HIBBLER’S MINIONS
JEFFREY FORD
It was 1933and we wintered at the Dripping Springs west of Okmulgee. The Dust Bowl was raging, money was scarce. People didn’t buy what they didn’t need, but one thing they still needed was Wonder. The folks out on the Great Plains could always scrape together a dime or two for Ichbon’s Caravan of Splendors, a wandering menagerie of freaks and exotic beasts. We put on shows from Oklahoma to Ohio and back each year. Granted, the custom of carnivals was dying, and it faded another few inches with every town we rolled into. Dying wasn’t dead, though, and in those days that was something.
Ichbon was an old-timer by then, having started out with Barnum in New York City at the American Museum when still in his teens. The great showman helped set the young assistant up with connections and cash to run the Caravan of Splendors. By the time I came to the Maestro, as we were required to call Ichbon, he had seen all the wonder he could stomach, and at nights was given to drinking Old Overholt. Although he’d lost his sense of splendor, he retained his shrewdness for a dollar through those weary years and always managed to keep us in food, drink, and a little pocket money. He dressed like an admiral, complete with a cocked hat ever askew on his bald head. His trucks were dented, his trailers were splintered and rickety, his tent was threadbare, his banners were moth eaten, and his beasts were starving. A lot of us, though, in the grasp of the Maestro, had nothing but the show between us and destitution. Who would hire a man born with an extra face on the back of his head? I was Janus, the Man Who Sees Past and Future. In reality, I saw neither, and even the present was murky.
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