- - - - [The following excerpt comes from Issue No. 10: McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.] - - - - R E V E N G E I S A S P O R T
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 Colombian 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 — be-fore 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. HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS FOR THE EARTH-SHAKING CONCLUSION, AVAILABLE ONLY IN McSWEENEY'S MAMMOTH TREASURY OF THRILLING TALES. - - - - Glen David Gold is the author of the novel Carter Beats the Devil. A strapping man with a square jaw and windswept teeth, he stands in splendid proportion: five foot nine inches in height, some of it churning with muscle.
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