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 08
Student: ___________________________________________________________________________

1. Sarah Ives purchased a piece of land in 20X8 in order to operate a greenhouse and an evergreen nursery.
This was Sarah's first entrepreneurial adventure which she engaged in when not teaching her grade six
classes. Now, one year later, she still has not started her business and upon receiving an offer to teach on
a tropical island, has decided to sell the land. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
A. Sarah's primary intent suggests that the income should be treated as a business transaction.
B. Sarah purchased the land with the primary intent to resell it at a profit.
C. Sarah purchased the land with the primary intent to recognize a long-term economic benefit.
D. The intent of the purchase is insignificant when determining the type of income to report.
2. Which of the following rules regarding the tax treatment of a principal residence is FALSE?
A. If a taxpayer only owns one residence, the 'principal residence formula' reduces any capital gain on the
sale to nil.
B When a taxpayer owns more than one residence, the decision to designate a particular property as
. the 'principal residence' occurs at the time of sale.
C Properties can be designated to each married or common-law partner in a family for the purpose of
. reducing the gains on the sale of two principal residences.
D. A capital loss cannot be realized on the sale of a principal residence.
3. John sold a piece of land in 20X9 for $350,000. The land was recognized as capital property. The original
cost of the land was $75,000. The selling costs incurred in 20X9 were $5,000. The terms of the payment
included an immediate down payment of $50,000, with the remainder of the cost to be paid over the next
three years in three equal payments. John wishes to report the minimum taxable capital gain allowed each
year. How much will he report in 20X9? (Round all numbers to zero decimal places.)
A. $0
B. $27,000
C. $50,000
D. $216,000
4. Mandy holds shares in Y Co. Recently, the shares have been experiencing a decline in market value. She
originally purchased 1000 shares in 20X0 at $5 per share. On September 22nd of 20X1 she sold the shares
when they were trading for only $3 per share. On October 3rd she felt optimistic that the market value
would rise substantially by the end of the year, so she repurchased 1000 shares of Y Co. at $2.50 per
share. Which of the following is true for Mandy?
A. Mandy can recognize a $2,000 capital loss on the sale of her shares on her 20X1 tax return.
B. Mandy can recognize a $2,000 superficial loss on the sale of her shares on her 20X1 tax return.
C. The adjusted cost base of Mandy's new shares is $4,500.
D. The adjusted cost base of Mandy's new shares is $2,500.
5. When establishing whether the sale of an asset is capital income or business income, which of the
following is not one of the factors that the courts take into consideration when determining the original
intention of a transaction?
A. Period of ownership
B. Canadian securities test
C. Number and frequency of transactions
D. Relation of transaction to taxpayer's business
6. Mr. Yee sold a piece of land in 20X0 for $500,000. He originally paid $100,000 for the land. Selling
costs totalled $15,000. The land is classified as capital property. The purchaser of the land paid Mr. Yee
$80,000 in 20X0, and will pay $84,000 each year for the next five years.
Required:
Calculate the taxable capital gain that Mr. Yee will have to include in his income for tax purposes in
20X0 and 20X1.

7. Greta Snow sold the following items prior to moving to Europe:

Required:
Calculate the tax consequences of Greta's sales, placing the items into the appropriate categories of
capital property.

8. Anne Smith acquired her house in 20X0 for $150,000 and her cottage in 20X4 for $100,000. Due to a
rise in real estate prices, she decided to sell both properties and backpack around the world for two years.
Both properties were sold in October of 20X8. Anne received $375,000 in proceeds for the house, and
$250,000 for the cottage.
Required:
Calculate the minimum taxable capital gain that the Anne can report for her house and for her cottage on
her 20X8 tax return.
9. The following cases pertain to some of the unique aspects regarding the sale of various types of capital
properties. Next to each case, identify (from the list) the type of capital property that applies. (Select only
one category of capital property for each case and use each category only once.)

List of capital properties:

1. Identical properties
2. Options and warrants
3. Commodities and futures transactions
4. Goodwill and eligible capital property
5. Voluntary and involuntary dispositions
6. Eligible small-business investments
7. Gifts of Canadian public securities
10. The company sold its entire public portfolio in the current year. The adjusted cost base of the shares was
$100,000. The market value of the shares at the time of sale was $135,000. Selling costs on the sale were
$5,000.
Required:
A) Calculate the minimum taxable capital gain that Evergreen Trees Inc. will have to report in 20X1.
B) Calculate the minimum taxable capital gain that must be reported in 20X2.
The land was purchased for $200,000 and sold for $250,000. Proceeds of $60,000 will be received in
the current year. The remainder of the payment will be received in equal installments over the next eight
years.
Marketable Securities
The building was previously purchased for $80,000. At the time of the sale, the accumulated amortization
on the building was $10,000. The UCC balance was $65,000. Proceeds on the sale were $110,000.
Land
Evergreen Trees Inc. is a CCPC operating in Nova Scotia.
Three asset sales occurred prior to the end of 20X1. The following information pertains to the net gain on
the sale of the assets:
Building (One of several owned by the company)
 08 Key
1. Sarah Ives purchased a piece of land in 20X8 in order to operate a greenhouse and an evergreen
(p. 268) nursery. This was Sarah's first entrepreneurial adventure which she engaged in when not teaching her
grade six classes. Now, one year later, she still has not started her business and upon receiving an offer
to teach on a tropical island, has decided to sell the land. Which of the following statements is TRUE?

A. Sarah's primary intent suggests that the income should be treated as a business transaction.
B. Sarah purchased the land with the primary intent to resell it at a profit.
C. Sarah purchased the land with the primary intent to recognize a long-term economic benefit.
D. The intent of the purchase is insignificant when determining the type of income to report.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Bloom's: Application
Buckwold - Chapter 08 #1
2. Which of the following rules regarding the tax treatment of a principal residence is FALSE?
(p. 282) A. If a taxpayer only owns one residence, the 'principal residence formula' reduces any capital gain on
the sale to nil.
B When a taxpayer owns more than one residence, the decision to designate a particular property as
. the 'principal residence' occurs at the time of sale.
C Properties can be designated to each married or common-law partner in a family for the purpose of
. reducing the gains on the sale of two principal residences.
D. A capital loss cannot be realized on the sale of a principal residence.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Bloom's: Knowledge
Buckwold - Chapter 08 #2
3. John sold a piece of land in 20X9 for $350,000. The land was recognized as capital property. The
(p. 275) original cost of the land was $75,000. The selling costs incurred in 20X9 were $5,000. The terms
of the payment included an immediate down payment of $50,000, with the remainder of the cost
to be paid over the next three years in three equal payments. John wishes to report the minimum
taxable capital gain allowed each year. How much will he report in 20X9? (Round all numbers to zero
decimal places.)
A. $0
B. $27,000
C. $50,000
D. $216,000

Bloom's: Application
Buckwold - Chapter 08 #3
4. Mandy holds shares in Y Co. Recently, the shares have been experiencing a decline in market value.
(p. 279) She originally purchased 1000 shares in 20X0 at $5 per share. On September 22nd of 20X1 she sold
the shares when they were trading for only $3 per share. On October 3rd she felt optimistic that the
market value would rise substantially by the end of the year, so she repurchased 1000 shares of Y Co.
at $2.50 per share. Which of the following is true for Mandy?
A. Mandy can recognize a $2,000 capital loss on the sale of her shares on her 20X1 tax return.
B. Mandy can recognize a $2,000 superficial loss on the sale of her shares on her 20X1 tax return.
C. The adjusted cost base of Mandy's new shares is $4,500.
D. The adjusted cost base of Mandy's new shares is $2,500.

Bloom's: Application
Buckwold - Chapter 08 #4
5. When establishing whether the sale of an asset is capital income or business income, which of the
(p. 269- following is not one of the factors that the courts take into consideration when determining the
271)
original intention of a transaction?
A. Period of ownership
B. Canadian securities test
C. Number and frequency of transactions
D. Relation of transaction to taxpayer's business
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Bloom's: Knowledge
Buckwold - Chapter 08 #5
Other documents randomly have
different content
wall, and some photographs and newspaper clippings, time-
yellowed. There was about the little chamber a cosiness, a
snugness, and, paradoxically enough, a sense of space. That was
the open window, doubtless, with its vista of water and sky giving
the effect of freedom.
“Dressing rooms during the performance,” Andy explained, “and
bedrooms the rest of the time. That’s the way we work it.”
Mrs. Hawks, with a single glance, encompassed the tiny room
and rejected it. “Expect me to live in a cubby-hole like that!” It was,
unconsciously, her first admission.
Magnolia, behind her mother’s skirts, was peering, wide-eyed,
into the room. “Why, I love it! Why, I’d love to live in it. Why, look,
there’s a little bed, and a dresser, and a——”
Andy interrupted hastily. “Course I don’t expect you to live in a
cubby-hole, Parthy. No, nor the child, neither. Just you step along
with me. Now don’t say anything; and stop your grumbling till you
see. Put that bonnet back, Nola, where you got it. That’s wardrobe.
Which room’d you get it out of?”
Across the stage, then, up the aisle to the stairway that led to
the balcony, Andy leading, Mrs. Hawks following funereally, Magnolia
playing a zigzag game between the rows of seats yet managing
mysteriously to arrive at the foot of the stairs just as they did. The
balcony reached, Magnolia had to be rescued from the death that in
Mrs. Hawks’ opinion inevitably would result from her leaning over
the railing to gaze enthralled on the auditorium and stage below.
“Hawks, will you look at that child! I declare, if I ever get her off this
boat alive I’ll never set foot on it again.”
But her tone somehow lacked conviction. And when she beheld
those two upper bedrooms forward, leading off the balcony—those
two square roomy bedrooms, as large, actually, as her bedroom in
the cottage, she was lost. The kitchen had scored. But the bedrooms
won. They were connected by a little washroom. Each had two
windows. Each held bed, dresser, rocker, stove. Bedraggled dimity
curtains hung at the windows. Matting covered the floors. Parthy did
an astonishing—though characteristic—thing. She walked to the
dresser, passed a practised forefinger over its surface, examined the
finger critically, and uttered that universal tongue-and-tooth sound
indicating disapproval. “An inch thick,” she then said. “A sight of
cleaning this boat will take, I can tell you. Not a curtain in the place
but’ll have to come down and washed and starched and ironed.”
Instinct or a superhuman wisdom cautioned Andy to say nothing.
From the next room came a shout of joy. “Is this my room? It’s got a
chair that rocks and a stove with a res’vore and I can see my whole
self in the looking-glass, it’s so big. Is this my room? Is it? Mama!”
Parthy passed into the next room. “We’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll
see.” Andy followed after, almost a-tiptoe; afraid to break the spell
with a sudden sound.
“But is it? I want to know. Papa, make her tell me. Look! The
window here is a little door. It’s a door and I can go right out on the
upstairs porch. And there’s the whole river.”
“I should say as much, and a fine way to fall and drown without
anybody being the wiser.”
But the child was beside herself with excitement and suspense.
She could endure it no longer; flew to her stern parent and actually
shook that adamantine figure in its dolman and bonnet. “Is it? Is it?
Is it?”
“We’ll see.” A look, then, of almost comic despair flashed
between father and child—a curiously adult look for one of
Magnolia’s years. It said: “What a woman this is! Can we stand it? I
can only if you can.”
Andy tried suggestion. “Could paint this furniture any colour Nola
says——”
“Blue,” put in Magnolia, promptly.
“—and new curtains, maybe, with ribbons to match——” He had,
among other unexpected traits, a keen eye for colour and line; a
love for fabrics.
 Parthy said nothing. Her lips were compressed. The look that
passed between Andy and Magnolia now was pure despair, with no
humour to relieve it. So they went disconsolately out of the door;
crossed the balcony, clumped down the stairs, like mutes at a
funeral. At the foot of the stairs they heard voices from without—
women’s voices, high and clear—and laughter. The sounds came
from the little porch-like deck forward. Parthy swooped through the
door; had scarcely time to gaze upon two sprightly females in gay
plumage before both fell upon her lawful husband Captain Andy
Hawks and embraced him. And the young pretty one kissed him on
his left-hand mutton-chop whisker. And the older plain one kissed
him on the right-hand mutton-chop whisker. And, “Oh, dear Captain
Hawks!” they cried. “Aren’t you surprised to see us! And happy! Do
say you’re happy. We drove over from Cairo specially to see you and
the Cotton Blossom. Doc’s with us.”
Andy flung an obliging arm about the waist of each and gave
each armful a little squeeze. “Happy ain’t the word.” And indeed it
scarcely seemed to cover the situation; for there stood Parthy
viewing the three entwined, and as she stood she seemed to grow
visibly taller, broader, more ominous, like a menacing cloud. Andy’s
expression was a protean thing in which bravado and apprehension
battled.
Magnolia had recognized them at once as the pretty young
woman in the rose-trimmed hat and the dark woman who had told
her not to smile too often that day when, in company with the
sloppy young man, they had passed the Hawks house, laughing and
chatting and spitting cherry stones idly and comfortably into the dust
of the village street. So she now took a step forward from behind
her mother’s voluminous skirts and made a little tentative gesture
with one hand toward the older woman. And that lively female at
once said, “Why, bless me! Look, Elly! It’s the little girl!”
Elly looked. “What little girl?”
“The little girl with the smile.” And at that, quite without
premeditation, and to her own surprise, Magnolia ran to her and put
her hand in hers and looked up into her strange ravaged face and
smiled. “There!” exclaimed the woman, exactly as she had done that
first time.
“Maggie Hawks!” came the voice.
And, “Oh, my God!” exclaimed the one called Elly, “it’s the——”
sensed something dangerous in the air, laughed, and stopped short.
Andy extricated himself from his physical entanglements and
attempted to do likewise with the social snarl that now held them all.
“Meet my wife Mrs. Hawks. Parthy, this is Julie Dozier, female half
of our general business team and one of the finest actresses on the
river besides being as nice a little lady as you’d meet in a month of
Sundays. . . . This here little beauty is Elly Chipley—Lenore La Verne
on the bills. Our ingénue lead and a favourite from Duluth to New
Orleans. . . . Where’s Doc?”
At which, with true dramatic instinct, Doc appeared scrambling
down the cinder path toward the boat; leaped across the gangplank,
poised on one toe, spread his arms and carolled, “Tra-da!” A hard-
visaged man of about fifty-five, yet with kindness, too, written there;
the deep-furrowed, sad-eyed ageless face of the circus shillaber and
showman.
“Girls say you drove over. Must be flush with your spondulicks,
Doc. . . . Parthy, meet Doc. He’s got another name, I guess, but
nobody’s ever used it. Doc’s enough for anybody on the river. Doc
goes ahead of the show and bills us and does the dirty work, don’t
you, Doc?”
“That’s about the size of it,” agreed Doc, and sped sadly and
accurately a comet of brown juice from his lips over the boat’s side
into the river. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Andy indicated Magnolia. “Here’s my girl Magnolia you’ve heard
me talk about.”
“Well, well! Lookit them eyes! They oughtn’t to go bad in the
show business, little later.” A sound from Parthy who until now had
stood a graven image, a portent. Doc turned to her, soft-spoken,
courteous. “Fixin’ to take a little ride with us for good luck I hope,
ma’am, our first trip out with Cap here?”
Mrs. Hawks glanced then at the arresting face of Julie Dozier,
female half of our general business team and one of the finest
actresses on the river. Mrs. Hawks looked at Elly Chipley (Lenore La
Verne on the bills), the little beauty and favourite from Duluth to
New Orleans. She breathed deep.
“Yes. I am.” And with those three monosyllables Parthenia Ann
Hawks renounced the ties of land, of conventionality; forsook the
staid orderliness of the little white-painted cottage at Thebes; shut
her ears to the scandalized gossip of her sedate neighbours; yielded
grimly to the urge of the river and became at last its unwilling
mistress.
 V

W
hen April came, and the dogwood flashed its spectral
white in the woods, the show boat started. It was the most
leisurely and dream-like of journeys. In all the hurried
harried country that still was intent on repairing the ravages of a
Civil War, they alone seemed to be leading an enchanted existence,
suspended on another plane. Miles—hundreds—thousands of miles
of willow-fringed streams flowing aquamarine in the sunlight, olive-
green in the shade. Wild honeysuckle clambering over black tree
trunks. Mules. Negroes. Bare unpainted cabins the colour of the
sandy soil itself. Sleepy little villages blinking drowsily down upon a
river which was some almost forgotten offspring spawned years
before by the Mississippi. The nearest railroad perhaps twenty-five
miles distant.
They floated down the rivers. They floated down the rivers.
Sometimes they were broad majestic streams rolling turbulently to
the sea, and draining a continent. Sometimes they were shallow
narrow streams little more than creeks, through which the Cotton
Blossom picked her way as cautiously as a timid girl picking her way
among stepping stones. Behind them, pushing them maternally
along like a fat puffing duck with her silly little gosling, was the
steamboat Mollie Able.
To the people dwelling in the towns, plantations, and hamlets
along the many tributaries of the Mississippi and Ohio, the show
boat was no longer a novelty. It had been a familiar and welcome
sight since 1817 when the first crude barge of that type had drifted
down the Cumberland River. But familiarity with these craft had
failed to dispel their glamour. To the farmers and villagers of the
Mid-west; and to the small planters—black and white—of the South,
the show boat meant music, romance, gaiety. It visited towns whose
leafy crypts had never echoed the shrill hoot of an engine whistle. It
penetrated settlements whose backwoods dwellers had never
witnessed a theatrical performance in all their lives—simple childlike
credulous people to whom the make-believe villainies, heroics, loves,
adventures of the drama were so real as sometimes to cause the
Cotton Blossom troupe actual embarrassment. Often quality folk
came to the show boat. The perfume and silks and broadcloth of the
Big House took frequent possession of the lower boxes and the front
seats.
That first summer was, to Magnolia, a dream of pure delight.
Nothing could mar it except that haunting spectre of autumn when
she would have to return to Thebes and to the ordinary routine of a
little girl in a second best pinafore that was donned for school in the
morning and thriftily replaced by a less important pinafore on her
return from school in the late afternoon. But throughout those
summer months Magnolia was a fairy princess. She was Cinderella at
the ball. She shut her mind to the horrid certainty that the clock
would inevitably strike twelve.
Year by year, as the spell of the river grew stronger and the easy
indolence of the life took firmer hold, Mrs. Hawks and the child spent
longer and longer periods on the show boat; less and less time in
the humdrum security of the cottage ashore. Usually the boat
started in April. But sometimes, when the season was mild, it was
March. Mrs. Hawks would announce with a good deal of firmness
that Magnolia must finish the school term, which ended in June.
Later she and the child would join the boat wherever it happened to
be showing at the time.
“Couple of months missed won’t hurt her,” Captain Andy would
argue, loath as always to be separated from his daughter. “May’s the
grandest month on the rivers—and April. Everything coming out
fresh. Outdoors all day. Do her good.”
“I may not know much, but this I do know, Andy Hawks: No child
of mine is going to grow up an ignoramus just because her father
has nothing better to do than go galumphing around the country
with a lot of riff-raff.”
 But in the end, when the show boat started its leisurely journey,
there was Mrs. Hawks hanging fresh dimity curtains; bickering with
Queenie; preventing, by her acid presence, the possibility of a too-
saccharine existence for the members of the Cotton Blossom troupe.
In her old capacity as school teacher, Parthy undertook the task of
carrying on Magnolia’s education during these truant spring months.
It was an acrimonious and painful business ending, almost
invariably, in temper, tears, disobedience, upbraidings. Unconsciously
Andy Hawks had done much for the youth of New England when he
ended Parthy’s public teaching career.
“Nine times seven, I said. . . . No, it isn’t! Just because fifty-six
was the right answer last time it isn’t right every time. That was
seven times eight and I’ll thank you to look at the book and not out
of the window. I declare, Maggie Hawks, sometimes I think you’re
downright simple.”
Magnolia’s under lip would come out. Her brow was lowering.
She somehow always looked her plainest and sallowest during these
sessions with her mother. “I don’t care what nine times seven is. Elly
doesn’t know, either. I asked her and she said she never had nine of
anything, much less nine times seven of anything; and Elly’s the
most beautiful person in the world, except Julie sometimes—and me
when I smile. And my name isn’t Maggie Hawks, either.”
“I’d like to know what it is if it isn’t. And if you talk to me like
that again, young lady, I’ll smack you just as sure as I’m sitting
here.”
“It’s Magnolia—Magnolia—uh—something beautiful—I don’t know
what. But not Hawks. Magnolia—uh——” a gesture with her right
hand meant to convey some idea of the exquisiteness of her real
name.
Mrs. Hawks clapped a maternal hand to her daughter’s somewhat
bulging brow, decided that she was feverish, needed a physic, and
promptly administered one.
As for geography, if Magnolia did not learn it, she lived it. She
came to know her country by travelling up and down its waterways.
She learned its people by meeting them, of all sorts and conditions.
She learned folkways; river lore; Negro songs; bird calls; pilot rules;
profanity; the art of stage make-up; all the parts in the Cotton
Blossom troupe’s repertoire including East Lynne, Lady Audley’s
Secret, Tempest and Sunshine, Spanish Gipsy, Madcap Margery, and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
There probably was much that was sordid about the life. But to
the imaginative and volatile little girl of ten or thereabouts it was a
combination playhouse, make-believe theatre, and picnic jaunt. Hers
were days of enchantment—or would have been were it not for the
practical Parthy who, iron woman that she was, saw to it that the
child was properly fed, well clothed, and sufficiently refreshed by
sleep. But Parthy’s interests now were too manifold and diverse to
permit of her accustomed concentration on Magnolia. She had an
entire boatload of people to boss—two boatloads, in fact, for she did
not hesitate to investigate and criticize the manners and morals of
the crew that manned the towboat Mollie Able. A man was never
safe from her as he sat smoking his after-dinner pipe and spitting
contemplatively into the river. It came about that Magnolia’s life was
infinitely more free afloat than it had ever been on land.
Up and down the rivers the story went that the Cotton Blossom
was the sternest-disciplined, best-managed, and most generously
provisioned boat in the business. And it was notorious that a sign
back-stage and in each dressing room read: “No lady of the
company allowed on deck in a wrapper.” It also was known that
drunkenness on the Cotton Blossom was punished by instant
dismissal; that Mrs. Captain Andy Hawks was a holy terror; that the
platters of fried chicken on Sunday were inexhaustible. All of this
was true.
Magnolia’s existence became a weird mixture of lawlessness and
order; of humdrum and fantasy. She slipped into the life as though
she had been born to it. Parthy alone kept her from being utterly
spoiled by the members of the troupe.
Mrs. Hawks’ stern tread never adjusted itself to the leisurely
rhythm of the show boat’s tempo. This was obvious even to
Magnolia. The very first week of their initial trip she had heard her
mother say briskly to Julie, “What time is it?” Mrs. Hawks was
marching from one end of the boat to the other, intent on some fell
domestic errand of her own. Julie, seated in a low chair on deck,
sewing and gazing out upon the yellow turbulence of the Mississippi,
had replied in her deep indolent voice, without glancing up, “What
does it matter?”
The four words epitomized the divinely care-free existence of the
Cotton Blossom show-boat troupe.
Sometimes they played a new town every night. Sometimes, in
regions that were populous and that boasted a good back-country,
they remained a week. In such towns, as the boat returned year
after year until it became a recognized institution, there grew up
between the show-boat troupe and the townspeople a sort of
friendly intimacy. They were warmly greeted on their arrival; sped
regretfully on their departure. They almost never travelled at night.
Usually they went to bed with the sound of the water slap-slapping
gently against the boat’s flat sides, and proceeded down river at
daybreak. This meant that constant warfare raged between the
steamboat crew of the Mollie Able and the show-boat troupe of the
Cotton Blossom. The steamer crew, its work done, retired early, for it
must be up and about at daybreak. It breakfasted at four-thirty or
five. The actors never were abed before midnight or one o’clock and
rose for a nine o’clock breakfast. They complained that the steamer
crew, with its bells, whistles, hoarse shouts, hammerings, puffings,
and general to-do attendant upon casting off and getting under way,
robbed them of their morning sleep. The crew grumbled and cursed
as it tried to get a night’s rest in spite of the noise of the band, the
departing audience, the midnight sociability of the players who, still
at high tension after their night’s work, could not yet retire meekly to
bed.
“Lot of damn scenery chewers,” growled the crew, turning in
sleep.
“Filthy roustabouts,” retorted the troupers, disturbed at dawn.
“Yell because they can’t talk like human beings.”
 They rarely mingled, except such members of the crew as played
in the band; and never exchanged civilities. This state of affairs lent
spice to an existence that might otherwise have proved too placid for
comfort. The bickering acted as a safety valve.
It all was, perhaps, the worst possible environment for a skinny,
high-strung, and sensitive little girl who was one-quarter French. But
Magnolia thrived on it. She had the solid and lumpy Puritanism of
Parthy’s presence to counteract the leaven of her volatile father. This
saved her from being utterly consumed.
The life was at once indolent and busy. Captain Andy, scurrying
hither and thither, into the town, up the river bank, rushing down
the aisle at rehearsal to squeak a false direction to the hard-working
company, driving off into the country to return in triumph laden with
farm produce, was fond of saying, “We’re just like one big happy
family.”
Captain Andy knew and liked good food (the Frenchman in him).
They ate the best that the countryside afforded—not a great deal of
meat in the height of summer when they were, perhaps, playing the
hot humid Southern river towns, but plenty of vegetables and fruit—
great melons bought from the patch with the sun still hot on their
rounded bulging sides, and then chilled to dripping deliciousness
before eating; luscious yams; country butter and cream. They all
drank the water dipped out of the river on which they happened to
be floating. They quaffed great dippersful of the Mississippi, the
Ohio, and even the turbid Missouri, and seemed none the worse for
it. At the stern was the settling barrel. Here the river water, dipped
up in buckets, was left to settle before drinking. At the bottom of
this receptacle, after it was three-quarters empty, one might find a
rich layer of Mississippi silt intermingled with plummy odds and ends
of every description including, sometimes, a sizable catfish.
In everything but actual rehearsing and playing, Magnolia lived
the life of the company. The boat was their home. They ate, slept,
worked, played on it. The company must be prompt at meal time, at
rehearsals, and at the evening performances. There all responsibility
ended for them.
 Breakfast was at nine; and under Parthy’s stern régime this
meant nine. They were a motley lot as they assembled. In that
bizarre setting the homely, everyday garb of the men and women
took on a grotesque aspect. It was as though they were dressed for
a part. As they appeared in the dining room, singly, in couples, or in
groups, with a cheerful or a dour greeting, depending on the
morning mood of each, an onlooker could think only of the home life
of the Vincent Crummleses. Having seen Elly the night before as
Miss Lenore La Verne in the golden curls, short skirts, and wide-eyed
innocence of Bessie, the backwoodsman’s daughter, who turned out,
in the last act, to be none other than the Lady Clarice Trelawney,
carelessly mislaid at birth, her appearance at breakfast was likely to
have something of the shock of disillusionment. The baby stare of
her great blue eyes was due to near-sightedness to correct which
she wore silver-rimmed spectacles when not under the public gaze.
Her breakfast jacket, though frilly, was not of the freshest, and her
kid curlers were not entirely hidden by a silk-and-lace cap. Elly was,
despite these grotesqueries, undeniably and triumphantly pretty, and
thus arrayed gave the effect of a little girl mischievously tricked out
in her grandmother’s wardrobe. Her husband, known as Schultzy in
private and Harold Westbrook on the bills, acted as director of the
company. He was what is known in actor’s parlance as a raver, and
his method of acting was designated in the show-boat world as
spitting scenery. A somewhat furtive young man in very tight pants
and high collar always a trifle too large. He was a cuff-shooter, and
those cuffs were secured and embellished with great square shiny
chunks of quartz-like stuff which he frequently breathed upon
heavily and then rubbed with his handkerchief. Schultzy played
juvenile leads opposite his wife’s ingénue rôles; had a real flair for
the theatre.
Sometimes they were in mid-river when the breakfast bell
sounded; sometimes tied to a landing. The view might be plantation,
woods, or small town—it was all one to the Cotton Blossom
company, intent on coffee and bacon. Long before white-aproned Jo,
breakfast bell in hand, emerged head first from the little doorway
beneath the stage back of the orchestra pit, like an amiable black
python from its lair, Mrs. Hawks was on the scene, squinting critically
into cream jugs, attacking flies as though they were dragons,
infuriating Queenie with the remark that the biscuits seemed soggy
this morning. Five minutes after the bell was brandished, Jo had
placed the breakfast on the table, hot: oatmeal, steaming pots of
coffee, platters of fried eggs with ham or bacon, stacks of toast,
biscuits fresh from the oven. If you were prompt you got a hot
breakfast; tardy, you took it cold.
Parthy, whose breakfast cap, designed to hide her curl papers,
always gave the effect, somehow, of a martial helmet, invariably was
first at the small table that stood at the head of the room farthest
from the little doorway. So she must have sat at her schoolhouse
desk during those New England winters, awaiting the tardy morning
arrival of reluctant and chilblained urchins. Magnolia was one of
those children whom breakfast does not interest. Left to her own
devices, she would have ignored the meal altogether. She usually
entered late, her black hair still wet from the comb, her eyes wide
with her eagerness to impart the day’s first bit of nautical news.
“Doc says there’s a family going down river on a bumboat, and
they’ve got a teensy baby no bigger than a——”
“Drink your milk.”
“—doll and he says it must have been born on the boat and he
bets it’s not more than a week old. Oh, I hope they’ll tie up
somewhere near——”
“Eat your toast with your egg.”
“Do I have to eat my egg?”
“Yes.”
If Magnolia was late, Andy was always later. He ate quickly and
abstractedly. As he swallowed his coffee you could almost see his
agile mind darting here and there, so that you wondered how his
electric little body resisted following it as a lesser force follows a
greater—up into the pilot house, down in the engine room, into the
town, leaping ahead to the next landing; dickering with storekeepers
for supplies. He was always the first to finish and was off at a quick
trot, clawing the mutton-chop whiskers as he went.
Early or late, Julie and Steve came in together, Steve’s great
height ludicrously bent to avoid the low rafters of the dining room.
Julie and Steve were the character team—Julie usually cast as
adventuress, older sister, foil for Elly, the ingénue. Julie was a natural
and intuitive actress, probably the best in the company. Sometimes
she watched Elly’s unintelligent work, heard her slovenly speech and
her silly inflections, and a little contemptuous look would come into
her face.
Steve played villains and could never have kept the job, even in
that uncritical group, had it not been for Julie. He was very big and
very fair, and almost entirely lacking in dramatic sense. A quiet
gentle giant, he always seemed almost grotesquely miscast, his
blondeur and his trusting faithful blue eyes belying the sable
hirsuteness of villainy. Julie coached him patiently, tirelessly. The
result was fairly satisfactory. But a nuance, an inflection, was beyond
him.
“Who has a better right!” his line would be, perhaps. Schultzy,
directing at rehearsal, would endeavour fruitlessly to convey to him
its correct reading. After rehearsal, Julie could be heard going over
the line again and again.
“Who has a better right!” Steve would thunder, dramatically.
“No, dear. The accent is on ‘better.’ Like this: ‘Who has a better
right!’ ”
Steve’s blue eyes would be very earnest, his face red with effort.
“Oh, I see. Come down hard on ‘better,’ huh? ‘Who has a better
right!’ ”
It was useless.
The two were very much in love. The others in the company
sometimes teased them about this, but not often. Julie and Steve
did not respond to this badinage gracefully. There existed between
the two a relation that made the outsider almost uncomfortable.
When they looked at each other, there vibrated between them a
current that sent a little shiver through the beholder. Julie’s eyes
were deep-set and really black, and there was about them a curious
indefinable quality. Magnolia liked to look into their soft and
mournful depths. Her own eyes were dark, but not like Julie’s.
Perhaps it was the whites of Julie’s eyes that were different.
Magnolia had once seen them kiss. She had come upon them
quietly and unexpectedly, on deck, in the dusk. Certainly she had
never witnessed a like passage of love between her parents; and
even her recent familiarity with stage romance had not prepared her
for it. It was long before the day of the motion picture fade-out.
Olga Nethersole’s famous osculation was yet to shock a Puritan
America. Steve had held Julie a long long minute, wordlessly. Her
slimness had seemed to melt into him. Julie’s eyes were closed. She
was quite limp as he tipped her upright. She stood thus a moment,
swaying, her eyes still shut. When she opened them they were
clouded, misty, as were his. The two then beheld a staring and
fascinated little girl quite palpably unable to move from the spot.
Julie had laughed a little low laugh. She had not flushed, exactly. Her
sallow colouring had taken on a tone at once deeper and clearer and
brighter, like amber underlaid with gold. Her eyes had widened until
they were enormous in her thin dark glowing face. It was as though
a lamp had been lighted somewhere behind them.
“What makes you look like that?” Magnolia had demanded, being
a forthright young person.
“Like what?” Julie had asked.
“Like you do. All—all shiny.”
“Love,” Julie had answered, quite simply. Magnolia had not in the
least understood; but she remembered. And years later she did
understand.
Besides Elly, the ingénue, Schultzy, juvenile lead, Julie and Steve,
character team, there were Mr. and Mrs. Means, general business
team, Frank, the heavy, and Ralph, general utility man. Elly and
Schultzy sat at table with the Hawkses, the mark of favour
customary to their lofty theatrical eminence. The others of the
company, together with Doc, and three of the band members, sat at
the long table in the centre of the room. Mrs. Means played haughty
dowagers, old Kentucky crones, widows, mothers, and middle-aged
females. Mr. Means did bankers, Scrooges, old hunters and trappers,
comics, and the like.
At the table nearest the door and the kitchen sat the captain and
crew of the Mollie Able. There were no morning newspapers to read
between sips of coffee; no mail to open. They were all men and
women of experience. They had knocked about the world. In their
faces was a lived look, together with an expression that had in it a
curiously childlike quality. Captain Andy was not far wrong in his
boast that they were like one big family—a close and jealous family
needing no outside stimulus for its amusement. They were
extraordinarily able to amuse themselves. Their talk was racy,
piquant, pungent. The women were, for the most part, made of
sterner stuff than the men—that is, among the actors. That the men
had chosen this drifting, care-free, protected life, and were satisfied
with it, proved that. Certainly Julie was a force stronger than Steve;
Elly made a slave of Schultzy; Mrs. Means was a sternly maternal
wife to her weak-chested and drily humorous little husband.
Usually they lingered over their coffee. Jo, padding in from the
kitchen, would bring on a hot potful.
Julie had a marmoset which she had come by in New Orleans,
where it had been brought from equatorial waters by some swarthy
earringed sailor. This she frequently carried to the table with her,
tucked under her arm, its tiny dark head with the tragic mask of a
face peering out from beneath her elbow. To Mrs. Hawks’ intense
disgust, Julie fed the tiny creature out of her own dish. In her cabin
its bed was an old sealskin muff from whose depths its mournful
dark eyes looked appealingly out from a face that was like nothing
so much as that of an old old baby.
“I declare,” Parthy would protest, almost daily, “it fairly turns a
body’s stomach to see her eating out of the same dish with that dirty
little rat.”
 “Why, Mama! it isn’t a rat any such thing! It’s a monkey and you
know it. Julie says maybe Schultzy can get one for me in New
Orleans if I promise to be very very careful of it.”
“I’d like to see her try,” grimly putting an end to that dream.
The women took care of their own cabins. The detail of this
occupied them until mid-morning. Often there was a rehearsal at ten
that lasted an hour or more. Schultzy announced it at breakfast.
As they swept up a river, or floated down, their approach to the
town was announced by the shrill iron-throated calliope, pride of
Captain Andy’s heart. Its blatant voice heralded the coming of the
show boat long before the boat itself could be seen from the river
bank. It had solid brass keys and could plainly be heard for five
miles. George, who played the calliope, was also the pianist. He was
known, like all calliope players, as the Whistler. Magnolia delighted in
watching him at the instrument. He wore a slicker and a slicker hat
and heavy gloves to protect his hands, for the steam of the whistles
turned to hot raindrops and showered his hands and his head and
shoulders as he played. As they neared the landing, the band,
perched atop the show boat, forward, alternated with the calliope.
From the town, hurrying down the streets, through the woods,
dotting the levee and the landing, came eager figures, black and
white. Almost invariably some magic-footed Negro, overcome by the
music, could be seen on the wharf executing the complicated and
rhythmic steps of a double shuffle, his rags flapping grotesquely
about him, his mouth a gash of white. By nine o’clock in the morning
every human being within a radius of five miles knew that the Cotton
Blossom Floating Palace Theatre had docked at the waterfront.
By half-past eleven the band, augmented by two or three men of
the company who doubled in brass, must be ready for the morning
concert on the main street corner. Often, queerly enough, the town
at which they made their landing was no longer there. The
Mississippi, in prankish mood, had dumped millions of tons of silt in
front of the street that faced the river. Year by year, perhaps, this
had gone on, until now that which had been a river town was an
inland town, with a mile of woodland and sandy road between its
main street and the waterfront. The old serpent now stretched its
sluggish yellow coils in another channel.
By eleven o’clock the band would have donned its scarlet coats
with the magnificent gold braid and brass buttons. The nether part
of these costumes always irritated Magnolia. Her colour-loving eye
turned away from them, offended. For while the upper costume was
splendidly martial, the lower part was composed merely of such
everyday pants as the band members might be wearing at the time
of the concert hour, and were a rude shock to the ravished eye as it
travelled from the gay flame and gold of the jacket and the dashing
impudence of the cap. Especially in the drum major did this offend
her. He was called the baton spinner and wore, instead of the scarlet
cap of the other band members, an imposing (though a slightly
mangy) fur shako, very black and shaggy and fierce-looking, and
with a strap under the chin. Pete, the bass drummer, worked in the
engine room. Usually, at the last minute, he washed up hastily,
grabbed his drum, buttoned on his coat, and was dazzlingly
transformed from a sooty crow into a scarlet tanager.
Up the levee they scrambled—two cornets, a clarinet, a tuba, an
alto (called a peck horn. Magnolia loved its ump-a ump-a ta-ta-ta-ta,
ump-a ump-a ta-ta-ta-ta), a snare drummer who was always called a
“sticks,” and the bass drum, known as the bull.
When the landing was a waterfront town, the band concert was a
pleasant enough interval in the day’s light duties. But when a mile or
more of dusty road lay between the show boat and the main street it
became a real chore. Carrying their heavy instruments, their scarlet
coats open, their caps in their hands, they would trudge, tired, hot,
and sweating, the long dusty road that led through the woods.
When the road became a clearing and they emerged abruptly into
the town, they would button their coats, mop their hot faces, adjust
cap or shako, stiffen their drooping shoulders. Their gait would
change from one of plodding weariness to a sprightly strut. Their
pepper-and-salt, or brown, or black trousered legs would move with
rhythmic precision in time to the music. From tired, sticky, wilted
plodders, they would be transformed into heroic and romantic
figures. Up came the chest of the baton spinner. His left hand rested
elegantly on his hip, his head and shoulders were held stiffly,
arrogantly; his right hand twirled the glittering baton until it dazzled
the eyes like a second noonday sun. Hotel waitresses, their hearts
beating high, scurried to the windows: children rushed pell-mell from
the school yard into the street; clerks in their black sateen aprons
and straw sleevelets stood in the shop doorways; housewives left
their pots a-boil as they lingered a wistful moment on the front
porch, shading their eyes with a work-seamed hand; loafers spilled
out of the saloons and stood agape and blinking. And as the music
blared and soared, the lethargic little town was transformed for an
hour into a gay and lively scene. Even the old white fly-bitten nags
in the streets stepped with a jerky liveliness in their spring-halted
gait, and a gleam came into their lack-lustre eyes as they pricked up
their ears to the sound. Seeking out the busiest corner of the dull
little main street, the band would take their stand, bleating and
blaring, the sun playing magnificently on the polished brass of their
instruments.
Although he never started with them, at this point Captain Andy
always turned up, having overtaken them in some mysterious way.
Perhaps he swung from tree to tree through the woods. There he
was in his blue coat, his wrinkled baggy linen pants, his white
canvas cap with the leather visor; fussy, nervous, animated, bright-
eyed, clawing the mutton-chop whiskers from side to side. Under his
arm he carried a sheaf of playbills announcing the programmes and
extolling the talents of the players. After the band had played two
lively numbers, he would make his speech, couched in the absurd
grandiloquence of the showman. He talked well. He made his
audience laugh, bizarre yet strangely appealing little figure that he
was. “Most magnificent company of players every assembled on the
rivers . . . unrivalled scenery and costumes . . . Miss Lenore La Verne
. . . dazzling array of talent . . . fresh from triumphs in the East . . .
concert after the show . . . singing and dancing . . . bring the
children . . . come one, come all. . . . Cotton Blossom troupe just
one big happy family. . . .”
 The band would strike up again. Captain Andy would whisk
through the crowd with uncanny swiftness distributing his playbills,
greeting an acquaintance met on previous trips, chucking a child
under the chin, extolling the brilliance and gaiety of the performance
scheduled for that evening. At the end of a half hour the band would
turn and march playing down the street. In the dispersing crowd
could be discerned Andy’s agile little figure darting, stooping,
swooping as he thriftily collected again the playbills that, once
perused, had been dropped in the dust by careless spectators.
Dinner was at four, a hearty meal. Before dinner, and after, the
Cotton Blossom troupe was free to spend its time as it would. The
women read or sewed. There were always new costumes to be
contrived, or old ones to mend and refurbish. The black-hearted
adventuress of that morning’s rehearsal sat neatly darning a pair of
her husband’s socks. There was always the near-by town to visit; a
spool of thread to be purchased, a stamp, a sack of peppermint
drops, a bit of muslin, a toothbrush. The indolence of the life was
such that they rarely took any premeditated exercise. Sometimes
they strolled in the woods at springtime when the first tender
yellow-green hazed the forest vistas. They fished, though the catch
was usually catfish. On hot days the more adventuresome of them
swam. The river was their front yard, grown as accustomed as a
stretch of lawn. They were extraordinarily able to amuse themselves.
Hardly one that did not play piano, violin, flute, banjo, mandolin.
By six o’clock a stir—a little electric unrest—an undercurrent of
excitement could be sensed aboard the show boat. They came
sauntering back from the woods, the town, the levee. They drifted
down the aisles and in and out of their dressing rooms. Years of
trouping failed to still in them the quickened pulse that always came
with the approach of the evening’s performance.
Down in the orchestra pit the band was tuning up. They would
play atop the show boat on the forward deck before the show,
alternating with the calliope, as in the morning. The daytime
lethargy had vanished. On the stage the men of the company were
setting the scene. Hoarse shouts. Lift ’er up there! No—down a little.
H’ist her up. Back! Closer! Dressing-room doors opened and shut.
Calls from one room to another. Twilight came on. Doc began to light
the auditorium kerosene lamps whose metal reflectors sent back
their yellow glow. Outside the kerosene search-light, cunningly
rigged on top of the Mollie Able’s pilot house, threw its broad beam
up the river bank to the levee.
Of all the hours in the day this was the one most beloved of
Magnolia’s heart. She enjoyed the stir, the colour, the music, the
people. Anything might happen on board the Cotton Blossom
Floating Palace Theatre between the night hours of seven and
eleven. And then it was that she was banished to bed. There was a
nightly struggle in which, during the first months of their life on the
rivers, Mrs. Hawks almost always won. Infrequently, by hook or
crook, Magnolia managed to evade the stern parental eye.
“Let me just stay up for the first act—where Elly shoots him.”
“Not a minute.”
“Let me stay till the curtain goes up, then.”
“You march yourself off to bed, young lady, or no trip to the
pirate’s cave to-morrow with Doc, and so I tell you.”
Doc’s knowledge of the gruesome history of river banditry and
piracy provided Magnolia with many a goose-skinned hour of
delicious terror. Together they went excursioning ashore in search of
the blood-curdling all the way from Little Egypt to the bayous of
Louisiana.
Lying there in her bed, then, wide-eyed, tense, Magnolia would
strain her ears to catch the words of the play’s dialogue as it came
faintly up to her through the locked door that opened on the
balcony; the almost incredibly naïve lines of a hackneyed play that
still held its audience because of its full measure of fundamental
human emotions. Hate, love, revenge, despair, hope, joy, terror.
“I will bring you to your knees yet, my proud beauty!”
“Never. I would rather die than accept help from your blood-
stained hand.”
 Once Parthy, warned by some maternal instinct, stole softly to
Magnolia’s room to find the prisoner flown. She had managed to
undo the special lock with which Mrs. Hawks had thought to make
impossible her little daughter’s access to the upper veranda deck just
off her room. Magnolia had crept around the perilously narrow ledge
enclosed by a low railing just below the upper deck and was there
found, a shawl over her nightgown, knitted bed-slippers on her feet,
peering in at the upper windows together with adventuresome and
indigent urchins of the town who had managed somehow to
scramble to this uncertain foothold.
After fitting punishment, the ban was gradually removed; or
perhaps Mrs. Hawks realized the futility of trying to bring up a show-
boat child according to Massachusetts small-town standards. With
natural human perversity, thereafter, Magnolia frequently betook
herself quietly to bed of her own accord the while the band blared
below, guns were fired, love lost, villains foiled, beauty endangered,
and blood spilled. Curiously enough, she never tired of watching
these simple blood-and-thunder dramas. Automatically she learned
every part in every play in the Cotton Blossom’s repertoire, so that
by the time she was thirteen she could have leaped on the stage at
a moment’s notice to play anything from Simon Legree to Lena
Rivers.
But best of all she liked to watch the audience assembling.
Unconsciously the child’s mind beheld the moving living drama of a
nation’s peasantry. It was such an audience as could be got together
in no other kind of theatre in all the world. Farmers, labourers,
Negroes; housewives, children, yokels, lovers; roustabouts, dock
wallopers, backwoodsmen, rivermen, gamblers. The coal-mining
regions furnished the roughest audiences. The actors rather dreaded
the coal towns of West Virginia or Pennsylvania. They knew that
when they played the Monongahela River or the Kanawha there
were likely to be more brawls and bloodshed off the stage than on.
By half-past six the levee and landing were already dotted with
the curious, the loafers, the impecunious, the barefoot urchins who
had gathered to snatch such crumbs as could be gathered without
pay. They fed richly on the colour, the crowds, the music, the
glimpses they caught of another world through the show boat’s
glowing windows.
Up the river bank from the boat landing to the top of the bluff
flared kerosene torches suspended on long spikes stuck in the
ground. Magnolia knew they were only kerosene torches, but their
orange and scarlet flames never failed to excite her. There was
something barbaric and splendid about them against the dusk of the
sky and woods beyond, the sinister mystery of the river below.
Something savage and elemental stirred in her at sight of them; a
momentary reversion to tribal days, though she could not know that.
She did know that she liked the fantastic dancing shadows cast by
their vivid tongues on the figures that now teetered and slid and
scrambled down the steep clay bank to the boat landing. They made
a weird spectacle of the commonplace. The whites of the Negroes’
eyes gleamed whiter. The lights turned their cheeks to copper and
bronze and polished ebony. The swarthy coal miners and their
shawled and sallow wives, the farmers of the corn and wheat lands,
the backwoods poor whites, the cotton pickers of Tennessee,
Louisiana, Mississippi, the small-town merchants, the shambling
loafers, the lovers two by two were magically transformed into
witches, giants, princesses, crones, gnomes, Nubians, genii.
At the little ticket window sat Doc, the astute, or Captain Andy.
Later Mrs. Hawks was found to possess a grim genius for handling
ticket-seeking crowds and the intricacies of ticket rack and small
coins. Those dimes, quarters, and half dollars poured so willingly
into the half-oval of the ticket window’s open mouth found their way
there, often enough, through a trail of pain and sweat and blood. It
was all one to Parthy. Black faces. White faces. Hands gnarled.
Hands calloused. Men in jeans. Women in calico. Babies. Children.
Gimme a ticket. I only got fifteen. How much for her here? Many of
them had never seen a theatre or a play. It was a strangely quiet
crowd, usually. Little of laughter, of shouting. They came to the show
boat timid, wide-eyed, wondering, like children. Two men of the
steamboat crew or two of the musicians acted as ushers. After the
first act was over they had often to assure these simple folk that the
play was not yet ended. “This is just a recess. You come back to
your seat in a couple of minutes. No, it isn’t over. There’s lots more
to the show.”
After the play there was the concert. Doc, Andy, and the ushers
passed up and down between the acts selling tickets for this. They
required an additional fifteen cents. Every member of the Cotton
Blossom troupe must be able to sing, dance, play some musical
instrument or give a monologue—in some way contribute to the half
hour of entertainment following the regular performance.
Now the band struck up. The kerosene lamps on the walls were
turned low. The scuffling, shuffling, coughing audience became
quiet, quiet. There was in that stillness something of fright. Seamed
faces. Furrowed faces. Drab. Bitter. Sodden. Childlike. Weary.
Sometimes, startlingly clear-cut in that half light, could be glimpsed
a profile of some gaunt Southern labourer, or backwoodsman; and it
was the profile of a portrait seen in some gallery or in the illustration
of a book of history. A nose high-bred, aquiline; a sensitive, haughty
mouth; eyes deep-set, arrogant. Spanish, French, English? The
blood of a Stuart, a Plantagenet? Some royal rogue or adventurer of
many many years ago whose seed, perhaps, this was.
The curtain rose. The music ceased jerkily, in mid-bar. They
became little children listening to a fairy tale. A glorious world of
unreality opened before their eyes. Things happened. They knew
that in life things did not happen thus. But here they saw, believed,
and were happy. Innocence wore golden curls. Wickedness wore
black. Love triumphed, right conquered, virtue was rewarded, evil
punished.
They forgot the cotton fields, the wheatfields, the cornfields.
They forgot the coal mines, the potato patch, the stable, the barn,
the shed. They forgot the labour under the pitiless blaze of the
noonday sun; the bitter marrow-numbing chill of winter; the
blistered skin; the frozen road; wind, snow, rain, flood. The women
forgot for an hour their washtubs, their kitchen stoves, childbirth
pains, drudgery, worry, disappointment. Here were blood, lust, love,
passion. Here were warmth, enchantment, laughter, music. It was
Anodyne. It was Lethe. It was Escape. It was the Theatre.
 VI

I
t was the theatre, perhaps, as the theatre was meant to be. A
place in which one saw one’s dreams come true. A place in
which one could live a vicarious life of splendour and
achievement; winning in love, foiling the evildoer; a place in which
one could weep unashamed, laugh aloud, give way to emotions long
pent-up. When the show was over, and they had clambered up the
steep bank, and the music of the band had ceased, and there was
left only the dying glow of the kerosene flares, you saw them
stumble a little and blink, dazedly, like one rudely awakened to
reality from a lovely dream.
By eleven the torches had been gathered in. The show-boat
lights were dimmed. Troupers as they were, no member of the
Cotton Blossom company could go meekly off to sleep once the work
day was over. They still were at high tension. So they discussed for
the thousandth time the performance that they had given a
thousand times. They dissected the audience.
“Well, they were sitting on their hands to-night, all right. Seemed
they never would warm up.”
“I got a big laugh on that new business with the pillow. Did you
notice?”
“Notice! Yeh, the next time you introduce any new business you
got a right to leave me know beforehand. I went right up. If
Schultzy hadn’t thrown me my line where’d I been!”
“I never thought of it till that minute, so help me! I just noticed
the pillow on the sofa and that minute it came to me it’d be a good
piece of business to grab it up like it was a baby in my arms. I didn’t
expect any such laugh as I got on it. I didn’t go to throw you off.”
From Schultzy, in the rôle of director: “Next time you get one of
those inspirations you try it out at rehearsal first.”
 “God, they was a million babies to-night. Cap, I guess you must
of threw a little something extra into your spiel about come and
bring the children. They sure took you seriously and brought ’em, all
right. I’d just soon play for a orphan asylum and be done with it.”
Julie was cooking a pot of coffee over a little spirit lamp. They
used the stage as a common gathering place. Bare of scenery now,
in readiness for next night’s set, it was their living room. Stark and
shadowy as it was, there was about it an air of coziness, of
domesticity. Mrs. Means, ponderous in dressing gown and slippers,
was heating some oily mess for use in the nightly ministrations on
her frail little husband’s delicate chest. Usually Andy, Parthy, Elly, and
Schultzy, as the haute monde, together with the occasional addition
of the Mollie Able’s captain and pilot, supped together at a table
below-stage in the dining room, where Jo and Queenie had set out a
cold collation—cheese, ham, bread, a pie left from dinner. Parthy
cooked the coffee on the kerosene stove. On stage the women of
the company hung their costumes carefully away in the tiny cubicles
provided for such purpose just outside the dressing-room doors. The
men smoked a sedative pipe. The lights of the little town on the
river bank had long been extinguished. Even the saloons on the
waterfront showed only an occasional glow. Sometimes George at
the piano tried out a new song for Elly or Schultzy or Ralph, in
preparation for to-morrow night’s concert. The tinkle of the piano,
the sound of the singer’s voice drifted across the river. Up in the little
town in a drab cottage near the waterfront a restless soul would turn
in his sleep and start up at the sound and listen between waking and
sleeping; wondering about these strange people singing on their
boat at midnight; envying them their fantastic vagabond life.
A peaceful enough existence in its routine, yet a curiously
crowded and colourful one for a child. She saw town after town
whose waterfront street was a solid block of saloons, one next the
other, open day and night. Her childhood impressions were formed
of stories, happenings, accidents, events born of the rivers. Towns
and cities and people came to be associated in her mind with this or
that bizarre bit of river life. The junction of the Ohio and Big Sandy
rivers always was remembered by Magnolia as the place where the
Black Diamond Saloon was opened on the day the Cotton Blossom
played Catlettsburg. Catlettsburg, typical waterfront town of the
times, was like a knot that drew together the two rivers. Ohio, West
Virginia, and Kentucky met just there. And at the junction of the
rivers there was opened with high and appropriate ceremonies the
Black Diamond Saloon, owned by those picturesque two, Big Wayne
Damron and Little Wayne Damron. From the deck of the Cotton
Blossom Magnolia saw the crowd waiting for the opening of the
Black Diamond doors—free drinks, free lunch, river town hospitality.
And then Big Wayne opened the doors, and the crowd surged back
while their giant host, holding the key aloft in his hand, walked down
to the river bank, held the key high for a moment, then hurled it far
into the yellow waters of the Big Sandy. The Black Diamond Saloon
was open for business.
The shifting colourful life of the rivers unfolded before her
ambient eyes. She saw and learned and remembered. Rough sights,
brutal sights; sights of beauty and colour; deeds of bravery; dirty
deeds. Through the wheat lands, the corn country, the fruit belt, the
cotton, the timber region. The river life flowed and changed like the
river itself. Shanty boats. Bumboats. Side-wheelers. Stern-wheelers.
Fussy packets, self-important. Races ending often in death and
disaster. Coal barges. A fleet of rafts, log-laden. The timber rafts,
drifting down to Louisville, were steered with great sweeps. As they
swept down the Ohio, the timbermen sang their chantey, their great
shoulders and strong muscular torsos bending, straightening to the
rhythm of the rowing song. Magnolia had learned the words from
Doc, and when she espied the oarsmen from the deck of the Cotton
Blossom she joined in the song and rocked with their motion out of
sheer dramatic love of it:
 “The river is up,
The channel is deep,
The wind blows steady and strong.
Oh, Dinah’s got the hoe cake on,
So row your boat along.
Down the river,
Down the river,
Down the O-hi-o.
Down the river,
Down the river,
Down the O-
hi-
O!”

Three tremendous pulls accompanied those last three long-drawn

syllables. Magnolia found it most invigorating. Doc had told her, too,
that the Ohio had got its name from the time when the Indians,
standing on one shore and wishing to cross to the other, would cup
their hands and send out the call to the opposite bank, loud and
high and clear, “O-HE-O!”
“Do you think it’s true?” Magnolia would say; for Mrs. Hawks had
got into the way of calling Doc’s stories stuff-and-nonsense. All those
tales, it would seem, to which Magnolia most thrilled, turned out,
according to Parthy, to be stuff-and-nonsense. So then, “Do you
think it’s true?” she would demand, fearfully.
“Think it! Why, pshaw! I know it’s true. Sure as shootin’.”
It was noteworthy and characteristic of Magnolia that she liked
best the rampant rivers. The Illinois, which had possessed such
fascination for Tonti, for Joliet, for Marquette—for countless coureurs
du bois who had frequented this trail to the southwest—left her cold.
Its clear water, its gentle current, its fretless channel, its green
hillsides, its tidy bordering grain fields, bored her. From Doc and
from her father she learned a haphazard and picturesque chronicle
of its history, and that of like rivers—a tale of voyageurs and
trappers, of flatboat and keelboat men, of rafters in the great
logging days, of shanty boaters, water gipsies, steamboats. She
listened, and remembered, but was unmoved. When the Cotton
Blossom floated down the tranquil bosom of the Illinois Magnolia
read a book. She drank its limpid waters and missed the mud-tang
to be found in a draught of the Mississippi.
“If I was going to be a river,” she announced, “I wouldn’t want to
be the Illinois, or like those. I’d want to be the Mississippi.”
“How’s that?” asked Captain Andy.
“Because the Illinois, it’s always the same. But the Mississippi is
always different. It’s like a person that you never know what they’re
going to do next, and that makes them interesting.”
Doc was oftenest her cicerone and playmate ashore. His
knowledge of the countryside, the rivers, the dwellers along the
shore and in the back-country, was almost godlike in its omniscience.
At his tongue’s end were tales of buccaneers, of pirates, of
adventurers. He told her of the bloodthirsty and rapacious Murrel
who, not content with robbing and killing his victims, ripped them
open, disembowelled them, and threw them into the river.
“Oh, my!” Magnolia would exclaim, inadequately; and peer with
some distaste into the water rushing past the boat’s flat sides. “How
did he look? Like Steve when he plays Legree?”
“Not by a jugful, he didn’t. Dressed up like a parson, and used to
travel from town to town, giving sermons. He had a slick tongue,
and while the congregation inside was all stirred up getting their
souls saved, Murrel’s gang outside would steal their horses.”
Stories of slaves stolen, sold, restolen, resold, and murdered.
Murrel’s attempted capture of New Orleans by rousing the blacks to
insurrection against the whites. Tales of Crenshaw, the vulture; of
Mason, terror of the Natchez road. On excursions ashore, Doc
showed her pirates’ caves, abandoned graveyards, ancient robber
retreats along the river banks or in the woods. They visited Sam
Grity’s soap kettle, a great iron pot half hidden in a rocky unused
field, in which Grity used to cache his stolen plunder. She never
again saw an old soap kettle sitting plumply in some Southern
kitchen doorway, its sides covered with a handsome black velvet
coat of soot, that she did not shiver deliciously. Strong fare for a