Free The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe

when she made an ordinary walking stick bloom paper flowers and gave us a bang-up finale to the first act – like Jesus, turning a glass of Missouri River water, too thin to plough and too thick to drink, into whisky, handing it to Sweet Oil Bob to sample and pronounce on its quality, and he pleading for another so plaintive and pitiful Madge laughed until her cheeks ran with tears.
    When intermission came I bought her a bottled ginger drink from Madame’s assistant. It was her first, she whispered to me, she’d never tasted the like of it.
    Madame came out for the second act in black tights and a black doublet, hair tucked up and hidden under a turban. Her assistant informed us sombrely that Madame was sometimes the “unwilling earthly tenement of souls gone over,” and that the ghost of the long-dead Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, desired to make a statement to the citizens of Fort Benton.
    A skull was whipped from behind Madame’s back, up it went into the lamp light, and in a voice manly, foreign, and otherworldly, she cried, “ ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ ” and launched into a speech about death that nailed us to our seats.
    But just as quick as this prince Hamlet took hold of her, he flew the coop, Madame recovered herself, looked about all bewildered,cried out to her assistant, “Prithee, Horatio, tell me! Where am I?”
    “Fort Benton, Madame Magique!” he hollered and poor Yorick’s skull banged like a rocket, sent up a cloud of blue smoke that scared the wits out of all and sundry. Madge screamed and hung to my arm, but she didn’t lose her nerve like those two prospectors who charged the gunwales and flung themselves overboard into Big Muddy. That set everybody stampeding about the deck, one or two pistols were drawn, and riot threatened. But it didn’t faze Madame. She just stood with her handsome face lifted to the stars and proclaimed with tender, calming, womanly emotion, “ ‘Good night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’ ”
    Dr. Bengough leapt to his feet to start the huzzahing and cheering, a signal the danger from spooks was past. A handful of rowdies planted Madame Magique on a chair, pranced her around the deck on their shoulders, bucked her down the gangplank, slogged her through the mud of the levee up to Front Street. Dr. Bengough laid hands to a wagon tongue, called for a “chariot of triumph.” With all the shoving and pushing, boys disputing for the honour of pulling Madame Magique up and down Front Street, I smelled a donnybrook, but Madame graciously suggested she’d make herself available for as long as necessary, see to it that everybody got their chance to haul her in the torchlight parade. I remember the two Englishmen standing clear of the fray, looking on the way boys watch grasshoppers tussle in a jar. The one with the moustache had a contemptuous smile on his face.
    My hands shake now when I think that was the last time I saw Madge, so alive and joyful, face shining among the quick. I don’t remember much else beyond that, try as I might. Those tiny hot lights started to spark a warning in the corners of my eyeballs. I knew I’d right soon be blind in swimming black, head athrob with a megrim. Madge had to be got home safe out of that mob of wild rascals while I was still fit to do it. So I took her hand and told her it was time for us to go. She didn’t want to and begged me to stay just a bit longer, but I dragged her off.
    I can recollect nothing after that. The laudanum bottle was dry this morning. But even if I don’t remember how, I know I would haveseen Madge Dray home safe and sound as is a gentleman escort’s bounden duty.
    There comes rain whistling down on the roof. My hands shake all the more, can’t even force them into my pockets to get them still. I got to climb up on the bed, hold to the window bars, look away from the corpse of little Madge Dray.
    Not much to see, the rain’s driven most to cover. A mule train’s leaving,