Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  “Keep her close to Lena; she’ll smack Baby Sara on the back again if she chokes. But I’m off to get help for the baby, so you can see I can’t stay. Besides, I’m no use to help a choking baby anyhow.”

  “Please don’t be gone long,” Cilus said. The poor boy was awful weary and frightened; I could see that plainly in his eyes, which was pinched and tired, more like the eyes of a haggard old man than an eleven-year-old boy. I knew Cilus harbored a fear of Baby Sara dying, and him not being able to do a damn thing to stop it. God knows, I struggled with the same terrible vision many times throughout that long night. So I hugged my brother and told him how brave and good and sensible he was, and when he seemed mollified, he let me go on my way.

  Wouldn’t you know, the first creature I came across was the Chinese lady from the laundry. She was up with the birds, too—God knows why. When she saw me coming, she started up to yelling again, but I stood well back, so she wouldn’t think I’d come begging again.

  “Missuz,” I shouted from halfway down the block, “Can you tell me where the Female Relief Society meets?”

  “I know nothing about them. Nothing to steal here! You leave me alone!”

  “But can’t you tell me where the Mormon ladies congregate? You live in this city; you must know something about the Mormons.”

  She pressed her lips together for a minute and looked me up and down. I made no move to come any closer than I already was, and certainly did not raise the question of work. Because I waited patiently, she finally relented.

  “Relief ladies meet all over the city. They like garden parties best. You go walking past the houses, you’ll find them, soon enough.”

  I thanked her with such wild abandon I think I made her wary all over again. She edged toward the door of her shop. I turned and scurried away before she could reach for her cudgel.

  It took nigh on half an hour to find my way out to the grand, fine homes along the finest avenue in all the city—all flower gardens and tidy white fences. I whiled away most of the morning tramping up and down, peering over every gate in search of a congregation of charitable-looking women. I’d begun to despair well before I covered the first block, for every yard was empty, but the laundress’s suggestion was the only thread of hope to which I could cling. So I marched past every home I saw, and went twice past a few of them, peering over hedges and pickets with haunted, desperate eyes.

  The sun climbed ever higher in the sky. Noon had almost arrived, and I was as famished as I’d ever been, for I’d eaten nothing that morning. I had just made up my mind to return to the slop buckets when I turned up a cobblestone lane and there, two houses down, I spotted a gathering of Mormon women in their peculiar, drab dresses, with their hair slicked back in severe and joyless styles. Each wore a straw hat to keep the sun off her face. I pressed myself into the shadow of a lilac tree, which overhung a neighboring fence, and watched the women flit about the garden. They flocked to a small table in the shade of a cottonwood tree. Even at my distance, I could see that the table was heaped with fine things to eat: sandwiches and apples, cold cuts of meat, a great wheel of yellow cheese with a fancy little knife for carving off delicate pieces. My stomach was past the point of rumbling; I yearned after that food so desperately that I felt properly sick, like I might have to heave up nothing right there under the lilac bush.

  All too many encounters with unfriendly city-goers had made me cautious. I didn’t like the notion of strolling right into that garden—Hello ladies, fine morning, ain’t it; I am an orphan and an especially downtrodden one at that. I felt I’d be prudent to get a feel for the society before I approached. I wanted to discern exactly the right angle from which to pitch my tale of woe. A paling fence wrapped around the garden, and the fence was backed by a thick stand of flowers and berry bushes. I casually strolled around the block till I circled all the way back towards that house, but from a different approach, just in case any of the ladies had spotted me huddled under the lilac. Then I crouched down and crept along the line of the fence till I could hear their voices, plain as day.

  One of the women seemed to preach a sermon of sorts. She spoke in a very melodious voice, one that put me in mind of an elegant queen or an operatic singer. “One cannot attain exaltation without bearing children, for that is why Woman was made. She with a large family is most blessed, for that happy Sister has done her duty by the Lord thoroughly, and with a full heart.”

  Another lady spoke up and said, “Sister, what do you tell a woman who can’t have a baby of her own?”

  Another lady, who must have been seated very near where I crouched, answered with a laugh. “Is she trying hard enough?”

  The first woman—the one who preached—replied in a withering tone. “Sister, we all know how babies are created. Let us not make light of a sacred process.”

  Another woman said, “I would like to know, too, Sister. My neighbor, Sister Shupe, has been trying for a child for three years now. The Lord hasn’t blessed her yet. I fear she’s becoming rather sad over her failure. There must be some way to help her.”

  A sober silence fell under the cottonwood. Then the preaching lady said, “We must pray for Sister Shupe, and a few of us—those with the most children—should offer ourselves for her consultation. Perhaps after all she isn’t aware—”

  The laughing woman blurted out, “Oh, she is aware, believe you me!”

  “Perhaps she needs better counsel,” the preaching woman insisted. “Perhaps we can aid her in this time of darkness. If there is some sin on her, we must help her see it, and repent of it. The Lord will provide a way, if Sister Shupe’s heart is free of sin.”

  I had seen a house with the name SHUPE carved above the door. I wasn’t an accomplished reader, but I could make out simple words, and that particular word had stuck in my head because it sounded so odd. The light green house, I told myself, three blocks down from here, right on the corner. An idea had come to me—one that wouldn’t require me to approach the Female Relief Society after all—for now I feared that if I did approach the whole society, they might split up all us children and separate me from my family. I didn’t like the thought of Baby Sara departing the Canary clan, but I liked the thought of her dying even less.

  I made it back to our encampment just past noon. The day was hot, the air full of biting flies; sweat ran down my back and my front by the time I found the children again. The sweat had coaxed the embedded dirt out of my dress, ruining the clean state I’d achieved at the shopkeeper’s rain barrel the day before. Now I could feel the grime scraping against my skin. I longed for another washing-up, but I had a more urgent task at hand.

  Cilus came running to meet me as I waded through the lot’s waist-high grass. He didn’t look sorrowful—only tired—so I reasoned Baby Sara had held onto life.

  “Go bundle up the baby and bring her to me,” I told my brother.

  Cilus waited, watching me in silence as if he expected some explanation. I didn’t give him one. I knew if he realized what I was about to do, he would be dead-set against me. He would rile up the other children, too. I could out-wait and out-stare Cilus; we both knew it was true. After a minute or two, he turned away and disappeared into the cottonwood shade. When he returned to me, he held Baby Sara in his arms, wrapped in the threadbare scrap of her blanket.

  Cilus stopped a few paces away. He looked up at me, pained and silent, and his scrawny little arms tightened around the baby, holding her close against his heart. Then he kissed Sara on the forehead and passed her over to me.

  Sara hardly stirred in my arms as I bundled her up against my shoulder. She was quiet, but her breath rattled a little in her chest. She felt weightless as a new-hatched chick. I turned and headed back towards the green house on the corner, moving briskly with my jaw clenched hard so my courage wouldn’t fail.

  When I reached the Shupe house, I pounded hard on the door, praying to the savior that Mrs. Shupe would answer, not her husband. I had no bead on whether menfolk were susceptible to
suffering babies; I suspected darkly that they were not.

  Luck was on my side for once. A thin woman came to the door. Her dark hair was curled and pulled back severely, so I could see the streaks of silver that had formed at her temples. But despite her gray hair, Mrs. Shupe didn’t look old—only harried and tired, like I was. She stared at me in confusion, her face blank and baffled. Then she looked at the baby in my arms.

  “Sister Shupe,” I said.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  I held my baby sister out toward her. Sara was thin as a twig, and just as brittle. “This is a gift from the Mormon Lord. A gift for you.”

  “Land sakes,” she said to me, “what are you talking about, girl?”

  I thought back on the high-flown words the preaching woman had used. “You can’t get exalted without having a baby. That’s why Woman was made.”

  Mrs. Shupe squinted at me. Something hard and hurt crimped the corners of her eyes. She pinched up her mouth as if she thought to spit on me, but I stepped forward and pressed Baby Sara toward her again. The woman skittered back, afraid to touch the baby or me.

  “This is a gift,” I said again, “for you. God has provided.” Still the woman hung back, so I added, “Please, mam. She’ll die if you don’t care for her.”

  I pulled back the corner of the grimy blanket that covered the baby’s face. Mrs. Shupe gasped, for Baby Sara was a pathetic sight. Now, seeing my sister in this new light, on the tidy step of the Shupe home—seeing her through the other woman’s eyes—I could tell exactly how sick and half-dead the baby appeared.

  “Heavenly Father have mercy,” Mrs. Shupe said. “The poor little thing!” Then she looked up at me, hard and spiteful again. “Why on Earth haven’t you cared for her properly?”

  Even hungry and filthy from head to toe, I was still a big, strapping girl. I looked somewhat older than my years. I think Mrs. Shupe believed I was the baby’s mother. I didn’t care what she thought at that moment, for she reached out and snatched Baby Sara from my arms, cradling her against that small, narrow breast despite the dirt and the smell that clung to the baby and to me.

  “Her name is Sara Canary,” I said. “I hope you’ll remember that, and tell her when she’s old enough to know.”

  The woman fixed me with her bitter eyes for a moment longer. I shivered under her stare, afraid she would push Sara back at me and tell us both to get off her doorstep. Then something softened in her face—not by much, but it was enough for me. I nodded; the deal was done. Then, without another word, Mrs. Shupe closed the door in my face.

  I wept all the long walk back to the cottonwood trees, but I did it quietly. I never wailed, nor wrung my hands like tragic figures in stories do. But though I was silent, my grief was a great and fearful burden. My young body could scarce bear to drag it. I knew I’d done right by Baby Sara—the rightest I could do. Still I felt like a traitor, like I’d stuck a knife into the backs of all my brothers and sisters, into the family name itself. The Canarys had no claim to riches or class or breeding, but we had one another, sure enough. I had parceled out one of our own, broken the bond between us all—given away a portion of our only treasure. I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that this was a fearful turning point, a moment from which there could be no going back. Now I could never expect to hold to what I once had been—what any of us had been. All of us would be forever changed, from that moment forward. And me most of all. Me especially.

  Cilus was the first one I saw when I made it back to our camp. He stood almost where I’d left him, there in the tall grass apart from the others, watching out for my return with hungry, avid eyes and a pale face. He looked down at my arms and saw that they held nothing. Slowly, he turned his back to me and walked off into the low glow of sunset, his head hung low, his steps like those of a grown-up man, weary and reluctant.

  The other children squatted around our little fire, roasting the skimpy meat of ground squirrels trussed up on cottonwood twigs. They looked up at me, each wide-eyed and hollow, but none of them said a word about Sara. I took my place in the circle. Lije passed me a bit of squirrel meat, and though something thick and heavy set low in my chest, I also felt a certain clarity in the air, a freshness and lightness, just like when a wind comes down from the hills and blows away wildfire smoke or oppressive thunder. I had separated Sara from our family. She was likely lost to us forever. But Sara was also safe. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the Canarys. Every one of us knew—even little Isabelle, I think—that Sara wouldn’t have held on much longer. The poor mite had used up all her strength to make it this far. I looked at my brothers and sisters, at their thin shoulders pressing through dirty shirts, the swell of their knobby knees on skinny legs. I wondered how much deeper their wells of strength ran. I wondered how much longer I could keep going.

  There ain’t much more to say about that night. After we picked the squirrels’ bones clean and tossed them into the fire, I told the children that come the morning we would set off again, headed north, for there wasn’t any work to be had in Salt Lake City. I might have parceled out the rest of the children to the Female Relief Society, but there was still some strength left in each of them, and I was determined to keep what remained of our clan bound tightly together for as long as I could manage.

  I said, “They’re building the railroad straight through Wyoming. I heard some men talking all about it yesterday, when I was out searching for work. I guess there’ll be new towns growing up along the rail line. It ain’t like prospecting for gold, I know—but in a town that’s still growing, we’ll find work for sure.”

  “I’ll work, too,” Cilus said. He didn’t seem happy about the prospect, but he did seem awful set on keeping the rest of us united. “I’ll learn how to drive a spike and I’ll join some of the work gangs on the rails.”

  “And I’ll work,” Lije said, though he was but nine years old.

  That night I slept heavily. I wish I could tell you that I dreamed no dreams. A hundred dreadful visions haunted me, but I was too exhausted by toil and sorrow to pull myself out of sleep. Worst of all my dreams was a dark nightmare: gangs of men with blank and featureless faces, spiking railroad ties to the hot red earth. The ties was made of thin little bones, white and clean—the bones of boys like Lije and Cilus, the bones of twelve-year-old whores.

  The very next morning, slim and fickle Fortune smiled on me, however briefly. I found a wagon train that was headed north, to the rail camps outside Piedmont, Wyoming. I was obliged to hand over our two horses and the one saddle we owned, but that sacrifice did make a small place for all of us in the back of one wagon, among barrels of apples and pickles and the flat, hard sacks of flour.

  I pledged myself to laundry work, too, and every night before I had my supper, I washed and beat and wrung clothing for the whole wagon train. It was hard and dreary labor; washing left me so worn out that I slept all day on the trail, propped up and wedged between two crates in the back of a jouncy wagon, with my legs pulled up against my chest. But I was determined to make our way fairly and honorably, without any of the trading I done on the way from Missouri. After all, the men of the wagon train were men in truth, not boys. Somehow it seemed extra sinful to me, to contemplate fooling around with grown-up types instead of other children like me.

  There was plenty of men on that wagon train, hard-working types with dirt and sweat and the body grime of horses and cattle ground deep into their clothes. After a couple nights spent washing, my hands was chapped so red they was near-about bloody. The skin of my knuckles and around my fingernails cracked open, and hurt so bad I could scarce stand to pick at my cold supper when the last of the clothes was hung up to dry beside the fire.

  One night of that trek to Piedmont I can recall with especial clarity. The light of the campfires glowed red, pushing back the sober, cold, blue-black shadows of night. I huddled on the ground, leaning back against a wagon wheel, too bone-weary to lift myself and go to my bedroll. Lena climbed into my lap and tucke
d her black curls right beneath my chin. I rested against her, grateful for her warmth, full of a timid, fragile gladness that we was still together. Dear little Lena held my hand in her own. She turned it over so she could study my cracked palm, the red angry blooms from the lye, the abrasions marring my knuckles. She contemplated my hand in silence. After a space she said, very quietly, “When we get to Wyoming, Martha, will you find a place for me, too—like you did for Baby Sara?”

  I said, “Ain’t you afraid of never seeing us again?”

  Lena was always a good Bible girl, even if she didn’t go to church much, being a Canary and all. God alone knows where she got her religious tendencies. She said, “The Lord will bring us back together someday. Don’t fear on that count.”

  But I did fear. I feared down to the depths of my soul, to the bottom of my well of strength, which was rapidly running dry. I didn’t know how to answer, so I pulled Lena tighter against my chest. I rocked her gently, side to side, and sang softly in her ear.

  I never possessed a suitable voice for singing—not even as a child, and a child’s voice is supposed to be high and sweet. But I sang anyway. I sang to drive away the hate I felt for myself; I despised myself passionately for giving Baby Sara away. And I sang to drive away the relief I felt at the mere thought of finding a place for Lena—and for Isabelle, and Cilus and Lije. Oh, how I wanted to free the little ones from that life of privation and failure. And how I wanted—more desperately than I can say—to hold our family together.

  Dear Lena, I tried. You never forgave me for all the ways I failed, but when I held you close in the firelight, when I sang to you in my cracked, unsatisfactory voice—and sang from the middle of my very soul—I hope you knew then that I tried.

  The Heroine of Whoop-Up

  What words can I find to express the relief I felt when at last we reached the rail camp outside Piedmont, Wyoming? The camp was about the ugliest place I’d ever seen, an orderless assemblage of canvas tents with roofs that flapped slowly in a lazy wind. Here and there, shacks made of old wood—busted up wagons, I suspect—crouched among the tents. The ground was flattened from the tramping of countless feet, all the grass worn away, so a haze of dust hung above the hot, dry earth. The camp didn’t seem like any type of home—an unlikely place to cultivate hope. But for me and my brothers and the two sisters who remained, it meant the end of the trail—and so my first sight of that camp was a blessing, a balm to my aching heart.