The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Elijah puffed out through his soup-strainer mustache and scrubbed at his moth-eaten thatch, but said nothing. They supposed he must feel a world of disappointment at the unfairness of life. Here was this meritless, spoiled boy possessed of a beautiful vessel through cheating and lying. Elijah, who had labored his life away as roustabout, mud clerk, and boiler man, and could steer a paddler with his feet, teetered now on the brink of a penniless old age. They waited for him to say some such thing.

  “She’s three yards longer and two wider in the beam” was all he said. “St. Louis built. Prob’ly draws more water.”

  “Is that good?” asked Everett.

  “Or bad?” asked his wife.

  Elijah shrugged. “’Pends on the wind, I guess. Steam up, should I?”

  Without knowing why, the children were given a five-dollar bill and sent to buy a side of bacon from the butcher in Blowville. It seemed a horrific extravagance.

  “Gonna hold a pig roast for the crowd, you wait,” Kookie stated. “Make some money that way.”

  “Cain’t roast a flitch of bacon, silly,” said Cissy. But she was unsure of her facts. Bacon was not spit-roasted in Oklahoma, but maybe in Missouri the locals were as squeamish as she was and didn’t like watching a whole dead pig revolving, ears and tail hanging loose.

  Five dollars would buy only one flitch. Kookie asked for two. “Send the bill on up to Mr. Cole Blacker, if you please,” he told the butcher. “He sent us.”

  Outside the shop, Tibbie (who was still an invalid so didn’t have to carry things) did her bit by getting hysterical. “That was a fearful big lie, Kooks!” she whispered, breathing too fast and biting her lip and looking back over her shoulder.

  “The Hand fleeced me, so now I’m flitching him,” said Kookie vengefully. “Any case, we didn’t have enough money for two.”

  The sides of bacon were greasy and bristly and rather too much like dead bodies for Tibbie’s liking, so she walked farther off, lest Cissy and Kookie bump her as they struggled along, each carrying an entire side of bacon. “What are you going to do with Mr. Crew’s five dollars? You keeping it for your gambling?” asked Tibbie. The procession came to an abrupt halt, and Cissy dropped her flitch. Kookie’s face was crimson with shame or anger.

  “I’m never ever gamblin’ ever again,” he snapped. “I taken the pledge on gamblin’.”

  The flitches were not intended for a pig roast on the riverbank. Elijah wanted them chopped up, carried aboard the boat, and steeped in turpentine. The Bright Lights Theater Company stood around and watched, mutiny in their hungry eyes. Curly, who did a lot of the cooking, chopped up one joint and sank it in the poisonous marinade, but he kept the other intact, just in case it could be spared.

  “We gonna send them around to Blacker as a gift?” Tibbie speculated. “Kill him of turpentine poisoning?” But Miss May March wrapped her in a blanket again and carried her ashore, telling her she had had enough excitement for one day and needed to give her brain a rest.

  Kookie had no intention of going ashore and, instead of crossing the gangplank, peeled off sideways and hid behind a stack of life rafts. Cissy went after him to ask what he thought he was doing and if he hadn’t caused enough trouble already. Then the gangplank was inboard . . . and so was Cissy . . . and there was nothing to be done about it.

  When the Blacker family arrived on the wharf, the crowds parted as if for royalty. They came in a horse-drawn landau, she a big woman in purple velvet, he with a florid face and hair the color of gravy. They looked as if they ate a flitch of bacon every day for breakfast. There was an auntie or two, and a pair of hunting dogs, in the carriage as well. They all had the look of money, but not the old kind. The Blackers had spent their lives earning more than anyone in the county, and the effort was etched in their faces. Now they sat in their luxury vehicle, hands folded in their laps, and gazed with fond affection and pride at the son who had made it all worthwhile. Cole Blacker was strutting up and down the hurricane deck of the Tula-Rose, up and down in front of his crew, like a general inspecting troops. He climbed to the pilothouse, sounding every bell, gong, whistle, and horn, and the whole crowd cheered.

  Blushing at her own daring, Miss May March called out across the water: “You can do it, boys! Pull out all the stops!”

  Curly, intending to wish Miss May March a cheery farewell, climbed up to the calliope and played a couple of ten-finger chords. To his consternation, the boiler had been primed to such a pitch that the steam pressure was enormous. Instead of the usual feeble, creaky groaning, a noise like the blast of a cannon issued from the calliope pipes. People nine miles away said they heard it and thought of their Maker. Horses shied, bucked, and tried to leave. The crowds put their hands over their ears. For the first time, the grin slipped off Cole Blacker’s face. The Sunshine Queen had shouted him down.

  This was the moment when Elijah chose to forget that he was pilot aboard the Queen, and set to work as her engineer. Everett did not argue with him: several of the men had mastered steering since Salvation. None had mastered the intricacies of the infernal iron demon in the engine room.

  The race was to be barely more than a sprint: a quick ten miles upriver—first to tie up at Boats-a-Cummin wharf. A fuel barge had been anchored in the center of the river, at the five-mile point, heaped with pitch knots and pine knots. It meant the boats ran light in the early stages, and refueling would add to the excitement. There was a gusting headwind, and a flock of fluffy white clouds was lining up to jump the sun.

  At the firing of a gun, the white horses harnessed to the landau flinched and reared up in the traces. They might have bolted if Loucien had not held them by the cheek straps. The crowd got to its feet. Medora and Tibbie and Miss March called across the water that Kookie and Cissy had not come ashore—but the boats were sounding their horns, the paddle wheels were splashing, the furnaces were roaring, the tall chimneys puking out fur balls of black smoke, and the race was under way. It was a race between a swan and a one-legged duck: the Queen did not stand a chance. But sometimes in life you just have to eat what’s put in front of you.

  The Tula-Rose pulled steadily into the lead. Cole’s friends, when they were not stoking or prodding valves, stood on the stern of the hurricane deck jeering and gesturing at the trailing boat. The Queen’s pilothouse was on their level, and Everett was obliged to look at their grinning, jubilant faces while beside him Chad babbled information: “Deeper channel just right of center. Reed bed on the left.”

  “I see it.”

  “Fallen tree on the next bend. You’re skidding.”

  “I’m aware that I’m skidding, thank you, Mr. Powers.”

  “Ducks off the port bow.”

  “I don’t think ducks constitute a hazard. Forgive me if I don’t steer around the ducks.”

  Sweeting and Max were lugging pine knots. Chips and Boisenberry were feeding the port furnace, Oskar and George the starboard. Elder Slater was praying noisily, drawing the Almighty’s attention to Cole Blacker’s wickednesses, in case God had been busy and missed them.

  “We gotta make ourselves useful!” said Cissy to Kookie.

  But Elijah was checking the water levels and pressure gauges; obsessively checking, rechecking, holding the safety valve down with a huge and filthy rag, letting it go when the needles reached red, counting the chunks of wood as they went into the furnace, seeking out the perfect tempo for stoking.

  “You there!” he said, seeing Cissy and Kookie loitering in the doorway. “Watch the chimneys! Tell me what comes outa the chimneys!”

  “We can work! I can do proper work!” protested Kookie, not wanting to be fobbed off with a child-sized job.

  But Elijah, stripped down to the waist now like some ancient John the Baptist, only gestured them away. “Do as you’re told and watch the stacks!”

  Useless, helpless to help, they climbed to the roof of the Texas; Cissy collected the water that distilled on the pipes of the calliope, meaning to take it up to the pilots. Then
she was fearful of how angry Everett would be when he saw she was still on board. So she and Kookie sipped the water themselves, sitting on the sand-canvas-covered roof, out of Everett’s line of sight. A rain of sparks showered down on them. The air was full of soot. The thick black smoke from the Queen’s chimneys was tugged astern by the wind. But the smoke from the Tula-Rose swamped them and covered them in soot.

  “Smoke’s comin” out,” said Cissy dubiously.

  Kookie repeated the message but, finding he could not make Elijah hear a word, jumped onto the roof of the hurricane deck and relayed the news from there. “Smoke’s comin’ out the chimneys!”

  Cole’s boat pulled farther ahead. The sloping paddle wheel of the Queen chipped the water into a curdled foamy wake that stretched out as far behind as they could see, but the Tula’s wheel was churning the river into snowy drifts of spray and foam.

  Back at the wharf, the landau was making hard work of turning around on the restricted space.

  “Would you good people carry us up to the finish line?” asked Loucien, stepping up onto the running board of the carriage. Miss March led the horses around by their cheek straps. The Blacker family looked put out—also alarmed by Loucien’s size and state. Against their will, she stowed Tibbie amid their feet. Pa Blacker began to open the carriage door to put Tibs out again, like a cat. Loucien deliberately misunderstood him. “Lor’, that’s kind of you to offer, sir, but you’ll never fit me in there,” she said, smiling him full in the face. And she closed the door again. The landau set off for Boats-a-Cummin with Miss May riding on one running board and Loucien Crew on the other.

  Cissy was starting to get bored. “Smoke’s comin’ out the chimneys,” she called yet again . . . then promptly changed her tune. Large chucks of wood began to fly out of the metal chimney stacks and shower down onto the stern decks and paddle wheel. Up in the pilothouse (which had its front shutters wide open) Crew was bombarded with hunks of charred and smoking wood, as well as a swarm of sparks.

  “WOOD COMIN’ OUT THE CHIMNEYS!” yelled Cissy.

  Kookie parroted her in disbelief. “Wood comin’ out the chimneys?”

  “What are those confounded children doing here?” said Everett, who could hardly fail to see Cissy running up and down the Texas roof, kicking chunks of burning wood off it and into the river while Kookie yelled between cupped hands: “WOOD COMIN’ OUT THE CHIMNEYS!”

  Elijah held up a shaking hand—”Lay off!”—and the stokers stopped stoking and fell up against one another, exhausted. The steam pressure eased; the rain of cinders and timber turned back to smoke. The Sunshine Queen slowed to a more sedate speed.

  But to their surprise, the Tula-Rose stayed in sight. Elijah emerged from the engine room and strolled forward to the bow, cocking his head to listen: “She’s picked up a load a silt,” he said matter-of-factly. “Losin’ pressure.”

  “So we have a chance?”

  Looking around him, Elijah seemed a great deal more interested in the scenery than in the race. “Familyer,” he said.

  “Yes, well, we’re going upriver, sir,” said Chad Powers. “We came through here yesterday—and the day before, going the other way.”

  “We did?” said Elijah. “Fancy.” Curly suspected he had forgotten the race altogether—was convinced of it when Elijah said, “Tell you what: why don’t we cook up some bacon?” Back in the engine room the old man clanged a bucket of bacon joints down in front of Max and Benet (who had taken over the stoking) and told them to feed the fire. Then he went back to poking the steam gauges with a broken broomstick and muttering to himself about his time as a mud clerk.

  A frenzy of rising hope took over from despair. Perhaps if Cole Blacker had clogged his boilers with silt, it was still possible to catch up, still possible to overtake him. “The tortoise and the hare! The tortoise and the hare!” roared Everett from the summit of the boat, and the filthy smoke-stained Bright Lights Theater Company snuffed up the smell of bacon and felt the kick of renewed speed as the Sunshine Queen devoured her breakfast.

  The five-mile raft came into sight. It had been moored in the center of the river, so that the racers could tie up to either side. No one but Elijah was going to be able to maneuver the Queen alongside a flat barge piled high with timber. But as he began to climb the four levels to the pilothouse, the man’s weariness showed. There was just no telling, beneath the grizzled stubble, what age Elijah was. Sixty? Seventy? When he came to a halt on the stairs, Cissy ran and took his hand, put it on her shoulder, and felt his skeleton settle its weight on hers: a wrecked paddleboat settling on a sandbar.

  “Can we manage it, Mr. Elijah, sir?” she said, meaning the race.

  “Sure,” said Elijah, meaning the stairs. “Only one more deck to go. Well, look at that. There’s my place.” They were passing through the canyon again, and there it was: that little swamped shack at the foot of a golden escarpment—one-time boathouse, maybe, of the vast mansion up top.

  Elijah contemplated climbing on right up to the roof of the pilothouse, so as to steer with his feet through the hatch. But the extra climb seemed beyond him. So he simply stepped behind the wheel and steered, as if he had been doing it that way for years.

  “Mud clerk, roustabout, boiler man . . . Elijah’s like living with four other people, isn’t he?” observed Everett, making the downward climb.

  “One man in his time plays many parts,” observed Curly, tenderly wiping the soot off Everett’s face with the tip of a damp handkerchief.

  Up ahead, the paddle wheel of the Tula-Rose fluttered to a halt. She thudded ungently against the fueling barge, though smoke kept pouring from her stacks. Blacker’s army of friends, in their natty maroon overalls, began flinging logs aboard. Their hoots of laughter and wild aim hinted at too much champagne and too little experience. They were playing at boats.

  Eighty yards, sixty yards. The Queen approached the port side of the fuel barge. They could see Cole Blacker standing at the door of the engine room swearing down at his engineer, blaming him for the loss of power. Everett even saw the moment Cole thought of his masterstroke, turned away from the engine-room door, and ordered the Tula-Rose to cast off.

  Heaving a tank of turpentine over the bull rails and into the river, Cole produced a handgun and emptied several bullets into it. The tank exploded under the tethering ropes, then sank amid a circle of fire. The ropes instantly severed; the raft began to move. The lads aboard it, unwarned and scared, scrambled over the log pile to try to clamber back aboard, but already the barge was drifting off its moorings, heading downriver: one boy fell between the Tula and the barge. One simply stood shouting: “You git back here! You git on back here, Cole!” The drifting log pile, trailing burning stumps of rope, bore down on the Queen. Cole had cast his friends adrift, simply to ensure that the Queen could not refuel. Added bonus if it smashed into the Queen and sank her.

  Elijah steered so sharply to port that his passen-gers were flung to the floor, but it was not enough. Picking themselves up, they ran to the starboard rail to fend off with a broom, a shovel, and outstretched hands—faint hope!—a ton of logs accelerating toward them on the current.

  “Whoso putteth his trust in the LORD!” bellowed Elder Slater. The boys aboard the wood barge squatted down among the logs, gaping faces staring at the vessel they were about to ram.

  Cissy, though, was not on the river at all. She was back in Olive Town, watching a raft of logs loose a metal silo to mow down her home and everyone in its path. “Fuller Monterey, you stink!” she bawled at the ton of lumber bearing down on her. “Don’t care if you’re live or dead. You still stink!”

  Beneath the water, a tree—uprooted in Patience and carried down a hundred miles of river before rerooting itself in Numchuck silt—snagged those trailing ropes. Ten yards short of collision, the log barge was pulled up short. It pitched wildly, dumped more timber, sent its cargo of stokers sprawling, spewed a big bow wave. The submerged tree reared up out of the water like the monster kraken .
. . but sank back down, still holding fast to the raft.

  Elijah had been forced so close to the bank that the port-side chimney clipped the escarpment. It tilted on its hinges and came crashing down—would certainly have killed anyone who had been standing in its path—might even now set the ship alight. But it seemed like a minor thing—almost insignificant. More important just then was the fact that they had not been engulfed by a ton of wood. Chad Powers shut down the port boiler. Smoke issued with less and less violence out of the fallen chimney. The Queen slowed to a stately four knots.

  “Slow and steady wins the race?” said Curly, ever optimistic, but Everett Crew shook his head. Not only had Blacker almost killed them, he had deprived them of the fuel they needed to make it to the finishing line.

  The lead boat, her stern wheel a thunder of foam once more, was picking up speed. But the fueling maneuver had asked a lot of the Tula-Rose—more than her days of genteel cruising had ever asked.

  “He’s cooking her,” observed Elijah casually to Chips, who had trailed up to the pilothouse in Elijah’s wake. “See them stacks?”

  “Yep,” said Chips.

  The sides of Cole’s chimneys looked as if mildew had broken out. Big dark patches were spreading across their pewter cladding: well, not mildew, but scorch marks, actually.

  “He’s strapped down his safety valves, I reckon,” said Elijah.

  “Yep,” said Chips, always happy to agree with the old man.

  “Best catch up and tell him,” said Elijah, and rang the gong twice for full speed ahead.

  They flung on every scrap of wood, voices crying out the water levels in the boiler, the readings on the steam gauge. Elijah rang the nonexistent ship’s bell and sounded the horn, the gong, the jingles, trying to catch Blacker’s attention. The rest of the crew only gradually worked out what was going on.