The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “On this occasion, dear lady, I think the better part of valor is discretion,” suggested Curly.

  “I spy strangers,” said Benet, who had just done a head count of people aboard. “Who’s him?” He pointed to a skinny beanpole of a boy standing behind Crew as if using him for a windbreak. The barber-surgeon, on his high-speed roundup of the company, had corralled one too many passengers.

  Crew turned and gave a start. “Oh! He’s the carpenter. I was in the middle of hiring him. To mend the paddle wheel.”

  “But he just now busted it worse ’n ever,” observed the carpenter, pointing at Chad and his axe. “Ain’t no wonder you need repairs if yuh’s gonna chop out yer blades.” And he waved a halfhearted hand toward the sorry sternwheel clattering against the stern of the ship. “You turnin’ back soon? ’Cause I got no makin’s.” He spoke with extreme slowness, swinging his tool bag forward and back so that nails and screws tinkled pleasantly inside. He smiled, too, at the nape of Everett Crew’s neck: nobody in Woodpile had trusted him with any carpentry work for months, so he looked on Crew as his friend and benefactor.

  There was someone else on board whom the carpenter was happy to see. “Hey there, Mr. Bouverie, sir!” he called up to Elijah on the wheelhouse roof. “You still sailin’?”

  “Looks like it, Chips,” said Elijah, and kicked vigorously at the ship’s wheel with his new, shiny, slimline boots.

  Elijah had never laid claim to a surname before, and it came as a surprise now to find he had one; also that he was known this far downriver. They asked Elijah how he came to know Chips the carpenter but got no more than a shrug for an answer. Occasional memories nudged Elijah’s brain, like flotsam banging against a boat hull, but they soon washed by. Besides, his attention was all on the riverbank.

  “Are we not getting a little close to the . . . ooo!” inquired Miss March as a twig plucked undone her bun and let her hair spill down.

  “Thought you’d favor that to gettin’ shot, ma’am,” said Elijah. “There’s four comin’ after us on horseback, look. Gives them ’bout three horsepower more ’n this old girl, I reckon.”

  Willow branches swept the Queen, and everybody ducked and covered their heads. Ducking was a good move, because that was the moment the riders on the far bank opened fire with rifles and hand-guns. Bullets tattered the willow fronds, pitted the pilothouse, the saloon wall. Buckshot disturbed the river’s surface like panicky schools of fish. The posse of embittered poker players was in no mood for parley: they were going to vent their bitterness on the Sunshine Queen, drawing no distinction between the boat and the crook who had owned it the year before.

  So close was she to the starboard bank now that her two tall smokestacks were smashing their way through the boughs of trees, fetching down twigs, sending birds squawking up into the sky.

  “Chad—help me drop the chimneys!” said Crew. “Lou, keep down! Someone get the children under cover!”

  Nobody needed much telling, except for Miss March, who was so horrified to see the twigs and willow fronds thrashing across her precious calliope that she fisted up her skirts and climbed three ladders in plain sight of the gunmen on the bank.

  Curly was appalled. “They’ll shoot her! They’ll shoot Miss May!”

  “They wouldn’t dare,” said Kookie, and the two girls nodded in agreement: anyone who had studied at Olive Town Academy knew their schoolteacher would never succumb to mere bullets.

  Curly and the children tumbled down into the boiler room, where the tree stump still rose crazily through the floor, while Max and Medora and the Dog Woman lay two decks above, in their cabins. The quartet helped Crew and Chad to hinge the smoke flues backward, then crouched along the starboard rail and sang hymns. Everyone knew the Dog Woman had not been hit, because they could hear her shrieking energetically, in chorus with her yipping dogs; they could also hear Elder Slater damning the gunmen to the deepest pit of hell without time off for good behavior. Medora crept under the sheet that draped her moving picture machine when it was not in use, and crouched there in the dark, her collection of movies wrapped in her skirts.

  Elijah, though, was obliged to stay sitting on the roof of the pilothouse, his feet through the hatch, steering so as to stay out of range. Almost. Chips the carpenter stayed where he was, on the deck below, stolid as a bollard, gazing up at Elijah, swinging his tool bag forward and back, forward and back.

  The river was wide, the riverbank treacherous, so the gunmen had to stop shooting now and then to pick their way around a mud slick, a cattle drink, a piece of flood debris, a fallen tree. But without power to drive the paddle wheel, the Sunshine Queen was only drifting along at the same stately speed as the current. Bullets smashed two of the windows in the stateroom before the ship drew ahead a little and their hopes lifted. Everett Crew joined his wife in the stateroom, where she sat up just high enough to slap him.

  “Why did you do that? Coulda got Chad killed! Coulda got killed yourself. . . . Lower the chimneys? To blazes with the chimneys! So we lose a chimney! Who gives a . . .” The noise of her fury rang through the ship. The stateroom, with broken windows, had wonderful acoustics. Even the dogs stopped barking to listen. There was some kind of physical intervention—a hand over her mouth, perhaps. A kiss?

  “Let go my hair, you damned man!”

  “The chimneys might have snagged in the trees,” came Everett Crew’s reply, soft but insistent. “Hooked us up, you know? Like Absalom caught by his hair in that tree.”

  “What tree?”

  “That tree in the Bible.”

  “Gosh sakes, Everett, I’m half Choctaw, half Minneapolis—and neither half does Bible trees! Let go my hair.” But the volume waned and the voices calmed, and the shushing of water past the hull erased the sound.

  “There’s a good hard towpath comin’ up,” called Elijah to no one in particular. “No help for it: they’re gonna catch up to us there, lickety-split.”

  Down in the boiler room, Tibbie heard this and burst into tears. Kookie put a comforting arm over her, but his eyes turned toward Cissy, and his face had not a shred of daredevilry left in it. Cissy wondered if her father would ever find out the circumstances of her death and track down her body.

  “There’s a side crick comin’ up in ‘bout a mile,” Elijah called. “If I can shuffle up there, we can maybe lose ourselves. . . .”

  “Truly?”

  “Maybe.”

  Why should there be a creek? How could Elijah possibly know—he whose thoughts had more holes in them than a pair of worn-out socks?

  But sure enough, there it was. Though it had seemed like wishful thinking, and though it was almost invisible from the open river, a side cut disgorged into the Numchuck River from behind a curtain of willows. By some deft use of the rudder, Elijah drove the Queen side-on into the drapery of leaves. Green leafy tongues licked the decks and windows.

  For weeks they had been tripping over the two long staves of yellow wood that lay along the deck to no apparent purpose. Now they found a use for them. The entire crew both fended off and dragged their way stern-first between the narrow banks of the creek despite an ominous noise of planks grazing bottom. They worked in silence: only noise could betray their whereabouts to the vigilantes now. One of the Dog Woman’s mutts began to bark—a noise a posse could have heard a mile away—and Curly shut them all in the property box, with Julius Caesar’s toga on top of them, muttering, “. . . when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!”

  “Oh, you cruel—!” the Dog Woman began to shriek, but she was jolted off her feet by the boat coming to a sudden standstill.

  “Yuh’s aground,” said Chips.

  “You have a viselike grasp of the obvious,” said Everett with a wan smile, and Chips beamed with pleasure. He had not been treated so decently for years.

  Wedged fast in the shallows of the creek, they were at the mercy of anyone who might find them there. But they were out of sight. The river spread over them its drapery of greenery and babbling noise
, like Julius Caesar’s toga. A few minutes later, the posse of aggrieved gamblers pounded past on the other bank without catching a glimmer of Sunshine.

  “They’ll be back presently,” said Elder Slater grimly. “Sure as the Four Horsemen of the Apollyclips. Fulla death and pestilence.”

  “Sure will,” said Elijah, his eyes shut as if to read off the wrinkled vellum of his eyelids. “Big chain barge at Strommaferry. They’ll cross over and come up the other bank.”

  The others stared at him. “This bank, you mean. How long?” said Crew.

  “How long what?”

  “How long before they come back on this side?”

  “Who?” said Elijah.

  The Sunshine Queen was aground. The heavy mass of metal that made up the boiler and engine block sat on the bed of the creek with only her wooden skin parting metal from grit. In a matter of hours, the gamblers of Woodpile might ride up the towpath behind them and empty four handguns into her passengers at point-blank range. The sudden stillness made the crew unsteady on their feet. The lack of movement made them travel sick. The willows fingered their faces sympathetically.

  “See them trees on a level with the bow?” said Elijah. “Rope around each of ’em. Use’m like bollards. Pull from the stern.”

  “That man sure has a closetful of useful tips,” observed Loucien, scouring the boat for enough rope.

  There were plenty of willing hands ready to haul. But when they did so, it was not the boat that moved—it was the trees. The roots came out of the soft mud banks as easily as teeth out of an old man’s gums. The upper branches splashed across the deck and put a dent in one of the chimney stacks.

  Hellfire Slater exhorted the waters to rise up from under the earth, but the Numchuck River had done flooding for the season and was on the ebb. The crew contemplated lightening the boat by carrying ashore everything not battened down. But it was all too plain: the immense weight of the boiler, the engine, and the crankshafts was what was pinning the hull to the riverbed. Fish were swimming freely under the stern, but the Queen was fast aground where the vast engine crouched, just forward of center.

  “If we all stood in the river and pushed . . . ,” Kookie began, but the hopelessness silenced even him.

  “Grasshoppering comes to mind,” said Elijah vaguely, and Chad Powers was up there beside him in an instant, paper and pencil at the ready.

  “There’s yer legs,” Elijah said, scowling in the direction of the yellow staves of wood. But then the concept of grasshoppering—the whole reason for talking about it—sprang out of Elijah’s brain, like a grasshopper through an open window. The men yelled at Elijah to try and remember. The women took a more practical approach.

  “Why’s it called grasshoppering, d’you suppose?” asked Loucien. “Must be a reason.”

  “Maybe if we clap our hands, it’ll jump clear outa the crick!” suggested Tibbie. Miss May March gave a slightly hysterical laugh.

  Chad Powers scribbled in his sketchbook, as he was inclined to do at times of stress. “Anyone remind me how a grasshopper hinges?” he asked.

  Now, in the glory days before school set in, Kookie Warboys had raced grasshoppers as well as turtles and beetles. Snatching the pencil, he drew a torpedo shape with legs like a spider.

  “Carrots ’n’ pears, that’s not it at all!” said Cissy (who had once lost all her buttons to Kookie by betting on a rheumatic grasshopper). She took the pencil and corrected the legs.

  “Then I reckon . . .” Chad Powers took back his sketchbook and began to draw, tongue protruding from one side of his mouth. His diagram looked like yet another plan for a prairie sailboat, but when it was finished, they could see it was a paddleboat with spindly grasshopper legs planted on either side of its thorax. “Block and tackle at the apex, right?” he said, thrusting the drawing under Elijah’s nose.

  “Yep,” said the old man, as if the knowledge had been there all along and he had just wanted them to work it out for themselves.

  The idea was to form a hoist from the staves of yellow oak and, by rope and pulley, to lift the Queen’s breastbone just clear enough of the gravel and pry her a few yards forward. A few yards were all it would take to break free. Elijah watched from the roof of the pilothouse, chewing on his beard, too old to lend any muscle power and haunted by half-remembered glimpses of other groundings: ancestral grasshoppers. He looked like an oracle divining smoky visions of coming disasters. “You put them legs in the river without shoes on, and they’ll let you down,” he moaned to himself.

  They had no idea what he meant, but they soon found out. As they hauled on the ropes—”Lou, you lay off pulling, or by God I’ll divorce you!”—the A-frame of yellow wood simply sank down, down, and down into the sand and grit of the creek bed.

  They scoured the boat for the “shoes” Elijah was talking about, but nothing suggested itself. Had he just known it, Curly had held them in his own two hands back at Salvation, but nothing called to mind the two “Norman helmets” he had come across, puzzled over, and stowed in the property box for some future play with knights and jousting.

  The mosquitoes gathered in clouds around their heads. Frogs onshore passed rude remarks about their seamanship. Tibbie began to cry again.

  “Powinniśmy śpiewać!” said Max cheerfully, and launched into a Polish folk song about a shipwreck.

  “Reckon we’re up Sheep Creek without a paddle,” said Tibbie, which was something she had heard her father say.

  Everett kept looking down at the watch Loucien had given him on their wedding day. Curly saw it and remarked, in an undertone, “Our minutes hasten to their end.”

  “Quite,” said Everett. “Time to abandon ship. They could be here any minute. Onshore, at least we can split up and hide in the greenery.”

  “They’ll burn the Queen if they find her,” said Curly, casting a glance over the dilapidated wreck he had come to think of as home.

  “With or without us on board, Curly, and I know which I’d prefer.”

  The Dog Woman waded ashore with all her mutts floating in a wooden tub. Medora wrapped up her precious equipment, and Chad Powers carried it on his head to the shore, returning to carry Medora ashore with the same infinite care. He prized her technological genius as highly as her mirrored skirt and waist-length hair. Everett had just picked up his wife in both arms, and sat down on the edge of the deck ready to slide into the water, when Elder Slater emerged from his cabin two decks up.

  “Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be!” bellowed Slater, advancing down the passenger deck brandishing his pawnshop poacher snares. And lowering himself into the river like John the Baptist, he drew an immense breath and disappeared below water.

  Thanks to the regular shouting he did in the name of the Lord, he had a huge lung capacity and did not surface again until he had positioned the spiky metal traps, jaws open, on the riverbed. He could have stayed under for longer if he had not been reciting a psalm throughout, for fear the trap jaws might spring shut on him and rip off both his arms.

  The yellow oak pilings were heaved to and fro till they could be pulled out of the soft riverbed. Now the base of each beam was lowered into the jaw of an open metal trap. The traps shut with a noise clearly audible through the water and made everybody jump. And this time, when the Bright Lights Theater Company joined forces and pulled on the ropes, the A-frame sank its iron-shod feet no more than a few inches into the riverbed before standing solid—a triumphal wooden arch capable of lifting the poor old Queen’s heart when nothing else could.

  With a noise like an explosion, one of the yellow beams splintered and broke. The grasshopper rig collapsed. A rope was lost. Medora and the Dog Woman were left behind on the towpath, but the Sunshine Queen was moving—was out on the river once more! Their hair full of wet willow leaves, their clothes soaked, their hands rope burned, the salvagers clung to the rails and marveled at their own achievement.

  “Who’da thought a bunch of lightweights
like us could lift a ton of engine!” panted Loucien, resting on her knees, one hand supporting the great weight of the baby inside her.

  “Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke!” declaimed Hellfire Slater, beaming so broadly that they caught a first glimpse of his tombstone teeth.

  “Loucien Shades Crew, will you kindly lie down and rest before I rope and hogtie you?” roared her husband, scarlet with annoyance and with straining on the ropes. “And can we please get those ladies back on board before the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come back, guns blazing?”

  If they did pass the vengeful posse of gamblers farther downstream, they did not see each other. A foggy dusk draped a gray tarpaulin over the Sunshine Queen; her passengers lit no lights, made no sound, until they were sure they had burrowed deep into moonless night. Soon afterward, the Queen rammed the bank and turned clear around before nestling to a halt in an eroded hollow. Chips came and explained that Elijah had fallen asleep on his roof. “I seed him doze off,” said Chips, still swinging his tool bag forward and back.

  They were ashamed to have forgotten the old man perched on the Texas, steering the vessel with his brand-new boots. They felt bad about letting Elijah exhaust himself, when he had, after all, saved the day. So they all climbed to the bridge and put Elijah to bed. He barely woke as they lowered him through the roof hatch and tucked him in on the mattress taken down from the deckhouse wall. Beside his head, Cissy set down a plate of breakfast.

  Or lunch if he overslept.

  “I make good picture from beside river,” said Medora at dinnertime, waving a glass plate in its wooden slide. They took turns peering at the blurred gray image of the Sunshine Queen erupting through the willows, hinged legs to the fore, very much like a three-story grasshopper. The moment had been preserved forever. Each member of the company contemplated the wonders of photography and thought of someone they would like to show this picture to—friend, father, brother, wife—in days to come.