When we got to Missouri a letter catches up to John Cole to say his father is dead but he don’t know what to do with such news as there ain’t a farm or nothing to claim on it. I guess he just thinks his father is dead and there’s an end to it. He says he would sure like to have seen him before he died and he is surprised to learn that his father died in Pennsylvania and he don’t even know who is sending the letter, it don’t say. It’s more than ten years since he seen him and it weren’t a fond goodbye then either. And who was your mother? I say, surprised at myself I never asked that before. I never remember a mother, says John Cole, though he looked like he would’ve liked to remember one. How old was your father, I says. Well, I don’t know, he says, I must be twenty-five or nearly. Maybe he was forty-five, fifty maybe.
It’s not like we got no money so we rent a house in Lemay along the river just a few miles outside St Louis. Curious to relate John Cole feels as fit as a hare and wonders if it weren’t the damn water at Laramie was poisoning him. John Cole says he’s cooking a plan and writes to our old friend of fond Daggsville days Mr Noone. That letter swirls around the country like his own letter bearing news of his father and it’s a month and more before he gets an answer. We know from Mr Noone’s faithful saint’s day letters that he has left Daggsville when too much civilisation come into it. But we can’t remember for the damnable life of us where he said he was going. Turns out Mr Noone he has a new place up in Grand Rapids running minstrel shows and he says he just might have work for Thomas McNulty if he ain’t lost his pretty looks fighting. That night as we lie chest to chest in the old doss and Winona purring in sleep in the next room we feel the lure of the unknown future distil into our bones.
Guess you ain’t lost your looks anyhows, says John Cole, staring at them in the half-light. Look pretty good to me.
You reckon? I says.
I like the way you look anyhows, he says, and kisses me.
It’s still new to be in a house and not slipping about the barracks like ghosts. It’s naught to Winona to see two men in a bed considering you might see that in any posthouse or boarding house when beds is scarce. I don’t even know how many beds she seen as such, she slept on the floor at Laramie. She got her own little bed now. She never even seen a town before and she likes to walk with us down to the river and take the ferry over to the store. Plain cooking just as promised is at her command and she speaks quite good and I don’t know why but she don’t get too many insults on the road from the cruder sort. Maybe we look like we’d box such a person and we would. John Cole must be six foot three so you don’t rile him in a casual way. I’m a little man right enough but maybe the best dagger is a short one sometimes. I always wear my Colt conspicuous on my trouser belt. I guess Winona don’t have too much to do and I bought her three dresses in St Louis as we came through so she has a wardrobe to her name. Nice flouncy pink dress is my favourite. I guess I like dresses just as much as she does. The girls in the shop put her underthings together without me looking because they said to look away, and we got her shoes and all too. There’s a Negro washerwoman nearby does the washing weekly. She’ll even starch. She says the Negro prayer house in St Louis used to be burned regular but she don’t hear it was burned recently. Got Winona’s straight black hair cut nice and bought her combs and a brush, she brushes it all the time at her vanity mirror. Winona. She don’t got a family name that anyone can pronounce so we ask her does she like Cole or McNulty and she says Cole sounds better, and maybe it does.
So when we go and buy train tickets for the new line to Grand Rapids, we give her name as Winona Cole. Seems natural as spitting in a spittoon.
We get to Grand Rapids by way of Kalamazoo and put up for the night at Sweet’s Hotel and in the morning our old friend Mr Titus Noone come in to view us. The whole way on the spitting puffing cranking train Winona was sat upright and sleepless as if she were in the belly of a demon and was soon to die. The folding and unfolding picture-maps of the beauties and terrors of America outside the window was as nothing to her. Old lakes like seas, old woods as dark as childhood fears, and sudden towns all swank and mud. Mr Noone he still ain’t so old we find. He is as dapper as a mackerel. His black coat shines with strangeness because it is made of the furs of black bears, his bluebird-blue cravat flashes also with birdy life, his cufflinks has been fished out of rivers in Australia he tells us, dark emeralds like poked-out eyes. His barber has shaved his face-hair so that it is all straight lines, black patches, and immaculateness. His skin is made of the aftermaths of smiles. Most likely Titus Noone has come into his heyday. John Cole looks at him and looks at me and laughs with that laughter that denotes delight and relief. Mr Noone gazes on us and claps his gloved hands like the feller who does the three-card trick but he ain’t no trickster and he laughs too. I guess we remember what he done for us in Daggsville and he remembers maybe that we did not let him down. Things like that sure is a basis for ongoing business. Fagged though she be by the long journey just the day before Winona still has the heart to join in. No exaggeration to say she got a laugh like a freshet in a summer meadow. When he first come into the hotel room Mr Noone had bowed to her and took her hand and shook it gently and said how do. I do well, she said, in her best Boston English learned off Mrs Neale. Just a moment of something that didn’t mean nothing. It gave me heart to see. Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget. This is John’s daughter, I say, without thinking much on it, and never having had that thought before exactly in words I knew about. John Cole didn’t talk against that. He beamed. Well, says Titus Noone, I guess her mother was a beauty, and he bowed his head as if to intimate sorrow at her possible passing, and he ain’t going to ask about that unless we say something more. So we leave it there like the last note of a ballad.
A little maid as black as a whetstone brings in tea and whisky. As if we was a creature with one head our eight eyes alight on the tea-pot and the cups on the tray and break out into laughter again. God knows why. I guess we’re giddy. Mr Noone says he got a big enterprise going in a fine hall on Grab Corners. Nicest bunch of blackface minstrels between Timbuctoo and Kalamazoo. Well, he says, they’re all pretty straight-up except one, his big knock-down star called Sojourner Wrathall. He does all the wenches, he says. Riotous goddamn genius. Cunt of the first water, no pun intended. What do you boys intend to do up here, he says? Well, says John Cole, a little abashed, we was just up here to talk to you. Of course you were, of course you were, he says. See, says John Cole, I had this thought come into my head last year. We was in this Indian camp up near Fort Laramie and there was these Sioux men dressed as women and the effect was very strange, some of them was so good-looking, and it made your knees a bit soft to see them. And I been thinking all this while that since Thomas ain’t no girl no more we could put him into women’s dresses and see what effect that had, I was just thinking you know it might have just the same effect as I was feeling there on the prairies. Well, says Titus, he could do himself up minstrel fashion and play the wench parts? He could well, says John Cole, but I been nursing this thought, I guess like a preacher nurses a vision of revelation, you know, of Thomas in his dress, and being as ladylike as a lady, only more so, everything done just so, and aiming for beauty, you know, and he is a beauty, ain’t he! So, says John Cole, after a break for laughter, I was thinking it might bear a try-out up here, in your hall, since you know us, and know we ain’t no fools. And is he going to sing, or dance, or what? says Mr Noone, leaning in now with great interest, all his showman’s antennae waving like a big desert ant. I thought, says John Cole, maybe he could be in little plays, maybe, or come on as a handsome young man, go behind a screen, and have some dancing from others and such, and then come back out as an out-and-out killer beauty, and just see what the audience thought of that. Or, she could be in her boudoir or such, completing her corsage, and maybe I come in as her beau and we have talking then, or singing – well, I can’t sing, so – you know? Okay
, and what will this little lady be doing, he says, nodding at Winona. I don’t know, says John Cole. I never thought of having her. Could be the child part, says Titus Noone, does she sing? You sing? says John Cole, not knowing one way or the other. I can sing, says Winona. What can you sing? says Titus Noone. I can sing ‘Rosalie, the Prairie Flower’, she says, Mrs Neale taught me. That a dead child song, says Titus Noone, nodding his approval. We can black up Winona, he says, and she can be the maid, and sing goddamn ‘Rosalie, the Prairie Flower’. Bring the house down. Meanwhile, Thomas in the dress, and you the beau, and swanking round, and Thomas ladylike and lovely just like you intimate, why, yes, why, yes, I think it might go. If it go, I pay you twenty-five dollars a week, for the three of you. How does that sit? That sits just as pretty as a robin in a bush, says John Cole. Well, says Titus, I have high hopes. I remember so well how much the miners took to you both when you was girls. Let’s drink to it, goddamn. And we do, we drink to it.
Mr Noone says they have miners too in Grand Rapids working the gypsum seams along the river. Something about miners makes a good audience. We’re hoping anyway. Then, with a bow and a sweep of his slouch hat, Titus Noone goes off and John Cole and me and Winona go out next morning and put all our savings into our stage gear. John Cole says he got to get the best dress we can afford. Got to be top notch. He ain’t aiming for no comedy skit. Wants me to be as splendid kitted as a high-born woman. Alright. We have the tricksy task of getting the full kit in a ladies’ haberdashery but the girls there ain’t so bad. We tell them we’re working in the minstrel show, they think that be very grand, so we have a good spiel to give them.
It’s evening in Grand Rapids as we trail back to Sweet’s Hotel. We are as weary as Indian fighters. The lights come up in the taverns and the eating houses and the sidewalks make their little bang under our boots and the shopgirls is affixing the shutters and the colder night air crowding into the roads. We ain’t even got the cost of a cart to carry our purchases so we are on Shanks’ pony. Could be lead in the bags the amount of stuff a lady needs. Beauty hasn’t come cheap and we are all bets on now with the ‘act’. We’re going to be seeking urgent employ if it don’t go. God took but a week to build the whole world, says John Cole. We can do it, I say.
We get back to our room and light the wick in the oil lamp and pull off our boots and we don’t dare to send Winona down for eats and so we will have a hungry night. Winona sets everything to rights then beds down on the little divan pushed agin the foot of our bed. We’ll be chaste as real travellers tonight. Soon her little shipshape form is caught in sleep, rising and falling with every small breath so that the bed feels like there must be a troubled brook running through it. In the darkness as we lie side by side John Cole’s left hand snakes over under the sheets and takes a hold of my right hand. We listen to the cries of the night revellers outside and hear the horses tramping along the ways. We’re holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ON THE GREAT NIGHT the stage doorman Mr Beulah McSweny opens the stage door as anyone would expect and allows us in where civilians cannot go. Mr McSweny were a black man from Toledo eighty-nine years old. All week we was going over our little act and Mrs Delahunt from the starving Kerry hills has overseen the painting of the flats and Mr Noone hisself he has mapped out our footfalls on the stage and sitting back in the haunted darkness of the hall has decreed where best Winona might give her song while we do our dumb-show in front of the footlights. The biggest confab is about does John Cole touch me or no or even kiss me and Titus Noone says best play it by ear and be ready to run off into the night if it blows up. Soon we are in the long dressing room at the rear and we are just one atom in a ruckus of a dozen characters daubing the black onto their faces and the little costume mistresses are sewing fat girls into costumes and there is a wondrous blather of laughter and moiling talk. The two real Negroes in the troupe – Mr Noone does call them Africans – are painting black on their black faces and daubing white mouths that make the singer clearer they do aver in the foggy yellowness of the footlights. The wicks be floating in the oil and make a mist like you might find along a morning valley in the sweet land of Yellowstone. Winona gets her black mask too. She looks in the mirror at herself with delight. Who am I now? she says. Singers warm up by singing. Gobs of spit are vacated from tobacco-y throats. The comic girls sit before their mirrors and practise their faces, pulling them into queer states. Out on stage soon we hear the first skits going over the footlights like crates of delicious apples. We can hear the roar like a river from the crowd and the sudden pitch into silence and then the roar again like the river was plunging down a falls. What surges into us is that elixir that do come from putting a danger in front of yourself like people intending to leap down into those falls and survive them. John Cole dandies himself up till his cheeks is shining like a lamp. He never did look so handsome. Our dresser comes behind my screen and assists me in the dark challenge of my underwear. What goes on first, what is added like a riddle next. The stays and the corset and the bosom holder and the padded arse and the cotton packages for breasts. And the soft under-blouse and the petticoats and the dress itself as stiff as a coffin-board. The dress as yellow as water in moonlight. Rich stitching, brackets of lace, and tucks, and crosshatched sides. A fog of flower-printed muslin before and behind. All good in the light, we trust. Stagelight, that will conspire with us, and make us into creatures not ourselves, wonders of people. Then the manager of the acts gives us the nod. We stand in the wings listening to the act that goes before us. Our suppers greatly desire to travel back up our throats. We are tense as fencing wire. It is a riotous song and dance, with all that quick Negro lingo and happy uproar. The crowd is pushed up from zephyr to gale. The stage clears and we hear the music that Mr Noone has assigned us starting softly on the piano. For a violent moment in my inner eye I see my father lying dead in Ireland. The flats are set in place and John Cole goes on with Winona. She walks down prettily to the lights and sings her song. We have heard the song sung while we did practise but now it is sung with a new force. There is something else crept into it like a mouse. There is applause and laughter, there is simple delight. I step on the stage and find the lights blazing against me and yet in the same instance pulling me forward. I am like something left over after a storm. Slight, a waif. It is like I am underwater in a pool of brightness. Slowly slowly I walk down towards the watching men. Something strange has happened, the hall has fallen into silence. Silence more speaking than any sound. I guess they don’t know what they are seeing. I guess it is true that they are seeing a lovely woman. Soft-breasted woman, like something off a picture of such dames. Now there rampages through me a thrill such as might be got otherwise only from opium. I might be one of the footlights, with a burning wick for a heart. I don’t utter a blessed word. Winona trips about as if putting a boudoir to rights. John Cole all spit and polish approaches from the far side of the stage and we hear the men draw in their breath like a sea tide drawing back on the shingle of a beach. He approaches and approaches. They know I am a man because they have read it on the bill. But I am suspecting that every one of them would like to touch me and now John Cole is their ambassador of kisses. Slowly slowly he edges nearer. He reaches out a hand, so openly and plainly that I believe I am going to expire. The held-in breath of the audience is not let out again. Half a minute passes. It is unlikely any of them could of holded their breath like this underwater. They have found new size in their lungs. Down down we go under them waters of desire. Every last man, young and old, wants John Cole to touch my face, hold my narrow shoulders, put his mouth against my lips. Handsome John Cole, my beau. Our love in plain sight. Then the lungs of the audience giving out, and a rasping rush of sound. We have reached the very borderland of our act, the strange frontier. Winona skips off the stage, and John Cole and myself break the spell. We part like dancer
s, we briefly go down to our patrons, we briefly bow, and then we have turned and are gone. As if for ever. They have seen something they don’t understand and partly do, in the same breath. We have done something we don’t understand neither and partly do. Mr Noone is over the moon. He is trembling for joy in the wings looking out into the hall with a light-drenched face. The crowd beyond the curtains now are clapping, hooting, stamping. There is a craziness in it all that betokens a kind of delicious freedom. Notions are cast off. If only for a moment. They seen a flickering picture of beauty. All day they’ve laboured in the beds of gypsum crystals, hacking and gathering. Their fingernails are a queer white from the work. Their backs are sore and they must troop out again in the morning. But for a minute they loved a woman that ain’t a real woman but that ain’t the point. There was love in Mr Titus Noone’s hall for a crazy foggy moment. There were love imperishable for a rushing moment.