The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (4 page)

Miss May March had harangued the sheriff of Salvation so hard that he had shortened Curly's sentence by four days and released him, just to get her off his doorstep. On and on she had raged about “sacred English literature,” “small-minded, small-town busybodies,” and “wilful ignorance.” Even Curly had been unable to poke a quotation in edgewise. As a result, he was on his way home to the bosom of the Bright Lights Theater Company. As he explained to everyone who would listen, he was now not merely the ticket seller: he was front-of-house/accounting/publicity/prompt/refreshments/property-manager/walk-on actor.

“Well, of course, I shall be on my way to my mother's in Des Moines, just as soon as I've delivered these children . . . ,” said Miss May March, unwilling to stray onto the insalubrious subject of acting.

“There it is!” Curly cried delightedly, breaking into a trot and pointing ahead with the umbrella.
“The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne.
”

And there it was, indeed.

The poop was not of beaten gold, nor were the oars of silver, but the stranded boat was certainly a sight to see: a sight fit to stop Shakespeare dead in his tracks. Like the ziggurat of some long-dead civilization, the paddle steamer lay fringed around with vegetation, its full extent uncertain beyond the shifting curtain of rain: fifty tons of wood, rising in three grimy, mold-stained tiers toward the pilothouse, the twin prongs of its metal chimney stacks and the single curlicued word propped up on the roof:
CALLIOPE
. A single light glimmered on the hurricane deck, but the hiss of the rain obliterated any other sign of life.

“Ahoy there!
Calliope!
Room aboard for a few drowned rats?” shouted Curly, his voice squeaking with happiness.

“Is that its name?” said Miss May, peaking her hands over her eyes to keep out the rain. “Are you sure?”

“That's what's writ on it, miss,” said Kookie patiently, gratified that here was a world where schoolteachers knew nothing useful at all.

Up close,
Calliope
was not quite so big. She was not one of the great Mississippi cruise steamers, which had once carried hosts of passengers up and down the country to the sound of large orchestras and a forest of trees burning in the engine furnaces. Just as the Numchuck was a lesser version of the Missouri or Mississippi, so the
Calliope
was built with less ambition. But some time before the flood, it had been a beautiful craft, lovingly turned out. The refugees shinnied over the bull rails, scattering their bags and baggage on the deck, then climbed to the deck above. At the head of the ladder, a figure in a loose dress peered down into the gloom, struggling to make out who they were. To Cissy, she looked like an angel checking the rungs on Jacob's ladder. All that red hair; those red gloves frayed at the fingers' ends; the comforting shape of the pearl-handled pistol tucked high up above her waist.

“Oh, Miss Loucien!” cried Cissy, tripping over her own skirt, stumbling up the last few steps of the ladder and into the arms of her best friend in the world. Saltwater spurted miraculously from eyes that had not shed one tear, and out of her throat came the most unearthly, banshee wail.
“Oh, Miss Loucien, it's all gone! Everything's gone!
Ma's as crazy as rabies and Sarah Waters is dead of the diphtheria and Poppy's all beat up 'cause Fuller dropped the silo on us, and everything's smashed to hell, and I'm not to go to school even when the plague's over—an' Pa's busted past redemption, an' I never learned the end of ‘The Lady of Shalott,' an' I missed you SOOO MUCH!”

At the mention of diphtheria, the gloved hands gripped Cissy's shoulders and pushed her sharply away, so that her head snapped back on her shoulders; a leak from the deckhead splashed directly in her face. She found herself looking up into features wearier than she had remembered them, wearier and more anxious.

Then someone turned up the wick in those big lilac eyes, and fold upon fold of the cheesecloth dress enveloped Cissy, and cheesecloth sleeves drew her close. “Well, looky here, Everett—everybody,” murmured the voice. “We got visitors from our former lives—when times were easy and the beds were hard. Someone put on a kettle of water, and let's share some news. Is that what we'll do, folks? Is it?”

Crouching with her face pressed hard in against Miss Loucien's front, Cissy was dimly aware that the teacher's familiar curvy uplands had been joined by a bigger hill lower down. After a moment's thought, it was her turn to pull away.

“Sacray blue, Miss Loucien! It wasn't Annie May at all! It's you that's 'specting the baby!”

Chapter Four
Calliope

T
wice a year, the Missouri rises. As it drinks down spring meltwater or summer rain, it loses its head and runs amok. It swells and throbs like the nightmares in Hulbert Sissney's feverish head. Forgetting the maps drawn up by fastidious river pilots, ignoring the dry, baked levees, it simply gets up and stretches itself. Overspilling its banks, unpicking its neat embroidery of tributaries—tributaries like the Numchuck River—it spreads out over the landscape, engulfing water meadows, swamps, landing stages, and riverside highways. It is an unstoppable surge of chocolate-brown water lumpy with storm litter, staking its claim to everything. And when it has made its point, and withdrawn, it leaves behind flotsam, like a drunkard's tip on the bar: tree stumps, shack roofs, dead cattle, cartwheels. Even boats.

That is how the wreck came to be sitting in a field. After prodigious storms upriver, the ship had broken its tethers, been swept off its moorings, and spun helplessly across a flooded river bend, coming to rest on a spit of land that had two days earlier been dry meadow. As the flood receded, the steamer had settled, like a dinosaur's skeleton in a tar pit, the paddle wheel at its stern snapped from the drive shafts, its frail hull cleaving to every mound and hollow of the ground.

Its fate went unnoticed by the owner of the field, who had died of pneumonia a day or two before. Only his goats and chickens knew of it: they sheltered there from the tail end of the storm. Rats and skunks quickly reconnoitered its three tiers, but apart from them, nobody knew about the ship. The dreary trees, hunching around like a circle of friends, conspired to hide it from sight. For a matter of weeks, neither the town of Salvation nor passing traffic on the river even knew it was there.

It was Salvation's children who sniffed it out. It was they who told Cyril Crew.

Finding no one wanted Shakespeare in Salvation, the manager of the Bright Lights Theater Company had mounted a pantomime for the town's children. Cyril Crew had a soft spot for children; they were always so ready to steal from their parents' pocketbooks in order to see a show. These ones were no exception. In their wild enthusiasm, swarming over the improvised stage, trying on costumes and playing with property swords, one or two happened to mention the stern-wheeler beached in a field about a mile down the river.

Ah!
Free lodgings
, thought Cyril, counting the cents, bottle tops, and shirt buttons in the collection dish.

And now the Bright Lights mounted another play—on the spot—to welcome the new arrivals. (Miss May March tried to insist they shouldn't.) It was a piece Cyril Crew had written based on “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The five members of the audience had to spread newspaper on their chairs to soak up the damp; the storm outside rattled loose boards against the saloon wall.

But the magic held.

Cissy's dreams had not deceived her. The actors' big booming voices in the big booming space of the saloon deckhouse drowned out the noise of wind and
rain. The story pulled her free of her weariness and worry as if she had jumped clean out of herself and landed way over in Calaveras County.

Revere was still so handsome, with his little whippety hips and sailor's blue eyes! Egil could do such interesting things with his face, as well as stand on his head without using his hands! Finn could play seven different people just by changing his accent. And though Cyril's gestures were big and wild, and Curly delivered all his lines as if Shakespeare had written them, Cyril's brother Everett's voice still poured through her like chocolate, and Miss Loucien—the new, extra-added Miss Loucien—still swooped around, graceful as a bluebird. When the champion jumping frog was fed ball bearings before the competition to weigh it down, Cissy laughed for the first time in at least a hundred years.

And when the play ended, she was slow to speak, unwilling to part with the magic of the past minutes. . . .

“
Can I be your new actress, Mr. Crew? Can I?
” The words fell into Cissy's ear like acid. She looked up and saw Tibbie Boden flash her pretty smile up into the theater manager's face as she asked again and again: “Can
I
be your new ingenoo?”

“Yeah!” cried Kookie. “Tibbie's pretty enough for Broadway!”

Cissy was filled with the desire to smash her damp chair over Kookie's head. She felt herself weighed down, pinned to the ground with disappointment, like an oversized frog stuffed with ball bearings. Could fame and happiness really be snatched so swiftly away?

“Tibbie, hon,” said Miss Loucien cheerfully, “if it don't stop raining soon, you'd be better off growing fins and making a career as a fish.” Then her lilac eyes flicked in Cissy's direction, and she gave a wink as swift as a gambler palming a card.

That night, Cissy lay wrapped in a mildewed curtain and listened to the river rush urgently past to its tryst with the sea. She pictured herself riding into Olive Town one day aboard Cleopatra's barge. (The railway sidings had somehow liquefied into a new tributary of the Mississippi.) She was standing on a raised platform, waving an arm gloved to the elbow in purple satin. From the bank, Mrs. Fudd (wearing a starched shop apron) cried excitedly, “Damson! Damson! Those gloves are the very color!” And Cissy the World-Famous Actress drew them off and threw them ashore, tossing her long and (oddly golden) hair and saying, “Have them—I have plenty more like them in Rome!”

Then a noise started up a couple of fathoms below her head—as of giant rats, big as beavers, gnawing through the hull. After that, she lay awake all night, clutching Curly's umbrella to her like the sword of an antique stone knight on a church sepulcher, but twice as cold.

“Picture it, my dears!” said Cyril Crew. “A showboat! A floating treasure-house of the performing arts! A wandering theater, taking drama to the people!”

The rain washed over the wooden roof in pulsing waves, playing a different pitch on the stern deck saloon, the Texas, and on forward to the gangplank at the prow.

“Well, I must be getting on. My mother in Des Moines is expecting me,” said Miss May March. In fact, she was effectively pinned in place by the weather and could go nowhere. But as soon as they started to talk of theater, she left the saloon as if in fear of infection.

“We have to be realistic,” said Cyril's brother regretfully. “Showboats are all washed up.”

“What,
all
of them?” Tibbie peered out through the dirt-caked windows, expecting to see a whole fleet of showboats beached alongside.

“The railroads did them in. Business turned away from the river. The rivers used to be the only way around this side of the world: north to south. Des Moines to New Orleans. Now people who want to get anywhere just board a train and make it inside the day. They can get to the big cities for theater. Even the water rats have turned sophisticate these days. No, the sun has set, I'm afraid, on the showboats and river palaces.”

Clearly this argument had been turned over as often as a wet pillow while the Bright Lights sat around, waiting for Curly to be released from jail. But the faded, jaded magnificence of
Calliope
encouraged foolish ambitious daydreams; Cissy and Kookie were quickly caught up by the possibility of joining a floating theater company.

“You could have dances! A band! A circus, even!” cried Cissy.

“Acrobats! Magicians! Chantoosies!”

“Kookie!” Tibbie looked shocked. “Chantoosies indeed! What would Miss May say?”

Kookie was about to describe how little he cared what Miss May thought, when the lady herself came back into the stateroom. Her hair was wetly slicked down against her head, and her bangs dripped. “I would say
chanteuses
,” she said reflectively, in a refined French accent. But her mind was not on saloon singers or even French pronunciation. Her mind was on the roof of the Texas. “
Calliope,”
she said in a sleepy, thoughtful murmur. “You truly think that's the name of the boat?”

“Looks that way, ma'am,” said Curly through a mouthful of pins.

The rain slid the leaves around on the outside of the windows. Curly was mending costumes. Powers was sketching waterborne sailboats. Cyril was busy writing a new play for St. Louis if ever they raised the fare to get there.

“Are you quite
sure
?” said Miss March, and there was a plaintive note in her voice.

When the rain eased, they carried a chair up to the Texas.

Chad Powers climbed up onto the roof, where the huge placard stood bearing the single word
CALLIOPE
. What else could it be, after all, but a nameboard for the ship?

Behind the notice rose up an array of little pipes.

“The vents from the boilers, surely,” said Finn.

“Look more like organ pipes to me,” said Chad.

“Why's it called Texas?” asked Kookie.

“Beats me, Kooks. Maybe from up here y'can see as far as Texas on a clear day,” suggested Loucien, holding her aching back.

Miss March made a noise of quiet self-satisfaction, like a duck smacking up duckweed. “A calliope, yes! I cannot wait to tell my mother. It is just as I thought! Yes! What a waste! What a shocking waste! If only we had it back at school!”

Kookie nudged Cissy in the ribs and whispered, “Must be a style of cooker, then. For roasting children.”

It was only the discovery of the calliope steam piano that made them venture as far as the boat's engine room. During all their stay on board, the Bright Lights had never braved it, because, despite Cyril's daydreaming, they had never seriously thought of putting out on the swollen, heaving river. (And there is no point in starting up the engines of a boat stranded in the middle of a field.) But finding themselves possessed of a steam piano made everyone hanker after some steam to power it.

“Couldn't we try for just a
little
puff?” Mr. Curly had said, noting the sparkle of excitement in Miss May's eye. “
The man that hath no music in himself is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils.”

Revere was adamant they should not. Revere had been a sailor before his acting days, and in his opinion, a lit steam boiler was “a bomb looking for somewhere to go off.” He lagged behind, laden with gloom, as they descended ladders and struggled aft along companionways blocked with storm debris and crates, to the engine room. Cissy (who had heard all that nighttime gnawing) stayed put in the saloon with Tibbie and Miss Loucien.

As they reached the stern of the boiler deck, dragged open the swollen, buckled boiler-room door, and stepped down three metal rungs into the unlit stokehole, a noise greeted them that made Finn's foot slip off the rung of the ladder, catching Everett a blow in the head; in falling off, Everett dislodged Chad—
”What the—?”
—who fell on top of Kookie.

The scuffling coming from the boiler was far too big to be a single rat. Was it perhaps a colony of rats—or a pig belonging to the dead farmer, trapped, unable to get out, and even now crazed by hunger? The pile of men on the floor picked themselves up extremely fast, and Kookie grabbed a log of wood from the fuel pile.

“Maybe it's an alligator!” he suggested. “Maybe it got on out of the swamps, down Deep South way!”

There was another scuffling sound from inside the boiler, and despite himself, Chad Powers started back up the ladder. A shape not unlike that of an alligator slid out of the boiler's round door, then rose onto its tail end.

“Do you feel it?” said the alligator. “She's on the move again.”