Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  I groaned, tried to roll away.

  “Made a mess of herself,” said the man who had settled near me. Timothy—his name came back to me, and I thought of the camp under the willows, and Bill in the starlight, sliding his ring onto my finger. “Joe, go back and get her a change of clothes. Bring a few canteens of water, too, and whatever cloth you can find. We need to clean her up. Poor girl.”

  I fell flat on my back. High above, the sky was a pale blue band, a strip of searing light between the sides of two buildings. My head throbbed with the agony of sunlight, but I squinted up at it, defying the pain. I had a vague idea that pain was no more than what I deserved for being such a useless thing, a waste who had let that bastard pull his gun from his holster.

  “We heard about Bill,” Jasper said, low and regretful. “Guess you heard about him, too.”

  I seen him killed, I wanted to say—and did not want to say. I just shook my head side to side, wordless in my grief, and waited. Waited for what, I cannot say—for my friends to tidy me up, for the sky to open like a mouth and swallow me, for my heart to give out and spare me any more suffering. But time and life went on and on, and I was scarce aware of Jasper and Timothy by my side. I was cognizant of nothing but the agony in my head and my heart, and certain of nothing, save this: Wild Bill Hickock was dead.

  In time, Joe returned, and the boys wrangled me to my feet. They stripped my soiled clothes from my body, right there in the alleyway, and cleaned me up as tenderly as a pack of new fathers washing a helpless baby. Then they wrestled my calico dress over my head and forced my swollen feet back into my boots.

  “You need water,” Jasper said, “and a bite to eat.”

  “Don’t want to eat.”

  “I know you don’t, but you’re going to anyway.”

  “Let me starve. I don’t care.”

  “You’re going to eat, Jane. And then we’ll all go together to Bill’s grave and pay our last respects.”

  Bill’s grave. “He’s already buried? How long have I been—”

  “Two days,” Joe said, in a gentle, consoling tone. “Now come along, Calam. Lean on me if you need to. We can’t do a thing to change what’s passed. All we can do is keep moving forward.”

  I did eat and drink, though nothing had any savor. I did whatever the boys asked of me, automatic and unthinking like some trained animal, grateful to surrender all thought to my friends. By and by, I felt steady enough to walk on my own, and Timothy took me out to the crick that ran behind Deadwood—the same crick that wended through our campsite, though we was far from our camp by then. We stood together in silence for a long time, listening to the gentle bubbling of what remained of the crick—what the summer had left us.

  “Where is he buried?” My voice sounded dull and small, even inside my own head.

  “Out back of the church. ’Bout a quarter mile from here.”

  I nodded, though moving hurt my neck and my eyes. Around the roots of the willows, in the perpetual mercy of their shade, sprays of blue forget-me-nots still bloomed. The flowers were as small and ragged as my hopes had ever been. I picked them all—every flower I could find—and when I had gathered two great fistfuls of blue, I turned to Timothy and said, “I’m ready now. Take me to his grave.”

  Wild Bill was laid to rest in a dirt hole like any other. There wasn’t any stone to mark his final resting place—not yet—but the freshness of the new-dug earth was as clear a marker as anyone would need. I laid my flowers at the head of his grave, then sat in the dirt beside the low mound. Sat all day, while the boys came and went, patting the earth that covered their friend, coaxing me into a sip of water here, a bite of bread there. They drifted to the grave and away again as the hours passed and sunset came on. I remained, watching the forget-me-nots fading and withering, wishing I could be down there with him, knowing I must go on alone.

  During my long and silent vigil, the realization came that I never had learned the name of Bill’s wife. I felt powerful guilty at that, for I thought it was only fitting that news of his death should come from me. I, the woman who had loved Bill more completely, more perfectly, than anyone had done. I imagined our shared grief—mine and the widow’s—and thought perhaps in the unity of mourning, we might come to understand one another. But I didn’t know her name. I had no hope of reaching her. In time, she would learn of her husband’s death, but the news wouldn’t come from my lips.

  Timothy returned to the grave as twilight set in. He found me there, right where I wanted to be.

  “We got to get back to camp,” he said.

  “I don’t care about that damn camp. I don’t care about the expedition, nor gold, nor anything else. Now that Bill is dead, there’s nothing for me in this life. Nothing. Go away and leave me be.”

  Timothy hung his head, then admitted quietly, “I know, Calam. I know how you felt about Bill. I saw it all. I—”

  A sudden turmoil of sound startled Timothy to silence and shook me from my stupor. These wasn’t the ordinary sounds of anger that had plagued Deadwood since our little expedition had arrived, some week and a half before. Shouts and screams rang through the night, high and frantic. Now and then a loud bang—gunshots?—boiled up from the town.

  “Good God, what now?” Timothy said.

  The screams grew louder, more desperate. A sickly glow bloomed and spread among the gathering dark—a fire, I realized. Somebody had set a building on fire.

  “It sounds like a riot,” I said.

  “All the more reason to get out of here.”

  I let Timothy pull me to my feet. I don’t know why. I should have stayed and allowed death to claim me. But we made our way back through town, clinging to alleys, skirting the backs of shops and houses. Deadwood had indeed fallen to riot. Men shouted and barreled through the streets, waving their guns, clutching at screaming women who clawed their faces and fought to break free. Away on the northern edge of town, I could see flames leaping above a rooftop. I thought it might have been the tavern where Bill was killed.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I said, more annoyed than frightened, for the riot had intruded on my private sphere of grief. “What’s the cause of all this?”

  Timothy and me didn’t stagger more than a dozen more steps before we saw the cause. The crowd broke and scattered, yielding the street to a tall gray horse and its rider—a man who whooped and cried like a wolf in a hunting pack. The gray horse ran at full tilt, throwing up its head, mouth white with foam. We shrank back into an alley as the horse and rider thundered past. And just as he flashed by our hiding place, the rider raised his arm. Something round and dark dangled from his hand, bouncing with his horse’s stride. A flash of passing torchlight illuminated the thing he held. I gasped, lurching away from the scene, and Timothy caught my arm to keep me from running, blinded by my fear and disgust.

  The man on the gray horse carried aloft an Indian’s head.

  Deadwood, I realized that night, was far worse than a tinder box. It was a keg of black powder, and the fuse was already lit.

  “The sooner we’re gone, the better,” Timothy said.

  I didn’t try to argue no more. We kept our heads down and hustled out of Deadwood, retreating into the kinder arms of night.

  The Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone

  The boys and I rode away from Deadwood that night. We reined in at the crest of a hill—the same one we’d paused atop less than two weeks before—and I turned in my saddle to take one last look at the town, Wild Bill’s resting place. Shouts and screams, and the occasional crack of a pistol, carried through the night to our vantage. The fire had spread, too; most of Deadwood’s northern edge smoldered in the dark, a smear of orange-red spilled across the barely-seen foot of the Hills. None of us spoke a word; we just set despondent in our saddles, watching Deadwood burn, listening to the chaos erupting all down the length of its streets. In time, Joe McAllister turned his horse and descended the opposite side of the hill, vanishing into the waiting night. One by one, the
rest of us followed.

  Our journey was largely silent, for we was all heavy with the weight of contemplation—the weight of my inconsolable grief. We rode without aim for the better part of a month, each of us wilting and fading under the relentless heat of the sun, each of us sagging in our saddles under the burden of sorrow. Bill had been the force holding our small band together; it was he who had provided us with purpose. Without him, all our dreams of prospecting dissolved—turned to trail dust, blowed away on an errant wind. I can’t tell you now whether we simply wandered without a destination, or whether Jasper (who had taken up the task of leading, rather half-heartedly) lost his direction. However it came to pass, we four battered souls meandered from one settlement to the next, finding small comfort where we could, speaking only when one of us had need.

  I recall very little of those dark days, save for a constant, thick sorrow that sickened me by day and left me sleepless every night. I do remember laying in my cold bed roll, staring into the campfire flames while the other fellas retreated into sleep. In the dance of flames—in their twisting, fleeting shapes—the image of my love came back to me, Wild Bill’s face and form repeating cruelly before my swollen eyes. I saw the color of his hair, the planes of his face, his tall proud silhouette against the darkness. I could even hear his voice in the soft murmur of burning wood—that low, slow way he had of speaking, the easy confidence that was his by nature. When the wood shattered and sent a stream of sparks flying high in a column of red, the crackle sounded like Bill’s laugh, sudden and bright.

  The only sense that penetrated my sorrow—the only reality I knew, beyond my private misery—was the danger pervading every town, a fearful alertness. In Custer’s wake, the West had been left on edge, waiting to plunge over the cliff of civility. By then, a fall seemed inevitable. Somewhere beyond the gray haze of my misery, I was braced—certain that the world as I knew it would shatter like a dropped china plate. That restless tension of rage and disbelief had caused Wild Bill’s death—at least in part. If the West hadn’t given itself over to hopeless terror and readiness for violence, then the man in the green scarf never would have raised his gun in the Deadwood tavern. I convinced myself that was the truth, during our long and terrible wandering—though today, I ain’t so certain.

  More than a week after leaving Deadwood, we learned what became of the town we fled. Jasper led us to a small village, situated where the Whitewood and Yellow Cricks join—I can’t remember the name of the town, and it has surely vanished by now. Jasper intended to sell our mining equipment at the hard-goods store and divide the money evenly, and while he was negotiating with the shopkeep, he inquired anent Deadwood’s fate. I hung back among the bins of sugar and corn seed, listening to the talk—keen for the first time since Bill’s death, for I expected the shopkeep to wail and wring his hands and recount a most dreadful tale of woe. If the man had done so, I would have reveled in the story, I’m sorry to say. I would have taken a sharp, bitter joy in knowing Deadwood had been destroyed. Nothing else seemed fitting to me, except that the town where Bill had met his untimely fate should fall as he had fallen.

  But the shopkeep perked right up when Jasper asked about Deadwood. “Had a spot of trouble, I know,” he said, “but all’s well now. The Army sent George Crook right up from Fort Laramie.”

  “Who?” said Joe McAllister.

  “George Crook. Captain of the Army. Distinguished himself in the war Back East and has been dealing with the Indians ever since. By God, son—ain’t you never heard of George Crook? The Reds call him ‘Chief Wolf.’ That’s how fearsome they account him. Anyway, he’d been waiting down at Laramie, readying his men for a foray against the Sioux. Intended to put down that damnable savage Red Cloud, or so I hear. But it seems some feller from Deadwood did the job for him.”

  “I’d just about say he did,” Timothy said. “Jane and me—we saw Red Cloud’s head when his killer rode back into town.”

  “Must have been a real sight,” said the shopkeep.

  “One I’d sooner forget.” Timothy shared a glance with me, and I nodded in agreement.

  “Anyway,” the man went on, “Crook came riding into Deadwood with a unit of his men—must have been a rapid march, to make it up from Laramie so fast—and he put out every fire in Deadwood. I mean every fire—the real ones and the ones that only burned inside men’s heads. Seems Crook settled the whole place down right smart, and just in time, too, for folks was all set to form a mob and light out after the Indians. I don’t know how many Indians they expected to find up in the Hills, with their chief dead and all. I reckon they must have all took off like a lot of scalded cats. But I suppose no good would come of giving pursuit. Not many men in Deadwood can call themselves proper scouts. The whole mob would have been lost up there in the Hills—lost and dead within a few short days.”

  I had known one man in Deadwood who could call himself a scout. I turned away so the shopkeep couldn’t see the pain rising to my face.

  He said, “Old Crook settled the whole place down and told them what-all is happening with the Indian war—I guess, a town remote as Deadwood, they don’t get a powerful lot of news. Whatever he told the townsfolk must have cheered them up considerable, for I heard they had a dandy of a ball at Crook’s insistence—sort of a way to cool the whole place down, you see. Like kissing and making up. And from what I heard, Deadwood has been peaceful as you please from that day to this.”

  “A ball,” Jasper said, dubious.

  “Sounds like a fine state of affairs,” said the shopkeep. “Wish we’d have a dance in these parts once’t in a while. Good excuse to watch all the girls get dolled up and go about in their fanciest dresses.”

  Crook’s ball sounded like a fucking stupid idea to me—like tying a bandage over a festering wound. The fear that had turned Deadwood into a powder keg still infected the West. My friends and me, we felt it all along our aimless journey. I was certain no mere bandage or ball could tamp down the hysteria for long. Custer was dead—Wild Bill, too. What might become of us next? Seemed anyone’s guess, by my reckoning.

  By and by, our flagging expedition parted ways. It happened naturally, quiet as dispersing mist, without any hoopla. Joe was the first to break away, deciding to settle himself in Scooptown, where he aimed to take up steady work as a bullwhacker. We sent him off with a round of whiskey at Scooptown’s fanciest saloon, then rode on our way one man poorer. Jasper peeled off at Rocky Pile back in Wyoming Territory, and then it was just Timothy and me.

  I figured it was a matter of time before Timothy found himself a new gig and a brighter future, and then he’d be obliged to set me down and shoot straight. Listen, Miss Jane, he’d tell me, I got my life all figured out now, and you haven’t. I’m sorry for your plight, but it’s time to go on to whatever’s next for you. It would be a hard speech to give, for Timothy was tender-hearted and sweet as you please; he had cared for me loving as a brother when he’d found me in that Deadwood alley, dirtied by shame and grief—and ever since that day, too. I made up my mind to spare him the difficulty of breaking my heart all over again, turning me loose in a cold, uncaring world. So I waited till he fell asleep one night beside a small, smoky fire of chips and slivers of juniper wood. Then I bundled my bed roll as quiet as I could, saddled my horse, and scratched in the dirt where I had lain my head:

  GON BAK TO RAIL CAMP. SO LONG, FREND.

  My word to Timothy was good: I did go back to the rail camps for a spell. How long? I can’t quite recall. Might have been six months, or the better part of a year. I find the months after Bill’s death run together into one great stream of featureless gray, like a bank of smoke or a wall of storm clouds. But I was a camp follower once more, and I made good money at the work, for by that time, Calamity Jane had garnered enough reputation to draw the curious—if not true admirers—into her unpredictable orbit.

  Following the rail camps again, but I can’t recall a single night I spent with any of those boys. None of them meant a thing to
me. None of them ever could, after I’d tasted the purity of joy—the sweetness of riding at Bill Hickock’s side.

  If I’m honest with you, Short Pants, it may also be the case that I stayed too drunk that year to remember much of anything. I guess I don’t need to tell you that I ran straight back into the arms of vice—my own particular vice, that hankering for strong drink that never quite left me, not even while Bill had lived. Without my love to restrain me—without the hope that he might someday come to love me in return—I saw no point in keeping clean. I threw myself back into whiskey with headlong abandon, consuming the stuff so thirstily, I believe I might have been trying to drink myself to death. Anything to ease the agony of my loss—anything to still the ghost that haunted me.

  I remember this all now, and I can’t tell you why I didn’t take the easy way out. Why I didn’t put Bill’s pistol to my head, or to my heart, and end it just as fast as his own radiant life was ended. I guess something deep down inside me wanted to live. Or maybe there was a part of me that didn’t believe Bill had truly died. Sometimes I still felt his presence there beside me, when I looked out over a canyon in evening light, or when I felt the endless green prairie wrap me in its sweeping embrace—oh, those long and lonesome rides. And in those moments, when I was alone with the land, I felt Bill so close I thought I would find him there if I only turned in my saddle to look.

  I never did turn, though. Part of me knew that presence, that longing, was only the desperate need of my battered heart. I had no desire to undo the comfort Bill’s ghost imparted. I preferred the fantasy, the slimness of the not-quite-possible—the thought that Bill might be there, not far back, following me up the trail.

  I did keep his gun wrapped in an oil cloth, stowed in my saddle bag. I kept his gold watch in my pocket and the snake ring with the garnet eyes on my thumb, exactly where Bill had placed it. And each night, when my latest caller left my tent and the railroad camp filled with its accustomed night sounds—the distant music of fiddle and mouth harp, gusts of laughter rising and falling abrupt as autumn storms—I looked at Bill’s things by the light of a lone candle, and pressed those artifacts to my heart, and kissed their cold metal with trembling lips. But none of that ever brought his memory any closer. It sure as Hell never brought him back to life.