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.
TREMORS 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.
THE 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.
Martha and Miette
HER CLOTHES WERE SMELLY RAGS SO DORA 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.
Oh can there be in life a charm,
More sweet that retrospection lends,
When dwells the heart with rapture warm,
On past delights and absent friends,
When dwells the heart with rapture warm,
On past delights and absent friends.
That soothing charm I would not lose,
For all the bliss that wealth attends;
That soothing charm I would not lose,
For all the bliss that wealth attends;
Its joys could ne’er a calm infuse,
So sweet as thought
Of Absent friends,
Of Absent friends,
Of Absent friends,
Of Absent friends,
Of Absent friends,
Of Absent friends,
Of Absent friends.
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.
Epilogue for Imogen
WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH THIS, MY SWEET and wonderful girl? What should be written on the tombstones of legends? Wild Bill is buried on a hill beneath a bronze bust of himself looking young and formal. The epitaph, written by Charlie Utter, reads, Pard, we will meet again in the Happy Hunting Ground. To part no more, goodbye.
Buffalo Bill is buried at Lookout Mountain overlooking the Great Plains and the mountains, the Continental Divide, the ponderosa pines. His tombstone is fashioned out of blond rocks cemented together in the shape of a chimney. A plaque gives his name and the dates of his birth and his death and says that he was a Noted Scout and Indian Fighter.
Crowfoot is buried with his horse. He was dressed in a buckskin suit with a feather headpiece adorned with a stuffed crow and solemnly carried with his saddle and rifle to a burial place on a rise overlooking Blackfoot Crossing, where Treaty 7 was signed. A bronze marker on the grave reads that he was Father of His People. In 1948 a stone cairn was also erected there in his honour.
Sitting Bull was buried in Post Cemetery, of Fort Yates, North Dakota. His gravestone is a tall marble pedestal supporting a three-ton granite bust of him on an elevated shrine with a flagpole that flies the American flag. His epitaph reads, Chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux.
Jesse James is buried by his wife and cousin Zerelda under a stone that stands for both of them and gives the dates of their beginnings and endings, commenting only that he was assassinated.
Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen, is buried on her ranch. Her stone bears a poem by her proud daughter Pearl:
Shed not for her the bitter tear,
Nor give the heart to vain regret;
’Tis but the casket that lies here,
The gem that filled it sparkles yet.
Doubt hangs about the contents of some of these graves and that of Red Cloud, and Geronimo. But no one imagines that Calamity Jane is not where she belongs. Dead on August 1st, 1903, buried on August 6th. Stories of who had stood by her deathbed—who had warned her of her death, who knew her, who had loved her, been loved by her—blossomed over her grand funeral.
She is buried in a modest grave in Mount Moriah Cemetery beside Bill Hickok and all the poor whose gravestones make up Potter’s Field. Two-thirds of 3,600 graves in Mount Moriah are paupers’ graves marked this way. Martha’s grave shows that her alias was Calamity Jane and that she requested to be buried by Bill. There was some confusion when the headstone was carved and it reads that she died on August 2nd, the anniversary of Wild Bill’s murder. This is an error no one bothers to correct, what with the value of stone. These are the stories of your ancestors. I give them to you because my grandmother and my mother loved me and I love you. One day I hope you will know how when you love a daughter it breaks the spine of history and folds time all around you. After horses there were carriages then cars then Bennett buggies and subways and then, who knows? There may be other cousins out there roaming about that you could meet someday, children of children of children had by Burke or by Steer’s daughter, Jesse, or by her other husbands, little lives that went unrecorded. If they exist I hope you find one another.
I love you and your brother so very, very much.
A Note on Pastiche Sources
THIS NOVEL IS A WORK OF METAHISTORIO-graphic fiction. Most of the facts about Calamity Jane, including who she was at birth, are difficult to prove. The woman named Martha Canary (sometimes Cannary or Burke), who became famous as Calamity Jane, claimed to have had a daughter by Wild Bill Hickok that she gave up for adoption, and it is out of this claim that the story of Miette was born. The novel and its arrangement are original, but almost every character—with the significant exceptions of the protagonist, her father, Zita and the Hag—is a real historical figure and wherever possible I use their words and their descriptions of the events that they were part of. In the sections where direct quoting at length occurs, the original, historical document has been altered to allow the novel to transition smoothly from scene to scene and to make these voices better aid the overall project. However, it is worth noting the sources of sections where real voices and other texts appear. The list that follows does not include the apocryphal quotes (the quote by Lincoln upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example) or any other facts or stories drawn from secondary descriptions of conversations, or events drawn from nonfiction sources that are not first-person accounts.
JUAN RULFO’S classic magic realist novel Pedro Páramo influenced the early chapters of the book. In fact, at one time I saw Miette’s story as a contemporary revisiting of his novel, which is the story of a man sent on a journey by his dying sainted mother to find his infamous criminal father.
TEXT FROM Jules Verne’s novel Five Weeks in a Balloon was adapted (where I preferred my own French) from a translation made available by Project Gutenberg. The text I adapted can be viewed here: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3526.
THE TEXT of the pamphlet handed out by Maguire describing Calamity Jane is from James D. McLaird’s critical biography, Calamity Jane.
THEOPHILUS LITTLE’S account is drawn from a description of his life in Abilene written in a loose-leaf notebook. It is altered via editing and rewrites to highlight Wild Bill Hickok’s story. It can be viewed here: www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~pasulliv/settlers/settlers25/WildBill.htm.
LEW SPENCER’S long speech is drawn in part from the memoir of another “Negro minstrel” named Ralph Keeler. That speech is rewritten and fictionalized to reflect the information I had about Lew, to better fit the novel and to conjure greater connection between Lew and Calamity Jane. The original (fascinating) Ralph Keeler story can be viewed here: www.circushistory.org/Cork/BurntCork5.htm#KEELER.
THE DESCRIPTION of Calamity Jane attributed to Charlie Utter is a highly contentious bit of text that may or may not have been invented by one biographer and then plagiarized by several others. It can be viewed here: www.deadwoodmagazine.com/archivedsite/Archives/Girls_Calamity.htm.
THE ARTICLE by Lavinia Hart has been edited for length. The complete article can be read here: panam1901.org/documents/dochumannature.html.
CALAMITY JANE’S letter to Miette is based on Calamity Jane’s autobiography, a pamphlet she sold on the street close to the end of her life to make a small amount of money. It has been greatly expanded in my version and recast as something not meant for public circulation. The original pamphlet can be viewed here: www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/hs
t/biography/LifeAdventuresCalamityJane/Chap1.html.
BLACKFOOT STORIES and beliefs appear in parts of Zita’s speeches. A great resource for Blackfoot culture is the beautiful and amazing Blackfoot Crossing Historical Centre in Alberta. I highly recommend a visit: www.blackfootcrossing.ca.
THE SONG lyrics are from songs that were popular in America in the nineteenth century. They would have been in circulation throughout Calamity Jane’s lifetime. They can be viewed here: pdmusic.org/1800s.html.
Acknowledgements
THIS BOOK HAD MANY TIRELESS CHAMPIONS for whom I am utterly grateful. Thank you, Hilary McMahon, for finding us a wonderful home. Thank you to my passionate editors Jennifer Lambert and Jane Warren at HarperCollins Canada for pushing me forward with your uncompromising vision. Thank you to Patrick Crean for your support, advice and guidance through the first years of this project. Thank you, Susan Swan, for your constant support, your friendship and your mentoring.
Thank you to Tom Wayman and Suzette Mayr, whose talent and commitment made this book (and my PhD in general) possible. Thank you also to the members of my committee for your thoughtful interrogations, your keen insights and your experience: Mary Polito, Rod McGillis, Elizabeth Jameson, Cecily Deveraux.
Thank you to the support staff in the University of Calgary Department of English, especially Barb Howe. Thank you to Russell Caple, Tasha Hubbard, Jonathan Ball, Nikki Sheppy, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Dennis Vanderspek, Michelle Berry, Angie Abdou and Suzanne Caple-Hicks for your feedback and advice as I worked on the novel and/or on the exegesis. Thank you, Colin Martin, for delivering my dissertation when I was far away.
In Calamity's Wake Page 17