The better part of the camp lay behind me now; I stood alone with Bill. I wanted to call out to him—some greeting or praise—but I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, and anyway, I was half afraid that if I opened my mouth a lot of nonsense would come spilling out, or maybe something downright damning. So I stood there, away back where Bill couldn’t see, and I trembled with the relief of knowing that he lived. I did my best to breathe.
At length, the desire to look upon his face overcame me—as did the need to hear his voice. I found I could speak after all. I said, “Hullo, Bill. Do you remember me?”
Bill started up at once, as if I’d rattled like a snake in the brush. I guess it was a shocking thing, to hear a woman’s voice in that camp, among so many men. And though my looks have never been much to speak of, at least I sounded like what I was: a girl of nineteen, fresh as could be expected (given my circumstances) and bubbling over with life.
When Bill saw it was me, his eyes went blank for a moment. His face twisted in an odd sort of way, so quick I almost didn’t see. For one painful heartbeat, I thought he would shout at me, tell me to get away and leave him be. Then he gave me a small, polite smile, just like the one he left me with—and though I knew it was only courtesy, nothing more, still that smile warmed me and thrilled me, all the way down to the soles of my feet. The feeling burned inside me, tingling, spreading through my stomach like a shot of powerful liquor.
He climbed to his feet, dusting off his britches with this hands. “Calamity Jane,” he said, slow and drawn out, as if he savored a real pleasant and unexpected treat. “By damn.”
“No sir, you got me mistaken.” I winked, bringing him in on my deception. “My name is Margaret Bird and I have lived at Fort Laramie all my life. I’m a real plum of a girl, too, despite my scandalous attire. Never did nothing sinful in my life, nor drank a drop of whiskey in all my tender years. Nor have I ever cussed, I assure you.”
Bill’s smile was sober, meditative. “That’s awful good to hear.” He spoke those words with a certain emphasis, and my stomach turned over as I wondered how in Hell I’d ever live up to that image now.
But I was determined to make good on the promise. Bill seemed so genuinely pleased to hear that I was a reformed character, I felt a steely resolve to be exactly the woman he expected me to be. I was determined to prove to him that I could change—become as much a lady as any other girl in the world. The grim circumstances of my origins might have yoked a certain shame around my neck, but there was no reason why I had to drag that weight forever. I knew it was so, as I stood there smiling back at him, shivering with the desire to touch him, to feel his arms around me. Burning with the need for him, strong enough to catch myself ablaze.
“Well, Miss Bird,” Bill said casually, “what brings you to this camp, all dressed to ride? If you’re a woman unblemished by sin, then it seems to me you got no business following an expedition out into the wilderness.”
I laughed as I answered him. “You pegged me wrong, sir. Colonel Dodge would never put up with scandalous behavior in his men, so I hear. Any woman of questionable morals would find it unfruitful to follow this camp. No, I ain’t following, but working alongside. I’ll be doing the wash, and caring for sick and injured fellows as the need arises, and maybe a bit of cooking if real misfortune strikes and I’m left as the last resort.”
“Well,” said he, “that sounds mighty respectable. I must admit I’m glad to see you’ve turned a new leaf. But you know, there’s plenty of men here who’ve signed on from other camps, done other tours. I’m afraid your disguise won’t last long. You’ll be recognized, sooner or later.”
I turned my eyes down to the trampled, dusty ground. “That don’t matter. By the time I’m known, we’ll be far out into the wilderness. It’ll be too late to send me back. Anyhow, I meant what I said; I’m reformed now.” (How I prayed right then for God to make my words true!) “I’m coming along to do respectable work, Bill—to prove I’m a worthy woman after all.”
He turned away from me, gazing across the river. “Just who you trying to prove that to, I wonder?”
He knew who. But I wouldn’t disgrace him or me by admitting it. Instead I threw my arms wide, as if I meant to embrace the whole world. And indeed, in that moment I felt as if I had enough love and happiness to share with everybody. I said, “Everyone, Bill! Everyone. Soon enough the name of Calamity Jane will have a whole new ring to it. You’ll see.”
Bill deigned to look back at me then, and the spark in his eye felt downright encouraging. “I do hope it will.”
The scientific expedition set out from Fort Laramie five days later. Mounted on Silkie, and with a tiny new canvas tent tied to my cantle, I rode alongside Dodge’s men and joined in when they sang their marching songs. We left the flat grasslands behind, climbing up through foothills scented with pine, dappled in light and shadow. Never in all my life had my heart felt so light, my soul so perfectly free. I truly felt as if I was riding away from the person I had been, leaving her far behind in her torn, degraded rags. Throughout the morning, as we progressed to the north and east, my spirit was light, my conscience easy.
It wasn’t till mid-day that my head began to pound. My mouth went fearsomely dry. Then I knew for certain I was heading into trouble.
You see, Short Pants, I hadn’t spent those last days lingering in Laramie as innocently as Bill thought. I knew a long trek lay ahead, and knew I’d be entirely without liquor all that while (unless I could negotiate some off of Dodge’s men, which seemed unlikely.) So I made sure to get good and skunked every night at the fort, indulging in the best and most expensive whiskey I could find. It was my last hurrah—or so I thought—so I spent my last few coins on liquor and savored every drop. But I had lived so long with whiskey in my gut—almost every day since I was a girl of thirteen—that I wasn’t prepared for the come-down. I didn’t know how dreadful the bottle-sickness can be.
As the sun climbed higher and the mid-day sun beat down on the piney hills, I began to get some inkling of what the day would hold. Dodge called lunch; the men pulled hard sausage and cheese and raisins from their saddle bags, stuffing their mouths full while they rode, but by that time I had long since stopped my singing. The thought of eating revolted me. I sweated, swaying on Silkie’s back with my dull, blurry eyes fixed on her withers, trying to ignore the sounds of eating all around me. When afternoon glazed the hills in a low, red light, I found myself hunched over the horn of my saddle, trying to prevent a string of drool dropping from my lip. By that time, my stomach couldn’t bear the thought of swallowing. My head pounded as harshly as the railroad mauls—a steady, driving pain that shot down the length of my spine with a metallic clang, rattling my guts, slowing my blood till I felt trapped inside my own skin.
I lost track of the hours. I no longer heard the men who inquired after my health or called up to Dr. McGillycuddy to bring me a remedy. (McGillycuddy declined, it seemed.) As the day plodded on, I was aware of nothing but Silkie’s mane bobbing slow beneath me—the only thing I could stand to look at—and a ceaseless, merciless thumping inside, fit to cleave my skull in two.
When Dodge called a halt for the night, I couldn’t seem to make my hands or my legs do their work. The other horses stopped, but Silkie walked on a few steps till a hand stretched into my downcast field of vision and took the rein, pulling my mare to stillness.
“God damn, Calamity. You’re a proper mess.”
Though Wild Bill’s voice was low and secretive, still it cut like a hot knife into my brain. I almost cried out from the pain of it.
Bill had ridden beside me—for how long, I couldn’t say. He called out gruffly to a few men nearby. “California Joe—Sam, get over here and help the lady down from her saddle. She’s taken on heat sickness.”
I lifted my head with an effort that almost made me sob, for the bones and muscles in my neck had grown stiff and tender, and my jaunty black sombrero seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. I looked across a line of m
en strung out in the gathering dusk. Some was already putting up their tents in the clearing where we found ourselves—a flat, open space at the top of a hill. Deep-blue twilight closed in around us. In dim light and violet shadow, I saw the doctor standing beside his horse, watching me with a skeptical air.
“She hasn’t taken on heat sickness,” McGillycuddy said knowingly. “Better not let the Lieutenant Colonel see.”
Wild Bill shot back at him. “Better not say a damn thing about it.” His note of warning was plain to be heard. “Sam, Joe, pull her down.”
Men’s hands grappled with me, hauling the weight of my body over till gravity caught me and dropped me from the saddle. The boys didn’t let me hit the ground. They got me more or less upright—and then Wild Bill was there beside me, pulling my arm around his neck, bracing his shoulder to support me.
“Get my tent up,” he said to one of the men. “Then bring the big canteen from my saddle. It’s got good water in it—still cool.”
Bill half-dragged me to the edge of the clearing. He murmured close beside my ear all the while, as close as my sombrero and his hat would allow. “Margaret Bird, you remember how to walk, don’t you? One foot in front of the other.”
Stands of pine and brush stood like a palisade around our growing camp. Bill and I found ourselves some way apart from the rest, screened by a thicket of some dense, ferny plant and a few scrubby willows. He lowered me to the ground, propping me up against the bole of a skinny pine. I groaned and hunched over myself, a-throb with pain in my head and neck. I hated myself in that moment, for the agony of my bottle-sickness was so great that I had scarcely been aware of Bill’s body pressed so close against mine. Such was the extent and totality of my misery: it even had the power to erase Wild Bill from my senses.
Bill sat down beside me, watching in silence while I dry-heaved and drooled into the dirt. When the fit had more or less passed, I threw off my sombrero and leaned my head back against the pine trunk, panting and suffering with my eyes shut tight against the lowering sun.
“God damn, Calamity,” he said again.
I made no answer.
“You’re coming down off liquor, ain’t you?”
“Yes sir.” My voice grated in my throat and in my ears. I felt powerful ashamed, like I was sinking into a dark pit of stifling cold slime, and knew it was exactly what I deserved.
I opened one eye a crack, looking sideways at Bill. I could barely make him out in the shadows of the thicket, but I saw that he was shaking his head, vigorously side to side, as if he couldn’t believe any human being could be as much of a shameful wreck as Calamity Jane.
“You’re just a girl,” he burst out suddenly, with a passion of tender feeling I had only hoped one day to hear. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Nineteen.”
“You ought to be at home baking pies with your ma.”
“My ma’s dead,” I said coldly. “My pa, too.”
I don’t know why I felt so hostile toward Bill right then. Maybe it was only the pounding in my head that made me short and ill-tempered. Maybe I detected a kind of judgment in him, and resented it. His grand sense of right and wrong flicked on my last nerve. My ma and pa was both dead, and I was alone in the world since the age of thirteen, and what would Wild Bill have done if he’d been me—a child abandoned by cruel circumstance on the side of a wagon trail, with five little ones to care for? And I had been a female child, at that—bereft of prospects, except the few and shameful prospects I could manufacture for myself. The only assets I could trade on were those nature had given me, though nature had proved herself to be a stingy bitch where my form and features was concerned. What would Bill have done, in my shoes? I felt certain he wouldn’t sit so comfortably in his lofty judgment if he’d-a had the least idea of what my life had been like since leaving Missouri.
And yet, even as my anger flared and I growled at him, I loved Bill more than ever before. For there he was, down in the dirt by my side, caring enough to tend me. There he was, lying to the doctor’s face when he and McGillycuddy and every damn man in the camp could tell exactly what was ailing me. Through my pain, through my raw sense of unfairness—the whole damn-blasted world was unfair—I felt something weave in the air between us. I felt a queer reaching-out of my spirit and Bill’s. Then I felt a silvery twining, as of hands clasping, or knots working themselves in an intricate, invisible lace. Something real existed between us now—something unseen, but binding. I couldn’t give a name to our strange bond; language has no words to describe it. The bond was one of love on my side only. I knew that was true; the cruel, stark nature of my condition forced me to see clearly, and I understood that whatever Bill felt for me, it wasn’t love. It wasn’t the great, hollow, claw-fingered longing I felt for him. But it was an affection of sorts, and that was good enough for me. It had to be good enough, for it was the best I’d ever get from Wild Bill.
After a time, Sam Young appeared with the canteen. Bill unstoppered it and passed it over. I took a long swallow.
“Not too much,” Bill said. “You’ll sick it all up and be worse off than before. Take a little at a time.”
The water was as cool and sweet as Bill had promised. I sipped it slowly till the fierce drumbeat in my skull diminished a little. I didn’t feel much like myself, but I felt a little less like a dumb creature caught in the jaws of a trap. I handed the canteen back to Bill.
“So you got yourself drunk again,” he said.
“I figured I ought to have one last hurrah.”
“Hurrah,” Bill cheered with irony. He swigged from his canteen.
I grinned at his joke. It made my whole face hurt, but I did it anyway.
“I do mean last, Bill,” I said with sudden desperation. “I intend to get myself clean and be a proper lady—honest I do. And I mean to make a real life somewheres. A proper life. There won’t be no liquor on the trail. Not for me.”
“Plenty of the boys have brought along liquor. You’ll light out after it the second you see it. Or smell it. Or hear the boys whooping it up at night.”
“Dodge don’t allow no whoop-up among his troops. The doc told me so. Anyway, I spent all my money at Fort Laramie, so even if I wanted to buy some whiskey, I can’t.”
“So this is to be a march of deprivation,” Bill said—hint of a laugh in his voice, a low, affectionate chuckle.
“I hope I won’t hurt quite so bad in the morning.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you will. That’s usually the way of a come-down. If you can ride out the first day, it’s easier the next, and the next. But Calam—”
I winced at the name.
Bill amended himself with a tolerant nod. “Miss Bird, once a thing has got its hooks in you, like whiskey or women or any other vice, it calls to you again and again. A come-down is one thing, but leaving it behind forever…” He trailed off to dismal silence. I couldn’t bear the weight of the words Bill left unspoken.
I said loud and strong, “I can kick it. I can kick anything. I’m ten times stronger than you think, Wild Bill. Just see if I ain’t.”
He reached out through the dusk, laid his hand gently on my shoulder. “Yes mam,” he said. “I believe you are, at that.”
How I ever managed to fall asleep in my tiny canvas tent, I will never know. That night, I laid awake for hours, staring up at the black nothingness on the tent’s inner peak, but rest evaded me despite my exhaustion. I believe it was the pain in my heart that kept me from sleeping. I felt a proper fool, for now Wild Bill could see me clearly: pathetic enough to attach myself to this expedition, just for the sake of being near him again—and still the wreck I’d been when he left me a year ago. I don’t remember ever growing drowsy or drifting, the way you do when sleep overtakes you slowly. I was simply wakeful and suffering in the slim confines of my private Hell, and then I was awake again, and suffering still. Though I will confess that Wild Bill had been right: when I rose up next morning, dragging myself reluctantly from the priv
acy of my tent, my stomach clenched a little less fiercely, and the ache in my head wasn’t quite as terrible as it had been the night before.
I hauled myself off into the brush to do what was needful. The men of the expedition pissed right against the trees, or even out in the open with their streams pattering down into the dew-wet meadow, but always with their backs turned to the colonel’s tent, so as to be respectful. I envied them the convenience. It was clear I would have my work cut out for me, for under the colonel’s eye—and McGillycuddy’s—I must maintain a level of ladylike decorum to which I had never before aspired.
When I was finished, I returned to pack up my tent, wincing a little at the early yellow sunlight that still played sort of harsh on my eyes. I found two men not much older than me loitering in my small territory.
“Boys,” I said in greeting.
One of them said excitedly, “You’re Calamity Jane!” He was gangly and thin, sandy-haired. I thought he had more good looks than sense.
I held back a groan of despair and looked around the camp cautiously, but no one else seemed to have heard his words. I guessed another of Bill’s predictions had come true: I would be known indeed, no matter how I tried to disguise myself.
I faced the men with as much dignity as I could muster and answered, “I don’t use that name no more—not on this trek. I’m Margaret Bird, and that’s all you can call me. And I don’t do anything Calamity Jane does, so don’t even ask. I didn’t join up with this expedition to make money. I come along for adventure and experience—and I’ll be earning my keep with honest work, not with anything Dodge disapproves of. Got it, boys?”
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