More Deadwood
Between the coward and the lapse of momentary fear...
In case you missed it, I wrote about Deadwood over on Dirt, and specifically about “Calamity” Jane Canary, everybody’s favorite fuck-up. I had lots of thoughts about what Jane calls “the difference…. between the coward and the lapse of momentary fear” and I highly fucking recommend you go over there and subscribe so you can read those thoughts. But I’m gonna talk about Jane more here out of my own free will.
There’s a great scene I didn’t get to write about on Dirt, one of my favorites in all of Deadwood, where a drunken Jane comes upon a smallpox-stricken small-time grifter, Andy Cramed, who has been dumped in the woods to die by his fellow racketeers for fear he’ll spread the virus. Watch.
Okay, some context: When Jane first sees him, she is sopping with whiskey and guilt that she wasn’t there to save her best friend. Andy, who is delirious from fever and lack of water, has been muttering over and over “I apologize,” begging God to put him down. While we’re not privy to what he’s apologizing for, we can venture it is mostly in reference to his life of being a shitheel.
I’m interested in why Jane responds as she does. The first thing she does, of course, is hit herself on the head with her waterskin, as if to punish herself or chase off the thoughts of her own shame at failing her friend. And the little speech she gives to him, which is more for the audience and Jane than it is for the delirious Andy (“My best friend died. The man I had my best friend feeling about in the world. Took you as he found you… thought the best of you… sweet to me!”) has always given me chills.
It’s not just that Jane is sad she’s lost her friend, what I hear Jane saying is that the one who remains — herself — cannot and will not take herself as she finds her, think the best of herself, or be sweet. She doesn’t think she deserves it. She too would like to apologize, but to whom is she supposed to apologize? Her best friend is dead. When she finishes, Andy apologizes again, and Jane looks again at her waterskin, which, if you haven’t guessed, does not have water in it but whiskey. What she wants to do is take a drink and obviate herself entirely. No more feelings, no more living, is the instinct.
But to do so would be to abandon the shitheel who is on the way to decomposing at her feet, and Jane can’t do that: that would be to give up not only on herself but to abdicate the one thing she cares about, her own sense of right and wrong and responsibility, so it’s at this moment that Jane has one of her little epiphanies: “maybe you’d rather have some water.”
Andy cannot hear her because he’s delirious from dehydration and covered with smallpox boils, so he apologizes again, and then we get the sudden shift in tone in the scene — Jane nearly leaves her feet to shout “shut the fuck up” as she strides off. Which goes to show that while she may have resolved to help, she won’t stand to be reminded of the music in her own head.
So, of course, helping Andy doesn’t save Jane from her feelings, or her addiction — why should it? — and it is several episodes later, when the smallpox is running wild through the camp, that Jane is approached by the Cochran, the doctor, who is looking for anyone who might help with the sick. Having been already exposed, Jane is one of the few people who can without risking themselves harm.
“My best friend died,” she protests, and he shouts back, “and he ain’t coming back! Now will you help me?” In other words, you can only control what you can control. You’ve got this desire to help others, and what can you follow other than your own intuition? The world may not earn your respect or trust, but yourself — that may be under your own power if you can will it.1
Anyways, go over to Dirt if you want to read more…
Milch writes in his own memoir about how one of the primary realizations of his own life was that thinking about his problems wouldn’t save him, but that one has to rewire themselves through their own behavior, and that “the good is what works.”