“I have lots of experience with the work,” I said—and that was true, though I doubted whether Madam Robair would have counted trail-trading, nor bartering for whiskey in a railroad camp, as legitimate experience.
“Do you?” she asked coolly. “How old are you, girl?”
“Seventeen.”
In truth I was just about fourteen—maybe a week or two shy of that age—but I knew my bigness worked in my favor, at least where fibbing about age was concerned. I turned my head a little, inciting my fancy feather plume to shake. I hoped it made me look sophisticated and experienced.
But it only made Madam Robair sniff in a thoroughly unimpressed way. “You look a proper mess,” she said.
I blushed. Maybe after all I hadn’t done as good a job with my hair and hat as I had formerly thought. Primping wasn’t an easy feat, without a mirror to check. I said, by way of excusing myself, “I had to ride an awful long time to get here, and I had nowhere to freshen up. But I can clean up real good, if I’m given half a chance.”
Now both of her brows raised and arched in a way that said, I doubt that very much.
“I haven’t any use for you,” the madam said shortly, turning her attention back to the great book that lay open before her. She picked up a black feather pen and made a few marks in a column. She didn’t so much as look at me again; it was a plain dismissal.
I couldn’t accept a dismissal. I had ridden too far for this opportunity, risked too much out there in the hills and the cold mountain passes.
“I don’t want to beg,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended, “but I will if you make me. I won’t be turned away, mam. Not at all. It’s best if you find a place for me—any place, even doing laundry for your girls—”
“I have all the washer-women I need.”
“But you ain’t got a girl who can do card tricks, I bet.”
She looked up from her book with her black feather pen quivering in her hand. This time her pink lips trembled, as if she was thinking seriously about laughing. “Card tricks? What need have I for that? It’s not card tricks you must turn here, Jane Burch.”
“I know,” I said, faltering. “I know what kind of tricks. And I can do ‘em better than any other girl.”
“Nonsense. I’ve the finest girls in the West under this roof, and a collection of other girls elsewhere—in my pool hall, at my road ranch. Every one of them is far more skilled than you.”
“How do you know that if you ain’t willing to give me a try?”
“Your speech is appalling, for one thing.” (Only she pronounced it as, sing.) “My girls are refined, a breath of fresh air for hard-working clients. Any common clod of mud may be found out there on the prairie. Companions of refinement are more difficult to come by.”
“It don’t take refinement to hike your skirt up to your waist, and that’s all anybody here’s after.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. For a minute I thought she might shout me out of the room, or call in some big old bully to haul me away. I said quickly, “Sorry, mam—I meant to say, it doesn’t take refinement.”
A silence fell between us, and for a few shaky heartbeats I could read no expression whatsoever in Madam Robair’s face. Then her sharp blue eyes widened; she burst out with a bright, chiming laugh.
As soon as her laughter died, my stomach rumbled so loud it made the madam blink. A cramp of hunger pinched me, and against my will I clamped a hand to my stomach, trying to press the pain away.
The amusement faded from the madam’s face. Something rather close to pity replaced it. “Hungry?” she asked softly.
“Very much so, mam. But I ain’t about to ask for charity. I’ll work for my keep, and work hard—harder than any of your other girls do. I’ll make you more money than you ever thought possible.”
She sighed, looked at my face; her glance flitted about, taking in my sallow skin, my flat nose, my thin lips and my small, dark eyes.
“I think you will not bring much money, Jane Burch, though I am sorry to say it, for you have a certain spark that I do like very much—very much indeed. I fear you will find it a hard road to tread here in Fort Laramie. The prettiest girls have come from many hundreds of miles to try their luck here.”
I sensed I was gaining some ground with her. I straightened up my spine, doing my best to look plucky. “My ma used to say, ‘pretty is as pretty does.’” That wasn’t true at all; I had never heard my dead mother say anything of the sort. But I heard the expression somewhere else and liked it. I hoped it was true—hoped I could be accounted pretty someday, if I only dedicated myself to kindly behavior and good works.
Madam Robair shrugged. “I do not agree with your mare, but I am a Christian woman, no matter what you might hear from my detractors. I cannot turn away a young woman in need.”
I didn’t know what any mare had to do with it; I hadn’t spoke a word about no horse, and anyway, I rode a mule. But I did understand that Madam Robair was willing to give me a chance. I scurried forward and reached over her great carved-wooden desk to grab her delicate little hand. I shook it, vigorous in my thanks. The madam squeaked in surprise at the strength of my grip—a tiny, fragile sound.
“Oh, thank you, Madam! Thank you. I won’t allow you to regret this. Where shall I go to get ready? When do you want me to start?”
“Not here,” she said, extracting herself from my grip. “This house is too fine for you, I fear. But I shall tell you where to find my pool hall, out on the edge of town, and there you’ll find a room of your own and food enough to fill your belly.”
I didn’t permit myself any disappointment. A pool hall was just as good as a fancy visiting-house. And it was a damn sight better than the raggedy tents the girls in the rail camps was obliged to use. “I’ll go there straight away,” I said. “Straight away.”
“God have mercy. Take this hand mirror and fix your hair first. You look like an unmade bed.”
Few there were in Death Notch who had not heard of the notorious girl
At Madam Robair’s pool hall, I fed on porridge and bacon and as much strong cider as I liked to drink till the hunger no longer haunted me and the hollows in my cheeks leveled out. Then, when I was healthy enough to pinch a convincing blush into my cheeks, I ventured out of the narrow crib that was my own private room, and debuted myself to the rough, raggy world of the pool hall.
Working Madam Robair’s pool hall was no simple task—not at first. Many was the hour when, below the grinning bravado I showed to all the fellas in the place, I secretly nursed despair. I had convinced myself that Madam was right, that I never would find my feet among the Laramie girls, and I was doomed to fail no matter how hard I tried—no matter how desperately I needed to succeed. My struggle was simple, you see: I wasn’t as pretty as the other girls. In fact, I wasn’t pretty a-tall, no matter what pains I took with my appearance. I tried to give myself a little more appeal by practicing the latest ways to fix my hair, and painting my lips and my eyes in shades I hoped might read as beguiling. But once, while I worked earnestly before a round, crackled wall-mirror, twisting my unruly locks this way and that and biting my lower lip to make it flush brighter, I overheard two of the pool girls giggling, and one whispered to the other, “Now that’s what I call polishing a turd.”
Compared to my early days following the wagon train, the pool hall was altogether a different scene. On the trail, girls was scarce enough that I looked properly tempting. But now I thumped and rattled around the place like a dull stone kicked through a garden of lilies. Every other girl was bright and delicate, pretty as you please in a fine, well-made dress—while I offered precious little appeal in the cast-off calicoes Madam Robair found for me. Big and blocky, flat-faced, with a voice harsh and loud as a crow’s. The men simply didn’t want to pick me, and who could expect otherwise? They had a selection of willing beauties at their fingertips. I was poor fare if you took me on looks alone. Those first few days in the pool hall was shadowed by despair, for it seemed my caree
r was well and truly sunk before it had even begun.
One especially difficult day—when a man had actually brayed in my face like a donkey while his friends sat around the table laughing—I found myself on the verge of giving up. I was ready to admit defeat and ride out of Laramie forever. Maybe, I thought, I’d go back to that burned-out house by the river and wait for the Indians to return and skewer me with their arrows and chop off the top of my head for a scalp. I skulked off to my crib and hid there, behind my closed door, fighting back tears and kicking the legs of my bed-stead till my toes stubbed and ached inside my boots.
But then I recalled the way Madam Robair had laughed upon our first meeting. I had made her laugh, pulled the humor right out of her guts against her steely will. I had made her like me, even when she’d been dead set against taking me on. She had seen a spark in me—and if the madam could see it, then I reasoned I could make men see it, too. After all, pretty, willing girls was a penny a dozen in Laramie. I had no hope of ever being pretty, but I could be something far better: unique. And in that moment, I resolved to make myself the uniquest girl in all of Wyoming Territory.
I stormed down the stairs and swung into the pool hall, bold as if I was the madam myself, and all the girls in the place owed their success to me. Upheaded, working my considerable height for all it was worth, I strutted between the pool tables where the men sat intent on their games and their conversations. There wasn’t no point in trying to make my hips sway. The men had learned the sound of my mannish stride; they would never glance up from their cards merely because I had passed by their tables. It would take more than prancing about to catch their attention now.
I stopped beside the pool tables.
“By shit!” I hollered at the top of my voice. “John Farley, that was the worst shot I ever seen, and I seen a half-dead, one-armed, all-the-way blind man shoot at a bale of hay ’cause he thought it was a deer.”
I yelled so loud, everybody in the place stopped what they was doing and looked at me—even the girls clear across the room, working up sweet to the men at the bar.
John Farley, a regular at the hall, straightened from his table with a stare that lingered somewhere between befuddlement and rage. I laughed right in his face and turned on my heel, flouncing the skirt of my too-short mulberry dress in such an exaggerated way that nobody present could take it for anything other than a crass imitation of the flirts the prettier girls always made.
Some man or other called after me, “John’s pretty bad at pool, but no way he’s worse than that!”
“The hell he ain’t,” I hollered back. “The one-armed man actually hit that bale of hay, and it fell over dead. Made a terrible venison roast, though. Tasted like shit, and you don’t want to know how I know it!”
Laughter crashed all around me like cymbals in a grand parade. I climbed up onto the biggest table, even though such acrobatics had been expressly forbidden by the madam, and strutted all down its length.
Another regular, Tom Porter, had no great liking for me. I still believe to this day that he had put the donkey-brayer up to that particular bit of mischief. Tom was the kind of sour old prick who liked to make girls feel bad about themselves. He did it to everyone, even some of the prettiest. Rumor among the girls was that he could only get hard if a girl was crying, or at least trembling and scared. Well, Tom wasn’t the sort of man who could tolerate a woman preening and holding herself up, high above the crowd as I was just then. He called out to me, “Ain’t no mystery to me why you know what shit tastes like. Bet it’s about all you can afford to eat, with how much money you must earn.”
I was ready for him. In fact, I’d been counting on Tom Porter opening his spiteful mouth. “Now, Tommy,” I said. “You don’t want me to tell our little secret, do you?”
“The fuck you talking about, girl?”
I leaned down, cupping a hand around my mouth, as if I was whispering to the nearest boys. But I talked loud enough for the whole hall to hear. “I’m Tom’s favorite. He can’t get enough of me. And boys, the things he likes to do! The Devil himself wouldn’t believe it.”
“That’s a damn lie,” Tom roared. “I got better things to waste my money on than some plug-ugly bitch like you.”
“Oh, is it a lie? Then how’s-a-come I know you got a red birthmark, right—here?” And I lifted my skirts up all the way, and showed the whole room that I hadn’t a thing on underneath.
They hooted and hollered and stamped their feet over the laugh, but best of all in my reckoning was the look of helpless fury on Tom Porter’s face. For it was true that he had a birthmark, right beside his little pecker. I’d never seen it myself, but plenty of the other girls had. Even an unpopular resident like myself still got an earful of gossip now and then.
I dropped my skirts and turned around, and shook my bottom at Tom Porter. He shouted a few cusses in my direction, but by the time I faced him again, he was marching out the door. For a moment I thought Madam Robair would be sore with me for chasing off a loyal customer. But raucous laughter filled the hall, and I reasoned I’d done more good than harm.
“What’s your name?” a fellow called out from the crowd. He was a newcomer, I guessed, for everybody else knew me by sight. I was a hard one to miss.
“Jane,” I shouted back. “The cussin’est, filthiest, most daring dame in all the West! And the funnest one, too! Go ask old Tom Porter if you don’t believe me!”
“Tom runned off like his ass was scorched,” somebody hollered. “Like a regular calamity was ’bout to overtake him!”
“I will overtake him, and make him drop every last bit of silver he’s got into my purse. I’m the calamity your ma warned you about, boys!”
“Calamity Jane!” somebody cried. They all took up the cry, chanting my name in unison.
I picked a big, strong fellow out of the crowd and winked at him. He seemed to know what I was thinking. I jumped off that pool table and he caught me in his arms, like I wasn’t nothing more than a feather, or a dolly made of rags.
“All right,” I said to him, laughing and breathless while the shouts still rang all around me. “You can put me down now.”
“Not a chance,” said he. “I’m taking you up to your room. And Miss Calamity Jane, I got a pocket full of silver just for you, if you think you’ll like me better than old Tom Porter.”
You’ve heard many tales of how I got my name, I suppose. ’Course you have, Short Pants, or else you wouldn’t be here talking to me right now—or listening to me talk, as it were. I’ve heard all the legends, too. Let me see if I can still reel them off, list every one from my long, long memory.
I had gone up into the Black Hills with a contingent of Indian hunters, under one Captain Egan (I never knew a man by that name). The Sioux caught us out bad and dropped six of our men from their saddles, shot seven more, Captain Egan included. When I turned in my saddle to look back at our fleeing troops, I saw the Captain reeling, ready to topple off his horse, where the hooves of our company would surely trample him to dust. I galloped back and pulled him from his saddle just as he slipped to the side. Then I raced back to the safety of our camp with the Captain bleeding in my arms. His life was saved by my quick action, and in his gratitude and awe he dubbed me Calamity Jane, Heroine of the Plains.
A less flattering tale goes like this: I was born under an unlucky star, so all manner of calamities followed me from the first day my poor ma laid me in my cradle. If I rented a team from a livery, I was bound to drive them straight into a collision, through no fault of my own—an oncoming team gone wild from deer flies, or spooked by a thunder storm way up on a mountain pass, charging toward me out of control, with no room to swerve and avoid the disaster. Or if I rented a tired old plug of a horse, it would suddenly find its spirit—sensing, perhaps, the spate of bad luck that hung over me like a cloak of wet wool—and dump me in the mud. If I got up on a fence rail—so the story goes—the durned thing would get up and buck. I think I like that story best of all. You know b
y now that I ain’t never shrank from admitting my own faults, and Lord knows I got plenty. I do believe that humility (where my faults is concerned) allows me enough leeway to brag a little on my good points. I always been good with horses—and mules—even while thoroughly drunk. There is no truth to the claim that I racked up astounding fees from the liveries, but I do still get a chuckle from the mere thought of a fence rail working up the gumption to throw me off its back.
There are some who disparage me, claiming the nickname originated in my crib. Any man who was fool enough to lay with me—so this scurrilous falsehood goes—rose up from my bed with a calamity of the venereal type. Well, that may be somewhat true, for all I can say. Many a time I had to take a cure, but that’s the nature of the work, and I maintain to this day that I wasn’t any dirtier than any other whore. In fact, I was a damn sight cleaner than most. Why is it always the whores who’s blamed for such misfortunes, anyway, when the men who scamper from one bed to another bear an equal share of guilt—if not more?
There’s more tales, I’m sure of it—there must be. How long have folks been talking about Calamity Jane, and none of them bothering to ask me for the truth—none till you came along, Short Pants. At one point, I knew every tale about my name, and every other tale that concerned my legendary doings. I still know those stories, I suppose, but I’ve grown weary of recalling. None of them is true. And all sound nobler than the truth—well, except for the tale about the fellas who lay with me.
Every story but one, more thrilling than the truth. Still, I wouldn’t trade the truth for a dozen fantasies. The day I drove off Tom Porter and won the hearts of every man in that pool hall was the first day I knew myself to be a real force in the world—strong and capable, confident when I needed to be—perhaps with more confidence than a girl with my looks should rightly claim. That day, I knew myself for exactly what I was: a force upon the land, a power as great as a whirlwind or a thunder storm, great as any calamity should be.
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