Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  “The Hell you come from, girl?”

  “From Corinne, but no one would take me in there, so I had to tramp all this way over the snow. And before that I was from Piedmont. I’m trying to make my way down to Salt Lake City, for my brother is going to meet me there. He’s through with the Army and he has a voucher to settle some land in Utah Territory, signed by Custer himself.” I was spouting nonsense now. Truth was, I had no idea whether Army men ever got vouchers, and it seemed damn silly to claim a body might possess one signed by the great hero Custer. But I reasoned that folks in Corinne probably didn’t know any more about the greater state of affairs than I did. “Only I didn’t make it to Salt Lake before the snows overtook me,” I went on desperately. “And now I’m sore in need of a place to stay, at least for tonight. You got a wife in there? I can help her out, and I’m glad to do it, to repay your kindness. I can do laundry real good.”

  “Ain’t got no wife,” the man said. He did swing the door open a little wider, though, and I counted that reason for hope. “What’s your name?”

  As he opened up the door, I could feel the warmth of his wood fire roll out to greet me. I shut my eyes for a second, giving in to a shiver of fear and despair. I had never wanted anything like I wanted the safety of that rancher’s hearth. I was ready to tell him anything to get it—even the truth.

  “My name’s Martha Canary. I got no one in all the world, sir, and I need help. Please. I’m willing to work—whatever work you have for me. I’ll stay all winter and work for you, if that’s what you want. I just need to wait out the snow so’s I can get myself down to Salt Lake City.”

  I thought maybe he would take my meaning, being a man with no wife and all. But the offer flew right past his head. He said, “Ain’t no kind of work on this place except driving mules.”

  I perked right up at that. “I can ride,” I said eagerly. “I’m a real good rider, in fact.”

  He narrowed his eyes at my pink dress, with no attempt to hide his skepticality.

  “Look,” I said, and lifted up the skirt some, so he could see I wore trousers. “I can ride, and everybody says I’m knacky with horses.”

  “Mules ain’t like horses.”

  “I know,” I said. “I worked with mules, too.” That wasn’t true, but I reasoned mules and horses looked so much alike, they couldn’t be vastly different in their natures.

  There was a long pause, during which I could feel the icy ache from my feet spreading up to my ankles. The cold sought to claim me piece by piece.

  Finally, he opened the door a little wider. “Well,” he said slowly, “my old hand runned off two weeks ago with some girl from town, and I’m no good lately.” He stepped back, the movement revealing a heavy limp. “Fell in a prairie dog hole,” he said. “Damn fool accident to have, for a fella of my age. But I won’t be much good till my knee’s healed up, and ain’t nobody come out here anyway, so I got no hope of finding a man to do whatever work needs doing. I might as well take on a girl. At least you’re big. You look strong enough.”

  I let out an explosive breath, half sigh of relief, half laughter. “Thank you, mister! Thank you. I won’t let you down.”

  “You ain’t Mormon, I hope.”

  “No, sir.”

  “No,” he said in that slow drawl, “reckon you ain’t, after all. ’Fyou was, you’d be married off to some old bull with his beard and his balls hanging clear down to his knees—you and a dozen other girls besides.”

  I smiled. I liked the way he talked.

  “Come in,” he said, “and get your feet warm. I’ll show you around the place in the morning.”

  The man’s name was Braddick, and we was as much alike as any two folks may be who haven’t a drop of blood in common. His fire saved my feet, though the burning as they thawed out and came back to life was about the worst pain I ever endured. I sat with my bare feet stretched out before his cheerful fire while Mr. Braddick distracted me from that searing, prickling ordeal by telling me all about his operation. He trained up teams of mules, which would haul wagon-loads of supplies from one rail camp to the next. In the years before the golden spike—when rail camps was still boiling with activity, and urgency to complete the Transcontinental still motivated every white soul in the West—Mr. Braddick’s business had been strong.

  “Now that the Trans is finished,” he said, “ain’t near as much need for the mule teams. Funny, the way it’s all worked out. That damn railway made a new way of life for the men who worked to lay its tracks—and for men like me, who see to all the needs of the camps. But soon as the track is finished, it’s the trains themselves that destroy those new ways of life. Yes, they do. Crush men’s occupations. Crush our very identities, in fact—our whole reason for living. What’s a man to live for, if not his work?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that question—what’s a man to live for—so I held my tongue.

  “Still,” Braddick said, brightening up a little, “mules can go where trains can’t. They can even go where horses can’t. There’s a few places here and there, places and men in need of my teams and my wagons. I ain’t finished yet—not yet.”

  I could read in Braddick’s eyes what he had left unspoken: I’ll be finished soon, though. Sooner or later, the rails will finish us all.

  Mr. Braddick fed me on thick, stale-tasting porridge, which I gulped down as if it was manna from Heaven. The next day, he showed me around his ranch. A corral stood behind his house, all its snow trampled down flat and pocked by muddy hoofprints. A sloped wooden awning slanted over the rear portion of the corral, and beneath that simple shelter, I found his herd of mules. It had been an awful long time since I’d been near anything resembling a horse, so I pricked up at sight of them. The mules seemed to sense my gladness to see them, too, for they all raised their big, bow-shaped heads at once, gazing at me with a curiosity and intelligence I couldn’t help but love.

  Braddick could get around on his injured knee just well enough to teach me everything I needed to know. At his instruction, I ducked between the rails of the corral fence and walked out into the center of the enclosure. Hardly had I ceased to move but the mules approached me of their own accord. I raised a loop of soft rope, which Braddick had given me to carry, and slipped it quietly over the neck of the first mule who came to greet me.

  “You’re a natural, Martha,” Braddick declared. “A real whacker in the making.”

  All that day, Braddick instructed me in the art of mulewhacking. He taught me the parts of a harness—how it fits together around an animal’s body, how a clever driver can use a creature’s weight to pull and stop a wagon or sled, no matter how heavy the load. By the end of the day, Braddick had me up in the seat of a small wagon, driving six spunky mules in a tight circle inside the muddy corral.

  He leaned on the fence, watching. “I’ll be damned. I admit I didn’t think a girl could do the job, but you got hands and a head perfectly suited for driving, Miss Martha.”

  I glowed with pride, and looking back, I think it was the first time I ever felt that grand, warm emotion in all my life.

  Within a few days, I was working a team of six out across the snowy range, pulling an old buckboard wagon which Braddick had fitted out with sleigh runners for winter-time use.

  Mules have an unfavorable reputation, but from the start I found them to be the pleasantest of creatures. It is true that they won’t tolerate a lick of nonsense from a handler, but in order to gain their cooperation—even their loyalty—all a body has to do is show them a little respect. Beat a mule or cuss him out, and he’ll plant his feet and throw up his head, and give you an unmistakable stare from his small, dark, infinitely peevish eye. That stare says, Just try and move me if you think you can—you who’s hardly bigger than a gnat, far as I’m concerned. Neither lash nor spur impresses a mule; they’ll tolerate an astonishing amount of pain in the interest of teaching you a lesson in courtesy. But coax a mule along with gentle words, tell her how pretty she is, how silky her ears,
how brave her heart, and by God she’ll march right through any hazard for your sake.

  I suppose I am like a mule in that regard, and while some folks would account that a grave insult, I have enough sense to take it as a compliment. A mule never puts her feet wrong—unless she means to, for purposes of her own. She may seem graceless or even malformed when stood up beside a well-bred horse with its mane all braided and its neck arched proud. But the mule can keep working long after the horse has dropped from exhaustion. Just try to tell me there ain’t something to be proud of in mulish fortitude.

  Though I was but a young thing, I dare say my head was nailed on straight, and from the first moment in the driver’s seat, I delighted in handling Braddick’s mule team. There’s something marvelously natural about driving a team; any half-wit can do it if they only pay attention to the animals’ moods. All you have to do is look where the mules is looking, and listen in the direction of their swiveling ears, and imagine your own self in the traces. With a little sympathy for your animals, you can feel in your own body the bite and tug of the harness, the weight dragging along behind, the cadence of your fellow team-mates’ hooves and the warm sway of their laboring bodies. You can hear their breath rushing and puffing in unison. You can feel the subtle rhythm of all those great, strong, inelegant bodies pulling together, working as one creature toward a common good. Driving was like a dance to me—like the bouncy, gleeful rhythm of the saloon girls, kicking and twirling in time. Only this dance was slower and softer, and far more intimate, for it was just me with the reins in my hands and the cold against my face. Just me, and the sweet breath of my animals steaming and pooling in the air around my head as we crossed the snow-covered hills.

  Once I’d got the hang of driving, I took up other work around Braddick’s ranch. Several of his fences had gone to pot, with wet boards sagging and nails rusted and bent. There was puddles of ice-rimmed mud inside the corrals, which I fixed easy enough by shoveling earth over the wet places. But the longer I stayed and toiled, the worse his ranch looked. I suspected the old man had something amiss with his body, beyond his hurt leg—or maybe something amiss with his head—for the ranch had surely fallen into disrepair long before Braddick twisted his knee, long before I arrived. But Braddick was a close-lipped fellow. He never talked much about himself, nor anything else for that matter. I knew no one could make a man like him confess to any bodily weakness, so I never bothered to ask. Old men are often that way—proud and sad in their aging, clinging to the strength they once had as if they can get it all back again if they just suffer long and silent enough.

  As I worked to improve the fences and grounds, I wondered how I might convince Braddick to let me stay on forever. By that time, he surely knew I could work as hard as any ranch hand, even if I was a girl. I liked him. He taught me card games and shuffling tricks each night while we warmed ourselves at the hearth. I had come to love that ranch as if it was my own, too. You can’t work a plot of land without feeling some bond with the soil and the sky. Every spadeful of earth you dig, the land itself digs deeper into your heart, till you’ve become the land—and the whole muddy, snow-choked, shit-stinking breadth of it trembles with the beat of your pulse.

  Sometime just after Christmas—Braddick gave me two oranges and a new pair of warm woolen stockings as a present—he sent me out on my first delivery. The route ran out to a railroad camp, away back toward Piedmont, where the railway men still worked to connect two offshoot branches of the Transcontinental.

  “You sure you can make this drive on your own?” he asked me as I finished tightening up the traces.

  “Shit, sir,” I said (he never did mind my cussing), “you said yourself I can do the run.”

  “But do you feel ready for it, girl? It’s a long and lonesome trail, and the winter’s dark and cold.”

  I smiled at him, for I knew he’d grown some scraggly kind of affection for me. That was a kindness I hadn’t oft enjoyed in my short lifetime. “I’m ready, sir; I know it. Don’t you worry none about me. Got the mules for company, and your rifle in case any wolves come after me.”

  “I do believe you find those mules real good company, too,” Braddick said, kind of slow and meditative, as if he still couldn’t quite believe anybody actually enjoyed the presence of mules—especially a girl, who was supposed to be delicate and frilly and fonder of park ponies than great kicking screamers with peevish little eyes.

  Braddick gave me his hand to steady me as I climbed up into the wagon, though I could feel a terrible shaking in his arm and shoulder, and I knew it was he who needed steadying. “Take this along with you,” he said, handing up a thick, flat packet wrapped in oil cloth and tied with soot-blackened twine. It was food, surely—though I’d already stowed a little crate under the driving seat, which held salt pork and softened apples from the root cellar, along with a couple loaves of bread, which I had made myself and burned all along the bottom. I tucked his package in with the rest of my provisions.

  I tapped the brim of the big black sombrero I’d donned to cut back the glare of winter sky. “Better be off, I guess, if I want to reach the depot on time.”

  “Well—” Braddick said. Just that, nothing more. Then he turned and headed back toward his little, dark-sided ranch house, limping on his bad knee and trembling with every step.

  When I get back, I told myself, I’ll set him down by the fire and make him see that he’s got to take me on as his permanent hand. Who else will help him? He’s got no one in all the world, and I can do the work of two men.

  That probably was not true—I was bigger than a girl of my age had any right to be, but I was still a girl, after all. It made me feel better to think it, though. I slapped the reins against my mules’ flanks and the wagon-sledge took off smartly toward the town depot.

  Soon as I was underway, a great joy surged up in my middle. Now I was off on my own, making the world mine, carving out a place for myself in the grown-up world of respectable, Christianly toil. My thrill was dampened a little as I entered the town of Corinne, which I hadn’t returned to since I’d cussed the whole place out in one shot. I didn’t know whether any of those upstanding citizens might recall me and wish me ill. I made my way to the train depot with an old plaid scarf pulled up high around my face, just my eyes showing below my sombrero, and in that way passed through Corinne without incident.

  When the depot hands had loaded up my wagon, I set off in the direction of Piedmont. The mules grumbled and tossed their heads in protest at the weight of their burden, but I talked pretty to them, and soon enough my voice reconciled them to the task. Together we made tracks over old but unmarked snow, which cracked and crisped beneath my team’s hooves, hissing loud under the runners.

  I loved the snow-covered hills with a deepness and trembling that startled me, for it came upon me so damn sudden, and I felt it so strong. The world was all of one color—silver-gray, with here and there the dark recesses of shadow where some tenacious patch of sage stood up tall against the blowing of winter storms. The world’s beauty held a certain fragility, a readiness to crack and shatter, as if the season meant to remind me that all things are impermanent, all things pass away. I guess most folks find such thoughts distressing. We love to tell ourselves—don’t we, Short Pants—that we’ll go on existing forever, that death will never come—not for us, not for us. But though I never learned much of the Bible, I do recall this much: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose. He hath made everything beautiful in His time.

  I rejoiced on that long, cold drive, for I was doing good—making myself useful, after a long and dreary season of failure and shame. Even the ice and the flatness and the persistent pale-gray state of the world couldn’t drag my spirits down. What did I care if the sage branches shivered and snapped beneath my wagon’s skids? What did I care if I, some distant day, would fall into a cold gray winter and, like the sage and the hills lying muffled under snow, shatter and break and fade? I had no need to learn the world from
beginning to end. My place was simply to have a place—to be there, at the back of my team, with my sorrows standing up in the trail of mules’ hoofprints and snow-slicked ruts. My sorrows standing up to follow me into the foothills, but never again to catch me.

  At night I built a little fire beside my wagon, in its lee side, where I could hear the bitter wind howling, but it couldn’t reach me with its claws. My mules gathered close to shelter from the cold. One by one I lifted their feet, picking balls of ice from the hair that fringed their heels. I did it till my fingers went numb, and kept at my work till all the mules’ feet was clear of ice and they relaxed with contented sighs.

  When it was time to sleep, I made my bed under thick wool blankets among the stacks of provisions. And there I lay, splendidly alone, and watched the stars turn slow overhead till sleep overtook me.

  The sun had already set by the time I found the rail camp halfway between Piedmont and Corinne. Twilight sagged heavy and gray across the land. I stood up in the wagon, bracing myself against its sway, against the occasional jolt as it ran over a hidden stone. I called out to the camp: “Halloo!”

  I already knew I had made an impression when I stopped my team in the heart of the camp. I guess my high-pitched holler must have given me away, so the men had already gathered, watching the approach of my mule team with curiosity plain on their faces. I swept off my sombrero and let my long black hair tumble down behind me, confirming their suspicions. The men, bundled up in wool and leather, laughed and pounded each other’s backs at the sight of a girl mulewhacker. For my part, I was glad to have the company of folks again. I do find mules especially agreeable, but they leave something wanting in the realm of conversation.

  “Hell if you ain’t a surprise,” one of the men said to me. “We got girls in this camp, sure enough, but none of them knows how to drive.”