The Circus Came to Town
One spring someone at work gave my mother a bunch of tickets to the Shriner's Circus. It was a good thing they gave her a bunch because there were three of us plus several other cousins who went. I am thinking Sharon and Ronnie had just arrived to spend part of the summer, and Joyce was visiting from Iowa. It certainly was not Barnum and Bailey, but it was a nice three ring circus complete with clowns, elephants, tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, and barrel walkers. We all got the circus bug. Jerald showed up from Little Rock and probably a few others too. For once, the Secret Society of Older Cousins enlisted our help. They needed the manual labor. Jimmy and Kenner were included and carried boards and poles from the barn.
Even before the circus, I had taught myself to walk on an old barrel that was around the farm. Jerald was, of course, the Ringmaster. Someone was going to walk on a wire that was strung between two trees. Others were going be clowns, and jugglers, and acrobats. We felt pretty educated since we had been watching the Ed Sullivan Show every week. Everything was perfectly planned and going according to the plan.
Jerald even toyed with the idea of being a bullfighter. He had taken a large towel or sheet off of the clothes line and waved it bullfighter style in front of Kersey Benefield’s bull that was grazing in the pasture beside the yard. We knew better than to tease that bull; we had been told often enough. For some reason, we thought this was different. That ugly bull with its big red bloodshot eyes and slobbering mouth immediately took notice. He pawed with his front hoof and snorted every time Jerald waved the makeshift cape and turned to bow to his audience. It was wonderful…until the bull tried to jump the fence. We quickly gave up that idea and returned Jerald to being Ringmaster. Little did we know that we had stirred up ire in that bull that would later come back to haunt us.
We were all having a great time planning the circus. I spent most of my time practicing barrel walking and was feeling pretty confident, a little too confident. In just a split-second, I walked the barrel over a rough place in the yard, and down I went slamming my arm against a rock on the ground. There was a compound fracture between my wrist and elbow. I remember pain at first and then just being very dizzy. Everyone was standing around me staring down at my arm. I felt like I was lying on a spinning merry-go-round. Kersey Benefield appeared from somewhere and picked me up and put me in the back seat of his car. I am sure Grandma had called him. I remember I was lying down and could see the sky out the back window moving in what seemed like circles. Somewhere between home and Fort Chaffee my mother joined us. I spent the next week in the hospital at Fort Chaffee eating ice-cream and showing off my cast.
Boy was I unpopular! As Joyce reminded me at the last reunion, the circus was cancelled. Grandma made the remaining cousins take everything down and carry it back to the barn. They had to call the Blevins children and all the others in the community that they had invited and tell them the circus was off. It was such a disappointment. When I returned from Fort Chaffee, Jerald and Joyce had both gone back home, and the remaining cousins were hardly speaking to me.
Things were pretty dull, and the most exciting thing on the farm was the big bad bull. We had figured out how to make him snort and paw and slobber profusely. At some point, everyone except me with my broken arm took a turn at amateur bullfighting, from the safety of the other side of the fence of course. As soon as the bull started to get too feisty we ran for the safety of the porch. We were very successful at stopping at just the right moment, before he got too mad, but in time to see him bellow, and paw, and slobber. We had totally dismissed Grandma’s warnings about staying away from that bull. The longer it went on, the braver we became.
One boring afternoon the cows arrived in the pasture, followed by none other than the big, bad slobbering bull. He glared with his nasty bloodshot eyes and watched us with great suspicion. I think it may have been Ronnie, but things happened so fast I really don’t remember. Someone took a towel and began to tease the bull. He barely snorted or pawed. He just glared, and then suddenly he was over the fence, and we were all screaming and running everywhere. The closest safe place was inside the chicken house, safe if you have forgotten that Rufus was in there with his hens. It was very crowded. I had climbed up into one of the nests on the shelf and tucked my legs up under me to keep them away from Rufus, who was going wild pecking and spurring any piece of bare flesh he could find. We were trapped and afraid to make a sound. I guess Grandma must have seen the bull in the yard, because Kersey eventually turned up and put him back in the pasture. We never mentioned our part in the great bull escape, and Grandma never said a word about our pecked-up legs and arms. We never bothered that bull again. Even so, it was not the end of our adventures with that maverick who had now become our enemy.