Buffalo Girls Read online

  The ointment smelled like grizzly grease to me, it was rank, the only thing that smells worse than buffalo hunters is grizzly grease. I have always been scared of bears, anyone with good sense is, that don’t include Blue, one of the best stories about Blue is him roping the grizzly. It was a young one, I guess Blue thought he could handle it, there’s no one as cocky as Blue, he thinks he can handle anything but he couldn’t handle that yearling grizzly. The bear turned around and killed his horse—Blue had to scamper out of there on foot or the bear would have killed him too. Later Blue went back hoping to find his saddle, he had had the saddle since his Texas days and hated to lose it, but he lost it, the saddle was never seen again. It taught Blue not to rope bears, it may be the one thing he has ever learned in his life, Blue is deadly stubborn.

  But now the grizzlies have about left the plains, the plains are too busy now, too many soldiers are running around who like to think they’re bear hunters, they’re fools, it’s no sure thing hunting bear.

  Last night I dreamed of you Janey, I often do. It’s sad that a mother only gets to see her little girl in dreams, but as Dora would say it’s better than nothing. You had won a prize at school for doing your letters graceful. I hope you will develop a good handwriting Janey, not a scrawl like mine. I was proud while the dream lasted, it’s a comfort to have a daughter who’s good in school or can even go to one, I never did. But then I woke up crying, I cried all morning, it’s another reason for the slow start.

  Dora DuFran hates it when I cry, she says will you dry up? She knows if I don’t she’ll start crying too and the two of us will bawl like babies half the day, Dora about her sorrows and me about mine. Hers are mostly the result of being in love with Blue, I can’t see that they compare with mine—love a skunk and you’re sure to get skunked. But that’s my point of view, I’m sure Dora’s is the opposite. The other day she told me she was thinking of moving to Deadwood, maybe she thinks Blue will let her alone if she’s living in the hills. He won’t—hill or plain means nothing to Blue, he’ll want his little visits wherever Dora is. She asked me if I’d come with her—we’ll always be a pair, she said.

  Dora and I will always be a pair, I won’t desert her, but life in Deadwood might be too painful, it’s where Wild Bill is buried. He’s in Mount Moriah cemetery, on Jerusalem Street. I have paid him many visits there—I visit him just as Blue visits Dora, except Blue’s alive and Dora’s alive—I guess they find some love amid their troubles. Blue being married elsewhere don’t mean he’s lost his passion for Dora.

  But it’s just a grave I’m visiting on Mount Moriah, Wild Bill’s grave, he’s been in it twelve years—you were already safe with your Daddy Jack when the coward McCall shot your father. I was not about to subject my precious daughter to these rough mining camps.

  I think it’s a mistake for Dora to move, the climate is healthier in Miles City, but Dora’s restless—she’s always restless, I expect she’ll move anyway and take along Fred the parrot. Maybe Fred will learn some new words over in Deadwood, but what will I learn new? It’s painful when your true love dies, that’s all I’ll learn in Deadwood, and I already know it.

  They say Deadwood is civilized now and even has a mayor, I asked who and someone said Potato Creek Johnny, ha! I had to laugh. I knew Johnny down at Fort Fetterman when he was breaking horses for soldiers, nobody would have picked him for a mayor then. I wouldn’t pick him for one now, though I count him a pal, he only found one nugget, finding one nugget don’t mean he can be a mayor. The first thing he’ll do is arrest me and Dora, or maybe he won’t, we both know too much about him.

  All this old stuff must bore you, Janey, I don’t mean to write it, I started these letters thinking you might want to know a little about your mother’s life—first thing you know it became a habit. I have no idea what you think about it—you are a bit young to be writing letters yourself. I want my little girl to be proud of her mother—I should have considered better, there’s not that much to be proud of, at least it don’t seem that way now. I am not a braggart Janey, I just try to be decent—some don’t think I am, ladies don’t, or women who call themselves ladies, there’s a few in every town, how I despise them. I picked one of the old snoots up and threw her in the horse trough in Dodge City, it aroused a crowd and your father Wild Bill said I ought to vamoose for a while. It made me fighting mad that he told me that, what right did he have to tell me I had to leave Dodge or anyplace? No right, and I told him so, then I left anyway—I am too proud to stay where I’m not wanted, we were a long time making that up, but we did.

  Well, this is another letter I might as well throw away, why would a sweet girl like you want to hear all this old stuff? I have wasted six sheets of paper on it.

  Good night Janey,

  Your mother, Martha Jane

  3

  DORA DU FRAN SAT BY HER BEDROOM WINDOW, WARMED BY a big cup of coffee and all the robes she could find to put on. Skeedle came up to bring her a little more coffee and laughed at the sight of Dora wrapped in three or four robes.

  “Why didn’t you put on a few more robes?” Skeedle asked.

  “Buy me a few more and I’ll put ’em on,” Dora said. “This was all I could find in the closet.”

  “You could buy a buffalo robe from an Indian, I bet,” Skeedle said. Skeedle was the premiere, and, in fact, the only blonde in Dora’s establishment. She had been the premiere blonde for several years, and it was beginning to show. If a younger blonde ever showed up and wanted to work, Skeedle might have had trouble holding her position, but the danger of that happening was not great. With the mining towns still booming in Dakota the blonde population of Miles City was not likely to increase.

  “Buffalo robes attract fleas,” Dora pointed out. “I don’t want to encourage fleas, the customers bring in enough as it is. Thanks for the coffee.”

  “You’re welcome,” Skeedle said, and left. She was well aware that Dora liked to keep to herself in the mornings.

  Dora heard the stairs creak as Skeedle descended to the first floor. Skeedle was not only the blondest whore in Miles City, she was also the largest whore, but that was fine, she brought in twice as much business as some of the prettier girls.

  Fred was not particularly found of Skeedle, being a rather jealous parrot. He kept his back turned while Skeedle was in the room, but as soon as she left he dropped off his perch and came waddling across the floor. Dora offered him her arm and he climbed up it and began to peck gently at the pearl buttons on one of Dora’s robes. Fred liked all jewelry, but he was especially fond of pearl buttons. Dora set her coffee cup down and stroked the green feathers on the top of the parrot’s head. When she did, Fred turned his beak and took hold of her ring, a cheap ring Blue had given her when they were still talking of marriage.

  Out her window Dora could see the gleam of the Yellowstone. Far across it to the west there was a river called the Musselshell, where Blue had his ranch. Dora had never been that far west, had never seen Blue’s ranch, but many a morning she had sat in sadness by her window, thinking about it, and about his house and his new wife, a sweet young half-breed woman. Dora had only Calamity’s word for it that Blue’s wife was sweet, but she was prepared to believe it. Calamity had been a guest in their house and had even gone to their wedding, a fact that had not sat well with Dora at the time.

  “Blue invited me, what did you want me to do?” Calamity asked, when Dora challenged her on the point—as Dora, much hurt, promptly did.

  “You’re my friend, ain’t you?” Dora said. “You could have mentioned me, at least. If you was in love with him and he suddenly slid past you and married somebody else, do you think I’d go to his damn wedding?”

  “Well, it would be fair enough, if you did,” Calamity said. She was a little drunk and had a hard time getting a grip on the complications such matters involved. She knew that Dora was upset because Blue had suddenly popped up married to Granville Stuart’s daughter—that was understandable. But her own attendance at the
wedding didn’t seem to matter one way or the other. Blue wasn’t marrying Dora, whoever went to the wedding, or didn’t go.

  “Blue’s been my friend too, since Dodge or before,” Calamity pointed out. “Don’t you go to the weddings of your old friends?”

  “I wouldn’t if one of them was jilting my best friend!” Dora said. While it lasted, her anger was unrelenting.

  “You shouldn’t have never counted on Blue, that’s the way I see it,” Calamity said.

  “The way I see it, you had to choose whose feelings to hurt and you chose mine,” Dora said. “I’d hurt the man’s, if it was me—not that many of them have really got feelings.”

  “Blue’s got feelings, he just wanted a wife to help with the work,” Calamity countered, trying to put the best face on it.

  “Anyway, next time I get jilted I just hope you’ll refrain from attending the wedding,” Dora said, just before she burst into tears.

  Later, when Dora’s anger had drained away, she went looking for Calamity to apologize, but Calamity was in the Elk Belly saloon, well on her way to being vomiting drunk. It was a winter night, cold and sleety. Calamity was as likely to mount up and ride off at midnight as at noon—Dora’s main worry was that she might pass out some night and freeze. Soberer specimens than Calamity had been known to pass out and freeze in the Montana winters.

  Dora assigned a couple of town Indians to see that that didn’t happen. Sure enough, Calamity rode off, fell off, and slept under her horse, but the Indians built a fire, covered her well, and brought her back to Dora the next morning, though in such a shaky state that she had to be carried into the house.

  It was not the only quarrel the two of them had had about Blue, and in every instance, no matter how blatant his misbehavior, Calamity took Blue’s side or found excuses for him. It infuriated Dora—she screamed Calamity out of the house many times, outraged because Calamity would never see, or at least would never admit, that she, not the man, was being wronged.

  “He didn’t mean it,” Calamity would always stammer, when Blue stood accused. “You know he didn’t mean it.”

  “I don’t care if he meant it!” Dora yelled. “He did it. He did it!”

  But in the end, when her anger died, Dora would begin to reproach herself, not for Blue, that laughing reprobate who usually knew exactly what he was doing, but for her treatment of Calamity, her sad old friend.

  Calamity didn’t understand men, or women, or love, or any of it, Dora always concluded, once her sympathies began to operate normally after some wild fit.

  What awakened Dora’s sympathies was the knowledge that Calamity’s life was so peculiar, and so lonely. She dressed like a man, and had lived a life as near to a man’s as she could get; it sometimes seemed to Dora that Calamity almost thought she was a man. Maybe it came from running with the boys too long. More often than not, she looked like a woman, though there was something indefinite in her look, a kind of in-between quality, that no one, man or woman, knew quite what to make of. At times Dora felt that Calamity had not quite made up her mind which sex to be. One day she’d be in a dress or even sport a fancy hat, and the next she’d be back in pants, cussing like a buffalo hunter and bragging about all the generals she’d scouted for, or the rides she had made for the Pony Express.

  Blue, who had known her as long as anyone, maintained that Calamity’s bragging was mostly just plain bragging, with little basis in fact.

  “The drunker she gets, the more she lies,” he put it, not unkindly—whatever his faults as a mate, Blue was a loyal friend to Calamity.

  “No general would have let a woman scout for him,” Blue pointed out. “He’d have been court-martialed, unless he was General Lee, and she sure didn’t scout for General Lee. She didn’t ride for the Pony Express, either—they shut down the Pony Express before I was even old enough to ride for it, and I’m older than Calamity.

  “What she might have done,” he added, in an effort to make their friend seem less of a braggart, “is tag along on a few scouts with Ragg and Bone. I think they took her with them sometimes, when it looked safe.”

  To Dora what he said just made the matter more sad; it made it seem that Calamity hadn’t actually done much of anything except wander here and there on the plains, the little reputation she had the result of invention, or the indulgence of a few kind men; her stories and her story were mainly based on whiskey and emptiness.

  Of course, the stories of half the people in Miles City, or perhaps in the west as a whole, were based on pretty much that, whiskey and emptiness; every night Dora’s house filled up with braggarts who hadn’t done half the things they said they had done. If every man who drank in the saloon had killed as many Indians as he claimed to have killed, there wouldn’t have been an Indian left west of the Mississippi; if every miner had found as much gold as was claimed, palaces would stretch down the Missouri all the way to St. Louis.

  But the men were just customers—Calamity was a friend. Dora didn’t try to be much, but she did try to be truthful, and it made her nervous and a little uncomfortable always to have to suspect Calamity of lying.

  “Oh, she just exaggerates,” Blue said. “Everybody exaggerates, once in a while.”

  “You don’t,” Dora pointed out. Bragging was not among T. Blue’s many failings; if anything he tended to understate his achievements as a cowboy.

  “Well, you don’t know that,” Blue said. “I might exaggerate once in a while when you’re not around.”

  “She’s been talking about Wild Bill lately,” Dora said. “I didn’t know she even knew him, but now she acts like they were in love. Do you think he was ever in love with her?”

  “No opinion,” Blue said immediately.

  “Why wouldn’t you have an opinion?” Dora asked. “You told me yourself you knew him.”

  “Now you see, right there I’m caught in a fine exaggeration,” Blue said. “I seen the man walk down the street a couple of times, and was once in a saloon where he was playing cards.”

  “That ain’t what you said,” Dora insisted. “You said you knew him well. Seems like if they were together you would have known.”

  “Myself, I was mostly with the herds,” Blue said. “I didn’t squander much time in Dodge City.”

  “Oh, hush, you liar,” Dora said. “Calamity said you had at least twenty girlfriends in Dodge. How’d you get ’em unless you spent some time there?”

  Blue looked amused—he rarely tried to deny that he was a sport.

  “I’m cursed with a weak memory,” he said. “I can’t recall that I had a single pal in the town.”

  “You don’t need to be such a devil,” Dora said. “I wasn’t even asking about you. I had a few loves myself before we met, what do I care if you had a thousand? I just wonder about Calamity and Wild Bill.”

  “He’s dead, what does it matter?” Blue asked.

  “He’s dead, but Calamity ain’t,” Dora said. “I feel sorry for Calamity. I don’t believe any man’s ever loved her—plenty of women never get loved, you know. I get a sad feeling when she talks about Wild Bill, because it just don’t sound true.”

  “That was years ago,” Blue reminded her. “Maybe she forgot the true part. People do forget.”

  “Not the great love of their life, they don’t,” Dora said. “Do you think I’d forget you? Hell and everything else will freeze over before I forget you.”

  “I do doubt that Calamity ever had such a true love as ours,” Blue said. His eyes grew misty and he kissed her—for all his brass he was a sentimental man at heart.

  Now Blue, sentimental still, was married and living on the Musselshell. Many a day Dora sat wrapped in her robes all morning, watching the plains to the north, and if a dot of a rider appeared far away her heart quickened despite her; most times, of course, the rider wasn’t Blue, and her hope turned to ache, to regret, to tears and listless misery. But every month or so the rider would be Blue, and a joy flooded her that she couldn’t suppress, despite his betray
al.

  “The Marquis de Mores gave me this robe with the pearl buttons,” Dora mentioned to Fred, but the information was of no interest to the parrot. It wasn’t of much interest to Dora, either, though it was a nice robe.

  The Marquis de Mores had also been nice. He had once said something about taking her to Paris and getting her an apartment, but that was just the usual silly talk. After all, he had just moved to South Dakota to go into the cattle business. Then his tall, aloof wife arrived, and there was no more talk of Paris, and no more presents, either.

  Still, the Marquis had liked her while it lasted. He wasn’t T. Blue—no one was—but he had offered a decent affection. What Dora wondered was whether anyone had ever offered even that much to Calamity?

  If they had, it didn’t show—and true joys did show a little, Dora believed. Hers did, she knew—the miserable stretches didn’t completely erase them. It was her sad suspicion that Calamity had had no joys, nothing for time to erase except her youth itself.

  “What do you think, Fred? Loves me, loves me not?” Dora asked.

  Fred looked up from the robe and cocked his head toward his mistress.

  “General Custer,” he said.

  Darling Jane—

  They call this dry old crack Powder River, it’s easy to see why. Today for a change I made good time, otherwise I wouldn’t be here, I’m a fair ways from where I started. I can’t stand the rattle at Mrs. Elk’s, she must have fifty grandkids and they all cry at the same time. Whoever said Indian babies don’t cry ought to spend a night at Mrs. Elk’s.

  I no longer have the patience I once had, Janey, squalling babies make me want to grit my teeth, the little squirts hold no charms for me. However why complain? I owe them my early start.

  Today I ran into a horse trader who had news of the boys, he says they’re down on the Little Missouri traveling with old No Ears. At least they won’t get lost, No Ears is the best scout left. General Crook tried to take him to Arizona to help catch Geronimo but No Ears wouldn’t go, too hot he said. I doubt General Crook will catch Geronimo, he’ll have to trick him if he does.