The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Kookie would never have admitted it, but he felt as if he had run through a month-long clump of nettles and was just starting to smart. When he saw his mother and father and assorted brothers and sisters, it was all he could do not to embarrass himself. There was the alligator and losing his reward money to Cole Blacker and the explosion and Sugar Cain and losing his shoes on the mudbank and the flitch that might have been . . . and Cyril’s hair on the prison floor that definitely was . . . and then finding out that Hulbert Sissney was dead even after everything Cissy had pulled off with the phrenology and Queen Victoria. . . . Somehow, without quite knowing why, he had told his parents about all these things within thirty seconds of bursting through the office door.

  “Hulbert’s not dead, honey,” said his mother, trying to excavate him from under the telegraph machine, where he had curled up in a ball.

  “I cabled Cissy,” said Pickard, dropping to his knees to help. “Didn’t she get my telegram? SAFE TO COME HOME. YOUR PA’S GONE TO FETCH YOUR MA?”

  “What’s wrong with Kookie?” asked the youngest Warboys.

  “He’s glad to see us,” said Pickard, and began disconnecting the telegraph machine for fear that Kookie would electrocute himself on the cables squirled under the desk. “Hulbert’s not dead, son, and Hildy has got over Judgment Day and soured down to her old miserable self.”

  “Where’s Kookie going?” asked the youngest Warboys, as Kookie came out from under the desk as fast he had gone in there, and bolted out of the office again in the direction of the grocery store.

  “To tell Cissy the good news, I guess,” said Pickard, “though she’s maybe found out for herself by now.”

  Hildy Sissney was in full cry. “What in the name of Jehosephat are you wearing, miss? I ken see they don’t have hairbrushes in Missouri: if you brung nits home, you can just take ’em back where you found’m—don’t hold her close like that, Hulbert; she’ll have nits sure as beans are green—all right for some to go off gallivanting, leavin’ others to pick up the pieces . . . Oh Lor’, now we got trouble: and what do you want, Warboys-boy whichever-one-you-are? There may be too many of yuh to have names, but I know yuh by yer hair; you’re the one that leads Cissy astray.”

  Kookie took shelter behind the shop door from the pepper-box gunfire of Hildy back in form. Living with that woman must be like Custer’s Last Stand on a daily basis: how long could anyone survive it? Maybe that was how Cissy had developed such nerves of steel. “You found out about Mr. Pickard not being dead, then,” he called, over the hail of abuse. “Musta lost some words off that telegram.”

  Cissy beamed back at Kookie from behind her pa’s bath chair, arms entwined around Hulbert’s neck, her chin on his shoulder. “I found out.”

  Kookie had to confess, as he backed out of the door: she was pretty spackfacious.

  But Cissy remembered something and called him back, detaching herself from her father. With distinct overtones of Pirate Nancy and looking twice as perilous, she told him, “You’re an unchivalrous dog, Kookie Warboys!” and slapped him so hard, it hurt her hand.

  Hildy Sissney was instantly silent.

  “What was that for, chicken?” asked her father, when Kookie was gone. “That boy get over-familyer or what?”

  “Huh!” said Cissy and threw back her shoulders with the defiance of a flamenco dancer. “He said I was flat as a wall.”

  School reopened. The day was greeted by its pupils as a natural disaster, on a par with the Missouri floods. Like the racing lizards and turtles Kookie Warboys kept in a packing crate, children who had been freely roaming up trees and down rivers found themselves crammed back on top of one another with nothing to look at but four wood walls. Only Cissy could appreciate that there were worse kinds of imprisonment out there, and worse blights than schoolteachers.

  One of her father’s broken legs had been mended with steel plate, and it seemed to have strengthened his willpower as well. The deal with Hildy was off that said Cissy must leave school and start work in the store. Hulbert had put his mended foot down. “With a good education, who knows, she can maybe follow in the steps of that Loucien lady.”

  “What, schoolteaching?” Hildy had screeched incredulously.

  “Mmmm,” Hulbert had said, and winked at Cissy.

  Now, here, sitting on a hard school bench, beside the globe of a vast and free-rolling world, even Cissy could not remember quite why she had wanted to stay on at school. Why had she felt so bereft peeping in at the window at children doing tests?

  Miss May March swept in, hair oppressed into a severe little bun, mouth clamped in a determined line—”I trust, class, that you have remembered your lunches and your brains? You will be needing both.”—and called their names at registration like the recording angel on doomsday. Then she passed out blank sheets of paper.

  Boredom lapped around the walls of the school-house as sure as the water did that rose up around Noah’s ark. A week had gone by and still no word, no telegram, no letter out of Missouri.

  “Today we shall be mastering the art of letter writing. The best three efforts will be sent to the State Governor, who, I am perfectly sure, abhors to see sticky finger marks or the tell-tale footprints of a dirty eraser! You will address the Governor on the following subject.” And she wrote on the blackboard in squealing letters:

  Why Olive Town,

  Okla., needs a theater

  “Oh!” said Cissy and Kookie and Tibs simultaneously. Class Three buzzed like a swarm of sewage flies. Miss May swatted them.

  “Assemble your arguments in your copybooks, then arrange them carefully on the page. Remember: paper costs money. This afternoon, we are going to prepare a play for the town, marking the passing of the Bad Times.”

  “Oh!” said Cissy and Kookie and Tibs.

  “’O’ is all very well, Habakkuk Warboys, but please attempt to use the other twenty-five letters of the alphabet.”

  Cissy was so absorbed by the task of writing to the Governor that she was last to notice when Miss May got out a hammer. (Several children flinched with fear.) Sinking a nail into the classroom wall, the schoolmistress unwrapped a framed picture and hung it from the nail. It was a sight so familiar to Cissy that all the scents of babyhood came suddenly flooding back: the very same portrait that had hung on her wall in Arkansas! Her earliest years had been overshadowed by those formidable marmot cheeks, those eyes speaking of thrones and dominions.

  Queen Victoria glared across the Olive Town schoolroom at the Stars and Stripes propped in the corner. The room was used by adults in the evenings, and several grumbled about the portrait’s presence. But Miss March was adamant. “It has meaning for us” was all she was prepared to say.

  Within a week, a letter arrived at the post office with an address so vague that the postmaster was unsure what to do with it and took it to Pickard at the telegraph office. Pickard Warboys was the best-informed man in Olive Town—probably because he could open an envelope and reseal it without anyone knowing. Not that he made a habit of it, but sometimes the skill came in useful. After taking a peek this time, he tossed the letter to his boy Kookie. “Take this into school and get Miss May to read it out, will you? The contents may signify something to someone.”

  Kookie naturally insisted on reading it out himself. He was missing his life as a performer, and letter reading to Class Three was as close as he was ever likely to get to show business, now that he was home in Boredom Country. (When he saw the handwriting inside, elaborate and curly as a wrought-iron gate, he rather regretted it.) Cissy could see at once that it was not from Miss Loucien: the ink was black, for a start, rather than green.

  The Bouverie Residence

  Golden Bend

  Blowville, Missouri

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I enclose, on behalf of Captain Elijah Bouverie, the warmest of salutations and good wishes, and trust that your homeward journey was accomplished satisfactorily.

  The Captain continues to make a steady recovery
, and an agreeable routine has returned to Golden Bend. We are rarely troubled by the doctor.

  The sight of the Sunshine Queen so lamentably foundered on the opposite bank was causing the Captain some distress. So I have arranged for it to be towed over and moored alongside the foot of the cliff steps where, if you recall, a derelict boathouse once languished. A carpenter (who appears to know both the Captain and the ship) appeared out of the blue one day, and I put him to work converting the hulk into a large but fitting summerhouse. Here the Captain will be able to spend his days enjoying the river at close quarters. He and the carpenter—one Mr. Chips—are already catching prodigious numbers of vile-tasting fish, much to the annoyance of Cook. With the canyon steps being so taxing on the legs (even without the burden of stretcher and patient), I am intending to install a rack-and-pinion elevator of sorts. I hope you will someday have the opportunity to admire its ingenuity. The calliope was, I felt, slightly unnecessary to a summerhouse, so I have arranged for that to be conveyed to Olive Town by railroad. This upon the advice of Mr. Curlitz, who said he knew of one who could put it to good use in the church.

  The house is strangely quiet since your departure, and the younger maids are quite downcast by the lack of—how shall I put it?—music. One was persuaded to repent by Elder Slater and has left with him to convert Canada: a formidable task, I feel, having consulted an atlas.

  For myself, I often think warmly of my brief time as Prime Minister of England and only wish I had been free to travel to Olive Town along with the others—who will, I assume, be arriving at much the same time as this letter. (The calliope may take longer.)

  I remain your affectionate and most obedient servant,

  Henry (sometime Prime Minister of the United Kingdom)

  As Kookie wrestled with the last word, a noise drifted in at the window like a whistle of admiration—the distant whistle of the morning train. There was an upheaval of papers and furniture, a bench tilted over backward, a box of chalks spilled. Everyone ran—most without knowing why, but since their teacher had headed off, as well as Cissy and Kookie and Tibs, they supposed school must be out.

  Kookie went by way of the window, so he was down the street and on the station platform before the train had even stopped. But since Pickard Warboys had read the letter ahead of his son, quite a crowd of adults had already gathered there, too. Almost everyone in Olive Town, in fact.

  “Now remember your ettiquette, children,” said Miss March, pinkly flustered. “Barney Mackinley, don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve.”

  Like a stern-wheeler approaching a landing stage, the train boasted four singers on its bow. Well, actually, they were balanced on the footplate playing banjos and singing “Rolling Down to Rio.”

  From the first-class carriage, a stranger descended first—a patrician gentleman carrying an artist’s pad, who seemed startled both by the reception committee and the size of the town. “Is this it?” he said. “Is this the full extent of Olive City?”

  “We plan on growing it some, with the passage of time,” said Cissy’s father from his wheelchair. “Give us time. Three years ago we weren’t even here. Think what we can work up to in the next fifty.”

  The elderly man hummed, presented Hulbert with his business card, and tottered on up the street, followed by a porter with the tiniest of bags. Perhaps he mistook the cheering behind him for some quaint local custom, for he lifted his hat in thanks, without looking back.

  The cheers were really for the Bright Lights, of course, who had just stepped down from third class and were cluttering up the platform with property box, costume basket, and a great number of fancy leather suitcases all stamped with Elijah Bouverie’s initials. “For Bright Lights, we sure travel heavy,” said Loucien, who was carrying only the smallest bundle. The baby.

  “Stands Scotland where it did?” said Curly, looking around him at a town that had changed entirely since he had last been there.

  Cissy rushed Loucien, without a care for etiquette, pressing her face in somewhere between baby and armpit. “I didn’t lie to you, honest! You don’t have to give Poppy a funeral, ’cause he isn’t dead! Don’t be angry! I didn’t mean to waste you a journey!”

  “We knew! We knew! Mr. Warboys cabled us, honey!” said Loucien, stroking Cissy’s hair. “Did we need a reason to come? Beyond us promising we would? Anyways, thought you’d like to see the missing persons again. Finally found them in the small ads, you know? Like three secondhand wheel-barrows.” Egil, Revere, and Finn smiled and bowed and did their best to impersonate wheelbarrows by carrying all the luggage.

  “You coming to live here forever and ever and ever?” Tibbie Boden demanded. “We’re doing a play in school. You can help us with our play!”

  “We’ll see, Tibs. I found out a whole heapa useful stuff ‘bout babies I never knew before. I could maybe teach a lesson or two, like in the old days. And while the boys are studyin’ babies, we gals can maybe work up a banjo band. I missed the quartet somethin’ fierce. Found them again by purest hunky-dory happenchance in a station hotel, working their ways west. They’ll lend us a hand or five. I been trying to master a drum roll on a snare drum, but Ellie’s a born critic—screams abuse louder’n a Chicago saloon with no whiskey. We’ll stay till Thanksgiving, then we’ll see.”

  “But I can be your noo ingenoo, cain’t I, Miss Loucien, cain’t I, I can, cain’t I?” Tibbie’s golden curls bounced around her angelic face, lustrous and sweet as buttered baby ears of corn, and Cissy felt herself shrivel into a testy little witch arriving too late with a cauldron of spells.

  Loucien gasped. “Oh, but the job’s taken, honey! Sorry ’bout that. Leastways, Mr. Cyril’s seen the actress he wants, and he’s in talks with her agent.”

  Tibbie shrugged and away she went, actually skipping, so as to enjoy the swish of her multiple petticoats, her ambitions altered in the blink of an eye. She would be a chanteuse instead, or a banjo player, or marry Egil, with his green eyes. Cissy paused to seal tight her cauldron of envy and nastiness, determined it would not slop over. Not ever. She could do that. Ever since Roper Junction, she had been able to do it: to pull down the veil, to seal up Cissy inside. “So . . . where did Mr. Cyril see her?” she asked, breezy as you like. “This new ingénue?”

  Loucien seemed to be concentrating on her waking baby. “Saw her in a place called Roper Junction,” she crooned. “Wish I’d been there. Quite a performance by all accounts. Everett said it lifted him higher’n the longest plank. I’m envious.” She brushed a finger against the baby’s cheek. “Her agent will stall for time, of course: he’s one tough hombre. But Cyril will wear him down in a year or three. When the girl’s got herself educated. The Bright Lights never give up when they’ve set their mind to a thing. I’m looking forward to it. Be like working with royalty.” She put the same finger against Cissy’s lips, which were failing to form words. “Keep it in, Cissy. Seal it up tight. You can run ten thousand mile on a furnace fulla happiness an’ you won’t explode. Feels like it, but take it from me: you won’t.”

  Cyril Crew did indeed hurry over to Cissy’s father, delighted to see him recovered, grasping him so eagerly by the hand that the stranger’s visiting card attached itself to his palm.

  “Goodness gracious,” he remarked, showing it to his brother. “When the good Captain Bouverie expresses his goodwill, he does not send chocolates, does he?”

  The train engineer shoved the quartet off his footplate and gave an impatient blast on his whistle. He was running late. A boy with red hair came up on him from behind, climbing onto the other footplate, tossing a piece of coal from hand to hand.

  “One day I’m gonna be a train engineer,” said Kookie nonchalantly. “Done it before. Piece-a pie.”

  “Why would you want to?” fumed the engineer, waving a fist at the crowd lackadaisically rambling to and fro across the tracks, making him late.

  But Kookie answered him in all earnest. “Why? ’Cause trains are good. Best things happen with trains. Trains
get people home.”

  Then, like cattle at milking time, the whole festive mob moved off up Main Street, with no particular destination in mind but a sense that things would be more agreeable thanks to the new day, more agreeable for them and for the world at large. God had given the globe a helpful spin—for luck, as it were.

  A week later, the calliope steam piano arrived by train, crated and padded to a prodigious size. Kookie told everyone it was a Growow, fiercest animal in the known world, and began selling tickets. But Miss March confiscated the proceeds to buy refreshments for anyone who would help haul the contraption up the hill to the church.

  No one had the first idea how to make it work. So they were glad of Chad Powers’s resourceful genius. They were glad of him altogether, after weeks of berating by Hulbert Sissney for banishing an innocent young eccentric. Chad managed to hook up the calliope to the back boiler. It meant having the stove lit every Sunday, which would be a trial in high summer, but it was more than worth it to own a calliope. Now the people in towns to north, south, east, and west would be able to hear when Olive Town was at its prayers.

  People stayed home the evenings Miss March gave recitals. It was not that they hated either Johann Sebastian Bach or Dixie music; it was just too deafening to stay inside the church when Miss March was in full flow.

  “When the theater is built,” said Chad dreamily, “I shall move it over there and build an organ here. I’m working up this idea for a wind-powered piano, you know? Fixing to call it the Powers Patent Aeolian Organ.”

  The church was full on Thanksgiving Day, of course. With certain exceptions, the people of Olive Town had a lot to be thankful for. The warmth from the boiler was welcome, and the calliope, in getting up steam, made merry little chirruping noises, like birds in the loft. Miss May March pulled out all the stops and played “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,” and if small children howled, no one could hear them so it didn’t matter. When she had finished, she rang down to Chad to tell him to ease off the steam pressure. Then she hurried down the steps, collected her bouquet from Cissy, and fairly sprinted up the length of the church. Waiting for her at the head of the aisle stood Curly, trembling with stage fright, as all bridegrooms do.