Excerpt from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PROLOGUE

LIFE IS A ROAD

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself. . . .
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. . . .
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Long before the war started, it was already there, breathing, rumbling, hidden. It was in the clouds, in the rush of the rivers and in the rain, in the way people talked, the things they said and didn't say. The worry, the awareness that things were wrong and getting worse.

I remember my father saying there was no easy answer, there would be a war and a lot of killing. He looked me in the eye. "And aren't you glad, Charlie, that you're a tiny runt of a dwarf and won't have to carry a gun and fight." It wasn't a question, it was a casual observation that he left hanging in the air. And it made me miserable because even then, young as I was, I didn't like the idea of being left out of anything, especially this wild, strange thing my father was talking about, filled with smoke and thunder and charging horses.

But the war hung back, biding its time. It whispered, it murmured. And maybe, I thought—maybe it would change its mind and go home to wherever it came from. But that was a big maybe, so big you could walk around inside it, and there was no place to hide.

I had been a large baby, nine pounds two ounces. My mother never tired of telling me that. After half a year, I measured twenty-five inches, head to feet—but afterward, nothing. I was twenty-five inches tall, and was stuck at that height until I was fifteen years old. Then I was growing again, but slowly, an inch a year, sometimes less.

It used to bother me, the way my mother was always saying I'd been a big, healthy baby. In part, I think, she was letting me know I had given her a hard time when I was born. But there was something else, too, which I eventually understood. She wanted me to know there was nothing wrong with me at birth. She had delivered me in perfect condition—normal, not a dwarf—and if, after six months, I suddenly stopped growing, it wasn't her fault, it was mine.

That may, in fact, have been the way it was: a secret willfulness deep inside me, invisible even to myself. A decision to be different. Not a conscious choice made on a certain day, but something written in my bones. And the irony is that my smallness was not the curse my parents first thought it was, but a blessing, for them and for me. Though I have, of late, come to understand that blessings, like gift horses, may come with a bad set of teeth.

I spent my first years in a small house on a narrow street, and have vivid memories of my two sisters, both older than I. They used to run around the house in their flimsy cotton shifts, or in nothing at all, throwing pillows at me. They would grab my arms and swing me back and forth, then toss me in the air and bounce me on the bed. I liked that.

They taught me my ABCs, and I watched as they wove their hair into long braids that they piled high on their heads. In their best Sunday clothes, their dark red satins, they were the prettiest girls in the neighborhood. I have pictures of them, pasted in a large book of photographs that I keep. Pictures of my parents, pictures of Barnum, pictures of Queen Victoria, Louis Philippe, Lincoln, Queen Isabella, and too many others. Pictures of pictures. Memory is a barbed hook. No matter how you struggle, you never get free.

I was four years old when Barnum discovered me, and soon to turn five when I first appeared on the big stage at his American Museum. Barnum told the world I was eleven, lest anyone imagine I was just an undernourished slow grower and not an authentic dwarf. And, on the theory that an English dwarf would be of more interest to Americans than a homegrown dwarf from Connecticut, he announced that I was English-born and had just arrived from London.

Excerpted from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi. Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Rinaldi. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.