“Thank you,” interrupted Dora, shutting the man down with the raise of one finger.
We ascended a very rickety staircase without further discussion with the hotel’s manager, Missy’s arm in mine. I leaned in close to whisper to her.
“My husband and I? Tryin’ somethin’ on, are you?”
“Maybe. Or maybe hotel people ain’t partial to renting rooms to unwed couples. Trust me, I know from experience they normally ain’t.”
Dora was the first in Jane’s room. She didn’t even try to go to her own room until she had seen Jane with her own eyes and dubbed her living. We three, for our part, stood outside the door with a pile of bags while an argument commenced inside the hotel room. Jane might be dying, but she pitched a tolerable fit. The sound of her relieved my nerves and lifted my spirit. She wouldn’t die, she couldn’t die. Not Jane.
When Dora emerged from the fray, her mask was slipping. Bags hung beneath her eyes, and even though there was a fair amount of rose in her cheeks from shouting, it was superficial on her graying skin. My hopes vanished at the sight of her.
“She ain’t good,” Dora said with a breath long held.
“Is she . . . goin’ to die?”
It was Missy who posed the question, but all of us asked it.
“I think so. It ain’t good.”
“When?”
“I don’t rightly know, but here’s how I see it. The damn fool wants to die alone, but we ain’t gonna let her. It ain’t right. So, I will take a shift tonight. I’ll stay with her so she won’t go alone. Then, Joseph can take her in tha mornin’. Jimmy can have the afternoon, and so on. If’n one of us thinks it’s time and can get tha others, do so. Okay?”
We all agreed, and Dora readied herself for the fight that was coming. She entered the room and ducked just before a glass shattered on the wall where her head had been only a second ago. I made to go in and help her, but she waved me away.
“Get your fat carcass outta here, Dora DuFran! I ain’t wantin’ nobody seein’ me this’a way. I told you, god dammit!”
Joseph made a motion to go in with her, but Dora’s hand stopped him as well. Her face hardened, and she shook her head.
“You got the shift in the mornin’. Go get some sleep, Joseph. Both of you, I got this.”
Dora shut the door just as another barrage of cursing hit our ears. Not knowing what else to do, I helped the man to his room with all of Dora’s luggage and bid him a good night. Missy and I went to our room where sleep became an illusive enemy. We spent some tender time together as we were wont to do. That part was nice, but the usual relaxed feeling it gave me after never came. I fidgeted under the quilt and Missy smacked my knee.
“You keep that up, and I’ll send you off to sleep with Joseph,” she teased.
“Na, he ain’t as fine at this part as you. He does snore less though.”
Missy slapped my knee again, and we laughed as I held her closer. Silence fell again over the two of us. It was an old blanket, that silence. Warm and tender and full of things unsaid. The peculiar thing about an old friend like that was it often encouraged the type of talking that was not fit for the hard light of day. Anything, I supposed, was better than being left alone with those unsaid things.
“You worried about Jane?”
“Yes’m. I hate feelin’ helpless. I want to do somethin’, but I don’t know what.”
“Me too.”
“I ain’t worth my salt, am I?”
“What do you mean, Jimmy?”
“Hour don’t need me anymore, I can’t help Jane, and you ain’t gonna marry me.”
“Who says I ain’t gonna marry you?”
I sat up and looked into her eyes. Her hair was splayed so pretty on the pillow, like curvy sun rays on snow. A little smile pulled at one side of her mouth, but I wasn’t reading the tale behind it. This was a game somehow, I just knew it, but the rules were hidden from me.
“You did . . . twice.”
“You weren’t listenin’. I said ‘no.’”
“Yeah, what am I missin’ exactly?”
“No ain’t never.”
I laid my head back down on the pillow, and she fit herself into the crook of my arm. It was her place, this spot. She knew it were hers too. Missy always found a home there, her head on my shoulder with one arm wrapped around my chest. This place was made for her.
Truth was what it was. Hard facts were difficult to ignore. Many years had passed since I knew the blonde slip of a girl at Dora’s place in Deadwood. Many more had passed since she knew the gangly protective brother of a broken little girl. I was older now than Jane was when I met her. Funny, that idea. Funny and strange and sad all at once.
We were different, older for sure. Without a little girl to protect, the years had made a wanderer out of me, but they had been kinder to Missy. Sure, she had little sagging pockets around her belly, and those cheekbones didn’t hold her skin the way they used to. A spring chicken she was not, but to me, she would always smell of cinnamon. In my truth, she was and would always be perfect, and that was the only truth that mattered to me.
“I don’t bed anyone else. Not anymore. I haven’t in a while.”
“So, what does that mean?”
“It means no ain’t never.”
Sometimes, life tells you to stop. It won’t get better than that, it says. Best not to push her. I felt that then. Even though I wanted to press the issue, I refrained. Pulling the quilt up over us, she moved closer to me. Cinnamon swirled around us, and finally, sleep came to me.
With the morning came breakfast downstairs in the hotel’s adjoining restaurant. Dora made a brief appearance, long enough to grab some bacon, coffee, and bread. She looked frazzled and drained, as though she had done battle the evening before. I was eager to see Jane, but after seeing Dora, I worried after how our reunion might go. She spoke little about Jane’s condition, but none of what she said was promising.
Around three in the afternoon, Joseph came knocking on our hotel room door. I answered it to find him looking beaten down with a cascade of coffee splashed on the front of his shirt. He stank of bile and vomit, and my heart sank further.
“It’s your turn, Jimmy,” he said sullenly.
I nodded to the man, and he lumbered away back to his room.
Jane’s room was quiet when I walked inside it. The thudding of my heart was all I could hear inside my own head. Looking around, I took inventory of the damage. Several broken glasses littered the floor. There was a white wash basin broken in two next to the only chair in the room. A tray that once might have contained breakfast laid smashed in the corner. It appeared as if someone had attempted to clean up some of the wreckage but given up. When I laid eyes on the actual woman, the sight was all too familiar.
The buckskins she normally wore were in a pile in the corner, and she wore a man’s long underwear beneath the quilts of the bed. Her hair was black in appearance but not in natural color, soaked with sweat and wildly stuck to her pillow. Jane twisted and writhed with feverish agitation. The smell was that of heat, an unnatural heat, along with bile and sweat. She lay there grappling with an unknown foe, her skin looking hollow and drained of blood, as if she were being replaced with wax.
It was eerie, the similarities, and for a moment, I was transported back in time to another place with a different dying woman. Even the damn quilt had a star pattern on it. My breath caught in my throat. I hadn’t even known I made a noise until Jane opened her eyes to look at me.
“Jimmy? Jimmy Glass?” she asked weakly.
I grabbed the chair and pulled it up to the side of the bed as she stared at me through graying eyes. They were red-rimmed and cloudier than when I last saw her. She searched my face for a long time, and I tried to smile at her.
“Is that you under that awful beard?”
“It’s me, Jane.”<
br />
I reached under the blankets and found her hand. It was clammy and hot to the touch with fever, but I held it in between mine anyway. Jane was in a sort of awe, staring at me. This wasn’t at all what I had expected. There seemed to be no more fight left in her. A terrible note of sadness accompanied that thought.
“I’m cold,” she said.
There was a spare quilt folded at the end of the bed. I stood, and draped it over her.
“Is that better?”
Jane didn’t answer. She merely gazed into my face, apparently enamored with something. Not knowing what else to do, I took her hand again. When she blinked, it was a slow, deliberate blink. Every time she did it, it looked to all the world like she was closing her eyes to sleep, but then she’d struggle to open them again and stare in wonderment at my face.
“Did Hour send you?”
“What? No, Jane. She’s with her husband. She don’t know I’m here. But I’ll tell her. I’m gonna send fer her. There’s a telegraph office . . .”
“No. No. Ain’t time. I got a letter fer her over yonder. Give it to her, would you, Jimmy?”
I looked in the direction of her gesture, and there sat a small stack of letters. Apparently, it was one of the only things she had that was hers in the room. I wondered briefly if Jane owned anything anywhere anymore.
“Give it to her.”
“I will, Jane. I’ll make sure of it.”
“The others go to my daughter . . . my other one . . . my blood one. Dora knows where she is. They need to get to her. It ain’t much or even . . . enough . . . but it’s important.”
“We’ll make sure, Jane. She’ll get them.”
She smiled then. It was a weak little thing. A smile I normally only saw on her when the liquor had taken her over and she was near sleep. But this wasn’t sleep, this was something else, and Jane hadn’t had any liquor. She shook her head slowly, struggling to focus on my face.
“Jane? Jane, you okay?”
“I still can’t believe it’s you, Jimmy Glass. Outta all the fuckin’ people in this world, you’re the one that is here to send me on. I coulda sworn it’d be Hour. That Injun gal, she said . . .”
Her tongue sort of lolled and ended her sentence there. Those once crystalline eyes of hers were gray as they rolled up in her head. Her body was still now, no longer struggling against its unknown foe. Life drained from her face right in front of me. She lacked the will to move. I hadn’t thought it possible, but her stillness was more terrifying than her fits. I tried desperately to hide it, but my voice shook under the weight of fear.
“Jane? Jane, how are you feeling? Are you still cold?”
“I ain’t feeling nothin’, Jimmy Glass.”
The words came out lethargic and slurred. Something inside me, something that knew more than me, told me that this was the end. This was it. I ran to the door and hollered out into the empty hallway.
“Missy, Dora, Joseph, come now!”
I slammed the door behind me, satisfied with the sound of shuffling in the hallway. There wasn’t time to check who it was. I didn’t dare leave Jane alone the way she was. Nothing to do but hope the proper people heard me.
When I got back to Jane, she looked almost gone, but her eyes found me again in the murky world she now found herself in. I held her hand, but she didn’t hold mine back. That part of her was already dead.
“Bill. I want to be near Bill.”
“Don’t worry, Jane, you will be. I promise.”
There was a commotion behind me as an unknown number of people entered the room. I didn’t look, I didn’t dare look at them and turn away from her. Every breath of hers was a struggle, and I held on tight to her hand as she slipped away between my fingers. The part of her that was Jane pulled gently away from me like an ebbing tide. I held on tighter to her hand, but there was no use in it. You couldn’t pull back the waves. They left when they so pleased.
In an instant, Dora was there on the opposite side of the bed. The look on her face, the longing of it, made me want to turn away. Tears came silently at first, but the racking sobs followed close behind. It weren’t right, seeing a woman like Dora in that way. Letting go of Jane’s hand, I stood and turned to be face to face with Missy. Her eyes were screwed up with sadness and tears. Her lower lip quivered.
“Jane?”
“She’s gone,” I said.
That was all there was to say. Words were not meant to be spoken in a time like this for they would do nothing but come up terribly short. Joseph went to Dora and held her. Missy collapsed in my arms and sobbed there for a long while. We four, the friends of Calamity Jane, were there for her passing on August 1, 1903.
I found very few words in the coming three days. There were matters to attend to and a funeral to arrange. Terry was blessedly close to Deadwood, and we transported Jane’s body by train to the place she wished to be buried. Missy and I went on ahead to make arrangements for the funeral and to make sure there were rooms available at Diddlin’ Dora’s for the two of us. I didn’t recognize any of the girls there, and Dora had even hired a new cook. Nancy May had gone off to California. It still felt like the old place to me though, alive and breathing with the number of people in it, and I was glad to be staying there.
Upon our arrival, we were approached by the Society of Black Hills Pioneers. They had heard of Jane’s passing and wished to help us in her burial. Arrangements were made at the Mount Moriah cemetery and at the First Methodist Church. Deadwood hadn’t been big enough to host a proper church the last I’d seen of her, but that had been some time ago.
On the fourth day of August, we set to the task of laying Jane to rest. Dressed in our Sunday best, the four of us joined a barrage of people spilling into the First Methodist Church of Deadwood. Some wept like fools in front of the closed casket containing what remained of our friend. Others tittered and gossiped among each other like hens, looking this way and that. I wondered how many here actually knew Jane, and how many were here because of the spectacle. Being present at the burial of a legend would be a tale to tell the grandchildren. Still, I scowled when I caught the hens in the act.
Dora and Missy had indeed sent word to Jane’s daughter along with the letters Jane had written and charged us with passing along. There had been no reply. Whether the silence had been purposeful or just out of not receiving the notice in time, we didn’t know for sure. I wondered if perhaps her daughter would try to attend the funeral, but there was no way to know her in the crowd, having never seen her face. Most of those paying their respects were a sea of strangers to me.
In Deadwood I enlisted a messenger to take Jane’s letter and my own to Hour. Whether she would want to have been present or not was a hard thing to tell. Death didn’t seem to hit her the way it hit others. When people passed, they were simply gone to her. Flown away. Regardless, it turned out she couldn’t come. The doctors wouldn’t allow it, not in her condition. News of my sister’s pregnancy didn’t reach me until Terry. I didn’t bother trying to telegraph her about Jane’s funeral. Hour might try to run herself ragged to make it out to Deadwood if she knew, and that would be bad for the baby. She would get the letters. I was joy-filled for Hour, and at the same time, my gut sat melancholy, knowing there would be no way she could be there with me.
The thought occurred to me to look for Charlie Utter or perhaps his brother. Might they come to bid their farewells? I hadn’t seen Charlie in ages, and he had been kind to us. I said as much to Dora, but she said something about his moving to Panama so that was the end of my inquiry.
Everyone said the service was a lovely one. I took their word for it, being that my judgment on such subjects was limited. The service was blessedly brief; that’s what I knew. Religion was never a thing I could ever grab ahold of for long. Probably because I was fashioned after my pa that way, I reckoned. I sure tried, but religion was like a slippery fish to me. I
never had it in me to hold on too long or too tightly, but I bowed my head at the proper parts.
After the services, everyone followed the casket to the cemetery. Mount Moriah was higher up on the hill than the original Ingleside Cemetery where my pa was buried. That cemetery had filled quickly in the early days of Deadwood’s youth, and Wild Bill’s friends had paid to have him moved to the new Mount Moriah Cemetery. The procession of mourners still passed the old cemetery though, and I found myself looking for my father’s grave.
There were so many more now, and I had to admit that all these years had erased its exact location from my mind. Still, I looked, crooking my neck as subtly as I could. We could only afford a wooden marker back then. Would it even still be there? Had time and weather washed it away already? A hard blow hit my chest, and I felt the urge to cry.
Missy, ever present at my side, took my hand and squeezed it, as if knowing my thoughts without words. I breathed in her scent and swallowed my pain down. It stuck for a bit in my throat, but I managed to work the lump away. I was here for Jane today, not Pa. I had wept my tears for him years ago.
We climbed the hill to the cemetery where a grave had been dug in the dark earth next to Wild Bill Hickok himself. The preacher said a few words over the coffin as four men lowered her down with ropes. Dora threw something on top of the grave as it sank. With a closer look, I saw it to be a bundle of wild flowers tied with a lace ribbon. Tears streamed down her face, and I knew in an instant she had picked them herself even though the madame surely had the money for store-bought. Words came to me from ages ago. I muttered them to myself.
“It does make it look nicer.”
“What?” Missy whispered.
I shook my head as if to say it were nothing. She wouldn’t understand.
Others threw tokens in with Jane’s coffin. Tokens, flowers, one person poured a little whiskey on the lid of the coffin. An act that received a scowl from the preacher, but I figured it were an appropriate thing.
It was my turn to leave something here for Jane. Some token of how I felt.
From my belt I retrieved a small knife I carried everywhere with me. It weren’t much of a blade, but it was true and sharp. It slipped from its buckskin sheath easily. The sheath weren’t the same leather as it had once been because I had replaced it to keep the knife in good condition. It was the knife bit of it that meant the most to me, and that was still the same as the day she gave it to me.
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