Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  I picked up the book in idle curiosity, having no intent to read it, for reading was always such a toil. But I liked the soft ruffle of its well-thumbed pages, and the smell of paper pulp and dry ink was soothing and compelling. I examined the cover: an intricate engraving of a woman riding a horse at a mad gallop down a narrow trail. Long black hair streamed out behind her, flying on the wind. Above the woman, in a fancy script that took me some time to puzzle out, the title read: The Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone.

  What have we here, I thought, and opened the book, expecting some inconsequential tale of adventure with perhaps a lurid passage or two. I read the first page in my halting, strenuous fashion, and straight away I realized the book was about me.

  Well, Short Pants, I stayed in my room all the rest of that day, agonizing over every page, piecing together the tale that yellow book told. Wouldn’t you know, the story wasn’t just about me. It was about me and Wild Bill Hickock. Oh, Bill wore a guise, to be sure: the novel called him Deadwood Dick, and his hair was yellow instead of red. But nothing could hide my true love’s nature from my eyes, my ravenous heart.

  As I turned one slow page after another, consuming the story with desperate greed, I had a recollection of a tavern somewheres up north—maybe as far north as Montana—where I had invented this very tale for a young writer from Pennsylvaney who had come west especially to find Calamity Jane. Of course, the writer fancied up my tale with pretty words, many of which I couldn’t make out for the life of me, but the core of my wild imagining remained the same. The tale was just as I had spun it for that writer-fella more than a year before—and I had spun it from the depths of my need, from the raw fiber of unfulfilled longing.

  This is how the story went.

  Away across the prairie, at the foot of the Rockies, the Indians came to fear only one person, the only soul brave enough to chase them into the heart of their hardest and most treacherous territory, where the ground steams like a kettle, where the earth will break beneath you if you set one foot wrong, and you’ll fall into the underground pits of boiling water. This brave soul was no man, but a lovely, black-haired woman, young and slender, wild and free. The Indians called her the Beautiful White Devil, and feared her because of her courage and her wily nature. The men of the West all longed for her legend, for none but she would make a worthy wife—yet no man dared to find her, for she dwelt in the wildest places and could vanish like a mountain lion if she didn’t wish to be found.

  Only one man was brave enough seek her out. His name was Deadwood Dick, the hero of countless adventures. Heartsick already, though he hadn’t yet laid eyes on the Beautiful White Devil, he rode both day and night to seek her and win her heart. But as Dick neared the White Devil’s territory, the Indians fell upon him and harried him and almost took his life.

  It was the black-haired girl who saved him from his fate, appearing like a hawk diving from the sky, descending upon the attacking Reds in a sudden fury worse than any hailstorm. She rode with the reins gripped in her teeth and fired her twin pistols from either hand, and in short order she drove all the Indians away. Then she held Deadwood Dick tenderly in her arms and treated his grievous wounds, and by and by she nursed him back to health and strength. Private and protected in the mountain stronghold of the White Devil, she let all her wild ways go, and she was tender and kind as any proper woman, and she was the most beautiful creature Deadwood Dick had ever seen, besides—so he fell in love with her straight away, and declared that he would marry her, for no other woman would do. No other woman was as beautiful or as brave, and Dick would have no wife but the bravest and the prettiest, for he was the great hero of the Plains and deserved nothing less.

  The White Devil held him tenderly in her arms and swore that she would become his wife, for he was the best and bravest man she had ever known. But before she would consent to marry him, she must confess her real name. And that was Calamity Jane.

  Deadwood Dick laid his noble head on Calamity Jane’s alabaster breast. In the solitude, in the quiet of their perfect love, he whispered that he would be hers forever, and she would always be his. And they lived a long and happy life together, with never a tear to fall between them.

  Of course, I invented that story wholecloth; it was one damn lie from cover to cover. But reading it on the page made it real to me. Real and true, maybe realer than the world around me. I turned those creased and softened pages, and smelled the mercy of ink and paper, and I convinced myself that maybe there was another world existing somewhere alongside my own, or behind my own, cast like a shadow. And in that shadow world, this precious story was no lie. In that shadow world, Wild Bill still lived. And he loved me, and I was the beautiful untamed girl with raven-black hair, free and lovely as the West itself.

  Except for that editor’s portrait and a few crusts of bread to feed my brothers and sisters, I never stole a thing in my life. I should have turned the book over to the boarding-house mistress, for it wasn’t mine to keep. Instead, I slipped it in my saddle bag straight away, and from that day on, wherever I rode I carried the book with me. I carried the possibility of another world, glimpsed like an image in a mirror—like a scene through a window as reflected in the dim gray surface of a mirror. Present and yet not present. Gone when you blink, gone the moment you look too directly.

  Queen of the Saddle and Lasso

  Whatever was left of that bleak autumn faded to a dim gray winter, and by the time the snows hit, I found myself in Rapid City. I figured it was as good a place as any other to settle down—to surrender myself to fate. I still had the trinkets Bill had given me to hold, and I had the book with its comforting fiction of our great love. Nor did I have the gumption—nor even any intent—to keep myself clear of the whiskey. Drinking was the only act that could separate me from my misery—for a short time at least. Whiskey was the only power I had over the ghosts of pain that haunted me, waking and sleeping.

  But though I no longer pretended I would keep myself clean, I did still hold some notion that I ought to be the kind of woman Bill could have favored, if he had lived. Bill had trusted me with his most treasured personal effects; an honest stab at decency seemed the least I could offer in repayment of that trust, the smallest gesture to honor my true love’s memory. That’s why I decided to marry in Rapid City: give up my wild ways and lonesome ramblings, take up the venerable mantle of Wife. Just who I ought to marry made no difference. One man was exactly the same as any other, in my estimation—for none of them was Wild Bill, and thus all fell miles short of my ideal.

  I took up with a whole string of husbands, one after another, starting that very winter. It may surprise you to learn that Calamity Jane was any man’s wife—the infamous heartbreaker, the untamed beauty of the West, restless as a prairie wind. But God’s honest truth, I was. Least-a-ways, I was some sort of wife to each of those men, even though I never stood before a justice nor a minister with a single one of ’em. I never spoke no vows. There’s some sort of fancy law that governs the spousal situation into which I blundered, time after time. A trick of those barristers and judges that makes two people husband and wife in all but name, provided you live together under the same roof. I never understood the ins and outs and all the particulars. They didn’t matter a whit to me then, and matter even less to me now.

  George Cosgrove was the first of my several husbands. I met him in a saloon, as you might expect—and he professed a great interest in my skills at faro and my prodigious thirst for whiskey. I figured that sort of admiration was reason enough to take up as his wife, and so I did, not long after.

  I can’t tell you what I expected from marriage, but I know for a certainty I didn’t expect what Cosgrove gave me. He was a mean fucker, with a hard eye and a harder fist. Don’t I know it; George Cosgrove gave me a taste of his fist all too many times. Straight away, before the first month of our unorthodox marriage had come to a close, I came to understand all the woes of wifehood, and I saw clearly why a wedded life had never set wel
l with my dear dead mother or with Emma Alton.

  “Listen,” I said to my husband one day, when his temper had cooled, and he settled into his favorite chair to smoke his pipe at ease. “You got to stop beating on me. I had enough.”

  George laughed, but he didn’t have that mean spark in his eye, so I knew he wouldn’t lash out at me—not that evening. “You damn fool,” he sneered. “If you don’t like it, go off and find yourself another husband. See if anyone else will have you, big ugly buffalo that you are.”

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll just do that.”

  George laughed again and refused to look at me or speak to me all the rest of the night. He only set staring into the fire, sucking on his pipe, self-satisfied and wholly assured. I could tell he was certain he had the final word, and I would come to my senses soon enough, and meekly allow him to go on walloping me like a proper wife should. But I spent that night quietly packing up my things—I didn’t own much, even as an established wife—and well before dawn, I saddled my loyal horse and left Rapid City and George Cosgrove both, for good and all.

  If I had any sense, I would have called that experiment in marital bliss a predictable failure and gone back to my wild ways—which, to be sure, suited me a damn sight better than cooking and cleaning and simpering for some dirt-crusted, pipe-smoking, womanizing old piece of leather like George Cosgrove. But I was young, and still far too foolish for my own good. And of course, the ache of my love for Wild Bill had settled way down deep in my spirit, and wouldn’t allow me any peace. So when I found myself in Coulson, Montana, I took up again with another man, a fella all of Coulson knew as Darling Jim.

  Jim was a real treat to look at, I must admit: six foot two with a square jaw and sparkling blue eyes, and hair so deep a shade of gold it looked like birch-sap candy. Darling Jim took a shine to my name and my reputation much more than he did to my actual person, but that was all right with me. We spent most nights beside the fire downing whiskey and rehearsing Jim’s schemes to make hay out of my identity—for he was a clever man, and hadn’t failed to notice how many dime novels bore my name. He knew there could be real good money in notoriety, if we only worked our angles just right, and if I stuck diligently to the business of being Calamity Jane.

  But Coulson in those days was far off the beaten track. No matter how Darling Jim schemed—no matter how I persevered at my cussing and whooping-up along the streets of the town—his plans never got too far off the ground. There simply wasn’t enough visitors from the East. We had a shortage of tenderfeet—those credulous gawkers in their dapper Back-East duds, always willing to spend a few coins if they thought they could get their picture made with a real, honest-to-God legend of the West. Still to this day, I think Darling Jim and I could have made a fortune if we had lived in Cheyenne or Salt Lake City, where tenderfeet was never in short supply. But stuck as we was in Montana, we never made more than a handful of cash, and all too soon our marriage soured. Darling Jim and I parted ways with no hard feelings between us, and I moved on to the new state of Colorado, lighting like a weary bird in the city of Boulder.

  There I found another husband in short order—a fella by the name of Frank Lacy. Frank was nothing to me, just like George Cosgrove and Darling Jim—for as you know, Short Pants, my heart had been Wild Bill’s from the day he rode into camp on Sheridan’s heels. There was no room for any other man within my soul—and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have let Frank Lacy in.

  Frank was as mean a cuss as Cosgrove had been, and he had a liking for theft besides. Worse crimes, too, I suspect. I never pried too far into Frank’s habits, for some small and frightened instinct told me I didn’t really want to know what my quiet, flat-eyed husband got up to. Some nights he stayed out till all hours, then came home wild, all a-quiver with some foul excitement that made me feel defenseless, big and strong though I was. But on the nights when Frank went out roaming, he would leave me alone, and wouldn’t raise a fist for a good week after—so I made myself content with leaving Frank to his questionable devices. Whatever he got up to on his midnight ramblings, I think he needed me as cover—a dutiful wife kept in a passably proper home; the sort of existence one would never think to question. That’s why he took me in, I guess, and made me his spouse.

  Aside from his temper and his mysterious late-night forays, Frank Lacy was a good enough provider. He worked as a delivery man by day, just like old Mr. Braddick, though Frank ran a team of oxen rather than a team of mules. Often I would stand on the sagging front porch of our tumble-down house, watching Frank drive his wagon down the lane and out to the open road. In those moments, my heart yearned for the carefree days of my youth, when I had only the route and my mules for company, yet I was more perfectly content than any girl on her own ought to be. And all the days Frank stayed away with his wagon and his team, I dreamed that I was the one driving those oxen. I imagined the sights Frank took in on the open trail and hungered for the freedom he surely felt in the great spaces between towns and encampments. And when he came home, I risked his impatient slaps and his ugly words so’s I could linger close beside him, breathing in the smell of sage, the smell of his ox-team’s sweat rising from his body.

  I stayed married to Frank Lacy for more than six months, right up till he divorced me by finally landing on the wrong side of the law. I kept myself mostly ignorant of his charges; I could only feel a wash of relief when the sheriff came a-knocking at my door to inform me that Frank Lacy would remain in prison for ten years at least due to the severity of his crimes. I think I did an acceptable job of feigning wifely shock at the length of his sentence, but when the sheriff imparted his next piece of news, not even God himself could have kept the grin from my face.

  “Seeing as how you are his wife, mam,” the sheriff said, “all of Mr. Lacy’s assets now belong to you.”

  “Do they?” said I. “We never married in front of a justice.”

  “That doesn’t matter, mam—not here in Colorado. The common law regards you as Frank Lacy’s wife, so everything belongs to you. This house, his business, and his team. You’ll want to keep the house, I suppose, but if you need assistance selling the business and the ox team to a more suitable party, you need only ask. I’d be happy to help you find a buyer. The profits should keep you till Mr. Lacy is set free—if you live frugally, as befits a woman in your predicament. You know where to find me, Mrs. Lacy.”

  The sheriff tipped his hat, then went on his way. But I had as much intention of selling the ox team as I had of wiping the damn-fool grin off my face. For all the trouble he’d put me through, Frank turned out to be good for something, after all. When he landed in jail, I landed in legal possession of a thriving delivery business and a healthy, experienced team.

  That’s how I became a bullwhacker, just as quick and easy as you please.

  I tell you what, Short Pants: I was a damn sight better at bullwhacking than Frank Lacy ever was. The lessons I learned with Braddick’s mules returned quick and easy, and I found oxen almost as agreeable in temperament. They ain’t as quick or agile as mules, but every ox can pull at least three times the weight of a single mule. As a team, my reliable old beasts could haul astounding burdens out across the prairie, or over the foothills, with no more trouble than a dog hauls its fleas. Most often, I transported great pieces of machinery from the rail lines out to the distant camps where young men built the offshoot branches of the Transcontinental. The bed of my wagon was reinforced with iron bands, and my oxen was all steady and strong from long work along their routes. Weather permitting, I could coax faster delivery times from my team than Frank ever could, for I ruled those beasts with sympathy and understanding, not with Frank’s hard will and harder fist. I soon built a reputation as the best bullwhacker anywhere along the Transcontinental, and the business flourished till I had enough scratch to buy three more wagons and teams, and to hire men to work along with me.

  How I loved those long, leisurely drives—the solitude of my routes—the company of m
emory. Wild Bill’s poison still burned in my heart, but out there on a remote hill, with nothing around me but the endless waves of grass and a sky pale with racing clouds, the burning didn’t hurt quite so bad. Bill’s agony took on a poignant significance, a weight suspended somewhere between blissful memory and searing loss. And even the loss felt beautiful, though it pained me something terrible—for alone among the sage with only the slow, steady tread of my oxen and the creak of my wagon’s axles, I came to feel a kind of holy perfection in my love for Bill. Because that longing could never be fulfilled, it could never be sullied by the countless disappointments and fears that had shadowed my marriages. My love for Bill would remain pure and whole all the days of my life, and though I would have given my own life gladly if it would have brought Bill back from his grave, at least I knew he would remain unchanged within my heart. That was the next best thing to having him back again.

  Wouldn’t you know, I found it easier to stay away from whiskey on the trail. Not only would I soon drink up any supply I brought along (leaving myself bereft of liquor for the rest of my slow-plodding route) but the work was taxing enough that I usually found myself bone-tired at the end of every day, with little inclination toward whooping up when I reached my destination.

  Now, that ain’t to say I never ventured a drink. One of the rail camps I visited most often lay very near Fort Pierre, in Dakota Territory. After a good rest, and just before turning my team south for Colorado, I often found myself riding my horse along the streets of Fort Pierre in search of one night of distraction.