Personal Challenge: Love, Death And Carnivals

Circus arriving in Seligman, Missouri, late 19th century

Public domain via wikimedia commons 

Greetings dear toads, toadettes and assorted followers. Hedgewitch here, responding to my first personal challenge, which comes boldly from one of our newer members, the ever-effervescent
Magaly Guerrero. This is the gauntlet she flung down for me:

"If you choose to accept this personal challenge, I would love to read a poem set on a carnival or circus during the Autumn Equinox. You can focus on whatever you like, as long as it happens in the setting and time I mentioned."

Well, of course I chose to accept, and I immediately wrote a love poem full of masks and feathers set at the famous Carnaval do Brasil in Rio De Janeiro. Then I realized that particular festivity takes place, like our Mardi Gras, shortly before Lent. Which is not the Autumn Equinox, when night and day are of equal length, taking place, as a matter of fact, today. So....back to the drawing board.

I followed many twisting pathways down the haunted lanes of the internet before I arrived at the grisly tale below, about two lovers who met at a carnival in September and ran away together the following summer, their lives and their untimely ends, based very loosely on an unsolved Territorial murder from 1905. A fuller explanation of the facts I have wreaked havoc upon follows the poem, and there are yet more on my blog , but first let me thank Magaly for the challenge, and my dear friend Shay (Fireblossom) without whose often dark and always bewitching poetry and short stories of lesbian love I would never have found my 'solution.' 

I hope you all enjoy this little slice of grim.

~*~

Dead Woman's Crossing

When the moon was a witchboat small and tossing

in the fade-time where night can see day as her twin,

down the rough blacktop to Dead Woman's Crossing

came the carnival rolling on a dustbowl wind.

They spindled the midway, freakshow and toss-ring,

before they spiked twenty ripe melons with gin

for Harvest Home in the dark of September,      

so the marks can do what they won't remember.

There was Jacko the clown, stringy as a rat,

Ma's name and a snake his tattoo valentine,

Rudy the barker in a ten dollar hat,

talking apple butter, smiling turpentine.

The Doll from Philly worked the striped gypsy-tent;

her brown eyes had just the right mad dog shine.

Then night seemed to give a coyote-moon cough

that shook her gold earrings, and Katie showed up

with her deathrattle tale of carnival past,

how she, the schoolteacher, met the Fallen Dove

Miss Fannie, too red-haired, too ruined, too fast,

on a September midway, bent moon above;

how love like a cloudburst caught her at last      

a kiss-whisper in place of the stone cold shove,

a granite fist traded for a velvet hand

and a five dollar ring for her wedding band.

The Dove blew out of Texas like a broken branch            

running  from Jesus, Daddy Jim and the law.

When she hit Mrs. Hamm's Saloon and Hog Ranch

she knew she had almost no time left at all

but still more than Katie, hellbound for a ditch,

face pale through the water where the black crows caw.

Thru plugged ears Doll could hear the walking night moan,

thru shut eyes see the bridge where Katie talked on:

The heat lightning flickered as midnight slammed shut,

Katie in a nightmare where she was the wheat

waiting dry in the dirt for the thresher's cut;

too many whiskey hard times in tangled sheets,

one scar too many from a cheap White Owl blunt

while the tumbleweeds wrote her name in the street.

She put on her bonnet, she packed up her grip,

met the Dove smiling with her child on her hip.

They sat down stiff as strangers on the noon train,

the nights and the men left behind in the dust.

They got off at Clinton in the quick July rain

with the last of the wheat burning red as rust.

When the moon was a witchboat sailing the plains,

as diamond eyes came home to lily-white trust

in the carnival night, storm in the willow,

the teacher slept sweet with her red-haired pillow.

The next day at midday, two girls and a child      

left town in a buggy to laugh and laugh last.

Fannie screamed like a bobcat, the wind went wild

when Katie's man came up through the tall sawgrass.

The Dove saw the buck-knife draw a cutthroat smile;

all she knew was to make the scared horse run fast

from the man who had Katie back, all his, dead.

All the Dove had was poison and a red dirt bed.

When the moon's a hook, a witchboat, a sickle

when the last of the wheat stands brown in the ground

while Orion runs after Hecate the fickle

above the dwindling lights of a dying town,

the Dove does her dance to a penny whistle

and a dead woman calls her child with that sound.

The next fall, when Doll's carnival topped the ridge

it rolled without stopping past Dead Woman's bridge.

 ~September 2014

~*~

Process notes: The bare bones of this story are true, if extremely conflicting, anecdotal and incomplete. Katie De Witt James was a schoolteacher seen boarding a train in Custer City, Oklahoma Territory, with her fourteen month old daughter in July of 1905. She had just filed for divorce from her husband Martin James on grounds of cruelty, and was supposedly going to stay with relatives in the small town of Ripley, about a hundred and twenty miles away. She never arrived.

Instead, she left the train in Clinton, a town only about fifteen miles further on, with a reputed prostitute named Fannie Norton, who also went by the sobriquet of 'Mrs. Ham' (which I decided to use in a wordplay on the frontier practice of referring to a brothel as a 'hog ranch.') Katie spent the night with Fannie at Fannie's brother-in-law's house, and the following day the two women and child rode out in a rented buggy to the countryside near Weatherford, the location of the creek and bridge in the poem, saying they would be back in a few hours. Fannie returned, after dropping off a baby in blood-stained clothes with a passing farm boy, but Katie never did.

After not hearing from his daughter for some weeks, Katie's father hired a detective to find out what happened to her. He traced her movements, and finally tracked Fannie down in Shawnee, where  Fannie vehemently denied killing Katie, saying Katie had 'met a man' then dissolving into incoherent tears. Later that night, Fannie took poison, killing herself. The divorce never went through, and Katie's husband, fitted up with an unbreakable alibi, and with suspicion diverted to Fannie, filed for custody of their daughter, inherited Katie's estate, which he subsequently sold, and left the Territory.

After Katie's body was found at the end of August  by two men fishing along the creek, with a bullet through her skull, her head severed from her body and a 'five dollar gold ring' on her hand, the tales began. The ghost of Katie is said to haunt the bridge and creek, calling for her daughter, and the sound of buggy wheels on wooden boards is often reported there, despite the old wooden bridge being washed out and replaced with a concrete one in 1980.

I totally made up the part about the two women meeting at a carnival in September and falling in love, though I think it explains some of the baffling aspects of this story, like why Katie might have left the train long before her planned destination with a supposed stranger, and a prostitute at that. Logic leads one to think  Katie may have been killed by someone who stood to lose everything if she lived, but benefited greatly by her death, someone who might easily have followed her, then later cobbled together an alibi. Her husband. But that is something only Katie and Fannie would know.

Regardless, the carnival doesn't stop there any more, toads. Thanks for bearing with me, and with this long, long September story.