The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Actually, people spent a lot of time doubting Mr. Powers too, but that was when he was talking up prairie sailboats. Since arriving in Olive Town to work at the umbrella factory, Chad Powers had given over all his spare time to building revolutionary horseless vehicles driven by wind—big, flat rafts on wheels, with masts and spinnakers and booms—sometimes outriggers and other times tillers. So far he had solved the problem of going but not of coming back.

  The children of Class Three had lined up, at one time, to test-drive the prototypes. But after one schooner took to the air and another overturned at full speed, the parents had banned any more rides. And so Chad Powers could be seen every weekend when there was a breath of wind, careering over the meadows, colliding with trees and cows and sailplaning into the river. He was forever wrapped up in bandages, splints, and surgical collars, but his enthusiasm was unquenchable. One day, he said, Olive Town would be famous as the birthplace of the Powers Patent Prairie Sailboat.

  In the meantime, he had submitted by far the best idea for moving the silo. The tissuey blue design paper covered in neat blue diagrams had convinced the town committee he was the best man for the job.

  A series of telegraph poles was laid on the ground for use as rollers. The huge metal body of the silo was to be lowered onto this rolling raft and pushed, like some ancient juggernaut, toward its new site by the railroad sidings. Everyone had offered to help—the children had been particularly keen—which was why Miss May March had organized a long exam for them to take, so that they couldn’t. She said they would get in the way.

  All day Kookie Warboys sat adding nonexistent lengths of rope together, measuring the perimeters of imaginary fields, labeling the states of the Union, and listing the plagues of Egypt, while out in the spring sunshine, men hauled on real lengths of rope and grappled with a genuine Tower of Babel. The silo was giving problems.

  As Kookie huffed and sighed and pushed his way through a barbed-wire entanglement of sums, a minefield of questions, Miss March’s pen scratched away covering page after page of lavender writing paper. She had a pianist’s hands, flexible and strong, and played the portable organ on Sunday in Olive Town’s one and only church. Her handwriting looked like rows of bedsprings. Page after page she covered with her even, bedspring writing. Kookie looked down and found a puddle of ink where his pen nib had bled into the blank test paper. Where was Cissy? That’s what he wanted to know. How were you supposed to copy from a person if that person did not turn up at school?

  From outside the window, Cissy spied on the roomful of bent heads, the tufts of home-barbered hair, the shoulders hunched as if against bad weather. Her schooldays were over, and suddenly there was nothing she craved so much as taking an un-do-able exam in an unknowable subject. She should never have learned to read, she told herself, and then she could have kept on going to school, year after year, until she was thirty-four and too big to fit behind a desk.

  “Pencils down, and rest your hands on your heads,” said Miss May March (who had theories about the circulation of the blood and also liked to keep children’s hands in plain sight at all times).

  Beyond the window, Cissy dodged out of sight. She bit her lip. She wished she had found the courage yesterday to go over to the telegraph office and break the news to Kookie. But telling it would have made it true, and yesterday Cissy had still been hoping to wake from a bad dream. Besides, Kookie’s sweet-natured mother would have kissed Cissy and hugged her and started her off crying in front of Kookie. And Cissy knew she looked like a sucked plum when she cried.

  “You came back then?” snapped Hildy Sissney when Cissy clattered into the shop. Cissy flinched from the reproach and from the noise of the bell over the door. “A fine lot of use you are to a business, I must say!”

  “Sorry, Ma. I just went—”

  “That you did! Just up and went, without a word! Left me to bag the orders single-handed! You’re not at school now, girl, learning sloth and idolatry.”

  “Idolatry?”

  “Well what else are you, if you ain’t idle? I’ve a good mind to—”

  “I sent her over to the print house with a message, Hildy,” said Cissy’s father, emerging from the back room. “No need to carry on at the child.”

  Cissy thanked her father with a smile and slipped the loop of her apron over her head once more. It was stiff and scratchy with starch, and it felt like a hangman’s noose as she tugged her hair free. “Why is the silo outside our place, Poppy?”

  “That’s as far as they got it, chicken. Mr. West put his knee out pushing one of the rollers. So they’ve wedged it where it is: all set for the last few yards tomorrow.”

  At the end of school, Kookie came tearing up the street to discover by what ruse Cissy had escaped Miss May March’s exam. Mrs. Fudd was standing in the doorway with two skeins of knitting yarn in either hand, showing them to the daylight, comparing them with a jar of jam. “Damson, my sister wants. Reckon that’s damson?”

  “I’d say it was, kinda.” Cissy tried to sound helpful but sounded simply unconvinced. When she saw Kookie on the boardwalk, waiting to get through the door, her cheeks flushed the color of strawberries.

  “Depends if it’s in the jar or on the tree, I guess,” said Mrs. Fudd. “Ya think my sister meant damson in the jar or on the tree?”

  Cissy had to confess: “I couldn’t say, Mrs. Fudd. It’s a pretty enough color. I think the Romans liked it. They dyed their best clothes in plum.” Her education might have foundered, but Cissy struggled to keep its little flag flying.

  “Romans? Save us all! Clementine wouldn’t want nothing as foreign as that!” And Mrs. Fudd hung her skeins over Cissy’s hands and left the shop.

  Cissy’s mother uttered a gasp of exasperation. “First I knew the Romans wore cardigans. Thank you kindly for edifying us, miss.” As she said it, her eyes flicked between Cissy and Kookie, hovering in the doorway. “Well? Set the wool back where you found it, and next time remember: keep your Romans to yourself, you hear?” It was said for Kookie’s benefit: Mrs. Sissney might just as well have embroidered SHOPGIRL on Cissy’s forehead with purple wool.

  Kookie frowned. “You shorthanded?” he asked. “You got a rush on?” His eyes drifted around the empty store, took in Cissy’s apron. “One of my brothers could help out, maybe.”

  Cissy said nothing. She tried to edge Kookie out through the door onto the sunlit boardwalk, away from her mother’s withering stare, but he stayed put, obdurately looking about him, putting two and two together.

  “’Nother letter came today from Miss Loucien,” he said. “Shoulda been there.”

  Cissy gave a little cry of anguish. The news felt like the last and unkindest cut. “So soon? Who read it out?”

  “I did, course. Seemingly, Curly got thirty days for profunnity (whatever that is) in a place called Salvation (wherever that is), so the rest of the company is camping out in a shipwreck till he’s served his time!”

  It was impossible to picture. Almost. In Cissy’s imagination, mild-mannered little Curly (ticket seller of the Bright Lights Theater Company) mouthed at her through the bars of a jail window, while Miss Loucien picnicked on the seabed off open clamshells. “Shipwreck?” she whispered.

  “Some old boat in a field.”

  “What’s a boat doing in a field?”

  But just then Tibbie Boden came toiling up the street, carrying a big, tightly stuffed carpetbag. Kookie, seeing an opportunity for chivalry, ran and snatched the bag from her. “Where d’you want I should take it?” His day took on a further strangeness when she nodded toward the store. “You stopping over with Cissy?” Behind her glasses, Tibbie’s blue eyes rolled, like those of a horse smelling smoke. Everyone in Class Three was more afraid of Mrs. Sissney at the store than they were of the diphtheria. Nobody would want to stay over at the store.

  The silo, lying flat along its rollers, pointed at the three children like heavy artillery.

  Not wishing to go inside the shop, Tibbie also began to
talk about the new letter from Miss Loucien. She could remember parts Kookie had left out.

  Fuller Monterey, on his way home from school, shouted something vile and kicked a can at them. It hit Cissy in the ankle, then spun to a standstill. Their eyes trailed after the scowling, blaspheming Fuller. “Miss May says we got to make allowances since his brother’s sick,” said Tibbie. “Peatie might be dead, even this minute!” she added, wide-eyed.

  “Mad coot,” said Kookie uncharitably. “Fuller don’t need an excuse to be nasty.”

  “You coming back to school tomorrow, Ciss?” said Tibbie.

  “No, she ain’t!” crowed Mrs. Sissney from inside the shop. “So unless you got something to buy, Hosea Warboys, I’ll thank you to git off home!”

  Oh, couldn’t she even have gotten Kookie’s name right? Cissy wanted to be at the bottom of the sea with Miss Loucien, cooking pancakes over the vent of a volcano.

  “You never coming back to school then, Ciss?” said Kookie with open jealousy.

  “Looks that way,” said Cissy, trying not to cry.

  After supper, she crept away out of the back door of the store. Her father was plying Tibbie Boden with kindly questions: “What’s your favorite subject at school? Which books do you like to read? You wanna help me hang up a hammock for you alongside Cissy’s?”

  The only person she passed on the street was Mr. Powers, who explained he had just been checking the wedges. He had one wrist plastered and the other in a sling; clearly he had been out testing another prairie sailboat.

  The schoolhouse was not locked, but Cissy climbed in at the window anyway, so as not to be seen going in. Two flies were following each other around the center of the room, flying in perfect squares as if they were using a ruler. She could see her story about Chinese dragons still pinned to the wall. When she slid open Miss March’s drawer, a smell of Parma violets and chalk came up at her. She stabbed her finger on the tines of a comb. But not one of the homemade envelopes bearing Miss Loucien’s big, wild handwriting lay among the chalk and confiscated playing cards, the coffee beans Miss March chewed on for her complexion, the pencils and red ink bottles. Had Miss May taken it home, then? Was it, like dear Miss Loucien, gone forever?

  No. One page at least was in the bottom of the wastepaper basket, along with some peanut shells and a dead mouse.

  . . . be wonderful to reflote it and werk the river, putting on shows all the way from here to Saint Looee? Teribal waist just rotting here but I spose it keeps the rain of our heds. Por Curly. He was only tawkin Shakespeare, the way he does, giving out with some purple passedges. Don’t think the pasters wife had herd much Tyoodor Powetry bifor.

  Lor I do miss you fokes. Lifes indoobitably grand but it would be grander with out the rats and with out feeling so sick all the . . .

  A clammy dread swept over Cissy. Her diaphragm quaked. Miss Loucien, if she was feeling sick, must have diphtheria! Rats were nibbling the glittering sequins from the costumes in the property box! The Bright Lights Theater Company was breathing its death rattle among heartless, soulless people who thought quoting Shakespeare was a crime! And Cissy, in the Olive Town Store, was in prison, as surely as Curly was in Salvation town jail.

  She slipped the page into her scratchy apron pocket. Her mother wore a Bible against her stomach (to let the holiness soak through). Well, Cissy would wear a letter from the Bright Lights Theater Company. Unpinning the dragon story, she took that too, and gave the globe a last spin. (Everyone in Class Three knew that spinning the globe could sometimes grant a wish.) Then she started back through the window, smearing her apron with dead flies from along the sill.

  There was a hooting, as though she were being mobbed by owls; someone tumbled out of the shadows and away down the street. It was Fuller Monterey. And when Cissy looked down, there was a wet red wound in the center of her apron. Fuller had been daubing paint on the outside of the school he hated so much, and her unexpected appearance had frightened him into a clumping, yelping run. She thought he must have been drinking cider or some of his father’s homemade hooch, because he seemed hard put to keep his balance. Cissy craned her head to see what he had written. you are de said the unfinished graffiti. She started back up Main Street. Ahead of her, the silo lay on its hard mattress of rollers, its great circular base looking like the entrance to a dark gigantic tunnel; or hell, perhaps.

  A thin liquorice whip of smoke rose up from behind the shining cylinder—nothing much. Just a rope or two on fire.

  With a noise like the twang of a bow, the rope gave way. The silo rocked and stirred. One by one, the telegraph poles on which it rested began to roll—to separate and splay out—letting the silo tip and grate. The metal capping—huge as a mill wheel—sheared off the silo and bowled away, down West Street, over the new sidings and out onto the prairie. But the bulky trunk of metal bent and bowed and bounced its way across the sloping street, until, like some monstrous, flaccid battering ram, it gouged its way end-first into the Olive Town Store. One building eating another. The raw metal edge was so sharp that it sliced the entire building out of the ground. Solid timbers, struts, and batons took on the grotesque softness of a shelled oyster, as glass shattered, cloth rippled, wood crumpled, and counters and racks spewed their contents. Five thousand nails streamed to the ground, spread out into a silvery puddle, and slopped against Cissy’s shoes, while dust rose up around her, swallowing the daylight, the detail, everything. The vast metal tube of the silo bent in and out of shape, giving off a deafening, unearthly wowing noise. And then the telegraph poles came piling in too, flattening the boardwalk, turning it to matchwood, piling up on top of the vacant plot that had, a moment before, been her home.

  When the dust cleared, Cissy still stood immobile, the sheet of writing paper aflutter in her hand, collecting brown dust out of the air. A burning rope wriggled at her feet, like a snake. In front of her, the silo lay on its side, intact. But of Cissy’s home and livelihood nothing remained but a hole in the air. Wanting to fill up the hole—to undo the unbearable—she tried to picture exactly how it had looked before she set off for the schoolhouse. But the only thing Cissy could truly remember was the check of the tablecloth where she had eaten supper with her family.

  Chapter Three

  The Exiles

  It’s the mark of the Beast,” said Hildy Sissney.

  She meant the red paint stain in the center of Cissy’s apron. The people who had found her standing in the street—unmoving, unspeaking—thought she had been hit by debris, impaled by some flying pickaxe or set of kitchen knives. Her mother knew better. “Mark of the Beast: that’s what that is.”

  As far as Mrs. Sissney was concerned, the long finger of God had expunged the Olive Town Store. Hildy had been engulfed by the booming, hollow dark of the silo. It had swallowed her, like the whale swallowing Jonah. Not for her the scarlet stain of sin. The only serious injury she had sustained was a purple-ridged bruise to her abdomen, caused by the Bible she kept, unread, in her apron pocket. To Hildy Sissney (whose mind was swinging like a door in the wind) the sign could not be plainer. Cissy had been daubed by the Devil, but she herself had been poked in the belly by God. The Living Word had delivered a blow to her solar plexus that had emptied her of breath but filled her with the spirit of holiness. She spoke in tongues, most of them angry and shrill, but at least she did not need consoling. Hildy was filled with the zeal of the Lord, and she had no need of knitting yarn, cooking pots, or a bed to sleep in. Even daughters were a thing that somehow belonged to an older, more sinful life.

  “Where’s Poppy?” asked Cissy. Neighbors were gathering up bits and pieces from the roadway—a spoon, a ball of string, a saucepan, an onion. “Where’s my pa?” said Cissy. “Where’s Kookie and Tibs?”

  Kind Mrs. Warboys from the telegraph office wrapped her in a blanket, and her husband picked Cissy up as if she were a baby. “Kookie was back at our place, thank the Lord, and Tibbie’s with him. It’s a mercy you were outside as well.”

  �
�But where’s Poppy?” said Cissy.

  Fuller Monterey, for the devil of it, had removed the wedges under the silo and set fire to one of the ropes securing it. But the sheriff made no arrest. Before nightfall, Fuller came down with diphtheria, like his brother; and people never care to speak ill of the ill.

  So they turned their wrath instead on Chad Powers, whose plans to move the silo had gone so catastrophically wrong. He was instantly fired from the umbrella factory, and one of his prairie sailboats was found the next morning burned down to its axles.

  Hulbert Sissney might have leaped to Chad’s defense—he hated to see blame put on a man like a saddle, “because there’s no other horse to hand.” But, as Cissy found, to her frantic grief, Hulbert was lying in the back room of the barber’s shop, both legs broken and his head thickly swathed in bandages.

  Fuller’s diphtheria sealed the fate of the school, which did not open its doors the next morning. Any child with relations elsewhere was packed off on the train until the epidemic was over.

  Hildy Sissney knew that God would be sending five more plagues along any minute for sure, and sat watching for them to arrive, like a child on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa. They asked her where Cissy should be sent—to what relation or trustworthy friend—but Hildy’s only trustworthy friend, at that moment, was Jesus, and she did not have a sound postal address for Him.

  “I could always go to Salvation,” said Cissy, thinking aloud. To Hildy, Salvation sounded next door to Jesus.

  “Yea, Lord! She shall! She shall go to Salvation!” she cried and, considering the matter settled, put Cissy quite out of mind.

  The neighbors, though, were not happy about it. They were less willing than her mother to put a lone, vulnerable child onto a train bound for a rumor of a place on the Missouri River.