Calamity

by Libbie Hawker

  They buried me next to him—right by his side. I expect Jessie saw to that; it was her last act of kindness towards me—her poor and broken, her inadequate mother—before she returned to her good life, her ready future. They buried me there, at Wild Bill’s side, and I lie beside him still. And yet I don’t. Here I am, talking to you, watching that whiskey slide down your throat, wishing it was my throat, my harsh burn to feel, my life to live again.

  And now you know the truth of it, the life I lived.

  I could walk outside and show you, if you please, the world I knew, the world that still lives. It vanishes a little more, day by day, but its trace is pressed into the hard, yellow earth. My feet know the way. You can find it with your fingers, like the cut of an arrowhead scored into old, dry bone. Walk with me out into Deadwood—the place that is Deadwood now. Stand just there, at the edge of the tavern’s parking lot, where pavement crumbles into ochre dust. Shut your eyes. See beyond the glare of headlights; listen past the moan of the interstate. You will find me in the silence. I stand at the end of the last stage line. Before me, ordered and straight and black-metal clean, the railway births itself, sleepers falling smack against the earth in a perfect rhythm. The line goes on toward an endless future. Behind me, a sage wind is rising. A drift of trail dust moves through Deadwood. It shines in the setting sun.

  Historical Note and Author’s Remarks

  There’s something about the West that gets under your skin. Like a porcupine’s quills, the West embeds itself in the heart with a sharp stab, and little by little it works its way in, until its hooks are set deep and it can’t be removed—not without greater pain and trauma.

  I was born in 1980 in Rexburg, a tiny college town in southeast Idaho, a place surrounded by mountains and buttes, green river valleys and cold ravines of black lava stone. Idaho, like most of the West, is a place of contradictions: A land both severe and poetic; tamed by agriculture yet owned by wild things; a place that is both hard and home. For all its flat brown nothingness and its isolation, its long stretches of monotony, I can’t ever think of the region of my birth without a lump rising to my throat and tears burning my eyes. I was born with the quill inside my heart. I may be a Northwesterner in the practical sense, but my soul is all West.

  In 2010 I was going through a divorce. My plan was to leave Seattle and move back to the Rocky Mountains the moment the proceedings had concluded—back to my place of origin, somewhere in the vicinity of the Grand Teton mountain range, and there seclude myself in some deep, dark-green, snow-scented valley. In the shadow of the mountains I love, and gloriously alone (only in the Rockies can one appreciate such a vast, towering lonesomeness) I would get on with living and write a brand-new chapter of my life.

  That didn’t happen. Before I could make the necessary arrangements to take myself back home, I fell crazy in love with Paul, who would become, three years later, my second husband. At the time, Paul was dedicated to a career that required him to live close to maritime ports, so the Rocky Mountains were out of the question if I wanted to keep this man in my life. As much as I loved Paul (still do) it was difficult for me to let go of my dream a homecoming and a resettling in the West (still is.) Even now, almost a decade after meeting Paul, I can feel those quill-hooks tearing at me, drawing me toward the landscape I love with a fierce and poignant pain.

  In 2015 the Historical Novel Society conference was held in Denver, Colorado, and I was not about to miss three days of partying with my fellow authors of historical fiction. (In case you’re wondering how historical novelists “party,” it mostly involves sipping coffee or tea while discussing the most minute details of one’s favorite slice of history. Also, we wear a lot of period costumes, which are made with fanatical accuracy. This is all very thrilling, I assure you.) It would have been cheaper and quicker to fly from Seattle to Denver, but the conference was just the excuse I needed to make a leisurely trip across the Intermountain West. I planned plenty of cushion time on either side of the conference, including three whole days to mope around the Grand Tetons, and set off for my big vacation.

  Although I’ve traveled through the West several times in my life, I’d never before made the trip alone. All that time with just my thoughts and the vast, heart-rending landscape did curious things to my mind. Everywhere I looked I saw the ghosts of my past, slender and pale, moving like mist among the sagebrush. I saw the life I might have had if I hadn’t met Paul—or hadn’t chosen to stay with him—but other specters haunted me, too.

  There are things we cannot change about our lives, things over which we have no control. Where we come from, who our parents are—that’s one of those factors beyond our power. Our origins are a toss of the dice, a flick of the card boss’s wrist. Sometimes fate deals a bad hand.

  My dad shaped and influenced me more than any other person in my life, more than anything—a work of art, a force of nature, a blind, crazy faith. What’s odd to me is that his influence was in his absence. We were close when I was a tiny kid—I have a few brief, cherished memories that remind me he was once a loving and very present father—but by the time I was six or seven years, old he was in the grip of severe mental illness. The only respite he could find from his illness was in the substances he came to abuse—alcohol first, then prescription narcotics, and finally heroin.

  Addiction is a monstrous thing. It strips away its victim’s dignity—sometimes their humanity, too. And it reaches beyond its victims to wound many other lives. Those who love the addicted must decide whether they’ll stay and watch their father or mother, their spouse or friend deteriorate and vanish—or whether they’ll leave their loved one behind with the hope that they will someday find recovery and peace. It was a hard choice, to separate myself from my father—and all the more difficult because I made that decision at a very young age, when I was just fifteen.

  By then, my father had been a sporadic and unpredictable presence in my life for nearly a decade. But he was still my father, and I loved him. He was—and will always be—so much more to me than his mental illness or his addiction. He was creative, bright, funny, with an enthusiasm for storytelling that I think I must have inherited from him. He was a brilliant artist whose stirring, light-filled paintings of the American West are still sought out by serious collectors to this day. My dad felt the West like a pulse under his skin, and his talent for depicting the landscape in his preferred medium—oil paint—fairly stops my heart whenever I think about it. I’m objective enough about my writing to feel confidence in my abilities. But when I consider how easily, how naturally my father expressed his love for the West with his brushes and pigments, I feel that my efforts in my chosen medium—words—can never compare.

  His ability to carve out a career in the arts made me realize that I could be a writer when I grew up, if I just wanted it badly enough—if I poured my passion into my art. His expression of his own loves—his dreams and his misted, light-filled longings—made me hope for his recovery, so that I could admire him without restraint. I know my love for the West, which is the sharp-hooked center of my very heart, comes from my love for my dad. He was undeniably a mess—a brilliant, tragic, beautiful, infuriating calamity. He died in his sleep when I was 23 and he was 49. He’d been in recovery for about two years, and as far as I know, he died sober. The knowledge that he spent his last days beyond the grip of addiction has remained a great comfort to me all these years later.

  I never realized how closely my experience of the West is tied up with the memory of my father until I made that drive out to Colorado in the summer of 2015. Every isolated town I passed reminded me of the summers I’d spent with my strange, distant dad in the canal-crossed farmlands between Rigby and Ririe, Idaho. Roadside convenience stores, their sides patinated with dust and age, brought back the taste of Reese’s peanut butter cups and blackberry soda, which Dad would buy me almost daily on those court-ordered visits. Buttes touched by fading red light held the contours of his face. And everywhere—in the long, ochre yellow o
f a dry plain touching a thunder-blue horizon, in a purple curve of the Snake River, in the umber crags of the lava heaves—I saw the colors of his palette.

  By the time I reached Denver I was wrung out and haunted. The quills in my raw heart ached. The fact that I arrived in the city at exactly the same time as a freak tornado seemed too significant for coincidence. I was ready to have a good time at the conference, but a persistent irritation had settled inside me, an itch I couldn’t scratch. After days of solitude in the Western landscape, I knew I wanted to write about my dad—not his biography, and not a family history, but something broader, something more accessible. Something that could touch more hearts than just my own. I wanted to write about emotion and addiction, love and loss, striving and failure—a brilliant, beautiful mess. But I couldn’t write such a book until I found the right subject. Who, in all the history of the West, could carry such a theme?

  A more practical problem weighed on me, too. I’d recently sold a novel to Lake Union Publishing—Mercer Girls—and I knew that fairly soon my editor would wonder what I’d have to offer next. I needed a very particular subject for my next historical novel if Mercer Girls was to work optimally within the framework of my business. I had to identify a historical figure whom fans of Mercer Girls would be likely to enjoy. She had to be female, had to exist in the late nineteenth century, and had to promise enough humor and fun to keep fans of Mercer Girls turning pages.

  It wasn’t until the second day of the conference that I ran into Calamity Jane, face-first in the midst of a panel about wild women of the West. One of the authors on the panel casually tossed out a remark about Calamity—something along the lines of, “Everybody thinks she was a famous scout and even a soldier, but the truth is that she was just a terribly afflicted alcoholic.” Just like that, the itch was scratched. Inspiration—even conviction—dawned like the sun on the Tetons, and I fumbled my phone out of my purse and excitedly tapped out an email to my editor: I’m doing my next book about Calamity Jane and it’s going to be really, really awesome. At that point, all I knew about Calamity was that hers was a famous name in the West and that she apparently struggled with addiction. But that was all I needed to know; I’d found the perfect vehicle for the story I wanted to tell.

  I began researching Calamity that very evening. While waiting for a fellow novelist to join me for dinner, I bought Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird and began reading it on the Kindle app on my phone. By the time my friend arrived I’d already highlighted so many passages that my wrist was getting sore, and my phone’s battery was almost dead. The more I read about Calamity—the real Calamity, not the towering legend she created to mask her true and tragic self—the more certain I became that I’d found the perfect subject for my novel. To my immense pleasure (and relief), I could recount a moving story of addiction, love, and loss without stretching the facts too far. Calamity Jane’s history was complicated and heavy enough to bring a tear to any reader’s eye. It needed virtually no embellishment to suit my purposes.

  Her real name was Martha Canary, and she was most likely born in the spring of 1856, though historians have had a hard time discerning her exact date of birth. Late in her life, Calamity’s only living came from the propagation of her own legend. In order to maintain her dazzling reputation, she had to prevent newspaper reporters and other interested parties from discovering too much about her, for the ugly truth never lurked very far beneath Calamity’s surface. Her early life was very much as I presented it in this novel—the most important exception being the timing of her mother’s death. Charlotte Burch Canary actually died in the Montana gold fields—I tinkered with the place and circumstances just to kick the story off faster—but otherwise, Martha/Calamity Jane’s childhood and family were as I depicted them. The exact cause of her father’s death is unrecorded, but he died while he was en route to Salt Lake City, freshly made a widower with his children in tow.

  As an orphan, it fell to Martha—who was between twelve and fourteen years old—to support her siblings. She took to sex work straight away, having few other options, and certainly no options that would pay as well. She really did place her siblings with other families, one by one, as the weight of so much responsibility proved too much for her young body and spirit to bear. I believe it must have been these early traumas that set her on her notorious life path and saddled her with the burden of alcoholism. I can hardly blame her. If I’d found myself in her situation, forced to take up sex work as a young girl merely to keep my brothers and sisters alive—and failing at that—I’m sure I would have ended up far more bitter and afflicted than Jane ever was.

  I read more about Calamity Jane, I was struck by her buoyant spirit. True, her character and her legacy were forged in loss and pain. But though her alcoholism often caused trouble, leading her to indulge in destructive behaviors, she was without question a kind-hearted and generous person, quick to laugh, eager to make friends, and with an overall enthusiasm for life.

  Her great tenderness for animals led her to mule- and bull-whacking careers, which she was able to maintain for a number of years. Her skill as a driver of animal teams almost kept her out of the dangerous world of sex work for good. And the fact that she nursed people who suffered from smallpox is well attested in several different sources, though the precise dates and locations of these stints as a nurse are difficult to verify. It’s possible that she acted as nurse to smallpox sufferers multiple times throughout her life. (Why she never caught the terrible disease herself isn’t known. Some who were exposed to smallpox in those days ate or drank preparations made from the scabs of smallpox wounds, which may have acted as a vaccination of sorts. There is also a genetic variation in the CCR5 gene that appears to provide natural immunity against certain viral diseases, smallpox included, and is present in about 10% of people of European descent.)

  I really began to like Calam on a personal level as I put in the work of researching and planning this novel. How could anyone fail to like her? More than a hundred years after her death, her personality still shines through every letter, journal entry, and newspaper article that was written about her true exploits.

  I say her true exploits because there’s a whole heap of fiction about Calamity Jane. That has been the case since Calam’s own time. I was never able to discern exactly how or why her fame began to spread, but spread it certainly did. She quickly became a fixture of the adventure novels that helped sell the idea of westward expansion to Americans living on the eastern side of the continent. She witnessed the birth of her own legend and watched it take shape, saw her name take on a personality of its own. The legend, alas, bore no resemblance to the truth Calamity Jane lived.

  Aside from altering the circumstances of her mother’s death, guessing on the smallpox incident, and shortening her stint with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (she really toured with Buffalo Bill for at least three years), all the other events depicted in this novel occurred how and as I portrayed them. Sources seem to agree that she had one daughter for certain, named Jessie and fathered by the ill-tempered and abusive Bill Steers, one of Calamity’s many common-law husbands. Calamity really did try to pass Jessie off as her granddaughter for reasons unknown. She also had at least one still birth while running her bullwhacking business. She may have had other children—the sources couldn’t seem to agree. I have invented accessory characters here and there for the sake of narrative color (Billy Voss, Red Nancy), or have inserted other notorious Western personages into Calamity Jane’s story (such as Molly B’Damn), but by and large, if I wrote a scene where something important happened to Calamity, it truly happened when and how I portrayed it—according to the available sources, that is, which I had to approach with caution. When you’re writing about a subject whose very livelihood depended on inflating the glamour of her own name, you must take certain accounts with a grain of salt. But I worked hard to faithfully depict as many parts of the verifiable historical record as I could. The result is a novel that cl
eaves as closely to truth as I believe any novel of Calamity Jane’s life may aspire to do. It was a project three and a half years in the making—my longest writing jag yet.

  Speaking of the countless fictions that surround this enigmatic subject, it may interest the reader to learn that I took the chapter titles from novels and newspaper accounts written about Calamity Jane and published during her time. The chapter titles were intended to contrast the vibrancy of her legend with the harsh realities of Calam’s actual life. It was a bittersweet process, combing through 19th-century writings about Calamity Jane and pulling out lines that might work as titles for the chapters I had already written. Hers was a life of struggle and heartbreak, patiently endured under the shadow of her fictionalized brilliance.

  Most affecting of all were the many novels and stories written about Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane. Calam seemed to have loved Wild Bill—passionately, completely, and hopelessly. Even after his death—which she truly did witness, as depicted in this book—she went on carrying his torch. She told some people that her daughter Jessie was fathered by Wild Bill in what I can only assume was a case of wistful longing. She really did keep his pocket watch and a golden, ruby-eyed snake ring throughout most of her life—and the ring truly was stolen while she lay in the grips of an alcoholic black-out. And the last photo of Calam was taken at Bill’s grave, holding a silk flower. When she died only a few days later in a Deadwood saloon, she was laid to rest at Bill’s side.

  I can’t tell you what inspired me to end this novel in modern times, with the revelation that “Short Pants” is actually the reader him- or herself, listening to the ghost of Calamity Jane spill out her true story in present-day Deadwood. The thought simply came to me and stuck in my head, with that peculiar, quiet persistence I’ve come to recognize as the flourishing of a Good Idea. But I knew I’d made the right decision when I gave the manuscript to a friend to read. This particular friend has struggled with addiction herself, and after reading the book, she said to me, “Thank you for making Calamity Jane more than just an alcoholic. You gave her dimension and life beyond her addiction. You made her addiction understandable. And somehow having it end in the present day makes it feel that much more real—like you aren’t just writing about an addict from history; you’re writing about addiction itself, as a contemporary problem that affects real people.”