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.