Illustration by Selena Wong. Click for larger image.The night Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head at a Black Hills poker table by the coward Jack McCall, my mother indeed grabbed a meat cleaver to take her revenge on that fuck. She ran barefoot through the streets, a buckskin jacket slung over her nightgown, the crowd parting like a dark sea before her until all that my mother faced was Bill’s head blooming open on a wooden table of the saloon. There were no female hysterics. There were no fainting spells. Just Jane’s steady hand bled white from her grip upon that cleaver’s handle.“Who did this?” she asked, so quiet that the crowd moved further away. But McCall had already fled, and so my mother was left with only the cleaver and her mourning, Bill’s ruined head now resting on her stained lap.
I am the bastard son of Calamity Jane. Facts and lies, they are so often the same when all you get is glimpses. Like spotting the flash of rainbow trout in a stream. But I know the truth. I am her blood. She was my mother.
Yes, she did spin a gorgeous yarn. What else to do on those long nights by a fire or done dancing at the brothel? Yes, she partook mightily of the bottle, but only in her last years. And no, she did not acquire the nickname Calamity because she had the clap. She came by her name honestly. And she was the lover of Wild Bill Hickok. But I am not Bill’s son.
Certainly, my mother gave herself to many men in the years after Bill’s murder, in part to try and drown the voices that would not leave her alone. She was always true to Bill, though, and he to her. The ones who were closest to both testified to that fact. One of them, the half-breed Charlie Utter, claimed Hickok from the morgue the next morning. Charlie carried Bill in his thick arms to the Utter camp three miles away to prepare and shroud the body for burial. The whole of town followed, black-clad bodies with faces etched in pale grief, a thin, dark stream that ran those miles from Deadwood. Crates of whisky screeched open in the late sun. Men began to fight for shovels to help dig the grave. By the time Charlie cried “Enough!” the hole was twice the depth and length than was necessary. Each one of those fools, they only wanted one day to claim, “I helped bury Wild Bill.”
As the sun weakened and the preacher did not show, a woman dressed in black lace and veil, sidesaddle on a pale horse, appeared from town. The din of the wake grew still. Heads turned to her, faces red and sweating, straining for a glimpse. She rode up to the prospector’s tent that held Bill’s closed coffin from the flies then rode straight in before slipping off her mare.
“I need to see him,” she spoke to red-eyed Charlie Utter. He leaned to pick up a hammer, sweat dripping on the casket as he whined the lid open. The horse grew nervous at the scent. My mother lifted her veil, then bent down to Bill’s long face and moustache outlined in thin cloth, as if to kiss his lips. If any in the tent had been sober enough to notice, they’d have seen that rare thing. My own mother’s hands, clasped behind her back, those same hands that had killed Indian and white outlaw alike, those steady, steady hands, they trembled. “You did a good, job, Charlie,” she said as she drew up to her height. Then she took the bottle from its place at his feet and drank deeply. I know now that this was the start of the end of my mother.
As the moon rose, pistols came out of holsters and shotguns out of burlap sacks, their crack and thunder aimed to pierce and sink that orb. Talk stank of tracking down the assassin Jack McCall, a few of the drunker men even clawing onto their horses and weaving into the dark, only to return a short while later, confused and embarrassed at their foolishness.
Is it true some of the early risers awoke to the sight of my mother curled up and naked, snoring in Wild Bill’s casket, her arm across his chest? What is truth is that she stood watch over Bill for hours that next morning, still dressed in black lace that hugged her woman’s curves like her buckskin couldn’t. Then she crossed the tent to oversee Charlie Utter carve with his knife onto a tombstone of sanded oak, Pard, we will meet again in the happy hunting ground to part no more. Good bye.
When the preacher didn’t show that second day, the wake drank hard to mob. The same men who’d thought it a reasonable idea the night before to ride whisky posse for Jack McCall rode more soberly into town, returning with the white-collared preacher on a mule between them, this one not much older than a boy and just as pimply.
