Reap the Whirlwind (9 page)

With a loud and unmistakable squish, the far lead horse shat and dropped its fragrant apples onto the raindamped ground where the pile steamed until flattened under the hooves of the animal coming along behind it. The earthy odor struck Martha’s nostrils as something familiar and good, even wholesome, not anything like the smells she remembered emanating from those mining camps. Stale whiskey breath and rotting teeth, tobacco stains on shirts not washed since the last rain, rotting sluice timbers and fresh-turned earth dug for new privy holes, rank meat and bones left for the wolves and coyotes that would slink down from the hills once the shadows grew long enough of every evening. The stench of punk sticks kept lit in every doorway, the sweetish fragrance of opium pipes the Chinese laborers preferred to the puke-bellied whiskey, the thick and oily perfumes the whores used hopelessly to cover up the forwardness of their sweat-slickened bodies.

She had watched her mother finally all but abandon her family, going off to pursue what a middle-aged woman could of that good life Alder Gulch offered. But right from the start Charlotte Cannary was unable to compete with the younger, firm-breasted, flat-bellied working girls. Besides that, Charlotte was simply too hot-tempered and quick-tongued to make her fortune flat on her back. Her dreams ended one night after Martha Jane had gone back to her father’s shanty to care for the younger ones. All there was the next morning were whispers of the argument, the rising voices, the threats and oaths over this man or that old insult, and finally the gunfire exchanged between the two whores.

Martha Jane had helped her pa wrap his unfaithful wife in a greasy blanket, helped dig the hole and bury her mama on the slope of a nearby hill near the end of that cruel winter of 1866. Come spring, Bob took his family away from Blackfoot, Montana Territory, and moved south to Salt Lake City. But a short year later he too died, leaving his three teenaged children to fend for themselves in the land of the Mormons.

With nary a shred of reluctance that following spring,
Martha shuffled off for Wyoming Territory to find work for the army at Fort Bridger and Fort Steele in 1868. After a season hauling supplies over South Pass from Cheyenne City, she found employment with the construction gangs of the Union Pacific working out of Piedmont. And ran smack into Allegheny Dick—the frontier’s most noted card shark besides being the most handsomest man-type of creature that ever walked the earth. Without complaint, Janey allowed the pasteboard shuffler to take her heart in ransom—but suffered a cruel dash of love’s bitter gall when one gray morning after many weeks of using her soft, scented, moistened woman’s equipment to the best of her ability to trap and hold a man, she awoke to find Allegheny Dick gone. And gone for good.

A woman scorned, Martha Jane once more donned teamster’s clothing, a masquerade that allowed her to move about in the rough company of these men on the edge of this frontier. Besides, she told herself: the more layers of clothes, the better—all the better to hide her wounded, mourning heart.

Time is said to heal all things, she had heard. By the time another winter had come and gone, Janey knew some scar tissue lay weathering on the surface of her heart. A heart destined to be broken once more with the advent of spring, the warming of the prairie, and the blooming of wildflowers that carpeted the high prairie.

Throwing caution to the wind, Martha Jane once more left her masquerade long enough to don hoop dresses, brush her hair, and rouge her cheeks—all so she could give herself fully to a handsome and lonely soldier, a Lieutenant Somers—and promptly got herself with child.

To tell her lover of the coming event would have been a joy—only to find a few days later the gay blade of an officer was off to a new duty station, having requested the change of scenery himself. Only in his leaving did he finally fess up to the fact that he was already very much married.

Once more mending her broken heart and with her newborn babe turned over to an upright family, Martha Jane again donned men’s clothing and plunged back into the world of males on the rough frontier. Not a strange thing to do, to remember it now as she unloaded freight
for Crook’s army. Not strange at all, for she was only carrying on what she had learned at no less than her own mother’s knee—this lunging, gasping chase after life’s rawest excesses.

Her pa, Bob Cannary, a young and innocent farm boy on a visit to Cincinnati, had become entranced with a young woman’s beauty and forwardness when he visited a “bawdy house” for the first, and last, time in his life. That very day he proposed to Charlotte, making the pretty one his wife just so that he could take her back to the farm with hopes of reforming the girl who had come north to escape a dismal existence in Kentucky. From there the couple moved across the Mississippi to Iowa and started raising crops and milk cows and kids.

Charlotte Cannary’s eldest child, Martha Jane, whelped on Missouri Methodist lawn socials, was not about to make herself another “good woman” in a long, long line of pioneer women who adhered to the virtue found in wearing themselves out with bone-wearying housework, long-suffering the chills, fevers, and tick-sicks of the frontier, the interminable childbearing and toddler-raising that destroyed a woman’s youth and made her a stooped and wrinkled hag in a handful of years after her twentieth birthday.

While her pa was best known as a listless man who likely wouldn’t amount to much of anything, Martha Jane had learned much more the ways of life from her own mother in those years on the family farm at the Collins Church settlement. Mother Cannary was a copper-haired, bright-eyed woman who smoked, drank, flirted brazenly, and publicly cursed when it damned well suited her. Charlotte’s bold ways suited her daughter just fine. Especially when Martha Jane was but a girl of eight or nine dashing about on dappled ponies, prancing like a gray squirrel through the virgin hardwood forests, chewing leaf tobacco and swearing with the best her male playmates could claim to know. Those had been days when no parent restrained the young, gangly girl from raiding the sugar bin or plunging naked into the swimming hole when the mood struck her. Very fitting indeed that Charlotte’s only daughter came to be known as the county’s wildcat.

What fitting training that had been, she so often thought in the years since Charlotte’s sudden death in Montana Territory: to be the daughter of a woman who was not about to raise her daughter like every other girl. Given free rein to hunt and ride, free to acquaint yourself with other hill folk in how to swaller down an occasional hooker of raw lightning without so much as a shudder quaking through your skinny frame. Mother Charlotte, God only knew, had come home drunk enough nights to Bob’s disapproving glare and her children’s muffled laughter as she let go with a long string of colorful, harumscarum bawdy talk, interspersed with mountain stomps that shook the timbers of the cabin floor.

“Grab it up, fella!” Martha Jane growled to the man working beside her at the tailgate of the freight wagon.

He squinted, sizing her, then took hold of the long wooden case of Springfield carbines. Together they heaved it out of the wagon, onto the loading dock, and wheeled in the mud and horse dung to grab the next.

It had been in the west that Martha Jane had found her true and ideal man: the showy but taciturn, curly-maned frontiersman who could perform the greatest feats of riding and marksmanship, spout lore of animals and Injuns alike, knew the passes and rivers and mountain peaks, the sort of man who lived life without apology, gulping whiskey and women down in the same breath.

While mother Charlotte had given birth to her daughter, and while the Missouri forests and the five-month trip west to the Rocky Mountains had whelped Martha Jane Cannary, it was without a doubt the hellish, roaring camps lining Alder Gulch that had made her Calamity Jane.

“Better you watch out for your hide, Grabber.”

Frank Grouard only rolled his eyes to the side to see who had come up behind his shoulder with the whispered warning. It was Baptiste Pourier. Better known out here in this country as Big Bat.

The bodies and shadows swirled past Grouard and the music throbbed that chill evening at the reservation. Red Cloud and American Horse had called for a dance to be held. The fires were leaping toward the sky, there was singing
and courting and occasionally a young buck would leap out front and count his coups—vowing to count even more on the white soldiers this summer.

“You don’t think I should dance, Bat?”

“Dance if it suits you, Grabber. But if you do, trust that I’ll watch your backside for you.”

“Reshaw ain’t stupid enough to try anything here.”

The half-breed Pourier wagged his head, still whispering, his eyes watchful as the Sioux celebrants throbbed and spun and cavorted past. “It ain’t just Louie. He’s got a lot of family here. Likely they’ll make quick work of you.”

Grouard snorted. “No, they won’t.”

“How you so goddamned sure,” Bat demanded.

“’Cause I got you to watch while I find me a squaw to dance with.”

Frank heard Pourier chuckling as he pushed into the whirling maze of dancers, ablaze and resplendent in beads and blankets, in feathers and all their finery for this dance called by the tribal chiefs to take the minds of all off the lure and beckoning from the leaders in the north country. So these agency Indians would not dwell on the seductive siren call of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, offering the sweet appeal of the free, roaming life on the high prairie.

Earlier that evening Red Cloud and his headmen had left Agent Hastings’s office in a huff, and an angry Crook and his soldiers stomped off into the darkness, leaving Frank and Bat alone with the agent and that smirk of Hastings’s.

“I hear the drums,” Pourier had suggested.

“Suppose we ought to see what’s going on,” Frank had replied, knowing that this was Louie Reshaw’s ground.

After Reynolds’s attack on the Powder River village failed and Crook returned his column to Fort Fetterman, the general disbanded his cadre of scouts, save for the three who would await the outfitting of the spring campaign. Grouard was to stay close, assigned to Fort Fetterman. Pourier was dispatched to cool his heels down at Fort Laramie. And Crook sent Reshaw as far away as he could from Frank Grouard—all the way down here to Red Cloud Agency to wait out the coming of spring.

But here they were, thrust together again. Bad blood
and all, tempers smoldering after the disastrous winter march into the Powder River county.

When Crook headed out from Omaha, he telegraphed ahead to have Grouard meet him in Cheyenne after coming through Laramie to pick up Pourier. The pair would accompany the general on his questionable mission to enlist Sioux scouts and auxiliaries.

“They gonna try to get close enough to me to use a knife?” Frank whispered as he slid back beside Pourier, winded and sweating from the exuberant dance.

Bat shook his head. “No. Plan is to shoot you when you leave here.”

He smiled, his dark eyes flashing. “Then I got time. I’m going to dance some more.”

“Keep your eye on me, Grabber. I’ll let you know, I see anything shaking loose.”

He wasn’t on the floor very long before he caught sight of Bat bobbing his head toward a group of four half-breeds hugged up against a near wall. As Frank turned back to the young woman to excuse himself from her, he found she had melted into the crowd. Just about the time a woman shrieked and a man grunted.

Grouard wheeled to find Big Bat had seized a man’s arm, shoving it into the air, a pistol trembling at the end of it. With his fists Pourier hammered the half-breed back into the stunned crowd, then whirled on the other three. He caught one by the collar as Frank leapt upon the other two, riding them clear to the floor.

It was only seconds before Hastings was in the middle of things, along with Bob Strahorn, the newsman out of Denver. They were pulling the young half-breeds out from under the pummeling Pourier and Grouard were handing out.

By the time the government man ordered the two army scouts out of the agency buildings, the dance was all but broken up. Frank stooped to retrieve his hat, nodding toward the door where Strahorn stood grinning.

“Ready?” Grouard asked Pourier.

“Lead on,” Bat replied.

Strahorn slapped Grouard on the shoulder as the
scouts came to the open doorway. Lamplight backdropped them, inky darkness lay ahead.

The newsman said, “You boys just won’t leave fighting to the army, will y—”

A percussion cap flashed, streaking the blackness beyond the doorway with a spurt of flame inches from Frank’s eyes. He was blinded for a moment by the flare, ducking backward against the two men at his shoulders. Someone shoved him roughly to the side as the air filled with oaths and running feet. There were two shots fired as Grouard’s eyes finally adjusted to the darkness and he could again see. His pistols already filled his hands.

Strahorn crouched beside him there at the wall. Inside the room Hastings was cursing the army scouts for causing this trouble, for bringing their quarrel with Louie Reshaw to Red Cloud Agency. Out of the darkness loomed Pourier, his pistol hung at the end of his long arm, a wisp of smoke still curling from its muzzle into the cool night breeze.

“Party’s over, Mr. Agent,” Big Bat snarled.

Hastings came to the doorway, glaring. “You kill anyone, you son of a bitch?”

Pourier shrugged, looking at Grouard. “Don’t know. Maybe not. They’re lucky tonight, Mr. Agent. Me and Frank, we’ll finish ’em next time.”

Hastings’s voice rose an octave. “You hit anyone?”

Pourier smiled. “Just said I didn’t kill no one. Found something that looked and tasted like blood along the wall of that near building.” He turned to Grouard. “Think I winged one of the bastards for you, Frank.”

“That’s good enough. We’ll call it even for now.”

Pourier asked, “You not hurt?”

“Only my pride. When I saw that cap flash, I ducked instead of drawing.”

“Likely it saved your life,” Pourier replied. “They might’ve gotten off a second shot at you.”

“And had a good cap under the hammer that second time,” Strahorn replied.