DEAD LITTLE DOLLY
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Prologue from "Dead Little Dolly"
The sun was thick and warm on Deputy Dolly Wakowski�s back, and on her neck, and on the top of her head. She pulled off her blue uniform hat and set it on the damp cemetery earth beside where she knelt.
A quiet May Sunday afternoon. Quieter, because there was no one else in the old Leetsville, Michigan, cemetery. No one there, among the tombstones, but Deputy Dolly, of the two-man Leetsville Police Department, who bowed her head over the bearded lady�s grave then laid a bouquet of wilting white daisies atop the mossy headstone:
GRACE HUMBERT 1873 � 1926
�Another year, Grace,� Dolly bent to whisper as she patted Grace Humbert�s grave, fingers brushing over the prickly sprouts of new weeds and grasses.
�Happy Mother�s Day. It�s me, Dolly.�
The day was all washed-fresh light. The shine of new spring green spread over the sunken graves of Civil War soldiers and around old headstones standing crookedly, slump-shouldered, names of the poor wiped away by harsh Michigan winters.
Tiny yellow dandelions�bright little toys�speckled the clustered graves of babies dead in a long-ago epidemic. Toward the back of the cemetery, proud family plots, surrounded by rusted and crooked iron railings, bloomed with new weeds.
Dolly�s uniform pants were damp at both knees, but that was as it should be. It was proper that once a year she came here and knelt to talk to Grace Humbert, the famous bearded lady of a long-ago Barnum & Bailey Circus.
She�d heard about Grace when she first came to Leetsville from southern Michigan, thirteen years before. Grace Humbert, memorialized in the museum down the road, in Kalkaska, but forgotten by everyone else except as an oddity a local newspaper or magazine would revisit every ten years of so: a woman who didn�t fit anywhere, not with her flowing beard and mustache, not with eyes direct and slightly amused, never part of the world around her, but never cowed by that world, her look steady and challenging, her back straight in satiny gowns draped across an ample bosom.
�Forty-seven Famous Freaks,� a 1903 photo hanging on the crowded old depot wall had screamed at Dolly, and there was Grace, a dark image in the third row, smiling, happy to be among her kinfolk of sword swallowers and tiny people and tall people and leopard-skinned people and pinheaded people. Different. An outsider.
Like Dolly Wakowski...
The sun was thick and warm on Deputy Dolly Wakowski�s back, and on her neck, and on the top of her head. She pulled off her blue uniform hat and set it on the damp cemetery earth beside where she knelt.
A quiet May Sunday afternoon. Quieter, because there was no one else in the old Leetsville, Michigan, cemetery. No one there, among the tombstones, but Deputy Dolly, of the two-man Leetsville Police Department, who bowed her head over the bearded lady�s grave then laid a bouquet of wilting white daisies atop the mossy headstone:
GRACE HUMBERT 1873 � 1926
�Another year, Grace,� Dolly bent to whisper as she patted Grace Humbert�s grave, fingers brushing over the prickly sprouts of new weeds and grasses.
�Happy Mother�s Day. It�s me, Dolly.�
The day was all washed-fresh light. The shine of new spring green spread over the sunken graves of Civil War soldiers and around old headstones standing crookedly, slump-shouldered, names of the poor wiped away by harsh Michigan winters.
Tiny yellow dandelions�bright little toys�speckled the clustered graves of babies dead in a long-ago epidemic. Toward the back of the cemetery, proud family plots, surrounded by rusted and crooked iron railings, bloomed with new weeds.
Dolly�s uniform pants were damp at both knees, but that was as it should be. It was proper that once a year she came here and knelt to talk to Grace Humbert, the famous bearded lady of a long-ago Barnum & Bailey Circus.
She�d heard about Grace when she first came to Leetsville from southern Michigan, thirteen years before. Grace Humbert, memorialized in the museum down the road, in Kalkaska, but forgotten by everyone else except as an oddity a local newspaper or magazine would revisit every ten years of so: a woman who didn�t fit anywhere, not with her flowing beard and mustache, not with eyes direct and slightly amused, never part of the world around her, but never cowed by that world, her look steady and challenging, her back straight in satiny gowns draped across an ample bosom.
�Forty-seven Famous Freaks,� a 1903 photo hanging on the crowded old depot wall had screamed at Dolly, and there was Grace, a dark image in the third row, smiling, happy to be among her kinfolk of sword swallowers and tiny people and tall people and leopard-skinned people and pinheaded people. Different. An outsider.
Like Dolly Wakowski...