The City of Lovely Brothers (8 page)

The saloon's no place to stay for a respectable lady like you, unless she's with her husband."

Callie sent a letter to Caleb telling him that Caliban would get better, but they would be in Billings until spring.

She praised Doctor Brewster's gifts as a physician to the skies and gave a long account of what he had been done.

The second week in October, Doctor Brewster said Caliban could leave his hospital as soon as he found a place for him to live. Mrs. Allen only had one spare bedroom.

"You should go back to Laramie, Callie, before we get snowed in here," Caliban told her. "That way I could stay with Mrs. Allen. I won't be alone. I know these people now, and I like 'em."

The Brewsters liked him, too. Doctor Brewster said it would have made him proud to have a son as fine as Caliban. His daughter, June, had fallen head over heels in love with him, and the doctor would have been happy to have him for a son-in-law. It was not about to happen, though. Caliban had yet to turn fourteen.

Callie did not want to leave her brother, but if she did, he could stay just a few doors down from the doctor's.

Then Doctor Brewster learned that one of the railroad 9executives and his wife would be going to Laramie by stagecoach, so Callie would not have to make the trip alone. She left four days later.

That winter, Montana was admitted to the Union.

Hoke Hill, where the brothers' father and

grandfather fought off the Indians, is the same hill where Caliban broke his hip. Hokey Hill Shopping Mall is some ten miles away. Calhoun High School is situated twice as far from the old Johnson home, where Calhoun lived after the brothers split up, and then Caleb and Caliban built a house on Caliban's section of the property. The original Caldwell homestead stood on Calvin's share, near the south end of the present city, and he, Darcie, and their children continued to live there.

Caliban undoubtedly provided the inspiration for the Caladelphia Shakespeare Festival. They performed
The
Tempest
in its inaugural year, and have twice since then. I performed in their second production when I was five years old, as a spirit Prospero conjures to entertain Ferdinand and Miranda. I doubt I entertained anybody. I kept the program as a souvenir and have read through it to for references to Caliban Caldwell, but I found none.

The photographs we have of the brothers were taken in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, when they were older men, balding or with white hair, but one can see that they were all handsome and kept their good looks into old age. They are sepia photographs, except Caleb's, which I found on microfilm in the
Rosebud
County Record
(
Sept. 20, 1923
)
along with his obituary, so 9it is grainy and blurred. We know the color of their hair and eyes from identification papers they filed when Montana became a state. We also have two colored-pencil sketches of Caliban in his early thirties that Nick drew in his diary, but the coloring is unreliable since his choice of colors was limited to the ten or twelve pencils he had at his disposal.

Still, it is significant that in the sketch that shows Caliban's face in closer detail, Nick used a brown pencil for his eyes and black for his hair and eyebrows.

The photos of Caliban and Calvin are standard

studio portraits, while Calhoun's shows him with four other cowboys guarding a herd of steer, mounted on their horses.

It is an excellent photo, artistically done, evidently the work of one of those anonymous photographers who went west to document frontier life, and available in a book of photographs of the Old West. I own a copy of the photograph as well as the book. It was probably the first of the photos to be taken. Calhoun looks younger than his brothers do in their photos, though it is hard to tell, since he is wearing a Stetson and you cannot see if his hair was greying. You can see him clearly in it. He is in the foreground, and the only one facing the camera. The caption reads: "Cowherds, ca. 1910; left foreground: C.

Caldwell; etc." and gives the names of two others and lists two as unknown. What I know about him and the family 9leads me to think it was taken five or even eight years earlier.

We have photographs of Darcie and Julia as well, taken at about the same time as those of the brothers.

Darcie is in Calvin's photograph. It shows her standing side by side with her husband. She barely comes up to his chest.

She has her hair in a bun, and is wearing a loose dress that hides her figure. She looks insecure. As we know that in life she was a capable and determined woman, we may assume that her expression reflects her uncertainty on how to pose for a photograph. Julia's shows her standing beside her four sons, ranging in age from about eighteen to thirty.

Zeke's wife, Lettie, is not in the picture, nor is their father.

The boys must have looked very much like him, however, and they are dressed like cowboys. Julia wears her blond hair in a long, thick braid hanging over her right shoulder.

She is smiling, which one rarely sees in photographs that old, but her features appear hardened with age. She is still very pretty, however, a full-figured woman with wide hips, and one can see that men must have paid her a good deal of attention when she was young, which may explain Calvin's doubts that she would make his brother a faithful wife.

There is no photograph of Nick, who was to play so important a role in their lives in the years to come. His diary also contains a black pencil sketch of the face of a 10man other than Caliban, which may be a self-portrait, though this is far from certain.

In addition, there exist four other photos of Caliban, one of him as a boy and three as a young man in his prime.

Two photographs give frontal views of him, and he is naked in all four. I came across them by chance in old medical book while doing research for this family history.

They are, of course, anonymous, and identify him only as

"male subject", a fact which anyone can see at a glance, but I recognized him as the Caliban Caldwell in the photograph taken of him in his late forties. They were obviously made to document the fractured hip and how the injury had affected him in later life. Alongside them are photographs of just the hip —they do not even show the parts next to it— and these photos could be of anyone. I assume Doctor Brewster himself took the earlier one toward the end of winter 1890, because Caliban's skin looks as if the cast and bandages had been removed about a month earlier, and he appears somewhat unsteady standing on his own with the awkward grin on his face we would expect of a boy being photographed in the nude more than a century ago.

Brewster must have been proud of his success, and in order to get him to pose, told him the photograph was for his files, though I imagine June Brewster peeked at it on occasion without her father's knowledge. The others 10probably date from one of the winters he spent in Laramie, when Callie, who had believed the fracture had completely healed and was distressed to see it had got worse, pressured him to see a doctor.

Inasmuch as Caliban will be the hero of this history, if it can be said to have a hero —I intend as much as possible to give equal weight to all four brothers— I am glad to have come by these photos. In the first, we see an absolutely perfect fourteen-year-old male, perhaps two years into puberty. One must use a magnifying glass to make out the scar, which is clearly visible in the accompanying close-ups. Despite the awkward smile, anyone who saw the photo would immediately be struck by his singular beauty, so much so that a person dealing in child pornography could earn himself a small fortune just from that one photograph. He is well developed for his age, though obviously not yet sixteen, with broad shoulders and muscular arms, and genitals many adult males would give their eye-teeth to possess. Only his legs are on the spindly side, attributable to his long convalescence. A year later they would have filled out with solid muscle, though the right had begun to wither, as we see in the other photographs, taken, it would seem, in his early twenties.

In these photos —frontal and back views and one of 10his right side— he is even handsomer, but the hip is deformed. The accompanying text explains that it ceased to grow after the fracture. In them, we see Caliban making a valiant and only partly successful attempt to stand straight.

Were it not for the hip and right leg, which is slightly shorter than the other but otherwise fully developed, he could pass for a movie star. He does not appear

embarrassed by his nakedness, nor does it look as if he was showing off for the camera. His expression is totally natural and relaxed. The deformity is most apparent in the view from the side, which no one would mistake for anything but a medical photograph, but one does not at first notice the withered hip in the other two because of his beauty. Most people would spot it soon enough, however, for they are the kind of photos one lingers over, not only women and homosexual men, but heterosexual men as well. If he were not simply standing in place with his arms at his sides, one would think they were art photos. The hair of his legs and forearms is fairly thin, and only a few hairs grow on his chest, on the sternum and around his nipples. He has a flat stomach, and, had he chosen to show it off, one suspects an impressive six-pack. A fine line of hair runs from his navel to his pubes, which look as though they have been trimmed, but that is unlikely. Although he is what men (all men) call extremely well endowed —the size of his genitals 10immediately draws one's gaze— his beautifully shaped and proportioned penis and testicles seem smaller in comparison with the rest of his body than when he was fourteen. Seen from the back, it appears that his tight, round buttocks were his third best feature. His face undoubtedly takes first place. He has a straight back.

Walking on legs of unequal length had not yet affected his spine, which we can guess became somewhat twisted with time, judging from the sepia photograph.

I own copies of all the photographs. I keep the sepia of Caliban in a frame on my desk, and in frames next to it, Xerox copies I made of the four medical photographs. The others I have in an album.

Caliban developed his passion for reading during his winter in Billings. The Brewsters owned an impressive collection of books, many of them medical texts, but also many works of literature, philosophy and history, and they gladly lent them to Caliban. He also read the articles in scientific journals the doctor subscribed to, but history books were his favorites. In addition to the books he lent him, for Christmas Doctor Brewster gave him what he thought were the best two gifts he had ever received: a guitar and a puppy that he named Jaggers after the character in Dickens'
Great Expectations
, which he was then reading.

By the time Caleb came to Billings to bring him

home, Caliban had probably become one of the better-educated men in the state, and certainly its youngest intellectual, all in under eight months. Caliban's interest in books startled and puzzled Caleb. Not only did he read constantly, but he became so engrossed in what he was reading that he would frequently tell Caleb, "Wait a few minutes, will you? I just wanna finish this part."

It is surprising that Caliban wanted to go back to the ranch, where he would have nothing to read but the Bible 10and an almanac. Although he owned almost one-fourth of the property, Calvin did not give him an allowance, nor would he have compensated him for his work if he had been able to do any, so he would have no money to buy books. Yet there was little he could do except read. He arranged for Doctor Brewster to send him a dozen books every month, but he usually finished them in two weeks and sent them back for another dozen.

If Caliban's having become a reader had surprised Caleb, Calhoun it merely amused, and it disgusted Calvin.

Truth be told, Calvin was not particularly well disposed toward his youngest brother after the accident. Until Caliban could work, which would not be for another year, he looked on him as an extra mouth to feed. On top of that, he considered it Caliban's fault that he was in debt to Callie, and he had been compelled to pay for Doctor Brewster's ongoing care after she went to Laramie, and Mrs. Allen as well, for the boy's lodgings.

Caliban had no intention of remaining a burden. He exercised his leg regularly and hiked a mile or so out on the range every day to read, going a little farther each week until he could go as far as the hill where he had been injured, which became his favorite reading spot. Although he could walk, by the end of summer it seemed to him he would never be able to sit in a saddle again or do any ranch 10work other than tending to the horses and pitching hay for them, nor be fit for farm work besides harvesting vegetables, so over the winter he taught himself to work leather. He started by making belts. As a grown man he made belts and even boots for his brothers and repaired the harnesses, and sold other things he made to buy books, which Calvin considered a waste. In addition, Caliban learned to sew, and took over the mending from Darcie and Julia. Calvin was not impressed. He thought the women had managed just fine without Caliban's help.

Calvin was not aware of the ill-will he bore his brother, and Caliban, who liked everyone and assumed everyone liked him, was oblivious to it. The others noticed, however, even Caleb, and Darcie most of all. She had known of it even before he returned to the ranch. When Caleb got Caliban's letter saying he wanted to come home and asking him to come to Billings and get him, Calvin said, "What's he wanna come home for? From what I gather, he won't never be able to be a rancher."

"You want his share of the ranch, don't you?"

Darcie asked. "Well, if he's willing to give it up, you can buy it from him. Lord knows he'll need the money when he grows up."

"Whattaya mean, I'm after his share? I was just wondering what he'd do here." "Be with us, of course. This is his home."

"Well, if Caleb's going to Billings for him, he had better do it now and get it over with before we get too busy."