The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “Oh, he would’ve,” snarled Miss Loucien. “Soon learn to stiff saps outa their life savings an’ gyp babes outa their lollipops.”

  The children flinched. Once again Everett glanced at his wife and wondered what could have given her such a hatred of river gamblers.

  “Ain’t no one used this stage for a twelvemonth,” said Elijah vaguely. “Tell by the nettles, look. Ain’t nobody stepped through them this side of recent.”

  They stared at him. “So! Why we stop here?” asked Medora, and Elijah shrugged.

  “Was remembering a different time, I guess.” The boiler scraper was like a fortune-teller with only half a deck of cards. Little snatches of information came to him through a fog of forgetfulness. “The bigmouths are good here,” he offered, holding up a fishing line with a bass still wriggling on it.

  Kookie, seeing that this might be the only dramatic performance of the day, jumped impetuously off the bow and sprang through nettles as high as his chest to take a look for himself at why the people of Doldrum were ignoring them.

  “How’d he do that?” asked the barber.

  “Thou art rash as fire!” Curly called after Kookie.

  “Power of prayer,” said Elder Slater, nicely taking the credit for getting the boy through the nettles.

  “He’s clever like Br’er Rabbit, that’s what,” said Cissy proudly.

  “Where there’s no sense, there’s no feeling,” said Miss March.

  After an hour, Kookie reappeared. “There’s no one home!” he called. “Not a mortal anybody.”

  A whole town deserted? Had the river risen so high, then, that it had washed the population of Doldrum out of their windows and yards, and away down river? No, the high-tide mark was plain on the timbers and undergrowth. So had the entire settlement been evacuated against disease or rehoused by it in the neat little cemetery?

  “Maybe they’re all lying dead in their beds with the diphtheria!” whispered Tibbie. “How would anyone know?”

  “They’ll be down at Plenty,” muttered Elijah, eyes jittering over the sunlit water. When they asked him how far it was to Plenty, he shrugged: “Don’t recall, but it’s deeper’n this puddle. New landing stage there. Made this one recumbent.” Memories only came to Elijah sporadically—like mail to an African explorer.

  So they unhitched the ropes and floated off. Kookie said he preferred to walk along the bank a way and sauntered off downstream.

  “Why is he walking bandy?” asked Tibbie.

  And two miles farther down stood Plenty. As Elijah had said, the dock there was new and sturdy—fortunate, since otherwise the weight of people standing on it might have broken the pilings. The entire population of Plenty, hearing Miss March playing “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer,” had dropped what they were doing and come running. Not just them, either, but the residents of Doldrum and Blane, Hoar Hill and Sunnyoaks.

  All of the Kobokins were there—that rooftop family at Patience for whom they had sung, delivered water, and invented the news. That little captive audience marooned until the water levels dropped had passed on word of the Bright Lights to every boat that sailed by. When they finally made it down off the roof, the first thing they did was to tell their neighbors about the showboat that had crashed into their jetty. The word had traveled along forty miles of riverbank.

  “Tell ’em ’bout the Walleroon!” called a familiar face half hidden behind a baby. “Tell ’em ’bout them butterflies stealing the cows!” And the children on either side set off laughing again so hard they nearly tottered into the water.

  Grubby and fly-blighted, desperate for some light relief after the misery of the floods, people had flocked to Plenty. Now they sat like the faithful at the feeding of the five thousand, waiting for miracles.

  “Hang out our banners on the outward walls; The cry is still, ‘They come!’” declared Curly delightedly, watching more arriving with every minute.

  “Beginners, please!” said Everett Crew, turning to address all his cast. “Ladies! Gentlemen! Let’s give these good people a show!”

  Just then, Kookie boarded the boat again after his long walk downstream; his arms and hands were livid, puffy, and covered in white spots. From the way he was holding himself, it was clear that the rash covered other parts of him.

  “Saints preserve us, boy, what happened to you?” asked Crew.

  “Ow. Ooo,” said Kookie, unusually short of words.

  “You look horrid,” said Tibbie, and Cissy grew a span taller with indignation.

  “He might be dying!” she protested. “Never mind how he looks!”

  “Oooo. Ow,” said Kookie.

  “Curly said you were rash,” said Miss May March, and laughed with surprise; she had never made a joke before. Nor had she ever called a gentleman by his nickname.

  They started at noon, thinking the crowds would want to get home by dark. But the crowd had an insatiable appetite for fun. Even when Elder Slater roared at them, crossed the gangplank waving his pistol, and stalked up and down among them, bellowing, “Sons of Adam! Daughters of Eve! Are you ready? Are your souls prepared? If I put this gun to your head tonight and pull the trigger, are you ready? Is your conscience clear?” they only smiled and offered him peanuts and discussed the quality of his boots and nodded appreciatively at his repertoire of big words. Apparently hellfire was small beer after the torment of the floods. If they could get through floods, Judgment Day would be a breeze. They did not understand the words of Curly’s soliloquy from The Tempest, but they clapped hugely every time he used a word they had never heard before, as if he had invented it then and there, just for their benefit.

  At eight o’clock that night the whole bank was aflicker with silver light playing on silvery faces as Medora projected her moving pictures against the side of the ship, and the light rebounded onto the audience. The offshore side of the boat seemed all the darker by contrast. That was where Loucien finally tracked down her husband, perched on the Texas.

  “I cannot pass around the hat,” he said as she sat down beside him. “These folk have big troubles.”

  Pelicans loomed white out on the river, drawn by the light, drifting like Chinese lanterns, indistinct and mysterious.

  “Don’t, then,” she said, and refrained from mentioning that she had not eaten all day.

  Five times over, Medora had to run her footage. Only then would the crowd let her pack away the Photopia. Crew need not have worried about the takings. The audience might have houses to mend, children to reclothe, gardens to excavate, animals and vehicles to replace, but they had enjoyed themselves immensely and were ready to share whatever came to hand. The Bright Lights Floating Theater Company ate and drank its fill.

  As Curly put it, “Best meal I’ve eaten since I was in jail!”

  What the Sunshine Queen delivered to the neigh-borhood was the possibility of being happy again—not just dry or back to normal, but happy, with the prospect of something coming around the river bend better than a flood. Someone in the audience even came up with calamine lotion for Kookie’s nettle rash.

  Only the Dog Woman was unhappy by bedtime. One of her dogs, instead of jumping into its basket at the end of the act, had run off across the gangplank and disappeared. Even when only one light was burning on the stern deck, the Dog Woman could be heard plowing up and down the towpath calling, “Binky! Binky, darling! Come here, you wretch, you!” There were plenty of answering barks from the darkened stoops of the houses, but Binky was saying nothing. Next morning there she was, curled up in her basket with a smug look on her face and grass stains on her back.

  Chapter Eight

  Max the Plank

  Everett left a message with the sheriff of Plenty and on a notice pinned up on the landing stage. He wrote his brother’s name in big letters at the top, but he barely knew what to write underneath.

  “Can we telegraph home, Mr. Crew?” asked Cissy. “Find out how Pa is doing?”

  “And if her ma’s stopped religifying?” said
Kookie, who was scared of Hildy Sissney at the best of times and terrified of her with the full might of Jesus behind her.

  “I would if I had the funds,” said Everett, and winced at the disappointment on their faces. That night they ate a stew of bluegill, bass, crappie, and drum caught by Elijah with hook and line, lying on his face on the cargo deck. It looked like the contents of a slop bucket, but it tasted pretty good if they talked hard enough about other things.

  Any news of Cyril, Egil, or the others was mired somewhere upriver. News of the Sunshine Queen traveled, though, with the speed of a swollen river. When they docked in Branko, they did two shows a day and ran the moving pictures as a separate attraction inside the stateroom. Elder Slater toured the saloons giving out advice on how to survive Judgment Day and passing around the hat. Branko had not suffered greatly in the flood, and the people there still had coins in their pockets. Everyone got paid, and for the first time in weeks the tension slackened in Everett’s jaw muscles. The first thing he did was to check for telegrams (there were none) and to send one off to Olive Town’s telegraph station.

  Kookie’s father (as town telegrapher) labored long and hard over answering the telegram. His wife asked him what was taking him so long.

  “We-e-ell. You recall Mr. Crew, when he was here?” Mr. Warboys answered, scratching his head with the pencil. “How he gave us the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July? A man like that savors words. Eats words outa the far side of the dish with a silver soup spoon. This wire’s gonna need careful crafting.”

  “Just pick out the meat, Pickard,” said his wife briskly. “Tell him Cissy’s pa is doing okay but he’s still hidin’ out at the barber’s ’cause there’s no place else for him to go. Say by all accounts Hildy is still flying around the ceiling with the angels. And tell him little Peatie . . . little Peatie . . .” Her voice slowed and filled up with tears. “Best say nothing about little Peatie.”

  “Little Peatie indeed,” said her husband gruffly. He knew very well there was nothing little about that hulking great lummox Peat Monterey; Pickard had felt the weight of him as he helped carry the boy’s coffin up to the graveyard. The telegrapher blew his nose loudly and thanked God that Kookie was safe in Missouri, even if Branko did not figure on any map in the schoolhouse. Tibbie, too.

  He could have said in the telegram that Hulbert Sissney was so depressed about his wrecked store, so anxious about his crazy wife, so lonely for his distant daughter, that the townsfolk were worried sick about him. But Pickard vowed to say nothing of the kind. He did not want to bring Cissy running home to be a comfort. Children were better off out of Olive Town right now. Better safe than sorry.

  At the same moment Pickard Warboys was wording his telegram, the Bright Lights Theater (and Showboat) Company members were making the acquaintance of Max, a big man in lime-green dungarees and possessed of a plank. It did not seem much of an achievement in life: a plank. Max’s English was limited. Very limited. Limited, in fact, to Polish. But his pride in his plank was plain to see in any language.

  “It’s a frabtious long plank,” said Kookie. “Half a mile at least.”

  “He’s a big man. I s’pose he needs a big plank,” said Tibbie distastefully. Tibbie liked things delicate, including people.

  “Length isn’t everything,” said Curly. “Hamlet is four hours long, but it’s better done in one hour fifty.”

  “Does he want us to buy it or what?” asked Crew.

  Max, who had smiled and clutched his plank while they discussed him, now took a pencil from Chad Powers’s pocket and drew on his plank. He drew two people facing each other with the plank sagging between them. A small body lay on the plank.

  “Moja żona, tak?” said Max, grinning.

  “Someone’s dead,” said Kookie, confidently guessing. The Dixie Quartet simultaneously removed their straw boaters.

  “Czy ktoś może potrzymać deskę na drugim końcu?” said Max, and swung his plank into the horizontal. Everyone ducked. But Max entrusted one end to a singer and held the other himself. Then he signaled, by waving one leg in the air, for Tibbie to climb astride the plank. All eyes turned on Tibbie, who took off her spectacles, because that was what she did whenever people looked at her.

  “Do it, girl!” exclaimed Kookie, admiring her daring. So Tibbie did not feel able to back down, and she laid herself gingerly on the center of the plank. It bowed almost to the ground . . . but not for long. Max, with an unforeseen flick of the wrist, flexed the thing so that Tibbie was lifted as high as the deckhouse roof. She screamed blue murder and clapped her arms and legs tight around the plank.

  “Nie! Nie! Rozlużnijć sie.” Max laughed and mimed “floppy” so well that he appeared to melt into his lime-green dungarees.

  “He is an eccentric devotee of planks, but he is an excellent mime, I’ll give him that,” said Everett, bemused.

  Chad Powers was eager to volunteer, not having broken any bones for at least a month, but seemingly it had to be someone small and light.

  “I’ll give it a try,” said Cissy casually, half hoping no one would hear but Kookie. She resolved to be as floppy as a dead rabbit if it meant impressing Kookie.

  The plank flexed downward under her weight and then upward, and up rose Cissy way above their heads. At the top of its curve, the plank stopped, but Cissy’s body threatened to go on rising. She was suddenly weightless, skyward bound. Her hair flew loose, her stomach lifted. Meanwhile, Max described in fluent Polish how his act had entertained and delighted circus crowds in Plock, Lublin, and Warsaw. He and his brother had worked the plank while his wife, Anka, performed leisurely acrobatics within the cradling hammock of bendy wood.

  Dead-rabbit Cissy let her knuckles brush the deck, then she was rising again, knowing she had only to let go with her knees and she would fly clear into the sky. It made her dizzy, and her stomach thought it was a really bad idea. But Cissy found it thrilling.

  Max’s wife had run off with his brother, leaving Max nothing but the plank. Being a placid kind of fellow, he had not gone after them with wrath and vengeance; he had simply emigrated to the Mississippi basin instead.

  Up and down went Cissy, feeling a little more at ease with each toss of the plank. She loosened her grip and sure enough entered free flight for a couple of seconds. None of what Max said meant a thing to those watching, but they were warming to his plank. There was something mesmerizing about watching Cissy Sissney go up and down like a kangaroo. Loucien asked if it was a fairground ride for children, and didn’t they sometimes fall off, but Max understood no more English than he spoke.

  “No, no. It’s an act!” said Cissy, rising and falling through the haze of evening insects. “Likely, I could turn over, sort of—turn around like an acrobat.”

  “Akrobata! Tak jest!” cried Max, recognizing fam-iliar ground.

  Not that Cissy meant to give it a try—not on the narrow side deck of a lopsided stern-wheeler. Unfortunately, her stomach informed her she was about to be sick. Her mother had always made it clear that being sick in company was an unforgivable sin, a crime and a disgrace, and that small children had been hanged for it or chopped up for firewood.

  The plank’s rising curve reached its zenith, and Cissy let go. She flew like a bird. Kookie whistled with awe. Tibs Boden screamed again. Everett Crew swore. The preacher stretched out a hand in blessing—or maybe an attempt to grab her.

  “Badż miękka! Miękka!” yelled Max. And Cissy arced high over their heads and landed in the river a stride away from the landing stage. If she had hit it, it would probably have broken her back. As it was, she stood up in waist-deep water and apologized for making extra laundry. Seventeen people ran, collided, shouted comfort, came to the rescue.

  “What was it like?” called Kookie.

  “Spackfacious!” said Cissy gamely as she sloshed back on board. Seeing the admiration in his eyes and how he knelt down to wring the dirty water out of her skirts, she would like to have added that it felt like being t
he bluebird of happiness perched on top of the rainbow.

  Max joined the troupe, and Cissy apprenticed herself, unasked, to this newfound circus act. It was not flashy or glamorous, but it was novel and funny: the kind of act that sent people home thinking, I could do that if I just had a plank. Miss Loucien anxiously and absentmindedly covered her unborn baby with protective hands and said it was far too dangerous. But Elijah knew where straw was to be had. . . .

  —“How do you know these things, Elijah?”—

  . . . and a thick bed of straw was laid down for each performance, which put Loucien’s mind at rest.

  Cissy’s heart sank the first time Max put on his makeup—white face, big red nose, a newspaper wig: this was a clown act. Cissy had been hoping for tights, leotard, sequins—but she quelled her disappointment just as she had quelled her airsickness. It was not acting, it was not Shakespeare or even The Perils of Nancy, but Kookie never failed to watch, and he always clapped louder than anyone else.

  The plank also set Everett thinking about The Perils of Nancy. Touring the newly built settlements of Oklahoma the year before, his brother had given up trying to interest the locals in Shakespeare. He had turned instead to The Perils of Nancy. The heroine of the piece got tied to a railway track by the villain, then rescued by the hero. Everett remembered Cyril watching him glue on his villainous mustache and saying, “These people live beside the railway tracks! For mercy’s sake, the trains are life or death to them in real life! They’ll love it!”

  And sure enough, The Perils of Nancy had been a great success. Kookie, Tibbie, and Cissy could still remember every twist and turn of the plot. Admittedly, someone who had never seen theater before had mistaken it for real life, and shot Everett . . . but that’s drama for you: an insecure and unpredictable profession.