I’m looking for my mother; she spent time in Deadwood.
Long as you’re not looking for your father! he laughed, and I knew by that laugh that it had been years since he had really thought anything was funny.
Maybe you met her; her name was Martha Canary—
—Calamity Jane! he finished my sentence. For the first time he relaxed and looked at me as if trying to see my features.
Calamity Jane, he said softly. He dropped his chin to his chest and the bartender filled his glass again. The statuary had dismantled itself and exited the stage and two men wearing only pants and suspenders were pretending to wrestle in order to demonstrate a bizarre range of motion.
Lew Spencer undid the cufflink at his wrist and folded back his sleeve to show the deep pits of smallpox scars. I looked at his face and saw tiny beads of sweat resting on thick makeup. He winked at me.
They wouldn’t let me in the tents so she had to come to my bedroom, where I was hid, in Mollie’s old cabin. She didn’t care what anyone said. I can’t even tell you what it means to have someone hold your hand and help you sit up and bring you water when you have been all alone expecting to die. It’s ugly too, so ugly my wife wouldn’t look, wouldn’t come to see me in that cold shack. And it’s dangerous, and Calamity didn’t even know me except as someone that had chided her for being ugly. She was, he laughed falsely, a dirty-looking sow. And I was a foolish young man. I lived to be a bitter old man. But I lived.
I hope you find her. Tell her Lew Spencer is alive still. Tell her she can stay here for free as long as she wants, drinks and food on the house. Tell her that the woman who is better than her does not exist. None of my wives was half so kind, though they were all pretty.
I sat beside him collecting my thoughts, thinking about her caring for strangers but not caring for me.
You can stay here, if you need a place. You have a horse?
No. I lost my horse.
You’re really her daughter?
Yes.
Do you need some help with something? Do you need a horse or train fare? Do you know where you are going?
No. Yes. I’m going to Virginia City.
She’s not there. She was at the Pan-American Exposition two years ago and after that she roamed around a lot. But I know she’s not in Virginia City. Your best bet is to go to Billings and see if Mollie Johnson has any idea. Or you can go straight to Deadwood and ask Dora DuFran. Excuse me; I have to perform.
He left me and leapt back up in front of the lights. A woman in a thin blue dress was wheeled onstage on a bed by a child who fled immediately to the wings. Lew knelt beside the bed and took her hand and crooned,
Oh, why should the girl of my soul be in tears at a meeting of rapture like this?
Oh, why should the girl of my soul be in tears at a meeting of rapture like this?
When the gloom of the past and the sorrows of years have been paid by a moment of bliss.
IN THE morning I woke in a soft bed with the sun shining on my face. I came down from my room. The bar and the stage were empty, swept clean. The space was so clean that the brass rail around the bar glowed in the sunlight pouring in from the tall windows. There was a smell of wax and soapy water. From the kitchen came the smell of bacon frying. I sat down at one of the card tables and stared at the silent pianola.
Are you hungry? Lew asked, walking in from the kitchen with two plates of steaming eggs and glistening bacon.
Yes.
Yes. No. Yes. You don’t talk much.
It was a wonderful show last night, I said as he put a plate down before me and sat across from me with his own. Without the makeup I could see his face was deeply scarred, as if someone had stabbed him with an awl a thousand times.
I’m glad you liked it. The trapeze act is hard in a space like this. He looked up at the vaulted ceiling where the two trapezes were tied to heavy beams.
I brought these for you, he said and he deposited three postcards on the table in front of me. On each was an image of a rough-looking woman.
Is that her? I said, feeling as if the wind had knocked me off a rooftop.
That’s her big face, he said and laughed.
She does have a big face, I whispered.
I’m sorry I called her a sow, he said, I’m sorry I called her ugly. She wasn’t ugly.
He sat across from me and ate without disturbing my racing thoughts. I felt weak. I felt he must hear my heart beating. After a while he got up and went into the kitchen and came back with two cups of coffee.
The first picture was labelled on the back Martha Canary (Calamity Jane), Black Hills, 1875. There was a stamp-shaped design in the upper right-hand corner.
Looking at her looking back at me from my hand I thought, this is where you put the stamp to send the postcard in which you tell someone that you saw her.
In the picture she leans on a large rock face, half lying down; the lichen on the stone shows up white in the photograph, as does the bright handkerchief around her neck. There is a skinny black tree bare of leaves beside her. It must have been fall. She looks straight at the camera, unsmiling but relaxed. She wears boots, trousers, a dark shirt with the cuffs rolled up and a brimmed hat. There is a mountain in the background and the furry outline of conifers. She would be somewhere between nineteen and twenty-three in this picture.
The second picture is labelled The One and Original Calamity Jane, Miles City, Montana, 1880–1882. It is an obvious studio shot. She sits, one arm on the top of a padded curved armchair, a plain band on her wedding finger. There is an Aztec design on the rug or the thick blanket over the back of the chair and under her arm. She is wearing a long dark dress with scalloped white cuffs peeking out from the conservative sleeves and a large white lace bib tied around her throat. The skirt is drawn into a bustle that peeks out from her hip and large bows of the same plain dark material run along the bustle-line. Her hair is ribbed with iron curls; a few tight ringlets lie on her forehead. There is a womanly hat, a stylish hat, on her head, decorated with bands of something that looks like tight little feathers. She looks stern or sad, stiff. She looks somewhat older than she could be but still very strong.
The third postcard is the most recent, from the Pan-American Exposition, 1901. She is dressed in full cowboy-on-exhibition beaded buckskin regalia, fancy gloves, a sharp, stiff hat. Her horse is beautiful; she has a white band down the middle of her sweet face. There is a lasso at the horse’s shoulder and the design on her saddle blanket matches the design on Jane’s suit. Jane holds the reins, arresting her horse. Much much thinner, in this photo almost drawn, she looks down at the photographer. There are white tents in the background. Her face is set in a deep, complicit frown.
I turned the postcards over and over again as I searched for some trace of me in her.
You can have them, he said. I bought them from her when she passed through. She was awfully down.
Thank you, I said. I did not speak again for minutes. When I did speak it was to shake myself free. Where did you learn to sing and dance and play like that? I asked him.
He stirred his coffee with his fork.
You want to hear my story? he said.
I nodded.
I’m like you, he said. I never knew my parents. They died of yellow jack when I was two. He straightened in his chair and put a hand to his chest, bowing his head.
Allow me to perform for you, he said.
Lew Spencer
I ALWAYS HOPED THAT I WAS PART APACHE AND belonged here, or that I was something new, of Africa and America at once, a citizen of the world and not just the ungrateful ancestor of honest people stolen and dragged across the ocean to be slaves. Not just the son of two people who worked too hard their whole lives only to die in exile in their own excrement, for that’s how you die of yellow fever. Forgive me this long recitation of my life, which I hope is in the Apache style.
We had a lot in common, your mother and I. But Calamity never wanted to perform. She did it to please people, t
o fill an obligation, to save herself from starvation. I grew up wanting to be a minstrel and see the world.
I lived with my grandmother in Washington, D.C. She was strict but I was her favourite person in the world. My grandmother took me to see the old Kunkels one Saturday when I was nine. She didn’t like music that wasn’t Church but she wanted to please me and I cannot convey the revelation that struck me seeing a troupe of coloured folks on the stage performing, being in the centre of everything. I was in awe of the banjo solo and resolved on the spot to be a Negro minstrel. Mr. Ford, in whose theatre President Lincoln was assassinated, was the Kunkels’ agent. My grandmother pointed him out to me as she told me about poor Mr. Lincoln, who she thought a hero. I got up out of my seat after the show and walked up to Mr. Ford and told him my ambitions. He laughed and introduced me to Mr. Kunkel who lit up a cigar and asked my age. I told them I was nine but very smart and eager to learn, and they promised, no doubt out of amusement or to escape me, to take me with them on a new travelling show when I was ready.
I did laundry and dishes at every establishment that would have me and I lay there in my cot at night making up songs in my head about heroes and ladies and thinking of circuses and shows. In the day I swept floors and brushed horses and every kind of work I could think of until my hands were raw and my arms were weak and then I bought a used banjo. I screwed pennies to the heels of my boots and I played and danced day and night until my grandmother began to fight with me and the neighbours in the boarding house complained but nothing could stop me. I practised until my fingers bled and my toes went numb. I practised until the landlord gave us a warning. And then I asked our preacher if I could practise in the church. He said no. I had to practise in the streets. The racket that I made at all hours and places can only be explained by youthful ambition, which is too broad to ever be contained by reality.
Well, the Kunkels never came back for me, and so, at the tender age of thirteen I ran away from home to find them. I travelled all over the Western lakes on the steamboats with my banjo, one suit that had belonged to my father and which I was never to grow into, and a wallet that ate what little money I put between its leather lips. I came pretty close to starving, but even after I gave up looking for the Kunkels I still dreamt of undertaking a barefoot tour of Europe and eating applause. I grieved for my dead parents and for my grandmother, who, I knew, would be broken by my absence. She had given me her waxing years and would need me when she waned. But I never returned and I never wrote. I evaded the House of Vagrancy and turned my coppers into a bankable sum by trading papers and books on the steamer Northern Indiana, commanded by the late Captain Pheatt. That old man threatened to throw me overboard every night when I clog-danced on the deck over his stateroom but he never disposed of me.
Once the steamer was laid up for the winter, I found a place to board in Toledo and argued a way to return to school. Of course that was when I ran into Ford and the Kunkels again and they again promised me that when I was ready they would take me with them. In the course of a month I abandoned everything to bring together a band of boys from school who all were failing chemistry. I formed with these boys a musical troupe with myself the appointed musical director.
Our instruments consisted of my banjo, three sets of bones, a tambourine, a bent triangle and a wheezy accordion. With this motley of soundmakers we set about making life miserable for everyone in the neighbourhood. On certain evenings a mob of angry neighbours rushed from the building into the street and stared up at our windows and yelled at us with pure wrath. I leaned out and sang back, Hallelujah!
It is no great confession to say that the truth is my little troupe and I were terrible, beyond terrible; there were cats that pled with us to stop screeching. I spent what was left of my earnings, desperate to get us to a point that warranted any hope of auditioning well should we have the chance to perform for Ford and Kunkel. After many long months of screeching we were turned out by our landlord and our furniture and instruments were seized. I was completely ruined, devastated.
Two of my friends were staying at the rooms of an aunt and I was looking for someone to blame for sabotaging my dreams. I went to that woman’s place already brewed for fighting and I stepped in her open door and found the quiet living room with its braided rug and the brown daguerrotypes of stiff family members lined up on the desk under the thick mirror and I saw my own face floating there, covered in dust. I heard something from the bedroom and I walked in without speaking. On the bed my two friends were naked, sleeping. They lay on top of the sheets. Their bodies were shining with sweat. The hand of one rested on the shoulder of the other. The intimacy hit me like a stroke in my brain. I felt hatred well up in me. That hatred was the expelled gas of my punctured dreams under so much pressure. I took the heavy lamp beside the bed and smashed it down on one of their faces. To this day I don’t remember which one I hit or what I thought while doing it. He woke screaming and so did my other friend. They wrestled me to the floor. I was possessed and spitting every kind of foul word I could find. They threw me out and locked the door and I cried in the hallway leaning on that door, knowing I was wrong and no one loved me.
I am so ashamed even now that I can only remember for a second what his face looked like with his nose pushed over his cheek and his upper lip split open, and then it hurts too much and I push it away, but it always returns. My grandmother used to say to me that as you go through life you should try to injure as few people as possible. I thought she was talking Jesus but she meant it literally. She meant that it is hard to be good but it is important to be good. I failed her in that too.
That day I saw a poster for a show featuring a woman in men’s clothes with a pistol in each hand. She was an Indian named Pauline with long black hair, bear claws in a necklace around her throat; she was the secret dream and the manifest terror of her audience. I stood for minutes and looked at the woman, who I felt a strong affinity for. I thought if I could be like her and have a stage of my own, I would change the world and row on row of white people would applaud until their hands bled. When the spell broke I sucked down my disappointment and my rage and I left town alone.
I worked the trains, singing and dancing in the aisles and selling newspapers and water until the middle of summer of 1876 when cholera became so prevalent in the Western cities that I thought it prudent to retire. In this way I managed to avoid the Ashtabula Horror, although I can still picture myself standing in the aisles hearing the great cracking of the bridge fracture and I can feel myself falling, falling with all those strangers into a watery abyss. I remember it because it was my fate in some other life.
After some indecisiveness, I settled in Jefferson City. One evening I strolled into the Diamond Mine, and, stepping to the bar, which came up to my juvenile shoulders—I was, by then, five foot tall—I demanded of the bartender if he had any good pale brandy. He waited a second and said that he had. The patrons all leaned in to hear me order. I told him in an imperative tone to give me a ten-cent drink, and none of his instant-death kind, either. This made a sensation among the coloured swells seated at the fashionable tables at the back. They took my swaggering to be the real confidence of a tiny man and thought me dangerous, but I was just sick and tired, and pale brandy had been prescribed to me as the best preventative of cholera. I swallowed my drink, paid for the brandy, was preparing to go when I heard this dialogue behind me.
Who, for pity’s sake, is that?
That? That there is just the boy you want!
Turning, I saw a couple of swells sitting together at the end of the room. One of them called me over and introduced me to Johnny Booker. Now, I had heard the songs then popular: “Meet Johnny Booker in the Bowling Green” and “Johnny Booker Help Dis’ Nigger,” and when I was aware that I was standing before the person to whose glory these songs were written, it was difficult to hold my jellied skeleton upright. I looked on this man as unquestionably the greatest Negro minstrel, the greatest man on earth. I felt about him the way Cal
amity Jane felt about Wild Bill; I would have borne his children.
In the course of a few minutes I was conducted to a backroom where I was made to dance juba to the time Johnny Booker kept by clapping his hands. He loved me! I was engaged on the spot and made a jig-dancer with a weekly salary of five dollars and all my expenses paid.
You can’t imagine the excitement with which I prepared for the stage. Napoleon in his coronation robes was not prouder or happier than I was in my flannel knee-pants, corked face and woolly wig, bowing for my audience. That first show I was called out for three encores. I do not remember any embarrassment, only a superior joy at filling the house and dancing in front of more heads than I could count. The day after my first performance I saw a poster of myself with one arm and one leg elevated in the act of performing juba over a miniature city. I was dancing over the heads of passersby, over the carts and carriages, over the bridges and churches. I was an angel. I was godlike.
It was glorious. I met and was equal to many other performers, some of whom I had admired for a long time, some of whom were famous! I felt the equal of the president and I know I could have shook his hand with pride if he could be seen at a Negro show.
The first part of our performance we gave with white-faces. I played a little Scotch girl in plaid petticoats, who executes the Highland fling. By practising all day most days I came to understand my role and even to resent the world from the point of view of a little redhead. I learned to spin and knock and toss about the tambourine on the end of my forefinger. At last, as the Scotch girl, I was promoted to be one of the end men in the first part of the performances. In addition to my jig I now appeared in all sorts of pas de deux. I took the principal parts in Negro ballads, and danced “Lucy Long.” I am told I was enchanting.
In Calamity's Wake Page 11
