Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  I rode out to a new length of track soon after it was dedicated. I rode as close to the track as I dared, as near as I knew my horse would stand, and gazed far along its cold black length, noting how it reached deep into the heart of the West, the relentless symmetry of its rails and ties, hard as a knife-cut through the soft virgin hills. I left my horse ground-tied and grazing, and moved closer on foot. Away in the distance, from the East where civilized men and fine ladies lived, I heard the faint, hoarse cry of its whistle. Then I laid down.

  Not on the tracks, as I guess you first supposed. I never once thought of doing myself in—not even when my spark was at its dimmest. That startles me now, to think back on it. I can’t explain why I kept on living, except to say that I was always eager for life, always ready to feel in my heart the fullness of anything that came my way, be it sorrow or joy.

  No, I laid down alongside the tracks. The grass was short there, dry and crackly, grazed by cattle and the thin brown shadows of antelopes. There, the prairie gave way to sun-scorched earth flooring the lines and ties. I laid down on my back; I closed my eyes.

  It took some long while for the train to reach me. As I waited with the afternoon sun hot on my cheeks and forehead, I heard my horse where I’d left him, tearing grass with his teeth and lashing his tail at lazy flies. I heard the hollow rush of his breath and felt the faint vibration of his hooves as he moved slow across the land, one step and then another. And I heard meadowlarks singing on the sage flats, their calls rising and falling from where they perched on the high yellow spikes of silver-leaved mullein.

  Then the rumble of the train’s wheels started low beneath my spine, and reached up through the earth, into my body and my blood. It overtook all my other senses, though it had yet to draw near, but I could feel its power growing, feel the inevitability of its weight and its speed, the black blindness of its onward rush. My breath came short. I told myself to get up and run, yet I knew full well there was nowhere to go. Nowhere left, where the tracks wouldn’t reach me sooner or later. I smelled a hot metal stink and the oily dust of coal. The train’s breath, like the panting of a sick man who can’t help but spread his disease.

  And then the train was upon me. I opened my mouth in shock as the engineer opened the throat of his train, and it seemed that vast, piercing, howling cry came from me, right up out of my soul. The train pounded; it thrashed; it beat to death reality around my splayed body. And in the thunder of its passing, I felt the world splinter and break.

  I opened my eyes. I tipped my head back to see. Bars of blue sky flashed rhythmically through a rush of metal black. The rapid change from light to dark, to light, to dark again sent all my wits spinning clean away, till I felt untethered from myself—from the whole world, severed from life as sure as if I’d thrown myself beneath the train’s screaming wheels, after all.

  And then it was gone. The roar of its passing seemed to fade away faster than it had come. In moments I was alone, lying on the earth, with tears of fear and wonder cutting tracks through the dirt on my face, from the corners of my eyes to my temples. The train cried again, but it was already distant, and I was already forgotten in its wake.

  The first night I tip-toed off to the railroad camp was also my last night of sneaking. I left as early as I dared and followed the saloon man’s directions, taking a wagon road out past the eastern edge of town, walking one foot in front of the other along a narrow, moonlit rut. It took me well over and hour to get there, but long before I arrived, I could see the rail camp nestled against the foot of a dark hill. The small, angular chips of canvas tents stood out plain in the night, like shavings from a soap bar scattered across’t the ground. The air was chilly, for autumn had come, but there was still a few crickets singing in the sagebrush. I had a black shawl which Emma had given me, having no further need of it herself—and the shawl, combined with the way my muscles never stopped shivering with excitement, kept me passably warm till I reached the camp.

  I smelled the camp before I heard anything of note—any song or laughter or masculine shouts cutting over the buzz of the crickets. Frontier camps always have a thick, heavy fug. It hangs like a cloak around every camp—the stink of the latrine pits and the sweat of men’s bodies. I went right through the first row of tents, half expecting someone to stop me and question me, but no one ever did. As in the saloons, no one of consequence took note of me a-tall. That was exactly the way I liked it. Only when I entered the camp did I hear the sounds of drinking and dancing and music—the sounds of life.

  The tent that served for a gathering place—a liquor dispensary of sorts—stood at the center of the encampment. That place was a-light with stubs of candles burning in dozens of leaded glass lanterns, all stuck up on posts and hung wherever a light could hang. The lanterns was all dented, their glass cracked and bubbled, and as they swung in the autumn wind, bars of yellow light slid and crossed and angled over the earth. It was as if the light was dancing to the music—fiddle, mouth-harp, banjaw—and in the center of all that warmth and movement, the ladies danced just as brightly.

  I held still beside a lantern post and watched. Watched men coming in from the perimeter with mud still on their boots and their bracers dropped down to trail at their sides. Most of the men had stains under their arms from a long day of work, and a smell hung all about the liquor tent that was just as rank as the camp-smell, thick like the burning of tallow, but somehow far sweeter to me, compelling as cinnamon or vanilla cream. The night cracked and split with the clapping of the women’s hands. They all clapped in the same rhythm, timed to the music, and soon my feet began tapping of their own accord. I laughed with pure delight whenever one of the men raised up a whoop, whenever the fiddle whined up high and the fiddler’s bow darted like lightning.

  Two men stood near me, watching the dancers, talking just loud enough so I could hear them.

  “Heard you ain’t long for this camp,” one said to the other.

  “That’s true,” the man replied. “Sioux getting fiercer by the day, it seems.”

  “Getting desperate,” said the first.

  “Maybe so. But I figure a man’s got a duty to stand against them.”

  “So you’ll go off and get yourself killed in the name of duty? Sounds damn foolish to me. You best reconsider.”

  “If we don’t do something to stop the devils, they’ll stamp us out sooner or later.”

  “They won’t,” the first man said. “They ain’t smart enough to stamp us out. Besides, I heard they’re sending Custer out to handle ’em.”

  “Custer? Of Appomattox, Custer?”

  “Do you know of another one?”

  “Horse shit. Where’d you hear that?”

  “Somewheres or other.”

  “Custer’s got better things to do than wallow around in the sagebrush hunting Indians.”

  “’Fyou say so, friend.”

  At that moment, one of them took note of me. “Hello there,” he said in that way men have—a sudden turn to the solicitous, warming all at once to a girl. “Haven’t seen you around before.”

  “No sir,” I said, “I’m new here. I heard this camp has the best whoop-up on offer, in the whole of the territory.”

  “You a girl who likes a wild time?” the fellow said, looking me up and down. I thought he might size up a heifer the same way, if he was thinking he might buy it.

  “She likes to dance, all right,” his friend said. “See how her toes is a-tappin’.”

  “I like to see a girl dance.”

  It seemed the two men could agree on that much, if they found no common ground on the matter of Custer.

  “Go on,” the first fella said. “The rest of the girls will let you dance along with them. They’re proper friendly.”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t,” I said. “I never danced before.”

  But it was already too late for my protestations. The men cupped their hands around their mouths and shouted over my head, “Hey Rosie! Hey Pearl! Here’s another dancer for yo
u, let’s see how she trots!”

  The girls surrounded me a moment later. Laughing, bouncing, smiling at me, their painted eyes beamed with gladness. Never had I smelled such flowery perfume or seen skin so ivory-smooth, though every girl was flushed warm from the dance. Beneath their perfume I could make out a muskier scent, primal and sharp like the smell that hangs over the prairie in the season of rut. It thrilled me to smell it. The girls took my hands, one to each side, and pulled me into their circle, close to the fiddle with its lightning bow and its high, scratching sing-song voice.

  “It’s easy,” one of the girls said, for she saw my wide eyes, my hesitation. She laughed and tossed her tight yellow rag-curls. “There ain’t nothin’ but music tonight. Feel it, and do whatever it tells you to do.”

  That’s exactly what I did. I loosened up all my fear and shame, casting away the last of what held me in check, held me tied to the moral world. My heart leaped; my feet pounded, but when I could catch my breath and see—really see what I was doing—I noted with great satisfaction that I moved in perfect time to the song.

  Emma was waiting up for me when I dragged myself home with a joyous ache in my feet and elsewhere in me, too. Sunrise was still an hour off, but there was enough of dawn’s gray along the flank of the land that she could see me coming down the road, could see the pink calico dress with the white ruffle on my pounding breast. I saw her standing in the yard of the boarding house, right at the front gate in her nightgown, wrapped in her fine new shawl. Her body was stiff with grim confirmation.

  I walked right up to her. Where else was I to go?

  “Well,” she said. “I was right after all. This is what comes of trying to do good in the world.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, knowing full well that I wasn’t.

  “Not half as sorry as you’ll soon be, Martha Canary.”

  Emma did not allow me to re-enter her house. It made no difference; everything I had was what the Altons had given me, trying to do good in the world.

  She did allow me to keep that long dress, though. There was no point pretending I was still a girl—not anymore.

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

  I took it in my head to return to Salt Lake City. I can’t say what drew me back to that strange, cold-shouldered place. Maybe it was the fact that it was a city, not a town like Piedmont or Princeton. Maybe the orderly grid of its streets called to me, promising something stable and predictable in a world that was, I was fast learning, liable to be shaken up at a moment’s notice. It could also be that I had some notion of finding Baby Sara and taking her back—today I can’t tell you exactly what motivated my return. My thoughts in those days was one great tangle inside my head.

  However I came by the notion, I found a place for myself in a wagon party bound for Utah Territory. As before, I worked for my passage south, for I had no money to pay my way. But I didn’t make it to Salt Lake before the snows set in. The wagons reached their destination, a town called Corinne, and there I was obliged to stay till I could arrange another passage south. At least I had procured warm clothing and a new bedroll from the wagon men, trading as I’d done in older days. Judge me if you like, but there was times that autumn when I thanked God for making me a girl, for at least He had equipped me with a natural means of providing for myself when there was no decent charity to be found. I felt sorry for orphan boys cast adrift in the world—I haven’t often met men who prefer a boy’s charms to a girl’s. Even a homely girl’s.

  In Corinne I perceived that I’d be real lucky to find a route to Salt Lake before springtime came, for the town was off the beaten track, as the saying goes. It had sprung up some few years before near a place called Promontory, which was a high bluff overlooking all the vast dry valley and the shining expanse of the Great Salt Lake below. In those days, just before my arrival in Corinne, there was nothing at Promontory save the view. But everyone in the railroad business had known all along that Promontory was the chosen site: the holy land where the tracks going east would meet up with the tracks going west, and so connect the whole continent by rail, from Boston clear to California. The much-anticipated moment of connection had occurred some five or six months before my arrival; the last railroad tie at Promontory’s summit had been fixed in its place with a golden spike. Corinne was still in a stupor of righteousness, like what I imagined the redeemed would feel when Christ returned to cleanse the world of sin. An air of unimaginable good luck hung over Corinne’s snow-choked streets, a certain smug glee at having made the right choice.

  For my part, I didn’t see what there was to feel so proud about. It was a tiny town, hardly more than a village. Far as I could see, nobody was clamoring to get there and revel in Corinne’s high society, no matter their vaunted proximity to that golden spike. Maybe the newly completed Transcontinental line would indeed bring riches undreamed-of to Corinne, and make every last man a baron and every woman a queen. But it hadn’t happened yet. Corinne was like Piedmont, to my eye—but considerably less enjoyable, what with its lack of saloons and taverns where a body might enjoy a little dancing now and then.

  The people of Corinne was also spiteful toward the Mormons. They took great pride in being All Gentile (the Mormons, you know, called anybody who was not of their ranks by that name.) I couldn’t imagine why a people who despised Mormons so thoroughly would stake out a claim in Utah Territory; far as I was concerned, the place had nothing to recommend it but Mormons, and that is a slim endorsement if you ask me. But such was the magic of the railroad. Promises lay all along its cold black lines. Folks routinely sacrificed all common sense—and more besides—on the altar of the iron horse.

  The very day I arrived, I set about finding work. I had some thought of keeping up a boarding house, for I had learned plenty in Piedmont and felt certain of my skills as a duster and a laundress. But no one found me promising, and anyway, there was only two boarding houses in all of Corinne, and neither was half as big as the Altons’ place. No one wanted me to wait at tables, neither; Corinne possessed but one eatery, and it was staffed by the owner’s grown-up daughters. I didn’t have the nerve to ask any of the women if they needed a hand caring for their children. It seemed too obscene a joke, even to try. I had done a piss-poor job by the five children left to my keeping, and they had been my own flesh and blood.

  By that time, I had no qualms about working on my back. In fact, after the fun I’d witnessed at the rail camp, whoring seemed a downright pleasant prospect. But even with its lack of Mormons, Corinne was the squeaky-cleanest town I ever laid eyes on—then or since. If anyone was whoring, they was doing it in the strictest secrecy. I couldn’t locate a cat house even though my life depended on it.

  After two days searching for employment without any luck—and two nights spent in the half-empty hay loft of a very cold and drafty barn—I finally resolved to take myself door to door. I knocked on every last door in Corinne, asking for work or charity, whichever fickle circumstance saw fit to strew across my path. I was resolved to take on any sort of work—anything a-tall—up to and including digging latrine pits in the frozen earth, though Corinne seemed to have its latrine needs amply seen to, along with its laundering and housekeeping. Word flew around town faster than I could, so by the end of the day no one in Corinne would answer their doors when I knocked, even though I could hear footsteps inside as they crept from window to window, trying to skim a look at the mysterious, unattached girl who had appeared in their railroad sanctuary as if from thin air.

  I determined to try my luck beyond the town, where a few ranch houses could be seen far and gray in the snow, huddled down low beneath a vast, oppressive weight of cloud-covered sky. I headed for the one that seemed closest, and as I left Corinne, I turned on my heel and shouted loud as I could, so all the people could hear, “You ain’t got a stick of charity among you! I hope you’re invaded by Mormons and I hope they pull your golden spike out of the ground and fuck every last one of you with the damnab
le thing!” Then I blushed terrible and hurried away, for I’d never said such a startling, unholy thing before, though I’d thought the like often enough. It’s one thing to let fly a cute little cuss or two to earn your whiskey, and quite another to give a whole town at once the bluest side of your tongue.

  The nearest ranch lay much farther away than it had originally seemed. Snow has that effect, I’ve found—as do certain other atmospheres, like spring haze or impending thunder. By the time I stumbled to the ranch house, my boots was soaked, my feet so frozen I couldn’t feel the pain anymore. The bottom of my pink calico dress was gray and draggled from the snow, but I had trousers on beneath that kept my legs from suffering overmuch. Still, I was worried about my feet. I’d left a trail of footprints across the rancher’s fields, stretching in a broken blue line all the way back to inhospitable Corinne. The town seemed to mock me from afar, and I swear to this day that I could still feel the eyes of all its people on my back, watching me, judging me, and not liking what they saw.

  Dusk had all but settled as I approached the ranch house, nestled in the center of a ring of barns and sheds. There was an orange glow in one window, a fire inside—the only spot of color in all the lonesome, blue-gray world. I knocked hard on the door and heard some surprised cussing inside. After a minute, a man of about fifty years opened up, but only just a crack, so that one steely eye peered out at me over the half I could see of his graying mustache.

  “Please, mister,” I said. “I’m in real bad shape. I need to get my feet warm and dry. Can’t you let me stay here for the night? I got my own bedroll. I can sleep on the floor. I won’t make any noise or even ask for any food.”