In Calamity's Wake (8 page)

S
O, YOU ARE ALIVE
. T
HAT'S GOOD NEWS
!

I must have passed out from the pain, while my horse found the trail and kept us moving, for when I heard that voice, my eye was on her neck and my arms were numb. I called, Whoa, and she stood still.

The voice belonged to a cheery little man mounted on a giant horse, a black mountain of a horse with a white heart on its chest and a white mane and tail. The man's moustache was equally oversized, hiding all of his lower face but the fraction of a lip and a small bit of chin.

He smiled at me and chuckled. I thought you were dead! he said.

Not yet.

Well you were headed in the right direction.

For Virginia City?

No, you are headed the opposite direction of Virginia City. You were headed in the right direction for death, riding around unconscious.

I looked around me. The trail looked the same ahead as behind.

Are you sure I'm going the wrong way? I said. Every word sent pain shooting across my scalp. My arms and legs felt stuffed with sawdust.

Yup, I just came from visiting my sister at Alder Gulch. You need a doctor to look at that ear, he said, moving his horse in and leaning down to peer at my head. He whistled through missing teeth. You need some help or you are gonna lose that head, he said. If you don't mind Indians I have some friends nearby who could fix you up better than any misfit money-hungry doctor.

I looked at him. His brow was crinkled with such concern it was comical. His horse and my horse assessed each other, waiting for an answer.

Yes, I said.

W
E FOLLOWED
him towards an encampment. I struggled to stay conscious through the pain. He called the Indians Blackfeet and when I corrected him, struggling to say Blackfoot, he said, Oh, you are a Canadian!

I stopped talking. It wasn't that he was saying anything wrong but opening my mouth to answer the man was enough to make me want to murder myself.

I could smell my wound and I felt a warm sticky flow down my neck. As we passed a rock formation he waved and I saw an Indian girl on horseback. From her expression I knew I must look mostly dead. She led us to a big campsite. There were twenty rings of teepees in large open clusters between two coulees. Five cairns were arranged along small hills at the north end of the camp. There were Cree and a few Assiniboine and some from other tribes there, but this was the Blackfoot reservation. She exchanged a few words with my rescuer and then with my horse and then she caught me as I fell from my saddle.

With the help of some friends she brought me to her family. I looked up at their faces as they carried me. I had never seen such beautiful eyes.

I lapsed into unconsciousness again and when I woke I lay within a circle of women in a large teepee. They had wrapped me tightly in blankets, soaked my hair with water, mopped the blood from my head, neck and shoulder, and tied a poultice to the wound.

Apos-ipoca, one woman said and made the sign for dry-root.

I lay on my back on the soft earth and turned my head to watch an old woman laying out a sheet and then
spreading bright beads of saskatoon berries across it to dry.

How's that? someone asked me.

Thank you.

A
WOMAN
and her daughter tended to me, clucking at the look of my ear. They called me sister-in-law. I didn't know why. Still, it was full of kindness. I knew by the movement of their voices that I had lost my hearing on the wounded side. The hours were different in length depending on the level of my pain. The painful hours were like tacks in my brain and the smoky minutes spread out over everything. I sucked on chokecherry mash and bit the inside of my cheek when they checked my ear. I told them about the woman at the well, about my father and how he had sent me to find my mother.

That was not her, one woman signed. That woman is crazy since the war.

Yes, said the old man, whose name was Theophilus Little. That poor woman is one of the common casualties of the war. She lost everything but the conviction that her children are still out there somewhere.

W
HEN WE
were alone Theophilus smoked a pipe and did not speak much, although he laughed often at his
own thoughts. His laugh was a rumble from the chest, almost like pleurisy. I slept and slept, waking most often when my head was being gently examined or my body shifted into a seated position so that delicious stew could be pushed through my lips.

As the days passed, the pain in my head grew noisy and hot; I hated even to move my neck. But when I lay perfectly still, I listened to the language of the people around me. It brought me back to Zita. Theophilus called the mother Lizzy and the daughter Poesa. Children and other adults came and went, clearly asking after me. Outside I heard grandmothers singing to babies and the horses gaily neighing. Lizzy and Poesa spoke some English and I some Blackfoot but mostly we communicated by signs.

Pain? signed Poesa.

More, I signed.

Poesa bid me to lie down and she spoke to her friends for some minutes.

While they spoke I stared at the interior of the cone of the ceiling. My head expanded and contracted around the drum of my bloody heartbeart.

I
N THE
night I woke shaking, the uncontrollable movements of my body adding to my pain. Poesa was there, watching me. She fed me and wet my face,
wiped at the eternal sweat. She swaddled me tightly in blankets against my weak protests and fanned me with my hat. She sang me back to sleep as if I were her own sister.

I woke in the dark and she was there, asleep at first and then woken by me. She lifted my bandage and clucked when I gasped.

Pain bad, she said.

I nodded. I hurt too much to speak or sign.

She nodded and then she pulled up her clothes to show me a scar in the centre of her belly, another naval, made by a De-Creator.

I live, she signed. Your wound is not as bad as this.

How? I signed.

She shook her head.

Thank you for saving me, I signed.

She wiped my face and neck again. She lifted the packing and examined my wound carefully while I clenched my teeth. She poured water into the wound and then packed it again with agrimony.

The fever is good.

Is my horse here?

Your horse is good. She is outside waiting for you.

She sat back and watched me burn. I saw her there through drifting eyelids whenever pain pushed me up to the surface of consciousness.

T
HEOPHILUS STAYED
on, sleeping in a tent he erected outside of the teepee. He came often to sit with me after the draining and washing and packing of my wound was done. He sat on his pack with his knees far apart and his elbows rested on them. His limbs were skinny as sticks inside his worn clothes but his feet were either bizarrely long and thin or else he wore shoes stuffed with newspaper.

Will you go on if the infection heals?

If it heals?

I'm sorry. I believe that it will continue to heal. Poesa says that it will and she knows her patients.

She's very kind.

How do you feel?

Less dead. If I don't move or breathe then not so bad. When she pulls the stuffing out of my head I feel like murdering myself.

Theophilus nodded. He leaned in close to sniff my head and whistled sympathetically.

Will you go on looking for your mother?

Yes. If I can I will.

After a long pause he asked, Why do you want to find her?

I don't. Or, I don't know. I promised I would.

A broken promise made to a dead man is seldom punished.

I had no answer to that and so I was silent. Theophilus cleared his throat a few times and rolled his eyes and rocked on his heels and swapped his cup from one hand to the other and back.

I love these people here, he said. Lizzy and her husband took me in one winter. I didn't know nothing about Indians. They showed me a buffalo jump where the bones of the buffalo have been layered over thousands of years. Around the fire they told me about the dog days, the days before horses, and the winters of starvation. They made me feel like part of a human family.

That's good, I said.

If you are who you say you are, I knew your daddy. That is, if you can trust Jane when she says that it was Bill.

I tried to sit up and cried out with pain. I held the packing against my ear and breathed hard through my teeth until I could speak.

How do you know him?

He's dead; you don't have to worry about finding Wild Bill. Is that who it is?

I don't know. That's what she told my father.

He looked confused. She couldna told Bill; he was dead before you were born.

No. I meant the man who adopted me.

Oh, well. That makes sense. I knew Wild Bill in Abilene when he was city marshal and I was selling lumber. He was a good man. I never knew anyone so sorry for killing a friend.

For killing a friend?

Yup. Say what you will, he was a gentleman of the old style in a savage new land.

I turned my head to listen better and Theophilus took this as encouragement to tell the tale he had been holding for me.

I
WAS
there ahead of the rush, got there in the winter, what year was it? 1881, 1882? Anyhow, in the early spring great herds of Texas cattle arrived to be shipped to the eastern markets, thousands upon thousands. The air smelled of manure and every conversation was held against great mooing. And with all those cows came cowboys, cattle owners, cattle buyers, gamblers, thieves, thugs, murderers, the painted women, the rich, the poor. Ha, talk about the Wild and Woolly West; everything calm went wild, everything went woolly.

I had a lumberyard on Texas Street near Walnut Street. The streets were always full, jammed full of saloons, gambling dens, dens of infamy of all kinds of character, cutthroats, robbers, murderers. There was money being passed from one end of the street to the
other and back up again all day long. I'm not exaggerating, I have not half told it. It was indescribable, it was the wickedest place on earth, and I was there on Texas selling lumber.

Every cowboy, black, white, or Hispanic, that came into town had to pass my office door. There were hundreds of them every day and every son of a gun had two guns, each as long as an Ohio fence-rail. These boys came to town to drink and gamble, get rip-roaring crazy drunk, try the patience of the whores, and towards evening jump on their ponies and shoot hundreds of shots at the sky.

Wild Bill was our city marshal. He was much admired. He was born in the state of New York, his father a Presbyterian deacon, but, as he told it to me, he grew up leaning west. I just went west and just couldn't stop going, he told me.

He stood over six feet tall, straight and erect, graceful as a woman. He had superb fingers, shoulders like a Hercules.

Like a Hercules? I could not resist.

Yes, yes, your father was a handsome man. The women loved him. He had gold hair flowing to his shoulders, an eagle's eye and two big ivory-handled guns, loaded to the muzzle, always hanging on his belt. I tell you this not to win your favour. The bad men
feared him. He never missed his mark when he fired those guns and the bad men fled from him as mice flee from a storm.

He killed someone?

Yes.

Who?

He killed Phil Coe. Oh, and a few others. He was not a violent man but you must understand it was hardly possible back then to get through your whole day not killing someone. Phil Coe ran the Bull's Head saloon. He was a vile character who for no reason I ever knew just hated Bill. Well, for some cause he vowed to secure Bill's death, marshal or no. Not having the courage to do it himself, but having many a drunk indebted to him, he filled two hundred cowboys with whisky, one day, intending to get them into trouble with Wild Bill in his role as marshal, hoping that they would all get to shooting and in the bedlam Bill would get shot too. But Wild Bill learned of the scheme and cornered Coe, his two pistols drawn. Just as he pulled the triggers, a policeman rushed around the corner between the two men and the pistols and the shots from both guns entered that poor man's body, killing him instantly. Of course, Bill then shot Coe twice in the belly. And then, whirling around with his two guns drawn on the drunken crowd of cowboys, Bill said, And now do any
of you fellows want the rest of these bullets? Not a word was uttered. Get on your ponies and ride to your camps or I'll shoot into you, Bill yelled.

A hush was upon these boys and in less than two minutes the mob had vanished into the darkness. Bill went back to the boy in the dust but he was already dead. Bill carried the policeman in his arms, like some sweetheart, to the coffin-maker and bought him a fine coffin. He paid all the expenses for the man's burial, including bringing his mother from Kansas to claim the remains. He felt real guilty about killing a man who surely was rushing to his aid.

My father killed two men?

Oh, he killed more than that! But things like that just happened all the time. Blame it on the moon, blame it on the stars or the whisky.

Blame it on the stars.

Or the whisky.

Well, thank you.

No never mind. Don't feel too bad about the killings. He got shot himself playing cards. Revenge killing, if that makes you feel any better.

It does not.

S
HE BEGGED
P
OKER
A
LICE TO READ HER THE
report of Bill's death in The Special Correspondence of the
Chicago Inter Ocean
.

A pistol was fired close to the back of the head, Alice read. The bullet entered the base of the brain, a little to the right of the centre, passing through in a straight line, making its exit through the right cheek between the upper and lower jawbones, loosening several of the molar teeth in its passage, and carrying a portion of the cerebellum through the wound.

Martha gagged hard and fell forward. Alice caught her by the shoulders and pushed her back in the chair, holding her as long as she could. Alice won three four-hour games with Martha crying on her, soaking the lace at the neck of her dress, until the men said they wouldn't play; they couldn't bluff over her weeping.

Most mornings she could be found sleeping in the
mud under a wagon. She had a little plot of land but she let it lie fallow. Bill was in the ground. Plagues took over. Locusts and beetles churned the plant matter. Nothing could reach through the grief; she just drank and drank and drank and drank and drank.

Bill's death was the beginning of hard times in Deadwood. Gold nuggets turned into frog bones, pans turned into colanders, piggy banks turned into rattles. The crowds that had flocked to the hills fled. Poker Alice couldn't get a game going. There were days and days when the only things said out loud were
sorry
and
goodbye
. Everyone said they were coming back, just going home to take care of something quick and planning to return. For a while Alice kept promises to watch belongings, keep an eye on families. Eventually all the families were sent for but not the belongings, and so she treated those as hers, an inheritance of dead hopes.

Those that stayed did so because they didn't have anywhere to go and they were getting richer. Women left in the town had more dresses than dancers, more pots and kettles than a big hotel, shoes for every occasion. The whores at Mollie Johnson's collected twenty-seven cats, ten dogs, five horses and nine canaries. They lined the canary cages with shredded claims.

On winter nights under skies bent with stars, Poker Alice, Martha and Dora DuFran went riding
in abandoned carriages. They tore up and down the empty streets under the falling snow whooping loud at the wind. They stopped at every bar and had a drink and got back in and raced up and down the main drag again. When Alice, Martha and Dora laughed at once it was like the sun coming up.