The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (17 page)

“Like as not,” said Loucien. “I came through yards of yard to get to the steps. But it was the first place I could get down to the river. It's an emergency. What kinda skunks are gonna object to us crossing their yard?”

“It's not the skunks I'm fretted about. It's guard dogs,” Cissy confessed. She had a mortal fear of guard dogs.

“Yard” did not quite describe the gardens sur-rounding the mansion on the river bend. There were knot gardens and water fountains, an orangery and strange big trees never seeded by any Missouri bird. There was a lake and a terrace made of bricks all crisscrossing, herringbone style. The house itself looked as if it should be inhabited by Greek gods, with easy steps running up toward half a dozen stone pillars holding up a triangle full of carvings. Naked people in helmets. (They were not from Missouri either, by the looks of them.)

The house staff were all gathered in one corner of the garden, looking upriver to the scene of the explosion, pointing and fretting. Barely an hour had passed, and yet they were already wearing black armbands as etiquette demanded. Far from setting the dogs on the Bright Lights, the maids and lackeys came hopping around, smart as magpies in their uniform black and white, offering to help. A maid with a tray offered them tumblers of orange punch.

“We have laid the dead in the hall, sir,” said the English butler, as if directing them to a buffet lunch.

“And the survivors?” said Everett.

“We have laid the dead in the hall, sir,” repeated the butler, and his face was rigid and grim.

“Well, this one's still breathing,” said Loucien decidedly. “You got somewhere a mite softer?”

The butler was transformed, energized. He summoned help to relieve them of the mattress, and a four-man team fairly ran with it up the shallow steps and into the portico. The Bright Lights caught up with them on the interior staircase. Loucien took back the scarlet jacket she had laid over Elijah's face. A couple of the maids glanced away for fear of what they might see underneath it. The stretcher bearers, though, came to a dead stop.

“Holy Mary,” said the footman.

“Oi vei! N'echtiker-tog!
” said the cook.

The butler sneezed.

“It's him. It truly is!” said the gardener.

The butler handled the situation with immaculate English efficiency, despite an allergy to excitement that always triggered a sneezing fit. He dispatched maids to turn down the bed and open the window in the master bedroom, the ostler to ride for a doctor, the cook to boil hot water, the upstairs maid to find a nightshirt.

“You know this man?” asked Everett as the sound of running feet echoed down six different corridors.

“Know him?” cried the butler, sneezing like a pepper-box pistol. “Don't you know who this is? Don't you recognize him? This is Captain Bouverie! This is the Master!”

Laid on the great expanse of his own bed, Elijah looked more frail and cadaverous than ever. Dried blood flaked the pillowcase, like iron scrapings from a boiler. His big hands lay limply open. For whole minutes together he did not appear to breathe at all; when he did, the air rasped in his throat. A bruise gradually obliterated one side of his face like a paddleboat's metal stacks scorching from within. Thanks to the disaster, the doctor was a long time coming; longer than long. The maids stood about, aprons clutched to their mouths, and when Elder Slater suggested prayers in the dressing room, they almost ran there, impatient to help in any way they could.

“Such a good man. Such a dear man,” they said, as if overalls, soot, and stubble might have hidden his qualities from the Bright Lights.

Despite the clouds of glory he had trailed behind him along the Numchuck, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers, Captain Elijah Bouverie had simply slipped out of sight one day and disappeared. His impaired memory had seen him wander off before, but one year earlier he had vanished without trace from his cliff-top mansion, and no amount of searching, advertising, or heartfelt wishing had brought him home again. All that remained within the high rooms and flowery walks were his fretful staff and the proofs of his glory days as the greatest captain ever to sail the Mississippi basin.

Despite hurricanes and lightning strikes, flood, wars, and the jealousy of his rivals, he had never lost a boat or a passenger. Myths had attached themselves to his name, like barnacles on a ship's hull: Captain Bouverie had a charmed life, a pact with the Devil, a magic ship's bell. . . .

“The truth is, sir, he had genius,” said Henry the butler. “Started off as a roustabout and a boiler monkey, worked his way up to river pilot and captain. He bought derelict boats and refurbished them into palaces—palaces!—not a word of a lie, sir! A fleet of forty boats. His crews were devoted to them, every man jack. It is said that he never raised an unjust hand against the meanest roustabout.”

“Even the Irish,” said the cook wonderingly.

“His engineering patents brought him the bulk of his fortune, of course,” Henry was saying as they moved along a corridor lined with paintings and photographs of paddle steamers. “By the age of fifty he had no need to work. But the lure of the river was very strong, I fear.” They paused beside a window filled with a view of the golden gorge. “I blame myself!” lamented the butler, running both hands through his dapper gray hair. “I never should have taken my eyes off him!”

The Bright Lights, meandering along behind, stopped to let him regain his composure.

“Does the Captain have folks?” asked Kookie. He was wondering—as everyone was—when Elijah's wife and children would come running.

“The master's wife and son were killed by a boiler explosion on the Platte River,” said the butler, and pointed out, as they entered the sitting room, a painting of a diminutive woman dressed in silver gray, carrying a tiny boy.

“But you said—”

“Hush, Kookie.”

The butler gasped. “Not aboard one of the Captain's ships! Never think it! They were traveling to meet him in Genoa.”

The room contained two button-back leather sofas, also two enormous brown dogs. The members of the Bright Lights Theater & Shipwrecking Company sat and sipped sherry. “Bit like turpentine,” said Kookie, trying to sound as if he liked turpentine. The dogs paced the room agitatedly, grumbling in their throats or sniffing at the base of the door.

“They sense he's home,” said the butler, and his voice cracked. “Poor beasts. Poor beasts.” Loucien poured him a glass of his own sherry and sat him down.

The driveway and brick terrace outside soon filled up with carriages. Saddle horses grazed the lawn. The families of missing boys moved like migrating bison through the gardens and came to a standstill in the marble hallway. Among them were Cole Blacker's parents. They stood there waiting for news and, however often they were told it, went on waiting. Their faces were blank—twin sacks emptied of coal. Emptied of Cole. They did not sob or moan or rage: they simply stood, hands hanging down. At a loss.

They had trouble understanding that there were no mortal remains to recover from the accident. “But the funeral,” they said, puzzled. “How d'we bury him?”

Cissy ran and fetched Elder Slater, but his kind of comfort was of no use to the Blackers.

“We don't have God,” said Pa Blacker—as someone might say “We don't take milk.” A generation or two before, a Blacker patriarch had fired God from his house in a fit of temper, as he might a maid who stole the teaspoons. Since then, his children and grandchildren had been too busy making money to interview for a replacement. So Pa and Ma Blacker lacked a body to bury and a religion to bury it in. Besides, they had never planned for such a day as this. Everett thought he had never seen two lives so vaporized by disaster.

“He got his crew off the boat, you know, before it blew?” Pa Blacker said. “He saved who he could. He was a brave boy.” The tone was pleading. When the old man's gaze met Everett's, the eyes were broken windows. Everett looked around him at the comrades whose lives Cole Blacker had blighted.

“Your boy was a . . . singular piece of work, sir,” he said, and Pa Blacker grasped his hand in gratitude.

“Thank you. Thank you. You know anything about funerals?”

“No, sir.”

Pa Blacker's thoughts kept spinning around and around this one black hole. “Don't know a thing about funerals, me. Never been to one. I mean, what do people say? What happens? Does it help? What does anyone do?”

Cissy tugged on Loucien's sleeve and whispered something to her.

Loucien leaned over and whispered in Everett's ear.

Everett, defeated by his own profession, smiled and nodded.

“Looky here, Mr. Blacker,” said Loucien. “We Bright Lights—we may not look much, but we know how to put on a . . . how to polish up an hour till it shines. We'll give your boy his shining moment. You leave it with us.”

Chapter Fifteen
A Good Send-Off

S
o they staged a funeral for Cole Blacker, even though the boy himself could not be there, the Bright Lights detested him, and the Blacker clan were strangers to God.

First, they raided the rubbish heaps for empty bottles and Golden Bend Mansion for candle stubs. They borrowed servants' uniforms, a horse from the Blacker Livery Stables, and a white duck from the town pond. Cissy and Kookie were given the job of gathering crow feathers. Tibbie was sent to pick flowers (since she was still inclined to faint if given jobs she didn't like). The men rowed over to the
Sunshine Queen
and brought back to Golden Bend anything of value—the property box, the costumes. Miss March and Loucien planned music for the funeral in Blowville.

Meanwhile, Captain Elijah Bouverie lay on his great white bed in the master bedroom of his great yellow mansion, unaware that he had made it back home. Over the bed hung a crown of gilded antlers won in a Missouri river race. In the opinion of the doctor, he was unlikely to see out the week. He simply lay, gaunt and bruised, beneath the gilded horns, as though gored by the past.

They opened the funeral in the late afternoon, with one sung note, braided and strengthened by ten more voices. It fetched people out onto Main Street. A procession appeared led by a little blond girl all in white, carrying a tin laurel wreath. Behind her came an unsaddled white horse, its withers draped with a black cloth, its mane and tail plaited with black feathers. Behind the horse, four barefoot men, their skin as black as their suits, sang in close harmony “Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen.” Behind the singers came the mourners, in a black-draped landau, their horses, too, plumed with crow feathers.

Curiosity had drawn people from their houses, some in the mood to jeer or hiss the Blackers. But sunset, music, and spectacle kept them from doing so or from turning back indoors.

As the cortege reached the wharf at the foot of Main Street, the sun was just setting. A sapling tree was planted, and the blurred shape of a pale bird flew up miraculously from its branches and took on the color of sunset. The singers started up a round that swirled and circled, capturing into its orbit the whole funeral cortege.

Then, from strategic housetops, came more lamentations—snatches of poetry, pieces of plays—nothing but turfs cut from a literary lawn . . . and yet they carried the authentic hallmark of sorrow.

Suddenly someone shouted and pointed upriver. Into sight came a host of little lights. Candle flames, flickering their way down the cold sleek slick of black water, quivered like grief itself as they came: a constellation of candles, their reflections doubling the number. There were flowers, too—weeds when they had been in the ground, but rags of luminous loveliness now aboard the darkened river. The crowd drew a single breath.

Loucien began to sing:
“I've got peace like a river—I've got peace like a river in my soul . . .”
and the crowd swayed—they could not help themselves. Children in nightclothes astride their fathers' shoulders watched the lights float by, flames reflected in their eyes. The calliope picked up the last note of Loucien's song and tumbled it into “Steal Away Home,” and the crowd joined in because they had stopped being spectators and become part of the event. Max led the carriage horses back toward the Blacker mansion.

“Such a clever boy,” Cole's mother said to him, her fingers fumbling the glass of the photograph in her lap. “You knew him. You know what a lovely boy he was.”

“Pan Bóg jest dobry,”
said Max.

“Yes, yes. Absolutely!” said Pa Blacker, hearing what he wanted to hear. The mourners were invisible in their black clothing. So, too, was their draped carriage, only its wheel spokes flickering white, like coins spun to settle a bet.

The townspeople herded instinctively toward the feast laid out at the big house. The Bright Lights Theater & Funeral Company did not follow: puppeteers never show themselves after a puppet show—it breaks the spell.

“Is there anything else?” asked Everett Crew, who was a perfectionist and never entirely happy after a performance.

“There weren't no telegrams,” said Kookie.

“That's weddings, silly,” said Tibbie, shivering now in her thin white dress.

Kookie shook his head. “I live in a telegraph office, me. There's always a shoal of telegrams come in after a buryin'. ‘Thinking of you.' ‘Carry your tears to Jesus.' ‘I knowd him and he wuz spickettyboo.' That manner of thing. Ma says people don't know what to say, so they send a telegram and get it over and done in five words.”

“Thank you, Kookie,” said Crew. “Tomorrow I'll fix for a flurry of messages from a variety of places. It will comfort the family to think the world is full of people who liked their boy.” Loucien linked her arm through her husband's. It was a whole lot easier to think gently of Cole Blacker now that he was dead.

Curly called on the Blackers next day, to ask for—if not a fee—the money they had spent staging the funeral. He and Miss May stood on the front stoop, face-to-face with the black wreath on the door knocker.

“Last night was the first time I ever heard you declaim, Mr. Curlitz. You have a fine voice.”

“Why, thank you, Miss May.”

A maid opened the door to them, but they were not invited in. The Blackers, she said, were not “at home” to strangers. Then she shut the door.

Everett Crew meanwhile went to the Blowville General Store so as to send a telegram to Pickard Warboys in Olive Town asking him to arrange telegrams of sympathy to the grieving family from far and wide. But he found he couldn't afford it. Still, it was not a wasted journey.

Pickard Warboys, studying an atlas night after night, had chanced sending a telegram to Cissy, care of the Blowville office. Everett had just slipped it into the breast pocket of his borrowed suit when he noticed, pinned to the adjoining post office desk, a sad mosaic of undeliverable letters. Among them was one addressed to

“Of course!”
His brother Cyril had known the ship by a different name! So there it had hung, yellowing in the sunlight, unread. In his delight and gratitude, Everett gave the telegrapher the price of a beer before tearing open the envelope.

It was a long, news-filled letter. It took some time to read. Everett had to sit down on the floor to read it. He had to read it twice over and then a third time. Customers calling in to send mail or telegrams had to step over him, but he did not even notice.

Stranded and left behind in Salvation, Cyril Crew, Egil, Finn, and Revere agreed they should jump a southbound train and catch up with the
Calliope
farther downstream. Egil, Finn, and Revere had had no trouble running alongside the very next freight train, hauling themselves aboard. If they had just chosen a train going south (not east), they would have been quickly reunited with the Bright Lights.

Cyril, being an older man and a little bow-fronted under his embroidered vest, found it much harder to jump aboard a moving train. Having missed three, he finally managed to clamber onto the rear platform of a southbound passenger train, only to be arrested by an overzealous train guard and thrown in jail at the next stop. Licorice.

In prison he shared a cell with a disagreeable but optimistic young man who told Cyril they would be free in no time. And this was true, since the young man promptly broke out of jail. He did it by shooting the deputy sheriff with his own gun, and he threatened to shoot Cyril, too, if he would not tag along. As Cyril recounted, in his elegant handwriting:

When he stood up again, Everett held out, on the flat of his hand, all the coins he owned. “A telegram. How many words can I send for that?”

“Three? Four?” said the telegrapher, holding on tight to the beer money.

So Everett dictated this succinct reply: