The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

The Glorious Adventures
of the
Sunshine Queen

Geraldine McCaughrean

For Ailsa Joy
and all her fellow actors

Contents

 

 

Cast of Characters

In Olive Town

Cissy Sissney

Hulbert Sissney, her father, the grocer

Hildy Sissney, her mother

Habakkuk (Kookie) Warboys

Pickard Warboys, his father, the telegrapher

Blosk Warboys, his mother

Tibbie Boden, a rancher's daughter

Miss May March, a schoolteacher

Chad Powers, a part-time inventor

The Bright Lights Theater Company

Cyril Crew, the proprietor

Everett Crew, his brother

Loucien Shades Crew, Everett's wife

“Curly” Curlitz, front-of-house/accounting/

publicity/prompt/refreshments/property-manager/walk-on actor

Egil, Finn, and Revere, actors

Aboard the
Sunshine Queen

Elijah Bouverie, boiler scraper

The Dixie Quartet: Benet, Boisenberry,

Sweeting, and Oskar

Max the Plank, a Polish clown

Medora and her Photopia

The Dog Woman and her three performing dogs

George, a barber-surgeon and phrenologist

Elder Slater, a hellfire preacher

Chips, a carpenter

Along the way

Sugar Cain, a “rafter,” or river pirate

Cole Blacker, son of wealthy parents

Henry, an English butler

 

and, of course, a host of others . . .

Chapter One
Absent Friends

Cissy folded the letter and gave it back to Miss May March, whose thin white face, like a dish towel resting on a puddle of wine, had grown pink around the edges.

“Thank you, Cecelia. You may return to your seat.”

Miss May March did not approve of the letters Class Three received from their previous teacher. To give Miss March her due, she never actually binned them, but she did not dwell on their contents either. Talk of cockroaches and “pretty ingénues” and “interesting conditions” was not on her curriculum.

One year earlier, “Miss Loucien” had taught the children the sum total of everything she knew. But she had married a traveling actor and left Olive Academy for a life in theater. Miss May March was well aware of the mark her predecessor had left on Class Three, but to her way of thinking it was the kind of mark that should have been quickly washed away, like the soap ring around a bathtub. There was something shocking about the woman, with her chaotic handwriting and her creative spelling and her gypsy existence. Her misspelled letters always put the children into a restless, contrary mood. This very minute Miss March knew perfectly well they were comparing her with Miss Loucien . . .
and marking her a very poor second. Knowing this sometimes made her spiteful.

“Take out your slates and write the following proper nouns:
New Orleans
. . .
Tucson
. . .
St. Paul
. . .
Fuller Monterey, pray tell me: what does a proper noun have?”

She knew he would not know. (The Monterey boys had less than one brain between the two of them.) Miss Loucien would not have known either. Perhaps this was a chance to impress on Class Three that Miss March alone had the power to make of them literate, civilized citizens. Fuller Monterey drew in his tortoise-shaped head and refused to answer. He looked even more sullen than usual.

“Habbakuk Warboys, then. What does a proper noun have?”

Kookie, however, was quite equal to the chal-lenge. “Panache!” he said.

“Hexclamation marks!” said Tibbie Boden, stick-ing up her hand.

“Clean linen!” said Barney Mackinley.

“First use of the washroom!” said Fred Stamp.

Cissy Sissney took no part in this. Her soul was still held between the folds of Miss Loucien's letter. She was imagining the footlights, the gilt moldings of the opera boxes, suspenders and kittens flying through the air, the noise of applause. . . .

Cissy lived for the days when a letter arrived from her old schoolteacher. Miss Loucien's letters were an Event, an Occasion almost. Cissy was always given the honor of reading them out loud because her reading was best. And afterward she liked to sit and savor what she had read—to imagine she was there, on the road with the Bright Lights Theater Company, seeing all those charlatans and celebrities, seeing all the big cities and out-of-the way settlements, singing for her supper.

It was so long since the Bright Lights had left town that she could barely remember the pretty Annie May. How would the Company manage without someone to play the helpless, screaming heroines? Cissy wondered if, at twelve, she was old enough to audition for the job of ingénue. Perhaps she and Kookie could run away to Nuorleens (wherever that was) and join the Bright Lights Theater Company and star in
The Perils of Nancy
and see Miss Loucien and Everett Crew again. Oh!

Beyond the window, a great tidal wave of Boredom rolled in from the eastern horizon, then broke over the school roofs and Main Street and the silo and the umbrella factory before rolling on to the western horizon. Cissy knew the color of boredom; it was the color of prairie. It was the color of northwest Oklahoma. It was the color of schoolday afternoons. Sometimes she thought the sky had been nailed down on Olive Town like a crate lid and that she was suffocating on Boredom.

Then her eye fell on the empty space left by Sarah Waters along the school bench, and suddenly Cissy's eyes felt hot and swollen. No amount of honey and whiskey would ease Sarah's throat now—but then how was Miss Loucien to know that? Since the last exchange of letters, Sarah's sore throat had proved to be diphtheria, and she had moved up to the cemetery, to be planted there like a melon seed that was never going to grow. Surely, if Miss Loucien had stayed, Sarah would not have died.

Though the school bench was crowded, no one had yet slid sideways to fill the empty space. Fear of infection or just pure superstition had saved a place for Sarah Waters. Everyone was hoping there had been a mistake and that she would walk back into school one day, good as new.

“Kookie,” Cissy whispered to the bristle-haired boy beside her. “What's it mean: ‘interesting con-dition'?”

Kookie gave a superior kind of snort. “Interesting condition? That's slang, that is. Means someone's 'specting a baby. Ma's been ‘interesting' so often now, she says she just ain't interested in bein' interesting no more.”

“Expecting? No, but . . .”

“The ingenoo must be 'specting—now she's marrying the bank teller.”

“No, that can't be right,” Cissy insisted. “She doesn't even get married till next month. So she can't hardly be expecting a baby now.”

Kookie gave this some thought. “Maybe the letter got held up in the mail,” he said.

“Cecelia Sissney! Habbakuk Warboys! Go right this minute and sit in Fool's Corner and write twelve times on your slates: I must not talk in class. Next time we receive a letter, Cecelia, perhaps someone else had better read it out,” said Miss May March, still pink around the edges.

The town committee was planning to move the grain silo. The speculator who had built it (back when the town itself was being built) had gone broke before the first harvest was in. The town committee wanted to keep the silo, but somewhere else, so that the station buildings could be enlarged. They wanted it moved up Main Street and down West Road to the new railway sidings. There the grain could be funneled directly into open-topped freight cars while they awaited a locomotive. The town committee was also of the opinion that there were enough willing hands in Olive Town to get the job done free.

Suggestions were invited from anyone with a pencil and a bright idea, and various citizens of Olive Town submitted diagrams full of arrows, ropes, and pulleys. Virgil Hobbs was of the opinion it could not be done at all, whereas Charlie Quex, the barber, knew a man who had won fifty dollars one time by moving a barn, intact, from one side of a river to the other.

“How did he do it?” Sheriff Monterey had asked.

“Beats me,” said Charlie. “I only shaved the guy. He didn't have time to go into detail.”

As Cissy ran home from school that day, she ran through the long black shadow cast by the big metal tower. It chilled her as though she had run through a brook.

“Gonna lower it onto its side and move it on rollers,” her father was telling his wife, as Cissy burst into the grocery store and ran through to the rooms in back, where the family lived. “Poppy! Poppy!”

“Hope Chad Powers knows what he's doing,” grumbled Mrs. Sissney. “Be a first if he does.”

“Poppy! Poppy! A letter came from Miss Loucien today! They're in Nuorleens, wherever that is, but Annie May is marrying a bank teller and leaving a hole, and someone's expecting, but we can't guess who!”

“
Well!
” said her mother, cramming the one word full of outrage and disgust. Hildy Sissney loaded her words like other people loaded cannon.

“That's nice, chicken,” said Hulbert.

A sixth sense warned Cissy that all was not well. When her mother began banging the pots around and her father hugged her tighter and longer than usual, she knew something bad was in the air. She wanted some comfort for the humiliation of Fool's Corner and her dreadful loss of letter-reading privileges, but dared not mention either in front of her mother.

“Was a delivery on the morning train,” said Hulbert. “Help me stack it onto the shelves?”

“Sure, Pops,” said Cissy warily.

“Best get in the practice,” said Hildy Sissney under her breath, and Hulbert turned and glared at his wife.

A terrible foreboding flooded Cissy. She went through to the shop to check the new stock of tins and packets and cartons, but though her father coughed several times, and rubbed his bad leg and seemed about to break some news, his courage failed him. Cissy had to wait till suppertime for the axe to fall. Then she found it had more than one blade.

“We thank the Lord for feeding us, body and soul,” said her mother in a huffy tone that suggested the Almighty had been shirking lately.

Cissy opened her eyes and picked up her fork, but there was more to come.

“We pray for the soul of poor Sarah Waters and for Gaff Boden's ranch hand and for Sheriff Monterey if it comes to it. Lead him not into drinking, leastways. Amen.”

“Sheriff Monterey? Why? How come we're pray-ing for him?” said Cissy.

“His boy Peat. Looks like diphtheria, same as Sarah,” said Hulbert. He had forgotten to open his eyes after grace—or perhaps he found things easier to say that way. “So your mother and I have decided to take you outa school, chicken . . .”

“Hotbedda germs,” said Hildy.

“. . . just till the sickness has passed through,” said Hulbert.

Hildy jabbed her fork accusingly at her husband. “Now don't you go doubling back on me, Hulbert Sissney. We agreed. Twelve's plenty soon enough for her to start pulling her weight. She's got reading. She's got her numbers. What more does she want to work in a grocery store?”

The newspapers with which the walls of the living room were papered suddenly seemed to be shouting their headlines into Cissy's face:
DENVER'S FIRST WOMAN DOCTOR . . . OKIE CENTENARIAN NEVER LEFT HOMETOWN . . . MEDFORD SCHOLAR ENTERS HARVARD . . . DIPHTHERIA KILLS THIRTY . . .

Through the window, the problematic silo cast its shadow across the street and in at the grocery door, like the index finger of Doom.

So. She was to leave school and work in the Olive Town grocery store, selling beans to cowboys and gingham to their wives. She was to spend her life reading the
Olive Town Morning Star
for news she already knew, about people she saw every day. The Medford State Fair would be the highlight of her year, each passing year. The rolling prairies would crush her days, the prairie moon pull faces at her each night.

Cissy loved Olive Town. She had lived there since the first train dumped its first handful of settlers on an empty wilderness: Claim Nos. 3048—9. She loved all the odd, desperate, varied people who had come there in search of a new life. But keep shop there? Forever? Abandon geography and history and daydreaming and playing “stones” with Kookie in the lunch break and reading the books Miss May March lent her and writing essays entitled “My Life: A Plan”?

“Don't sit there moping. Go fetch in a dozen carrots, Cecelia, thanking you,” said her mother sharply, and Cissy gladly bolted out the back door. She disturbed several rabbits that had been feeding on the vegetable patch, and she watched their pale shapes speed away across the prairie, passing far out of sight: lucky rabbits. In between the failed squash and the aphid-covered lettuces, Cissy gave herself up to crying—for Sarah Waters and Peat Monterey and Gaff Boden's ranch hand—and for the end of her childhood.

Her father came out to help her tug up the puny, blunt-nosed carrots.

“I don't want to leave school, Poppy!” she told him.

“I know, chicken. I know. But your ma wore me down. She gets fearful tired serving in the shop all day, you know . . . and if diphtheria's gotten loose in the schoolroom, school'll be shut down soon anyhow. . . . Oh. And Gaff Boden has asked us to take in his girl, Tibbie, till the sickness is past. Your mother said no. Had to reach an accommodation with her, didn't I? ‘You take Cissy outa school,' she said, ‘and I'll take in Tibbie Boden.'”

“Tibbie Boden is coming
here
? To
live
?” Another blow.

“Sure is.” Her father smiled broadly. He thought he had saved the good news till last.

Not Tibbie! Golden-haired, blue-eyed Tibbie off the Boden ranch! The girl Kookie had vowed to marry. The one girl who made Cissy invisible in Kookie's eyes.

“You like Tibbie?” Hulbert said cajolingly. “And she needs somewhere safe from the germs up at her place. You
do
like Tibbie, don't you, chicken?”

“Sure,” said Cissy, thinking: I like her right where she is . . . way out of town, on her daddy's ranch. Cissy's sole advantage had been in living a few doors away from the telegraph office where Kookie lived. Now even that advantage was gone, and she would lose Kookie. He and Tibs would marry and move away to Yale and study astronomy or taxidermy or something with a future in it.