Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  “It can’t be true, that your admirers prefer falsehood to truth. Miss Canary, don’t you know how many admirers you have? You’re a celebrity Back East. And I’ve come all this way to find you, and speak with you, and learn who you truly are. Won’t you please agree? Allow me to interview you. I am young, I know—but I am a skilled writer, despite my youth. I can bring the truth to life for the benefit of your admirers. They will finally know your history—and however bleak that history may seem to you, I assure you, it will thrill and inspire the countless readers who already have come to adore your name.”

  It wasn’t so much the flattery, but the earnest excitement that won me over. Short Pants Freeman seemed about as dumbfounded by my celebrity as he thought every reader in America would be, and I suppose his buoyant energy drew me in. I agreed to meet with him two days hence, just after the breakfast hour, and swore I would regale him with my adventures—my true and honest adventures, laid bare for the first time in my lengthy history of entertaining writers.

  And I did honestly mean to go through with it: spill my guts to Short Pants, let him pen the mess of my life and expose it before my admirers—the whole, ugly truth. But that night I lay awake remembering it all—the trading on the trail, the whorehouses, the drinking, the many days spent languishing and suffering in a jail cell. I thought of all those letters I received—how those folks could have made me rich if they sent money instead of well-wishes. Maybe legend was preferable, after all. If the real Calamity Jane was exposed—if the mask of myth was ripped away and my shame revealed, sweating and pale—no one would admire me any longer. The most outrageous fiction of my life—the most impossible, wildest flight of fevered fancy—was a damn sight more appealing than any truth.

  And my thoughts turned to Jessie, and lingered there far longer than I dwelt on my own shame and humiliation. My girl had a chance now to build a real life—a future unclouded by Calamity’s notoriety. If I let the truth out—raised it up from an unmarked grave—my shame would follow Jessie everywhere she went. For I couldn’t tell my life story without confessing that I was her mother. I couldn’t say a single true word about my life without speaking Jessie’s name. She was the whole of my life, my sun and my moon, even if I was obliged to love her from afar. If the truth was revealed, Jessie would lose whatever place she could carve among better society. Her future would be eclipsed by my long shadow. The daughter of a whore has no future—not in the West, not Back East. Nowhere.

  That’s why I boarded a train and put White Sulphur Springs behind me. It was dawn—a rosy flush on the eastern edge of the prairie—and it was the day I had promised to meet with Short Pants Freeman and tell him everything.

  I couldn’t face the truth back then. It ain’t much easier to face it now.

  Deadwood Dick’s Doom, or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure

  By and by, I found my way back to Billings, and there I languished for some long while. With each slow-passing day, I felt a deep shadow encroaching—a patch of darkness stealing overhead, blotting out the sky. My life, the world I knew—the only world that truly existed, far as I was concerned—was vanishing around me. Billings sprouted new houses like toadstools popping up after an autumn rain. Faster and faster they came, till the long, lazy stretches of peaceful silence was replaced by the ringing of hammers and the rasping of saws. Mud roads gave way to streets paved with stone. The shops towered like a forest of pines—one story growing to two; two stories reaching upwards to three, to four. The bland, dry smell of brick dust and mortar replaced the sharp perfume of sage. Billings sighed and sank into itself, calm and resolute—a horse broke to the saddle, already forgetting the smell of wind on the open prairie and the freedom of flight beneath an unrestricted sky.

  I watched Billings spreading, unfurling, eating the land. I wondered how large Salt Lake City had grown. And Cheyenne, and Laramie, and sour old Corinne. Boulder—had that town matured to a city? Had Boulder, in its hungry need, already consumed the house where I had lived, the pasture where my ox teams had grazed? What stood now in place of my first child’s grave? A dry goods store or a fancy new boarding house, an impossible weight bearing down on those small and delicate, forgotten bones, my dead son slumbering alone in the dark.

  I knew what was coming for me. I had seen it Back East. And I knew my only hope was to stay drunk, so I couldn’t feel the worst of the pain, nor the sharpest pangs of despair. And so I did: I drank up every drop I could buy, and when my money ran short, I sold what few possessions I had—the biographies, and photographs of myself, the Hellcat in Leather Britches, posing as Western as you please with a rifle and a buckskin fringe and a lost expression on my broad, bewildered face.

  When I had nothing left to sell, I begged for money or whiskey—either one would do. Many griefs and sorrows visited me during those times—and all of them due to my taste for liquor. But though I kept myself as drunk as my fortunes would allow, I never managed to convince myself that the end wasn’t coming. No hurdy-gurdy or jangling piano, no frantic tapping of the dancing girls’ feet, could drown out the voice that whispered in my mind. We are already gone, the voice said. They have fenced us in and cut a path to our grave—all of us, the West—who we was and the truths we knew. We been written over by pretty lies, our truth muted by the blaring bullhorn of show promoters, by the whistle of relentless trains.

  My last great loss struck me Billings, and struck me so hard I felt sure my heart would wither and abandon me at last to Death’s bleak mercy. I had stayed on the whiskey most doggedly for many a day. I can’t tell you how many days exactly—I never knew the count then, for day and night had long since blended into one another, and nothing mattered to me except finding another glass and convincing the barkeep to fill it. All I know for certain is that the last amiable barkeep in Billings finally had enough of me, and turned me out onto the street. I stumbled past the post office and the remains of a disused livery. A small park lay beyond, a pretty place fenced in by white palings, dappled with the gentle blue shadows of cottonwood and aspen. Ladies liked to bring their children to the park so’s they could play, but no children frolicked on the grass that afternoon. The place was empty and silent, but for the ceaseless noise of expansion echoing along every street. So I eased myself down onto the grass, under the whispering trees. I fell into a deep sleep, dreaming of my mulewhacking days—picking the ice from my animals’ hooves, their comfortable nearness, the way they drew close to my small fire in the winter night, stamping and sighing, with the world spreading broad and free all around us.

  I woke—who can say when; hours later? A day later?—groggy and aching, my mouth tasting both bitter and sour. I set up slowly, groaning at the pain as it throbbed in my head and my heart. I realized what I had done—what I had become—falling asleep sprawled on the ground as if I thought myself worth nothing more than the dirt beneath my feet, and I was sore ashamed. What was my legend or my name worth, if I laid like a bloated carcass under the public eye?

  Even as I patted and brushed at my body, trying to clean away the grass and dust that clung to me—and trying to reassure myself that I was still whole—I felt a slow, creeping dread, a certainty that something had gone terribly wrong. Something was missing. My small purse still hung from my belt, light and empty as it had been when the barkeep had thrown me out. My boots was still on my feet. I hadn’t worn a hat out of my boarding room that morning—or whenever I had left the room last—so my uncovered, tangled hair was no great surprise.

  Then I caught sight of my hand as it moved down my stained and rumpled skirt, straightening my clothing, putting myself back into some kind of order. I stared at my hand for a terrible long time before I knew the worst was true. Before I realized my heart had broken.

  Wild Bill’s snake ring was gone.

  Frantic, I pawed through the short grass around me, already certain my effort was useless. That ring had resided on my thumb for damn near thirty years. Only a witless fool would believe it could up and slip off after so
long a spell. Even while I searched, I knew the truth. I saw it plain, though I could see little else through the tears that half-blinded me. Someone had stolen my ring. Come across me laid out flat, and taken that ring right off my hand. Robbed the half-dead corpse of a drunkard, Calamity Jane, the shame of Billings.

  I could bear none of it—not the insult of the theft, and not the wrenching, sickening lurch of my disgrace. I let the tears spill down my cheeks as I left the park and prowled back down the road, into the heart of Billings. But by the time I reached the first saloon, fury had burned my tears away. I threw open the door and burst into that bar, raging like a gullywasher.

  “Who took it?” I shouted.

  My outraged bellow was so loud, the piano plunked into silence and every man in the place turned to stare at me.

  “Who took my ring?”

  The fellas in the bar cast looks at one another—wary or amused. Those who thought to laugh at my expense only made me all the hotter.

  “What peckerless son of a poxy whore robbed me? I want to know!”

  The barkeep held up his hands as if he could soothe away my anger, as if he could brush off my hurt like dust from his trousers. “Now, Jane—”

  I didn’t wait to hear what useless, mealy-mouthed excuse he would make. I reached towards the nearest man’s hip and ripped his pistol from its holster before anyone could stop me—before anyone knew what I intended. As I brandished the gun, every fella in the place leaped to his feet. The whores went running for cover, shrilling their fear.

  “Put down the gun, Jane,” somebody shouted. Another man yelled, “She’s gone mad at last! Run for the sheriff!”

  But if anyone thought to escape that saloon, they would have to bull past me. And I was armed, and furious.

  Again I hollered, “I want my ring back. And I want to know which of you dirty, shit-eating fucks took it!”

  The man whose gun I’d stolen rose slowly to his feet. “Easy now, Jane,” he said, all smooth and conciliating. “I don’t think anybody here knows jest what you’re talking about. Why don’t you tell us more, and we’ll see if we can’t help you find what’s missing?”

  “Missing?” I cried. “Ain’t nothing missing! It was stolen! I been robbed!” The injustice of it all—my whole damnable life—expanded in my chest with a force and suddenness that should have stopped my heart, by rights. I thrust the gun out before me and pointed it this way and that, and shouted at the whole blind lot of them. “What’s missing? The fuck can’t you tell what’s missing? Look around you! Look at this world! Look at your lives, you liars, you frauds! Don’t you see what you’re bringing in?”

  “Jane—poor old girl. Give me back my gun. Ain’t nobody here gonna hurt you; you know that.”

  “The hurt’s already done! I’m already dead, and so’s the lot of you! So’s the world all around you, the mountains and the rivers and the sky. The prairie, the Hills, every damn place and every damn thing! Dead on our feet—that’s what we are. ’Cause none of you could get enough. Not enough gold, not enough of the trains, not enough of those spineless tenderfeet that come invading like a plague of locusts to eat us up and eat up all our land before they leave again. And what are we when they’ve gone? Gnawed and barren—that’s what. They come to consume us, like we did to the Indians. By God, maybe we deserve it.”

  At that point in my raving, I scarce knew what I was saying, myself. The pistol trembled in my hand; it felt heavier than a load of bricks. My arm and my heart lost their resolve. The gun lowered to my side.

  The man I had taken it from stepped closer and reached for his pistol, but in that moment, I jerked it up again.

  “I want my ring back. I want it now. I’m willing to kill for it. Who doubts me?”

  The barkeep said, “No one doubts you, Jane. But this is—”

  The pistol bucked in my hand. That was the first I knew that I’d fired. The deafening report barely registered, for my head was already pounding, my ears already roaring with rage and the desperate certainty that I was lost. Again and again I fired—at the floor, just in front of fellas’ feet, making them skip and dance and stumble to get away from me. They scattered around me like quail evading a hunter—small things, weak, easy prey for the strong and the powerful. I went on firing till the pistol clicked dry and silence crowded in.

  Then a burst of pain exploded at the back of my skull. I remember the sound of shattering glass, the smell and sting of ale spilling down the back of me, soaking through my dress. I remember the floor rushing up to meet me, and a steep plunge into darkness that sheltered me from my rage.

  It seems to me now as if I stayed in that merciful darkness for years. A new century came; a few years ticked by. Somehow, I eked out the same miserable existence in Billings, which became a city, all right—not as big as Minneapolis, but the outward spread of its stain couldn’t be stemmed or contained. Sooner or later, it would swell to the size of any city Back East—bloated by a cancer that could never be excised.

  Now and then, during the gray stretch of years, I ventured down to Helena, and there I orbited Jessie’s school. Never had I ceased to ache for my daughter—for one word from her, for a single glance to reassure me that she was well and whole, that she had a future in this mad, unrecognizable world, even if I did not.

  By 1903, Jessie was sixteen years old—old enough to make her own way. And she did intend to make her way, I knew, for Lije had written me once in Billings to tell me what he had learned of Jessie’s life. She had done well in her fancy school, but though she was bright and hard-working, she decided not to venture to the east-coast colleges, after all. Rather, Jessie chose to stay on in Helena, and take up as apprentice to a well-to-do seamstress. She had developed a knack for the needle and had taken a shine to fashion and style—she told her uncle Lije all about it in a letter. She would not go Back East (she wrote to Lije) because she had seen a postcard of New York City and it looked a grim and heartless place. That was the words she used: It looks a grim and heartless place; I’ve no desire to leave behind this beautiful country where I feel quite at home. Those words was so pretty to me, when I read them in Lije’s letter. I thought my girl could write as well as any fancy novelist whose lies I ever read.

  Jessie told Lije, too, that she never intended to marry. She preferred to work and make her own way. She had read the writings of some high-minded Back-East lady in that school of hers, one of the white-clad suffragists who exhorted girls not to marry, but to heed a special call for special work. When I read Lije’s report of my Jessie’s heart, I swear I never felt prouder of that girl—and that’s a heap of praise, for nothing in this miserable life ever made me proud except for my good girl Jessie.

  Those long years, those gray years, when I drifted (half-senseless) between Billings and Helena. I should have given up my wild ways, for they was awful unbecoming of a woman past fifty years. But I no longer cared to maintain a pretense of dignity. What was the use? Legend I might have been, but my fame never saved me from penury. What would dignity have brought me, other than sympathetic smiles from the folks who saw my outstretched hand and walked by without dropping a penny in my palm?

  So my wildness continued. Mine was the lashing out of a creature caught in a trap—one who knows its fate is sealed, one who clashes its teeth against a foe it knows it can’t subdue. I raised Hell in saloons and taverns. I made a nuisance of myself on city streets. Tales of my exploits still made the papers, though even in my drunken state, I could tell that reports of my legendary self had changed in tone from fondness to grim disapproval. Whenever I could get my hands on a paper, I scanned the damn thing, sheepish and cringing, for Calamity’s name. In that way, I learned what dreadful things I had said or done while I bobbed and floundered in the whiskey, for I had little memory of my own exploits by then.

  Now and again, the newspaper reports of Calamity Jane took a different shape altogether. Columnists hashed endlessly over my reported adventures, all the while opining on the uncivilized natur
e of the West, bemoaning the need for good people of clean conscience and respectable living to go and tame the wild women and men. How can we call this America? the writers asked. Are we not more civil than this?

  Once, while I huddled across’t the street from Jessie’s school, pining for a glance of my dear child, I happened across’t a column written by none other than Buffalo Bill Cody himself. Calamity Jane does not deserve the scorn heaped upon her by so-called reporters, Cody said, who have never met the woman herself, but who merely re-circulate sordid rumors of that good lady’s doings for the sake of titillation. I knew Miss Jane personally, Cody said, while she toured with my Wild West Show. I can vouch for her character, and the editor of this paper should cease to besmirch a good woman’s name.

  Cody’s words was true enough. While I toured with his show, I held myself more rigidly upright than at any point in my life. But I knew how disgracefully I had fallen since the Buffalo Bill days. I knew—and that’s why I never responded the following week, when that same paper ran a notice placed by none other than Josephine Brake. She had secured a pension for me (Josephine claimed) from Buffalo Bill Cody, in thanks for the good works I performed while traveling with his exhibition. She would send every penny to me if I would come out to see her, and prove that I was sober.

  I was not sober, so I did not write.

  You’re wondering, ain’t you, how I ended up back here in Deadwood. It’s a reasonable curiosity, for you will remember that once I left Bill Cody’s exhibition, I swore never to return to this place. And anyhow, Jessie was all growed up and putting down roots in Helena. There seems little sense in my being here now, yet here I am, undeniable, the One and Only In the Flesh, setting on this bar stool beside you.