Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  I had a special fondness for Lilah Dean, a half-Negro beauty with a round face and a rounder bosom, whose talkative nature and fondness for jokes made us fast friends from the moment we first met. Lilah and me got up to new mischief just about every day, playing good-natured tricks on the other girls that most often set them to laughing right along with us. When she heard I was leaving the road ranch, Lilah clung to me weeping and wouldn’t let go.

  “You can’t leave me now, Jane,” she wailed with her arms around my neck. “It’ll be too dull without you. Nobody else will get into trouble with me; I’ll just die of boredom!”

  I was sore tempted to stay on forever, purely for the affection I felt for Lilah and the other girls, who lacked all the hard-scrabble meanness of the pack I’d met at Madam Robair’s pool hall. I thought it likely I would never find such pleasant girl-friends again in all my life, but a firmness of mind and spirit had recently come over me, and I knew it was time for me to move along.

  I disentangled myself from Lilah’s embrace and kissed her on both cheeks. “I ain’t much good at writing,” I told her, “but I can write some, so I’ll send you letters often as I can. I promise. And when I got my course set clear ahead of me, I’ll come back this way for a visit.”

  “What is your course, anyhow?” Lilah dabbed away her tears with a lace kerchief I had given her. It had been a present from one of my gentleman admirers. Whatever he’d thought a buckskin-wearing she-buffalo like me would do with a dainty lace kerchief was beyond my reckoning.

  I didn’t answer Lilah’s question, for I had no answer yet. I just kissed her one more time on that round, rosy cheek and swung up onto Silkie’s back, and waved a last good-bye to the Cuny and Coffey crowd. There was nothing I could have told my friend, anyhow, that would have made her understand. She would have counted me a fool, and I would have had no defense against such an accusation, for I most certainly was a fool, but powerless to change my heart.

  You see, all that year I told myself I must forget Wild Bill and move on with my life. Day in and day out, even while I squinted at my targets before a rapturous crowd, I tried imagine a future and a life without Bill Hickock, for no matter how I longed for that man, he assuredly wanted nothing to do with me. But more often than not, the gun I fired was Bill’s gun. And sometimes late at night, when I took a traveler to my bed, his arms reminded me of Bill’s, wrapped tight around me as I swayed with whiskey-sickness in the brief and sacred privacy of that small pine grove. To forget Bill was a plain impossibility—a feat far beyond my strength. I might as well have told myself to fly up to the moon. To picture a life without Bill in it was to envision nothing but gray—a featureless, colorless expanse, a dull and empty nothingness that stretched on forever. I was twenty years old and feeling my oats. I knew for a certainty that a life without Wild Bill was no life for me.

  So you can see, Short Pants, I was right back to the state of mind in which I’d found myself the previous summer, at the start Dodge’s great expedition: determined to reform my character, to polish the rough stone of my spirit into a gem of a woman, fine and upstanding—or failing fine and upstanding, then at least respectable enough that I might hope to win Bill Hickock’s heart.

  That’s why I went to Cheyenne. This time, I had no intention of hitting the hurdy-gurdy circuit. I’d heard tell that Cheyenne had grown considerably since I last seen the place. I thought I might reprise my ancient role as a maid in a boarding house, for surely the quantity of boarding houses had grown along with the general population. Now that I was a woman of twenty, possessed of a righteous aim to become respectable, I even daydreamed about opening a boarding house of my own. If I was diligent and saved every penny I earned—and kept myself away from the whiskey—I might reasonably expect to buy my own house in two or three years. (At least, that’s what I told myself. The truth is, I had no idea how much a big house might cost in a growing city of Cheyenne’s caliber.) I pictured it all as I rode south toward my destination: the grand place I’d own someday soon, smack in the middle of town, with a peaked roof and dormer windows and every room rented out, every room earning me a fat, respectable profit. Wouldn’t Bill’s head just about spin when he rode to Cheyenne someday and inquired after the finest temporary housing available—only to find his old friend Calam, dressed in the ruffled frock of a proper respectable lady, holding open her door to welcome him in!

  I reached Cheyenne a few days later. Reports of its growth didn’t go halfway far enough. Dozens of new buildings lined the main street—not only houses, but several general stores, a dressmaker’s shop, a handful of restaurants, and two new hotels. I recognized the saloons from my prior tenure, but they seemed grander now, their façades brighter and more cheerful than I had recalled, and they bustled with activity. The entire town was lively as an ant hill, in fact, with wagons so thick along the hard, bare road that at times I was obliged to weave Silkie in and out of their lumbering paths. Two stage coaches passed by, one headed east and the other west, with their window covers rolled up to take in the sight of an expanding city—Cheyenne perched on the edge of its former humbleness, fledging into an honest-to-God metropolis.

  There was even a brand-new sheriff’s building, complete with jail, the whole thing constructed from smooth red sandstone blocks. I stopped to admire the clean, square novelty of that building, smiling to myself over the ingenuity of fancy scrolls carved into the uppermost corners near the roof. On that fine day, I had no idea that me and the jailhouse would soon make a more intimate acquaintance.

  McDaniels’ hurdy-gurdy house was gone—replaced by three or four others—but its disappearance didn’t trouble me. I hadn’t come to Cheyenne in order to fall back into my old profession. My aim was noble, free from sin. My first order of business was to seek out a place to lay my head, and I found that in the rather crowded halls of Skipton’s Boarding House, a big mismatched lurch of a building out on the northern edge of town. Skipton’s looked as if somebody had rounded up all the tumble-down shacks for miles around, herded them onto one barren patch of hot, red earth, and stitched them together willy-nilly without much regard for whether the finished result looked welcoming—or even stable enough to stand up to a stiff breeze. But the rates was cheap, so I paid up for a week in advance, hoping I would find respectable employment by then, and could justify a less dodgy accommodation.

  Mrs. Skipton, a stout and blustery dame somewheres around fifty years of age, showed me to the narrow closet that was to be my room. Then she wagged her finger in my face. “No gentleman visitors of any kind—you hear me? Not even ones as are already boarding here. I don’t run a cat house, miss!” I guess she could feel my history emanating from my person, the way you can sense a ripple of body heat before a gentleman visitor touches your bare skin in the dark.

  I tucked my few belongings into an undersized chest—the only bit of furnishing, aside from my bed, that would fit in the rented room. Then I inquired after the best livery stable in Cheyenne, and duly boarded Silkie with all the comforts she deserved. I set out on foot to explore the booming town, grateful for a chance to stroll and stretch my legs after days in the saddle.

  I spent an awkward hour with a dressmaker, standing with my arms held wide while the woman measured every part and portion of my big, ungainly body. I needed to be cautious with my money, I knew, but I had also perceived that no high-class boarding house was like to hire me if I wore shirt and trousers. Hell, no middling-class establishment would hire me, neither, and probably not even a dive like Skipton’s. If I wanted a proper lady’s work, I must do my best to look the part. A dress would act as a disguise of sorts, too, shielding me from my reputation as the girl shootist of Cheyenne—for it had been only a few short years since my previous habitation of the town, and I had no doubt that some men could still recognize me at first sight. A frilly get-up would help me blend in with the women of Cheyenne till I secured a place as a maid. Or at least, that’s what I hoped.

  The dressmaker scratched a few figu
res in her little notebook. She tutted and squinted at the difficulty posed by my broad shoulders, my startling height, my disappointing bust. She disappeared into a back room partitioned by a fine curtain of olive-green velvet, and I listened in on an extensive course of rustling and bumping and the occasional curse, whispered in a small, genteel voice, so faint I almost couldn’t hear. At last, she re-emerged with two dresses slung over her arms: a cream calico dotted with blue flowers, and a pink-and-white check.

  “The waist will be too big,” she said. “I made these for a much stouter lady who never paid me for the work. But you can wrap a woven scarf around your middle and draw them in tight. That will be stylish enough, I think.”

  Style was the least of my concerns. I needed to go about decently while I hunted up a new living; that was all I cared for now. I bought both dresses and a blue sash for the sake of my unremarkable waist, then hastened back to the Skipton house where I bathed and clothed myself as quick as I could.

  I spent the next five days tramping up and down the streets of Cheyenne, inquiring at every boarding house, restaurant, and laundry I could find, but no one seemed inclined to hire me, even decked out in my new dresses. The end of the week was fast approaching; my prospects had begun to feel distinctly small. An odd malaise had settled over me from the first day of my search, too. At first, I thought the strange weight of discomfort, the dragging reluctance of my every step, came only from the dresses. I hadn’t worn a dress since the start of my hurdy-gurdy days, after all, so I reasoned that the sensation had become unfamiliar, and convinced myself I’d feel right as rain once I fell back into the habit of comporting myself more or less like a lady. But as the week plodded on, that distant, haunting melancholy took on a note more ominous and troubling. Perhaps I was only feeling the effect of so many shaking heads, so many doors closed firmly in my face. But looking back now, I can’t quite make myself believe it. A curious tension ran through the streets of Cheyenne. Something was bubbling all through the population, a strange disquiet that grew day by day. As I walked one street, then another, I noted men tumbling out from saloons and restaurants to shake their fists in one another’s faces. I saw women scold their children, and their voices grew harsher every day. Even the sun seemed to beat down with concentrated fury, so the heat of the day felt impatient—or vengeful.

  On my sixth day in Cheyenne, I came to understand why.

  That morning, my route took me up the main street and past the jail, which happened to stand right beside a freshly installed news printer’s shop. The newspaper had landed in town only a couple months before I had, and was still such a novelty that ladies and gentlemen alike found it good fun to stand outside the shop waiting for the paper, each one hoping to be the first soul in Cheyenne to clap eyes on whatever news of the world had just traveled across the telegraph wires from every far-flung location they could imagine. I had seen the morning crowd on my first day searching for work. The gathering was significantly larger now—more than double its previous size, and that same curious tension I’d sensed in the town at large fairly boiled outside the news printer.

  I worked myself into the edge of the crowd, listening to the conversation around me.

  “There ain’t nothing to worry about,” one man said to his friends. “You think the greatest hero of the Civil War can’t handle a mess of Reds?”

  “The last news we heard was of ‘the biggest village ever seen.’ That’s a mite more than a ‘mess of Reds,’ I wager.”

  “Don’t matter how many Indians there is. Custer can lick ’em all.”

  “So we all must pray,” said a gray-haired woman. She was dressed in widow’s black, high-collared and severe, and she had the look of a humorless schoolmarm or an overworked mother. “For if Custer can’t put this village to flight, there will be no one left to stop the Sioux.”

  Somebody deep within the crowd chuckled at her words. “Stop the Sioux from what? All the Indians is running now. They know what’s good for them.”

  “Stop them from raiding one town after another.” The gray-haired woman’s voice rose with every word. She seemed barely capable of holding herself from the edge of hysteria—and she wasn’t alone. As she spoke, men turned their hats nervously in their hands or kicked their feet in the dust, and women whispered in one another’s ears. “Certainly, the threat seems far away now. Montana is a long way off. But you know as well as I do that Indians travel fast. If God doesn’t grant Custer this victory, the Indians will take it as a sign from their heathen spirits. The raids will begin again, but worse than before—worse! We’ll all be in terrible danger, even here in Cheyenne. Don’t think the modernization of this town will keep the Godless menace at bay!”

  “Have a little faith, Grandma,” a man called. “Or if you got no faith, then have some respect, at least. It’s George Armstrong Custer you’re talking about. If God ever made a man better fitted for war, then I never heard of him.”

  I stepped closer to the woman in black. “Please, mam,” I said, “I been on the road for an awful long time and ain’t heard news of the world for many days. What has happened out there?”

  She looked me over carefully before she answered. Her mouth twisted in judgment when she saw my ill-fitting pink-check dress and the blue sash that contained it. But she answered politely enough. “We would all like to know what has happened out there, young lady. We’ve had no news of Custer for several days, and I’m afraid it has put us all on edge.”

  “What news should we expect to hear? I been traveling long enough that I ain’t heard a peep about Custer for months.”

  She raised one doubtful brow at that and looked me over more sharply—no doubt wondering just where I’d sprung from, and what suspect purpose had brought me to Cheyenne. At length, she said, “My goodness. You must have traveled some lonesome roads indeed, not to have heard what has transpired with General Custer. But surely you know that the Seventh Cavalry has been engaged on the Montana frontier, in the unceded territory, all spring and summer.”

  “Certainly,” I said, though in truth I hadn’t heard much about it, saving a few moments of idle chatter gleaned from visitors to Cuny and Coffey’s.

  “Well,” said the woman in black, “we’ve heard nothing here in Cheyenne since our last news of the Seventh Cavalry. That was more than a week ago. It was a tale daunting enough to rob us all of sleep; I can tell you that much. The Seventh fell into a battle at a place called Rosebud Creek. They were routed by the Indians. Our troops retreated—and that’s all we’ve known from that day to this.”

  “I can understand why everyone’s hopping about,” I said. “That’s a powerful long time to wait, when you’re fretting over news.”

  “The printing is almost an hour late by now. I suspect some important telegraph came in and has delayed publication. I’m a wreck of nerves, to tell you the truth. The unceded territory isn’t so very far away, and if the Seventh has lost ground, I shudder to think…”

  The woman didn’t finish her thought, but she hardly needed to. I shuddered to think, myself.

  At that moment the door to the newspaper office creaked open, a small and hesitant motion. A young man in a felt cap poked his head outside and looked around, wide-eyed. When he saw the size of the waiting crowd, he turned rather pale and sickly.

  “What news?” someone cried. Then the whole street burst into one great clamor, men and women alike shouting at the tops of their voices for word of Custer and the Seventh Cavalry.

  The newsman cringed at the sound. He shrank back into the building, then suddenly threw the door wide, heaved a stack of papers out onto the boardwalk, and slammed the door shut again as the crowd surged forward.

  I knew the news was grim long before I saw a paper myself, for a great moan of despair went up from the crowd, spreading up and down the street in waves. Then the men began to shout again—a ruckus of outrage, of disbelief, of violence itching to be unleashed. I pushed through the pack of bodies, trying to get close enough to a paper to
read the news on my own, for I thought the odds slim that I could convince anyone to pause and speak to me now. The crowd was too riled, each person stunned and reeling within the confines of their individual shock. Papers flitted hand to hand all around me; I craned my neck or turned on my heels, trying to track each flapping, rustling bird before it flew away. I could scarce be called literate—truth was, I struggled even to read my own name—but the urgency and commotion seemed to sharpen my wits, and whenever I caught sight of the hard black headline, the words burned themselves into my eyes, echoing like rifle shots inside my head.

  MASSACRE!

  3 DAYS DESPERATE FIGHTING

  GEN. CUSTER AND 261 MEN LOST

  That night, I stayed out late on the streets of Cheyenne. Dread had gripped the whole town, and the streets was full to busting with an air of wild abandon. A desperate certainty had fallen over Cheyenne: certainty that doom would soon come—indeed, that some dark and foreboding fate would shortly envelop the whole West. That sickening air of impending disaster made men rowdy. They was all unpredictable, reckless and loud. Every sensible woman had shut herself away at home, there to weep frightened tears into her kerchief. But I had never been especially sensible—and anyway, a private melancholy all my own settled over me, making me near as desperate and wild as the men. I had no reason to believe Wild Bill had attached himself to Custer’s Seventh, but Bill had been a soldier in the war, and the last time I’d seen him it had been in Indian territory. The two facts seemed most ominously connected. I couldn’t shake a terrible certainty that Wild Bill Hickock, my true and abiding love, was laying dead somewheres along the banks of Rosebud Creek, bloated like a dropped deer, his pretty hazel eyes picked out by vultures, leaving nothing but black pits and a void where his spirit used to be.