Carl and Calamity Jane 1

Context: Madonna finds herself alone in Carl's Roycroft studio shortly after they become friends. She discovers a scrapbook he keeps there and learns that he has many secrets.

Madonna scanned the books in his cupboard. The volumes by Byron and Shelley came as no surprise, but the worn copy of Jane Eyre gave her pause. One of her favorites. The Mr. Rochester she had sighed over since the age of eleven had evolved into a taller, slimmer man in the last few months, his eyes still piercing, yet now the color of a cloudless sky rather than of coal. She forced herself to also imagine a sane wife and three children beside him. Her smile vanished.
She retreated to his desk with a tattered leather scrapbook.

The first photograph featured two small boys, inscribed Berlin, Ontario, 1865. The younger child, perhaps three, was recognizably Mr. Ahrens. Another picture showed him older, maybe ten, also inscribed Berlin. His home town? A train pass to Winnipeg, dated May 14, 1878. Mr. Ahrens as a teenager, lean and dapper in a frock coat and top hat, from a photo studio in Sturgis. A playbill from Deadwood dated four years before Madonna’s. Mother’s letters from Dakota Territory had described an uncivilized place. How lawless and primitive would it have been a decade earlier?

The next caption read Jane, me and the boys – Deadwood – 1879 but the image included four men beside a stagecoach. She peered closer. The slight man beside Mr. Ahrens looked familiar. 1879. Deadwood. Jane. No! Surely he would have told her.

He hands trembled as she turned the page to find an 1886 clipping from a Nebraska City newspaper: This city congratulates our own Dr. Carl Ahrens, aged twenty-four, who yesterday received an invitation from the International Medical Congress to attend their meeting in Washington, DC, for his contributions in the field of oral surgery.

Madonna compared his age and the date again and frowned. This made him thirty-eight, not thirty-two, as he once told her. Why would he fib about such a thing?

The next article came from a Toronto paper, dated 1892: The hanging committee of the Ottawa Art Exhibition unanimously gave the place of honor to “Cradled in the Net” by Mr. Carl von Ahrens. The canvas features the artist’s son asleep in a fishing net hammock while the strong light from a window touches cheek, brow and hair.

“What can’t you do?” she asked aloud.

“I can’t whistle.”

She dropped the book on the table. “Don’t sneak up on me. You know I startle easily.”

He chuckled and squeezed her shoulder. “That’s why I said your name twice.”

His hand smelled of mineral spirits; she wondered if he painted more than swept at Eleanor’s. “Should I call you Dr. Ahrens?”

“No, you should call me Carl.”

“I can’t.”

“You don’t call Sammy ‘Mr. Warner.’”

At his wounded tone, her hand raised halfway to his before she realized it. She scratched a feigned itch on her collarbone before lowering it again. “That’s different. Sammy’s like an older brother to me.”

“So you’ve said.” He pulled away. “But the formality still irks me.”

He had always been Carl in the privacy of her mind, but she sensed this line should not be crossed aloud. “Blame seventeen years of Mother’s etiquette lessons.”

“Fair enough. For now.” He brushed aside his supplies and sat on the table beside her. “I only call myself ‘Doctor’ when it opens doors that would otherwise remain closed. I never went to dentistry school. I can’t practice in Ontario.”

“Carl von Ahrens.” She smiled. “That’s dashing. Makes you sound like an aristocrat.”

“My grandfather was a Danish nobleman, but the title means nothing outside of Europe and I find it pretentious. The stuffier members of the hanging committees take me more seriously when I use it, though. They assume I’m wealthy and attended the best art schools abroad. In reality, I’m penniless and self-taught.” He peered at her. “You look pale, Madonna.”

“You called yourself an apprentice, but you’re a famous surgeon.”

“Surgeon, yes. Famous, no.”

“You don’t paint portraits, yet one earned you the place of honor at an exhibition.”

“A lifetime ago.”

“You’re thirty-eight.”

He grimaced. “Guilty.”

She thumbed through the scrapbook to the page with the stage coach picture. “That’s Calamity Jane, isn’t it?”

“You know of her?”

“My brother loved the Deadwood Dick novels. However did you meet her?”

“Would you prefer the clean version of the story, or the truth?”

“Which do you think?”

He cracked his knuckles and grinned. “The first time I saw Jane, she was gagged and trussed up to a post in the center of a Deadwood saloon with a rope wrapped around her from here to here.” He indicated chest to ankles. “Until her hat fell off, I thought she was a man. I was eighteen and rather chivalrous, and I couldn’t believe a room full of men would ignore a lady’s obvious distress. I complained to the bartender. He spat into a glass, wiped it out with a filthy rag, poured a shot of whisky and pushed it toward me. ‘Jane knocked Harry out cold,’ he explained, and pointed to a burly man in the corner with blood pouring from his nose. ‘Then she went after Tom. She’s so soused I reckon she couldn’t have hurt him none with that meat clever, but I don’t want to drag another body from my bar. It’s bad for business.’”

“Another body?” Madonna leaned forward in her chair. “A meat cleaver?”

Carl held a finger to his lips to silence her. “So anyway, I rejoined my friends while Jane did her damnedest to get loose. Eventually, her gag fell.” Carl stopped, flushed crimson, and shook his head. “You’ll have to settle for the milder version, Madonna. There are things I can’t say in front of a lady, even when quoting one.”

“Could you paraphrase?”

“Well, yes, let me see. She insulted Tom’s character, his mother, his dog, and his, um, anatomy, or lack there of, apparently. This tirade included picturesque images that fascinated me even more than the sounds coming from the brothel above my room at night.”

“A brothel!”

He shrugged. “Deadwood was a mining town of mostly single men. The hotels and boarding houses all served an alternate purpose.”

“I see.” She raised one eyebrow, uncertain she wanted to hear more, but too enthralled to object.

He rolled his sleeves up past his elbows. “Anyway, after Jane insulted poor Tom in every way imaginable, she threatened to kick his—manly parts—until they came out of his, well, never mind, and then Tom doused her with a bucket of water. At least that’s what I think it was; I saw no one use it as a spittoon.”

“Revolting!”

“Yes, and she was furious. All her thrashing about tightened the knots. She had to be cut free.”

Madonna rested her forearm on the table beside his leg. “You did it, I’m sure.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve been in close proximity to someone who’s inebriated?”

“No.”

“Imagine yourself trapped in a room full of rotting fruit. She didn’t smell that good, though, because she hadn’t bathed in awhile. My eyes watered as I worked. She’d have decked me if I cut her.”

“But you didn’t.”

He shook his head. “She liked me after that and hired me to work on her ranch in Montana. She taught me how to cuss like a cowboy.”

“You said you couldn’t speak like that in front of a lady.”

“Jane was many things. A lady was not one of them.”