Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  Calamity

  Libbie Hawker

  In memory of my dad, who was his own kind of calamity.

  And for Paul, with love.

  Many people think Calamity Jane is a heated myth of the disordered brain of some penny-a-liner, but she is a reality, and the pen of a half crazy imagination is not needed to enhance her actual deeds.

  – The Cheyenne Daily Leader, 1885

  * * *

  Neither of us have been angels, but let that drop. No one ever gets any consolation looking back into a shadowed past.

  – Deadwood Dick’s Big Deal, Edward Wheeler, 1883

  Contents

  The gal’s got honor left with her grit, out of the wreck of a young life

  The notorious free-and-easy waif of the rocky Western Country

  The Heroine of Whoop-Up

  Can drink whiskey, shoot, play cards, or swear, if it comes to it

  Few there were in Death Notch who had not heard of the notorious girl

  Lest the yearning, hungry look in her wildly beautiful eyes should pain him

  A breast of alabaster purity

  The most reckless buchario in the Hills

  A Romance of the Silent Tongues

  The Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone

  Queen of the Saddle and Lasso

  She has grown reckless in act and rough in language

  Her prospects have suffered sadly from her neglect of appearances

  Lighting a cigar at full motion

  The buckskin-clad belle of the plains

  Sometimes I pop over a rough, jest to keep my hand in

  Hellcat in Leather Britches

  Deadwood Dick’s Doom, or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure

  Historical Note and Author’s Remarks

  Also by Libbie Hawker

  About the Author

  The gal’s got honor left with her grit, out of the wreck of a young life

  This is the first thing I can remember: the crack of a rifle in the clear blue air, and ringing from the distant hills the shot repeated, bouncing back across the sunlit plain like a jackrabbit in flight.

  I turned in the saddle when I heard the shot—an involuntary thing, for the quiet fear that had whispered at me all the way from Missouri shouted in my head all at once, and leaped up in my heart, and even though I knew it was foolish to look back, still I couldn’t stop myself. I saw my Pa with both his arms wrapped tight around his body, and his face turned down to the grass where the ends of his dropped reins dragged. He looked as if he was trying to contain some sudden, terrible part of himself that he never knew existed before—the hot, bursting pain roaring through like a blast of dynamite. He leaned, then he tipped, and then, as his horse stopped walking and lowered its head to graze, he fell from the saddle. Just before he disappeared into the knee-high grass I saw the red flower blooming on his back.

  I didn’t know what to do. Well, what does a body do when that body is only twelve years old and a girl and suddenly, quick as a snap of the fingers, an orphan? I turned my own horse around and stared at the place where my Pa had fallen. There was a voice in my head—the very voice that had been whispering fear—and it told me I ought to scream and cry, but all I seemed capable of was looking. Looking at the blue shadow in the grass, the pressed-down place that concealed my father’s body, waiting for him to jump up and let loose a string of cusses and shout at me to stop staring and get out of his damn sight before he knocked my fool head in. I looked, and the prairie stayed still. His horse took one slow step, then another, intent on its forage. The sound of tearing as it ripped grass from the earth came loud across the space between us.

  Then hooves beating fast against thick earth. I looked up toward the rise—the little hill Pa and I had ridden up just moments before—and saw the crown of a black sugarloaf hat bob up and vanish again behind the crest. Then it rose again, and rose yet more as the horse carried its rider up and over and into the line of my sight. He was an ugly man—or I remember him that way, with a hard, hateful scowl half-shadowed by the brim of his hat. A dirty green scarf hung loose around his neck and his shoulders were thin and wiry.

  He never took his eyes off me as he reined in beside my Pa’s mount. For a long while we sat watching one another. He was waiting for me to scream, maybe, though the little town outside Fort Kearney was two miles off at least, and even my strident voice would never carry that far. The wagon train we’d been following was an hour’s ride to the west—and there my five little brothers and sisters rode, tucked in the back of an old prairie schooner amid barrels of oats and jars of pickled eggs. They were too far off to help me, but they weren’t near big or strong enough to lend a hand, anyhow.

  After a spell, the rider in the black hat broke my wide-eyed gaze and looked down into the grass where my father lay. The smooth-worn stock of his rifle glinted beside his saddle horn—the rifle that had killed my Pa. The rider’s mouth moved quietly on a cuss I couldn’t hear. Then he spat into the grass.

  “Get out!” I shouted at him, because I had to do something.

  The man crossed his wrists on the saddle horn and slouched a little, the very picture of unconcern. He laughed at me, slow and easy. “Or what? What are you going to do about it, girl?”

  Tears stung my eyes then. I felt I was drifting a mile above my saddle, floating away from this terrible scene, from the shadow in the grass and the rider’s hard, flashing smile. I became aware, with slow, prickling horror, that the skirt of my faded brown linsey-woolsey dress was pushed far up my leg, baring my knee and even the cuff of my drawers. I tried to pull the cloth down to cover myself.

  That only made the man laugh harder. “Easy, filly. I got no interest in you. Look like you been clobbered in the face by the ugly stick.”

  He tapped his horse with his gads and the big gelding danced sideways, nearer to Pa’s mount. The rider slid his hand into my father’s saddle bag and pulled out a small leather pouch—his money bag, and all I or anyone with the Canary name had left in the world. “This is all I come for,” the man said. “Now I’ve got it, I’ll be leaving you in peace.”

  “Wait!” I cried. “No, you can’t!” Reaching out my hand toward him as if I could stop him somehow, take the purse back or knock him from his saddle, or twist his green scarf till it choked off his breath. “We need that money, Mister. I got five brothers and sisters—just little ones. I got to pay for their space in the wagon or the driver will kick them off!”

  “I’m afraid that’s not my trouble to sort out, little missy.”

  “I’ll be left in the wide-open prairie with five babies to look after.”

  “Your daddy should’a thought of that before he cheated me at faro. There’s honest ways for a man to earn a buck and provide for his get.”

  “Ain’t you a Christian man?”

  The rider dropped my money into his saddle bag and made a hawking sound, as if my story—or maybe my question—left a bad taste in his mouth. He said, “Fuck off outta here before I shoot you, too. And I’d be doing you a favor if I did. Turn that nag around and ride; I’ll give you a count of fifty before I start firing in your direction. You hear me?”

  I heard him. My heart leaped all at once in my throat, just as my horse leaped and reeled away, and I clung to its coarse, dry mane and beat its ribs with my heels, and sent it flying off across the prairie, as far as I could get from my father and the vengeful gambler who’d felled him. The whole time I was braced for the impact of his bullet, and my head was ready to crack open with the sound of his shot. The thunder never came.

  It wasn’t quite true, Short Pants—what I told you just now. That is to say, every word about my Pa’s death and the rider in the black hat—that’s all true as the gospel, down to the last word. But it ain’t so, that it was
the first thing I can remember.

  I was twelve years old then, just on the verge of thirteen. Of course I remember loads about my life from before my father was killed—before I was left alone in the world. But ever since that day, I have felt that I truly began, for better or worse, with that first calamity. Still and all, since I’m coming clean—since you want to know the real truth of me, all of it without no legends or fantasies—I suppose it can’t hurt to sketch out my early life in brief.

  I was born Martha Canary, in the town of Princeton, Missouri. You know some folks call it Misery, and by my accounting that’s not far from the truth. For my Ma it was surely a pit of despair, though the Lord knows we all did our best to make life go easy on her. I suppose a woman can’t enjoy any ease in life when she has six children to care for. I was the oldest of them all—her first, and therefore the source of all her troubles. I’ve always felt guilty over being first, the shackle on her ankle and the weight she was made to drag, though by God it was no choice of mine to come along when and how I did.

  This is the way it happened. Pa—that is, Robert Canary by name—was a young man of around twenty years. He was heading with his own pa and ma and his brothers and their wives from Ohio to Misery via Iowa, the place of fair fields and sunny days, and there he spotted the sunlight falling on my Ma’s black hair. She was called Charlotte Burch at that point in time, and she was fifteen, a sleek, glossy blackbird of the prairie. That was the way Pa liked to tell the tale.

  Whenever he’d recount the story, we little ones all whooped and clapped when he got to the part where he saw Ma for the first time. She was starry and bright in our imaginations, a pretty slip of a girl, a hero’s reward in some grand adventure tale. But whenever Pa told it, Ma’s smile got tight and her eyes looked small and narrow, as if she peered through the walls of our little cabin toward a thing impossibly far off. Another life that might have been, if she’d spurned Robert’s charms, if the blackbird of the prairie had been left to fly free. Instead, she tumbled in some haystack with Robert Canary and when she stood up with the hay still clinging to her long black hair, she had me already planted in her belly.

  She married my pa at fifteen, because that’s the way good girls do, and though Charlotte had never been very good, she had ambitions back then to make right and live a respectable life. Her own family wouldn’t consent to look at her, let alone speak to her—even married now to make good on her grave mistake. So she left Iowa with the husband she hardly knew and settled with him in Missouri.

  She was only sixteen when I came into this world. She said I screamed like the dickens and was an ugly baby besides, and those features combined made me impossible to love. But she never loved the other children much, either—even the pretty ones and the quiet ones. She made as if she despised my pa—most of the time, anyway, far as I can recall. Still, she must have counted him tolerable enough, for she kept having babies, one after another, and that only happens by miracle if your name is The Virgin Mary.

  By the time Ma was in her grave and Pa was yearning for the gold fields, I came to believe that maybe my mother hadn’t always amused herself with her lawfully wedded husband. She was fond of drinking, and as soon as I was old enough to feed and change a child on my own, she left me to tend the brood and spent most of her days at one of Princeton’s two dance halls, kicking it up with the railroad men and the bawdy girls who entertained them. For all I know, she took to playing hostess-of-the-hour herself, and that accounts for my five brothers and sisters.

  Understand, I don’t say these things to disparage her or to smirch up her memory. The prairie is a lonesome place, and life is a cruel, sad thing. If I’d’a been in her shoes, I’d likely do the same.

  Since we are talking of recollection, of my life before the rifle’s blast, let me tell you what I remember of my childhood. It wasn’t all my mother’s sadness or the hopelessness of poverty.

  I remember vast blue storms building like castle ramparts over the fresh green of the prairie, their upper parts sharply defined, their lower edges swept and blurred by distant veils of rain. I remember the smell of wet sage and dust turned to mud, and gusting across the river on a cool wind, the biting scent of animal herds with rain-soaked hides—cattle, buffalo, pronghorn, the wild horses that sometimes roamed through.

  I remember in the mornings the rooster with the scraggly yellow tail chasing a string of hens around and around the cabin, how Lije and I would laugh to watch them scramble, the proud way that rooster stretched his spiky neck and glared as his little clucking wives ran in fear of him.

  In the summer when the grass was just turning yellow, I would lean all day on the pasture fence and talk to the horses, listen as they moved together, their warm, full, patient hoofbeats on the hot earth, each of them taking one slow step and pausing, each of them swishing their tails to clear away the flies, and when they all together had moved and picked out a mouthful of grass they would move again, another slow step, as if they shared a single, round-sided, sun-warmed body and one sweet and gentle mind. I named them all, though Pa never saw much point in naming horses since they came and went with his gambling habits. Bess and Button and Sharlamain, Zee and Indian and Red Cat with spots on his hind end like a leopard’s hide. If I stood quiet enough for a long enough spell, they’d graze around me and allow me to braid flowers in their hair.

  I remember every spring, just as the rivers began to slacken, the wagon trains would form up and creep along the edge of the earth. They were a long, white, endless rope stretched where the prairie met the sky. Their canvas canopies were alike from one wagon to the next, and from a distance I couldn’t tell their oxen apart by color. The beasts were all the same, all one shade of umber shadow, the same blocky forms tossing their thick heads in unison, their flat backs bobbing to a common rhythm. How I longed to be among the wagons! I imagined myself riding Red Cat or Bess down that line, listening to the creak of axles and the breathing of the beasts. Heading west—West—to Oregon Territory, or to Wyoming, or Salt Lake City where the Mormons would give you fresh fruit and fry bread and where the sun shone like gold on the flat expanse of their inland sea. Sometimes storm clouds would rise up above the wagons, and like teeth in a singing mouth they stood out bold and white against the rain that obscured everything beyond. And a fork of lightning would flash down from the heavens, and I would imagine a saddle rocking beneath me, a horse tossing its head in alarm, and the pop of thunder put me in mind of all those great teeth gnashing.

  Being poor was a great adventure to me, back when I was young. When you have no obligations to society and no one has any expectations of you, either, then the world opens up and flowers with possibility. I could, you see, ride off and join one of those wagon trains any time I pleased. It wasn’t just a daydream; I could have done it truly, whenever I made up my mind to go, and not much of anyone would miss me—not for long. That’s why I loved to watch the prairie schooners go by, why I loved the company of horses who could carry me off in any direction, off to any Western horizon I might set within my sights. The world was a beauty and a mystery, because even at a tender age I was free to seize it all.

  I wish I could say my Ma ever got such enjoyment out of being poor, of having no expectations to meet. But the only pleasure she ever found was in a bottle. I was only a small thing when it dawned on me that our nearest neighbors looked away when any Canary—man, woman, or child—passed by their gate. And not much older when I figured out that my aunts and uncles lived in Princeton, too—also my grandfather, a red-faced, stoop-shouldered old man—but it was a rare day I saw their faces, and then the meetings were rushed and tense, and they cast glances over their shoulders as if fearful of who might see them consorting with Robert and his pack of questionable get. I never could puzzle out whether they all stayed away because my Pa preferred gambling to farming, or whether it was my Ma’s drinking and dancing that put them off so. I don’t suppose it matters, in the end.

  Once I recall my Pa drove a cart back fro
m town, an old rocky thing which I thought the pinnacle of magnificence because its two wheels reached so high up its sides and made such a grand growling sound as they rolled along the hard-packed road. I sat atop an empty crate, upturned, for it had held the harvest of our small potato patch and Pa’d had good luck to sell the whole crop in one go. This was a rare combination of occurrences. He had money in his pocket which he hadn’t thought to bet at faro—not yet—and had bought me a twist of molasses candy which I sucked as fast as I could, so it’d be mostly gone by the time we got home and the little ones clamored around begging for a taste. Our cabin was in sight around the road’s final bend, and as we passed in front of the neighbor’s yard—Sowders was their name—Mrs. Sowders came storming out from her clapboard house shaking her fist with her angry teeth showing. She shouted at my father so loud I nearly dropped my candy in the dirt, and the little naked boy who followed her across the yard gripped onto her skirt and screamed in fear of her howling voice.

  “Robert Canary,” she said, “the Devil has a place all prepared for gamblers. You’ll go to Hell and take your pack of misbehaving brats with you if you don’t do right by the Lord. This town won’t stand no more of your miscreant ways, nor the sins of your wife, who just yesterday was trying to get my own husband to buy her a drink and a dance at Curdy’s. And he wasn’t even in the saloon neither, just walking by, for he knows how to be a proper man. If you don’t tame that strumpet Charlotte—”

  At that very moment, the strumpet herself came riding by. Neither Pa nor I knew she’d been in town, nor could we say how long she’d been there, whether an hour or since sunup. Nor did we know just where exactly she had spent her time. She was riding a strange horse we’d never seen before, galloping hard with the wind pulling her hair out of its knot, and her cheeks were hot as embers. When she rode, she never bothered going sidesaddle. Her skirt was pushed up over her knees. The wind rippled the cloth of her bloomers and the little satin bows at the cuffs shivered and bounced in time with the horse’s stride. For some reason I never have puzzled out, she carried a long piece of scarlet cloth balled up under one arm. Perhaps she’d intended to make a dress with it, or work it into the only quilt she ever made, a patchwork she never did manage to finish. But Mrs. Sowders watched her thunder up, and stood there slack-jawed and afraid, as my Ma pulled the horse in so hard it rose up on its lathered haunches.