Free Reap the Whirlwind by Terry C. Johnston Page B

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,