The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen Read Free

masts and spinnakers and booms—sometimes outriggers and other times tillers. So far he had solved the problem of going but not of coming back.
    The children of Class Three had lined up, at one time, to test-drive the prototypes. But after one schooner took to the air and another overturned at full speed, the parents had banned any more rides. And so Chad Powers could be seen every weekend when there was a breath of wind, careering over the meadows, colliding with trees and cows and sailplaning into the river. He was forever wrapped up in bandages, splints, and surgical collars, but his enthusiasm was unquenchable. One day, he said, Olive Town would be famous as the birthplace of the Powers Patent Prairie Sailboat.
    In the meantime, he had submitted by far the best idea for moving the silo. The tissuey blue design paper covered in neat blue diagrams had convinced the town committee he was the best man for the job.
    A series of telegraph poles was laid on the ground for use as rollers. The huge metal body of the silo was to be lowered onto this rolling raft and pushed, like some ancient juggernaut, toward its new site by the railroad sidings. Everyone had offered to help—the children had been particularly keen—which was why Miss May March had organized a long exam for them to take, so that they couldn’t. She said they would get in the way.
    All day Kookie Warboys sat adding nonexistent lengths of rope together, measuring the perimeters of imaginary fields, labeling the states of the Union, and listing the plagues of Egypt, while out in the spring sunshine, men hauled on real lengths of rope and grappled with a genuine Tower of Babel. The silo was giving problems.
    As Kookie huffed and sighed and pushed his way through a barbed-wire entanglement of sums, a minefield of questions, Miss March’s pen scratched away covering page after page of lavender writing paper. She had a pianist’s hands, flexible and strong, and played the portable organ on Sunday in Olive Town’s one and only church. Her handwriting looked like rows of bedsprings. Page after page she covered with her even, bedspring writing. Kookie looked down and found a puddle of ink where his pen nib had bled into the blank test paper. Where was Cissy? That’s what he wanted to know. How were you supposed to copy from a person if that person did not turn up at school?
    From outside the window, Cissy spied on the roomful of bent heads, the tufts of home-barbered hair, the shoulders hunched as if against bad weather. Her schooldays were over, and suddenly there was nothing she craved so much as taking an un-do-able exam in an unknowable subject. She should never have learned to read, she told herself, and then she could have kept on going to school, year after year, until she was thirty-four and too big to fit behind a desk.
    â€œPencils down, and rest your hands on your heads,” said Miss May March (who had theories about the circulation of the blood and also liked to keep children’s hands in plain sight at all times).
    Beyond the window, Cissy dodged out of sight. She bit her lip. She wished she had found the courage yesterday to go over to the telegraph office and break the news to Kookie. But telling it would have made it true, and yesterday Cissy had still been hoping to wake from a bad dream. Besides, Kookie’s sweet-natured mother would have kissed Cissy and hugged her and started her off crying in front of Kookie. And Cissy knew she looked like a sucked plum when she cried.
    â€œYou came back then?” snapped Hildy Sissney when Cissy clattered into the shop. Cissy flinched from the reproach and from the noise of the bell over the door. “A fine lot of use you are to a business, I must say!”
    â€œSorry, Ma. I just went—”
    â€œThat you did! Just up and went, without a word! Left me to bag the orders single-handed! You’re not at school now, girl, learning sloth and