Josephine Brake was a damned prickly bitch, but she was as good as her word. I endured only three more days at the Star Theater. Then, without the least warning, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show up and transported itself to the outer limits of Minneapolis. Cody had leased a disused hay field not far from the train depot and had it mowed down; when I arrived with the rest of his performers (all of us climbing dazed and wide-eyed from our carriages to look upon our new venue) I found a crew of builders erecting a grand outdoor stage, complete with long red curtains shielding the wings from view and a fancy painted backdrop, all made up with cactuses and buttes under a sunset sky. Rows of empty benches waited for that night’s audience to arrive. The smell of fresh-cut grass hung over the field.
To the right of the new stage I found an arena all my own: a trick-riding circuit marked out with stakes and simple cloth flags, and a stack of straw bales to catch my bullets. The workers had raised a fancy painted sign between two poles:
THE AUTHENTIC
CALAMITY JANE
MOST BRAZEN GUN OF THE WEST
The sign put me so much in mind of the old hotel back in Billings—and of Clinton Burke’s kindly ways—that a great lump came to my throat and for a moment I could not speak. I could only swallow, blinking back tears of gratitude or nostalgia; I knew not which.
“Well,” I said at length, turning to Josephine.
“Mr. Cody took your suggestion to heart, Jane. I suspect he wishes to recoup your advance as quickly as possible.”
I thought that might mean Cody was somewhat less than pleased with my performance, but now that I could ride and shoot for him, I felt certain he’d come to regard me as a wise investment.
“I’ll need a pistol,” I said. “Two would be better. And I’ll need a few hours to practice. Can’t shoot straight with an unfamiliar gun.”
“Lucy has a selection of pistols. You may choose any that appeal to you. And Mr. Cody has procured a few horses and saddles. They’re waiting behind the stage—the horses and Lucy, alike. You’ll find army tents back there, as well, serving as your new costuming rooms. Not as comfortable or convenient as the Star Theater, alas—but if you can double Mr. Cody’s ticket sales, I believe both he and the other performers will forgive you for taking them away from the Star.”
“I didn’t intend to put anyone out,” I said quietly. “Are they cross with me now—the can-can girls and the Indian chief?”
“No one wishes to abandon the luxury of a theater for a field, Jane. But we are all here for the same reason: to earn money. The more, the better. Now you had best go and choose your pistols. Tonight’s show begins in four hours.”
The pistols proved serviceable enough, though nowhere near as dandy as the two guns I had loved and lost so many years before. As for the horses, Cody had procured sweet-tempered old nags, but as trick-riding ponies they left much to be desired. In the end, I settled on a fat pinto with a flashy coat but lazy bones. The pinto was grudging and slow, but I could coax him to rear up on his hind legs when the occasion called for it, and I could make him lope around my shooting circuit if I kicked him with sufficient insistence. He would have to do for the time being, but I resolved to ask Cody for a younger, more spirited mount—one freshly broke to the saddle so’s I could train it proper, for my special purpose. I reasoned if I impressed Cody’s audiences enough—and made good on my boast to double his sales—then I could ask for damn near anything I pleased, and expect to get it, too.
Just before our first outdoor audience arrived, I rode one last circuit on my sluggish pinto, pinging tin cans off their posts. I reined in beneath my sign and made my resentful mount rise up on his hind legs to the applause of the can-can dancers, who had gathered to watch me rehearse.
“The show will never be the same,” one of the girls declared.
Another admitted, “We were all sore when we learned we must to perform outdoors from now on. But it’s plain to see we’ll make more money this way.”
“We’re glad you’ve come, Calamity Jane—or whoever you are.”
Well, I guess I don’t need to tell you that the first outdoor performance was a success. Minneapolis buzzed like nest of bees; every paper proclaimed that the great girl-hero of the West had come, and our rented field filled with such large and eager audiences that Cody set his workers to building more benches to accommodate the crowds. I earned back my advance in six short weeks, and began sending money to the convent school for Jessie’s care and necessities. I was far from my daughter and missed her more terribly with each passing day, but I felt like a proper mother at last, for the first time since Jessie’s birth. I had some hope of giving her the life she deserved—a life of comfort and safety. It had been too long coming, but the hour was finally at hand.
I toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show for the better part of two years. We went from Minneapolis to Philadelphia, from Chicago to Atlanta and every city in between. My shooting demonstrations drew bigger crowds in each new town, but I never grew used to the life, despite my hope and my fierce determination.
To tell you the truth, the Wild West Show weighed heavier on my heart with each passing day—as did the cities themselves. I longed for the open plains and the quiet red shadows of slot canyons so desperately that a permanent cloud of melancholy settled over my heart. Whiskey would have alleviated my sorrow, to be sure, but the thought of my girl in her fancy school—safe, well fed, and warm; getting smarter every day—kept me from my vice. But without the whiskey to bolster me, I grew pensive and heartsick. Josephine had instructed me to give our audiences the fantasy they craved. Meanwhile, I longed for the real West, not Bill Cody’s fanciful construction of outrageous lies. I missed the singing of wind through prairie grasses, the creak of saddle leather on a lonesome trail. I missed the larks rising in the morning, and the slope of a mountain foothill blue with lupine flowers, and buffalo herds blackening the horizon between two widely separated buttes of ochre-red. I missed the stars. You never know how small and insignificant a body can feel till you look up at the night sky and find nothing looking back at you—nothing but black like an unwritten slate, unrelieved emptiness, the jewels of Nature Herself dimmed to insignificance by the thousand clamoring lights of a city.
The dime novelists had done their work, and no mistake: I was the biggest draw Buffalo Bill had ever exhibited. Cody made a generous profit from my appearances, but he was always fair in giving me my cut (delivered via Josephine, who skimmed her due share off the top, I dare say.) By the time we reached Chicago, I reasoned I ought to profit from my own name at least as much as Cody did. During our long engagement in Illinois’s greatest city, I asked Josephine to locate a writer-for-hire. I met with that fellow every morning in a little café, and I paid for his cups of coffee and poured my tales into his ear, just as I’m doing to you now. His pen moved as fast as I could talk. Long before the Wild West Show was set to depart from Chicago, he presented me with a manuscript, some fifty pages long: my life and adventures, recounted in my own words. Well—they was more or less my own words. That writer-fella was far more eloquent than I ever could be. I hope you’re half as good as he is, Short Pants.
I took that manuscript to a printer; had two hundred and fifty copies made. The biography was a type of insurance, you see—something to cushion my fall if the Wild West Show ever folded, or if Bill Cody grew tired of me. Something to fall back on, should the whiskey begin calling again, too strong to resist—or if I found I could no longer live without stars in the night-time sky. I could sell the biographies myself and keep every penny. After all, it was my own story. Why should anyone else profit from my life?
You’ve heard my story thus far. You know that most of what I told that Chicago writer was a pack of lies. I told him I was the hero of half a dozen scouting parties. I saved the life of a general, a colonel, a runaway stagecoach full of women and children. I told him I could ride for miles standing up in the saddle and light a cigar at full motion. I had rescued men from wild cats an
d made peace with Indians and I was the beloved daughter of two good and caring people.
And I told him Wild Bill Hickock had loved me. That Bill’s heart and mine beat as one.
I still hoped I could make it so. I still hoped I could make myself believe, if only I repeated the tale often enough.
As the months dragged on—as Cody hauled his spectacle from one city to the next—the show routine wearied me ever more. I found it harder to rouse myself from my bed with each passing morning. The pains of whiskey sickness had long since left me in peace, but the slow, dreary dullness that replaced them felt somehow harder to bear.
The other performers was jolly company (the lively can-can girls in particular) and they had all taken a shine to me, for true to my promise, I had doubled the size of our crowds and the money poured in, steady and strong as a springtime river. I missed Jessie, of course, but it wasn’t loneliness that plagued me and made me long for the quiet seclusion of my hotel room. What pained me most was the falsity of what we did—the can-can girls, the Indian chief, Buffalo Bill himself. And me. Oh, we gave our audiences exactly what they’d come seeking. In no time a-tall, I was a plum expert in portraying the Hellcat in Leather Britches; I could shout and whoop and fire my pistol good enough to bring an audience to its feet. But every night when the show was finished, and we gathered in Lucy’s tent to strip away our false pretenses, my heart weighed so heavy, I half expected it to trip me right off my feet.
None of us bore the least resemblance to the West—the real West as I had known it, the land I fell in love with under skies swept with purple cloud. In fact, I will confide this truth in you: aside from Cody, who had honestly been a scout for a spell during the Indian Wars, I was the only performer who had ventured farther west than Kansas. The rest of the cast all hailed from the riverlands, the valleys of the Mississippi and the broad brown Ohio. And one of the dancing girls came from Carolina, if I rightly recall. Together, we was nothing more than a dime novel brought to jarring life, all loud music and bright color—our carefully practiced steps, our scripted words. Even my horses was fat with grain, having never run free on the open prairie.
And, Short Pants—I know you’ve set here beside me, at this Deadwood bar, and listened while I admitted to the hundred lies I told throughout my shameful life. You know by now that dishonesty don’t agonize me especially, under ordinary circumstances (if any of my circumstances can be called ordinary.) But when it came to the West I portrayed, that routine of practiced falsehood pained me something awful. For since that day when (at a soft and tender age) I had fallen in love with Bill Hickock, he and the West were the same to me. They had been the same all along; I still feel the West as it once was, fighting against the confines of my heart, just as the ache of Bill’s death strikes me in the center of my chest and floods me with trembling and tears, a dozen times a day or more. Each time I rode to my triumphant finish and reared my horse back on its hind legs, and brandished my pistols above my head with a hearty cry, I felt as if I danced upon Wild Bill’s grave—made a joke of his memory, and all for the sake of a little pay. I needed that pay bad enough that I couldn’t stop. But I didn’t know whether I could go on living with myself for the dishonor I’d brought to Bill’s memory.
I can see the doubt in your eyes. I know you didn’t believe me when I told you I stayed dead sober that whole time, almost two full years. Not one drop of liquor passed my lips, for I believed the steely-eyed Josephine when she told me neither she nor Cody would tolerate whooping up. I knew drinking and carrying on would only strip me of my place and my income, and then my Jessie would suffer, just when I had finally found my way to a proper sort of motherhood and provided that precious child with everything she needed. So I guarded myself against the Devil Whiskey, kept myself away from his sweet and comforting grip, no matter how desperately I longed for an escape, no matter how powerful the sickness struck me—that deep and wretched craving. I never knew I had the strength to truly defy Whiskey’s command, but I found the strength inside me, out there on the show circuit. Fortitude was the one good thing the Wild West Show gave me—though still I believe that I could have kept going much longer, and made far more money for Jessie’s education, if Josephine hadn’t been so hard, if I’d been allowed to wet my lips now and then.
Whiskey aside, I did long for some small portion of whoop-up. My wild cries and boasts before a paying audience couldn’t bring the same rush of relief I found back West, where I was untethered, where I was free. Wors’t, there was moments (just after waking, when the fog of sleep and half-remembered dreams still hung gray and thick inside my mind) when I couldn’t recall who was the real, the One and Only, the Authentic Calamity Jane and who was the invention of the novelists, scratching out tall tales for their pay, just as desperate to keep a crust of bread on their tables as I was. I had worn the mask of the Frontier Belle for so many months, I could no longer say when I had taken it off and when I had donned it. Many a night have I set here at this very bar, on this exact seat, and listened to the women around me confide to one another, I come all this way to find myself. There was a time when I would have laughed at such foolishness. Who mislays her own self? Was a time when such a thing would have seemed impossible to me. But that was precisely how I felt then, at the tail end of my tenure with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. My very identity up and ran away, and the faster I chased her, the easier she found it to slip beyond my reach.
I don’t know how I cooked up the damned-fool idea that came to me in Kansas City. I had picked up another novel about Calamity Jane back in Nashville (I never broke myself of the ill-advised habit of reading about my own alleged exploits) and I read that scurrilous trash on the train ride from one city to another. I can’t recall the title of that book. It might have been The Girl Scout’s Great Triumph or The Rival Indian Slayers of Redwood Canyon. I guess it don’t make a lick of difference which one it was. But that particular book showed me as a fearless tamer of wild horses, even though I was a willow-slim girl. I trained my share of horses and mules, as you know, Short Pants. But never in my life had I tamed a wild mustang.
At first, I found the story amusing. I even chuckled over it in the close, stinking heat of the train car, and I was grateful to have my spirits lifted after so long and trying a spell. But that accursed story worked its way under my skin, just like a cactus spine or a porcupine quill, and all too soon, I found I couldn’t let the idea alone—the sharp pain of a relentless goading, the drive to bring that vivid yellow tale to life.
By the time we reached Kansas City, I was fair consumed with the idea of riding a wild horse—taming its fearsome spirit, bringing it to heel. Maybe I felt the show had tamed me—broken my wildness, stripped away my liberty—but if I could pass along the favor to another creature, the strictures that bound my heart would lift, and I would be free and wild again. Or maybe it was just a lack of whiskey that addled my wits. All I know for certain was that my sleep was restless, haunted by dreams of bucking horses with me atop them, setting easy in the saddle, riding like I was born to the task. And the words I’d read about myself—lies, every one—colored the landscape of my dreams.
That was how I found myself (one starless night, after three back-to-back runs of our show) leaning on the top rail of the makeshift corral, watching my horses milling in the darkness. Cody had recently procured for me two new mounts, both young and fresh as new-sprouted grass. He said he wanted to see a little more pep in my rides, more drama and danger—and I told him I had to have horses trained special for the work if he wanted a real dandy of a show. No one had so much as saddled the two new ponies yet. They was skittish, mistrustful; I could see the big sorrel filly with a bald face and blue eyes staring at me above the backs of her lazier, more jaded herd-mates.
I though, She’s the one.
I was tired that night, as I was every night. I wasn’t right in the head. The desire to be what I claimed to be—what all the stories said I had been all along—came upon me so powerfully t
hat I let go of all common sense (what little I’d possessed in the first place.) The rest of the performers busied themselves in the costuming tent, shaking out their cloaks of camouflage, donning their real and true selves. I still wore my beaded trousers and the jacket with the buckskin fringe. I could still feel the grease from my polished gun slick across’t my palm, still felt its cold weight in my hand. And I could hear the audience clapping for me, shouting my name, though I knew the field was silent and empty around me.
I fixed my stare on that bald-faced sorrel filly. She stared back at me and switched her tail and gave a low grunt that sounded like a mountain lion’s growl. And I knew I must prove to myself that very night the one thing I still felt I had failed to prove to the whole damn world: that I was Calamity.
The can-can girls and the French trapper and Lucy the costumer, and Josephine and Bill Cody—all would emerge from the lamp-lit tent any minute. Time for proving was woefully short. I slipped between the rails of the corral and took my lasso from a fence post. I walked after the herd, talking low and sweet while they shied and trotted away, till finally they settled around me and even the unbroke sorrel deigned to come near. It was a simple thing, to slide my rope gently over her head and lead her to the fence.
Saddling that filly didn’t come near as easy. She tensed and snorted and kicked out with her hind feet, first one, then the other, warning me that that she wouldn’t cooperate like the lazy pinto I most often rode. But I kept up my sweet talk and moved slow as molasses on a cold day, and by and by I buckled the cinch around her belly.
She wouldn’t accept a bridle—not yet—so I twisted the rope into a halter of sorts. Then I led my new mount to the center of the corral and I leaped up into the saddle, sudden and sure, before the sorrel could crow-hop away from me.
I guess by the look of you that you ain’t never rode a bucking bronc. Don’t take it for an insult, Short Pants; tenderfeet seldom have occasion to launch themselves onto the back of a furious wild animal. How can I describe the sensation to a fella who has never felt it for himself? Hell, even I hadn’t the least idea what to expect, for those dime novels had made the whole business sound simple—downright romantical. Calamity Jane, She-Scout of the Great Frontier, setting her saddle with ease while the horse bucked and kicked beneath her. She laughed as her dark tresses swayed in the dusty breeze. And when her horse had tired itself and landed on all four feet, she swung down from the saddle and patted its neck, and kissed its velvet nose, and the horse lost its heart to the girl beauty, and followed her loyal as a puppy from that day on.
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