Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  If only it had been so easy. The sorrel filly surged beneath me, springing high into the air. I felt the weight of the earth drag at my back; I grabbed white-knuckled for my saddle horn and clamped my legs around the filly’s sides. I’d been riding all my life; I was as strong as I was ugly. But still I slid backward in that terrible moment, when the horse shot up from solid ground faster and more powerful than the firing of a cannonball. Then she reached the peak of her arc and she flung both heels out behind. I jolted forward; my nose collided with the crest of her neck and my vision flashed from the dark of night to a blinding white pain. I came down hard in the saddle; my feet left the stirrups; the violence of the moment knocked the breath from my body. All I could do was cling to the horn in terror. I had long since dropped the rope; it dragged under the filly’s feet, and I prayed in dazed terror that she wouldn’t step on it and flip end-over-end, crushing me in the dirt.

  The filly rose in another raging leap and kicked out again; once more I was flung and battered like a rag doll. The muscles in my legs and arms went weak and trembly. I could feel my heart racing in my throat, choking off my breath. Seconds had passed, yet it seemed to me I had never done a thing in my life but hold in desperate fear to that saddle while the horse kicked and whirled and screamed beneath me. Nothing had ever frightened me so completely—not even facing down Wild Bill’s killer in that butcher shop in Deadwood.

  Well, I can’t say to this day whether the horse threw me on its third leap, or whether I jumped, finding the hard ground a friendlier prospect than the wild upheaval of my saddle. As I sailed through the darkness, time paused expressly for me, giving me ample chance to examine all the foolish feats of a long and exceptionally idiotic life. Then I hit the ground. Pain crashed in upon me. I heard the pain, ringing high and sharp like the cymbals in Cody’s band, punctuating my failure. The pain was particularly fierce in my neck and shoulder. I lay as still as I could manage, thinking myself killed (or near enough as made no real difference.) The sorrel filly’s hooves thundered around my breakable body. I could hear her blowing and grunting, cursing me in the language of the mustang.

  Then I heard the can-can girls shouting, “Jane! Jane, are you killed?” and folks running from the direction of the costumer’s tent. A minute later, there they all stood around me, my fellow performers and Josephine Brake and even Cody himself, who snapped at the Indian Chief to bring a lantern so’s he could see my face.

  Cody bent over me. The night was dark, but I could see him clear as midday, for either my terror or his anger had turned the whole scene bright and significant.

  “God’s sake, Jane,” Cody said, speaking through his extravagant mustache. “What fool thing have you gone and done?”

  Josephine crouched on her heels beside him. “Her nose is bleeding badly. She must have broken it.” She reached out and took me by the shoulder as if to shake me out of my stupefaction, but the moment she touched me, I cried out with renewed pain.

  “Don’t move,” Cody said.

  The Indian Chief had arrived with a lantern. Cody brought it close to my face; it blinded me with searing yellow light. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried my damndest not to whimper, but I was dreadful afraid I had broken my neck and wouldn’t be no good to anybody no more.

  “It’s her collarbone,” Cody finally said. “Look here; you can see how it’s all popped up under her shirt.”

  The can-can girls made tiny sounds of faintness and disgust.

  “Has the bone punched through the skin?” Cody said.

  Josephine soothed me with a murmur, then unbuttoned my embroidered shirt, doing her best not to touch the fracture. I squeezed my eyes tighter still, fearing what Josephine would say. But a moment later she sighed in relief. “No, not through the skin—thank God. But it looks a dreadful break, all the same.”

  I hadn’t killed myself after all, but my injury was terrible enough that I couldn’t perform for six weeks while the fracture healed. Cody was sore as Hell. The moment I was installed in my hotel bed (left arm freshly tied up in a sling by the doctor Cody sent to me, plugs of cotton stuffed up my nose to stop the bleeding) Cody gave me a lecture for my get-well-soon present, delivered by Josephine Brake. She, after all, was his agent—designated to speak on his behalf. I had no choice but to set up against my headboard, blushing and shame-faced, listening while Josephine excoriated me for my foolishness. I dare say I deserved every word of that vicious chewing-out, for I had been the star attraction for many a month now. Without me, ticket sales would surely dwindle, and every member of the cast and crew would suffer.

  The six weeks of my convalescence proved a dreadful trial. Even after I’d begun to feel somewhat stronger and had learned how to take the pain, Josephine seldom let me out of my bed. I did grow a mite better at reading during those miserable weeks, for I hadn’t any other means to while away the hours. But I never touched a novel about Calamity Jane again.

  One day, though—it was at least a month after my mishap with the sorrel filly—Josephine was called away to attend to more business on Cody’s behalf. I was in the finest fettle that could be expected, all things considered, so I left my bed and peeked out the window, watching Josephine climb into a carriage and trundle away up the streets of Kansas City. The rest of the performers had gone, readying for the evening show. I strolled out of my hotel room, nonchalant as you please despite my bound-up arm, determined to stretch my legs and relieve my boredom for a few minutes. Then I would hasten back to my bed before Josephine could learn of my deception.

  I descended the stairs on legs grown weak from inactivity and sauntered into the hotel’s bar. I had no intention of drinking—I would only carry the deception so far. I wanted nothing more than to look at something other than the walls of my room (for I had counted every gilded fleur-de-lis on the paper by then) and hear a human voice that didn’t belong to the stodgy Miss Josephine Brake.

  Oh, Short Pants. To this day, I regret that decision. I wish I had never gone to that bar; bitterly do I regret my plan to leave the room a-tall. For I walked right in to a scene that cut me to my heart. A young man with a very inadequate mustache had climbed up onto the bar-top. He held forth to a crowd of laughing, jeering Missourians—city folk, to a one. The man on the bar wore a wig of long, braided locks, somewhat resembling the head of a mop but stained black with coal dust. He had painted two bright-pink circles on his cheeks in imitation of a girl’s rosy complexion, and had drawn the long spikes of false lashes around his eyes. And he had decked himself out in a fringed jacket and beaded trousers, and held a rifle across his chest, and he fluttered his eyelids and spoke in a high, straining voice while he pranced to and fro down the length of the bar.

  “It’s I,” he said, “the one and only Calamity Jane, the Beauty of the West, the Brave Girl Scout of the Untamed Plains!”

  The men in that bar hooted and laughed and shouted up at him, urging him on.

  “You aren’t any kind of beauty,” somebody hollered. “Why, I saw you last month at the Wild West Show. You are just about the ugliest cow of a woman I’ve ever seen!”

  I turned on my heel and left that bar. I shut myself in the confines of my room and I wept for hours, till Josephine returned. I ain’t ashamed to tell you that, Short Pants—that I cried the bitterest tears of my life, sobbing till I could scarce catch my breath, weeping till my stomach turned sick with my unrelieved sorrow.

  I didn’t weep because those men had mocked me. Goodness knows, I heard such insultations plenty times before. What broke my heart that day—what sullied my very spirit—was knowing that those men believed the West, my home country, the land I loved, was a thing to be laughed at and dismissed. A place inferior, a joke to be played, a picture to be viewed like a postcard, then tucked away again and forgotten while the real world—the city world—went on turning.

  And as I sniffled and choked and waited for Josephine to return, I wondered if it really was so. I couldn’t shake a sinking certainty that Braddick’s prediction h
ad come to pass. The West was dead. I had helped kill it by taking up with Bill Cody—by selling the life I loved to a crowd that jeered and then departed.

  Sometimes I pop over a rough, jest to keep my hand in

  The next winter came, so harsh and deep with snow that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was obliged to halt its travels. Calamity Jane had become essential to Cody’s profits; the man could no longer justify his show without my riding and trick-shooting (those six weeks I spent penned up in my room with one arm in a sling proved trying weeks for us all.) With every city buried under winter, there wasn’t no sense in continuing through the darkest and coldest months of the year, for I couldn’t ride like a wild thing in knee-deep snow, even if the audiences would deign to sit shivering in a field or a train yard watching me shoot and holler.

  Happily, the work we did in milder seasons set us up proper. Each of us declared ourselves fit to make it through the winter—and none fitter than Cody, whose coffers had grown fat since I took up with his spectacle. The lot of us parted ways in Minneapolis, the very place where I had joined—the Indian Chief and the Fur Trapper shaking my hand, the can-can girls kissing my cheek, each of them teary-eyed over parting.

  “Swear you’ll come back to us in the spring,” one of the dancers said. “It wouldn’t be the same show without you.”

  I gave my promise, but I knew I spoke a lie. I was already itching to climb aboard my train and put the grand cities of the East at my back—forever, if fate would allow. I yearned for my own world—the real West—wors’t than any hunger that had afflicted me as a child. The falsehood I made alongside Bill Cody, the bright and musical lie of the Wild West tamed and trotted out upon a stage… that was a poor imitation at the best of times. Certainly, Cody’s show couldn’t fill the void inside my heart, nor fool me into believing I had found the place where I belonged.

  So I boarded that train with a trunk stuffed full of my books (the biographies of Calamity I had printed, as my surety against poverty.) I waved to the can-can girls and nodded my thanks to Cody and Josephine Brake, who stood frowning up at me from the platform. And as the train began to roll westward, carrying me home towards Deadwood, I settled in my seat with the longest sigh I ever breathed, and I promised myself I would never do such folly again. If I was careful with the money I had made, and diligent in selling my trunkful of books, I would have no further need for the Wild West Show in any case.

  I would ask you to pour another whiskey, Short Pants, for now I’ve come to the last stretch of my sorry tale, the place where the road of my history bends sharp and sudden toward shame. But I swear you look as if you can’t take another drop—and anyway, more whiskey now, at this dark juncture, would only redouble my misery. If I was still the type who could pray—the type who could hold some belief in a Grand Overseer—I’d wish you was a priest in a confessional. That seems a fitting man to hear the remainder of my story. But you ain’t a priest. You’re another writer come seeking my history. Like the dozen that came before you.

  The hundred, the thousand.

  Fuck it, Short Pants. Fill up the glass. What’s one more drink in the final reckoning?

  The train carried me toward Deadwood, but when it pulled into the familiar station and stopped at the platform with a shudder and a hiss of steam, I couldn’t make myself rise from my seat. Despite my resolve to never again pedal the false flash of a fictitious West, I found I hadn’t left that sinking guilt and self-loathing in Minneapolis after all. Regret had followed me all down the tracks, mile after snow-muffled mile. It gnawed at my conscience all the worse as the Black Hills appeared on the horizon, advancing in their pale winter shrouds till they stood gathered all around the tracks—around me—watching in silent judgment. I took one look at Deadwood out the window of my train car. Bigger than when I’d seen it last, growing like a child in sudden leaps—unexpected stretching toward a grim and inevitable maturity. The streets was boggy and slick with mud; deep snow lay heaped against the sides of buildings and the snow was crusted with grime like the coal dust of the cities, the ever-present filth. And though the snow was deep and the roads a morass, still the sidewalks of Deadwood hummed with activity. Men and women hurrying about their business. Men and women cultivating the place, nurturing it, tending to its growth.

  I wanted no part of Deadwood. Not that day. Too many women wore the flounces and bustles of Josephine Brake. Too many fellas had grown out their mustaches in exactly the same style as Bill Cody’s. The town was still small, but it wouldn’t remain so for much longer. So I reached into my little beaded purse and extracted enough coins to carry me farther—into the heart of the West. All the way to the end of the line, wherever that end may be.

  That’s how I found myself in Gilt Edge, Montana that particularly cold and lonesome winter. Gilt Edge was a town like the ones I had known in my younger days: not much more than a hardgoods store and a couple of watering holes, one or two shabby boarding houses and a livery. It was sunk deep, like a post-hole or a prairie dog’s burrow, straight down in the flatness of the prairie. Blue granite crags reared up to the west of town, sheltering and sharp. The mountains put me in mind of the palisade at Cuny and Coffey’s. Of a certainty, between the mountains to the west and the abandoned prairie to the east, I couldn’t see the rest of the world from Gilt Edge. The arch of the sky was interrupted, spilling from the teeth of the mountains, and no dark smut of city or industry fouled the broad sweep of grassland. Privately, I declared Gilt Edge the most perfect roost an old hen like me could hope for; straight away I found myself a room to let and I went about the business of settling in for the winter.

  My first order of business was to write a letter to Josephine Brake. I can’t do it no more, I said. The show life ain’t for me. Tell all the can-can girls and the rest of my friends I’m awful sorry to let them down. But Mr. Cody can hire some other woman to be his Calamity Jane. It won’t make no difference to the crowd, and if they find a pretty girl to take my place, the audience will pay even more to watch her strut and holler.

  The money I made from Bill Cody kept me in comfort all winter long. My room was spacious, boasting of a feather bed—not as fine or well-made as the beds I’d enjoyed in the cities Back East, but a damn sight finer than any other bed in Gilt Edge. I would have wagered every penny I had on that. The boarding house was elegant and gracious, considering it stood at the end of an insignificant rail line in the middle of nowhere. Gilt Edge was a small enough place that I convinced myself for a good many weeks that my money would never dry up. I treated myself to such extravagances as I had never known before. I had a fancy suit made by the local seamstress—a proper woman’s suit with a brocade skirt and a matching jacket, even prettier than the green dress I had worn at Madam Robair’s place. What in God’s name I thought to do with that suit is beyond my powers to comprehend. There wasn’t no society to speak of in Gilt Edge, and if there was, it’s a sure bet I would never have found myself on the receiving end of any gracious invitations. Guess I hankered after something pretty. I had lived a life of sore deprivation, but there was no reason to deny myself any longer. When the seamstress finished her work, I donned that new suit and stared at myself in the mirror. Martha Canary, arrayed in wine-red brocade, tucked and trimmed and looking as much like a lady as she ever was like to seem. I found if I held my back very straight and lifted my chin, I came perilous-close to looking like a respectable woman. I thought, If Wild Bill had seen me this way, maybe my life wouldn’t have been so hopeless.

  I had a picture made in that dress, standing straight and proud—but I only made one copy. I couldn’t sell that image, you see. No tenderfoot would have parted with his money for the Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone looking decidedly un-devilish. No, it was not a picture of Calamity Jane. It was Martha Canary—me, given back to myself, returned to my own keeping and transformed at last into the woman I had always longed to be.

  This story would be grim enough if my carelessness went no farther than my purse. But
I’m afraid my attitude toward liquor—so strictly minded during the Cody days—loosened every bit as fast. For all I appreciated Gilt Edge’s smallness and seclusion, still the weight of my lonesome heart began to drag at me within a few short weeks of my arrival.

  Maybe it was more than lonesomeness, too. Maybe something yet more dire drove me back towards the whiskey. Day and night, dreaming and waking, my knowledge of the cities was a torment. That first startled sight of Minneapolis had burned itself into my memory, still smoking and stinking like a fresh brand on a panicked steer’s hide. Nothing would allow me to forget it: the red, luminous sprawl of the city bleeding like a stain across the night. The lamps uncountable, more numerous than stars. A wound in the flesh of the prairie—a wound that wept and spread its infection, the human crowd increasing, the herd breeding and multiplying, the wide-open spaces crumbling little by little, falling to the encroachment of mankind.

  And all those people in Minneapolis, in Boston, in Atlanta, in all the countless towns between—all hungering for the West, eager to see the land yet none of them knowing the land, none of them caring to learn the truth I knew. My world, my life, was naught but a fantasy to those countless crowds. A park through which to stroll; a wilderness to convert and tame, to bend to a city-man’s will. I could see plainly what was coming. I knew what would be lost and forgotten, replaced by the costume of legend. I couldn’t bear a future I had no power to change.