In Calamity's Wake (4 page)

I silently cursed her a liar and named her Hag. I heard her singing a lullaby to herself deep in the darkened house.

S
OME SAID SHE WAS A HIGHWAYMAN, A ROAD
agent, that she was involved with opium running, that she led gangs of Indians to lynch white men prospecting in the sacred hills. It can be said, wrote one skinny upstart, that Calamity Jane knows more about jail than about scouting, trooping or even bullwhacking.

S
HE WAS
known to liberate horses. After quarrelling with one husband, Steer, who beat her, hit her in the lip with a rock and tried to stab her, she tried to get him arrested. When that didn't work, when he beat her again with the heel of his boot, she tied him to a mule and left him in a stable. She took his saddle and his horse and rode right out of marriage.

S
HE ARRIVED
in Rawlins to see the swinging bodies of Jim Lacy and Opium Bob. Reporters crowded
around her and scribbled on their pads. She called the sight of the two dead men in the middle of the town
seeing the elephant
, which meant reaching one's destination, witnessing a flood or an epidemic, or encountering something that makes you go back the way that you came.

S
HE TOLD
a reporter who was sure he had her pinned for a stagecoach robbery that it might have been the night she married Jesse James.

It was a night for madness, she said.

A
MAN
named Maguire walked the streets of Deadwood handing out a colourful pamphlet to tourists. The pamphlet described the first time he saw her:

I
N
C
HEYENNE
the newspaper editor was so afraid of her that when she arrived in town and marched into his office to tell him to make his journalists stop printing lies he escaped through the skylight, leaving his trembling adolescent son to take down this message:

R
IDING THROUGH
Wyoming, into a remote mining camp, she found miners beaten and starving, their food, their horses and their equipment stolen by road agents, and themselves left without boots to figure a long trek over stony land to help. She rode to a grocery store ten miles away. She told the owner that men were dying and she needed help. He was intractable, arms folded over a big belly framed by suspenders. On the counter she saw a novel, placed down open-faced. She smiled.

Do you know who I am?

He looked at her and he looked down at the book's cover and he looked back at the guns strapped to her body.

Who am I? she asked.

She returned to the camp with food and blankets.

The storeowner became famous for being robbed by the Heroine of Whoop-Up.

S
HE APPEARED
in paintings and prints as a heroically pretty girl with flowing hair and dark-lined eyes, or else first as a man and then as a woman. Songs were written about her or adapted to refer to her. She sometimes sang those songs to herself as she drifted between states. She liked “Crazy Jane,” but more often she sang the one that sounded ideal.

I
WOKE BEFORE THE
H
AG AND WENT OUTSIDE TO
use the privy. Water dripping from the roof tiles gouged cups of mud out of the earth around the stone patio. The night was short and the morning air tasted new. I was sitting on the pot staring at a leaf stuck in one of the cups of mud; it startled every time a drop struck it. A storm had passed without me knowing it. Ragged hens huddled nearby on a roost, shivering to get the water off their feathers. I watched the clouds retreat and the spiteful sun emerge to send shocks of heat down on the rocks, which sparkled like the backs of frogs.

What's taking you so long on the privy, girl?

Nothing.

If you stay there too long a snake will come and bite you.

Go away, I muttered. Leave me alone.

She left me and I retreated into memories of an old friend, the Blackfoot woman my father called Zita after his sister and after the saint who had angels bake bread for her while she tended to people in need. I worked at a memory of flying kites on windy days. The three of us ran beneath the volcanic-looking columns of hoodoos.

Those are bad mothers, she said of the hoodoos. They were turned to stone and their heads were knocked off.

I
WAS
jealous of Zita's children. I needed her so much that I hid the kites when they tried to play. Zita sent them running home.

When the wind pulled too hard I called, help me! She put her hands over mine and together we tugged the somersaulting kite back from the sky. My father with his green eyes like glistening bottle-glass laughed at us wading in the long prairie grass.

He squeezed my hand as we walked.

Zita sent her children home, I said. He nodded.

I
LOOKED
up and saw the Hag in the doorway again. I felt a snap between my eyes and I had to dig my nails into the palms of my hands to keep from screaming at her.

It's called a privy because that's where people go to have some privacy, I said.

Did your father teach you to speak that way?

No, ma'am.

If you're done at that thing, empty it out and wash up and come help me shell some corn.

I have to be goin', ma'am.

Well, when you are done goin', come help me.

So I lingered as long as I could and then came in to help her. I felt that was my duty since she had let me stay the night.

It's fifty miles to Lethbridge, she said when I came in. Should take you a day or a day and a half depending on your pace. From there you can cross the border at Coutts into Sweetgrass. What's your horse's name? she asked. She was looking out the window.

I don't know.

She's not yours, then?

She's mine.

Then why doesn't she have a name? A pretty brown thing like that a person wants to name.

I took her from someone. He knows her name.

You stole that horse.

He was whipping her. He whipped her with a chain and then he left her outside a bar and I took her away. He didn't deserve a horse.

She sighed and crossed herself. Did your father know?

No. He was already sick.

And the man did not come after his horse?

He came after her. I sent him away.

Your father was weak for horses too, she said.

The corn was all shelled. I looked over her shoulder at my horse. She's more black than brown, I thought, with eyelashes long enough to make a breeze.

Am I pretty? I said before I could stop myself. As if to show how strange my query, a hummingbird paused at my eye level just outside the window, attracted by the heavy purple blossoms of cut jasmine in a vase on the sill. The woman looked at me. Behind her, on a shelf nailed to the wall, was a porcelain portrait of the Sacred Heart. Beside it hung a Catholic calendar with all the ferial and Ember days, the fish days and the feast days, and the seasons marked. I felt hot, afraid. I looked down on my shaking hands.

No, she whispered sadly. Her face was transparent with pity. You're not pretty. Your mother wasn't pretty either. But, she said and sighed, I heard that she loved animals too. Once she caught a man whipping a mule and she rode over to him and told him to stop. He cracked the whip at her head and sent her hat flying into the dirt. She drew a rifle on him and said, You put that back where you found it. And he did.

How do you know that story?

The woman is famous. Everyone knows one thing about her.

I don't.

Well, now you do, she said. You should go home. She's probably long gone.

I promised him.

Yes. She nodded and sighed. She moved to a drawer under the counter and drew out a folded garment. She held the shoulders and let the rest fall until I could see it was a dress of black crepe with a high neck and buttons to the waist.

Take this, she said. Wear it when you tell your mother that the man she gave her child to is dead now.

I
RODE
away with the dress in my side-pack. It began to rain again. I listened to the water in the creek winding beside us, mumbling and gurgling in harmony with my stomach. My hat kept slipping over my eyes. I took it off, shook off the water and kept it on my lap. The raindrops threaded down my cheeks like tears. In the hours that passed I began to hear voices, the Hag saying, Yes, I nearly was your mother, didn't you know? The man on the trail saying, She's living, moving, humping bile! My father saying the Rosary, asking for the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the flesh. I heard
beads clicking as they rolled against one another. After a while the voices were speaking together and I started talking to my horse to drown them out.

I don't know why but in the middle of the night I put that black dress on and lay on the ground in the grass, watching the stars fall. The heat from my fire was almost gone. I was waiting for the last embers to die. My horse was asleep.

A voice said: I took on everything that happened, as if I wanted it just the way it happened. That was my trick. That was a good trick.

I turned my head. I did not know the voice but I knew who it was. I'm dreaming you, I said, although there was no one there that I could see. There was nothing but smoke from the broken fire and a strange smell of whisky.

Yes, the voice whispered. When the drunk hit I threw back my head and howled. That's when they knew to hand me a bottle and escort me from the bar. And then I walked for as long as I could, which was never very long, until I was away from them, and then I fell on my knees and I howled.

I hate you, I said. The night was already so far gone that I didn't mind talking angry and crazy to myself. Why did you give me away? What did you think would happen to me? Didn't you care what happened to me?

The wind blew ashes into my eyes. I felt very sorry for the girl that was me.

Go away, I said. Go away. I'll look for you but I don't care if I find you.

I forced myself back to my father, back into recollection. It gave me peace even in the black cold night without anyone alive to love me. I remembered how when he read to me and I was cold he would spread his much-mended, oldest, wool cassock over my sheets and tuck the black cloth all around my body. It may have been a sin for him to use his old robes as a blanket, but I knew that he could never put away in the dark dusty cupboard his first and most precious vestments. I felt a hard nut form in my chest for he was a good man, a really good man, and I could remember his voice perfectly, but for how long?

He read softly in the dark:

I love you.

Go to sleep, Mighty Miette. Go to sleep.

I
LAY
in the dirt by the trail trying to see things that were close to me, my horse, my arm, the firepit, but I could only see things that were millions of miles above. The round ceiling of stars shone through thin clouds. I wiped my cheeks with impatient hands and tasted grit in my teeth. Below the stars but far, far above everything else, Father, you were hiding. Hiding in God's immensity. Hiding where I could not see you and where my prayers could not reach your ears.