The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  But the preacher brought his face so close up to Everett’s that their noses touched. “I will dispense with my gun, sir, on the day that the Devil dispenses with his traps and snares!” And he went to pitch himself a tent at one end of the hurricane deck. Cissy could not see how money was to be made out of telling people they were going to hell. Kookie suggested it might set his audience shaking so much at the knees that all the coins would fall out of their pockets, but Loucien said it was more a matter of passing around a hat.

  “Well, I wouldn’t pay him,” said Kookie obdurately. “Call that an act?”

  There were no ballerinas, but there was a deputation of four black men with banjo cases. They were not exactly in the full flush of youth, their hair varying from pepper-and-salt to silver, but they were wearing the nattiest getups Cissy had ever seen—including two-tone shoes. Kookie, though, had begun to savor his power. “State your business and where you done it previous!” he said ferociously, and stood up on the stack of life rafts. (The men were all as tall as scaffolding poles.)

  Benet, spokesman for the quartet, gripped the hem of his houndstooth vest with one hand and embraced his straw boater with the other. “Ladies! Suh! We was employed previous by no less than the Hamlin Wizard’s Oil, Blood and Liver Pills, and Cough Balsam Show! We been hired out by them to revival meetings ’tween St. Louis and Houston. We’s close-harmony an’ Dixie—play two instruments apiece . . . ’ceptin’ our banjos are presently . . . sublet.”

  “Sub . . . ?”

  “In exchange for a herd o’ George Washingtons,” said the second singer.

  “George . . . ?”

  “Left ’em on the peak of the mont-de-piété,” said the third.

  “The . . . ?”

  “They gone swimming ’mong the sharks. . . . That’s to say, suh, we was obliged to pawn them,” admitted the fourth member of the band.

  “Can you sing like you talk?” asked Kookie.

  “Better, suh!”

  And they could. They plaited their four voices around a medley of songs so catchy and cheering that the rest of the Bright Lights were all tempted into the stateroom to listen and clap.

  “That’s what you want on your bow,” observed Elijah, nodding his head in time to the music even after the music had stopped. “Sing you into port. Gather a crowd. That’s what we had. I remember.”

  “When, Elijah?” asked Loucien.

  “Was a while back.”

  Told that they were hired, the Dixie Quartet (late of the Hamlin Wizard’s Oil, Blood and Liver Pills, and Cough Balsam Show) bowed smartly, like butlers taking orders for tea, and filed out of the room. It was not until they had climbed to the Texas to sign their contracts that they could be heard soft-shoe shuffling their joy across the roof.

  “They never said they could dance!” said Tibbie delightedly, her dreams of ballerinas very nearly come true.

  When the next candidate came in, they were quick to tell him (before he could start roaring), “We already have one preacher on board, sir!” This man was dressed identically to the first—shoestring tie, black duster coat—except for his hat, which was low, as if it had ducked to avoid gunfire.

  “Always room for both the cloth and me,” said the man, looking around the room with expert eyes. “Me, I’d set up down thar.” He pointed to the far end of the stateroom. “Put up screens. Discreet. Be sweet. No disturbance to either party. Ten percent to the house. Monte and faro. You know?”

  The children looked back at him blankly. “Is that like bloodletting?” asked Kookie, envisaging some terrible surgical procedure hidden from sight behind screens.

  The newcomer studied their faces with his head to one side. “Not unrelated,” he said. “I’ll happily skin a sucker anytime. Why don’t we call it five percent to the house, after all? Reckon that’s plenty for innocents like you.”

  “Why don’t we call it time to leave?” said Miss Loucien’s voice, and there was the unmistakable click of a pistol being cocked. “I’ll have no gamblers on this boat, mister.”

  The gambler held his hands well away from his sides, as if to show he had nothing up his sleeves. “Clean! Clean! Nothing sharp about me! Nothing shady, lady.”

  But Loucien only advanced on him, the gun aimed at the waistband where he carried his playing cards in two leather pouches.

  “Enough, ma’am!” he protested. “I’m wise! I’m advised. But you won’t begrudge me a ticket as a fare-paying passenger? Carry me down to Mayhew? So long as I promise not to play on board, yes? Maybe I’ll find me a more obliging boat down there.”

  “Y’ can walk downstream on the water, for all I care,” Loucien told him, “or take a lift with a bald eagle. Y’ ain’t sailing with us. I’m not carrying your breed as far as I can spit!”

  The gambler backed toward the door, grinning more broadly than any preacher. “What? A river paddler with no sport? That’s like a church with no steeple. People! What can I say? You’re fools to yourselves.” Skipping nimbly down the gangplank, he escaped with his dignity almost intact.

  Meanwhile, embarrassment hung in the stateroom wetter than the condensation on the walls. The crew of the Calliope, not liking to meet Miss Loucien’s blazing eye, looked at their feet, then slunk back to what they had been doing. Everett, though, studied his wife anxiously for signs that she might be ill. “Why particularly—” he began, taking the pistol out of her shaking hands.

  “I won’t have them, I said!” Loucien stamped her foot and sank her fists in under her cheekbones, which were burning red.

  The three children, embarrassed still to be there listening, were glad enough to look up and find that another hopeful had entered the room.

  “State your name and what you do and where you done it previous!” said Kookie. “Magic, is it? Magic wouldn’t go amiss.”

  Cissy could not think quite what this one might be about to offer in the way of entertainment, what with his sallow sunken face, limp suit, and straggling mustache overhanging his mouth like a soup strainer. Mind reading? Puppets? Peanuts?

  “Do you dance at all?” asked Tibbie of the man in the limp suit.

  “Could you give us a taste, maybe?” asked Cissy politely when the man still failed to mount the stage.

  “I’m not about to give you a damned thing,” said the man, loosening his frayed tie and glaring around him. “But you can give me back what’s mine. You can give me back this boat. I won her fair and square. And she’s mine!”

  Chapter Seven

  Patience Rewarded

  Something inside Cissy withered and shrank. The back of her neck grew hot and sore, as if a starched apron had chafed it.

  Now the Calliope would be taken away, just like the store; just like school. . . . Of course the Calliope had an owner. Paddle steamers are not thrown away like apple cores, into the long grass of a riverbank. Apparently the Calliope had two owners to squabble over her, and neither of them was the Bright Lights Theater Company.

  The man showed them his gambling marker.

  “We wuz sitting right there,” he recounted in his high mosquito whine. “I’m two thousand dollars up, and I want to call it a night. Then in comes this stranger. The house won’t give him credit, he says, and he’s thirsting for a game of poker. Who’ll lend him two hundred dollars so he can join in the game? ‘What you got to cover the loan?’ I ask him, ’cause I’m feeling flush, right? And he writes this pledge for his riverboat: ‘The Sunshine Queen and all that’s in her—an’ that’s includin’ the safe,’ says he. And dammee, but he cleans us out. I watch that two thousand dollars dwindle and dwindle—biggest pile I ever stacked up. You’re not telling me he was playing straight: no one gets that lucky without he’s carrying five aces up his sleeve! Come the end, I’ve got a fistful of colors—winning hand!—but nothing to bet on it but his damned marker. An’ I lay it down. I gotta! He’s skinned me. He’s just won every cent I got. Just gimme this one, I’m praying. Just lemme win this hand, God! Then this Black Hand gyp stand
s up. Puts down his cards and stands up. ‘Keep it,’ he says. ‘I’m gettin’ outa the shipping business.’ I’m holding this winning hand—three kings and a queen—and game’s over and I think . . . But it’s okay! I got the boat, yeah? I still got the boat? I seen this boat: it’s gotta be worth a sum! I’m off the hook! I’m not busted! If worst comes to worst, I kin mortgage it to the bank! Come the morning, I go down to the wharf to check her over: my ship. An’ guess what I find.” The man’s lip curled with such contempt that his mustache bristled like a hedgehog doing gymnastics. “Gone! He’s up and sailed away in the night. He’s beggared me, the crimper!”

  There was a long pause after the gambler’s sad story finished. It was all too plain to see that nothing good had happened to him since.

  “I think you are mistaken,” said Everett, almost convincingly. “This note refers to a ship called the Sunshine Queen. This vessel is the Calliope—a derelict we picked up near Salvation.” And he pointed at the sign on the roof.

  The gamer in the limp suit pulled another face. “That? That’s not her name! That there’s a billboard! Might as well say she’s called ‘Don’t Lean Out’ or ‘No Spitting.’”

  They followed him up the various steps and ladders to the roof of the Texas and the peeling plywood noticeboard proclaiming CALLIOPE. On the way, they picked up a train of interested parties: Elder Slater, the preacher; the Dog Woman; Medora (without her Photopia); the Dixie Quartet. The man with the frayed necktie made a few feeble attacks on the placard, trying to pry it off. In the end, Everett felt obliged to help him. By that time everyone knew full well what they would find underneath.

  THE SUNSHINE QUEEN

  VENICE STEAMBOAT COMPANY

  The cardplayer’s small head wagged in triumph on its long neck. “So you just shift yerselves off my property, and take yer freaks and yer animals and yer undertaker music with you! And count yerselves lucky I don’t have you thrown in jail!”

  There was another long pause.

  “Very well,” said Everett coolly. “I’ll just go and make up your bill.”

  “Bill?”

  “For salvage, yes,” said Everett, raising his eyebrows and widening his large, expressive eyes. “I refloated your ship off a water meadow near Salvation. Plenty witnesses to it. Naturally I have no objection to you taking back what’s yours, sir. But the laws of navigation say you have to pay me fifty percent of her value. For salvage.”

  “Salvage!?”

  “And delivery, yes.”

  “Just cast off the ropes and let’s get out of here,” said Everett, watching the hunched narrow shoulders of the owner slump away in despair, cheated of his prize once again. The children were as hopping happy as fleas; the quartet were dancing. But Everett froze them with one glance. “The man had hopes, and I just dashed them. I don’t find that cause for pride or celebration, do you, people?”

  Miss Loucien stroked her husband’s sleeve. “He meant to win his luck by turning over a playin’ card,” she said. “Us, we’re meaning to earn ours by hard work, ain’t we?”

  He looked her over, soothed but not cheered. The look said that he would sooner his pregnant wife did not have to earn her living at all but could be provided for by a better husband in a better place. “I wonder what became of The Hand,” he said, picking up the crumpled gambling pledge. Its owner had thrown it down in disgust, too broke to pay salvage on the boat he believed was his by right—and probably was.

  “Fancy you knowing that stuff ‘bout savages!” exclaimed Kookie.

  Miss May March winced. “Salvage, Habakkuk, not savages. It is the act of recovering a wrecked ship. It gives certain rights to the person who saved the ship from being completely lost. Clever Mr. Crew knew that. Haven’t I told you a thousand times, children? Knowledge is power.”

  Everett grunted. “It generally beats ignorance. But to tell you the truth, ma’am, I don’t know the first thing about salvage. It works like that at sea. I recall Revere saying something about it, and he was a sailor once.”

  “Not here,” said Elijah, leaning over the ship’s rail, measuring the river’s depth with a weighted length of cord. “Not on the Numchuck it don’t. No matter. It seed off that gambler. Kinder ’n’ easier than shooting him in the head and losing the body overboard.”

  “I was unwilling to part with the boat,” said Crew, looking more and more guilt ridden. Then he drew himself up to his full height, gave a shudder, and attempted to justify bamboozling the gambler. His voice was that of Coriolanus explaining why he had turned traitor. “In the absence of my brother, Cyril, I have developed responsibilities. Right now that feels a lot like the sweating sickness. I have seventeen souls, three dogs, and an unborn child to shield from the elements, and this derelict washtub of a boat is the only thing that comes to hand. I also think there is more chance of our lost companions finding us again in a large and watery world if we stay aboard her. That was my motive. If I swindled the man to do it, let it be added to my account on Judgment Day, but so help me, if I have to, I shall do it again!”

  Having delivered this splendid apologia, he left the saloon deck at speed, a handkerchief pressed to his face.

  Loucien hurried after him. “He’s real worried ‘bout his brother,” she explained to those who had not guessed it already.

  The Sunshine Queen was on her way downriver again, Chad Powers at the helm. But to say he was steering would have been flattery. The ship was zigzagging from bank to bank, sometimes tattering the curtain of willows only to cross back and frighten the birds out of the trees on the other bank. The Queen was not navigating the flooded river so much as riding it, bronco style. Every moment they expected to collide with dry land or with some floating tree trunk, and the boat to fall apart around them.

  “He’s overwinding her,” said Elijah, shaking his head disapprovingly.

  “Perseverance, dear my lord, keeps honor bright.” said Curly.

  “But you could maybe do better, Elijah?” suggested Loucien. It did not seem very likely that this raggedy boiler scraper had ever even visited the bridge of a stern-wheeler, but he seemed to think he knew something; and just then the water rats on the bank knew more about rivers than anyone in the Bright Lights Theater Company did. Everyone else looked doubtful, including Elijah. His eyes wandered up and down the ornate metal pillars, the wrought-iron tracery, in that vacant, tell-me-where-I-was-again way that made him look permanently half asleep.

  “Could do it better with my feet,” he said.

  It sounded like bragging, but Elijah was not boasting. He was dredging up a memory of childhood. He contemplated the roof of the pilothouse, head to one side, eyelids drooping. As a boy (he told them) he had been too small to stand at the helm and see the way ahead. So he had sat on the roof and dangled his legs through the hatch, turning the ship’s wheel with his bare feet.

  “Humdiddly! They let you do that?” asked Kookie, instantly desperate to give it a try.

  Elijah shrugged. “Don’t recall anyone stopping me.”

  So they helped the old man up onto the roof of the pilothouse, and he dangled his legs through the hatch. His big scuffed boots were too big to fit between the spokes of the oaken wheel, and because the laces were missing, they were soon pulled off by the tug of the rudder. Clump, clump, they fell onto the floor. With bare feet, though, Elijah’s skill at steering came back to him like a gladsome memory, and a smile settled on his biblical features as he brought the Sunshine Queen under control. Chad Powers could have learned a thing or two about steering from those deft kicks of Elijah’s large grubby feet, but oddly enough, Chad did not choose to stay in the wheelhouse for long after Elijah’s boots came off. He opted for a breath of fresh air instead.

  The furniture grew calm and still, like horses after a storm. The crockery in the cupboards stopped jittering. The Dixie Quartet stopped throwing up over the rail; the colza oil stopped slopping out of the wall lamps, and the Queen became almost sedate, as Elijah steered a clean line down the center
of the river. Now and then a crosswind would shove at her like a playground bully and send her skidding across the surface, but Elijah would simply side-pedal her back onto the straight and narrow, letting only the mildest swear words trickle like tobacco dust out of the corner of his mouth.

  A lost brother and a guilty conscience were not the only things troubling Everett Crew. The floods were easing, the banks emerging, littered with flotsam. Trees that had been underwater shook their branches dry. People too would be shaking themselves and looking around. The Sunshine Queen showboat now held talent enough to mount a show. What it lacked was an audience. How was anyone to know about the joys in store for them without posters, advertisements in the press, or a lively reputation? All their past was upstream. All their audiences were downstream, ignorant of the existence of the Sunshine Queen and all who sailed in her.

  As they came into Doldrum, it was sunny again. Elijah sounded the ship’s whistle. The Dixie Quartet stood on the bow amid a cloud of midges and sang “O Promise Me” in close harmony. Miss March played harmonious chords on the calliope, and the resident ducks stretched their necks and quacked like little town criers.

  But nobody came.

  Elijah’s steering placed the Queen just so—though the berth was shallow, and they could feel the hull scraping over mud. Two dogs sleeping on the pier stirred. Each opened a jaundiced eye. The Dog Woman’s terriers barked furiously at them. The hellfire preacher fired his pistol and bellowed a few lines about the loving-kindness of God. The dogs woke up fully and ran off, scared by the gunfire.

  Still no one came.

  The houses were tidemarked by the flood, but Doldrum had not had it half as bad as Salvation or Patience. Even so, nobody so much as looked out a window.

  They tied up and peered for signs of life beyond the dense nettles that grew shoulder deep behind the pier. A locked warehouse. A pile of timber. Nobody. For an hour they sat, like the ark on Ararat, and wondered what they had to do to fetch people out of their houses. If they lacked the curiosity even to come and look at a three-story stern-wheeler, Everett despaired of them paying fifty cents to see a variety show. “I think perhaps I should have given the ship back to the man who thought he’d won it: let him find a way of making it pay,” he muttered.