The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen Read online

  Another boat was requisitioned, and the search party started out across the water, their oars leaving dimples in the gleaming surface.

  “We are contagious, as my wife told you!” called Everett through cupped hands. The quartet tuned up for a melancholy song. Miss March tore the collar off her blouse and put it on her head like a nurse’s cap.

  “Please don’t incriminate yourself, May,” urged Curly. “Not on our account. Remember your mother in Des Moines.”

  “We are in this together!” said Miss May March, and rummaged in the property box for an apron. “Besides, it was I who threw that wretched dog . . . hello, what’s this?” It was the velvet choker they had all grown accustomed to seeing around the Dog Woman’s throat. Its crystal buttons glittered malevolently. Could this be the “stolen property” the Sheriff had been sent to look for?

  The flaw in Loucien’s plan lay in the nature of sweating sickness. There was so much of it along the Numchuck River that people lived with it. They might not know where it came from or how to cure it, but it was not catching, mouth to mouth, sneeze to sneeze, hand to hand, soil pit to dining table. The sweating sickness killed children and old folk from time to time, but it was not the Black Death or cholera. So the Sheriff’s search crew came on, unafraid. Now, though, thanks to the loss of his launch, the Sheriff was in the mood to shoot anyone who so much as looked at him sideways. Flicking a rope over the bull rail of the Sunshine Queen, he stood up, pistol drawn.

  He was confronted by a ghost of a girl, about ten years old, in nothing but her short shift, arms and legs bare, hair pulled up on top of her head. Her face, her neck, her limbs, her chest were smothered in a vivid, purpling rash that made the Sheriff’s men screw their faces into a communal ouch. She reached out to him a velvet choker decorated with crystal buttons.

  “The Dog Woman from Boston gave me this,” she said in a voice straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. “That’s what did me in, I reckon,” and real tears welled in her eyes. “Why’d she do that, mister? Why’d she want to give me the sickness?” A tear crawled awkwardly between the bumps on her cheeks.

  “That ain’t sweating sickness,” said the Sheriff, sinking down again onto the thwart of the boat, leaving the spotted wraith holding out the choker. “How many of you is sick?”

  The girl shrugged feebly. “Six? Seven? Little Johnny’s been took already.”

  The boat pushed off—pushed off with an oar, the Sheriff’s men not wanting to touch so much as the hull of the fever ship, for fear of that purpling rash. When she threw the choker down into the boat, they drew in their feet and let it lie.

  The Scottish engineer chose that moment to come up from the engine room, wiping his hands on a rag. “Could they no ha’ given me a ride back to the yard?” he said, peeved to see the boat speeding away, oars flailing.

  The Sunshine Queen clicked her tongue as steam explored her maze of pipes, metal expanded, and valves tentatively rose and fell. Her crew, by contrast, was silent and still as statues. The engineer thought he had stepped out into the middle of a stage tableau. Not until they heard the boat banging against the landing stage on the far side of the river did the Bright Lights Theater Company unfreeze and turn their faces toward Cissy.

  “That’s the bravest thing I ever seen,” breathed Kookie.

  “Moja biedna, mała akrobatka!”

  “What would your poor father say if he knew? What were you thinking of, Cecelia Sissney?”

  “She never slipped the lever over to ‘thinking,’ lady: she just gone ahead and done it.”

  “What she do? I never saw! Someone tell me. What?”

  Cissy by this time was shivering with cold and shock and pain. The tears rolled freely down her cheeks.

  “Never mind ‘brave.’ Where’s the calamine lotion?” Loucien came swooping with a bed sheet, engulfed Cissy in linen and love, and led her away to lie down.

  Loucien said it was the best piece of acting she had ever seen. She said there was not a broad on Broadway who would have been ready and willing to roll herself naked in nettles for the sake of her art.

  “Mr. Everett got shot once onstage,” whispered Cissy, trembling in every limb, her eyelids and lips puffy, her hands and feet swollen to twice their size.

  “Not voluntary he didn’t,” Loucien assured her, larding on calamine like icing over a wedding cake. “No two ways, child. You’re the genuine, solid-gold, thespian article!” And Cissy’s heart—which was fluttering very oddly already—swelled up like the rest of her, but with pride rather than formic acid.

  “How’d you do the crying bit?” asked Kookie later. In his role as Nancy, he had often wished he could do tears, but had no idea how to cry to order.

  “I just thought of Sarah Waters and the Monterey boys and Ma and Poppy and all,” Cissy confided. (Though she had to admit that the excruciating pain had helped quite a bit.)

  Luckily there was no mirror in her cabin and no sign of Tibbie Boden to tell her how hideous she looked covered in nettle burns and dried calamine lotion, but Cissy feared the worst. Had she won Kookie’s admiration only to be left looking like the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, lumpy with ball bearings? Now Tibbie would look all the more beautiful by comparison, and Kookie was so easily swayed by appearances. . . .

  Having opened the door to jealousy, Cissy felt so wretched that she opened the door wider and let it move in and get comfy. Would Tibbie of the golden hair and peachy skin have rolled herself in nettles for the good of the Bright Lights? Where had Tibs been with the “Thank you, Cissy!” “Well done, Cissy!” “Brave girl, Cissy!” “What an actress you are, Cissy!”? Nowhere!

  Next morning, Cissy was stung by a guilt almost as fierce as nettles. For Tibbie Boden was found on her cabin bed, still fully dressed from the day before, with a fever of 104, hallucinating about alligators and sweating like a steamship’s boiler. Thanks to the mosquitoes, Tibbie had contracted the genuine article: plain old sweating sickness, scourge of the Mississippi basin.

  Chapter Eleven

  Raising Cain

  George the barber-surgeon laid out his instru-ments on a cushion on his lap, pressing them down into deep hollows, so that they would not slide onto the floor while he wrestled with Tibbie Boden. Adults were generally pretty cooperative, but children always wrestled. Children did not grasp the science behind bleeding. Tibbie most definitely did not grasp it. Without her glasses and gripped with fever, she got the idea that George was a stage magician planning to saw her in half, a butcher intent on cutting her into joints. She screamed and sobbed and tossed her golden curls around until the ringlets snagged in the splintery bed frame.

  “They are trying new remedies out East,” said Chad Powers uneasily.

  Miss March was eager to believe him. She, too, was pacing up and down the cargo deck, having unsuccessfully forbidden George to lay a blade on Tibbie. She had said to his face: the idea was barbarous.

  “But I am a barber,” George pleaded unhappily. Not for the first time, he wished a barber’s job consisted only of shaving beards and cutting hair, without the need for scalpels or conversation.

  Chips the carpenter was particularly agitated and roamed around the boat with a mallet hammer, banging in any nail heads that were not absolutely flush, screws that had gone in crooked. Rotten wood and rusty finials fell away wherever he hammered—the Sunshine Queen could not stand up to rough treatment—but Chips was too distressed even to notice.

  “Has the sickness himself, see,” said Elijah, watching broodingly from the pilothouse. “Had it bad as a boy. Slowed him down a shade in the thinking department.”

  “Don’t look sick none now,” said Benet above the noise of Chips banging the deck with his mallet.

  “Thing about the sickness,” said Elijah, “it comes and goes reg’lar as Christmas.”

  “You’ve known Chips a long while then, Elijah?” they asked, intrigued by the boiler man’s past.

  “Prob’ly,” said Elijah, running cupped hands up
and down his own forearms over and over and over.

  “Those scars of yours . . . left over from being bled?” asked Everett, casual as can be.

  Elijah glanced down at his arms, curious. “Prob’ly,” he admitted.

  “So you had it too?”

  “Had what?”

  The Sunshine Queen made steady progress now, her cockeyed paddle wheel pushing her through the water with regal dignity. The wind could still waltz her sideways over the water, but the back eddies and shoalings could no longer snatch her skirts and drag her into a dance against her will. Little tufts of smoke tore off the two tall chimneys and hung in the air like afterthoughts. Tibbie Boden, on the other hand, made less progress. After the bleeding, Miss May March wanted to get her up on deck, out of that sweaty oven of a cabin with its stucco of mildew and cornice of black mold. But the child fainted as soon as she was raised to her feet, so they laid her back down again and left her to sleep, the women taking turns to cool her forehead with damp cloths.

  They sailed on for mile after mile, the wheel milling the river into silver spray, manufacturing rainbows. They passed one, two, three little settlements without mooring against their mud levees. It was as if Everett were trying to shake off a guilty conscience or a sheriff’s posse. In fact he was simply eager to get to Blowville, a town large enough to have a doctor, a telegraph office, and a railway station. He had Chad Powers steer the ship during daylight hours and, instead of mooring up, allowed Elijah to continue sailing through the night. With the spokes of the wheel between his shoes, the old man sank into a frame of mind that saw nothing but the job in hand. At night he was adrift in a two-tone blackness: the darker dark the bank, the lighter the sky with its nettle rash of stars. His eyes were fixed on the “nighthawk,” a metal blob impaled on the jack staff at the boat’s prow. It glimmered dimly in the dark and told him, by some diviner’s magic none of the others had, his distance from the riverbank. Now and then, if he detected some patch of darkness on the great shine of the river itself—something that might be a raft or a sandbar or an unlit fishing vessel, he would sound the bell by kicking at the space where it had once hung within the pilothouse. The bell itself had long since been stolen, but inside Elijah’s head it still sounded out, when he kicked it, with the sweet musical clarity of polished brass.

  So on the night when he saw a light on the shore, and heard the cry of “Ahoy there!” he rang the silent ship’s bell three times and made directly for the light, remembering back to his days aboard passenger steamers.

  Elijah touched the bank so gently that none of the company asleep below him even stirred. The passenger who had hailed him clambered over the rail. Then the river drew the Queen gently back into its arms. Darkness trickled back into Elijah’s old eyes and, as it did so, rubbed out all memory of what had just happened.

  Chips saw, of course. Someone had to sit on the engine-room floor all the while the boat was sailing, checking the water levels in the boilers and throwing fuel into the furnace. (Chips and Sweeting took turns.) Chips could have woken someone and said that a heavily armed man had just come aboard. But why question Elijah’s judgment? Elijah knew best.

  So it was not until morning that the Bright Lights Theater Company made the acquaintance of Sugar Cain.

  His mother had meant to call him after the sweetest thing she knew but, having lousy spelling, had managed accidentally to name him after the first murderer in the scriptures. The sprinkling of “Sugar” on top had done nothing to sweeten Cain. He was a hoodlum and a pirate, and his own preferred taste was blood.

  They found him going through the various bags and crates stored in the saloon as they assembled for breakfast. Finding only an assortment of stage props, books, half-mended costumes, musical instruments, and clown noses had already worked Cain into a stew. Each person, on entering the room—yawning, dressing, humming—was greeted by the sight of a wizened crab apple of a youth sitting with his child-sized boots on the table and pointing a triple-barreled handgun at their hearts.

  “Empty up,” said Cain, and each person had to empty their pockets onto the table. Now and then he made a circular gesture with the awkward, lumpy weapon, to remind the early risers that he had his eye on them. Even Elijah was there, having smelled nonexistent bacon and banked the Queen while he ate breakfast. Only Medora had managed to hide herself under the cloth of her projection machine.

  The valuables they could produce—those who ran to pockets at that time of day—only made Cain angrier. Where were the takings from their last show, he wanted to know?

  “We had repairs to pay for,” said Everett evenly. He described the engineer’s work, the patching of the hull. He explained, too, that he had children and sickness aboard and a strong desire to reach Blowville and a doctor as soon as possible. Sugar Cain lifted the pepper-box pistol and shot out a wall lamp, which spattered the ceiling with colza oil and the people below with glass shards.

  “My wife is pregnant, boy. You will desist instantly!” said Everett, and though he seemed the bigger man by it, for a moment everyone thought Cain was going to empty the gun into him, too.

  Cissy’s first reaction to finding a pirate aboard was to look to Loucien. Even as Olive Town’s first schoolteacher, in happier times, Miss Loucien had always worn a pearl-handled pistol just below her bust, tucked into that place where hiccups come from. Cissy could remember back to when Class Two had been terrified at the sight of that pistol; now she was much more frightened by the fact that it was missing. The baby had finally grown too big to leave room for a hiccup, let alone a pistol, under Loucien Crew’s bust. Worse still, at the sight of Everett placing his hunter watch on the table—the one she had given him at their wedding—Loucien burst into uncontrollable tears.

  The foundations of Cissy’s world rocked. It was unheard of for Miss Loucien to cry! She might shoot a hole through a pen-and-ink portrait, or take a bullwhip to a row of tin cans, or pry up a railway line with a crowbar . . . but cry? Cissy looked across at Benet, because he was the hero in The Perils of Pirate Nancy—then Chad Powers, because he was resourceful and inventive—then Elder Slater, because he owned a much bigger pistol than Sugar Cain’s. But of course Elder Slater had not brought his gun down to breakfast, nor Chad Powers the blueprint for a rescue, nor Benet his heroism. Instead he and the rest of the quartet were humming maudlin spirituals about going home, stealing away, jumping aboard low-flying chariots, or otherwise pushing off to be with Jesus. Also, all the men in the room had their hands resting on top of their heads, as Cain had told them.

  “Like we’re all teaching ourselves phrenology,” said George the barber to Cissy with an apologetic shrug, his long trembling fingers resting on his skull.

  Outside the saloon, Kookie Warboys held as still as a stick insect, one foot in the air, frozen in the act of overhearing. He sucked back in through puckered lips the tune he had been whistling.

  He had no idea just how many buccaneers had boarded the Queen or what they were doing to the people in the breakfast room, but he did not risk taking a look. Another inch, and the scuffed toecap of his boot would have appeared in the doorway. Now he backed along the deck to the nearest stairs and climbed back up to the cabin deck.

  “Hey! Tibs! Wake up! You gotta wake up!”

  Through a stupor of gummy sleep pitted with deep, dark nightmares, Tibbie Boden struggled to surface. She found Kookie’s face close to her own. His breath smelled of river clams. Or was it Harriet Beecher Stowe? Or the Republican party?

  “We got bandits downstairs tryin’ to rob us. We gotta lay an ambush!”

  Tibbie Boden did not want to lay an ambush. She had the sweating sickness—people had told her, as if it were a rare talent. It is hard work being ill. It leaves you worn out. She put a hand in Kookie’s face and pushed it away. His face felt pleasantly cool against her sweaty palm.

  Kookie made a couple more attempts to pull her out of bed, and then to stop her objecting so loudly. “Shush up, Tibs! You gotta hide, at least! We go
tta lie low, so they don’t know we’re here! Then we can creep out and maybe cut the others loose. We gotta round up knives and tripwires and George’s razors maybe. . . .” Which was all it took to set Tibbie moaning, squealing, and tossing again, fighting off Kookie with arms of rubber and as much noise as she could muster. The cabin door opened and Miss Loucien entered, big as a ship, followed by Cain, whose gun was pressed into the small of her back.

  Tibbie Boden still did not stir from her bed. So she did not see Kookie join the rest of the hostages in the saloon. She did not see when he had to empty out his entire wealth of buttons and cents onto the breakfast table. She had turned over and gone back to sleep.

  Elder Slater said that Sugar Cain would carry his crime on his forehead until Judgment Day, when he would be spit-roasted like a hog.

  Elijah recalled a “rafter,” in the old days, who had made a habit of climbing aboard the luxury paddle steamers and stealing from the passengers. One day he had been caught, and the captain of the ship had tied him to the paddle wheel and drowned him real slow, because that was what rafters deserved.

  Curly shoveled on more Shakespearian insults than a Tudor stoker. Miss May March fainted, thinking Curly would be shot for sure by Sugar Cain.

  Kookie was usually terrific at swearwords, because (as he had often told Cissy) he invented his, so they weren’t real and he wouldn’t go to hell for using them. But Kookie was wordless now.

  Mixed-race Loucien knew a useful number of Choctaw curses and Minneapolis swearwords, but she could not stop crying for long enough to muster them. “I’m sorry, Everett. I’m sorry, everyone,” she kept panting between sobs. “This baby’s got a fist on the tap: I’m all waterworks. What good am I?”

  But as far as Sugar Cain was concerned, Loucien was just perfect. He had only to jab his pepper-box pistol up against her stomach and he could stop time. Everyone in the room froze, their faces toward him, their hands reaching out unconsciously for mercy, like hoboes begging for a crust of bread. It was a heady, delectable sensation. It stirred up feelings in Cain’s own belly—hot and kicking and big as any unborn demon.