Chapter 23 - THE LEATHERMAN'S JOURNAL – October 14, 1875

At the Fisher Farm today my emotions overtook me.

I approached the farm from over the hills in Middlefield. I saw some activity in the small grass plot in front of the large house. The house sat close to the edge of the wide stage road called Washington Street since, I am told, thought I don’t ask, General Washington marched his troops down the wide corridor. A path off the road led to a shelter I had on the mountain that looked, to the West, over Meriden.

As I approached, I saw that the husband was back from the fields, the grown children, four boys, as well, and the wife, and some of the other hands stood in a group talking, or lolled on the porch that skirted the front and side of the house.

For a moment I thought they were waiting for me, and I was prepared to turn away, and rely on what I carried away from breakfast in my pack instead of facing the crowd. And as I thought this, I saw all attention was focused upon me, and slowly the crowd dispersed, leaving only the husband and wife, another woman, and a child. As I moved closer, I peered from under the brim of my hat and saw someone I recognized.

I knew her name was Emma, and I had not seen her for many years, though the exact number of years is cloudy in my thoughts. She was a negro servant when I knew her, in her teens, moving into womanhood, and was treated as a member of the family in the Fisher household. One of her jobs was to feed me.

I grew to love her, in a fashion. For she never served me without speaking to me, without stopping a one-sided conversation, from the time she set the food down, until the time I mopped the last bit of gravy from my plate. After which she would always wrap me a thick sandwich made from bread heels and meat scraps.

She spoke with irreverence, and in this she reminded me of my Marie. No thought to age, class, or status. She spoke her mind. Told me I was dirty. She told me once that I stank, and so from that point, before each visit, I soaked in a creek when the weather was warm. She told me all about the family that she lived with, and she told me the gossip of the house, the town, the state, and the country.

Mrs. Fisher taught her to read, and so she kept up on events by reading the newspapers, and kept up on the gossip by keeping her sharp ears open, and her mouth closed, except when she was with me. I believed I was the only one she spoke to this way, because she knew I would not reveal a single secret.

She told me of her ambitions. She told me how she would love to study inside Wesleyan's walls, but feared that she would never have the chance. She told me she wanted a family, because she missed her own. They lived in a town called Oakley, in a place she only referred to as the South.

And she told me that she understood how I felt to be someone wandering on the outskirts of a society that was not mine to call my own, for she felt the same way.

And finally, she told me when she was leaving, to be married to a young farmer named Sanders. And she wept copiously. As I did walking away from the Fisher farm that last time I saw her.

Here was Emma standing, waiting, hands resting on hips cocked to the left. A huge grin illuminating the face of this girl with a woman's figure. And before her, a child, skin a lustrous cocoa, hair raven, and beaming the way her mother beamed. I felt my eyes must be lying to me.

As I got closer, I knew my eyes were telling the truth. It was not a vision. This was Emma, my Emma, and what must be her daughter.

"Why old man," I heard her laugh. "In all these years you never learned to walk any faster. Aren't you glad to see your Emma."

I don't know if I smiled. My heart smiled. My soul smiled. My face could do nothing but follow, but I forgot what a smile could feel like, and so I was not sure what contortion my face had taken upon itself to perform.

"Well, look here," she laughed again. "You learned something, didn't you? You're smiling."

I turned my face to the earth, ashamed at the betrayal of my own vows, but I had to admit, sinfully it seemed, that I felt more joy in this moment than I had felt in many years.

When I reached the small knot of people, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher backed off, leaving me looking at the earth, and at the feet of Emma. As if she had glided there on a sheet of ice, the little girl slid into my view. She looked up at a face that I knew contained the lie of a grimace.

"Old man leather," she said, pointing.

"I tell her about you all the time," Emma said.

I looked up furtively, not wanting the secrets of my soul to be discovered. She was smiling, gently, with an understanding that didn't need explanation.

"She's almost four. Her name's Alice."

"Alice Sanders," the girl corrected.

I knelt, and put my pack and stick on the ground and reached out slowly toward Alice. I was unsure of myself. I had not reached out for another person in a longer time than I had smiled last. She seemed timid at my faltering reach. But when I placed my hands on her shoulders, though my fingers trembled under the weight of years of abandoned emotion. She relaxed, and seemed to spread her confidence through my fingers.

She smiled a smile I will never forget. It came quickly, from nowhere, like a swallow on the hunt, and it was as broad as the rivers I couldn't cross, and it carried the warmth of the summer sun, though there were gaps where her small children's teeth had fallen victim to a piece of taffy, or an apple. She smiled, and looked at me with a child's innocent coyness. And I thought of my meals with Emma, and I thought of Marie. And I pulled the child to me and held her tight, and wept as I heard the lighter than air laughter escape from her perfect mouth. And I wept like a man who had lost his mother.

The little girl pulled away, and I let her run. I folded my face into my hands and tried to hide my sorrow from those few who had gathered. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and having gained my composure, I looked up to see Emma smiling back at me.

"It's all right," she said. "It'll be all right."

With this reassurance, I almost fled. It is the course I have learned to take. No longer a predator in life. I was now scavenger, and sometimes prey. It meant that I could not show vulnerability. Could not afford to expose any weaknesses to those who might see them as excuses for abandoning their kind treatment of me. I knew that to survive I had to run when threatened. I was compelled to run.

But at this moment. The first such moment in many years, I knew I did not have to run, did not want to run, and in the end, would not run. I would stand and share these small emotions with this woman who shared her’s with me so many times, and share with these people who shared their labors, and the food from the table with me for so many years.

Emma took me by the arm and led me toward the porch. Mrs. Fisher hurried ahead. And Alice ran ahead with Mr. Fisher. Emma spoke softly to me, but she could not resist speaking.

"Any man with a life as hard as your own deserves to weep a river of tears. I've wept them myself, I know. A lot has happened since we met last. Mr. Sanders, my husband, Ernest, has taken a job with the New Haven railroad. We own a piece of land near Bridgeport. And I've learned to read."

She spoke to me thus, through my meal, and for the hour it took for me to reach the hill that lead up to the Insane Asylum. And we both wept when we parted again.

Chapter Twenty One, addendum

(Last week I neglected to add the final two pages to chapter Twenty One. These are the missing pages.)

Burke lay his head back on an uncased pillow, piping dark with the sweat from his head. His eyes closed, and I stood and watched for a minute, thinking that he might have fallen asleep again. I scraped my soles on the gritty floor, and he stirred again.

"You still here?" he asked.

"Do you still track people for Barnum?" I asked.

"Fish for freaks?" he laughed a laugh which avalanched into a phlegmy cough. "Barum fired me months ago when I made a set of Siamese twins pregnant on the trip back from the Ukraine. I told him they'd be an even bigger attraction. He made me bring them back to their country. I sailed for Europe, but I sold them to a circus in Milan. The Circus de Santo Paulo."

He laughed again.

"How do you track people, people like that?"

"Freaks. Sideshow freaks, kid. Don't be afraid to call them what they are. They know what they are. Freaks of nature," with this his head fell with a greasy flop to his pillow again. This last pronouncement seemed to drain him of the last of his energy.

I waited to see if he would raise his head again of his own volition, and when he did not, I opened my mouth once more.

"How do you convince them to come with you?" I asked.

He looked up, as he did before, and I was sure he was going to ask again if I was still here, but he grunted and gave me a look that begged the same answer.

"Money brings lots of them. Promise of money. Most of these freaks are poor. Stone poor. So money gets them most of the time. Money in their own pockets, or money in the pockets of starving parents. They give up these kids because they know they'd never make it in their own world. They take their money and buy some chickens, or a cow, or a plot of land, and make life better for the rest of the little wogs. Everybody's happy."

I looked at him hard, not saying a word, but he knew he hadn't given me a complete answer. And for a moment, his head swung on his neck like a cowbird on the end of a cattail, I thought he would drop to the pillow once more to evade a response.

"The rest we take. If they're good. A live, two-headed animal, or some extremely small dwarve. We take them. We always leave the money. Hell, with Barnum, the money's never a problem, but sometimes the owner just won't give up what rightfully don't belong to him alone. 'Belongs to the world,' Mr. Barnum says. And I say he's right.

"So we take them in the name of the rest of the world. It's only fair. It's only right. Do you think that old dog-faced boy ought to be kept from the world? Course you don't. So we got the right to take them. We do. And, besides, we always leave the money."

This time I lost him to the pillow. His collapse sent a storm of dust motes through a shaft of sunlight that burned through the morning haze and lit the room in all its impoverished despair. I left.

McDonough won his case, and he seemed to sense this when I returned to give him the news that I would be leaving the next day to track down the Leatherman.

"Why leave?" he asked. "He'll show up in town someday soon, just follow him once he gets here.”

"What am I supposed to offer him? A salary. Clean bedding, food, what?" I asked.

McDonough outlined a plan of compensation that put my own to shame. He obviously envisioned the Leatherman as a big attraction for the theatre. He was prepared to offer him a salary of fifteen dollars a week, a room at the Riverview Hotel, and one meal a day in the hotel dining room, for as long as the engagement drew people.

"I know this won't be an easy job," McDonough advised. "So, you take as long as you like. Don't force him into anything. Make sure we meet his needs. Take as long as you like, but bring him back alive, Jack."

I wouldn't have it any other way," I insisted.

I spent the next two days puting together provisions for my tracking. I knew I'd be following old man Leather from town to town, and so the need for victuals each day was diminished. But I did buy myself a good mule, a sleeping role, a waxed canvas ground sheet, and an umbrella. It was early September, so I also bought a new woolen union suit, a thick wool parka, and two pairs of Levi Strauss dungarees.

This along with a knife, hatchet and cook set was all I needed. I
packed it in bags attached to my mule. Miverva was her name, and she was kept at the ready at a livery two doors down from the Palace. Word was out I wanted to know the first someone spotted old man Leather in or around town.

I settled in to wait.

And it was a waiting game. Though I hadn't been officially dismissed from the theatre staff, or from the cast of McDonough's shows, for that matter, I didn't turn up at the theatre every day. I stayed out of McDonough's way. I found a place on a bench in front of the sundries store that VanRediger owned on Main St. Though I knew old man Leather never passed this close to civilization, I also knew that the latest word of gossip, of any kind, was dropped as thoughtlessly and unkindly as a road apple at the crossroads in front of VanRedigers.

I held court with the old men, who told me tales of old man Leather from when they were youngsters, twenty years before. Though they were all past fourscore years, youth appeared in the haze of their memory as only twenty years distant.

They told me of his regularity. They told me his name, or I should say names: LeClerc, and Bonhomme, and Poitin, and Bourglay and Tournoir.

But they took the greatest joy in telling me of his crimes. Of the farmer's wives he had seduced, of the farm children he had abducted, and eventually eaten, of the farmhouses he had plundered, and of the farm animals that he is reputed to have rustled, killed, maimed and buggered, though not all four to any one animal.

I listened with a certain dispassionate interest, for I knew, that these men, like the reporter for The Middletown Herald, gathered all of their information by staying in one place, and awaiting for it to arrive on their doorstep like the mail. I knew the truth didn't arrive in the mail.

Chapter Twenty Two - Bring Me the Leatherman

Six months. We were opened six month before the sheriff showed up. And McDonough was ready.

"Jack, fetch me Flynn, now," McDonough whispered to me as he spotted the sheriff and his men entering the stage door.

I ran past the men, who smelled of whiskey and sweat. They saw me, and would likely have stopped me, but I was mighty quick. I heard one yell, "The kid" as the door slammed behind me. I was turning the corner at the end of the alley before the door even began to open again.

I was never to Flynn's office before, but I knew where it was. He had the entire front of the second floor over Pearl's, the men's clothier. His offices faced Main Street, and though I never met the man, I knew his flaming red hair, his flamboyant handlebar moustache, and his cigar, which never seemed new. I knew all this because when he thought or spoke he paced in front of those windows. I remember standing across the wide Main Street in front of the Belle Tavern, just watching as this great man paced and shouted, paced and thought. I feared for the man that sat opposite him when he spoke. On that day I saw him, he was not happy.

I didn't know what mood he'd be in today, but McDonough was adamant, even in his whispered offer. I ran into Flynn's office breathless.

His clerk looked like he was about to chase me away.

"McDonough needs Mr. Flynn right away," I pleaded.

"Mr. Flynn is busy. Get lost," the clerk was back at his work and didn't even look up as he spoke to me.

I stepped up to his desk and cleared my throat. He didn't move his pencil from the paper.

"I said, M. McDonough has asked that Mr. Lynn come down to the Palace right away."

"And I said get lost."

"Listen, you little puking bastard. Mr. McDonough pays Mr. Flynn good money to represent him. He pays him that money when all Flynn does is to strut back and forth in those Main Street windows," as my argument commenced the volume of my voice increased proportionately. "Now if you don't move your skinny rump off that chair and walk in there and inform Mr. Flynn that he's wanted, I'm going to climb over this desk, push your face into the ash bin and do it myself."

Though the clerk's face grew noticeably redder as I spoke, he stared at me unblinkingly, almost if his eyes were lidless, like a frog’s, until the last fleck of my spittle rested on his lapel.

"Get lost you little beggar before I call the polieeee..."

Truth is, I didn't allow him to finish his sentence. Truth is, his face drained of all the color it which had risen to his cheeks when I stepped onto his desk and he saw my mucky boots soiling the neat legal papers theree. And I'm not lying when I write that he screamed, loudly, rather girlishly in my opinion, as I pushed his oak chair over with a loud commotion and began to drag him toward the ash bin by his collar.

By the time Flynn got to me, with a firm hand on my shoulder, shaking to stir me from my trance of anger, I already pulled the clerks's stiff starched collar and suspenders completely off. When I finally realized that Flynn was counseling me to leave the frightened clerk alone, I dropped the clerk to the floor, where he lay motionless for the entire length of my short conversation with Flynn.

"I couldn't help but teach your clerk a lesson," I explained.

"I heard everything," Flynn said. "Where’s McDonough?"

"The Palace," I answered.

He grabbed my arm as an indication that we should go and until we moved onto Main Street he didn't ask me another question.

"What's the trouble?" Flynn asked.

"The sheriff's inside, probably trying to close the place down again," I shouted through my lack of breath.

"We'll see about that," Flynn said as he picked up speed and strode ahead of me.

I had to run to keep up.

We arrived to the sight of McDonough and the sheriff on stage, surrounded by dancers. The sheriff and his men had their guns drawn, and McDonough was back behind a stage model of the three Egyptian pyramids. We weren't sure whether the audience knew that this real-life drama was part of the show, or not, because every time McDonough, or the sheriff spoke, the audience reacted appropriately.

"You aren't going to close this place again," McDonough shouted, his blood peppering his cheeks with blotches of red.

The audience applauded wildly.

"This is an indecent show," the sheriff shouted back.

The audience again applauded wildly.

"And I'm closing it down," the sheriff continued.

Suddenly the hall was filled with hisses and boos. The sheriff, looking dismayed, waved his gun toward the audience and brought about the silence he desired.

"Just because you've got a gun and some hired goons, I refuse to let you interrupt the fine entertainment I assemble for the good people of this town."

Wild applause again. McDonough smiled and took a slight, almost humble, bow.

Now Flynn stepped in.

“Do you have a complaint,” he asked the sheriff.

“Indecent display,” the sheriff replied.

Once again the audience broke into applause.

“I’m putting McDonough under arrest,” the sheriff concluded.

Booes and hisses again.

“Not without a sworn warrant,” Flynn shot back. “See the judge, and then come back.”

The sheriff took a step forward, stoked his unruly moustache, and then hesitated. He turned to his men.

“Okay boys, let’s go,” he said. The crowd stood and cheered.

“But we’ll be back,” he shouted over the applause.

McDonough hissed at the orchestra leader, made some wild motions with his arms, and the curtain fell heavily between us and the audience.

“Better find another way to make audiences happy,” Flynn warned as he strode away.

Two days later, McDonough called me into his office.

“Jack, look at this,” he insisted, pointing at a Penny Press story with the headline, “Old Leatherman a Cuckolded Husband: Wife Murdered By Lover.”
McDonough proceeded to read the story to me.

It was about a tanner from Greenwich whose name was LeClerc. LeClerk’s wife Violette abandoned her husband for a new lover, Guillaume Blanchette.

Furthermore it was described how Blanchette had abandoned the woman and headed for the port of Boston town. Violette took to the road to follow him.

LeClerc followed their trail, learning that his wife underwent some of the terrible abuses of the road, and that she finally caught up to Blanchette in the small town of Terryville, adjacent to Plainville in Connecticut. Here the two stayed at a small boarding house for a few days.

One morning when the couple did not rise for breakfast, the landlady visited their room to determine if they left the premises without settling their debts. She found Violette LeClerc on the bed with a dagger plunged through her heart.

That afternoon, Simon LeClerc arrived at the boarding house to be told that his wife was murdered.

LeClerc went mad at the news and pursued the murderer after putting his wife to rest in a small family plot donated to him by a Terryville resident.

According to an anonymous source in Terryville, LeClerc never caught his wife's murderer. The murderer is said to have put to sea on a clipper headed for the Azores.

LeClerc returned to Terryville where he is said to have worked for some time as a plumber, often exhibiting signs of his mental instability. Town folk said he spoke to himself loudly, or he refused to speak for weeks at a time. After several weeks he began to wear rags and scraps, although he was making a good working wage, and staying in a lean-to shack in the wooded hills near town.

At some point, no one in the town can remember exactly when, the man began to appear only in leather, and then to disappear, only to return at regular intervals.

It can be assumed that it was during this period that LeClerc, known only as the Leatherman to those outside of Terryville, began to wander from town to town throughout Connecticut.

During this time he also ceased speaking to anyone, begging meals from farmwives and splitting wood for pennies.

His hunt for his wife's murderer is said to have taken place nearly twenty years ago, and to this day, the lonely Leatherman can be seen wandering the hills still searching for the man who murdered his wife.
“Sell story, eh Jack?” McDonough asked.

Well, I knew for sure that this reporter had written his report from the comfort of his desk. I saw old man Leather as far away from Terryville as the Hudson River put him, and the story of the murder sounded chancy even to naive reader like me.

"Jack," McDonough said. "I know just the act to save our theatre."

I didn't now the theatre was in trouble. In fact, I knew it was not in trouble. But somehow this seed of disaster had impregnated a troubled mind, and now we needed an act to pull us from desperation.

I didn't ask. But he told me.

"We'll get him," McDonough said shaking the Middletown Herald in my face.

I knew full well who "he" was, but I refused to get excited about a ridiculous, perhaps even cruel, proposition.

"You with me Jack?" McDonough asked. "We'll get Simon LeClerc. We'll get the Leatherman."

"What do you mean, get, McDonough? Stalk him like Barnum's hunters stalk lions and apes? Capture him with a net? Display him in a cage?" I asked, sparing him no sarcasm.

"What I mean is we go after him. I don't know. Talk to him. Pay him. Convince him to come and live here. We'll take care of him. Give him all he could ever want to eat. A bed to lie in."

¬ "He doesn't speak." I nodded.

"He doesn't sp..... He won't have to speak. I'll tell the story. We'll create vignettes of his life. He'll just have to walk on the stage, and walk off. Just like he does now. Only he'll get paid." McDonough's enthusiasm was growing, but was hardly contagious.

"Suppose he doesn't want to get paid. Doesn't want the food, or bed," I asked.

"Jack, what man doesn't want security. Hell, we'll get him a woman. What man doesn't want a woman. We'll get him all right." McDonough punctuated his enthusiasm with a sharp clap of the hands. "We'll get him all right."


"You know him, don't you?" he asked me.
"Know him? No."

"I mean you've seen him, haven't you?"

"Yes, everybody has."

"But everybody doesn't work for me, you're going, Jack," McDonough said, clapping me on the back.

"No I'm not."

"What?"

"I said I'm not going," I glared at him with an authority beyond my years.

"All right," he agreed amiably. "I can understand your reluctance."

I was flabbergasted at my ability to dissuade McDonough from what I thought was a powerfully bad idea. I knew he had grown to trust me more, but I didn't realize that he had grown to respect my opinion.

"I realize you might be afraid to approach him. It is rumored that he's murdered some children," McDonough said triumphantly. "But I believe those are only rumors."

I knew his game. I knew what he wanted me to say. But I would not say it. I would not tell him I was not afraid. I would not say that I was only concerned for the Old Leatherman's welfare. He knew all this. I stood my ground. I stood silent.

"Do you know where James Burke lives?" he asked me.

I told him I did.

"He's the one who worked for Barnum in China. Is he not."

McDonough was taking another tack and I willed myself not to respond to this one either. McDonough, himself was beginning to feel a bit of the frustration.

"He did some scouting for Barnum," I said cooly.

"Do you think he'd take four hundred dollars to capture the Leatherman and bring him back here?" McDonough asked.

"I think he'd laugh in your face," I sassed.

"Well, then, Jack. Why don't you fetch him here for me and see if he’s game.
McDonough turned and strode up the wide corridor that lead to the theatre lobby. I surprised myself by thinking that he was incredibly graceful for a man of his size.

I left for Burke’s room.

James Burke was drunk. He was polluted and stank of alcohol the way a tavern's floor does. His eyes were rheumy and yellow where read lines didn't blot the whites. At first he didn't answer the door when I knocked. I heard a grunt from within and tried the latch. I found him sprawled on his bead in a stained and tattered union suit. His hair looked as if it was the product of a stick of dynamite, instead of a comb.

"Who're you?" he muttered, staring at me with unfocused eyes.

"Jack Conroy, you James Burke?" I asked.