History has kept a cache of information on Calamity Jane stored haphazardly in buckets and trunks: postcards and rumours, blurry photographs and spirit-soaked legends, penny novels and trembling oral accounts. The complexity of the legends surrounding her kept Calamity Jane alive long after her boots rotted and her rifle rusted away. And it’s the richness of Calamity’s stories—the stories of Calamity—that the talented Natalee Caple taps with In Calamity’s Wake.
Officially described as a historical novel, Caple herself refers to Wake as “a work of metahistoriographic fiction,” a cocktail of straight-up primary source material, brushed-up and dusted-down historical accounts, and purely fictional detail. Together, these form a fascinating though indistinct portrait of this elusive historical character. The reader never sees her whole face, just her profile—or a sidelong glance before she turns away.
Much of the novel is told from the perspective of Miette, Calamity’s daughter. Abandoned by Calamity at birth in the arms of a Canadian Catholic priest, Miette has grown up steeped in books and bathed in her adopted father’s benign love. But Wake begins at his deathbed, and with his last breaths he tells the grieving Miette to go find the mother she doesn’t remember: “Don’t ask her for anything. Just what was meant to be yours but she never gave you, and make her explain all the years she put you out of her mind.”
In alternating chapters, Miette describes her journey, by horse, foot and train, to find her mother, and an omniscient narrator recounts the story of Calamity—christened Martha—from her birth to her final years. Other characters are occasionally given voice in their own chapters: Lavinia Hart, writing at the turn of the century about the Pan-American Exposition; Dora DuFran relating tales of Calamity’s involvement in her brothel; Lew Spencer describing the dust of Deadwood, South Dakota, how he danced and sang for pay and ate Chinese food and drank with Calamity between shows.
These latter chapters mostly add atmosphere and background details to the montage. Frankly, they are details the book could manage without: they offer colour, an arresting shakeup of pace and voice, and behind-the-scenes angles on the mystery of Calamity. But Miette’s chapters steal the show.
She is alone, following the death of the only family she’s ever known, and she’s only following her father’s dying directions out of love for him. But as she wanders across the immensity of the landscape stretching in unbroken folds from the Canadian border through the Dakotas, Miette encounters her mother’s country, stressed with conflict and populated with ghosts of the past:
We meandered all day over the body of the landscape, around concretions that might be shoulders and ribs and knees of a sleeping being. Echoes dissolved into whispers. We stopped to drink from Milk River and I saw carvings in the stone side of a steep butte, of battles between men with shields. I saw the bodies fall before me again. I saw a rider on a horse, long flowing lines of his headdress behind him and a buffalo before him. It put me off balance, I don’t know why, but I was out of time with myself. Something heavy shifted in me.
Much of the book deals, either directly or indirectly, with grief, and Miette’s sorrow over her father’s death provide some of Wake’s most stirring passages. Caple’s trick of forever looking at her subject from the side lends them even more emotional capital. Miette experiences her grief through her observations of the living world around her, and she avoids it through mental exercises:
As the night came on I observed the time and the distance of the sun and moon’s nearest limbs. I found myself making lists, reducing everything in me and around me to lists just to force myself to stay with the present, keep sane, keep hold of my thoughts, which were slippery in my loneliness.
Measured the width of the river from the point across to the point of view. Measured the curve of the flow around the rocks. Measured how white the foam is on the banks. Measured the height and width of reeds. Measured the length of time I need.
But as captivating as Miette is, Wake’s subject is undoubtedly Calamity. As Miette rides over the hills toward Deadwood, her relationship with her mother edges out thoughts of her father, and Calamity’s chaotic history begins to take centre stage in the narrative. And Calamity, “who, for all her drinking, had the ability to see inside people and forgive them,” as one character remembers, is a worthy study.
She was young and her profile clear-cut, her whole countenance resolute and defiant. She wore lifts that made her tall as an elk. Her hands, spinning the lasso by her feet, or juggling knives to make her point, were so quick they were almost invisible. Impersonating a grizzly bear she growled so effectively the little fiddler and several women in the crowd screamed. She seemed to the unschooled miners, the bullwhackers, the gamblers, and even to the prostitutes, to be a thing beyond Creation—both awesome and bizarre.
Even as more and more shades of Calamity come out of the woodwork of Wake, her contradictions and complexities make her difficult to see, an essential tension in the novel that Caple embraces. The reader may not have the satisfaction of observing a complete picture, but the shards that emerge feel all the more valuable.
The design of In Calamity’s Wake is neatly compact, hardcover but lightweight and free of a potentially obstructive dust jacket. The uniqueness of the book’s design is fitting, considering its author’s highly individual voice. Back-cover plaudits and laudations can leave readers irritated at best and jaded at worst, but Caple at least is deserving of the praise. Wake is both a tribute to the gritty final dregs of the Wild West era and a tender argument for the value of the human souls wearing history’s heavy period costumes. Sometimes the costumes hide more than they reveal of the hearts beating beneath them. Caple’s clever guesses strip away some of her fascinating subjects’ stage makeup and bring them out into the light.
‘In Calamity’s Wake’ by Natalee Caple
Book Reviews
History has kept a cache of information on Calamity Jane stored haphazardly in buckets and trunks: postcards and rumours, blurry photographs and spirit-soaked legends, penny novels and trembling oral accounts. The complexity of the legends surrounding her kept Calamity Jane alive long after her boots rotted and her rifle rusted away. And it’s the richness of Calamity’s stories—the stories of Calamity—that the talented Natalee Caple taps with In Calamity’s Wake.
Officially described as a historical novel, Caple herself refers to Wake as “a work of metahistoriographic fiction,” a cocktail of straight-up primary source material, brushed-up and dusted-down historical accounts, and purely fictional detail. Together, these form a fascinating though indistinct portrait of this elusive historical character. The reader never sees her whole face, just her profile—or a sidelong glance before she turns away.
Much of the novel is told from the perspective of Miette, Calamity’s daughter. Abandoned by Calamity at birth in the arms of a Canadian Catholic priest, Miette has grown up steeped in books and bathed in her adopted father’s benign love. But Wake begins at his deathbed, and with his last breaths he tells the grieving Miette to go find the mother she doesn’t remember: “Don’t ask her for anything. Just what was meant to be yours but she never gave you, and make her explain all the years she put you out of her mind.”
In alternating chapters, Miette describes her journey, by horse, foot and train, to find her mother, and an omniscient narrator recounts the story of Calamity—christened Martha—from her birth to her final years. Other characters are occasionally given voice in their own chapters: Lavinia Hart, writing at the turn of the century about the Pan-American Exposition; Dora DuFran relating tales of Calamity’s involvement in her brothel; Lew Spencer describing the dust of Deadwood, South Dakota, how he danced and sang for pay and ate Chinese food and drank with Calamity between shows.
These latter chapters mostly add atmosphere and background details to the montage. Frankly, they are details the book could manage without: they offer colour, an arresting shakeup of pace and voice, and behind-the-scenes angles on the mystery of Calamity. But Miette’s chapters steal the show.
She is alone, following the death of the only family she’s ever known, and she’s only following her father’s dying directions out of love for him. But as she wanders across the immensity of the landscape stretching in unbroken folds from the Canadian border through the Dakotas, Miette encounters her mother’s country, stressed with conflict and populated with ghosts of the past:
We meandered all day over the body of the landscape, around concretions that might be shoulders and ribs and knees of a sleeping being. Echoes dissolved into whispers. We stopped to drink from Milk River and I saw carvings in the stone side of a steep butte, of battles between men with shields. I saw the bodies fall before me again. I saw a rider on a horse, long flowing lines of his headdress behind him and a buffalo before him. It put me off balance, I don’t know why, but I was out of time with myself. Something heavy shifted in me.
Much of the book deals, either directly or indirectly, with grief, and Miette’s sorrow over her father’s death provide some of Wake’s most stirring passages. Caple’s trick of forever looking at her subject from the side lends them even more emotional capital. Miette experiences her grief through her observations of the living world around her, and she avoids it through mental exercises:
As the night came on I observed the time and the distance of the sun and moon’s nearest limbs. I found myself making lists, reducing everything in me and around me to lists just to force myself to stay with the present, keep sane, keep hold of my thoughts, which were slippery in my loneliness.
Measured the width of the river from the point across to the point of view. Measured the curve of the flow around the rocks. Measured how white the foam is on the banks. Measured the height and width of reeds. Measured the length of time I need.
But as captivating as Miette is, Wake’s subject is undoubtedly Calamity. As Miette rides over the hills toward Deadwood, her relationship with her mother edges out thoughts of her father, and Calamity’s chaotic history begins to take centre stage in the narrative. And Calamity, “who, for all her drinking, had the ability to see inside people and forgive them,” as one character remembers, is a worthy study.
She was young and her profile clear-cut, her whole countenance resolute and defiant. She wore lifts that made her tall as an elk. Her hands, spinning the lasso by her feet, or juggling knives to make her point, were so quick they were almost invisible. Impersonating a grizzly bear she growled so effectively the little fiddler and several women in the crowd screamed. She seemed to the unschooled miners, the bullwhackers, the gamblers, and even to the prostitutes, to be a thing beyond Creation—both awesome and bizarre.
Even as more and more shades of Calamity come out of the woodwork of Wake, her contradictions and complexities make her difficult to see, an essential tension in the novel that Caple embraces. The reader may not have the satisfaction of observing a complete picture, but the shards that emerge feel all the more valuable.
The design of In Calamity’s Wake is neatly compact, hardcover but lightweight and free of a potentially obstructive dust jacket. The uniqueness of the book’s design is fitting, considering its author’s highly individual voice. Back-cover plaudits and laudations can leave readers irritated at best and jaded at worst, but Caple at least is deserving of the praise. Wake is both a tribute to the gritty final dregs of the Wild West era and a tender argument for the value of the human souls wearing history’s heavy period costumes. Sometimes the costumes hide more than they reveal of the hearts beating beneath them. Caple’s clever guesses strip away some of her fascinating subjects’ stage makeup and bring them out into the light.
HarperCollins | 272 pages | $24.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-1443406703