Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  I picked up Jessie and passed her across to Clinton, who settled her on his pommel. Then I untied her roll from the back of my saddle and handed that to Clinton, too. Only then did I speak. “I passed a prospectors’ camp back some ways, down in that gully past Medicine Rocks. The men was all down with the smallpox.”

  Clinton flinched. His arm tightened around Jessie’s middle, locking her in a protective grip. “You didn’t touch anyone, did you?”

  “No. Didn’t get close enough to touch. But I saw them, Clinton. God help me, I’ll never forget the sight.”

  Clinton stared out over the cattle herds for a spell, frowning, considering the news. Finally he said, “That’s bad, Martha, but nothing to be done about it.”

  “The Hell there ain’t. I’m going back to tend those men.”

  “God sakes, Martha. Don’t talk crazy.”

  “I ain’t talking crazy, Clinton Burke. I thought about nothing except those miners since this morning. I can’t leave them to suffer.”

  He shook his head in denial, but he was helpless to stop me, and he knew it. “You can’t do it! You’ll take the sickness yourself, Martha. You’ll die.”

  Clinton sounded so pained by the prospect of my death, I was almost convinced to heed his warning. But I couldn’t release myself from the memory of those men, trapped in a web of suffering without anyone to fetch a sip of water or hold their blistered hands and ease them toward their end. “It ain’t right, to leave sick men with no help. If I die, then at least I’ll have done some good in this world. And there’s no one else to give them aid, Clinton. No one else to bury them when they die.”

  “Let some of the men from the ranch go down and bury the dead.”

  “No. They all got families here, from what you said. They shouldn’t risk taking the pox themselves.”

  “You got family here, too.” Clinton spoke those words so quietly, so reluctantly, they caught at my heart and filled me with caution. But then he sighed, surrendering to my mule-stubborn will. He reached towards me; I took his hand and held it, squeezing his fingers tight. “Why do I feel I’m saying good-bye to you forever?”

  I thought it more than likely this would be our final parting. I said, “You take good care of Jessie, if I never come back.”

  “You know I will. I’ll be praying for you, Martha.”

  I blew a kiss to my daughter, then another. I would have given much to wrap my arms around her. But I had already risked Jessie too far. I knew I mustn’t touch her again till I could be sure the smallpox had passed me by—if it passed me by a-tall. I turned my horse around and rode back toward the gully, blinded by tears. As much as I treasured my daughter, I couldn’t leave suffering men to face their torment alone. My tender heart wouldn’t allow it.

  Nightfall found me back on the banks of that crick, riding slow among the darkly shadowed lean-tos. The mining camp was as silent as it had been before, and the steep walls of the gully seemed to tip toward me, hemming me in, threatening to close overhead like the mouth of a bag pulled shut by its drawstrings. My heart hammered sharp and heavy inside my chest; my stomach churned with fear. But I dismounted and took my time pulling the saddle from my horse’s back. I meant to stay a good long while—maybe for what remained of my life. There was nothing for it but to settle in.

  Starlight glinted off something smooth and round near one of the lean-tos. I crept closer, squinting through the darkness. Someone had left a kerosene lantern setting on a birch stump; when I picked it up, the oil sloshed inside the chamber and the wick looked like it would serve. I lit the thing straight away; a ring of light wrapped itself around me, driving back a small portion of my fear. That lantern gave me the courage to set about my work.

  The nearest I’d ever come to smallpox was at Cuny and Coffey’s, that year after I first made Wild Bill’s acquaintance. I had taken a fellow with a pox-scarred face to my cabin and entertained him there, and after our transaction he told me harrowing tales of his illness, and stories of the nurses who had cared for him back in Nebraska. I hadn’t liked his stories—I never took kindly to tales of suffering, for I have always had a tender heart, and can’t help but feel the pangs and sorrows of those around me as if I was afflicted myself. But I did recall that boy’s description of the nurses with their faces tied up in clean white cloths, with their hands always pink and raw from endless washing. It was any man’s guess whether those Nebraska nurses took the smallpox in spite of their precautions. The boy at Cuny and Coffey’s never mentioned their fate, and I guess he wasn’t like to know. But his word was the best guide I had on that dark night. Before I laid a hand on the suffering miners, I set about armoring myself as best I could.

  I rummaged in my saddle bag till I found the cleanest shirt I possessed. It wasn’t especially spotless, to be sure, but it was the best I could do at short notice, a day’s ride from anything resembling civilization. I tore the shirt into wide strips and tied a double layer around my face, covering my nose and mouth. Then I took the lantern and looked in on the ailing miners, leaning my cautious, cloth-bound head into the dark recesses of their inadequate shacks.

  The situation was much as it had been at the start of the day: men flat out on their backs, skin bubbled and weeping with putrefaction. Six still clung to life, though their grip was rapidly failing. One of the men had succumbed to his disease. I found him in the door of his lean-to, one hand stretched out before him as if he had reached for the wide-open world in his last agonized moment. He must have crawled from his bed roll when he knew death had arrived. As if you can run from death. As if you can escape its slow-blinking eye.

  I stood over the dead man for a while, lantern light flaring and receding over his lifeless, pox-ravaged form. My breath was close and rapid in the confines of my mask. I hadn’t stood in the presence of death since Wild Bill. The loss of my true love shook me, as it always did when I allowed myself to remember. The slump of Bill’s body over the faro table, the spray of red across’t old wood. For a minute I knew myself a coward; I told myself to get back on my horse and ride away, run and never come back to this dreadful place. Then I shrugged and hung my lantern from the edge of the lean-to, on a splintered piece of pine wood. I grabbed the dead man by his sleeve and dragged him well away from the camp, out among the rocks and willows. Then I set to work digging his grave.

  Being a prospectors’ camp, at least there was no shortage of picks and spades. I fetched my lantern and took up a spade from where it leaned against a shack. Then I made the deepest pit I could manage in the hard, rocky soil near the gully wall—which to be sure was not especially deep. When my spade hit stubborn rock no matter how I plunged and pried, I rolled the dead man into his grave and stood over him, looking down. Shadows deep in the pit already covered the body, so I could make out little save for the toes of his boots, poking up to where the lantern light could touch them.

  “Afraid this is the end of the line, fella,” I said. Then, more solemnly, “God rest your soul, whoever you may be.”

  When the dead prospector was properly buried (resting place marked with a flat stone from the crick) I found canteens and empty whiskey bottles, and filled every one with cool water. Then I made my rounds of the lean-tos, trickling water into each man’s mouth by turns, doing my best not to see the horrific yellow nodules that distorted their faces. At least my double thickness of a mask cut down some of the stench. I wanted to tear down the flimsy walls of the shacks and let fresh air blow through, but I feared the night’s chill would only heap misery on misery.

  I believe I made the rounds of those shacks for two hours or more, doling out water in sparing sips till at last I noted results from my ministrations. When my light filled a shack, its wretched inhabitants turned their blistered heads toward me. The nightmare slits of their mouths moved in entreaty, yearning for a drink. I watered them all one last time. Then, weak with exhaustion and shivering from the cold, I stumbled out to the stream.

  Sometime that night, I located a bottle of whiske
y among the prospectors’ goods. I thought to take a pull at it, merely for comfort’s sake—but I had seen spirits used now and then to clean doctors’ knives and bone saws. I reasoned the whiskey might do just as well on my hands, so I tipped some into my palm and scrubbed myself up to the elbows, holding my arms out to dry in the cold night air. I removed the rags from my face, dunked them in the crick, and draped them over a willow branch to dry. Then I hauled my bed roll as far from the camp as I dared go and toppled, bone-weary, into bed.

  My last thought before sleep took me was, You’ll wake up with blisters for sure. Jee-zus, you are a dumb little bitch sometimes, Martha Canary.

  I didn’t take the smallpox next day. Nor the day after that, nor the week after. Truth to tell, I cannot say whether the cloth I kept tied around my face saved me, or whether I simply had some miraculous immunity lodged within my blood, alongside my propensity for cussing and my native stubbornness. Whatever the reason, I was spared—and so I went on caring for the sick prospectors, day after day. I gave them water every hour, and fixed up a thin gruel from the rations of oats I found among their supplies. It took some doing to make them all eat, but I cajoled or bullied each one into two small meals a day. I stripped off their clothes (moving with tenderest care, for the blisters had spared no part of their wretched bodies) and washed away the foul suppurations with cool water from the crick. I held pots for them to piss in, once they started pissing again, and talked to them all the while, telling them what good boys they was, how brave, how strong, and how their mothers loved them.

  And every hour, every minute, whenever I looked down at my laboring hands, I expected to find the pustules bursting from my own skin, rising like mushrooms from a stump. I would take the illness soon enough, I knew, and perish. There would be no kindly nurse to look after me. The end was coming; I couldn’t avoid it. I could only work to save these men as long as my strength held out, and pray my labors would spare at least one life.

  Yes, I was resigned to my fate, and I tell you what, Short Pants: I even felt a curious peace in the face of certain death—for at least I had seen my daughter to safety. At least I knew Jessie would live, safe and sound in Clinton’s care. And each night, when I dropped into my hard, cold bed, my thoughts turned to Wild Bill, pensive and calm. When death finally came for me, would I find my love in the world beyond? I imagined the scene: Bill standing among the clouds, just this side of the Pearly Gate, his arms wide open to embrace me, the fringe of his coat swinging on a Heavenly breeze. In the Great Beyond, Bill would be eager for my company, as he never had been in life. I was certain it would be so—and with that sweet promise hanging before me like the morning sun, I was almost cheerful in my grim and weary duty.

  Two more men perished of the disease despite my constant efforts. I buried them beside their fallen comrade. But four recovered, little by little, marshaling more strength every day till they could even sit up in their cots and speak.

  Nine days into the ordeal, I stepped inside a shack with a whiskey bottle, newly filled with crick water. My patient had raised himself, trembling, on one elbow. Some of the blisters had subsided on his face; I could see his eyes more clearly than I ever had before, and he stared at me with an intensity that stopped me in my tracks.

  “Who are you?” His voice, a dry and painful rasp, sounded like a grinding stone.

  I didn’t know what to tell him, save for the truth. I shook my head helplessly, then admitted, “Calamity Jane.”

  I sank to my knees beside his bed and held the bottle to his lips. He drank with more vigor than he ever had before. When he’d taken his fill, he nodded, paused, and swallowed. Then he said, “You’re an angel, ain’t you? I died. I died and now I’m in Heaven, and you’re an angel.”

  I laughed at that. I couldn’t help it. Through my cloth mask, I said, “Mister, I am the farthest thing from an angel you’re ever like to meet, believe me. Just look at me. You ever heard of an angel who looks like the wrong end of a mule? I’m afraid you ain’t dead—not yet. I can’t swear you’ll get into Heaven when you do die, someday—but today ain’t that day.”

  He laid back in his cot, but those bright, adoring eyes never left mine. “If you say I ain’t dead, I guess I must believe you. But God’s honest truth, you are the most beautiful woman I ever seen. A pure angel. Thank God for you.”

  After three weeks of ministrations, the prospectors grew strong enough to see to their own needs. The worst of the disease had passed. They was all still weak and shaky, but I knew they would survive; they grew stronger by the day, and the blisters had vanished, leaving raw red scabs behind. I waited till the dark of night, when they slept around their potbelly stoves. Then I packed up my bed roll, saddled my horse, and followed the crick upstream, away from that camp forever. I had no wish to make a grand farewell, no wish to hear those boys plead with me to stay. I done what I set out to do—and I saved more lives than I thought possible. There wasn’t no point in hanging around any longer.

  I headed out into the wilderness, riding under a gentle sweep of moonlight. But I didn’t go to Clinton’s ranch, as you may have thought—for I still feared the smallpox, and fretted that I might bring death to my daughter, and to the rest of the innocents camped outside Ekalaka. Instead, I aimed to spend the remainder of that summer on my own, away up in the sandstone buttes, waiting for the smallpox to take me. If by some miracle the autumn found me still kicking, I would return to Ekalaka and claim my Jessie.

  I would claim Clinton, too, if he still had a hankering for my heart. For that summer, I had drawn near enough to death that I treasured the small joys my humble life contained—Clinton foremost among them.

  There’s little I can tell you about the tail end of that summer. I camped at the top of a butte directly across the valley from Ekalaka. From my vantage I could just make out the distant ranch: specks of white canvas tents encircling the low, blue shadow of the pine grove; swaths of darkness, slow-moving and ever-shifting in form, the vast herds of cattle tended by Clinton and his friends. I had taken enough rations from the mining camp to see me through the rest of the summer—with three men down, the surviving fellas had a surplus—and I lived humbly, dwelling in the private halls of my thoughts while autumn crept ever nearer. I watched the valley below surrender its green to the coming season, watched the earth deepen into gold, drying and fading a little more with each passing day.

  I had dwelt among death for the better part of a month—and a harrowing month it had been. Alone on my butte, with only my horse and the pine jays for company, I found I could think of little else but the world to come. But for all the time I spent considering death’s relentless progress, now I can recall very little of my revelations—if indeed I had any revelations to speak of, up there in my lonesome camp among white birches, with my daughter’s distant safety my only view. Now, of course, I understand death’s nature—its enduring truth. Now I can see more clearly what lies beyond. Death in its shifting colors, the shades of green and gold.

  There’s a funny thing that happens, once you’ve gone. Time ceases to matter, or it maybe it matters in a different way; its shape and utility change. It folds back upon itself. In thick and dusty layers it lies, and the nap of time’s velvet settles and crushes against your skin. Time pulls itself this way and that; each individual thread that makes up the weave shifts and bends. Now it is dark, now light. Now it lies down smooth, and the next moment something stirs—a memory or a moment relived—and time is alive beneath your hand, and your fingertips trace patterns through it, and the patterns remain.

  If you know the way to do it, time will allow you to pick up its very substance and shake it out. And then you fold it again, so this part touches that, and it lies in a different way, with its grain running across’t itself in new directions. But there’s the pattern you drew before—the track of you, a dark line sunk in the shining substance, all down the length of the velvet.

  There is something that connects us, like the underground rivers that be
ar sweet water or water laced with sulfur to widely separated springs. Not all of us are connected. I mean to say, we aren’t all made from the same stuff, but each of us has our river, our network of commonalities. That summer, set among my silver birches, I would have said the Almighty made us this way, all of a purpose—I would have told you that He cut some folks from this cloth, and others from that, and stitched us together in subtle ways after His own design.

  I know better now.

  There was no grand purpose to our making; there was only ever chance. But the lack of purpose makes our affinities no less powerful. Every one of us goes through life looking—always searching, with a weather eye peeled for that sense of sameness in others, the proof that we are made from the same substance, cut from the same cloth. And when we find those who are like ourselves—whose springs taste of the same water—we never lose our way back to them, even when death divides us.

  Bill and me never touched in love. He never embraced me—not the way I wanted him to. But still I carried him inside me. He is with me even now. His faro game is smooth and cool in my hand—the tip of one finger rests on the rounded corner of a card, its edge pressing into the callus. I feel his hat on my head, the familiar cling of its band; his hair brushing my shoulders, the place on his shoulder where a mosquito bit and the welt and the itch remain. At night in the scouting camp, my body lies in his bed roll, tired and relaxed, and my hands are folded behind his head while he listens through the darkness, through the smoky air beyond his tent, to the sound—far on the other side of camp—of Calamity Jane singing.

  You tell me these are memories, and broken ones at that—fractured by time, put back together in the haste of my miserable longing, so the pieces are skewed and misaligned. But I know better by now. I have folded time’s velvet. I have laid Wild Bill and me nap upon nap. I have sunk into him, or he has sunk into me, water into parched earth, drunk down to fill an empty hollow. And the common stuff that makes us has mingled, so that everything I was and everything I am becomes Wild Bill—and he, poor soul, becomes me.