The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “No, no,” said kind Mrs. Warboys. “You and Tibbie can mess in with us, darling. Where you can fit nine, you can fit eleven, if everyone breathes in.”

  Hulbert, meanwhile, lay in Charlie Quex’s back room with an old pair of cavalry field glasses near at hand, so that he could watch the space on Main Street where his home had once stood—watch it for signs of regrowth. His nightmares were filled with noise and pain and panic as he relived the disaster over and over again. But while he was awake, he gave great thought to his daughter and the need to get her away. “If I can just keep her safe . . . ,” he kept repeating, as if she were the last and most precious item of stock spared by the collapsing store.

  “I can’t leave you, Poppy,” she told him. “You need me here to look after you!”

  “I’d rather have you back safe when there’s a roof for you to live under, chicken. Mrs. Warboys comes in every day to feed me, and Charlie is keeping me shaved. Now if we can just fix up somewhere for you to go . . . I’m sending you and your mother to stay with your grandmother—just till the excitement’s left her. You and she . . .” The rictus that tugged at Hulbert’s face was meant to be a smile.

  “Oh please, Poppy! No! Not Grandma Gorgon! Please! She’d be sure an’ say everything was my fault!”

  For a moment they sat in silence, pretending Cissy had not called her grandmother a gorgon, each racking their brains to find something nicer to call her without actually lying.

  “Not Grandma, then?”

  “Not Grandma, please, Poppy!”

  “I’ll take her, Mr. Sissney. I’ll take Cissy and Tibs to a place of safety!”

  It was Kookie. He was holding himself very erect, so as to look taller than his height, and against the low morning sunshine in the doorway, it gave him a look of martyred heroism. (He knew this, because he had checked it out in the barber’s brass-rimmed mirror.) Cissy’s heart fluttered a little within her.

  “Kind of ya, son,” said Hulbert gently. “Reckon you might be up to rescuing a responsible adult while you’re at it? No disrespect, but I’d feel easier in my mind if an adult went along with you to this place of safety.” Kookie wilted a little. “Miss May March might be willing. Send her to me, and I’ll ask her.” Kookie wilted even more. In his experience, adventurers rarely took their schoolteachers along on quests into the unknown.

  “Take them where?”

  Miss May March was a Christian soul and took her responsibilities as teacher very seriously indeed. But the thought of evacuating her charges to a riverbank somewhere in Missouri and handing them into the care of “Miss Loucien” and a bunch of strolling actors . . . well, that seemed quite the opposite of a Christian duty. She had met the former schoolteacher once; the memory alarmed Miss March even more than Miss Loucien’s awful spelling or the liveliness of her letters. All that red hair, those curving uplands and hand gestures! No! Seeking out the shelter of the Bright Lights Theater Company would be like running in under a burning tree to keep out of the rain. Something inside her twisted up at the very thought.

  On the outside, only her lips pursed tight. “If you’re sure that is what you wish, Mr. Sissney.”

  “Cissy thinks the world of those acting folk,” said Hulbert, trying to take the schoolmarm’s hand but misjudging the distance. “And she’s not wrong. I’d trust Loucien and Everett Crew with the eyes outa my head, and that’s the truth.”

  The idea had come to him in the middle of the night, when a man with a head wound has all his best and worst ideas. He should not have quenched his daughter’s dreams, he told himself now. He should never have consented to taking her out of school! Sooner than extinguish her spark of Promethean fire, he should have let her run wild, like a bronco, across the lush green paddocks of the world!

  “You should never have given him that whiskey for pain-killin’,” Mrs. Fudd told Mr. Warboys. “Hildy’s kept him strictly teetotal. He ain’t used to it.”

  But whether Hulbert’s idea was the result of concussion, whiskey, or a temperature of 104 degrees, the upshot was that Miss May March found she had agreed to deliver Cissy Sissney and Tibbie Boden into the care of the Bright Lights Theater Company in a shipwreck somewhere along a tributary of the Missouri, called the Numchuck River.

  Kookie simply invited himself along.

  They were not the only passengers to board the Red Rock Runner when it pulled in to Olive Town Station. Chad Powers, hampered with cardboard tubes, an artist’s portfolio, a spare crutch, and his arm in a sling, had to make several attempts before

  fitting himself through the train door.

  “You ’scaping the diphtheria too, Mr. Powers?” asked Kookie.

  “Me, I’m just escaping,” said Chad Powers, his face a picture of fright and confusion. That was when the children noticed that the townsfolk assembled on the platform were actually hissing behind their teeth, hissing Powers out of town. Someone even threw an egg.

  Inside the carriage, teacher, children, and inventor stared transfixed as the yellow yolk slid slowly down the glass—a small putrid sun setting on Chad Powers’s career. No one commented on the egg. Tibbie, who had a horror of scenes, took off her glasses, the better not to see it.

  “I shall be continuing on to Des Moines, myself, to visit my invalid mother,” said Miss March, pulling down the window blind with sudden violence. “Where are you headed, Mr. Powers?”

  “Somewhere I’m not known,” he said, and turned his face to the wall.

  “You should come with us to Salvation!” said Kookie. “You could join the theater, maybe!

  Cissy stared at Kookie. So did Mr. Powers, unmanned by this sudden kindness. But talk of the Bright Lights had Miss March on her third tirade of the morning.

  “Now, this is strictly a temporary arrangement, children. I’ve told you already: I want to hear no talk of theatricals. If your—ahem—friends—were not resting from their disgraceful line of work, I could not possibly place you in their care. I do hope that is clearly understood. We go in search purely of shelter from the hurricanes of misfortune. If I find this . . . encampment of theirs is unsuitable, I shall have no choice but to take you with me to my invalid mother in Des Moines.”

  The train, in starting to move, jerked Tibbie Boden into the knowledge that she was leaving behind her father, her town, and everything familiar and friendly. She ran back down the train to the rear platform and stood coughing up tears and protests and regrets. Cissy and Kookie ran after her. The little settlement of Olive Town shrank away from them into the distance, as though they had offended it by leaving.

  “There are rats in Salvation, Miss Loucien says,” Cissy whispered to Kookie.

  “Didn’t read out the bit about the rats,” said Kookie. “When I read the letter in class. Thought it might color Miss March against the Bright Lights.”

  So that had been why a single page had lain in the wastepaper basket. Not for the first time, Cissy was filled with admiration for the sharp thoughts inside Kookie’s spiky-haired head. She had never thought of censoring the letters as she read them out in class. “Do I hate Chad Powers?” she asked him, suddenly needing advice.

  Kookie shrugged and pulled his hands up the

  sleeves of his shirt. “Couldn’t say. He draws spack-facious trains and boats and chariots and the like.”

  “And it wasn’t his fault really, was it? It was Fuller’s doin’, really. Wasn’t it? The store getting flattened?”

  “Mad son of a—” Kookie began to say of Fuller, but he turned instead and went back inside the train.

  If it had not been for Curly’s prison sentence, Miss March would never have known where to start looking. She and the children might have traipsed upriver and down without ever finding the “shipwreck.” As it was, they headed straight for the Salvation town jail, standing on tiptoe in the alley alongside, to peep in at the high, barred window.

  So the first happy sight Cissy saw, a week after the demolition of her life, was the top of Curly’s bald head shining beyon
d the prison bars. It looked like the classroom globe, and she wanted so much to give it a spin, for luck.

  “How’s things, Curly?” shouted Kookie, too excited to keep his voice low.

  Curly slopped his coffee and looked up at them through bent spectacles. “The worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst,’” he intoned.

  “We’ve come visiting!” roared Kookie. “Everyone’s got diphtheria back home, and school’s closed and Cissy and Tibbie’s got no place to live, so Miss May’s brung us to join the Bright Lights—we had to change trains four times! And this is Chad Powers, who come along for the ride. Where’s this shipwreck, then?”

  “Kindly allow me to communicate, Habakkuk,” said Miss March reprovingly, but Curly was already at the window, dispensing quotations like rosettes. He and Miss March shook hands through the bars, while she explained about her mother in Des Moines and how she would not be stopping. Since Miss March was no taller than Cissy, prisoner and teacher were able to see only each other’s foreheads, and with their free hands, they brushed away sewage flies from their faces, only to feel them resettle time and again, like kisses.

  When Miss March asked him to lead the way to the shipwreck, Curly apologized: “Sadly, lady, I’m in here and you’re out there—on account of the profanity.”

  “And did you speak profanities, Mr. Curlitz?” she replied, tight-lipped.

  “Certainly not! I spoke the words of the Bard of Avon! But ‘mountainous error be too highly heap’d for truth to o’erpeer.’ That’s to say, they didn’t understand I was speaking Shakespearean—thought I was blaspheming.”

  “Then let us correct the error, Mr. Curlitz,” said Miss March decidedly. “Would you care for a coffee bean?”

  It was a tedious walk downriver, their path often blocked by bulrushes as tall as their heads, and by big hunks of driftwood washed up by the last flood. It was made more tedious by a fine, mizzling rain. Their boots sank into the soft black soil, and the footprints, as they pulled their feet free, filled up with shining brown water. The trees changed to a uniform, ghostly gray and hissed like the people at Olive Town Station running Powers out of town. The bulky luggage seemed ridiculous and irrelevant. Who, in this sodden waterworld, would ever need a change of petticoat, a portfolio, a book, a sunhat, a crutch? Curly tried his best to shelter Miss March under her umbrella, but the spokes only snagged on the vegetation and brought extra water cascading off the leaves. At one point a water rat ran across their feet and plopped into the river. At another, a section of bank subsided into the water like a suicide despairing.

  Miss May March had harangued the sheriff of Salvation so hard that he had shortened Curly’s sentence by four days and released him, just to get her off his doorstep. On and on she had raged about “sacred English literature,” “small-minded, small-town busybodies,” and “wilful ignorance.” Even Curly had been unable to poke a quotation in edgewise. As a result, he was on his way home to the bosom of the Bright Lights Theater Company. As he explained to everyone who would listen, he was now not merely the ticket seller: he was front-of-house/accounting/publicity/prompt/refreshments/property-manager/walk-on actor.

  “Well, of course, I shall be on my way to my mother’s in Des Moines, just as soon as I’ve delivered these children . . . ,” said Miss May March, unwilling to stray onto the insalubrious subject of acting.

  “There it is!” Curly cried delightedly, breaking into a trot and pointing ahead with the umbrella. “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne.”

  And there it was, indeed.

  The poop was not of beaten gold, nor were the oars of silver, but the stranded boat was certainly a sight to see: a sight fit to stop Shakespeare dead in his tracks. Like the ziggurat of some long-dead civilization, the paddle steamer lay fringed around with vegetation, its full extent uncertain beyond the shifting curtain of rain: fifty tons of wood, rising in three grimy, mold-stained tiers toward the pilothouse, the twin prongs of its metal chimney stacks and the single curlicued word propped up on the roof: CALLIOPE. A single light glimmered on the hurricane deck, but the hiss of the rain obliterated any other sign of life.

  “Ahoy there! Calliope! Room aboard for a few drowned rats?” shouted Curly, his voice squeaking with happiness.

  “Is that its name?” said Miss May, peaking her hands over her eyes to keep out the rain. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what’s writ on it, miss,” said Kookie patiently, gratified that here was a world where schoolteachers knew nothing useful at all.

  Up close, Calliope was not quite so big. She was not one of the great Mississippi cruise steamers, which had once carried hosts of passengers up and down the country to the sound of large orchestras and a forest of trees burning in the engine furnaces. Just as the Numchuck was a lesser version of the Missouri or Mississippi, so the Calliope was built with less ambition. But some time before the flood, it had been a beautiful craft, lovingly turned out. The refugees shinnied over the bull rails, scattering their bags and baggage on the deck, then climbed to the deck above. At the head of the ladder, a figure in a loose dress peered down into the gloom, struggling to make out who they were. To Cissy, she looked like an angel checking the rungs on Jacob’s ladder. All that red hair; those red gloves frayed at the fingers’ ends; the comforting shape of the pearl-handled pistol tucked high up above her waist.

  “Oh, Miss Loucien!” cried Cissy, tripping over her own skirt, stumbling up the last few steps of the ladder and into the arms of her best friend in the world. Saltwater spurted miraculously from eyes that had not shed one tear, and out of her throat came the most unearthly, banshee wail. “Oh, Miss Loucien, it’s all gone! Everything’s gone! Ma’s as crazy as rabies and Sarah Waters is dead of the diphtheria and Poppy’s all beat up ’cause Fuller dropped the silo on us, and everything’s smashed to hell, and I’m not to go to school even when the plague’s over—an’ Pa’s busted past redemption, an’ I never learned the end of ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ an’ I missed you SOOO MUCH!”

  At the mention of diphtheria, the gloved hands gripped Cissy’s shoulders and pushed her sharply away, so that her head snapped back on her shoulders; a leak from the deckhead splashed directly in her face. She found herself looking up into features wearier than she had remembered them, wearier and more anxious.

  Then someone turned up the wick in those big lilac eyes, and fold upon fold of the cheesecloth dress enveloped Cissy, and cheesecloth sleeves drew her close. “Well, looky here, Everett—everybody,” murmured the voice. “We got visitors from our former lives—when times were easy and the beds were hard. Someone put on a kettle of water, and let’s share some news. Is that what we’ll do, folks? Is it?”

  Crouching with her face pressed hard in against Miss Loucien’s front, Cissy was dimly aware that the teacher’s familiar curvy uplands had been joined by a bigger hill lower down. After a moment’s thought, it was her turn to pull away.

  “Sacray blue, Miss Loucien! It wasn’t Annie May at all! It’s you that’s ’specting the baby!”

  Chapter Four

  Calliope

  Twice a year, the Missouri rises. As it drinks down spring meltwater or summer rain, it loses its head and runs amok. It swells and throbs like the nightmares in Hulbert Sissney’s feverish head. Forgetting the maps drawn up by fastidious river pilots, ignoring the dry, baked levees, it simply gets up and stretches itself. Overspilling its banks, unpicking its neat embroidery of tributaries—tributaries like the Numchuck River—it spreads out over the landscape, engulfing water meadows, swamps, landing stages, and riverside highways. It is an unstoppable surge of chocolate-brown water lumpy with storm litter, staking its claim to everything. And when it has made its point, and withdrawn, it leaves behind flotsam, like a drunkard’s tip on the bar: tree stumps, shack roofs, dead cattle, cartwheels. Even boats.

  That is how the wreck came to be sitting in a field. After prodigious storms upriver, the ship had broken its tethers, been swept off its moorings, and
spun helplessly across a flooded river bend, coming to rest on a spit of land that had two days earlier been dry meadow. As the flood receded, the steamer had settled, like a dinosaur’s skeleton in a tar pit, the paddle wheel at its stern snapped from the drive shafts, its frail hull cleaving to every mound and hollow of the ground.

  Its fate went unnoticed by the owner of the field, who had died of pneumonia a day or two before. Only his goats and chickens knew of it: they sheltered there from the tail end of the storm. Rats and skunks quickly reconnoitered its three tiers, but apart from them, nobody knew about the ship. The dreary trees, hunching around like a circle of friends, conspired to hide it from sight. For a matter of weeks, neither the town of Salvation nor passing traffic on the river even knew it was there.

  It was Salvation’s children who sniffed it out. It was they who told Cyril Crew.

  Finding no one wanted Shakespeare in Salvation, the manager of the Bright Lights Theater Company had mounted a pantomime for the town’s children. Cyril Crew had a soft spot for children; they were always so ready to steal from their parents’ pocketbooks in order to see a show. These ones were no exception. In their wild enthusiasm, swarming over the improvised stage, trying on costumes and playing with property swords, one or two happened to mention the stern-wheeler beached in a field about a mile down the river.

  Ah! Free lodgings, thought Cyril, counting the cents, bottle tops, and shirt buttons in the collection dish.

  And now the Bright Lights mounted another play—on the spot—to welcome the new arrivals. (Miss May March tried to insist they shouldn’t.) It was a piece Cyril Crew had written based on “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The five members of the audience had to spread newspaper on their chairs to soak up the damp; the storm outside rattled loose boards against the saloon wall.

  But the magic held.

  Cissy’s dreams had not deceived her. The actors’ big booming voices in the big booming space of the saloon deckhouse drowned out the noise of wind and