A Tyranny of Petticoats

by Jessica Spotswood

  “It was my mother’s,” I say, trying not to remember the way I once dreamed of wearing it.

  “I could have gotten you a cheaper model,” Mr. McHenry says, indicating my pocket where the box lies hidden.

  I know he could have. “This is just right,” I say. “Thank you.”

  Annie’s attendance becomes increasingly sporadic in the next few weeks, and she shows up later and later in the day. Snow starts sprinkling down, dusting everything in white, and the promised glass for the grease-paper window still hasn’t arrived, but the stove keeps us warm enough.

  We’re in the middle of saying the Lord’s Prayer when Annie rushes in, snow already melting on her coat from the steamy heat of the stove. She carefully leans her rifle against the back wall and then whirls around to me.

  “Miss Davies!” she gasps.

  “Don’t interrupt,” I say, but it’s too late — the rest of the children are thoroughly distracted by Annie’s sudden appearance.

  “A stranger’s here!” Annie says, still catching her breath. “He was at McHenry’s, looking for you!”

  The children are abuzz, quizzing Annie about the stranger. For one brief moment, I think maybe it’s my papa, that Maggie told him where I went and he realized he loved me more than my reputation. But Maggie never really did like Papa.

  Not the way she liked Richard.

  And there he is, standing in the doorway.

  “This is him!” Annie says excitedly. “The stranger!”

  Richard strides into the room as if he owns the schoolhouse.

  “That’s no stranger, Annie,” I say, backing up. “That’s a snake.”

  The entire class’s attitude shifts immediately, although Richard doesn’t notice it. Jebediah’s and Joseph’s hands go to the revolvers they carry. Annie slinks to the back and picks up the Ballard rifle.

  But Richard just slithers forward.

  “I knew I’d find you eventually, Helen,” he says, his voice low and horrible. “You can’t run forever.”

  “I’m not running, Richard,” I say. My hand goes to my pocket.

  Jebediah moves, and Richard must notice him from the corner of his eye. He turns, surprised, and sees Jebediah’s hand on the grip of his pistol, not yet drawn. “Uh-uh, little boy,” he tells Jebediah. Richard moves like lightning, knocking the boy to the ground, and pulls out his own pistol quicker than thought. Joseph tries to draw his weapon, but Richard already has the barrel of his pistol pointed at him.

  “Richard!” I scream. “Leave the children alone!”

  Richard kicks Joseph in the chest, sending him to the ground too. “You’re coming with me, Helen. You’re coming home. What’s mine is mine, and you’re mine.”

  “Miss Davies?” Annie’s voice is quiet, quivering in fear. Richard doesn’t turn around as he draws closer and closer to me. “Miss Davies, my daddy said I wasn’t allowed to shoot nobody in the back, not ever, but I’m wondering if it’s okay to shoot snakes in the back.”

  Richard turns around slowly. Annie’s Ballard No. 4 Perfection Model is aimed right at his heart. And although she’s white as a ghost, her aim doesn’t quiver.

  Richard snorts in contempt. “You’re going to let a little girl like that play with a big gun just so you feel safe?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m not.”

  I pull my own pistol out of my pocket. A small gun, bought with my mother’s wedding dress. I traded her seed pearls for the pearl grips of the .32.

  “You’d never shoot me, Helen,” Richard says, smiling, his fangs showing. “No woman of mine would shoot me.”

  So I shoot him.

  “Get the law,” I order Bridget as the twins scream. Jebediah and Joseph pin Richard down as he writhes in pain on the floor. I peer down at him dispassionately.

  I only shot him in the shoulder; you’d think a man would have more respect for himself than to scream like that.

  Sharp-eyed readers may note that the sharpshooting little girl in this story is based on real-life crack shot Annie Oakley, who said, “I ain’t afraid to love a man. I ain’t afraid to shoot him either.” While Annie was famous for being able to shoot a cigarette from a person’s lips or a playing card edge on, she learned to be a crack shot at a very young age in order to provide her family with meat. They couldn’t afford to waste bullets, so if she missed, she went hungry. With such motivation, it’s little wonder she learned to shoot well.

  After the Civil War, many teachers were female. They typically had a cursory education from a “normal school,” a school or college that trained teachers, and they could be as young as fifteen years old. Rules for female teachers were strict, commonly including a mandate that the woman not marry while teaching, and teachers had to uphold a very strict moral code. For all that, an average teacher’s salary for a woman was around fifty dollars a year. A male teacher received around seventy dollars per year. Subscription schools were not rare in the mid- to late 1800s and were in fact the model used to develop the first school in Wyoming.

  The author would like to gratefully thank Louis L’Amour’s books and her father for inspiration and information.

  THE PROSPECTOR ACROSS THE TABLE smelled of horse manure and two long months of summer sweat. I wished to tell him that his dead business partner wanted him to go back to camp with a bar of lye soap and soak in a hot bath, but I suspected any business partner of his wouldn’t have been much for hygiene either, and the prospector’s glare told me he was already skeptical enough.

  “The spirits not always come,” I explained as I lit the incense sticks. “But ask your question and we will hope.” I spoke slowly, using the broken cadence I mimicked from my uncle and neighbors, even though I’d been born in San Francisco and was one of the few Chinese in the Badlands fluent in both languages. The miners valued the heavy accent. They seemed to think it made me a more authentic descendent of the Celestial Kingdom — their exotic word for China — and more connected with the spirits that spoke through me.

  At least, on a good day they spoke through me.

  “When you say spirits,” the man said, watching my hands with suspicion, as if lighting incense were a dangerous pastime, “you mean just the one, right? I just need to talk to my partner. None of your pagan gods or nothing like that.”

  I pressed my lips, barricading my pride against the affront. “I invite your partner but cannot choose who answers.” I lit the candle on the table and shook out the match. “You have gift for spirits?”

  He snarled, showing yellowed teeth surrounded by grizzly whiskers. “Like a sacrifice?”

  I stared at him over the flame, long enough that I hoped he understood he’d asked a remarkably stupid question. Finally, I responded, “Or perhaps a cup of rice.”

  He slowly sat back, but his glower didn’t lessen. “What’s a cup of rice gonna do?”

  “Is customary to give gifts to the dead, as a sign of respect, and so they might have sustenance in the next life. If you do not have gift, we have spirit money for purchase.” I gestured to the front room, where my uncle ran his laundry service.

  The prospector spent a moment rocking on the wooden stool, then reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a pre-rolled cigarette. He tossed it into the brass bowl on the table. “He can have that. But just one. I ain’t got more to spare.”

  Jaw tightening, I scooted the bowl to the side of the table. “His name?”

  “Thomas Manning.”

  “Think on the question you would ask Thomas Manning.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table while I did my best to concentrate. Sitting back, I shut my eyes and let my breathing calm. I imagined the drumbeats I had heard a hundred times during my mother’s rituals, back when she was a respected wu-shaman in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

  I did not have high hopes that Thomas Manning would make his presence known today. If I’d been partnered with this man in life, I wouldn’t come back to visit him either.

  Which meant it was time for a performance.<
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  Sometimes my patrons had simple requests — a fortune told by the wrinkles of their palm or a question answered by the kau cim sticks.

  But usually they came to me because they wished to speak with the dead.

  When my uncle first brought me to Dakota Territory, I refused to take for granted the traditions my mother had begun to teach me before she too became an honored spirit. I would light the incense. I would burn spirit money and paper effigies. I would sink into my trance so the spirits might use my voice to speak.

  But I had never finished my training to become a true shaman, and too often my patrons left disappointed and angry. The rough-edged men of Deadwood had little patience for our traditions, and they didn’t like being told that the spirits did not wish to speak with them.

  After a week with sparse patronage and a threat from my uncle that he would soon have me scrubbing linens in the laundry, I dared to fake my first trance.

  It had gotten easier since then.

  I did not tell lies, after all. I told likelihoods.

  Your departed lover is here, I’d whisper, and she wants only your happiness, even if you need to take comfort in the arms of a soft-bosomed dove. The lonely man would no doubt visit a pleasure house soon enough, even without my encouragement. Or I might say, The spirits urge you to welcome the one-eyed man, for he will bring you prosperity. Then I’d imagine the prospector chuckling to himself when the one-eyed knave of hearts came into his poker hand that night.

  I was right often enough that they kept coming back, eagerly listening to my whispered fortunes, and always hoping to hear a single word.

  Gold.

  Satisfied or not, they all dropped a few coins into my tin cup as they left. It would not make me wealthy, but at least I didn’t have to spread my legs for coin like the girls I saw hanging out the windows of the Gem or Bella Union.

  “Well?” said the prospector. “Has old Manning got something to tell me or not?”

  I caught a whiff of his rancid breath mixed with my incense and tried to disguise my grimace. Through my puckered lips, I whispered, “Yes. He is here.”

  The prospector’s voice was lower now, following my example. “Tom?”

  I swayed on my seat. “Thomas Manning. We invite you to speak. Please, answer our questions.”

  “Tom, are you there?”

  It was amazing to me how easily their suspicions came and went. How strongly they wished to believe, despite how they scoffed at our ways and traditions.

  The prospector began to speak in earnest. “You picked a right awful time to get yourself killed, Tom. We’ve got an offer to buy the claim, and it could be a good deal for me, but I need to know —”

  I held up my hands. “Wait. Thomas speaks.”

  A silence. I shifted my eyes beneath my eyelids. “He is telling you to seek out your bright future.”

  “Bright? You mean like gold?”

  I cocked my head to the side, pretending to listen. “He is unclear. But I see much joy. There is piano music in a dimly lit hall. A pretty girl is trying to catch —”

  A crushing grip wrapped around my wrist, yanking me forward. I cried out, my eyes snapping open. The incense clattered to the floor.

  The man sneered. “Do I look like a fool, you slant-eyed witch? You think I care about an overpriced whore? You think Tom did?”

  I winced, as much from his rotted breath as the insult, which, truth be told, was one of the less creative my patrons had called me.

  “Tom and me been working the same goddamn gold claim for nine months, with nothing but goddamn rocks to show for it. So you tell me if you can talk to his ghost or not, ’cause I need to know if he found gold, or if I should sell my claim and get the hell out of here.”

  “S-sorry,” I stammered.

  “You’d better be, ’cause if I think you’re tryin’ to make an idiot of me, I will gut you like a pig.”

  My gaze darted to the tattered sheet that divided my room from the front of the shop, but I knew my uncle wasn’t back from visiting with the neighbors.

  I tried to pull away, but his fingers only tightened. “We try again,” I assured him, wrapping my free hand around the brass bowl that held the lone cigarette. “Thomas Manning come for sure this time.”

  His grip began to loosen.

  I smiled submissively and, hard as I could, smashed the bowl against his temple.

  The man reeled back, startled. I flipped the table, catching him in the jaw and sending him and his stool toppling backward. The candle on the table extinguished. The man released a stream of curses and slurs, but I was already at the desk on which we’d built our spirit altar, yanking open the top drawer.

  I grabbed the pistol my uncle had given me when he said we were leaving San Francisco. Leaving behind the only life I’d ever known. Leaving behind my mother’s still-wandering ghost.

  I raised the gun and locked my elbow. I’d never fired the gun before, and I hoped the sight of it alone would persuade the prospector to leave.

  Except, when the prospector spotted my tiny pistol, an amused grin showed his cracked teeth. In a blink, he unholstered his own gun, much larger than mine, and trained it on me. I guessed it would not be his first time pulling a trigger.

  Panic scratched at my throat.

  Then, all in unison, the candle flames on the altar flickered. The world hesitated. A familiar hum vibrated through my chest.

  The prospector frowned and glanced at a shelf on the wall, where three candles dripped with old wax.

  A chill of air brushed against my neck. Gooseflesh tickled down my arms. Not in fear, but not in relief either. I was used to ghosts on the streets and in the hills and drifting aimlessly through town, but I didn’t care for those who came into my home, uninvited and rarely welcome.

  “Tell him that gold has been found.”

  The deep voice tumbled and rolled with the measured cadence of the dead. Though I strained my eyes to the edge of their sockets, I could not see him behind me and I dared not turn my back on the prospector.

  “What was that?” The man twisted his head. I couldn’t tell if he meant the whisper or the flicker of candlelight.

  I wet the roof of my mouth. “He says that gold has been found,” I said, dropping the fragmented English to better echo the ghost. With so few chances to communicate with the living, spirits could be sensitive about being misunderstood, and translating them falsely could lead to more upsets than a few coins in a tin cup were worth.

  The prospector turned wary. “What’re you on about?”

  The ghost appeared at the edge of my vision, gripping the straps of his suspenders as tight as one would grip a butcher knife. His messy yellow hair was full of dust, and a feather-tipped arrow jutted from between his shoulder blades, like a flag marking its territory. The shaft was striped in the traditional red and blue paint of the Sioux. Blood had crisped to dark brown on his shirt.

  There was something unnervingly familiar about him, but I couldn’t see his face, and anyhow, all the white men with their bushy mustaches and dirty linen shirts looked the same.

  He was much too calm to be è guĭ, and I could be glad of that, at least. Even after all these years, the hungry ghosts terrified me. Perhaps he was yuān guî, a wandering spirit seeking justice for a wrongful death. The arrow would suggest as much.

  “Tell him,” the ghost said, moving past me, “there is still gold to be found in these hills.”

  “A male spirit has arrived,” I said, before repeating his words.

  The prospector’s eyes widened. He followed my look, but to him there was only empty air. Maybe a shadow. Maybe a spot of cold. Maybe his own superstitions creeping through the candle smoke. “Tom? Tom, that you?”

  The ghost shook his head. “Thomas Manning is gone.”

  I wasn’t surprised. “No, he says Thomas Manning has gone on to —”

  The prospector spat onto the wood floor. The glob passed through the ghost’s shoe. “You are a witch.”

&nb
sp; The ghost inhaled — a sharp hiss. “She told you what you wanted to hear, you ignorant ass.” Though he was so close, I knew the prospector couldn’t hear him, and I wasn’t about to repeat those words. I thought again that maybe I should shoot the prospector before he shot me — the pistol was still warm in my palm — but then the walls and floorboards began to tremble, the candlesticks rattling, the brass bowl vibrating across the floor.

  The prospector turned ashen.

  “Tell him,” said the ghost, “that while there is gold to be found, he’ll see not one nugget nor a pinch of dust. Death is painted in ashes upon his forehead. He’ll die if he stays in Deadwood.”

  I gaped at his back. Though I was willing to make up fortunes to satisfy my patrons, it was rare to hear one from the lips of a true ghost. They were secretive beings, and even now it was unclear to me how much of the future they could see, and how much of it could be changed.

  “Is that true?” I whispered.

  The ghost cut a glare at me, his pupils dilated with anger, and I gasped at seeing his face.

  I’d been right before. He was familiar, and a sorry sight to my eyes.

  “Just tell him,” said the ghost, at the same time the prospector stammered, “Is what true?”

  Again, I repeated the ghost’s words. Perhaps the prospector could see the truth in my face, for he did not gut me like a pig after all, just lowered his gun and cursed, a lot. “You goddamn Celestials and your goddamn superstitions,” he railed, but there was more fear in his voice than gall. “You should all be hanged for bringing your curses down on us!”

  Despite his hubris, he snatched up his filth-covered hat and fled, shoving his way through the curtain. I wondered if by morning light he’d be hitching a ride on the first stagecoach, or discovered whiskey-drunk in a saloon.

  Summer heat seeped back through the walls as the ghost’s fury began to ebb. My pulse stayed erratic. My palm would be ridged with lines where the gun’s handle pressed into it.

  I stared at the arrow in the ghost’s back and waited for him to speak, willing away my distress at recognizing him.