Hour Glass Read online

  “I ain’t no legend.”

  “You got a card in poker named after you. The Queen of Spades is called a Calamity Jane.”

  “So I hear tell. I ’spect that has more to do with my unwaverin’ ability to dig a fuckin’ grave than anything of real value. Gamblin’s for dumb shits anyways. It’s what got Wild Bill killed in the first place.”

  “I thought it was in reference to the idea that to ignore a Queen of Spades was to court calamity. At least, that’s what I heard. Not much of a gambler, myself.”

  “That’s a goddamned blessing.”

  A pause passed between us as Jane stared off into the spot of sky the sun had recently occupied. There was a longing there plain as day. It reminded me of old poems I read in school of fishermen’s widows standing vigil and waiting for their loves to return from the ocean. Unlike the dead fishermen, the sun would return again, and so would the crowds and the laughter of children as Calamity Jane told and retold her amazing tall tales of the Old West. Tales that were dying a little slower than she was, but dying all the same.

  It was a funny thing how the west was already old. When I was a kid, it was all new, but with the trains and the law came a different era. The dawn of a new kind of people. The legends like Calamity Jane and Wild Bill were fading into the sunset. They were spectacles—legends on display—because there were no real places for legends anymore. As if reading my mind, Jane broke our silence with an answer.

  “I ain’t so legendary to forget people. Not people like you and . . . your sister. How is Hour anyhow? What I did back then . . .” Jane tripped on her words and gnawed at her nail to cover the blunder. It was an odd thing for her not to know what to say or how to say it. “Did it work out? I always wondered . . . Is she all right?”

  Jane was hesitant, and I wanted to hug her for it. We had been on her mind all these years. We weren’t just a footnote in her tales. Maybe nobody else knew of us, or what happened eighteen years ago, but she did. My face had not been lost in a sea of faces. Jane knew me. She would always know me. I sat beside not a legend, but my old friend, the woman who saved my life.

  2

  In August of 1876, home was a shanty in the Black Hills outside of Deadwood, South Dakota. At the time, the entirety of the land of Deadwood Gulch and the gold-filled Black Hills was legally the property of the Lakota Sioux people as part of the Laramie Treaty. Two years prior, General Custer had reported the discovery of gold. Pioneers flooded the land to pan for the yellow. It wasn’t long before the land was annexed into the South Dakota territory by the United States, but before all that came to pass, it was where our father had planted his claim and our home.

  The air was getting cooler, which was the nature of autumn in the Black Hills. I don’t reckon I’ll ever forget how the air smelled that morning: full of wet leaves, whiskey, and cinnamon. Sunlight filtered in patches and bits through the tall trees around us like bright stamps on our persons. A decent rain had fallen over night, so the piece of land we occupied was ripe for planting a garden if we were the type to be so inclined to do such things.

  My sister and I made our way out to the water’s edge, finding our favorite set of flat stones to make our base for the morning’s toilet. She went away behind some trees to do her business, always cautious about me seeing her unmentionables. A silly thing since I’d changed her messes only years earlier, but at six years old, my sister had discovered modesty, and I allowed her the privacy it required.

  When she was finished, we washed our hands in the rushing water. I took it upon myself to wash her face with a bit of a rag that had been soaked. Once a week we cleaned our faces and nether parts. The job would become more and more unpleasant the colder the air around us became, but both of our mothers would have insisted if they were alive.

  “Pa is sick,” she said.

  I was gently wiping bits of dirt from her cheek as she stared off the way she was wont to do. My sister rarely looked into a person’s face the way that was common. Conversation, too, was strained and nearly impossible with folks other than me and our pa. It was the staring, though, that clued people in to her otherness. Instead of meeting eyes, she’d gazed off blankly over my shoulder to something that was visible only to her.

  “Yeh, I heard him moaning. He’ll be all right.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why do you reckon so?”

  “He got blisters. The bumps like Mr. McCreeny.”

  I shook my head. I had seen the bumps too, but unlike her, I didn’t come out with what I already figured was truth. Mr. McCreeny was a nice enough fellow to us and our pa. We helped each other out quite often, but news traveled fast among miners, and we all knew Mr. McCreeny had been taken to see the doc in Deadwood. That was about a week ago, and the stories trickled in like rainwater through leaves. Miners from all over were coming down with a sickness that covered you in bumps and left you feverish and weak.

  After we were clean, we made our way back to our shanty. The moaning could be heard from outside, and my back tensed at the thought of Pa and his misery. I was plagued with the need to somehow get him all the way to Deadwood to see the doc. Being a boy of only twelve, I was not nearly strong enough to help him to town on my own.

  I asked my sister to wait for me while I went inside to check on Pa. He looked worse than before we left that morning. Pa groaned when I entered, rolling here and there trying to escape the pain of his fever. The sickness followed him this way and that, unrelenting in its torment. With trembling fingers, I approached his cot.

  “Pa? You sick?”

  Only moans escaped his lips. When he managed to open his eyes, I could see they were red where the whites ought to be. He blinked hard, trying to bring my face in focus, but it seemed little use as his gaze couldn’t rest on my eyes. Red, swollen bumps plagued his face, arms, and legs. They looked painful. I feared touching the things lest they sprout legs and infest me as well.

  “Pa, we need to get you to the doc in town.”

  He nodded but made no motion to stand. His body shivered violently, and I flung an extra blanket on top of him. When I left him, thick spittle was leaking from his mouth. It foamed and gathered in between his cheek and pillow. There weren’t nothing for it. Somehow, I had to get him some care.

  I found my sister sitting outside on a stump drawing swirls in the dirt. Beside her was the old wagon Pa used for hauling. The idea struck me like a rock upside the head. We could load Pa onto the wagon and make our way with him all the way to Deadwood proper. There, someone could help us get him to the doc. It was the only way with him unable to move under his own power.

  A second thought flashed in my mind. Hauling a grown man out of the gulch to town would take quite the doing. Could we even make it, just the two of us? The alternative would be to leave and set off to Deadwood on foot to seek help, leaving my little sister alone to care for Pa until I got back. That was not a prospect that I cared to entertain, either. Not all of our neighbors were as kindly as Mr. McCreeny, and the woods were ripe with all manner of scoundrels. She was still a child and probably wouldn’t call out for help given the way she was. No, I wouldn’t leave her alone to care for a sick man and fend off whatever lay hidden in the gulch. Dragging the wagon up to Deadwood together was our only option.

  I gave her soft tack to chew on as I loaded the hand wagon with every bit of comfort and provision I could find. We had two packs meant for children our size that I filled with clothes and food in case the journey found us in a tight spot. Things being as they were, we might need to stay at the doc’s with our pa for a spell, and it wouldn’t do to have to travel all the way back down here.

  My sister said nothing as I explained the plan to her. She rarely said much, and the words she did use were often straight to the point with no nonsense in between. I didn’t even mind that she spoke staring at my boots instead of my face. Such was the way of things. She could keep he
r own company if she wanted. There were enough thoughts rattling around in my head that I didn’t need any additions.

  Finally, I was able to wheel the wagon into the shanty by way of moving our makeshift table. It took some doing, but we managed to coax Pa off of the cot and onto the wagon. It was a tight fit, and my sister had to help him bend his legs up so they wouldn’t drag on the ground, slowing our progress like two hefty anchors. When the deed was done, I inspected our work. Pa looked like a crumpled doll in a baby buggy, but it would have to do.

  I had her take point at the front of the wagon while I pushed from the back. Since most of the journey would be uphill, I decided that her pulling and guiding us was the best plan of action. Pushing the wagon would take the most strength, and if the wagon were to slip, I’d rather it roll over me than her. At first, she was dubious of her position, thinking that I gave her the easy task because she was a girl and smaller. But she soon realized that neither task was an easy one.

  It took us most of the day to make our way to town. I allowed us respite once every hour or so, as to not kill our legs maneuvering up the wet earth and through the trees. The journey was a hard one, and not a lick of luck joined in it. The thought that some good citizen might discover us and give aid was met with quiet disappointment. At one point, a large bit of earth gave way under my feet, and I had to grab ahold of some exposed rocks to not fall down the hill. The wagon was spared when the wheels got caught up in some roots that had been unearthed in the small landslide.

  By the time we reached the bustling boomtown of Deadwood, we were tired, muddy, and hungry. The only blessing of the trip had been that Pa had fallen unconscious about an hour in, so the ever present groans of pain no longer sounded in our ears. I switched places with my sister since the bulk of the effort would go to pulling the old wagon instead of pushing. She accepted the reprieve without so much as a glance as we entered the town, so alive and vibrating with people.

  Pa had allowed us to come to town with him before, when it was time for a run to gather supplies and food. It was difficult not to gawk at all the marvels of such a place. In mining camps, things were quiet until they weren’t. The noisy parts were rarely happy, so the onslaught of noise in the town always set my teeth on edge, like I was in the middle of something large and terrible. It was exciting too, in its own way. Everything you could ever dream of was in town. Silk dresses and fur blankets. And the girls. Oh, the girls! They were painted and dressed up like cakes in all sorts of colors. The use of such women was known to me, but at the time, they were still beautiful mysteries in my young eyes.

  But that day, none of the excitement felt exhilarating. The rain had made the main thoroughfare a muddy mess of well-worn wagon tracks and hoofprints. My sister and I were covered in thick mud up to our knobby knees as we tried to maneuver our hand wagon through the streets. We were tiny mud urchins in the larger-than-life crowd that swarmed around us. One man nearly ran us over in his haste as a buxom woman shouted at him like a scolding schoolmarm.

  “Tom Gibson, you dumb-ass bastard! Ain’t you got the lick of sense not to run over children?”

  The man rode off, embarrassment flooding his cheeks, but said nothing by way of apology. The woman gave us a hard look. We must have seemed quite the sight to a woman like her. She had a pretty face for an aging lady. Of course, at the time, any woman over eighteen seemed like an aging woman to me. Nevertheless, she was a looker with a round bottom and an ample bosom tucked neatly into a red and black corset. Her dark hair was piled high into an elaborate hat, and she had several lengths of fur scarves wound around her neck, trailing down to her waist. The furs were so clean, I reckoned somewhere in them the animal still lingered, liable to jump out at me at any moment. The rest of her costume was just as clean. Her whole dress would have cost a month’s worth of our food, I reckoned.

  “You. Kid,” she said, calling to me.

  Her voice was loud and sultry. There was the slightest hint of an accent I couldn’t yet place. Most folks around the mining camps spoke with funny accents. Norwegians, Germans, Irish, and of course, the Celestials in town, but hers was of a different lilt. I stopped my wagon to answer.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “That feller on your wagon dead?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then what ails him?” The question came out as curiosity edged with kindness.

  “It’s our pa. He’s real sick. My sis and I, we’re trying to take him to the doc.”

  She pursed her lips and stared down at us over her finery. Pa twitched a little but did not wake, even with all the hubbub around him. My sister focused her gaze at Pa’s feet.

  “He looks to have smallpox like the rest of them,” she said after her brief evaluation.

  “Yes, ma’am. I ’spect that sounds about right.”

  The woman cocked her head and shouted into the building she was standing in front of. She didn’t take her eyes off us for a second.

  “Joseph! Go fetch Jane.”

  A rustling came from inside, and somewhere in the background, we heard a door open and shut. Within ten minutes, a short, squatty man appeared followed by a rather tall fellow dressed in an apron over buckskins with a bandana over his mouth. They both took one look at our cargo with somber eyes. The portly man moved at once to relieve us of our burden as the taller man beckoned us to join him and the woman on the slatted porch. We did as we were told, too tired to argue or question. A few others were hailed to help as they worked together to move our pa in his wagon. The struggle to get the thing moving again took a few minutes and a lot of cursing, but they managed to shove it through the mud.

  “You brung him here by yourselves?” asked the one in buckskins.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  The woman next to him smiled a little as if there were some joke I was not privy to. She stifled a giggle with a gloved hand. He gave her a frustrated look before he turned back to me.

  “That yer pa?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I ain’t no sir, boy. Where are y’all from?”

  “Pa works a claim in the gulch near the creek. We brung him up from there.” I looked over my shoulder following the wagon. “Where are those men taking him? To the doc?”

  “No. There’s been an infestation of the smallpox, so we had to make a pest tent down yonder to quarantine those infected.”

  I shuddered a little at the thought of having to go to a pest tent. I hadn’t seen such a thing in life before, but my imagination wasn’t doing my spine any favors. The man in buckskins eyed me up and down. It was then I noticed his apron was stained with splotches of blood and all other manner of fluids.

  “You dragged your daddy all the way here in that wagon? That’s quite a thing to do.”

  “I had to. No other way to get him here and look out fer my sister.”

  “You two have a place to stay here?”

  “No, sir. We’ll just make our way back home once Pa is settled, I reckon.”

  “Goddamn it, kid,” said the man in buckskins as he yanked down the bandana from his mouth. “Do I have to show you my complete lack of pecker before you get it in your head that I ain’t a man? And I definitely ain’t no sir.”

  With the mask pulled aside, it was obvious that the man with whom I was speaking was actually a woman. Her skin was tanned and leathery, and she wore the uniform of a pioneer. If she had any bit of femininity about her shape, it was hidden beneath the layers of buckskin. Her hat was a man’s hat, worn from use, ornamented with Indian feathers. Everything about her had read “man” until she pulled away that bandana to show the more delicate features of a woman’s mouth. Her crystal-blue eyes glared down at me as I froze in place. The buxom woman next to her looked like she was about to burst with laughter.

  My lips trembled, struggling to find words to say. Never had I heard a woman talk like that, much less to me. It left
a fellow dumb.

  A bark of laughter finally erupted from the woman in finery, and she slapped the strange woman on her back with good humor. “Oh, you poor kid. You ain’t the first to make that mistake. I’ll tell you that!”

  “And thank you ever so fuckin’ much, Miss Dora DuFran, for yer lovely candor,” the other woman spat back sarcastically.

  “Oh Jane, you ain’t no delicate flower. And you, young man, just had the pleasure of meeting the infamous Calamity Jane.”

  She gestured with a gloved hand like an auctioneer displaying his next item for sale. I stared dumbstruck at the two completely opposite women. Dora DuFran continued to chuckle as Jane softened at my confusion. Stories abounded about Calamity Jane. Rumor had it she was a sharpshooter and a better horsewoman than most Sioux. The latest tales were about her and Wild Bill Hickok. They had only been in Deadwood a short time before he was killed during a poker game.

  Now the infamous Calamity Jane was kneeling in front of me, a soft smile on her face. The voice that came from her lips was calm and pleasant. I breathed out the embarrassed gasp I had been holding.

  “Yer pa, how long has he been sick?”

  My shoulders relaxed, suddenly realizing how tense they had been. I looked around, but Pa was no longer in sight. In all my confusion, the men had already moved him to the pest tent at the other end of the thoroughfare. A quick glance told me my sister was all right. She sat nearby, drawing in the mud with a stick. I made to answer Jane as best as I could.

  “A few days, I suppose. He weren’t feeling too good all week. But it was yesterday the bumps started showing real bad.”

  “I see. You got a mama or somebody nearby to care for you?”

  I shook my head. “We can just go on home.”

  “No, you ain’t gonna do that. Two youngins out in the gulch alone? Not as long as I’m breathin’, kid.”

  “Then where . . .?”

  “You can stay right here with me,” said Jane, standing up tall above me like a statue.