike and confused. “Mr. Jones, we have a dilemma.” Her words were halting, but she forced herself to go on. “Mr. Hanby is temporarily unable to walk.” She took a quick breath. “Mrs. Hanby and I have offered to assist him to travel to Cincinnati, where he has business. But he is reluctant to accept our offer.” A pulse pounded in her temples as if it might burst out like a river through a weak dam.