But when the sheriff of Butte finally set me free, I found another letter waiting. I cringed when the jailer handed it over, for I had no great desire to read Lena’s angry words again—not after the ordeal I had faced in my cell. Yet that very same ordeal had humbled me some, as much as a woman of my type may ever be humbled. I staggered out of the jailhouse with the letter clutched in my trembling fist and sank down on the boards of the sidewalk. Men and women muttered curses as they stepped around me; dust rose from the sun-baked street, so thick I could taste its earthiness with every breath. I ignored those who cursed me; I opened the letter with timid care. Another scouring from Lena’s sharp tongue seemed a fitting punishment, I told myself. Penance for a lifetime of… what? Not sins, exactly. Failings.
I slid the paper from its sleeve, grim and steeled against what would follow. But I didn’t find Lena’s handwriting, neat and tidy, evenly spaced across’t the page. These words was big and shaky, loosely scrawled—the way I wrote, when I wrote a-tall. I turned the letter over and read the signature at the end, before I read another word. Elijah Canary—my brother, Lije.
Dearest Martha,
I hope this letter finds you well. I guess you are still in Butte for I read in the news paper that you was picked up by the law and thrown in to jail. I know you would rather get out soon but I hope for a long enough sentance that this letter finds you. You have been hard to locate and I must share some news.
First: Cilus has returned and he is well. He got himself married to a nice girl and he has set up a business in Boulder. I am going over to join him soon to help him run it. Prospecks look good. I guess Cilus and me turned out all right in the end, as I am a reformed man who does not take to rustling cattle or frauding insurers any longer.
Isabelle has two little girls and loves them dearly. She is a good mother. Has come to visit us with her husband and children and they all are happy and healthy. She tells you hello and said to tell you she hopes you are well.
Lena has five children now and they are all dandys. I think they will miss their uncle Lije when I go out to work with Cilus but it can’t be helped. John is well too and his farm is thriving so much that Lena no longer is oblijed to wash cloas for anyone except her own children.
Now I come to the most important news. Martha, I had a good long talk with Lena some months back and set her straight about you. She says she guesses maybe she was too hard on you after all. Lena and John and Cilus and me have all put some money together and we have sent your daughter Jessie to a good school in Helena, Montana where she will learn more then what the nuns could teach her at that place in Sturgis. Akshully, Isabelle and her husband gave a little to our fund too. So all the Canary kids pitched in (tho we still have not found Sara but we have not given up on her eether.) The new school for Jessie is a real good one that all the papers talk about. Girls get real smart there and some have gone on to ladys colleges back east. We want Jessie to have a good future because you did us all so many kindnesses when we was children, Martha, and at least Cilus and me never forgot. We understood all along, what you did to keep us alive. I guess it has gone hard on you to live that kind of life, but Cilus and me, we don’t want you to think we never knew what you sacrificed. We know how you lowered yourself so we could all get by. You was always a real good sister to us, and a better ma than the ma we had.
I think senss you are Jessie’s mother, it is only fitting that you know where she lives and what she is up to. I don’t want you to worry on her account. But I think it is best if you leave her be, Martha. Let her get on with her life and you get on with yours. Now that she is in that school, she has a shot at a real good future and none of us wants to see her chances put in any sort of danger. I am sure you understand what I mean.
Oh I love you so very much, my good and kind hearted sister. I wish you all the health and happyness in the world. Please come and visit Cilus and me in Boulder when you have a chance. Cilus’s wife has a baby on the way and I know he would like to see you again.
With much affection,
Your brother
Elijah Canary
I did not go to Boulder to visit my brothers, though I would be lying to you if I said I didn’t ache to see them again. A more poignant and powerful ache drew me west to Helena. I heeded Lije’s warning well, and kept myself away from Jessie’s school. The school was a big, fine place, in a beautiful red-brick building right at the center of town—and Helena was growing fast, poised to become the bustling sort of place that would soon convert to a real, proper city, like those I had visited in the Cody days. Not once did I resurrect the legend of Calamity Jane; I didn’t even dare sell my biographies at the train station, where the tenderfeet came and went in their Back-East city dresses and fashionable hats. I called myself Margaret Bird again, and took up work in a laundry, and kept myself in humble anonymity, swearing with every pass of wet cloth across my wash-board that I would leave Jessie alone to live her life—to pursue her grand new future—and never trouble her with my shadow. But I needed to be close to my girl. I was her mother, after all, even if she never knew it. What if Jessie fell sick, or got herself hurt in some dreadful accident? I couldn’t bear the thought of dwelling far away if she should ever need the tender care of one who loved her. And who could ever adore my Jessie more than me?
Week after week, month after month, I toiled at the laundry and never raised my head from my wash tubs or my iron. I pinched every penny I earned, living smaller than I had since my show days. A new and thrilling goal hung before me now: I would save up enough money to send Jessie off to a fancy east-coast ladies’ college, just as soon as she was old enough and smart enough. Wouldn’t she be glad when I stepped out of the forgotten shadows of her past—the weathered old grandmam she had all but forgotten—and opened for her a new door, the passage to a bright and shining opportunity.
That was my intent, I mean—to save as assiduously as a miser. But more often than not, the whiskey came a-calling, and I was more susceptible than ever before to its sweetly whispering voice. I would save every cent for a week or two. Then I spent it all when sorrow overtook me—when I got to thinking of everything I had lost, all the ways I had lowered myself (as Lije had said in his letter.) In those dark hours, the need for a wild time came over me—a need to forget my ghosts. And though I knew it was folly, still I took the chance every time that cold, black lonesomeness came calling—for whiskey was my only relief from that particular suffering, the only friend who could ease the burden of my self-loathing.
Thanks to the whiskey, I was no closer to sending Jessie off to college—even after a year spent working in Helena. But month after month, I told myself I still had time. I always had more time. Jessie was twelve years old by then; she couldn’t leave for a fancy Back East ladies’ college till she was sixteen at least. No matter how much whiskey I drank, I could always earn more money the following day.
One autumn afternoon, alone in the steam-veiled confines of the laundry (and nursing a whiskey headache that pounded cruelly in my head) I lifted a man’s jacket from a heap of washing yet to be done. Some unknown weight swung inside, bumping against my hip. I reached into the pocket and took out the book which the jacket’s owner had forgotten. Wouldn’t you know, it was The Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone, that mad collection of lies, the first story that had made me famous. I stood there for a long time, staring at the book in my chapped and weary hands. The worn spine, the thumbed pages, the creases along its tired cover. The year was 1899; folks still liked to read that scurrilous trash, the lies about me. They still hankered for adventure, the romance of my supposed life.
I tossed that ridiculous novel aside and returned to my work, but I recalled my trunk full of biographies. I hadn’t yet sold them all—I hadn’t even come close. Perhaps, I thought, it was time to leave Helena. Take to the road again, and this time, I would truly work at selling every last copy of my story. Perhaps I would have more printed, too, and sell those from Salt Lake City to Wichita. S
ave that money for Jessie’s future, since the laundry money turned to whiskey almost as fast as I earned it.
A few days later, I told the woman who owned the laundry that I must travel for the sake of a sick relation. Then I headed for Livingstone, where I’d heard a good printing press could be found, newly brought in from the East. Alas, I never made it to Livingstone, for a terrible illness overtook me on the train. Not whiskey sickness, I’ll have you know—this time it was a real illness, the kind any respectable person may catch if luck declines to favor them. As the train crept east and my stomach soured—as I huddled in upon myself, aching and wracked with shivers—I recalled my wish on the river bank (to expire from pneumonia) and I was gripped by fear, for I thought I might actually die then and there, on that stuffy, rattling train. Death itself didn’t worry me overmuch, but I hadn’t made good with Jessie—hadn’t saved up for her schooling Back East. I was damn determined to pull off that miracle before the dark angel came for me and carried me off to my grave.
I had been leaning my throbbing head against the pane of a window, but a queasy wave rose in my gut and I sat up, then tried to stand, thinking I ought to make my way back to the little toilet closet and heave up all the sickness inside me in the privacy of that stinking cell. But when I moved, a few women glanced my way. One of them let out a shriek at the sight of me—my sweating face, my pallor.
“God preserve us,” said another woman, pressing a kerchief to her mouth and nose. “That woman is dreadfully ill.”
“I ain’t,” I said—and thought to say more in my own defense, but my arms lost all their strength as I fought to pull myself to my feet. I collapsed back onto the bench seat and hunched there, head swimming, breath rasping in my throat.
“Go and fetch the usher,” somebody said. “Her illness may be catching.”
My feeble protests went unheeded, and after the usher took a long look at me (he too held a kerchief across his mouth and nose), the train made an unscheduled stop at a town of no consequence called White Sulphur Springs. The conductor himself came to my car and spoke to me, gently but without any possibility for argument.
“You are seriously ill, madam. You need the ministrations of a doctor.”
“I can continue on. I won’t give nobody the sickness. It’s just a head cold, besides.” I knew it wasn’t. Even the worst of my whiskey fevers had never left me so weak or listless.
“I’m afraid you haven’t any choice in the matter. For the safety of the rest of my passengers, I must insist that you get off here and seek a doctor at once.”
There was nothing I could say to convince the conductor to keep me on board. I had no strength for arguments, anyhow. I left my trunk in the care of the station master and staggered my way to the only doctor White Sulphur Springs had. To be honest, I counted it a minor miracle that town had any learned man to boast of, but I will admit that he looked me over as carefully as any physician I encountered Back East. He pronounced me sick with pneumonia (my wish had come true, after all) and ordered me to check into a tiny, ramshackle hospital on the edge of town. But I hadn’t any money to pay for a bed, and the hospital wouldn’t accept copies of my biography as compensation. A squint-eyed, hard-mouthed nurse sent me to a poor house instead—a thoroughly inadequate, depressing sort of place, all gray planks and shadows, its corners hung with cobwebs that had caught only dust for years. The poor house was maintained, after a fashion, by stodgy women of the far-too-Christian breed, each dressed in bleak gray with starched white pinafores (upon which, if you looked closely in a fleeting slide of candlelight, you could make out the faint spatters and spots of old blood stains.) My new keepers was a grim pack indeed, but I was grateful for their ministrations. After all, I had nowhere else to go.
Well, I had thought the days of my legend truly behind me. Certainly, a body doesn’t feel especially legendary while convalescing—coughing and shivering—in a lightless poorhouse somewheres in the featureless expanse of the prairie. But word got out that the great Calamity Jane had landed under the roof of Christian charity in White Sulphur Springs, and before I could realize what was happening, every newspaper from Oregon to New York carried the story. Day after day, as I slowly recuperated under the scowls of my caretakers, letters began to arrive. First one, then a pair, and all too soon I found myself with a new stack of letters every day.
Never in my life had I imagined I had so many admirers—nor had I believed a name could spread to those far-flung places. Propped up in my hard bed, shaking my head in awe, I pawed through each new delivery, wondering over the names of towns and cities from whence my well-wishers hailed. Boston. Philadelphia. Ottawa. San Francisco. Seattle. Towns I’d never heard of in Tennessee, Carolina, Kansas and Delaware. My mind fairly reeled at the spread of my news—and the well-wishes contained in those letters did me a world of good. I will grant you, if each of those folks had sent me a dollar instead of a note telling me how much they liked the stories about my life, I could have set Jessie up for life and died in peace, right there in the poor house. But I appreciated their encouragement almost as much as I would have appreciated their money. I knew I was loved, you see—I knew that somebody out there, in the vast, impersonal world, feared for my health and wished me no ill luck. Maybe it sounds foolish to you, but knowing some folks still remembered Calamity Jane eased some of the pain in my heart.
I convalesced in that charity house for more than a month, till at last my lungs lost their terrible rattle and most of my strength returned. The white-pinafored old hags who looked after me sent for the lone doctor, and he pronounced me healthy enough to walk around some, so my caretakers wrapped me in a good woolen shawl and turned me out-of-doors to ambulate and take in the fresh air.
Oh, I ambulated, all right—directly to the nearest saloon. Nothing will make you long to forget your troubles like lying in the same damn bed in a gray tomb of a creaking house for nigh-on six weeks. I needed a little fun, just as bad as I needed the fresh air. And I tell you what: that was one drink I never regretted.
But I did get so addled—as you know—that I lost my way back to the poor house. It was a kindly young gentleman, scarce more than a boy, who took me by my arm and guided me back to my keepers. And it was that same jolly, sweet-tempered fella who helped the Christian ladies tuck me into my bed.
That’s how I met you, Short Pants. And here we are.
No. That ain’t right. My recollection has slipped—skewed itself, as it does now, sometimes. Year after year, I find it grows harder to keep my memories in order, to sort through the lies and the legends, and find the truth. I have folded the velvet so many times. I have walked this way and that, in search of the few sweet remembrances that still remain. I have sucked the nectar from the faded flowers of my past, and those blossoms have yielded the last of their sweetness. The petals are falling now.
But I got it wrong. I’m sure of that. You ain’t Short Pants, after all. All this time, I had myself convinced that you was him. My God—how old is that boy now, assuming he still lives? He’s long dead and in his grave, for all I can tell.
You ain’t Short Pants. But if my life has taught me one firm truth, it’s this: one writer is very much like another. As long as you aim to tell my story and tell it true, you’ll serve just as well.
Don’t fidget, now, my friend—whoever you are, whatever your real name might be. The story’s almost over, and then you can get back to your notebook and pen. Your typewriter. What does your breed use, nowadays, to write? How do you spread the germ of your lies, the clinging burrs of legend?
Hell; it hardly matters to me. Top up that glass, you stranger—you friend—and then I’ll go on talking.
Next morning, that same smiling young man arrived at the poor house, tapping on the door just as the sun came up. The stodgy Christian frowners had already carried in my breakfast tray; they was seeing to their own morning sup. They didn’t seem best pleased to have a visitor, but I could hear the boy out there in the hall, asking to speak with me.
“Miss Canary is not well enough for visitors,” one of the caretakers said.
“Please, ma’am; I’m the fellow who helped bring her home last night.”
I heard only a sharp sniff in reply.
The young man said, “I have business with Miss Jane—or I hope to have business with her. If I cannot speak with her today, please tell me when I may return.”
The prospect of business perked me up, and no mistake. I hastily set my tray aside and wobbled up out of my bed, dressed in a flannel nightgown, trembling a little at the knees—whether from the dregs of my pneumonia or from the whiskey haze, I couldn’t say. I marched out into the hall and nodded to the scowling lady in her white pinafore, and when she had gone off in a huff, I clapped the young fella on the shoulder and welcomed him to my humble abode.
“My name is Lewis Ransome Freeman,” he said.
He was such a colt of a man—so gangly and young—I laughed at the bigness of his name. “Your name is Short Pants, son. What do you want from me?”
“I’m a writer, Miss Canary. I’ve traveled all the way from Boston to White Sulphur Springs to find you. I read about your plight in the papers, and I felt inspired.”
“Inspired?” I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly conscious of the shapeless flannel I wore, of the smell of sickness that still clung to me—hung all about the poor house. Nothing could be less of an inspiration. But Short Pants seemed undaunted.
“I want to write about you.” He took an eager step toward me. “I want to tell your real story—the true life of Calamity Jane. Not another silly, make-believe flight—the kind you can find in any dime novel.”
I shook my head, rather dazed by his enthusiasm. “Ain’t nobody out there who wants to know my real story. My history is a very sad and sorry one, I’m afraid. Take it from me, Short Pants: folks prefer the lies in the dime novels. They can eat those up like whipped cream, a spoonful at a time.”
Calamity Page 47
