(1986) Deadwood (47 page)

The history of the northern Hills was a history of its claims, though—even the Bottle Fiend's—broken hearts and broken backs. There was something undiscovered that nobody would leave. It held Charley too.

He thought sometimes of leaving to look for Agnes Lake, but his thoughts of her were like dreams, and in his dreams Deadwood was where she was, and he was afraid he would lose her if he left.

The first case of smallpox broke out on a friday, two weeks to the day after Jane's return. It was one of the upstairs girls at the Gem Theater. She was found in her bed by Al Swearingen, sweating, blistered skin, running a fever that Jane—who had been pulled from her sleep under a table downstairs—put at 106 degrees.

"Get her out," Swearingen said, when Jane told him what it was. "I don't want none of that in here."

Swearingen never left the theater now, an adjustment he'd made to the boy in the preacher's clothes sitting across the street waiting for him. He had even quit going to the windows. It was useless, because he worried one way when the boy was gone and another way when he was there.

Swearingen had given up on having the boy killed—there were roughs who would shoot off their own toes for a hundred dollars that had refused to put a bullet in a preacher—and found his safety inside. He stayed upstairs, where he'd taken a corner room. Several times he had begun to read the Bible, for protection, but he couldn't read enough of the words to fight the boy.

The discovery of smallpox in his place—two doors from his own room—was a sign to Swearingen that the boy and his Bible were beginning to force him out into the open. And he stood at the door while Jane worried over the girl, wondering how things had gone so wrong. Jane soaked rags in a fixer she had mixed in secret and pressed them against the girl's forehead, holding them there with one hand, drinking from the fixer with the other.

"It's smallpox, all right," she said, sounding proud. "Just like in Sidney, and Elk Point before. It's a lucky thing I got here, the regular sawbones is scairt to treat it."

"Get her out," he said.

Jane shook her head. "No such thing. I ain't takin' this poor child to no pesthouse." She wiped at the girl's forehead and patted her cheek. The girl's eyes were shiny and inattentive.

"It's God's will," Jane said, "that he puts me to a place in time to nurse the pox."

"This is my place," he said.

She didn't even look back when she answered. "I am a screamin' eagle from Bitter Creek, the further you go the bitterer it gets, and I'm from the head end. Now git before I shoot the toes off your feet."

Jane had been saying that, every time she got happy, ever since her return from Nebraska.

A line of sweat broke out across Swearingen's forehead and a trembling occurred in his hands. He stepped out of the room and watched Jane tend the whore from the hall. He felt it coming after him now—a judgment before he was ready. He touched his cheek, testing for fever. Jane had begun to hum. The upstairs girl pulled at her nightclothes and a bubble of spit hung on her chin. He took the handkerchief out of his back pocket and held it against his face. Through it, he felt the trembling in his hands.

Jane poured fresh fixer into the rag, took another drink for herself.

"This is my place," he said again.

She laughed at him. "Move her yourself, then," she said. "You touch this child, and you'll be dead in three weeks."

The upstairs girl's eyes came back into focus for a moment, and her breathing turned faster and shallow. "Don't be scairt," Jane said, and put the rag against her forehead. "I been through this about six hundred times and you ain't got a killing case." She considered the sores on the girl's face and shook her head. "There is going to be some disfigurations, though . . ."

"You got one hour," Swearingen said.

Jane unholstered one of her pistols, cocked it, and set it on the bed next to the girl. "Ain't nobody takin' this child to the pest-house," she said. "Nobody that wants to live."

He stared at the girl on the bed. One minute she twisted with the fever, the next she lay still as the dead. He tried to see if the boy was behind it, but the image of the girl on the bed was strong and clear, and wouldn't move aside for him to look for the cause.

"I'm going to need about six helpers," Jane said. "Git me plain girls without no medical education. I don't need arguments. They can take turns to sit here and empty pans."

He closed the door and walked downstairs, into the bar. The whores had seen the girl's affliction, and they crowded around him to ask what it was. One of them said if it was poison, she knew who did it.

Swearingen pushed through them and walked behind the bar. He found himself a bottle of clear whiskey and a glass. "Is she dead?" one of the girls asked.

He walked back through them, up the stairs and into his room. He locked the door and pulled back the window curtain, and sat on his bed, watching the street.

The boy was gone, but he would be back.

The second and third cases of smallpox were reported the next day at the Bella Union, across the street from the Gem. It was another upstairs girl and a gambler, both of them broke. Dr. H. Wedelstaedt was called to the bar early in the afternoon, and he ordered them quarantined in the pesthouse.

He never put his hands on either of them, a fact reported to Jane that night when she stopped in the bar on her way home. She had found a lean-to on the north end of town, built by children, and claimed it for her own. She knew it was children because it was built on a hill with the open end facing up—an evening shower could drown you—and because she'd found a broken top inside. The place wasn't badly built, but she thought parents ought to teach their children to face a lean-to downhill.

She stood with one elbow on the bar, taking the weight off her bad leg, and listened while a whore told her that Doc Wedelstaedt wouldn't touch either victim. "The doctors is all afraid to mix with smallpox," Jane said.

The girl was plain-looking and fat. She said, "Doc Wedelstaedt is the only one that tends the Chinese, that's how come they called him for this."

Jane sighed. She looked at her hands, black-nailed and soft. "For some reason I don't know, God give me the touch to cure and heal,, and I best be about my business."

She was tired and drunk, but she headed out the door and followed the Whitewood all the way to the pesthouse. It was a small, windowless shack in the mud beside the creeks. The door was shut, and there was a sign nailed to it that said, QUARANTINED BY ORDER OF DR. H. WEDELSTAEDT. STAY THE HELL OUT.

Jane read the sign slowly, drinking from a bottle of fixer. She laughed out loud and threw her head back and let go of an eagle scream Bill himself could of heard, up in the cemetery. "I am a screamin' eagle from Bitter Creek, the further you go the bitterer it gets," she said, "and I'm from the head end. Now git before I shoot the toes off your feet." She pulled the sign off the door and tore it in half and walked in.

The only light inside was what came from the door, and it took her a moment to locate her charges. They had been laid on narrow cots in opposite ends of the room. The gambler lifted his head to see who it was, the girl lay still. She went to him first. He had damped his clothes and the sheets with his sweat, and he was blistered everywhere she looked.

He asked for water.

There were sixteen cots in the pesthouse, and she pulled an empty one close to his and sat down to administer her healing. "That ain't what you need," she said. She hadn't brought rags, so she tore some out of the sheet she was sitting on. She used the teeth on her right side, the only place where her uppers touched her lowers, and when she had finished there was a taste of blood in her mouth. She reached in with her fingers and found two teeth that moved when she touched them.

"Don't ever eat fruit," she said. The gambler smiled, but she saw he didn't understand. "I had the prettiest teeth in the West," she said, "but fruit rotted my gums." She poured fixer over one of the rags and wiped the gambler's head. She felt the heat an inch off his forehead.

On the other side of the room, the girl turned in her sleep and began to cry. Jane soaked another rag and pressed it against the gambler's chest. "I got to tend that poor girl," she said.

She crossed the room, the floor giving under her feet all the way across. The air was hot, and Jane broke a sweat on her neck and under her arms. She wiped it away and drank from the bottle of fixer. It was how she stayed immune, cleaning her insides with the fixer. It was the secret of the cure, too. The trick was knowing when. Administered at the crossroads of the disease, it never failed.

In her fever, the girl had pulled most of the clothes off herself, and was lying uncovered on the cot, naked except for her petticoat, moving her head back and forth on the pillow, making a wheezing noise in her throat.

Jane sat on a cot and studied the girl's condition. She was worse than the gambler, close to the crossroads already, if not beyond. She had a pretty, round face and puffy lips. There were bruises on her legs and arms, Jane guessed she had a regular man. Jane washed her forehead with fixer and the girl jumped under her touch.

"There, there," Jane said, "God sent me here to cure you, child." The girl opened her eyes at the sound of the voice, studied Jane's face, and then resumed her death wheeze.

Jane put her hand against the girl's cheek. "You got a fever, all right," she said. "About a hundret and ten degrees." The girl didn't seem to hear. Jane said, "It's time, child."

She looked behind her to make sure the gambler wasn't watching, then she cradled the girl's head in her elbow and lifted her up off the pillow. The girl's head fell back and her mouth opened. Jane fastened down her grip and brought the bottle of fixer slowly to the girl's lips. "You got to drink about half of this now," she said.

The girl opened her eyes again and Jane stuck the neck of the bottle two inches into her mouth, hinged it there, and brought the bottom straight up. The girl choked and spit, and the fixer ran out both sides of her mouth. She fought it, trying to get her head loose, but Jane held on. "There, now," she said, "God sent me . . ."

The girl began to choke deep in her chest, a sign that the fixer was down where it would do its work. Some of it came out her nose. The girl's nails dug into Jane's arms, but Jane held tight until the bottle was half empty.

The girl ceased to struggle.

Jane laid her gently back on her pillow, wiped at some blood where her lip had been cut. "That treatments the only thing that could save you, child," she said. The girl didn't appear to be breathing, and Jane leaned closer, listening at the girl's mouth, and waited a long time.

Finally it came, a little warm air in Jane's ear, it sounded like a tiny sigh. The girl began to breathe. Jane wiped at her head and then moved away a few feet, not to be hit by the regurgitate.

The convulsions lasted most of an hour. Jane sat on the cot, watching. If the fixer failed to purge a victim, it was time to meet God. She wiped the girl's blood off the lip of the bottle and drank from it herself.

She heard the gambler snoring in the half-dark, across the room. It was a peaceful, even sound, but she knew he was dreaming horrible deaths. It was an early symptom of the disease. She put her hand on the girl's forehead again, and it was cooler now.

Jane took another swallow of the mix, and smiled. "When they're coolin' and breathin'," she said out loud, "they're healin'."

She sat and drank another hour, until the girl began to chill. Jane moved into her cot and lay down next to her. She put her arms around her narrow shoulders and pulled her close, smelling perfume and vomit and the disease. It was sweet to Jane, and she pulled the girl's head into the soft junction of her neck and shoulder.

She felt herself nodding, and drank the fixer to hold off her sleep. The girl shook and Jane held her tight, and after a while she began to hum.

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Al Swearingen saw Jane early the next morning, in the hallway outside his room. He was on the way to the bar for another bottle of local; she had just climbed the stairs. Swearingen's nerves were shot and he screamed.

He had been awake all night, watching the street, thinking of the diseases in the air, in his room. Even the local couldn't calm him down. And an hour after daybreak he stepped out into the hallway, the only noises in the place his own feet on the pine floor, and ran into Calamity Jane Cannary.

He heard his own scream, and then saw who it was. Jane's eyes were blood-red and her skin had sagged and paled in the night.

There was blood caked in one corner of her mouth, and her hair was like snakes.

She stopped when he screamed, and squinted at him. "That is the most cowardly thing I seen yet," she said. "A whore man scairt in his own whorehouse. If you've woke my patient, your peeder's as good as shot off."

He stood in the hallway, trying to find his breath. He smelled it then, there was death all over her. "I told you to remove that girl out of here," he said.

She spit on the floor. "There ain't nobody movin' that child until I say so," she said. "She ain't reached the crossroads yet." She stared into Swearingen as she spoke, and gradually her expression changed. Her hand crossed the distance between them and lay against his forehead.

He swayed and closed his eyes. "You might of got it yourself," she said. "What is your dreams like?"

He turned in the hall and went back into his room. It was an act of will not to run. He heard her calling after him, warning him. "Don't trifle with this," she said. He shut the door and locked it. He put a chair under the doorknob and then pushed towels against the crack at the bottom. He stood in the middle of the room, trying to find his breath, and noticed he was sweating. He felt his forehead, and it was damp and hot.

Jane knocked at the door. "Heed me, whore man," she said. "There ain't nobody immune except me. If you want to live, you best put yourself in my hands." He moved to the far end of the room and stood near the window. Her voice stopped, but there were no footsteps moving away. "You hear me in there?"