The Wreck of the H.M.S. Pinafore

In the middle of Louis Vinson’s grand summer tour for his 13th book, the weather turned uncooperative. His tour was literally a washout, with the AirBnB places cancelling at last minute and hotels and motels filled to capacity and unable to accept him.

“You’ll be driving a teensy bit out of the way,” his publicist Maude advised him. “And staying the night at Barberville.”

He had sworn he would never go back to Barberville. Yet here he was, the victim of Mother Nature and tight schedules.

“Now that you’ve made it big,” Maude had advised, “you should let your followers know you haven’t forgotten your roots.” She spoke so firmly and convincingly, and she was always so well put together, never a hair out of place, that it was Louis’s inclination to obey. After all, she had shepherded him through a dozen of his books as he rose in a breakout career from struggling scribbler to New York Times best-selling author. He emailed back, “Sure, I’d be pleased to kick off Literacy Week in Colorado this year.” He wondered if he should add specifics such as “I will go anywhere in the state except Barberville.” But no, he thought, brevity is the soul of clarity. He hated typing long emails as much as he hated reading them.

He left the hotel searching for coffee. Contrary to news reports about many small American towns of late, downtown Barberville was thriving, boasting broad sidewalks, inviting storefronts, and a phalanx of gaudy “Celebrate Barberville” banners flapping from the light standards.

On his stroll along Main Street, Louis passed small shops with plaques which identified places such as “the original town saloon” (now a cheese shop) and “one of the first five churches” (now fashion and accessories stores). Clearly, there was an active local history movement in this town of Barberville.

The Urban Grind cafe looked exactly right, offering real coffee and fresh croissants. Its small historic plaque informed passersby that the building used to be the “town haberdashery.” Huh, Louis thought, maybe in 1898, but the last time I saw this shop, it was called Discount Denim. He’d bought his first pair of “cool” jeans, stonewashed dungarees, there. Not that it had won him any dates in high school. Although Fernanda had noticed them. That was something.

Louis pushed open the front door to find a gaggle of young Coloradans perched on vintage wingback chairs, sipping handcrafted lattes. Feeling deeply middle-aged in boot-cut jeans and a button-down shirt, he went to the counter.

While waiting for his latte to be made, to avoid staring at the locals, Louis studied a large, navy-blue wall entirely devoted to the history of Barberville. It was full of autographed photos and framed replicas of historic newspaper pages reporting on big stories such as: A mining camp finished the tunnel of the first mine. Completion of a railroad station. First presidential visit on said railroad. And so on through the decades.

And there, hanging quietly, the display that ambushed him without warning, was a replica two-page spread of the Barberville Bugle capturing the worst night of his life with a banner headline: “The Wreck of the HMS Pinafore” over a montage of photos:

A boat.

A fancy boat.

Flames engulfing the fancy boat and people jumping from it.

Firetrucks at the riverside, hoses pointed at the boat in flames.

A funeral cortege.

Headshots of two high school students.

Louis turned away so quickly he was momentarily dizzy, and had to stretch out his hand to steady himself at the nearest table. He stayed that way, frozen, heart pounding, resolutely not looking at that photo. Every cell in his body screamed: Get me out of here.

His phone buzzed with incoming mail. He opened Maude’s email. “Hey Louis, New storm alert grounding all airplanes. I’ll let Hertz know you are keeping the car. Stay in touch. Cheers, Maude.”

As he looked up from Maude’s message, his eyes went straight to the photo display again, drawn like a moth to the bug-zapper.

He straightened. Oh well, might as well take it on the chin. Louis strongly believed the universe had a message to give him and it was pointless to hide. He stepped closer to the photo display and read the small tag. “On May 20, 1990, fire destroyed the stage of H.M.S. Pinafore, a high school production.”

The barista brought Louis’s drink to where he stood. “Hm, I see you’re admiring the display by our local history group.”

Admiring, huh? Small towns are full of boosters.

He accepted the cup she offered and tried to muster a pleasant, neutral smile. “This is the most documented small western town I’ve ever seen.”

She smiled back. “Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.”

He sized her up. Not your average barista. “Are you a history major?”

She laughed. “No, but it’s an all-consuming hobby.” She nodded toward the photo. “By the way, my dad was there when the fire happened. He was in the chorus for that operetta, H.M.S. Pinafore.”

Louis felt the blood rise to his cheeks. An apology leaped to the front of his mind, but he stayed silent.

She wiped a damp cloth over the counter and chanted a Gilbert & Sullivan song:

“I am the monarch of the sea,

The ruler of the Queen’s Navee…”

It was so unexpected, Louis laughed outright.

“My dad said it was ‘spectacular,’ both the intended show, and then, unfortunately, the fire.”

Louis perked up. “Really?” Although it was a closed chapter of his life, he still hungered for one word of praise.

“Dad said they had the entire high school band. Dancers galore. The Glee Club. All told, about a hundred people staging it, imagine that, on a boat they had borrowed and decked out as the HMS Pinafore.”

He nodded, trying to look like he was hearing the information for the first time. In fact, he had been intimately involved in creating that very stage to make an ordinary boat look like 19th-century British warship. Thanks to his experience in two years of stagecraft on earlier school productions, Louis had been the chief builder. The stage set had then been attached to a boat that a citizen of Barberville had loaned the school.

His eyes returned to the photo of the boat in flames, with silhouettes of persons jumping. Oh, God.

His blood ran hot and cold as he stared at the photo, remembering the screams and the chaos. It was such a fiasco, Louis could not return to the school. At the time he’d left, there was still no known cause of the fire.

“Any casualties?” he asked, hoping the quaver in his voice was not a giveaway. To disguise his morbid curiosity, he gulped the latte and immediately burned his tongue. What irony, he thought: people died in those flames and now the architect of their demise burns his mouth when speaking of the tragedy.

She pursed her mouth, reflecting.

“Never mind,” he said. “I guess you wouldn’t know much about such a horrific event,” He would never forget the outraged headline that ran in the local paper: “Newbie Stage Designer Took Foolish Risks.”

The Barberville Bugle ran an editorial, demanding an inquest into shoddy construction. “Lazy teachers did not properly supervise their Golden Boy, Louis Montigny, the ambitious know-it-all who cobbled together a floating funeral pyre.” The critics’ words were etched in his mind. Louis had intercepted and destroyed the Bugle each Thursday before his parents could read and feel even more ashamed about him,

“Oh, I do know something,” the barista said. “I was on the research subcommittee that made this display.”

He took a second look. Under the harsh counter light, the barista looked older than the student he had pegged her as.

Louis was interrupted by a call. “Sorry, gotta take this. My publicist.”

The barista lifted an eyebrow.

Maude’s full-throated warble gave him the revised schedule for the weekend. “I realize a small-town stayover is not your style, Louis, but planes, trains, and buses are being grounded due to bad weather.

Louis stepped into an alcove. “Maude,” he hissed, “get me back to civilization, pronto!”

“Calm down,” she said.

Columbus, Indianapolis, Detroit, and Milwaukee. He jotted down the next cities he was due to visit. “And how big are the venues and how many books are you shipping?” he asked.

Her voice came back, “A hundred seats in Columbus, a 500-seat auditorium in Indianapolis. And only a small library in Detroit, but that will be televised,” she said.

He peered out the front window. Rain was lashing hypnotically around and landing in puddles pooling around cars, park benches, sidewalk curbs, anything it could find.

“Hunker down for the day,” Maude said, “The planes can’t get permission for take-off due to high winds and poor visibility.”

Barberville. He was caught in Barberville, he seethed, the town he had sworn never to return to. He stared gloomily out the window. The front door moaned and whistled as the wind picked up. When a customer left, the door closing behind made a slight sucking sound.

Louis got out his Moleskin and jotted: moan whistle suction. It gave him a sense of lightness, transforming the crummy weather into something useful. The type of challenging setting, Mother Nature at her worst, that made his novels bestsellers. They were all historical fiction featuring detectives in the Wild West, from the 1870s to the 1890s, back when Pinkerton’s agency was gaining momentum.

Louis’s fictional detectives not only had bad guys to find and arrest, they had natural disasters like blizzards and wildfires to battle. That was his niche, each novel a heady mix of Western + detective + enviro-disaster, and it was lucrative.

Making notes in the same tiny handwriting he used for all his projects, Louis was immersed for an hour in another world. He looked up in surprise to see that Urban Grind was now empty except for the barista, who was equally immersed in paging through a large archivist binder, the kind with pockets for photos and mementos and colorful dividers for each section.

She looked up at the same moment and nodded. They spoke again at the counter. “I guess I’ll have an early lunch,” he said and placed his order for smoked turkey on sourdough.

“I pulled out the old scrapbook for the Wreck of the Pinafore if you’d like to take a look,” she said, writing his name with the Jiffy marker on the cup and takeout sandwich container, which amused him because he was the only one in the shop now. He supposed she labeled out of habit.

“Nah, that’s okay,” he said. If he looked too curious, she might connect Louis Vinson with Louis Montigny, the newbie stage designer who had caused the town tragedy. He had changed his last name, but still, “there was no sense stirring up old demons,” as his dad used to say.

“On a different track,” Louis said, “Do you have any material about Barberville as a frontier town in, say, the 1870s to the 1890s?”

Her face brightened. “Sure. Founded as a settlement during the Wild West days. Indigenous territory first. Then, mining camp. It went through the rounds of getting bank, saloon, jail, and five churches—boom boom boom,” she said.

They shared a laugh about the predictability of human settlement. “Just a sec,” she said. “I’ll go pull it from the shelf.” She went down a flight of stairs behind the counter.

She was gone a long time and since the binder with the H.M.S. Pinafore material was lying open, Louis could not resist examining the material. For so long his sin had lived in a void: he deliberately did not seek information about this time in his past.

There was his high school picture—what a pimply, arrogant ass! There were pictures of the supervising teachers—the eager learn-by-doing types. There were the pictures of Muhammed and Fernanda, his two classmates who’d perished in the fire.

He’d tried to put it out of his mind all these years. But here in the heart of Barberville, the shameful episode of his past came rushing back. The chaos, the smoke, the screams, the sparks. The sudden way the crowd went ooooohh. The terrifying realization that something was terribly wrong. Fear had paralyzed him. He was on the riverside, sitting in a lifeguard’s chair placed near a stand of willows.

Behind him sat an audience of parents, extended families and friends of the performers. Basically, everyone in town because Barberville was a small town and this was a major production.

It was an electrical fire. The fire had started in a small cupboard at the bottom of the boat. Two students sitting in the lowest part of the boat had died of asphyxiation. That was the rumor he’d heard in May about the tragedy. Not the coroner’s verdict, which wouldn’t appear until fall.

Louis hid away, too ashamed to return to school for the final month of the term. Then a heavy spring thaw and torrential rains in June created the worst flood conditions of the century, wiping away twenty-three houses in the lowest part of the valley. Including Louis’s family’s trailer.

In the chaos of the flood, most people had forgotten the loss from the high school fire.

But not Louis. Some bodies were never recovered from the flood and Louis realized this was his opportunity to fade away and completely sever himself from Barberville.

From that point on, he’d had nothing to do with theatre, nothing to do with music. Nothing to do with carpentry. He’d stayed in an encampment and toiled as a day-jobber until he could get a student loan. He wrote a self-castigating memoir that never saw the light of day, but that eased his heart. He took up fiction full time and discovered the Pinkerton men and the Wild West.

The barista returned with a large dark box. “Sorry to be so long. I have several items relating to Barberville as a frontier town.”

He took a good long look at her, a fellow history buff. “I appreciate this. Source material is golden. By the way, could I get your name? I’d like to mention it in the acknowledgements.”

“Oh my.” She blushed. “Calista Gordon.”

Louis took out his Moleskin, but didn't write in it. He was still distracted, his gaze lingering on the binder about the wreck of the H.M.S. Pinafore.

She caressed the binder. “It’s a fascinating story,” she said. “The Drama teacher saved a nickel and pushed a promising young student to design and build the set.” She tapped Louis’s high school photo. “Instead of having a properly trained carpenter do it according to code. So when the fire happened, the student became a scapegoat. He died before he could learn about the true events of the inferno. We’ll never know how he felt because the next month the big flood happened, washed away the whole Montigny family and other townspeople.”

Louis felt like interrupting and saying, “I am the one!” but decided against it.

“At first, they thought it was an electrical fire," she said. "But it turned out to be a double suicide.”

“What!”

She nodded. “Yes, Louis. Two star-crossed lovers, a Catholic and a Muslim, Fernanda and Muhammed, from very strict families.” She flipped the binder to the second last page.

And there was a clipping from the Barberville Bugle. With the headline “Romeo and Juliet.”

Louis drew back, trying to process the new information. All those years of living under a cloud. A pressure inside him began to ease. Outside, the rain was pelting down.

The End