Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  But when they was gone, they was gone. It was just me alone in the church yard, with the sweet Wyoming air and the sunshine and the dark spots in the dust between my feet where my tears had fallen down.

  I have no doubt that the kindly Reverend Wilkes would have let me stay in the little white church till the end of my days, if I’d asked him. But to tell you the truth, church life never was for me. I always found it oppressive to sit still and listen to talk about God in Heaven, when Heaven was so far away. A soul may have some use for Heaven, but a body had none, near as I could tell. And the world was solid and real around me, and I was in it, feeling every painful beat of my hollowed-out heart. What my body needed seemed of much greater consequence than the needs of my soul. I reckon I was just about right in those days, too. Look at me now, Short Pants, and tell me what good Heaven is to body or to spirit.

  I did learn one surprising fact about myself in those days. The toils I’d performed in service to my family—all those months along the trail—left me hungry for work. Lord knows I had earned my rest, but I didn’t want to take it. My hands had grown used to staying occupied. I wanted nothing of quiet contemplation, for it only allowed my most heart-rending thoughts to come crowding in. The church was too quiet, too serene to hold me. I had to leave it behind—get out on my own, make my way in the world. What else was a girl like me to do?

  As a growing town with a bustling rail camp not far away, Piedmont had a few boarding houses lining its dirt roads. The roads themselves were still rather soft and new, and turned to trenches of mud whenever a thunder shower swept overhead. But the town was growing so fast that the boarding houses thrived despite the mud and the rusticity. I thought to take up work in one of those houses—some grand and important work, like cooking suppers, or maybe singing for guests in the evenings, though my voice wasn’t much to begin with, and had gone kind of dry and flat since the little ones had left. But even though Piedmont seemed a world apart from Salt Lake City, the two towns bore a most unfortunate similarity. I found no work to speak of—none for a girl like me, just thirteen years old with a sharp spark of pain in her eye.

  By and by, Reverend Wilkes secured a place for me in Piedmont society. He understood, I think, that I wasn’t long for the church life. He knew if he didn’t locate a branch for me to light on, I would fly about restlessly till I dropped right out of the sky. There was a married couple who came to his services sometimes, by the names of Emma and Edward Alton. They was only part-timers at the little white church, for they spent most Sundays at another church across town—a larger and finer one, with better benches. The minister at the other church wasn’t as satisfactory with his gospel (or so the gossips of Piedmont held) but he was white-skinned, which some foolish folks reckoned gave him a more substantial quality than my good, kind friend Reverend Wilkes.

  The third Sunday after Cilus and Lije departed, the Altons happened to appear at Reverend Wilkes’ church. Both of the Altons looked like real dandies, fine and upright in their carefully made clothes. Mrs. Emma Alton wore a smart hat of dark beaver fur pinned to her golden hair, and she carried herself with a stiff pride, which I thought made her the queenliest woman in all of Wyoming.

  After service, Reverend Wilkes took the Altons aside and spoke to them most earnestly. The Reverend never looked at me, but both the Altons sent frequent glances to the back pew where I sat staring fixedly at the empty pulpit, and by their sudden interest, I reasoned they was all discussing what to do about me. I listened more sharply to the Reverend’s voice.

  “Martha is a good, strong girl,” Reverend Wilkes said quietly. “She has a laudable heart.”

  I didn’t know that word—laudable. But I knew my own heart well enough to surmise his meaning. My heart was broke and aching, but it felt strong, too—strong and certain that it had guided me right, that the children would be well and safe, even if I wouldn’t. That was all that mattered to my heart and to me. Laudable, that was his word.

  He said, “This child has lived through horrors that would kill a grown woman—kill her dead with grief. She has the grace of Jesus Christ inside her. All she lacks in this world is the love of good Christians, guardians to teach her proper ways, to bring her up smartly. Are you followers of the Savior? Can you offer your hearts to that needy child?”

  Edward Alton looked at me for a long while—I didn’t take my eyes off the pulpit, for I was still musing over my laudable heart, but I could feel him staring. Finally he said, “Come over here, girl.”

  I went and stood before them. I felt myself drifting, like a stick or a leaf blowed into a river, surrendered to the current.

  Emma said, “She’s a homely thing—poor girl.”

  Poor girl. And Emma Alton was so lovely, with her shining hair neatly curled, and her pointed nose, and her eyes like two bright sapphires. What can a beautiful woman know of pity—of understanding? There ain’t no poorer soul in all the world than an ugly girl, an ugly woman. Take it from me, Short Pants. If you ain’t like Emma Alton, doors slam in your face, and your face gets blunter and sadder and your mouth more downturned with every door that closes.

  Mr. Alton said, “But she’s big and strapping—big as any boy.”

  “Can you do laundry?” the missuz asked.

  “Yes mam,” I said, “I do believe that laundry is my God-given purpose in this world.”

  She sniffed and cast the minister a disapproving look, as if I’d made a joke against the Lord, but I was in earnest.

  I believe Emma Alton was set to turn me down. I believe she was on the point of walking out of that church and never coming back again, having decided after all that a white preacher who confuses the points of gospel was infinitely preferable to a black one who foists homely orphans on his part-time flock. But before she could voice her preference, her husband said, “We could use a laundress at the boarding house, since Ellie Mae got herself married off. And with time—if you’re good and work hard, young Martha—you may learn how to clean the rooms and serve the boarders.”

  Like a leaf or a twig blowed into a river. Going where the Lord directed, or if not the Lord—if Heaven had no use for a body, only for a soul—then wherever Reverend Wilkes saw fit to send me. He was the only person in the world I trusted by then, the only one who’d shown me a lick of kindness.

  I said, “I’d be very pleased to learn how to serve boarders, Mister, if you’ll give me a chance.” What I thought was, I don’t give a damn about your boarders, nor their laundry, neither. But I needed a place to lay my head at night, and I knew I couldn’t stay in the church eternally.

  Emma Alton wasn’t keen on this turn of events. But the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church—that was one bit of gospel I’m sure the white preacher always got down rightly. Men do love to quote it at women, whenever the occasion allows. So I stepped past Mrs. Alton and took the Reverend’s hands in mine. Or he took my hands. To this day I can’t remember; to this very day, I ain’t sure who reached first for the other. But he held my hands warmly in his own, and smiled down at me, and for a moment I felt as if he could see right into my laudable heart.

  Laundry, of course, was deadly dull work—as dull in a boarding house as it was on the trail. I have no doubt that’s true to this very day, though I haven’t needed to wash any clothes in a powerful long time. If anything, the work was made even more wearisome by the unrelenting sameness of my surroundings. At least on the wagon trails, I set up my kettle in a new location each evening, with new vistas turning rosy before me in the setting sun, and a new world of mountains and buttes and folded plains stretching out beneath the slow-wheeling stars. But in Piedmont I had only the back side of the Altons’ home to look at, or if I turned the other way, the short snub of a half-hill, flat along its top, blocking off all sight of anything beyond it—anything except an expanse of sky, which was always the same pale, cloudless blue.

  Maybe there wouldn’t have been much to see, even if that hill hadn’t stood in my way. T
he land around Piedmont was much the same as it was everywhere in Wyoming: sere and unchanging, except when cloud-shadows chased each other across the prairie. But the penned-in nature of the Altons’ yard made me feel restless. There had to be more to life than what I’d found in my Piedmont predicament; surely my destiny wasn’t as bleak and colorless as the prairie I couldn’t even see. I guess I had no real reason to believe that was so, for I hadn’t yet found cause to hope for a better future, to dream of something grand—unless it was the storms I used to watch from the cabin in Missouri. Those towers of purple rising, moving free across the plains.

  Emma Alton never came to trust me, nor even to like me, in all the time I lived beneath her roof. She would just as soon have sent me away—perhaps she sensed what was to come, what I would soon make of myself, and she didn’t approve of my trajectory. But she was a righteous, proper woman who obeyed her husband’s will, and Mr. Alton was appreciative of the work I did, so Emma couldn’t speak a word against him. But countless were the times I looked up from the old wooden stool on which I used to beat wet clothing, only to find Emma watching me, narrow-eyed and suspicious, from the window of a room where she’d been making a boarder’s bed, or from the screen door that led to her spotless kitchen. I do believe she thought I was likely to make off with boarders’ soiled shirts or their sopping-wet underthings, just for the pleasure of thievery.

  High expectations soared all around me, till I felt I lived behind a palisade. I was to come to the supper table with my hands and face freshly washed, even if I’d been at my laundry kettle all day and hadn’t had the least opportunity to get dirty. I was to sit up straight, but keep my eyes lowered at all times. I was seen, but never heard, unless one of the Altons spoke to me directly, and then I was only to speak long enough to answer their questions. After supper was finished, I was to shut myself away in my tiny bedroom—where Emma expected me to occupy myself with needlework or some other girlish nonsense, I suppose. But since she never came inquiring after my evening activities, I most often laid flat on my bed (too weary to move a muscle) and dreamed up a hundred impossible plans to reunite my family.

  Emma’s propriety extended to my language, as I guess you’ve already surmised. She had no toleration for a blue tongue, nor even slangy speech. Emma Alton’s high ideals—to say nothing of her sharp stare—very nearly broke my habit of talking like a Missouri farmer, but I do believe even God himself couldn’t proper me up that much. However, I did my best to make her happy, for she was an awful fright when she was upset. She had a cold, hard anger. Not the sort that fired up into shouting or wild slaps—but the sort of anger that knew how to hurt, all the same. And she was ever on the lookout for opportunities to drive home a lesson in the most memorable fashion.

  Once I got careless as I pulled my laundry kettle off the fire; my hand missed the wool pad I used to wrangle the kettle’s handle, and the burn across my palm made me yelp out a cuss loud as a clap of thunder. Emma was out the kitchen door so fast I felt sure she must have been poised, wiggling with anticipation like a cat stalking birds, waiting for me to break one of her rules. She had a switch in her hand—a thin, whippy one—and she stood before me as I licked my palm and blinked back tears. She looked down at me with her stern, beautiful eyes and said not a word. I didn’t try to explain myself. She didn’t ask me to. She took my hand and extended it, turned it palm up. Then the switch cracked down across my palm, square along the track of the burn. It hurt so bad I couldn’t cry, couldn’t even breathe. Everything seemed to lurch in toward me, the Altons’ clapboard house and the dry hill that cut off the land and the unending blueness of the sky all shuddering and toppling upon me at once, as if the pain in my hand was a sinkhole that pulled the whole world down. After a minute, I gasped a big breath and stammered out an apology for cussing, and Emma turned and walked away like it was all in a day’s work. She was a beautiful woman, to be sure, but she never was motherly.

  To tell the truth, Emma’s lack of maternal impulse didn’t trouble me much. My own ma had never carried a motherly notion in her heart. Cold cruelty was all I knew of a woman’s world. What little kindness I had encountered had come from men, and it was to men I was drawn, while anything in a long skirt might as well have spit venom at me.

  Despite the cussing and the switching and Emma Alton’s hard blue eyes, I worked hard and did every task as well as I could manage. I dropped myself deep into the routine of washing: stoking the fire, boiling the water, measuring out the lye. The chapping of my hands and the burning of my fingers served as a useful distraction, keeping me well away from the precipice of sorrow and lonesomeness. At night I lay down in my hard, narrow bed in a room behind the stairs—not much more than a closet, really. I felt the familiar ache in my shoulders from swinging the laundry bat. I thought about my brothers and sisters every night, while the stiffness in my shoulders and back ebbed away and sleep sang a welcome song in my ear. In those hours, without Emma to watch me, it was safe to muse on the Canary predicament. I was so worn out from the work that I didn’t have any spark left for crying. Calmed by exhaustion, I tried to think up clever ways to get messages to the boys at the ranch, or to Lena and Isabelle somewhere in the town with their pretty, soft new mamas. But no matter how I turned the problem in my head, I never could find any useful way a-tall. You see, I didn’t know exactly where they lived—any of them, except for Baby Sara, who was too young to read a post card. Anyhow, I didn’t know much about writing in those days; I could barely scratch out a M and a C to represent my own name.

  Sometimes I worked myself into such a state of exhaustion that sleep would cruelly evade me. Then I laid still with only my imagination for company—but oh, the sweet visions those imaginings brought! I pictured the children, each well-fed and scrubbed clean, wearing bright, new-made clothes. I visioned up what their lives must be like now—now that they had kindly new caretakers of their own. In those imaginings, Cilus and Lije was already handsome young men on the verge of twenty, brave and competent cowpunchers who rode magnificent, tall horses with saddle that gleamed with silver. I pictured them galloping along the flat-topped hill behind the boarding house, shouting and racing free. I saw Lena and Isabelle as beautiful brides, decked in silken gowns of sky-blue or rose-pink with lace spilling from their collars and sleeves. They always married grand men in my fantasies—sheriffs or doctors or railroad magnates—and Baby Sara was their bridesmaid, growed up to a girl of thirteen just like me, but far prettier than I had ever been, with a dimpled smile and cascades of sleek, dark hair.

  After a time—some three weeks or more—even Emma couldn’t deny that I was a hard worker and valuable around the place. There came a morning when she set my porridge down in front of me and said, just as the bowl hit the table, “It’s time you learned how to tend the rooms, Martha. You’re getting so fast with the laundry, anyhow; soon you’ll find yourself idle in the afternoons, and idle hands are the Devil’s playthings.”

  I was so pleased for a change of scenery—even if the scene was only the upper floor of the boarding house—that I behaved perfect as an angel as I followed Emma through the routine of cleaning the rooms. She could strip the sheets off a bed and replace them in the blink of an eye, with a great white billow of linen floating up in the air and landing precise as you please on the mattress. Her technique never left so much as one wrinkle for her dainty white hands to smooth away.

  The beds that filled the boarding rooms was serviceable, but not pretty (this was Piedmont, after all)—narrow affairs, framed with simple wooden planks, and their ticks filled with more pinfeathers than any bed ought to have, and entirely more horsehair and straw than was comfortable. But good feathers were a luxury that didn’t often find their way to Piedmont, and so (as Emma was fond of saying, if ever a boarder dared to criticize the spartan nature of her accommodations) beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  At least the rooms remained orderly and clean, with never a hint of dust to darken the bubbled window panes, nor cobwebs in
the corners of the walls. With few words but plenty of sharp looks and pointed demonstrations, Emma taught me the right way to dust the chests-of-drawers and wash-stands: Pick up each item the boarders had set out while they went about their business in town for the day. Clean beneath with a damp cloth. Set the gewgaws and bits and pieces back, in exactly the same position as I’d found them.

  “You must never give the impression of having rooted through a boarder’s belongings,” Emma told me. “You must always be trustworthy and commendable in all things, for once a reputation is lost, it can never be regained. And everything you do in life will depend upon your reputation. That is true for any person, but especially for a girl. Do you understand me, Martha?”

  I said, “Yes mam, I surely do.”

  But I wasn’t certain I did understand. Or rather, I wasn’t certain Emma Alton truly understood me. It was clear she knew by then that I was no thief. Otherwise, she never would have allowed me in the upstairs rooms, where all the Altons’ livelihood resided along with their precious reputation. Emma never forgot ignominious beginnings, and I am damn sure she never fully trusted me—though in those days, I was careful to be the very picture of a good, obedient girl. I endeavored to fix a permanent halo to my dark, unlovely head, but Emma always looked askance at its light. I think there was a part of her that sensed my past—that saw, somehow, deep into my soul and read the memories that had imprinted themselves forever. Memories of the things I’d done behind the wagon train in the dark of a prairie night. I believe she knew my reputation was shot already, though I didn’t know it yet, myself.

  Ignominious. I learned that word from the papers, years after I worked at the Alton place. I was a grown woman by then—grown and tired, with the pluck all drained out of me, a transparent husk of a hell-cat like the shed skin you find discarded in the dust below a spider’s web. Amber, thin, dry legs curled up, forgotten and unmoving in the darkness.