The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (3 page)

When the dust cleared, Cissy still stood immobile, the sheet of writing paper aflutter in her hand, collecting brown dust out of the air. A burning rope wriggled at her feet, like a snake. In front of her, the silo lay on its side, intact. But of Cissy's home and livelihood nothing remained but a hole in the air. Wanting to fill up the hole—to undo the unbearable—she tried to picture exactly how it had looked before she set off for the schoolhouse. But the only thing Cissy could truly remember was the check of the tablecloth where she had eaten supper with her family.

Chapter Three
The Exiles

I
t's the mark of the Beast,” said Hildy Sissney.

She meant the red paint stain in the center of Cissy's apron. The people who had found her standing in the street—unmoving, unspeaking—thought she had been hit by debris, impaled by some flying pickaxe or set of kitchen knives. Her mother knew better. “Mark of the Beast: that's what that is.”

As far as Mrs. Sissney was concerned, the long finger of God had expunged the Olive Town Store. Hildy had been engulfed by the booming, hollow dark of the silo. It had swallowed her, like the whale swallowing Jonah. Not for her the scarlet stain of sin. The only serious injury she had sustained was a purple-ridged bruise to her abdomen, caused by the Bible she kept, unread, in her apron pocket. To Hildy Sissney (whose mind was swinging like a door in the wind) the sign could not be plainer. Cissy had been daubed by the Devil, but she herself had been poked in the belly by God. The Living Word had delivered a blow to her solar plexus that had emptied her of breath but filled her with the spirit of holiness. She spoke in tongues, most of them angry and shrill, but at least she did not need consoling. Hildy was filled with the zeal of the Lord, and she had no need of knitting yarn, cooking pots, or a bed to sleep in. Even daughters were a thing that somehow belonged to an older, more sinful life.

“Where's Poppy?” asked Cissy. Neighbors were gathering up bits and pieces from the roadway—a spoon, a ball of string, a saucepan, an onion. “Where's my pa?” said Cissy. “Where's Kookie and Tibs?”

Kind Mrs. Warboys from the telegraph office wrapped her in a blanket, and her husband picked Cissy up as if she were a baby. “Kookie was back at our place, thank the Lord, and Tibbie's with him. It's a mercy you were outside as well.”

“But where's Poppy?” said Cissy.

Fuller Monterey, for the devil of it, had removed the wedges under the silo and set fire to one of the ropes securing it. But the sheriff made no arrest. Before nightfall, Fuller came down with diphtheria, like his brother; and people never care to speak ill of the ill.

So they turned their wrath instead on Chad Powers, whose plans to move the silo had gone so catastrophically wrong. He was instantly fired from the umbrella factory, and one of his prairie sailboats was found the next morning burned down to its axles.

Hulbert Sissney might have leaped to Chad's defense—he hated to see blame put on a man like a saddle, “because there's no other horse to hand.” But, as Cissy found, to her frantic grief, Hulbert was lying in the back room of the barber's shop, both legs broken and his head thickly swathed in bandages.

Fuller's diphtheria sealed the fate of the school, which did not open its doors the next morning. Any child with relations elsewhere was packed off on the train until the epidemic was over.

Hildy Sissney knew that God would be sending five more plagues along any minute for sure, and sat watching for them to arrive, like a child on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa. They asked her where Cissy should be sent—to what relation or trustworthy friend—but Hildy's only trustworthy friend, at that moment, was Jesus, and she did not have a sound postal address for Him.

“I could always go to Salvation,” said Cissy, thinking aloud. To Hildy, Salvation sounded next door to Jesus.

“Yea, Lord! She shall! She shall go to Salvation!” she cried and, considering the matter settled, put Cissy quite out of mind.

The neighbors, though, were not happy about it. They were less willing than her mother to put a lone, vulnerable child onto a train bound for a rumor of a place on the Missouri River.

“No, no,” said kind Mrs. Warboys. “You and Tibbie can mess in with us, darling. Where you can fit nine, you can fit eleven, if everyone breathes in.”

Hulbert, meanwhile, lay in Charlie Quex's back room with an old pair of cavalry field glasses near at hand, so that he could watch the space on Main Street where his home had once stood—watch it for signs of regrowth. His nightmares were filled with noise and pain and panic as he relived the disaster over and over again. But while he was awake, he gave great thought to his daughter and the need to get her away. “If I can just keep her safe . . . ,” he kept repeating, as if she were the last and most precious item of stock spared by the collapsing store.

“I can't leave you, Poppy,” she told him. “You need me here to look after you!”

“I'd rather have you back safe when there's a roof for you to live under, chicken. Mrs. Warboys comes in every day to feed me, and Charlie is keeping me shaved. Now if we can just fix up somewhere for you to go . . . I'm sending you and your mother to stay with your grandmother—just till the excitement's left her. You and she . . .” The rictus that tugged at Hulbert's face was meant to be a smile.

“Oh please, Poppy! No! Not Grandma Gorgon! Please! She'd be sure an' say everything was my fault!”

For a moment they sat in silence, pretending Cissy had not called her grandmother a gorgon, each racking their brains to find something nicer to call her without actually lying.

“Not Grandma, then?”

“Not Grandma,
please,
Poppy!”

“
I'll
take her, Mr. Sissney.
I'll
take Cissy and Tibs to a place of safety!”

It was Kookie. He was holding himself very erect, so as to look taller than his height, and against the low morning sunshine in the doorway, it gave him a look of martyred heroism. (He knew this, because he had checked it out in the barber's brass-rimmed mirror.) Cissy's heart fluttered a little within her.

“Kind of ya, son,” said Hulbert gently. “Reckon you might be up to rescuing a responsible adult while you're at it? No disrespect, but I'd feel easier in my mind if an adult went along with you to this place of safety.” Kookie wilted a little. “Miss May March might be willing. Send her to me, and I'll ask her.” Kookie wilted even more. In his experience, adventurers rarely took their schoolteachers along on quests into the unknown.

“Take them
where
?”

Miss May March was a Christian soul and took her responsibilities as teacher very seriously indeed. But the thought of evacuating her charges to a riverbank somewhere in Missouri and handing them into the care of “Miss Loucien” and a bunch of strolling actors . . . well, that seemed quite the opposite of a Christian duty. She had met the former schoolteacher once; the memory alarmed Miss March even more than Miss Loucien's awful spelling or the liveliness of her letters. All that red hair, those curving uplands and hand gestures! No! Seeking out the shelter of the Bright Lights Theater Company would be like running in under a burning tree to keep out of the rain. Something inside her twisted up at the very thought.

On the outside, only her lips pursed tight. “If you're sure that is what you wish, Mr. Sissney.”

“Cissy thinks the world of those acting folk,” said Hulbert, trying to take the schoolmarm's hand but misjudging the distance. “And she's not wrong. I'd trust Loucien and Everett Crew with the eyes outa my head, and that's the truth.”

The idea had come to him in the middle of the night, when a man with a head wound has all his best and worst ideas. He should not have quenched his daughter's dreams, he told himself now. He should never have consented to taking her out of school! Sooner than extinguish her spark of Promethean fire, he should have let her run wild, like a bronco, across the lush green paddocks of the world!

“You should never have given him that whiskey for pain-killin',” Mrs. Fudd told Mr. Warboys. “Hildy's kept him strictly teetotal. He ain't used to it.”

But whether Hulbert's idea was the result of concussion, whiskey, or a temperature of 104 degrees, the upshot was that Miss May March found she had agreed to deliver Cissy Sissney and Tibbie Boden into the care of the Bright Lights Theater Company in a shipwreck somewhere along a tributary of the Missouri, called the Numchuck River.

Kookie simply invited himself along.

They were not the only passengers to board the Red Rock Runner when it pulled in to Olive Town Station. Chad Powers, hampered with cardboard tubes, an artist's portfolio, a spare crutch, and his arm in a sling, had to make several attempts before
fitting himself through the train door.

“You 'scaping the diphtheria too, Mr. Powers?” asked Kookie.

“Me, I'm just escaping,” said Chad Powers, his face a picture of fright and confusion. That was when the children noticed that the townsfolk assembled on the platform were actually hissing behind their teeth, hissing Powers out of town. Someone even threw an egg.

Inside the carriage, teacher, children, and inventor stared transfixed as the yellow yolk slid slowly down the glass—a small putrid sun setting on Chad Powers's career. No one commented on the egg. Tibbie, who had a horror of scenes, took off her glasses, the better not to see it.

“I shall be continuing on to Des Moines, myself, to visit my invalid mother,” said Miss March, pulling down the window blind with sudden violence. “Where are you headed, Mr. Powers?”

“Somewhere I'm not known,” he said, and turned his face to the wall.

“You should come with us to Salvation!” said Kookie. “You could join the theater, maybe!

Cissy stared at Kookie. So did Mr. Powers, unmanned by this sudden kindness. But talk of the Bright Lights had Miss March on her third tirade of the morning.

“Now, this is strictly a
temporary
arrangement, children. I've told you already: I want to hear no talk of theatricals. If your—ahem—
friends
—were not resting from their disgraceful line of work, I could not
possibly
place you in their care. I do hope that is clearly understood. We go in search purely of shelter from the hurricanes of misfortune. If I find this . . .
encampment
of theirs is unsuitable, I shall have no choice but to take you with me to my invalid mother in Des Moines.”

The train, in starting to move, jerked Tibbie Boden into the knowledge that she was leaving behind her father, her town, and everything familiar and friendly. She ran back down the train to the rear platform and stood coughing up tears and protests and regrets. Cissy and Kookie ran after her. The little settlement of Olive Town shrank away from them into the distance, as though they had offended it by leaving.

“There are rats in Salvation, Miss Loucien says,” Cissy whispered to Kookie.

“Didn't read out the bit about the rats,” said Kookie. “When I read the letter in class. Thought it might color Miss March against the Bright Lights.”

So
that
had been why a single page had lain in the wastepaper basket. Not for the first time, Cissy was filled with admiration for the sharp thoughts inside Kookie's spiky-haired head. She had never thought of censoring the letters as she read them out in class. “Do I hate Chad Powers?” she asked him, suddenly needing advice.

Kookie shrugged and pulled his hands up the
sleeves of his shirt. “Couldn't say. He draws spack-facious trains and boats and chariots and the like.”

“And it wasn't his fault really, was it? It
was
Fuller's doin', really. Wasn't it? The store getting flattened?”

“Mad son of a—” Kookie began to say of Fuller, but he turned instead and went back inside the train.

If it had not been for Curly's prison sentence, Miss March would never have known where to start looking. She and the children might have traipsed upriver and down without ever finding the “shipwreck.” As it was, they headed straight for the Salvation town jail, standing on tiptoe in the alley alongside, to peep in at the high, barred window.

So the first happy sight Cissy saw, a week after the demolition of her life, was the top of Curly's bald head shining beyond the prison bars. It looked like the classroom globe, and she wanted so much to give it a spin, for luck.

“How's things, Curly?” shouted Kookie, too excited to keep his voice low.

Curly slopped his coffee and looked up at them through bent spectacles.
“The worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst
,
'”
he intoned.

“We've come visiting!” roared Kookie. “Everyone's got diphtheria back home, and school's closed and Cissy and Tibbie's got no place to live, so Miss May's brung us to join the Bright Lights—we had to change trains four times! And this is Chad Powers, who come along for the ride. Where's this shipwreck, then?”

“Kindly allow
me
to communicate, Habakkuk,” said Miss March reprovingly, but Curly was already at the window, dispensing quotations like rosettes. He and Miss March shook hands through the bars, while she explained about her mother in Des Moines and how she would not be stopping. Since Miss March was no taller than Cissy, prisoner and teacher were able to see only each other's foreheads, and with their free hands, they brushed away sewage flies from their faces, only to feel them resettle time and again, like kisses.

When Miss March asked him to lead the way to the shipwreck, Curly apologized: “Sadly, lady, I'm in here and you're out there—on account of the profanity.”

“And did you speak profanities, Mr. Curlitz?” she replied, tight-lipped.

“Certainly not! I spoke the words of the Bard of Avon! But ‘mountainous error be too highly heap'd for truth to o'erpeer.' That's to say, they didn't understand I was speaking Shakespearean—thought I was blaspheming.”

“Then let us correct the error, Mr. Curlitz,” said Miss March decidedly. “Would you care for a coffee bean?”

It was a tedious walk downriver, their path often blocked by bulrushes as tall as their heads, and by big hunks of driftwood washed up by the last flood. It was made more tedious by a fine, mizzling rain. Their boots sank into the soft black soil, and the footprints, as they pulled their feet free, filled up with shining brown water. The trees changed to a uniform, ghostly gray and hissed like the people at Olive Town Station running Powers out of town. The bulky luggage seemed ridiculous and irrelevant. Who, in this sodden waterworld, would ever need a change of petticoat, a portfolio, a book, a sunhat, a crutch? Curly tried his best to shelter Miss March under her umbrella, but the spokes only snagged on the vegetation and brought extra water cascading off the leaves. At one point a water rat ran across their feet and plopped into the river. At another, a section of bank subsided into the water like a suicide despairing.