Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  “Yes mam,” I told her, and set to work. But as I hung Emma’s dresses to dry in the autumn breeze, I looked carefully at their long hems, their serious and womanish style. I counted the dresses with a speculative eye. No fewer than a dozen dripped and swayed heavily above the bare earth. Emma Alton surely did own an awful lot of dresses. I suspected she wouldn’t miss one if I borrowed it for a spell. And I only meant to borrow it, not take it for keeps. I’ve never been any kind of thief.

  That evening I pulled the dresses down and pressed them, then took them to my tiny room for folding. And when I presented the stack of neatly folded, freshly washed, lavender-scented things to Emma, tied up securely with twine so she could smash the whole lot down in her trunk till springtime came again, she nodded briskly and didn’t bother to count. My elation knew no limits, though I succeeded in keeping my face neutral, entirely unblushed, till she had gone back up to the second floor.

  As soon as I heard Emma’s bedroom door shut, I scampered to my little cell and pulled the dress I’d hidden out from under my cot. It was a pink calico with a high collar and a white bib ruffle, prettier than anything I’d ever worn. I got a sick little shiver in my stomach as I stroked the cloth by the light of my tallow candle. That twist of guilt never relented, even through supper. In fact, it grew stronger while I set in my hard chair, with my eyes properly cast down to my boiled potatoes and chicken stew, listening to the Altons talking over the details of their day. I held myself so still and made myself so unobtrusive, the Altons didn’t even notice that I barely picked at my food. I was much too nervous to eat heartily. I told Emma I would do the washing up, and she seemed mighty pleased at my eagerness for the job, never suspecting it was only an attempt to ease my heavy conscience of its burden.

  But though guilt sickened me, not once did I consider staying in my bed where I belonged. I had yearned for the joyful atmosphere of the saloons for many long days. Now, at last, in my grown-woman’s dress, I could slip through the saloon door without a second glance. There was no need to pinch myself awake that night. I shivered under my blanket as I listened to the house bedding down, anxious as a flea on a wet cat. When the house fell silent, I dressed by feel, doing up the pink calico’s buttons in darkness, hoping I had lined up all my buttons straight.

  The first time you do a rotten deed, it goes hard on the soul. You can feel the Lord watching, and you make your apologies and hope you’ll be forgiven in the end. But the next time, iniquity goes down easier—and a time or two after that, you find that you’ve taken to rotten deeds like a duck to water. I guess that’s why preachers always say never to commit a sin in the first place: they know sin only stings but once. By the time I’d put the borrowed dress on and drifted silently out the kitchen door with boots in hand, all that dreadful shivering was done. I put on my boots and fairly flew down the road to the heart of town. My mind and my immortal soul was both light as cottonwood puffs drifting on an easy wind. I reached the saloons in no time at all, following the honey trail of their distant music through the coal-black night.

  As before, I entered the saloon on the left. I felt puffed up on my own cleverness; I wanted to flaunt my wits before the proprietor who had questioned me sharply about my ma and pa. I pushed open the door with its fly-screen square, just as bold as you please, and sauntered in like I owned the place. But the man with the towel was busy behind his long oak bar. He took no notice of me. It’s possible that, disguised by a grown woman’s long skirt, I was entirely invisible to him.

  Unseen and accepted, my heart pounded and the blood rushed loud in my ears, for I realized I had entered the grown-up world. I moved through that saloon rather slowly, dreamy with disbelief, sluggish and dazed in all my movements. I found an empty table near the piano—the player was busy talking to a pair of dancing girls, neither of whom was the redhead with the bouncing curls. I sat with my back to the bar, for it occurred to me that I had no money, and long skirt or no, I’d be tossed out the moment the bar man realized I wasn’t a paying customer.

  “Hi, honey.” A man stepped up close beside me. “Looks like you could use some company.”

  I looked up, alarmed, thinking for a moment that it was the proprietor, and my good time would be over before it had really begun. But it was only a fella with a patchy mustache. He wasn’t a whole lot older than me, and he had a big smile with a gap between his teeth, and black eyes that sparkled with mischief. I guessed him to be Mexican or maybe part Indian, though I had no way of knowing for sure.

  He said, “Mind if I join you?”

  “Guess not,” I said.

  He pulled out a chair and set so close our shoulders almost touched. I could smell sweat and horse on him, but the smell wasn’t a bit unpleasant.

  “I ain’t never seen you here before,” he said.

  “No, reckon not. I ain’t from here. I come up to Piedmont on business.”

  “Where you from, then?”

  “Salt Lake City.” I figured it was wise to throw him off my trail, to stop word from traveling back to the Altons.

  “Salt Lake? You a Mormon, then? Got a whole passel of sister-wives and a husband with a beard clear down to his over-used balls?”

  For a second I thought maybe I’d blush at his language, but then I figured it was all part of being in the grown-up world, so I laughed instead. “I ain’t married to no one,” I said, “and I ain’t a Mormon neither, though one of my sisters is. I’m on business for my pa. I keep his books for him.” As I said it, I remembered the kindly shop keeper who had let me wash up in his rain barrel, and I pretended to myself that he was my own dear father. “My pa keeps a store,” I said, before the fella could ask.

  “Don’t you have brothers? Strange of your pa, to send a girl your age to do his business for him.”

  “My brothers are occupied on a ranch,” I said, and then leaned toward him urgently. “Say, Mister, do you know where the Richardson ranch is? I have… I have an errand to run there, on my pa’s behalf.”

  He didn’t know the location. He said, “How old are you, anyway, sweetheart?”

  I thought there might be an official age for staying on in saloons, but I didn’t know what it was, so I answered evasively: “Old enough.”

  He laughed at that, like it was the closing line to a joke he’d been waiting his whole life to hear. He dropped one heavy arm around my shoulders. “I bet you are at that,” he said. “I bet you are.” His fingers moved along my collarbone through the worn calico of Mrs. Alton’s dress. His touch didn’t disturb me; I’d had rougher treatment from the wagon boys. “Let me buy you a drink, honey.”

  “I’ll have a sarsaparilla.”

  My pa had once let me try sarsaparilla, on a day when I accompanied him to town to sell a paltry load of corn ears. That day had been so hot, you could have sizzled bacon on the ground—but the thick, throbbing heat had fallen away the moment the invigorating spice of that drink hit my tongue. I was eager to taste it again.

  My companion seemed to think I’d made another joke. He laughed even louder than before, and his touch below my neck got a little firmer—more insistent. Then his fingers slid down a little lower. “Jake,” he called back into the bar, “bring this filly a whiskey. I’m paying.”

  At that moment, the dancing girls took their places beside the piano, all smiling red lips and sweeps of cream-colored skin. And then the music began to play.

  That first taste of whiskey. I remember it well, even to this day. A sudden woody bite upon my tongue, a reflexive swallow—and then that queer, tingling warmth running all down my throat into the pit of my stomach, to the bottom of my very soul. The fire of it spreading, perking up my senses; the hot vapor rising to the back of my throat, burning my nostrils when I exhaled.

  And the rush of glee to my head, the wild wicked glory, the knowledge that however the world might try to hurt me, it could never hurt me enough. Not enough to keep me down. Not enough to break me.

  Drink it the first time, and it makes you giddy
and light.

  Drink it a thousand times, and you’re already broken. The world has already won.

  But you’ll keep coming back, no matter how you try to stay away. You will return time and again, thirsty for that first sip, desperate to relive the moment when you thought yourself invincible. The more you hurt—the harder the world kicks you—the more you crave it. The more your heart aches for the round, mellow comfort, its fulsome taste. The more you need the fire in your breath, and the will to go on laughing, and the blank, dark peace of forgetting.

  Order up another whiskey, Short Pants. This story ain’t half over yet.

  I never did nothing with that Mexican fella, God’s honest truth. I managed to convince him I truly was the daughter of a merchant and too respectable for cavorting, and when he disappeared for a few minutes—to piss out back, maybe, or to find another girl to woo—I retreated into the night. The sharp, woody taste of whiskey was still warm and full in my mouth. That was all I wanted for one night—all I could manage just then.

  Somehow, I found my way back to my bed, even with the liquor clouding my senses. It may have been the resilience of youth, or maybe I just wasn’t as skunked as I thought. In any case, I managed to slide into my cot as quietly as I slid out of it some two or three hours before, and with the burn of liquor in my belly, I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow.

  I was plenty tired out next morning, tuckered as I’d ever been on the wagon trail, but as I sleep-walked through the day’s work, I knew I had to get back to the saloon that very night, and all nights to come. It wasn’t the man who drew me back. His fondling had meant nothing to me, for even at my tender age I was already jaded where that was concerned. Nor had the liquor set its hook in my soul—not yet. It was the possibility of the place that called to me. All those folks passing in and out of that red swinging door, all the people I might meet, the stories I might hear. The saloon was a world apart from the quiet routine and daily lonesomeness of the boarding house. As long as I was busy recalling the fun I had at the saloon, and pondering on what types of folks I might meet next, I had no room in my head to worry about my brothers and sisters, and no chance to berate myself for failing to round them up again and make good on my promises. The saloon was my secret salvation. I knew already that I’d never be able to let the place alone.

  As I bent over the laundry kettle with hot water pinking my arms, I felt shame and guilt heat me from the inside, too. I recalled the kindly face of Reverend Wilkes, who had taken us in and done his best to bring me properly close to God. I knew the Reverend would disapprove of my sneaking and fibbing. And I knew I ought to find some way to get the pink calico dress back to Emma Alton—make some plausible excuse for its absence and hand it over, folded and neat and pressed with lavender. For as long as I kept that dress, I had the means to enter another world—a world which was still rightly forbidden to a girl of my age. The moment the dress was out of my hands, I would be helpless. I would be forced to give saloons up for good—at least till I aged up proper.

  I will give it back, I told myself as I worked. I imagined I was talking to Reverend Wilkes, and maybe to Jesus Christ Himself, too, whose kindly sad eyes I sometimes felt peering down on me from the sky, or from wherever it is He’s thought to dwell. (I never have been able to locate Him, from that day to this.) I thought, I’ll give the dress back after two more visits. Or three. I only wanted another handful of nights at the saloon, a few more sweet memories to suck and savor like a good, rare candy before I gave myself over to morals and made myself into the fine upstanding lady I was supposed to grow up and be.

  But the more often I went, the harder it became to abandon my secret new life. I slept only a few hours each night, but my dreams were sweet and scored by the grand, gravelly purr of the hurdy-gurdy. I was slow and clumsy at my work; I yawned over breakfast and supper alike. Sometimes my thoughts were so slow that I never was able to talk myself out of saucing Emma Alton before it was too late, and I tasted the sting of her birch stick more often than ever before.

  Once I spilled a whole kettle of laundry into the dirt, and Emma, with stick raised, paused and blinked at me, startled-like. She said, “Mother of mercy, child. I believe you’ve got the bottle-ache.”

  “No mam,” I said quickly, and tried to straighten up and look lively. “I don’t even know what bottle-ache is, but I can assure you, I ain’t got that. It’s just a head cold, I swear. Must have got it from one of the boarders. It’s making me ache something awful, right here.” I touched the place next to my nose, where you get that dull pounding pain whenever a cold settles in. Then I simulated a sneeze for good measure, and groaned good enough make any stage actress turn green with envy.

  Emma lowered her stick without striking me once, but she stood there staring at me—a hard, level, icy-cold stare from those pretty blue eyes. She watched me so long, I felt as if she could see right through my chest and into my cowering, shriveled little soul. How I ever held her gaze without busting into tears and begging for forgiveness is a mystery to me. But at last, Emma turned away and said, “Clean up that mess and don’t be so clumsy, girl. And if you have a head cold, tell me so I can remedy you, instead of bumbling around making a wreckage of my home.”

  Well, I hardly need to tell you that the promise I’d made to myself—to only go back to the saloon two or three more times—was a promise I broke good and hard, just like all the rest. A week flew by, then two, and I snuck out to the saloon every night except Sundays, for the good people of Piedmont wouldn’t suffer any saloon to operate on the Lord’s Day. Otherwise I would have been there Sunday nights, too, sure as you’re born. It wasn’t the fact that I went back again and again that shames me now, these many years later. It’s the fact that I gave up all thought of finding the Richardson ranch and the boys, and seldom thought about the little girls anymore, either. Between the great enjoyment of music and the excitement of the stories I heard from the gambling men, there was no more room in my heart for sadness. You might account that a good thing, but I do not. If I’ve come to learn one truth in all my sad and sorry existence, it’s this: our sorrows drive us. All work—all good—grows from a deep bed of longing. And in my life, I have come to believe that longing is just another shade of sorrow.

  The men who roamed those two saloons seemed grand creatures to me. They was all quick with a laugh, and they trailed the glamour of the frontier behind them—a wake of adventure and dry dust, of flecks of gold and the broken fletchings of Indian arrows. I liked to talk to those men, for they never minded my unrefined speech. They didn’t even mind when I swore. They laughed all the harder, in fact, and slapped me on the bottom in a friendly sort of way, and offered up yet more tales of their boldest deeds—and expected me to believe them, too. When they paid me any kindness, I thought myself a pretty girl, even though none of them ever said I was. I felt just as splendid and fair as Emma Alton—felt it right down to my big Missouri bones.

  It was in a moment exactly like that—setting on a man’s knee, with the glass of whiskey he’d bought me half-drunk already, feeling lovely as a queen—that I got the first big idea of my life. I don’t remember anything about the man today—not his name nor his age, not the sound of his voice nor the quality of his smile (but they all had slow hunting grins and eyes that measured me with knowing confidence.) All I remember about that man was his words.

  “I come from the railroad camp, you know. It’s only two miles from the edge of town by now. Maybe three miles.”

  “A railroad camp must be pretty grand.” I had seen the camp when we’d first arrived in Piedmont, of course. I knew it wasn’t grand. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  “No,” he said truthfully, “not at all. It’s damn muddy and hard, and that’s why I’m here tonight, to get a handful of something soft.” He squeezed my hip, and usually that made me giggle and squirm, but for some reason I’d fastened onto his talk of the camp and I couldn’t be persuaded into giggling.

  I said, “Wh
y do you do the work if it’s hard and muddy?”

  I don’t know what I expected him to say. For the money, maybe. Or, What the Hell else am I supposed to do? But he got quiet for a minute and sipped at his liquor, and seemed to stare right through the piano and the dancing girls to a place far beyond Piedmont, a place I couldn’t see. Finally he said, “Have you ever seen a train up close? Ever seen a train in motion?”

  “No sir,” I said, sort of quiet because I could sense his awe, his church-like reverence.

  “Trains are the kind of thing only Man could make,” he said. “Even God could never create something so powerful.”

  That shocked me, for it seemed improper, even though I had never been an especially pious girl. I drank down the rest of my whiskey and considered giggling just to get him off the subject.

  He said, “There’s a motion to trains that is so complete, it’s almost holy. They always go somewhere, you see. They’re never stuck, never stalled, never grounded. Or if they do get stuck, it ain’t for long. They keep moving, and everywhere they go, they move with purpose and power. That’s the kind of man I want to be: like a train. So I guess I’m in service to the trains, working for their purpose.”

  “Like a preacher works for God’s purpose?”

  “No. Like a slave works for his master.” Then he looked at me funny and barked out a big, loud laugh. “Jesus, girl, you getting churchy on me?”

  I wasn’t getting churchy; all danger of that was long past. But that night, as I set upon his knee and let him squeeze handfuls of my softness—and later, as I walked home with the throb already building behind my eyes—I thought of purpose and power. I thought of motion, of the holiness of going somewhere, of never being grounded. And far in the back of my head, under the dwindling music of the saloons, I could hear the crying of a train’s whistle.

  Years later, I had occasion to watch a train go by—to really see it, I mean, and feel the thunder of its passing shudder through my body. It ain’t like watching from a distance while a train creeps low along the horizon with a black fog of breath trailing behind. I didn’t think of the man in the saloon when I saw that train, but I think of him now, as I remember.