In Calamity's Wake (16 page)

They called me Calamity Jane. They did not call me Slutty Jane or Jane the Drunk or Boy Jane. They called me Calamity. I did not give myself that name and I did not make others use it. I may not be a hero who saved a man on the front of her horse, but to those who say I am not, I say, How do you know that? Was Bill Hickok
everything he said? Was he everything that was said about him? Was Jesse James? A hero is someone who does something extraordinary and gets recognized for it. The only reason why I cannot be a hero is that I do extraordinary things all the time. It is expected of me. I cannot leave you any money or any cattle or any land. But I can leave you this, this one thing I know. A lie is a thing. It is a real thing in the world like a diamond or a gold nugget or a name or a hole in the wall. It's real but it only has the meaning you give it. Some think it's valuable, some don't. Some believe in it, some don't. And like a hole in the wall once it's there you can fill it in or cover it up, or elaborate on it, or say that it doesn't affect any other thing, or you can go fuck yourself. The lie doesn't care. Like that hole in the wall it does not care what you do.

I write this so as to tell you who I was or who I am. I write this to speak about MY self in MY words. I write this so that no one can kill me because it seems often that everyone is trying to kill me by forgetting me, ignoring me or giving all the fame to my beloved friends. It's true I never killed anyone, but I nursed dozens back to life. I did things I didn't believe in and others that I am ashamed of. But so did Bill and Buffalo Bill and Charlie. I never betrayed a friend and there were many who loved me regardless of my flaws. I tried
to avoid conflict between the white regiments and the Indians. I tried to reject the violence that everyone said was just life; I truly believe that every injury you leave upon another stays with you. And so I tried to injure as few people as possible. And that was more difficult than I can explain.

I would have liked you to meet Poker Alice when she was smoking cigars and cleaning out a table of highrollers. I'd have liked you to see Annie Oakley and me telling stories on a stage in front of a happy audience. That did happen once or twice. I'd have liked to ask you who you are and hear about it all. But those things can't happen in this lifetime. So I write this hoping that this little history of my life may interest you. I do love you. I love you so much more than I can say.

I remain, alive or dead, forever yours,

Mrs. M. BURKE

Better known as Calamity Jane, Jane Canary, Martha

Canary or Your Mother

I
LAID MY FACE ON MY PILLOW FOR AN HOUR
and then I went to Dora. She told me to go to Terry to find her. There had been an incident and she was sick on the ore-train. I borrowed a horse to ride. At the brink of town the wolf was there. It was the most venomous day of summer; all the flowers had gone rotten in the heat and the stench was like the armpit of someone you used to love. The road under our ten feet—the horse's four solid hooves, the wolf's paws and my two dangling flesh mitts—went up and down and seemed to rock like water. It's always downhill at the end. I spoke out loud to myself and pretended I could see my destination.

I expected to find her by her own light, to see her radiating in the dark with all the stories of gambling and drinking and whoring under great skies surrounding her. I was so dazed from her letter and so
afraid of her. For no reason I can fathom I remembered something from a story about a gate that led to the only green field and a plain of corn impossible except for the bottomless will of an English farmer. From the other side of that gate, across that field, you can see the Badlands, shining at night because the earth is white, I whispered, telling lies. The earth isn't white in the Badlands, it is red, orange, brown, purple, black, but never white.

We, the wolf, the horse and me, made our way down a steep incline between rock faces. The long echoes of clickety-clop-clip-clop-clickety-clop-clip-clop made it seem as if we were at the head of a train of obedient burrow ghosts, our eyes bulging from the heat that poured off the hard spiky surfaces all around us.

S
HE WAS
lying on the floor, thin as a woman could be and still be alive. Her mouth was open, gaping as if she were asleep. A tin can sang as it collected one out of every thousand raindrops that fell from the roof.

I stepped inside and shuddered at the smell of shit and vomit, of deathly sickness, dirt and whisky. She looked up and in her gaze was the cannonball coming for me.

Hello, dear, she said. Her voice was thick and hard to understand.

Hello, darlin', I said.

The train conductor left me here, she said and sighed in a frightening way, as if to expel all the air left in her body. I guess I misbehaved.

Her skin was white and powdery. Her eyes were yellow. Her face was so lined and the lips so collapsed she looked ninety. Her eyelids were brown and shrivelled about her eyeballs.

How long have you been here? I asked, wondering what sort of man would carry a woman, however drunk, off of a train and leave her in an abandoned cabin alone to die.

She shrugged and a sound of gases welled up from her stomach. She started to cry.

I
SLIPPED
my arms beneath her and lifted her. I carried my mother like some broken bride-doll back across the threshold to the waiting horse. I flopped her unceremoniously into the saddle and rode them both back into Deadwood. I took her straight to Dora's place because I knew we wouldn't be turned away.

Dora gave us her own room, which was clean and light and filled with chintz and lace curtains and pillows and embroidered blankets and painted furniture. Calamity laughed to see herself in the mirror with all of Heaven reflected behind her. There were mirrors
everywhere; the vanity, the bureau was made of mirrors. A full-length three-part mirror stood by the windows, the jewellery box was mirrored, and on the wall hung a large oval mirror in a gilt frame. All these surfaces reflected her back in multiples that suggested a crystal growing. She looked at herself and cocked her head like a puppy and sighed.

I washed her in the tub and saw the scars beneath the bruises, yellow bruises and red bruises and bruises where the blood seeped through, all over her arms and torso. Her breasts were collapsed; her ribs were sculpted out of driftwood. She lay in the warm water with her eyes closed and a hand over her eyes. When she moaned I asked if she felt sick and brought a bucket but there was nothing left inside her. I used Dora's soaps and shampoo and the pink sponge she had in a porcelain dish. I rubbed my mother's arms and scrubbed her fingers and nails and cleaned her back and behind and between until she was rosy from the rubbing. She had no strength left and so I lifted her with my two arms wrapped around her waist. She retched but could not vomit. Her feet hovered above the wet rug shaped like a rosebud. I left my footprints there.

I dried her propped against the wall and walked her to the bed and sat her down wrapped in a warm
dry towel. Dora had been standing by and she took the clothes. I apologized but she said nothing, only shook her head. I wrapped my mother in one of Dora's robes, shiny white silk with purple flowers blossoming across the back.

It's soft, she said.

You take a bath, said Dora. I'll watch her. You don't want to get her dirty again.

I bathed as quick as I could. Dora gave me another robe and gathered my clothes with my mother's and left us. The door closed and we were alone together, she lying on the bed and me standing over her.

Dora gave me your letter, I said.

She showed no understanding.

My father sent me to find you.

She opened her eyes and looked at me. We camped, she said.

What?

After Mama died and Daddy died, we camped. The Indians showed us how. We followed the soldiers and stayed outside the forts. Sometimes the soldiers gave us food.

But they didn't take you in?

She shook her head. Only the Indians ever took us in.

I held her head to help her sip water. I tried to give her soup but she was beyond eating. I sat beside the bed
and watched her. I held her hand and rubbed her palm. Her breathing was laboured and when she coughed it was a painful wet dig for air.

T
REMORS TOOK
her in the night and I got into the bed to hold her, to keep her from falling apart. I curved my body around hers and held her tightly, her back against my belly, her legs bent and knees to her chest and held there by my arm. I breathed into her hair. Half the time her mouth was so sticky I couldn't understand what she said. She might have been dreaming or she might have been seeing the people to whom she spoke. She spoke to my father and asked him to care for me. She spoke to Charlie and Dora. She spoke to her brother Elijah, begging him not to resurrect her. She spoke to her stepdaughter Jesse. She asked Jesse where she was and then she covered her face and cried. I wanted her to speak to me. I wanted her to look at me and know who I was but I couldn't say that. I couldn't hurt her and break the only minutes we had together.

Once she looked at me with all the warmth and understanding of an old friend. I lay on the floor and rolled back and forth over the aches in my belly, my back and my chest. I crushed my eyes with my fingers. I surrendered the idea of asking her anything. There was
nothing left to do but forgive. The woman was dying in my arms and all I could think was how, in fact, I loved her. It was a bone stuck in my throat. Her breathing slowed and she asked for a drink.

Just one drink to toast you? she said.

No, it's better that you don't. Do you want me to sing to you? My father used to like me to sing.

Is he dead?

Yes.

Were you there with your father when he died?

Yes.

Was it terrible? Was it terrible to die?

No. He knew he was going to Heaven.

What about me? she cried. What if you are not going to Heaven?

Are you in pain?

Yes, she cried and then she wept, and I shushed her and rocked her in my arms and held her hands and squeezed them. I rubbed her arms and back and stroked her hair. I weighed her body, light as paper ashes, against mine.

Her bladder and bowels by then were dry and her stomach was concave. I saw her hair fall out when she turned her head on the pillow. I sat in a rocking chair by the window and looked out over Deadwood. The streets were lit and the people walking along the paved roads
between the pretty brick Victorian buildings seemed civilized and carefree. I felt as if I watched them from the moon.

A wolf showed me where you were.

I always liked wolves, she said.

Yes, well, it seems like that was clear.

That's good.

I looked at her thinking, if I only get a few questions, what should they be?

Where were you born?

I don't remember. Don't cry. Why are you crying? Your eyes are so light, she said.

My eyes.

Yes, your eyes are so light. I like them.

I like your eyes too, I said.

T
HE LAST
hours of her life passed in silence but we were together. I held her hand and rubbed circles in her motionless palm with my thumb. Dora brought us a phonograph and kept music playing. I looked up at her when she came in but I never could speak. There was a hard nut of pain in my chest. I rubbed at my breast bone and coughed but the pain didn't care. I tried out words that children call their mothers, pushed them around with my tongue while I watched her. I might as well have pulled arrows from my flesh.

I heard a rattle from the bed and when I touched her wrist I knew she was gone. It was gentle as far as death goes. Downstairs the girls were laughing and people were drunk and happy. A tabby cat threaded between my legs and rolled on its back and rubbed its softness on my feet. Kittens mewled in the closet. I heard a car outside, a sound I could not get used to, and the train whistle, farther off, described an elaborating distance. I went to her and kissed her.

H
ER CLOTHES WERE SMELLY RAGS SO
D
ORA
and I dressed her in one of Dora's white nightgowns. It was very loose about her but the sleeves were not long enough to cover her wrists. The town paid for a walnut coffin lined with ruffled silver silk. The coffin-maker had the coffin brought to the room. Dora and I lifted her body and let her down into the silk. I smoothed the folds of white cotton around her body and then rearranged them because they revealed too much of her bones. Dora put one of her own books by my mother's hip. I put the Jules Verne book beside her cheek, thinking perhaps she could read it in the afterlife. We tucked her hair into a neat bun. She was stark but we decided not to paint her.

The girls all came into the room to say goodbye. A very young prostitute named Sara held up a kitten to kiss my mother's cheek with its rasping tongue.
Joannie put a mirror in beside my mother's hand. Feathers and flowers and cards bearing aces and drawings of hearts and foreign coins all were made to dress her simple uniform.

There was a parade. Men in fine suits and stovepipe hats carried her in her coffin down the main street past the weeping, bleary crowds. A drummer and trumpet player and a little boy carrying Old Glory led the procession. I walked at the back. The Chinese scattered red papers riddled with holes all around the streets.

It will slow the Devil down, Dora whispered. He has to pass through every hole before he can get to her.

Someone threw a book at me and when I caught it I saw that it was a novel about her. Everywhere, people embraced me. They gripped my shoulders and turned me around and looked in my eyes and stroked my face. Their tears fell on my neck and hands. The stories of her good deeds began to harmonize. The sheriff gave a speech over her open grave and looked up to Heaven and held out his arms and thanked God for her. Dora held me up, put her arm about my waist when I staggered. One of Dora's girls stood at the head of the grave. She was dressed in a white gown with a full bustle and a plunging neckline. She held an ivory bone fan that she waved in front of her face as she sang the coffin into the ground.

Later that night a production called
Life of Calamity
was improvised upon the stage at the Bella Union. I sat in the front row of the darkened auditorium sipping wine, long-stemmed roses on my lap. Dora, seated beside me, held my free hand. A voice began to sing
a cappella
and it was as if that voice created a space
so that it could be joined by another and another and another as the lights rose to show the cast. Calamity Jane lay in the arms of her long-lost daughter; Wild Bill embraced his wife Agnes with Charlie Utter looking on; Lew Spencer laughed as he stood arm in arm with the Queen of the Blondes and her two blond companions. In the background, a line of people moved through a series of tableaux, staging scenes about work, of panning for gold, of farming, of tending to the sick and to the lonely, of providing entertainment and sex, of cooking and doing laundry, of digging graves and saying goodbye.