Ruth
After the accident, everything had changed for Ruth—not only her work and her intimate relationships, her daily routines, her body and her brain, but even the way she saw the world. Her life, formerly quiet and mostly fulfilling, had been turned inside out. But it would be wrong to say that life before the accident had been trouble-free.
Her mother, Gwen, was in her final months of terminal breast cancer when Ruth dropped out of grad school in Iowa City and moved back home to Minnesota to be with her. Even before she started dating Scott, the only good thing that happened that dismal winter and spring, Ruth had come up with the idea of salvaging part of her unfinished dissertation about Annie Oakley and converting it into a slim, nonacademic book.
Scott encouraged her. It’ll be good for your CV. Maybe it’s your way into a museum job. Her adjunct teaching certainly wasn’t paying the bills. It doesn’t have to be brilliant. It’s just a good old story about a historical figure people already like, told in a fresh way.
None of that seemed convincing enough once Ruth was in the office of Laura Boyd. Was the editor stifling a yawn, or was the sun in her eyes? They were seated around a small round table in a room dominated by enormous picture windows framing a reed-edged pond. It was a fall day: brilliant blue sky, dazzling light bouncing off every glass and metal surface. Ruth looked across the room to the editor’s corner desk, above which hung family photos, two diplomas and a shot of Boyd herself next to a canoe and a Labrador retriever.
“Tell me again,” the editor prompted. “Why does this book matter now?”
Ruth took a sip of water, as if she’d only been warming up. “Gun culture. A new Annie Oakley book will deepen our understanding of American gun culture.”
The editor was gazing out the window at a flock of geese taking flight from the pond. For the first time, she settled back in her chair and looked at Ruth with real, unhurried interest.
“Tell me more about that.”
It was one of several themes in the book proposal, but here, in person, Ruth could expand and improvise in response to Boyd’s cues. The editor was familiar with Oakley’s fame as a celebrity performer and her cheerful go-get-’em reputation, familiar to Americans since the inaccurate and irrelevant 1946 musical, Annie Get Your Gun. But she hadn’t known about Annie’s work as a serious gun advocate. She hadn’t realized how fervently Oakley had promoted the use of firearms to women—up to twenty thousand of them—as a way to protect themselves.
Boyd asked, “Did you know Eleanor Roosevelt packed a pistol?”
Ruth hesitated. “She was amazing, wasn’t she?” Ruth had once seen a photo of the First Lady’s gun permit. She wasn’t convinced that this meant the first lady carried or shot a gun frequently, but she knew gun-rights advocates enjoyed thinking it was so.
They talked at length about Annie’s early years, when she was already a traveling performer. But only briefly about the years before that. When Ruth mentioned Annie’s troubled childhood, Boyd’s eyes didn’t light up.
“I think people overemphasize the importance of childhood experiences,” the editor said. “It’s tiresome after a while, don’t you think? Everyone’s had hard times, especially in the old days. We have a book about Lincoln coming out next spring. Did you know his father rented him out as a servant? ‘Ten to thirty-one cents a day,’ evidently. To do whatever people wanted. Log-splitting, farm work, whatever. Lincoln’s own words: ‘I was a slave.’”
“That’s . . . surprising.”
“Yes.” Boyd beamed. “A slave! But here’s the thing. He rarely talked about it. In the book, we give it maybe a quarter of a page. His father was domineering, semiliterate, didn’t want Lincoln to get an education, and I wouldn’t be shocked to find out he knocked him around—and let the neighbors knock him around, too. I mean, if they were paying, right?”
Ruth took another sip of water.
“Kidding,” her editor said. “Where Lincoln’s involved, everyone gets way too serious. That’s the problem with most popular history: too serious.”
The press was publishing less about the Civil War and Native Americans, even while they’d added some coffee-table-size books on historic gardens and pioneer cooking. They were even beginning to package books as gift sets: a small baking book sold with a miniature cast-iron pan, a book on early American brewing sold with a set of mason-jar drinking glasses. Ruth had a creeping suspicion Laura Boyd didn’t really care for history at all—neither the public nor the personal kind.
“In our forthcoming book,” Boyd continued, “the slave comment isn’t the jumping-off point to explain how Lincoln became Lincoln. People grow up. They get over things. It’s just a brief anecdote.”
Ruth pictured Abe Lincoln’s somber face. She’d like to read more, actually, about whether Lincoln’s views on slavery and his willingness to go to war might have owed something to this early experience, or what he’d been thinking when he’d chosen to use that word, “slave,” knowing how it would resonate with the day’s most pressing controversy. But Ruth also knew better than to question a point emphatically made by the woman who would decide whether to publish her.
So the door to childhood trauma was closed, and they were back to straight gun talk again, navigating together as they reviewed the presidential assassinations during Oakley’s lifetime: Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. One could say that Americans’ fascination with guns and the belief in solving problems with physical force had led to some unfortunate consequences. One could also say that guns were part of America and had always been. Ruth would tie this fact to the uplifting story of a well-known woman with a positive outlook, someone easy to admire.
Responding to Laura Boyd’s unmistakable leanings, Ruth used words like empowerment.
The one word she never used was revenge.
Ruth wrote the book chronologically, unsatisfied with the childhood years, the part that interested her the most and Laura Boyd the least. The material was scant. Born in 1860, Annie—born Phoebe Ann Mosey—grew up in western Ohio, the fifth of seven surviving children. Following overexposure during a blizzard, which led to pneumonia, her father died. Soon after, Annie started trapping. At the age of eight, without permission, she lowered an old gun from the wall of her family’s cabin in order to shoot game. Legend had it she was a bizarrely talented shot from day one. Annie continued hunting, feeding her family and selling extra game to a local buyer. It wasn’t enough.
Annie was sent to the Darke County Infirmary, a poor farm where the superintendent and his wife liked their young ward, but not enough to keep her. Annie was then lent out to a farm family, new parents who needed help with child-minding, pumping water and all the other chores of farm life. They promised to pay and educate her, promises never kept. Instead, they beat her. Whipped her. Possibly worse.
The Wolves. That was what Annie had called them just before her death in the autobiography she’d never finished writing. One source suggested that Miss Oakley was just trying to protect them “kindly.” Not so. There was no reason to believe that Annie felt the need to be “kind” or forgiving of the couple who had abused her. Other early biographies failed to mention this part of Annie’s life at all.
Two years or a little more. Age nine to eleven or twelve. Those were the years that Ruth refused to allow to pass in a single sentence or a sparse paragraph.
How do you write about what you don’t know, what you can’t prove?
Ruth found herself dwelling on what was known and unknown about the Wolves, imagining those early episodes. Driving back and forth to her job as an adjunct at the community college forty minutes away, she caught herself daydreaming at stoplights, playing imaginary scenes like a movie in her mind. The false promise of fifty cents a week and an education, the lonely Ohio cabin, the infant Annie was made to care for, the endless physical chores, the beatings and whippings that left scars on her back, the blizzard in which Annie was made to stand outside shoeless, the despicable woman who turned a blind eye to her husband’s cravings.
Sexual abuse—if that was what Annie had experienced—was both tragic and arresting, a car wreck you couldn’t help but stare at but that made you sorry when you did, because the images would never leave you. At the same time, Ruth already knew her editor was uninterested in this aspect of Annie’s story, as well as any other part of the story not in service to a simple inspirational theme.
There were two small foundations and a limited number of American museums that referred to Annie Oakley. On their websites and in their most visible public interpretations, some made mention of the Wolves. Some did not.
Ruth decided to tackle the question directly. She called Laura Boyd.
“How’s this,” Boyd said. “Cover the childhood episode, keep it very short, and name the Wolf. Most of the older biographies don’t, isn’t that right?”
“Because it’s not certain. A few names have been suggested, none a perfect fit.”
“Then give readers the options.”
“You’re not worried about me naming an innocent man?”
Boyd laughed. “Five years ago, I would have been worried. But the culture has changed. Men who are still living and famous are being called out on social media all the time without evidence. You’re talking about naming a possible child abuser who has been dead for, what, a century?”
“Possibly a hundred and fifty years.”
None of Ruth’s best guesses satisfied her, and she started to explain to Boyd about a man named Boose or maybe Bosse, another named Rannals or maybe Reynolds, and an entirely different family named the Studabakers, just to start.
“Ruth,” Boyd interrupted. “You’re losing me in the weeds here, which doesn’t bode well. These men are long dead. Their great-grandchildren are long dead. One did something, another maybe didn’t, or perhaps nobody did anything that wasn’t considered normal behavior. Weren’t plenty of young girls forced to chop wood and carry buckets of water in those days?”
Ruth tried to keep her voice level. “It went beyond that.”
“Okay, and the parts that ‘went beyond.’ I’m sorry. Men take advantage. They always have. Isn’t that common as well?”
“It is. That’s the point, I think. The ‘common’ thing that Annie suffered made her who she was: an uncommon woman fueled by . . .”
Ruth was about to say “rage,” but she stopped herself. She had no proof of rage. She was projecting, letting Boyd’s loose standards erode her own scholarly self-respect.
“Okay,” Boyd said. “We’re getting somewhere. The woman she became. Annie Oakley was abused—maybe. But it doesn’t matter who did it. I’m rethinking my earlier suggestion. You’re not sure, so let’s not name him at all. It’s a little late for justice, don’t you think?”
The conversation ended in a series of banalities that dribbled off into the discussion of photo research, marketing and publicity, Instagram and Twitter.
By the time Laura Boyd hung up, Ruth’s phone was hot against her cheek. Whether or not Annie was angry, Ruth certainly was.
Why did she have to know—and name—the Wolf? Why did she have to understand why Annie herself hadn’t named him? Why did we have to know anything at all?
Ruth shouldn’t have been surprised that people were losing interest in history. They didn’t even care about truth in the present.
She had to stop herself before this internal rant and its rhetorical questions soured her on research altogether. Ruth cared. Maybe she hadn’t cared doggedly enough about other things in her life, but she cared about this.
For the moment, Ruth pressed forward, digging into the middle years, for which documentation was more plentiful. The challenge here was making the familiar fresh. The public liked the Annie they already knew. Ruth felt she was gently renovating a house with historically sourced materials. It was more a form of carpentry than construction. And it was certainly not demolition. No one—certainly not Ruth’s editor or publisher—had begun this project intending to surprise or upset any reader.
In graduate school, Ruth had enjoyed brainstorming with like-minded colleagues. When she’d gotten a call in November from her old friend and doctorate peer Joe Grandlouis, now a visiting professor at the University of Washington, his voice brought back the memory of not only the two months they’d dated —a poor match, though not one she regretted—but also the pleasure of academic camaraderie.
Joe, as it turned out, was calling with news. His wife, Christine, had given birth to their daughter Reka: healthy, six pounds two ounces, “as ugly as her father.”
“Oh, come on,” Ruth said.
“Well, only for the first day. Then we saw some improvements.”
Joe knew he was good looking. A bear of a man, tall and broad-chested, who wore his shiny black hair in a long braid down his back.
As Joe told her, he was finishing an article on Chief Sitting Bull’s role in the Wild West show, a performance allowed by government authorities after the leader and medicine man surrendered to US forces almost a decade after defeating Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn—or Battle of the Greasy Grass, as Joe and other Plains Indians preferred to call it.
Joe wanted Ruth’s perspective on the closeness of Sitting Bull’s relationship with his fellow performer Annie Oakley. A minor point that affected no more than a paragraph, but something he didn’t want to get wrong. He was on the fence between two interpretations: one, that Oakley and Sitting Bull had been genuinely close. Or two, that the acquaintanceship was struck up on a whim and deepened, but only slightly, by circumstance.
“Theory one,” Ruth said, “Sitting Bull chose Annie as a replacement for the daughter he had lost, according to the Lakota tradition of adopting to replace lost family, gave her the moccasins supposedly made by his daughter, was truly and deeply impressed with Annie’s shooting skill. Relationship of mutual respect. ‘My dear, old, faithful friend,’ Annie called him later in life. You know all that.”
“I think I already know theory two,” Joe said. “Same meet-cute start—the chief was impressed by her shooting the first time he saw it—but the rest was mostly marketing, for both of them. Watanya Cicilla.”
Ruth had to agree. “The ‘Little Sure Shot’ honorific—if that’s even the proper translation—couldn’t have been bad for her image, and maybe the benefit ran both ways.”
“So that’s what you’re saying in your own book. You’re going for door number two. Colleagues of convenience, nothing more.”
“Lacking better evidence. Even if it’s not as good a story.”
“You’re right. It’s not a good story. Well, maybe this call was just me procrastinating. But there’s always the sense that you’re missing something that would turn things upside down and bring these old dead guys to life.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Maybe that’s just authorial self-sabotage. And dirty diaper avoidance.”
“Exactly,” she said. “So, tell me about new babies. Do they really never sleep?”
“Better than I do.”
She understood that, as well.
The deadline loomed as Ruth wrote about Annie in her forties, beginning with the famous train accident in 1901, after which—anecdotally—Annie Oakley’s hair turned bright white.
Ruth had a dream one night of the forty-one-year-old Annie standing alongside a train track next to a toppled, derailed car. She had aged overnight. She was ashen-faced, thin-lipped, haunted. Staring. Trying to tell Ruth something.
You can’t go forward without going back.
Or was it, You can’t go back without going forward?
Maybe she had said both. It was all a blur, suffused with the smell of smoke and something sour, like urine, the product of animal panic. As far as Ruth could recall, she had never remembered a smell from a dream before.
In the dream, Ruth felt she was doing something wrong, that she was disappointing Annie somehow, and that very disappointment seemed to make Annie fade, her outline blending with the rising smoke, even as she continued muttering something that Ruth couldn’t hear. She tried to go toward her, stepping over the railroad tracks with great effort and the sense of being held back, the motions syrupy and slow.
She heard Annie speak again, even more faintly, from behind a veil of smoke or fog or simply time: Open the cabin door.
Ruth woke up, heart pounding, trying to hold on to her memory of the dream, the feeling of frustrated movement and also guilt that she wasn’t doing what Annie had begged her to do. Ruth didn’t believe in ghosts, but she did believe that time itself, like many a historical script, bore faint traces and echoes of what had come before and been effaced.
All our stories were like that: our passing joys and sorrows just the latest scratch marks on the Möbius strip of time and space that must of necessity be endlessly recycled.