Natalee Caple is the author of In Calamity's Wake, which Richard Wagamese, author of Indian Horse, calls "mythic, real, compelling ... a sumptuous feast of storytelling." As accomplished, poetic, and original as the novel is, however, it almost never was. Natalee shares the event that almost halted her work on In Calamity's Wake—then gave it its foundation. An excerpt follows.

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When I first started researching the frontierswoman Calamity Jane for a novel it was with the idea of writing a feminist Western. But by the end of my work, In Calamity’s Wake became a book that I wrote because I couldn’t save my cousin Heather’s life. So I wrote her into fiction, hoping that my daughter and my son would one day encounter her there and see her the way I needed her to be seen, as heroic and immortal.

In brief, while I was already working on the novel, Heather was on her way back from a pub to her home on the estate (the ridiculous thing we call public housing) where she lived in Cardiff, Wales, when she was approached on the street and beaten by an eighteen-year-old boy who wanted to kill someone in front of his friends. Weeks later, she came out of her coma and began a difficult recovery that ended at 18 months post-attack when she died of an aneurysm related to her brain damage. Before she died Heather forgave the boy who killed her, a feat I am unable to match.

I struggled with writing after Heather’s death. I tried to work but it was weak work at best and I did everything with little pleasure or interest. Writing seemed like helplessness, like avoiding reality and wallowing in my specialness. Dailiness of every kind seemed wrong and bettering myself through school or work seemed disgusting. But I had received grants and made promises and I knew I had to see this book through. I decided to finish it, hand it in, and throw it away. It seemed like the right thing to do.

I made a schedule and started combing through research materials again. One day I happened to look at two images at once.

I had seen many pictures of Calamity Jane and I had known my cousin all my life but I had never made any connection. Now I saw a great likeness. Heather and Calamity Jane were both six feet tall. Heather worked as a helper in a hospital and Calamity Jane cared for strangers sick with yellow fever. Both women adored animals, perhaps even more than humans. Both women lived as if childless although Calamity Jane may have had children. Most importantly (to me), regardless of the violence visited on them, both women remained profoundly non-violent.

When I started In Calamity’s Wake, I had no idea what to do with a gunslinger who refused to shoot another person. It was Heather who helped me to understand that it was Calamity Jane’s resistance to violence that was her true heroism. The showdown was between her and a world that demanded a violent contest to determine a winner. Calamity Jane refused to be a winner. I realized that I could go back into the novel, find Heather, and write a Western that was profoundly anti-violence.

I decided to highlight the issue of choice, the choice to be or not to be violent, as deeply important to negotiating subjectivity in the West. This choice was (and still is) of course, influenced by gender, economic status, and race because the choice to avoid being part of violence is so much more difficult for individuals of lower social status, who are so often the target of both criminal and institutionalized violence. I chose to emphasize (as both Calamity Jane and Lew Spencer’s grandmother say in the book) how hard it is, and yet how important to try and go through life hurting as few people as possible.

On one level this book is utterly personal. It is the safe place I keep Heather and visit her. With this book I have tried to highlight and preserve the qualities that she has come to stand for in my mind: extraordinary gentleness, superhuman forgiveness, and the ability to resist violence when it seems as if the world insists that your reality includes violence.

On another level, this book is my proof of what Heather and Calamity Jane together revealed to me: that hero stories can be about the masses and not about the rarity of exceptional people. Calamity Jane’s fame—and because of it, the existence of her doubles in print, film, and television—eclipse the fact that the real woman, Martha Canary or Cannary, was incredibly poor for most if not all of her entire life. Calamity Jane was not exceptional, not heroized, in the way Wild Bill Hickok or Buffalo Bill or Jesse James were. She did not rise up out of the masses to become an ideal. She represents the working poor and their imaginations. She represents the heroism of the masses who get up and live every day. She is one, like the hundreds of poor buried beside her in the same graveyard, who worked and drank and loved and spun tales about their potential.

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From In Calamity's Wake (beginning on page 12, where Miette is grieving for the man who raised her)

Aliena misericordia. It means stranger sympathy, not strange sympathy; he loved me even though I was a stranger. He was never insulted to be called a wandering bishop. He was an episcopus vagans. A man of God consecrated by God, living outside the structures and canons of the Church. He was his own vision of God’s work, better, clearer, more humane. Not interested in selling faith.

He taught me that myths are neither true nor fair. Slaves were not servile by nature but beaten into submission. The Indians, he said, were never savages but perhaps the Europeans were. Indians do not particularly stand for nature and neither do women. A woman’s brain, he said, is smaller than a man’s because her skull is smaller. A woman’s mind is a different thing that has no natural limits. Children are not immoral at birth but new and possessed of great potential. The poor are not weak or debauched but just poor. The rich are not wise or deserved but just rich. People of every race and nation love their children equally and if it does not always seem that way it is because we do not love the children of others well enough. Christians are not in possession of a unique appendage in the soul. Priests are not better or kinder or more moral on average than farmers. Wolves do not embody Satan or devilry at all. The world is precious and it is a gift, but we are not the recipients. To think that we are the masters or owners is to imagine we could be excised from the world with no trace of us left. I muttered to myself the things that he had told me and remembered him a thousand ways, lecturing me in the evenings when I was wakeful, walking beside me, sitting in a chair reading, making me eggs, standing at the stove beside me while the hen scratched under the kitchen table.

I lay in my narrow bed thinking, this is the evening of his last earthly day. The long harmonizing of faraway wolves drifted into the room. I breathed grief in and blew it out again.

I remembered him explaining himself, kneading bread, leaning the red heels of his palms into the dough as if it could be sculpted to hold ideas. I remembered watching him and all my fears of life or death, of darkness, illness or abandonment dissolving.

Father, I—

The Old Church believes in unity in diversity, he said. In the old theology, Church meant reconciliation. Taste this, he said.

I looked down from his face, the length of his arm, at the green leaf pinched between the fingers of his hand, which was crusted with flour. I smelled the bruised herb.

Reconciliation?

God never meant, he told me gently, for us to devalue Earth to dignify Heaven. God never meant for eternity to devalue the present.

Father, I—

Go find her.