In Calamity's Wake Read Online Free

at me.
    The wind rose up very strangely. I heard thunderroll and then, as if after a breath, the sky began to hail.
    Come on, keep moving, I said. Crazy weather.
    The hail was painful, as large as musket balls. The flowers were abused. I saw a blackbird knocked out of a tree and killed. We shouldered the wind with our faces tucked to our chests. Even my horse walked with her head swinging back and forth to escape the stinging. I took for granted that we were still heading in the right direction because it hurt too much to open my eyes and look around. Then, as suddenly as the hail began, it fell away and a blazing white sun took over the sky.
    I know her, he said. I know your mother. Look, you see that hill, and those cliffs? He pointed at the landscape but there was nothing like what he described before us. The little man shook with excitement.
    I know her, he exclaimed. She lived right behind there. Now turn this way. You see the brow of that hill, where it cuts the sky? Now look hard. Look hard to see it. And back this way. You see that ridge, so far away you can barely see it? You see that broken tree? Well, end to end, your famous mother owned every speck of this land. Owned it with her body for patrolling it as a scout and seeing and knowing it. Every tree and stone and animal that crossed this earth belonged to her. All of us were her sons and daughters brought into this world drunk and rolling on straw mats. And the real joke of itis our fathers carried each of us to be baptized, and we only knew a father’s arms. Not one of us was baptized on her land. It was that way with you as well, wasn’t it?
    What the hell are you talking about?
    Calamity Jane is my mother too.
    He laughed and I shivered. A murder of crows the size of terriers came cawing over a break in the rocks and blackened the sky. I looked at the glittering balls of ice on the trail and I felt like I was sinking into a pure cold fire. I thought, he is either a lunatic or a ghost. If this is death, if I am somehow dead, then I will have to ask the Devil for a blanket. I looked at him and thought maybe the sudden hail pounding our heads was queering either what he said or what I heard or both, or else my grief had conjured a hallucination.
    You know her?
    I did but she’s dead. Calamity Jane has been dead for years. A train hit her when she was drunk and sleeping on the tracks. Cut her into squirming parts and never stopped. The woman was living bile—living, moving, humping bile. But I think about her at Christmas.
    He whipped out a long knife from his hip and struck my horse with the flat of the blade. She went stumbling fast down the incline. Her reins pulled from my hand and I had to chase her even though our six legs were made of unjointed lead.

Martha
    S HE FLOATED IN THE WATER IN THE WEEDY creek, parched skin gleaming. Boys in uniform called abuse from the shore. She laughed and showed her finger. They dropped belts and guns and clothing in the long grasses and entered the water splashing like dogs, paddling to her. It was as if for an hour the war meant nothing. Martha and the other soldiers dove under the surface, touched the stones, scratched the soft silt and swam in circles. The cold water washed old dirt from wounds, erased false lines from their soft faces. Kicking, they felt feet and legs touch weeds. Empty stomachs rumbled.
    She looked down at herself and then at them, how thin they all were. She turned her face towards the sun and touched the part in her hair where the scalp had burnt. She bent her knees, pulling herself under the surface. Water filled her ears and she heard the roaring.

Miette
    T HEY CALLED IT OBLATION . I T BEGAN IN THE East but when it came to the West, the practice of leaving infants on the steps of monasteries, or in churches, or by cemetery graves had become the very incarnation of gifting a life to God.
    I was an oblate?
    Yes, you were a gift. St. Benedictine said that if a child—like