The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (20 page)

“Rumor?”

“Publicity! Terribly important before any show! Spread the word something big is about to happen—biggest day in the history of Roper Junction! People see, dear boy, what they have been primed to see. How else do you think the illusion of theater works? By the time my brother arrives, we want the whole town to be buzzing—isn't that right, my boy?”

When Kookie had gone, given his vital mission to perform, Cyril Crew sank to hands and knees on the cell floor, exhausted. He had no confidence whatsoever that a second train would be stopping in Roper Junction that day. Not in time . . . But now at least the boy had something to keep him occupied, and Cyril could be alone to gather up the grated shreds of his courage.

Kookie beamed at passers-by in the street and asked if they had heard the news. He called in at the saloon. He stopped by the school yard. Cyril had given him a job, and he hauled that job around town as doggedly as a husky pulling a sled. The more people he told, the more he believed it himself: a train would be stopping later that day at Roper Junction, and aboard it would be someone who would make everything good.

But the telegram was his masterstroke. Everett Crew had given him two dollars that morning to send a telegram. So that is precisely what he did. He had grown up in a telegraph office: he knew the places were hotbeds of gossip.

After Kookie had left the shop, the telegrapher could not help mentioning to his wife the contents of the message he had just tapped out. His wife could not resist running next door shrieking,
“The Queen's comin'! The Queen! The Queen! And look at the state of my hair!”
The people next door could not resist stepping down to the grocery store to see if the grocer had heard any such thing and to ask if it was true. The grocer said that some kid had mentioned some such nonsense—he had not thought much of it, but if the telegrapher knew better . . . After that, nobody knew where they had heard it first, but everybody in town knew that Queen Victoria was vacationing in Missouri and would be calling by in a train.

In faraway Oklahoma, Pickard Warboys tore off the ticker-tape message and read it. His heart, too, rattled like a telegraphic machine. What in the name of goodness was Kookie up to? There was no one by the name of Noboddi in Olive Town. Pickard firmly believed there was no one anywhere called Noboddi. The atlas on his desk fell open automatically now at the page showing the Numchuck River. His finger traced the river's course but could not find the town where his son must now be standing. So what was Kookie doing there? Was it true, Pickard wondered? Would the Queen of England truly be passing today through Roper Junction, Missouri? No: if Kookie and a bunch of actors were involved, it was a piece of invention, for sure. Promoting a play, maybe. Or fooling some
grandissimo
into bankrolling the company. Hence the invented Noboddi. If Kookie had needed help, he would have made himself plainer. “Don't do anything stupid, son,” murmured Pickard. He dared not tell his wife: either she would get as worried as he, or she would want a new hat and a rail ticket to go and scour Missouri for a glimpse of Queen Victoria.

“Any word from the Bright Lights?” asked Mrs. Warboys from the doorway.

Pickard crumpled up the ticker tape. “Nothing today, my love, but you know what they say: no news is good news.”

“Why
do
they say that?” Mrs. Warboys said. “It's never been true.”

The royal train halted at signals outside Roper Junction. Henry tried not to be seen checking his pocket watch, but everyone knew there was no time left for unforeseen delays.

“Now, Cissy, remember what Mr. Crew said,” Miss March fussed. “Confine yourself to those little phrases Mr. Henry has taught you. A wave of the hand. An inclining of the head. Let Mr. Crew do the rest. He is the actor.”

Oskar chimed in: “You an old lady, Missy Cissy. No one don' arx nothin' of no old-lady queen.”

Sweeting agreed. “Yeah. Let Everett string them greeners.”

“
Be great in act, as you have been in thought,”
Curly declaimed, taking hold of Cissy's hands.

“Wish these signals would change,” muttered George, reaching for his watch and remembering, for the fiftieth time, that he had lost it in the river.

The train gave a violent lurch and rolled forward. The royal entourage squeezed through into the second coach—”
Good luck, Missy Cissy!”
—leaving the Queen and Prime Minister and American Ambassador to a lonely dignity in the lead coach.

“You give 'em what for, Missy Cissy!”

“Co robimy? Niemam mojej deski,”
said Max, who was under the impression that they were about to put on a show.

“At least we'll die with harness on our back!”

Everett shot to his feet with clenched fists and bawled,
“Curlitz, do me an immeasurable favor, will you, and stop quoting from danged
Macbeth
!”

(He was, after all, an actor.)

Returning to the jailhouse to report to Cyril, Kookie was almost cheerful. But when he called out under the prison window—”Mr. Crew! Mr. Cyril Crew? Listen up!”—there was no answer.

Figures were hurrying past the end of the alleyway, all in the direction of the station—“They're here! She's coming!”—but Kookie was too busy looking for something to stand on so as to see in at the cell window. When he finally found a galvanized bucket, turned it upside down, and stood on it, tiptoe, he peered in on an empty cell. A screw of blanket, a torn jacket, a strewing of shorn hair all said that the condemned man had been fetched away by his executioners.

Everett got down first. At least he scrambled as far as the bottom of the steps. It was impossible to get any farther. The train was besieged.

Nowhere is there a truer bunch of Stars-and-Stripes, democratic Americans than in Roper Junction. Yet the rumor of visiting royalty brought them out like ants at a picnic. In ten years of selling tickets, the man in the railway-station booth had never sold so many tickets. Someone had even strung bunting across railway property. With elbows out, with umbrellas, parasols, and walking sticks to hand, the town's citizens crammed the platform as the little two-carriage train came in.

“What in blue blazes is going on?” demanded the bank manager, passing the station gate, but the porter he asked was standing on his handcart, craning to see over the heads of the crowd.

The Mayor himself could not make his way through the crowd until the Sheriff fired his pistol to get everyone's attention. The Queen—who had just appeared in the carriage doorway—flinched visibly. The crowd roared its disapproval and the Sheriff was jostled, the pistol snatched out of his hand.

The Mayor was flustered: he had been cleaning his boots, ready for the hanging, when he heard the news, and had just realized that his hands were covered in brown polish. “
Welcome! Welcome, ma'am!”
he called, still worming his way toward the front of the crowd. “'Pologies for that. Hope my Sheriff didn't alarm you.”

Crew stepped forward to deflect the question. “Not at all, sir. It is just that some anarchist took a shot at Her Majesty recently and the sound of pistols still . . .
excites her. . . . How very good of you all to turn out. However did you—”

“Good day,” said Queen Victoria, taking one step down.

Delighted, the Mayor reached out a hand, remembered the boot polish, and withdrew it. Their hands dodged each other. “Hoon! Mayor Hoon! Hector Hoon, Mayor of this fine town!”

The occupants of the second carriage were causing a stir. Two black men in straw boaters were an exoticism they had not been expecting. A third appeared soon after, still tying his tie.

“Her Majesty is making a
private
tour of the area,” said Everett. “Permit me to introduce Her Majesty's Prime Minister . . .”

“The Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone,” said Henry, being the only one who could remember the whole mouthful.

“And this here is my American Ambassador, Sir Everett,” the Queen chipped in, “and this here's the Polish one.”

“Przyjemne miasto. Och, chciałbym, mieć móją deskę!”

“This is Chancellor Curlitz, and these all—well, mustn't bore you—other bits of government. Those three yonder are my good friends Mr. Sweeting, Mr. Benet, and Mr. Oskar. They come to my place in Windsor a couple of years back with Mr. Hatherley's Traveling Minstrel Show, and they told me
sooo
much about Missouri and the river 'n' all that I fair longed to see it for myself. Ask them nice and they may give you a song later. So if we could just squeeze on through . . . ?”

The Prime Minister and the American Ambassador looked at each other, rattled by the unexpected crowds, nonplussed by Cissy's sudden willingness to speak. Mayor Hoon wiped his palms vigorously on the seat of his trousers and shook the Queen warmly by the hand. “Oof, Mr. Mayor Hoon, mind the artheritees,” said the Queen. Then the crowd drew in its stomachs, children, and skirts and made way for Victoria, Queen of England, and for various bits of her government and minstrelsy, all four hundred falling in behind, like a school of dolphins following a yacht.

“Ain't she tiny” someone could be heard to say.

“Heard tell she was,” said another. “Child sized, I heard.”

“Kinda round, too.”

“Muffins,” said some sage scholar of English practices. “Eat wagonloadsa muffins, them English.”

The tour took in the church and the bank, the school and the civic assembly rooms (though it said
DANCE HALL
over the door). It stopped at the cloth and wool shop. . . .

“What did she say? What did she ask you?”

“Asked me what's the colora damson. ‘What color would you call damson?' she said to me. Be able to tell my grandchildren: Queen of England once asked me what color's damson!”

And the fairground:

“Such a pity there is no fair, Mayor Hoon. We are partial to candy apples at Ballymoral.”

It paused at the newspaper offices for a photograph of the entire royal party with Mayor, Sheriff, corn merchant, editor, and assorted wives. The wives spent the time urgently whispering to one another about what they ought to present to the Queen as a memento of her visit. It was exactly what the Queen wanted to overhear. Now she would be able to ask for the pardon and release of Cyril Crew.

“I see no barbershop,” George observed.

“No! Sorry. Barber died of the sweating sickness back in eighty-one. Sorry. Was Her Majesty looking to . . .”

“No, I don't shave, and I don't hold with bloodletting. They got new treatments out East, you know? George is my trade person. He's runnin' a survey, is all,” the Queen explained.

They moved on to the hotel:

“I fear I cannot stay over the night, can I, Chancellor Curlitz?”

“No, ma'am. The President is expecting us.”

“Oh it's all right, Sheriff. Don't you go worrying on my account. There's a little bed on the train with two mattresses and a toothmug with a thing on it—lion and a unicorn.”

Even the grain silo benefited from a royal visit. The Queen seemed overwhelmed with emotion for a moment by the Roper Junction grain silo, and the American Ambassador stepped closer in case she was going to faint. “You take care of that,” said Queen Victoria at last. “I know some lovely people back in London got flattened by one of those.” Every word she spoke was relayed backward through the crowd in a surf surge of whispers. On this occasion, the women all gasped and put hands to their mouths and looked up at the tip of the grain silo and said, “How awful.” Ambassador Everett took the Queen's arm and escorted her across the dark band of shadow cast by the silo. The shadow was long. The sun was in decline.

The Sheriff and Mayor Hoon put their heads together in murmured panic. “. . . hardly a fittin' sight for . . .”

“But people come specially to see it . . .”

“ . . . can postpone till tomorrow, surely . . .”

“But we already shaved and tied him!”

Cissy felt Everett Crew's arm go rigid inside hers. She squeezed it as hard as she knew how.

The Sheriff and Mayor Hoon had just agreed between them to hide the execution from the Queen's delicate gaze when a boy with startled red hair rushed the royal party and asked Victoria, “You staying on for the hangin', Majesty?” Kookie added with massive emphasis: “Because it's
happening
NOW
!”

The Queen stopped dead. The crowd behind piled into each other: a raucous starling flock of noise. Flushed with embarrassment, the Sheriff dispatched the boy with the toe of his boot. The crowd was torn by the desire to be in two places at one time.

The Sheriff selected the nicest words to phrase it—like choosing chocolates. “A felon is due to receive his just reward this evening, Your Majesty. Of the throttling variety.”

“But we'll keep it discreet!” Mayor Hoon put in hastily.

“Oh, pray don't!” snapped Everett, catching every-one off guard. “Her Majesty takes a keen interest in the administration of justice.” Then he forged ahead, in the direction the boy with red hair was heading. The Queen had to break into a trot.

And there it was, as if to make it all real—the stage on which the last act of the tragedy was to be played out. The scaffold. The noose.

The happy crowd was in fiesta mood by this time. They fell quiet only when Cyril Crew was brought out, but their silence was an eager, breathless excitement. His hands tied behind his back, his glory of white hair shorn down to the roots, he stumbled slightly on the sidewalk steps. A tetchy wind was catching and snatching at clothes, at bunting, at hats, at dust and street litter. The crowd looked jumpy with excitement, lids narrowed against the dust, slipping their eyes to and fro, wanting to watch both Queen and prisoner, wanting to see how queens behave at hangings. They were proud. They were proud like cats laying a chewed mouse at the feet of their visitor and looking for praise.