Hour Glass Read online

  The weight of it all was a heavy fog that rolled in over my eyes. I was at a funeral again. This time, it was my home’s funeral, and I was mourning something I didn’t even understand. Inside the fog, Jane suggested we leave.

  “Why’d you let me come here?” I asked her breathlessly.

  “Cause you ain’t the type to go on word alone. Sometimes you gotta feel a thing, see it, smell it, taste it, before you can dub it true and move along.”

  I felt my head nod, but I hadn’t commanded it to do so. Something somewhere in the back of my brain took the reins and led me and Jane back to our horses without another word between us. Hell, what more could we do?

  The next morning was moving day for us. Charlie Utter had readied his wagon for Hour and me, and he had built a small crate for Fred the Kitten to make the journey as well. The thought of asking Hour to leave her kitten here with Dora had come to mind, but I quickly dismissed it. We were going to a new place, and Hour was used to routine. This would all be a difficult adjustment, so I decided Hour got to keep her confidence things. Fred and the colored beads were coming with us, no argument.

  A gentle fog hung near the ground even as midmorning brought Charlie Utter’s garish wagon to the front of Diddlin’ Dora’s. I wondered if it had been the same fog that had infected my brain recently. Had it leaked out of my ear in the night and haunted the world of Deadwood or was it left over from the fire? It was a dumb thought, but you think dumb thoughts when you’re afraid. I tried not to tremble as I loaded the few meager possessions we had left and an angry kitten onto the wagon with Charlie Utter’s help. Hour stood on the floorboards outside Dora’s, nervously watching us handling her kitten. Her thumb and forefinger were likely to wear all the paint off of those pearls of hers.

  By the time the deed was done, I turned around to see a spectacle of women. There were men too, like Charlie and Joseph, but they were overtaken by all of Dora’s girls standing outside in various stages of sleepiness, waiting to see us off. Nancy May had tears in her eyes as she told Hour what a good girl she was and patted her head. Hour’s head looked tiny under the large woman’s man-sized hand.

  Dora, for her part, hugged me against that bosom of hers like she was trying to squeeze and smother me to death with it. She kissed Hour gently on the forehead, knowing she would hate a hug of that magnitude. Joseph shook my hand and slapped my back like a man might another man, and my chest swelled at the meaning of that.

  Within a blink of an eye, Lil’ Missy was in front of me. No kidding. She wasn’t there, then I blinked, and then she was there. For a second I thought she might be a figment or a specter in the smoke, like the fog that leeched from the night before, but when that cinnamon smell wafted over me, I knew it was her. Pretty soon, she was all I could see in the whole world.

  “You write me, okay? I mean it, Jimmy Glass. I can read just fine, and Dora’s helpin’ us all with our letters and such, so you best write me. Promise?”

  “I promise. I’ll write e’ery day.”

  Missy giggled, and it sounded like little song birds.

  “Easy now. You’ll have your studies, so how ’bout once a week?”

  “Of course. I’ll write you . . . once a week.”

  There was a thing I needed to say. I knew I might never again have the chance to say it to her in person again because who knew what the future held? The problem wasn’t wanting to say it. The problem was in the saying it. Words got locked up in my throat and refused to come out. I moved them around in my mouth like marbles, but each one was too hard and thick and stupid to use, so I kept us in silence trying to string the proper words together fit for her.

  “Missy, I . . . I wanna say . . . well, what I was hoping to tell you was . . . I love . . .”

  Everything shifted because there were lips on my mouth, Missy’s lips. She kissed me on the mouth, in front of everyone. Cinnamon swirled around us so all I could hear was the collective gasp of dozens of surprised folks. Somewhere a few girls giggled. Missy released me from the moment, allowing me to float back down to Earth gently. When I looked around, a whole crowd of smiling faces were winking at me.

  “Well, kid. I didn’t know you had it in you,” said Charlie Utter as he nudged me with the point of his elbow.

  Scarlet posies blossomed all over my face, and some of the girls got brave enough to laugh as Missy turned and disappeared among their ranks. I went and stood next to Hour since she was the only one unmoved by Missy’s farewell display.

  “I s’pose we should get along now if’n we want to make use of the sunlight,” said Charlie Utter.

  “Not so fast, Charlie Utter, you old windbag of a man, gettin’ everything going too damn early. I ain’t said my farewells as of yet.”

  The crowd parted and there stood Calamity Jane, larger than life and smiling. I drunk her in at that moment so I might take her with us to Sturgis in my mind. When she walked up to me, I felt hot tears fall unbidden down my cheeks. I didn’t mean for it to happen, and it weren’t manly, but there it was.

  “Now, don’t look so sad, Jimmy Glass. I know I ain’t no pretty thing like Lil’ Missy yonder, but surely the fear of kissin’ a mug as ugly as this one ought not to make a young man cry.”

  I could no longer hold back the dam. The tears came, and I flung my arms around that woman without abandon. To her credit, she held me just as tight right back. Sobs, the kind that you can’t control, racked my body. I was a boy, the one without a mama, once again enveloped in her buckskinned embrace. By the time I pulled away, I had left a wet spot of tears and snot on her shoulder.

  “You are a fine man, Jimmy Glass. As fine as any man I’ve seen. As fine as Bill.”

  Wiping my eyes, I nodded to her. All my words were used up, and the few I had left were muffled by the sounds of sobbing all around us.

  “Thank you, Jane. I reckon we’re even now.”

  “Kid, I reckon the two of us ain’t never gonna be even in this here lifetime. That there is a fact that is fine by me.”

  She shook my hand like a man might, and I shook hers back like a friend.

  Jane kneeled down in front of Hour while she stared, unmoved, at the floor. There wouldn’t be much of a reaction to good-byes from her. I wasn’t even sure Hour knew what the concept meant after her explanation of Pa’s death, but Jane wasn’t going to let her leave without trying to say her piece to the little girl.

  “Hour, honey, you gotta go now with yer brother. There’s this great school where yer goin’, and it has comfy beds for you and lots of mice for Fred, and yer just gonna love it there. You mind the teachers and yer brother and you’ll be just fine.”

  “Jane?” asked Hour without lifting her gaze from the floor.

  It was a little thing, but it made Jane’s lower lip begin to quiver. Her own river of tears was beginning to cut trails through the canyons of dirt on her face. She managed to swallow enough of it back to answer.

  “No, no baby. I can’t come with you. I hafta stay here. They don’t teach no schoolin’ to the likes of me. Besides, who’s gonna argue with Dora if I ain’t around?”

  Jane tried to smile, but it was strained. Not for the first time, I wished Hour was normal. It wasn’t for me this time. It was for Jane. Despite all her gruff exterior, all she wanted was for this little girl to hug her. Maybe she wanted a semblance of the embrace she had with Hour during the fire. For all Jane had done, she deserved it, but you can’t force a child like Hour to be normal, no matter how much you wanted it and who you wanted it for.

  “All right, little Hour, the most beautiful girl ever, it’s time to say goodbye. I ain’t gonna try to make you say . . .”

  Hour’s face looked up into Jane’s then, cutting off her words. It wasn’t the mechanical way she tended to do sometimes. The movement was a deliberate one, as though she were thinking it out step by step. I felt my mouth hang open at the sight. My sister was he
re and present in the moment. She was right there with us and listening like any little girl might. With all the effort in the world of creation, she managed four little words, each in itself a thing to be said clear and loud and proud. Each enough to bring down even the strongest of people.

  “I love you, Jane.”

  24

  Somewhere across the land, eighteen years later, those same tears fell again across the same dirty face. Sure, it weren’t as youthful, but the same crystalline eyes blinked those tears away as they did all those years before. I sniffled for what I was worth and poked the fire with one of the nearest sticks to distract from my less-than-manly state of being. It wasn’t until both of our sleeves were damp with brine that we spoke of real things once again.

  “Why don’t you go rustle us up some grub, Jimmy Glass? I haven’t eaten in a coon’s age, and I reckon I could eat ’bout anything right ’bout now. Cooky’s over at the chuck wagon yonder. It’s the one painted uglier than Charlie Utter’s old box.”

  The leaves crackled and a twig snapped as I stood from my post and walked away from the woman who changed my life forever. In fact, every step I made was noisy. My last trail boss told me I couldn’t sneak up on a deaf drunkard in the boots I bought. He was right, but those boots cost me more than I could have imagined when I was twelve and living in Deadwood. There was a lot of pride in owning something outright you never thought was possible before.

  I sauntered up to Cooky’s wagon and waited my turn behind a man I recognized as the host of the show. The moonlight gleamed off the waxed tips of his elegantly groomed mustache. He wore a fine suit and checked the time on a chained piece with the nearby torchlight. The man smelled of tobacco and appraised me when I approached.

  “You the one been talkin’ with Jane?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How you know her?”

  “We knew each other in Deadwood a long time ago. Just catchin’ up.”

  “I see. Jane is a nice gal, as far as those types go, but watch your wallet, if you take my meaning.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, sir. You callin’ her a thief?”

  It got my spine up, but I showed no sign of it to the fellow.

  “No, I reckon not a thief the way the dictionary might define it, but that woman’ll talk you into buying plenty for her. I can attest to that first hand. I bet she sent you here to buy her dinner?”

  I smiled. It couldn’t be helped.

  “Yes, sir. She did just that.”

  “If I was you, I’d haul, son, before your pay is gone for good. Just a friendly warnin’. Calamity Jane is a great lady, and a hell of a performer, but aptly named if you catch my meanin’.”

  A tray of food was provided and the man with the waxed mustache took it in hand. He paid the aproned cook inside the wagon and nodded to him. Cooky scowled, glared at me, and then looked back to the waxed man. I wondered if there was a wad of spit sitting there in the mess of beans on his plate with the look he gave.

  “Next,” he barked without any fanfare.

  “I guess that’s me,” I said, stepping in front of him to place my order.

  “Oh, and don’t worry about me getting dinner for Jane. I will owe that woman until the end of my days, I reckon.”

  Tipping my hat, I bowed a bit to excuse the confused man with his dinner. He said no further words to me but turned around and walked away. When I faced the wagon once again, I found that Cooky was looking upon me in a kinder light. Perhaps, after all, I would not be eating his spittle with my dinner as I assumed the last customer was doomed to do.

  The menu read as most chuck wagons did. Everything was brown and hot and named something other than what it really was. My choices consisted of Sonofabitch Stew, Mysteries, and Mexican Strawberries. I ordered two of each, and tipped Cooky a little extra in the hopes my food would truly be spit free.

  Sonofabitch Stew I had heard of before. It was pretty much a mug stew with anything and everything handy thrown in—heavy on the potatoes. Mexican Strawberries were easily identified as beans, but the Mysteries were, well, a mystery, until my trays showed up on Cooky’s counter. Each order had a link of some sort of sausage. My best guess would put the name having to do with the mystery of what sort of meat was in the casing. I hadn’t seen many dogs around and hoped it was due to a high population of coyotes and not the ingredients in Cooky’s sausages.

  Regardless, I thanked Cooky and headed back to Jane with my trays of hot brown food in hand. She thanked me when I handed her a tray, then offered me a swig of her whiskey. We sat there, eating and drinking in amicable silence for a spell, neither one of us wanting to broach the next subject we both knew was bound to come up. It weren’t for fear, and it weren’t because we were awkward around each other. Neither of us had a yellow streak in us, and we had spent the last few hours reliving the past together.

  The thing of it was, all that time, it left a hole. Jane and I sat a few feet from one another, next to a tall fire in the darkness of the evening, but those few feet might have well been a mile for the distance eighteen years will add to them. Somehow it was easier talking about the past. It was a time in our lives when there was no gulf of years, no hole in the middle. Back then, we were friends, and talking about back then was comfortable. Now, reaching across to her to finish the untold story was like trying to shout it across a canyon.

  “I still write Dora,” began Jane.

  Her edge of the canyon got a little closer.

  “Yeah, she still in Deadwood?” I asked.

  “More or less. She lives there sort of permanent, but she travels a lot too, to visit her other places in the other cities. She and Joseph are still married. Still together.”

  “That’s good. Seems like ev’rywhere you turn, the story’s otherwise. If there was two people supposed to be together, it were them, I reckon.”

  My edge of the canyon crept closer still, and Jane looked up at me with that crooked stare of hers. I knew that stare, even after eighteen years I knew it. The gulf between us shrunk even further. I could see the question skitter across the plain of her mind before it even left her lips.

  “You and Missy ever . . .?”

  I smiled and poked the fire with my stick again. The sparks dazzled the night and lit up our section of the dark with little false fireflies.

  “We wrote, and we still do. She’s runnin’ Dora’s place in Belle Fourche. I’ve visited her a few times. Life of a cowboy don’t lend itself to sittin’ still, so we visit when we can.”

  Jane smiled.

  “I figured that filly might’ve ruined you on all others. You were so smitten by her back then. Never seen a worse case of it.”

  “Yeh, I won’t lie none. Not to you. I ain’t never loved a woman like Missy. Not ever. I tried a few times, but nah. Never quite got over that one.”

  We laughed a while at the absurdity of love and silly campaigns our young hearts force on us in its glorious name. By the time the real question came, Jane and I were practically next to one another. The grand opening of time that had yawned before was now only a crack in the Earth. I gazed up into those crystalline eyes of hers, the ones that looked so much like Hour’s, and awaited what I knew would come next.

  “Your sister, is she . . .?”

  “Not dead, if that is your meanin’.”

  “It is. How is she?”

  “Hour is a woman unto herself, thanks to you.”

  I paused to let Jane release the breath I could feel she was holding in. All these years, and she never knew if her good deed helped that girl. She had never known what became of the troubled child she found in Deadwood. Eighteen years Jane had waited to hear that news. Eighteen years she had been holding that breath.

  “The nuns at the boardin’ school, they had dealt with such children before. No beatin’s like others might have gotten. They gave her a routine and played to thin
gs she liked. Animals mainly. She learned to read and write, and a speech teacher worked on her talkin’.”

  “She’s normal now?”

  “No, she ain’t normal, but she is independent. There’s some stuff she ain’t never gonna be good at. Folks conversate with her, but she gets confused sometimes when what she says makes ’em mad and the like.”

  “She talks to people?”

  This one came out like a burst of steam, and I was again reminded how long it had been since Jane knew my sister—when four words strung together was a miraculous thing. I had watched her almost every day for a time as she improved measure by measure. Looking back to Hour eighteen years ago and thinking she might someday speak with people and look them in the eyes without trouble would have taken my breath away too.

  “Yeh. She’s even married, Jane. Has her a young doctor up in Kansas City. He’s a kind fella. I sure do like how patient he is with her. They have a piece of land out there where Hour has her work. She’s one of them animal doctors. Works on horses mainly.”

  “Horses. She works on horses?” she asked.

  The tears were flowing again in a trickle down the worn grooves around her eyes. Her words were small and breathless, a strange sound coming from the legendary Calamity Jane. Shock chilled me a bit and I wondered for a moment if I should go sit beside her. The idea of needing to comfort Jane was a foreign one, and I wasn’t sure how to act on it or if I should act on it at all. How did a mere cowpoke go comfort a person like her? Was it even possible?

  Jane wiped her face with her sleeve and continued without my help.

  “She purdy? I always figured she would be. I s’pose she must be to get a young doctor and all. Funny how what you want fer a girl can also be the thing you fear fer her too.”

  “She’s gorgeous. A picture,” I said.

  “A picture. I knew it. I just knew she would be a picture of a thing.”

  “You always made quite an impression on her you know.”