Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  I almost fell to the ground, for I was quaking with weariness. I caught myself on the edge of a pool table and hung over it, palms braced against smooth green felt. Beyond the realm of my fear and agony, I was aware of women—their voices, their hands—gathering all around me. And then a sharp clap, and the dancing-girls skittering away. The madam stood before me, her aging face too brightly painted, looking me up and down with a glint of skeptical disappointment.

  “Madam, you must take me in,” I said.

  “In your state? You must be mad, girl.”

  “I can earn you money, once this baby’s born.”

  She laughed rather grimly. “I doubt that.”

  “I don’t mean by dancing,” I said. “I’m too big and ugly for that. I’m about to bust open, besides. But I’m Calamity Jane—the one and only. I know I don’t look like much right now, but you must believe me, Madam; I swear I’m the famed wild girl of the West. My trick-shooting shows bring in real good money. All of it’s yours—all of it, for the whole next year—as long you’ll give me a room to stay in, so’s I can birth this baby someplace warm. I’ll need a pistol, too, for I lost my last remaining gun.”

  A murmur spread among the girls the moment I confessed my name. The madam silenced them with another sharp clap. “Why should I believe you?” she said to me. “Ten girls have come to me in the past year, all claiming to be Calamity Jane. The West is full of Calamity Janes; they’re worse than a plague of locusts.”

  Even in my desperate state, I perked up at her words, for it was news to me. “You haven’t any reason to believe me, I guess. Except this: would a false Calamity appear to you in such a state? No! Only the real thing would come crawling in like this, claiming such an infamous name when she’s in terrible dire straits. You got no reason to believe me, Madam—yet still I say it’s the truth. And I’ll make you a rich woman, if you only take pity on me and trust me. Please, Madam. I can’t have this baby out there in the street. It’s too cold; the little thing will die.”

  That was so miserably true that I burst into fresh tears. I don’t think that madam trusted me one bit—not yet. But my tears moved her to pity. She rolled her eyes and turned away, but she did give me lodging—and not a minute too soon, for by the time the dancing-girls helped me up the stairs to a cramped, musty room, the birth-water gushed down my legs and my labor began in earnest.

  The madam sent two of her girls running for the town’s midwife, and a few hard hours later, my baby girl drew her first breath in the confines of a whorehouse. She cried first thing, the moment she slid out into the midwife’s hands, and that strong, defiant wail drowned out all my fears that she would be born cold and blue like her brother.

  When the midwife wrapped her in a blanket and pressed that precious bundle into my arms, I set up in bed and turned toward the dusty window pane. I watched the October sun shining on my angel’s features. She was beautiful—perfect—with wet black curls and porcelain skin, dark lashes and a nose like a rosy little button. I named her Jessie.

  The longer I stared transfixed at my daughter’s round, red face, the stronger grew my resolve to do right by that child. I had a dreadful premonition, a sick fear way down deep in my aching guts, that I would fail to be a proper mother, the kind of mother my little angel deserved.

  I would fail, but by God, I would try.

  Her prospects have suffered sadly from her neglect of appearances

  She was a rider from a right early age, my Jessie. Set up on the saddle before me, she learned the sway and rhythm of a horse’s gait before she learned her own. We left Douglas as soon as we was able—just a few weeks after my year-long promise to the madam was fulfilled. Then Jessie and I and drifted from town to town (whatever town would have us) with Jessie carried in a cloth sling against my heart till she was big enough to set upright. Everywhere we lit, I took up work as a laundress or a maid till I lost my place again. Then we found ourselves mounted on our horse once more, plodding across an expanse of hot grass, following the slim black line of the train tracks from west to east and back west again.

  Those first years of Jessie’s life was a trial, I suppose—or at least I know it ought to have felt like a trial. One woman alone in the wilderness, with a tiny child to care for. But now, when I cast my thoughts back to those days, all I can feel is the sacred joy of my sweet little girl held tight in my arms. All I can see is the straightness her tiny back, how proud and confident she always looked in the saddle. I remember the way her fine, black curls bounced when I kicked our horse’s flanks, and clucked with my tongue, and we started off at a trot down another long and lonesome road. Jessie never minded our untethered state, our restless circuit of the towns and forts spread out across’t the prairie. All she cared for was the ride—and oh, how she laughed to feel that horse go.

  The weeks we spent riding are the greatest treasures of my remembrance. I cherished our time alone, traveling from one town to the next, for it was just me and Jessie—no searching eye to seek out my sins and my failings, no one to judge me. Freed from all constraint, with no one to heed but the little girl wrapped tightly in my arms, I painted pictures for my Jessie with a thousand beautiful lies. They shone in the brightest colors.

  I told myself Jessie was never Bill Steers’ daughter, but Wild Bill’s. Steers never could have made something so pretty and good. Come to that, I never could have made a child as beautiful as Jessie, either. Wild Bill’s spirit had found its way into my daughter’s soul—into her very making, somehow—through some process of angels and miracles, the nature of which I had no power to understand. Don’t look at me that way, Short Pants. I knew it was all a fantasy; I know it still. But I wanted it to be true. I longed for that truth so hungrily, to this day I suspect some part of me really did believe.

  The tales I wove for Jessie was wilder still, but I justified the lies because the stories I told my girl was sweeter than honey—to me and to her.

  “Your mother’s name was Charlotte Burch,” I told her. “She was pretty as a blackbird flying. Charlotte was my daughter; that makes me your grandmam.”

  Had anyone ridden along beside us—had anyone but Jessie heard the story—I doubt they would have questioned my claim. I couldn’t have been older than thirty-three, but hard living had taken a brutal toll. I’m afraid the hollow, broken state of my heart was visible from the outside; I looked at least twenty years beyond my real age. But while we journeyed across the prairie with the tall grass brushing my feet in the stirrups, there was no one else to hear, no one to shatter the delicate filigree of my lies. And Jessie resembled my mother so very much, I found it easy to believe the tale, myself. So I recited the familiar story as many times as Jessie liked to hear it—which was plenty.

  “Your ma Charlotte Burch was a real beauty, and a fine upstanding lady, adored by all who met her. She loved you more than the moon loves the stars, and always treated you gentle.

  “Your pa was Wild Bill Hickok, a brave and fine hero of the war, a renowned scout who treated everyone he encountered with wisdom and justice. His hair was red as the sunset, and his eyes was sad and kind, and he was the beautifullest man anyone ever seen.

  “Wild Bill loved your ma with a purity and passion even the angels envied. He intended to marry her and make an honest woman of her, but General Sheridan wouldn’t let him, for he needed Wild Bill for his grand missions. And your pa was so righteous and upstanding that he did his duty by the General, even though his heart cried out for your ma. On the last day he rode out with Sheridan, Wild Bill said to his men, ‘When I get home to Deadwood, I will make Charlotte Burch my wife, for there never was a finer woman in all God’s creation, and her child is mine, and I intend to raise Jessie up proper, for she is the most beautiful and sweetest-tempered baby in the whole of the West, and when she’s big enough I intend to give her a pony of her own and teach her how to ride.’

  “But Wild Bill never came back from that ride. He was killed saving General Sheridan and ten other men from an Indian
ambush. He sacrificed himself, so the rest of the men might get away. He was a hero and a gentleman, and he never had no vices. And he loved you, Jessie girl. He loved you with all his heart.

  “The only bit of Wild Bill Hickok that made it back to Deadwood was a lock of his long red hair. When Charlotte saw that lock of hair, she knew it meant Wild Bill was dead. She fell down in a faint from heartbreak, straight away, and I’m afraid she never did recover. She expired of a broken heart; her love for Wild Bill was the very blood in her veins. I set by her bedside, holding her hand the whole time she ailed—and she looked so fine and delicate and pretty, though I could see how sorrow made her cheeks go pale and made her eyes flame with the last passion of her heart.

  “She came around just long enough to clutch my hand and say, ‘Mother, my dearest mother who was always good and loyal to me—you must take my baby Jessie and raise her up proper, for I shan’t be able to. And tell her all about her ma, Charlotte Burch, who treasured her more than any mother has ever loved a daughter before. And tell her about her pa, Wild Bill Hickok, the finest and handsomest and most respectable man who ever rode the Hills.’”

  By the time Jessie reached her second year, I could have recited the legend of her origins in my sleep—and did a time or two, for I recall jerking awake in the stillness of night, murmuring those familiar words into the darkness of a boarding-house room or beside the embers of our lone camp fire. When she was two, I dressed Jessie in a little frock of scarlet, which I paid a girl in Douglas to sew. That dress was dandy with pintucks and frills, and it put me in mind of the bit of red cloth my mother had flung at the neighbor-lady back in Missouri. “Take that cloth and make a dress for that bastard of yours,” she’d said, and then she thundered away, leaving me in the dust with only my awe of her and the taste of molasses candy lingering on my tongue.

  Those warm days in the saddle. Jessie talking happily in my lap, the horse moving steady through the knee-high grass. I used to sing to my girl—songs I picked up from the boys in the saloons, or learned long ago at the rail camps. Although my voice had never been accounted very fine (or even acceptable, truth be told) Jessie laughed and clapped and looked up at me with shining black eyes whenever I broke out a tune.

  I sang Oh Johnny, Oh Jonny, Oh and funny songs I gleaned from the Englishmen and the Scots who’d come searching for gold.

  I’m a broken-hearted keelsman and I’m or-head in love

  with a young lass down in Gateshead and I call her my dove.

  Her name is Cushie Butterfield and she sells yeller clay,

  and her cousin is a muckman and they call him Tom Gray.

  She’s a big lass and a bonny lass, oh and she likes her beer,

  and her name is Cushie Butterfield and I wish she was here,

  she’s a big lass and a bonny lass, oh and I’m sore in love,

  and her name is Cushie Butterfield and I call her my dove.

  That year—the year Jessie was two and dressed in her little red frock—when I was twenty years beyond my real age, wrapped in the comfort of my beautiful lies—I passed through more towns than I could count. Everywhere I went, I put on a different name, fearing my reputation had preceded me and wrecked up all my prospects before I’d even arrived. Sometimes I was Mary King, and sometimes Margaret Bird. I was known to call myself Charlotte or Isabelle or Lena, and I pulled out the surnames of my various husbands whenever the need arose. Now and then I was even Martha Canary, when I felt haunted by the past and ready to atone for my sins. A patchwork of identities, but never did I admit to being Calamity Jane. Jessie deserved better than that. She was a sunny child with a real sharp mind; I couldn’t stand to cover her in the shadow of my infamy.

  I suppose we never can escape our nature, though, no matter how we try. As I told you, I would begin working in a laundry just as soon as we arrived at a new destination. I fell quickly into the routine of my new job, but once life began to get easy for me again—once I felt, as it were, my feet on solid ground—then the whiskey called. It always called, sooner or later, and no matter how I insisted that this time would be different, this town would be different—in the end, I succumbed to my vice.

  No—in truth it wasn’t whiskey that called to me. I can see that now. Rather it was memory a-calling. It was sin and hurt and a vastness of loss, endless as the sky. It was the lightness of Baby Sara in my arms, and Lena in my lap, asking me to find a place for her. It was the man in the sugarloaf hat tucking my pa’s money into his saddle bag and saying, Fuck off out of here, girl. It was a stick cracking down on a burned palm, a rattle of wagon wheels rolling away, and most of all—most of all, it was Wild Bill saying, You know, Calam, I went and got myself a wife.

  All that came first. The whiskey came after.

  But the whiskey always did come.

  I might hope to last two months, maybe three at best, before calamity caught up to me and sullied the good reputation I built in town after town. Rather than allow my past to overtake me and swallow up my Jessie—my Cushie Butterfield—I moved on before any sheriff could toss me in jail, or any sharp wit could connect my habits and style with the reports that circulated the Plains and Hills—the legend of Calamity Jane.

  It helped some that by that time—late in 1893—the West was overfull with Calamities, full to the point of busting. Anyplace where a girl got herself into trouble and whooped it up a little too hard, she claimed her initials was C. J. I heard tales of girls robbing one another blind in the cat houses, and laying the blame at Calamity’s feet. There was even one intrepid lady who tied a black scarf around her face to hide her identity, then held a stage coach at gunpoint till she collected every last bit of gold off its driver and its occupants. As she rode away, the thief hollered, “You just been robbed by Calamity Jane, the fastest gun this side of the Mississippi!” It surely was not me, for I have never approved of thieving. But the law never caught up to the stage coach robber, and I must admit I find something admirable about her ploy. It was clever, even if it was a damn dirty trick. Calamities wrecked up rented carriages and set saloons afire. They beat their husbands and rustled cattle; they took out stakes in the Black Hills and built companies of all-lady miners. In the streets of damn near every town, some Jane or other drank to excess and made a scene, or stole bottles of whiskey right off the shelves, or fought bare-knuckled in the alleys, spitting cusses along with the blood that dripped from their broken noses.

  That state of affairs suited me just fine. By then, I was content to pass the mantel of notoriety to girls who actually wanted to wear those accursed rags. I surely had no more desire for infamy, or the keen attention it brought. I was content to be Martha Burch, loving grandmother and half-assed guardian of Jessie—daughter of the Blackbird of the Plains and Hero Wild Bill. I kept one eye on the newspapers and took in each fresh tale of a new Calamity, and every time some wild girl incited outrage, I breathed a sigh of relief. For if the law sought Calamity Jane in some piss-pot of a settlement a hundred miles away, then no one was likely to spot me where I actually was, right under their noses.

  And when I gave in to the call of memory and whiskey—when the true Jane revealed herself at last—I moved along the very next day, for moving on was easier than getting the Devil out of me for good. Moving troubled me not one bit—not those first years, anyway. As long as I still had Jessie, I reasoned, I could make it through any turn of fortune.

  But after a time, my predicaments became somewhat harder to flee. Jessie’s third birthday was fast approaching; I had lighted in scores of towns by then and fled them all when the whiskey had taken too strong a hold. We was running short of destinations; after three years of sin, Martha Burch had accumulated almost as dire a reputation as Calamity Jane. Me and Jessie found ourselves in northern Wyoming, having fled a succession of towns and forts at the heart of the new-made state. A string of ill-advised behaviors dragged along behind me (maybe a few warrants for my arrest, too.) It was autumn already, and the season was getting late. To the south, f
oul weather had already set in, burying the plains under bushels of snow. I knew I would never make it down to Utah or Arizona with Jessie, young as she was. Fate obliged us to hole up for the winter, and there was only one town in our vicinity where I could safely go to ground—where I hadn’t already made a nuisance of myself.

  Long before we reached Suggs, Wyoming, I was fearful of the place, for men I met along the road cautioned me that Suggs was about boiling with danger. “Go to Deadwood,” travelers advised time and again, “for the Negro-haters are wild just now in Suggs, and they are a damn sight more dangerous than the Indians.”

  (There was a certain faction in Suggs, I guess, who objected to the camps of Buffalo Soldiers who had worked in the hills nearby for damn near twenty years. I never understood the misliking some whites have for black folks. Up to that point in my life, the only men who ever showed me any genuine kindness—except for Wild Bill—was Reverend Wilkes and Timothy Crutch. But many a time had I seen the hate burning in white men’s eyes when they talked about the freed Negroes—who they expected would set about the business of raping every white woman from Carolina to California, any day now, any day. The freed slaves certainly had not set a precedent for such behavior. Thirty years after the Emancipation, it didn’t seem likely to me that they was about to begin their rumored campaign of vengeance against every white person they could lay hands on. But hatred never thinks; it only feels. Seems to me, the most dangerous man is one who won’t use the head on his shoulders, regardless of the color of his skin.)

  I didn’t like to bring my daughter to any place that was boiling over with hate. Men lose all control when they’re ruled by hate—all control, and any claim on good sense they might once have had. Whenever men lose control, it’s always women and children who suffer worst. But I couldn’t go to Deadwood—not ever again. I’d be recognized there for certain, before I even swung down from my saddle. And winter was coming on fast and hard; I could smell snow on the air, blowing up from the south, smoky and biting—and the winds that came down from the Rockies was cold enough to raise tears.