Free The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 by Daniel Kraus

WHISTLER’S, LITTLE JOHNNY GRANDPA explained, was what the Barker’s traveling show was called by those relaxed to its lectures, performances, and product, though the traveling medicine show’s full title, if you lingered upon the banner that stretched between the entry poles erected in each town, was Dr. Whistler’s Pageant of Health and Gallery of Suffering.
    You understand that this was before health commissions, before laboratory trials, before warning labels. Popularity of a given drug was based upon nothing more than the unsubstantiated claims on the packaging. Medicine lecturers I’d glimpsed in Chicago had sold their serums out of the backs of wagons, which folded down into clever little stages. Dr. Whistler’s, however, required the entirety of a vacant lot and carried with it the atmosphere of a circus.
    This is no surprise, given the Barker’s history. It was said that he spent his early career stamping and hollering in front of a one-ring circus sideshow (hence the sobriquet; his real name was unknown). Despite the vaudeville and blackface acts overtaking the business in 1896, the Barker still believed in the gasps-over-giggles sideshow approach.
    On a good day our bally would draw several hundred simps so starved for entertainment that they’d purchase product out of sheer gratefulness. Dr. Whistler’s core company hovered around twenty,each of them pulling double or triple duty. It was not at all uncommon during periods of heavy merchandry to see a worker pitchforking horse manure throw aside his tool and leap to the stage to extol the virtues of Benjamin Franklin’s Cocaine Tooth-Drops or Dr. Basil’s Genuine Preparation of Highly Concentrated Fluid Extracts of Borneo.
    Dr. Whistler’s peddled roughly fifty different panaceas at any given time, most of which were mixed on-site in a bathtub. If business was brisk, we remained in town for up to a week. There was no hurry to leave; travel was hard, weather was unpredictable, and mud mired us. After we pulled up stakes, the company formed a convoy of five bulging, top-heavy, horse-drawn wagons. This was accomplished with a maximum of irritability, for the Barker was never satisfied with the take and his upset quickly filtered down to the lowliest soul. (That would be me.)
    We packed four or five to a wagon and followed the harvest, playing central states in summer before heading to cotton towns with the onset of autumn. During travel, which was, shall we say, bumpy, I lay curled in fetal position within my straw; there was no sense in suffering another injury that would never heal. In a day if we were lucky—three days if we were not—we reached the town of our next destination. “Ideally not as small as a fly on a pile of dung,” the Barker once said, “but not as large as the dung, either.”
    I was too weak to assist in the setting up of stages and booths. During those first weeks my proudest accomplishments were twofold: drawing myself to a sitting position and, from my cage, tearing a hole in my tent so that I could observe the company’s activities.
    Shows began at eleven in the morning, an optimal time for bringing out customers who did not want to miss out on special bargains(hah!) on limited stock (hah, hah!) and who would then be caught hungry around lunchtime and purchase our overpriced (and undercooked) food.
    Every element of the show was this shrewdly designed. As townsfolk arrived, they were greeted with the sounds of four musicians tuning their instruments. Given our ensemble’s middling faculty with mandolin, lyre, and hurdy-gurdy, their tuning session was preposterously belabored, which was precisely the point. Their atonal blurts and nerve-jangling shrieks served to put customers on edge while they absorbed the horrifying advertisements painted on sackcloth and draped at regular intervals:
    O, Why Shall Ye Die? When The Never-Failing Remedy For That Deadly Scourge Of