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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.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

O
N
THE
G
REAT
N
IGHT
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 dancers, 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.

Next day we feel some remorse about working Winona and John Cole brings her over to a Mr Chesebro and asks him could he take an Indian girl for his school if she be a half-caste and his own blood. The gentleman has a little stone school in a lane the back of Pearl Street. He says to John Cole that the town would not stand for that and so John Cole comes back with Winona and says he would like sometimes to kill just for the sake of making his point plainly. He never had no schooling himself of course. Maybe I was thinking myself a great scholar because I was a few years schooled up in Sligo. I guess I was thinking that. So, says John Cole, do you think you could teach her something that she ain’t learned off Mrs Neale? I said I don’t reckon so. There ain’t no Indian school hereabouts because the Indians were drove out years and years ago. Looks like the Chippewa were the big cheeses round here one time. Goddamn it, he says, how come there ain’t no place for Winona? Then he’s talking about this that night to the elegant Beulah McSweny and he says he’ll teach Winona. He says his nickname is the poet McSweny and he has wrote maybe three songs used in the minstrel shows. No, by God, is that right, says John Cole. Yes, he says, and I can school Winona three mornings a week because I only works evenings. That’s just the best, says John Cole, how did you get to be such a gent, Mr McSweny? My father was a free man, he said, on the Mississippi river. Ferrying every damn thing between the English and the Spanish. Where your father now? says John Cole. My father gone so long, says Beulah, there was a seventeen in the date when he was overground. God Almighty, says John Cole.

Thus we inaugurate the best time in the little kingdom we have pitched up against the darkness. Seems to be a law that if we get a house it’s going to overlook the water. We got a riverside house of four rooms and we got a porch on the street side and it ain’t the best part of town and that’s where we fit like gloves. Like gloves. No one can best imagine the motley crowd that go to make a American town. First you got the have-nothing know-everything goddamn Irish God damn them who will live under leaky steps and count themselves in palaces. Then you got the half-breed Indians mixed with God knows what. Then you got the blacks, maybe they came up from Carolina or them places. Then you got the Chinese and the Spanish families. Where we are is where all these folks come home at night to roost when they’ve done working, mostly at the gypsum mines or doing for the Dutch the other side of town. Our landlord is the poet McSweny. After all he been saving his money for seventy-five years so he got a half dozen properties.

But that ain’t the point. The point is we living like a family. John Cole know he was born in December or seems to remember that month and maybe I remember I was born in June and Winona says she was born during the Full Buck Moon. Anyhow we roll all that into one and on the first of May we have assigned our birthday for the three of us. We say Winona is nine years old and John Cole has settled on twenty-nine. So that must make me twenty-six. Something along those lines. Point is, whatever ages we be, we’re young. John Cole is the best-looking man in Christendom and this is his heyday. Winona is sure the prettiest little daughter ever man had. Goddamned beautiful black hair.
Blue eyes like a mackerel’s blue back. Or a duck’s wing feathers. Sweet little face cool as a melon when you hold it in your hands and kiss her forehead. God knows what stories she seen and been part in. Savage murder for sure because we caused it. Walked through the carnage and the slaughter of her own. You could expect a child that has seen all that to wake in the night sweating and she does. Then John Cole is obliged to hold her trembling form against him and soothe her with lullabies. Well he only knows one and he does that over and over. He holds her softly and sings her the lullaby. Where he got that no man knows not even hisself. Like a stray bird from some distant country. Then he lies on her bed and she pushes in tight against him like you might imagine bear cubs do in the winter hide or maybe even wolves. Tight in, like John Cole was that bit of safety she is trying to reach. A harbour. Then her breathing slowly lengthens and then she is snoring a little. Time to come back to bed and in the darkness or the helpful dim of the candle he looks at me and nods his head. Got her sleeping, he says. You sure do, I say.

Not much more than that needed to make men happy.

After a few months of doing our damnedest for Mr Noone it just seems natural to be not always changing garb by the hour and there seems to be greater contentment in it for me to wear a simple-hued housedress and not be always dragging on the trews. Outside is one matter, in another. Winona never does say nothing about it. Never seems to see me only as what I am in my face. Whatever that be. I don’t know then and I don’t know now. But I am easier in the dress, that’s all I can say. Well I would almost attest I say funnier things or things that make my man John
Cole laugh like a donkey. Winona makes her plain cooking and we sit the three of us in the dim light and in the summer we have the windows covered against the violent heat and in the winter likewise against the rats of cold that creep in anywhere you leave a finger’s width of a gap. At home Winona don’t sing minstrel songs but those other songs that carry her back to where she begun in the innocence of her youth. We are racked to think we don’t know who even her mother was or maybe it was a woman that we killed. God knows that feels like a colossal-sized crime betimes and if you was counting crimes on a abacus maybe it won’t be the only one we done against her. She could slit our throats in the night with justice, spray out our blood redly on the linen pillows. But she don’t do that. She sings and we listen and all three are returned to the prairie in our heads. She to her guiltless haunts and us to those moments when in truth we stood gazing out onto all that lonesome beauty.