Battery of gunshots discharged in ear.
Beating, on an iron bar, tremulous tingling in ear.
Bells, ringing in the distance.
Bird wings fluttering momentarily in ear.
Biting of electric sparks on ear.
Blood bursting out of earlobes.
Blowing, into ear, someone was.
Boring of worms in canal of the ear.
Breath came from ears instead of lungs.
Cannonading.
Cat spitting in ear.
Coals glowing in small spots on ear.
Coldness in ear with numbness extending to cheeks and lips.
Crackling of straw on motion of jaws.
Crawling, out of ear.
Creaking like turning of wooden screw in ear.
Crying of animals in ear.
Detonating in ears.
Digging in ear with blunt piece of wood.
Echoes in ear.
Forcing, of brain through skull out of ear.
Heat, streaming out of ear.
Hissing, of boiling water.
Ice, thin crackling.
Insects.
Instruments.
Jumping of fleas off of ear.
Kettledrums.
Knife, dull, pressing.
Landslide.
Locomotive.
Murmuring.
Noise.
Opening and closing in right ear like a fluttering.
Opening, in right ear through which air could penetrate.
Parchment drawn over ear on which I was lying.
Rain in ear.
Rain, striking ground beside ears.
Reports, of distant guns in ears.
Roaring, in ears like draft through a stove.
Roaring, like a partridge drumming.
Roaring, of storm in a forest.
Roaring, of waterfall.
Rolled back and forth shaking head.
Running, from ears, ice-cold water.
Running, out of right ear, hot water.
Rushing in ear of a stream of blood.
Rushing, through small hole in ear.
Rushing, of escaping steam.
Seashell in left ear.
Snapping.
Sound, a strange voice.
Sound, of bats.
Sound, of bells.
Sound, of clock striking.
Sound, my voice, like someone else’s voice speaking.
Sound, walking at night, I hear someone.
Straighten out lobe of ear.
Teakettle beginning to boil.
Teakettle, singing.
Thread drawn through ear.
Thunder rumbling.
Twittering, of young mice.
Wax flowing from ear.
Windstorm.
Wood, stacking it for fire.
Worms, crawling under ears.
You singing.
Zither of nerve endings played by a demon.
Martha
IN CAIRO SHE SAW THE GREAT MISSISSIPPI LIT up by the fires of an execution. She sat on her horse on the bank watching as a Negro woman, the owner of a gambling saloon on an old wharf-boat moored to the levee of the town, was threatened from the bank by a group of twenty figures bearing torches. Torchlight falling on the faces of the vigilantes drew long shadows from their eyes to their jaws, making them look ghoulish.
Calamity called to a boy in raggy trousers running towards the crowd: Boy, what happened? What’s happening?
The boy turned, jogging backwards, to answer her. They’re goin’ to lynch her, he said. She bin winnin’ all their money.
Calamity rode her horse around to get a better look at the scene. The crowd grew as more and more people ran to the wharf with sticks and torches and rifles. Soon it was a hundred strong and fire heated the air. On the wharf-boat the thin Negro woman in a grey dress stood, yelling back at her would-be killers, Get away from here. You too stupid to keep your money! Get away from here! The Lord won’t forgive you people if you shed my blood! You all going to Hell like demons! You gonna burn! You gonna burn, not me. Get away from here!
The vigilantes began to move into small boats and they rowed over. Soon the black lines of rifle stocks were like spokes surrounding the woman on the wharf-boat. Someone gave a signal, though Calamity didn’t see or hear it, and the boat was set afire and cut adrift. As it floated out into the current, the woman on the bow fell to her knees screaming and crying and covering her eyes with her hands. After a minute she got to her feet and went into the cabin. The vigilantes were calling to each other, We got her now! We got her! Where is she? Can you see her?
When the wharf-boat was well into the stream the woman appeared standing at the freight opening. Her hair was wild, released from its severe bun, her eyes were wide and her whole body tensed. She rolled a large keg of powder into the middle of the open space. She stood in the light of her burning craft, with a cocked musket in her arms, the muzzle plunged into the keg of powder.
I dare you, she screamed, I dare you to come on and take me! You demons from the underworld, you white Satans, you whoremongers, you come and get me!
The night was soaked in silence. The small boats kept at a proper distance now, their occupants floating, stunned. The flames licked up the sides of the wharf-boat, growing thicker and brighter until enormous sheets of flame cradled the boat. The woman stood, floating down into the darkness that swallowed the river, with her cocked musket still in the keg of powder. She cursed and defied her executioners. Calamity rode to the water, swung off her horse and waded in. She swam, limbs thrashing in the water, towards the woman.
Jump, she yelled. I won’t let them lynch you. Jump and swim away from the boat. She screamed at the vigilantes, Put your guns down. Put your guns down. She’s a woman. Are you going to burn her alive? Are you gonna hang a woman? Put your guns down. Goddammit, put your guns down!
Calamity heard an explosion. It was a boom that struck her in the gut; she felt it move through her. She saw the wharf-boat sink. Sparks showered the water, fell on her wet hair.
Damn you! she screamed. Damn you! Damn you! Damn you! She smacked and punched and kicked the water as she waded back to shore.
There was a long silence from the people in the boats. Their arms were at their sides, weapons on the ground. Their expressions were astonished. A number finally spoke out in sincere voices as if to a jury:
She didn’t have to do that.
I didn’t have the heart to lynch a woman nigger.
We would have taken her in for cheatin’, that’s all. We were only trying to frighten her.
Nigger woman was crazy.
She had a death wish.
Don’t they all.
Miette
SO, YOU ARE ALIVE. THAT’S GOOD NEWS!
I must have passed out from the pain, while my horse found the trail and kept us moving, for when I heard that voice, my eye was on her neck and my arms were numb. I called, Whoa, and she stood still.
The voice belonged to a cheery little man mounted on a giant horse, a black mountain of a horse with a white heart on its chest and a white mane and tail. The man’s moustache was equally oversized, hiding all of his lower face but the fraction of a lip and a small bit of chin.
He smiled at me and chuckled. I thought you were dead! he said.
Not yet.
Well you were headed in the right direction.
For Virginia City?
No, you are headed the opposite direction of Virginia City. You were headed in the right direction for death, riding around unconscious.
I looked around me. The trail looked the same ahead as behind.
Are you sure I’m going the wrong way? I said. Every word sent pain shooting across my scalp. My arms and legs felt stuffed with sawdust.
Yup, I just came from visiting my sister at Alder Gulch. You need a doctor to look at that ear, he said, moving his horse in and leaning down to peer at my head. He whistled through missing teeth. You need some hel
p or you are gonna lose that head, he said. If you don’t mind Indians I have some friends nearby who could fix you up better than any misfit money-hungry doctor.
I looked at him. His brow was crinkled with such concern it was comical. His horse and my horse assessed each other, waiting for an answer.
Yes, I said.
WE FOLLOWED him towards an encampment. I struggled to stay conscious through the pain. He called the Indians Blackfeet and when I corrected him, struggling to say Blackfoot, he said, Oh, you are a Canadian!
I stopped talking. It wasn’t that he was saying anything wrong but opening my mouth to answer the man was enough to make me want to murder myself.
I could smell my wound and I felt a warm sticky flow down my neck. As we passed a rock formation he waved and I saw an Indian girl on horseback. From her expression I knew I must look mostly dead. She led us to a big campsite. There were twenty rings of teepees in large open clusters between two coulees. Five cairns were arranged along small hills at the north end of the camp. There were Cree and a few Assiniboine and some from other tribes there, but this was the Blackfoot reservation. She exchanged a few words with my rescuer and then with my horse and then she caught me as I fell from my saddle.
With the help of some friends she brought me to her family. I looked up at their faces as they carried me. I had never seen such beautiful eyes.
I lapsed into unconsciousness again and when I woke I lay within a circle of women in a large teepee. They had wrapped me tightly in blankets, soaked my hair with water, mopped the blood from my head, neck and shoulder, and tied a poultice to the wound.
Apos-ipoca, one woman said and made the sign for dry-root.
I lay on my back on the soft earth and turned my head to watch an old woman laying out a sheet and then spreading bright beads of saskatoon berries across it to dry.
How’s that? someone asked me.
Thank you.
A WOMAN and her daughter tended to me, clucking at the look of my ear. They called me sister-in-law. I didn’t know why. Still, it was full of kindness. I knew by the movement of their voices that I had lost my hearing on the wounded side. The hours were different in length depending on the level of my pain. The painful hours were like tacks in my brain and the smoky minutes spread out over everything. I sucked on chokecherry mash and bit the inside of my cheek when they checked my ear. I told them about the woman at the well, about my father and how he had sent me to find my mother.
That was not her, one woman signed. That woman is crazy since the war.
Yes, said the old man, whose name was Theophilus Little. That poor woman is one of the common casualties of the war. She lost everything but the conviction that her children are still out there somewhere.
WHEN WE were alone Theophilus smoked a pipe and did not speak much, although he laughed often at his own thoughts. His laugh was a rumble from the chest, almost like pleurisy. I slept and slept, waking most often when my head was being gently examined or my body shifted into a seated position so that delicious stew could be pushed through my lips.
As the days passed, the pain in my head grew noisy and hot; I hated even to move my neck. But when I lay perfectly still, I listened to the language of the people around me. It brought me back to Zita. Theophilus called the mother Lizzy and the daughter Poesa. Children and other adults came and went, clearly asking after me. Outside I heard grandmothers singing to babies and the horses gaily neighing. Lizzy and Poesa spoke some English and I some Blackfoot but mostly we communicated by signs.
Pain? signed Poesa.
More, I signed.
Poesa bid me to lie down and she spoke to her friends for some minutes.
While they spoke I stared at the interior of the cone of the ceiling. My head expanded and contracted around the drum of my bloody heartbeart.
IN THE night I woke shaking, the uncontrollable movements of my body adding to my pain. Poesa was there, watching me. She fed me and wet my face, wiped at the eternal sweat. She swaddled me tightly in blankets against my weak protests and fanned me with my hat. She sang me back to sleep as if I were her own sister.
I woke in the dark and she was there, asleep at first and then woken by me. She lifted my bandage and clucked when I gasped.
Pain bad, she said.
I nodded. I hurt too much to speak or sign.
She nodded and then she pulled up her clothes to show me a scar in the centre of her belly, another naval, made by a De-Creator.
I live, she signed. Your wound is not as bad as this.
How? I signed.
She shook her head.
Thank you for saving me, I signed.
She wiped my face and neck again. She lifted the packing and examined my wound carefully while I clenched my teeth. She poured water into the wound and then packed it again with agrimony.
The fever is good.
Is my horse here?
Your horse is good. She is outside waiting for you.
She sat back and watched me burn. I saw her there through drifting eyelids whenever pain pushed me up to the surface of consciousness.
THEOPHILUS STAYED on, sleeping in a tent he erected outside of the teepee. He came often to sit with me after the draining and washing and packing of my wound was done. He sat on his pack with his knees far apart and his elbows rested on them. His limbs were skinny as sticks inside his worn clothes but his feet were either bizarrely long and thin or else he wore shoes stuffed with newspaper.
Will you go on if the infection heals?
If it heals?
I’m sorry. I believe that it will continue to heal. Poesa says that it will and she knows her patients.
She’s very kind.
How do you feel?
Less dead. If I don’t move or breathe then not so bad. When she pulls the stuffing out of my head I feel like murdering myself.
Theophilus nodded. He leaned in close to sniff my head and whistled sympathetically.
Will you go on looking for your mother?
Yes. If I can I will.
After a long pause he asked, Why do you want to find her?
I don’t. Or, I don’t know. I promised I would.
A broken promise made to a dead man is seldom punished.
I had no answer to that and so I was silent. Theophilus cleared his throat a few times and rolled his eyes and rocked on his heels and swapped his cup from one hand to the other and back.
I love these people here, he said. Lizzy and her husband took me in one winter. I didn’t know nothing about Indians. They showed me a buffalo jump where the bones of the buffalo have been layered over thousands of years. Around the fire they told me about the dog days, the days before horses, and the winters of starvation. They made me feel like part of a human family.
That’s good, I said.
If you are who you say you are, I knew your daddy. That is, if you can trust Jane when she says that it was Bill.
I tried to sit up and cried out with pain. I held the packing against my ear and breathed hard through my teeth until I could speak.
How do you know him?
He’s dead; you don’t have to worry about finding Wild Bill. Is that who it is?
I don’t know. That’s what she told my father.
He looked confused. She couldna told Bill; he was dead before you were born.
No. I meant the man who adopted me.
Oh, well. That makes sense. I knew Wild Bill in Abilene when he was city marshal and I was selling lumber. He was a good man. I never knew anyone so sorry for killing a friend.
For killing a friend?
Yup. Say what you will, he was a gentleman of the old style in a savage new land.
I turned my head to listen better and Theophilus took this as encouragement to tell the tale he had been holding for me.
I WAS there ahead of the rush, got there in the winter, what year was it? 1881, 1882? Anyhow, in the early spring great herds of Texas cattle arrived to be shipped to the eastern markets, thousands upon tho
usands. The air smelled of manure and every conversation was held against great mooing. And with all those cows came cowboys, cattle owners, cattle buyers, gamblers, thieves, thugs, murderers, the painted women, the rich, the poor. Ha, talk about the Wild and Woolly West; everything calm went wild, everything went woolly.
I had a lumberyard on Texas Street near Walnut Street. The streets were always full, jammed full of saloons, gambling dens, dens of infamy of all kinds of character, cutthroats, robbers, murderers. There was money being passed from one end of the street to the other and back up again all day long. I’m not exaggerating, I have not half told it. It was indescribable, it was the wickedest place on earth, and I was there on Texas selling lumber.
Every cowboy, black, white, or Hispanic, that came into town had to pass my office door. There were hundreds of them every day and every son of a gun had two guns, each as long as an Ohio fence-rail. These boys came to town to drink and gamble, get rip-roaring crazy drunk, try the patience of the whores, and towards evening jump on their ponies and shoot hundreds of shots at the sky.
Wild Bill was our city marshal. He was much admired. He was born in the state of New York, his father a Presbyterian deacon, but, as he told it to me, he grew up leaning west. I just went west and just couldn’t stop going, he told me.
He stood over six feet tall, straight and erect, graceful as a woman. He had superb fingers, shoulders like a Hercules.
Like a Hercules? I could not resist.
Yes, yes, your father was a handsome man. The women loved him. He had gold hair flowing to his shoulders, an eagle’s eye and two big ivory-handled guns, loaded to the muzzle, always hanging on his belt. I tell you this not to win your favour. The bad men feared him. He never missed his mark when he fired those guns and the bad men fled from him as mice flee from a storm.
He killed someone?
Yes.
Who?
He killed Phil Coe. Oh, and a few others. He was not a violent man but you must understand it was hardly possible back then to get through your whole day not killing someone. Phil Coe ran the Bull’s Head saloon. He was a vile character who for no reason I ever knew just hated Bill. Well, for some cause he vowed to secure Bill’s death, marshal or no. Not having the courage to do it himself, but having many a drunk indebted to him, he filled two hundred cowboys with whisky, one day, intending to get them into trouble with Wild Bill in his role as marshal, hoping that they would all get to shooting and in the bedlam Bill would get shot too. But Wild Bill learned of the scheme and cornered Coe, his two pistols drawn. Just as he pulled the triggers, a policeman rushed around the corner between the two men and the pistols and the shots from both guns entered that poor man’s body, killing him instantly. Of course, Bill then shot Coe twice in the belly. And then, whirling around with his two guns drawn on the drunken crowd of cowboys, Bill said, And now do any of you fellows want the rest of these bullets? Not a word was uttered. Get on your ponies and ride to your camps or I’ll shoot into you, Bill yelled.
In Calamity's Wake Page 7
