Doc Read online

  ALSO BY MARY DORIA RUSSELL

  Dreamers of the Day

  A Thread of Grace

  Children of God

  The Sparrow

  Doc is a work of fiction. Though some incidents, dialogue, and characters are based on the historical record, the work as a whole is the product of the author’s imagination.

  Copyright © 2011 by Mary Doria Russell

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Russell, Mary Doria

  Doc: a novel / Mary Doria Russell.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60439-6

  1. Holliday, John Henry, 1851–1887—Fiction. 2. Earp, Wyatt, 1848–1929—Fiction. 3. Dodge City (Kan.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.U76678E54 2011 813′.54—dc22 2010015062

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Marietta Anastassatos

  Photo illustration: Steven Youll, based on images

  © Iain McKell/Reportage/Getty Images (chair) and

  © Matthias Clamer/Stone Collection/Getty Images

  (room and piano)

  v3.1

  For Art Nolan, who told me what Wyatt knew; for Eddie Nolan, who showed us what John Henry had to learn; for Alice McKey Holliday, who raised a fine young man; with thanks to Bob Price and Gretchen Batton.

  This book is fiction, but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

  —E. HEMINGWAY, A MOVEABLE FEAST

  The Game

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  THE PLAYERS

  Georgia

  Texas

  Kansas

  THE ANTE

  Playing for Time

  FIRST HAND

  The Deal

  Down Cards

  Show Cards

  SECOND HAND

  Bad Beat

  Roughing the Edges

  Three Grand Gone

  Stacking the Deck

  THIRD HAND

  The River

  Ladies High

  Wild Card

  Three of a Kind

  FOURTH HAND

  Side Bets

  Ringer

  Chinaman’s Chance

  FIFTH HAND

  Joker

  Call

  Under the Table

  SIXTH HAND

  No Help

  Raising Blind

  Turning the Play

  CASHING OUT

  Playing for Keeps

  THE RAKE

  The Bitch in the Deck

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  The Players

  Fictional characters are listed in italics.

  GEORGIA

  The Hollidays

  John Henry Holliday, D.D.S., later known as Doc Holliday

  Alice McKey Holliday: his mother

  Henry Holliday: his father

  Wilson and Chainey: brothers, born into his family’s possession

  John Stiles Holliday, M.D.: JHH’s uncle

  Permelia: his wife

  Robert: his younger son, later a dentist

  George: his older son; sent to care for JHH in Texas in 1877

  Sophie Walton: his foster child; taught JHH to play cards

  Martha Anne Holliday: JHH’s childhood sweetheart

  TEXAS

  Henry Kahn: a bad-tempered gambler; shot JHH in 1877

  Mary Katharine “Kate” Harony: a prostitute; JHH’s companion

  David W. “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh: a train robber

  George Hoyt: an inexpert assassin

  Tobias Driskill: a Texan with a grudge

  Billy Driskill: his son, arrested for assault in Dodge

  KANSAS

  The Earps

  Morgan Earp: a policeman; JHH’s closest friend

  Louisa “Lou” Houston: his girlfriend

  James Earp: Morgan’s brother, a brothel manager

  Bessie Bartlett Earp: his wife, the madam

  Wyatt Earp: brother of Morgan and James; a policeman

  Urilla Sutherland Earp: Wyatt’s wife, deceased

  Mattie Blaylock: a Dodge City streetwalker

  Lawmen

  Lawrence “Fat Larry” Deger: the Dodge City marshal (chief of police)

  Ed Masterson: chief deputy to Marshal Deger; deceased

  Marshal Deger’s deputies:

  Morgan Earp

  Wyatt Earp

  Jack Brown

  Chuck Trask

  John Stauber

  William Barkley “Bat” Masterson: sheriff of Ford County; half owner, Lone Star Saloon and Dance Hall

  Dodge City Chamber of Commerce

  Robert C. “Bob” Wright: proprietor, Wright’s General Outfitting Store; member, Kansas House of Representatives

  Isabelle “Belle” Wright: his daughter

  Alice Wright: his wife

  Hamilton “Ham” Bell: proprietor, Hamilton Bell’s Famous Elephant Barn

  Chalkley “Chalkie” Beeson: proprietor, the Long Branch Saloon

  George “Deacon” Cox: proprietor, the Dodge House Hotel

  James H. “Dog” Kelley: mayor of Dodge; proprietor, the Alhambra Saloon

  George “Big George” Hoover: proprietor, Hoover’s Cigar Shop and Wholesale Liquors; leader, Dodge City anti-saloon reform movement

  Margaret: his wife; formerly the prostitute Maggie Carnahan

  Other Kansas Figures (Dodge and Elsewhere)

  Edwin “Eddie Foy” Fitzgerald: vaudeville comedian

  Verelda: his girlfriend, a prostitute

  Jau “China Joe” Dong-Sing: proprietor, China Joe’s Laundry and Baths John Horse Sanders: a young faro dealer

  Charles Sanders: Johnnie’s father, deceased; a black man killed in Wichita after defending his wife from two Texans

  Father Alexander von Angensperg, S.J.: an Austrian Jesuit; Johnnie Sanders’ favorite teacher at the St. Francis Mission School for Indians, near Wichita

  Father John Schoenmakers, S.J.: a Dutch Jesuit; superior of St. Francis

  Brother Sheehan, S.J.: an Irish lay brother; taught farming at St. Francis

  Father Paul Maria Ponziglione, S.J.: an Italian Jesuit, missionary to the Plains Indians

  Captain Elijah Garrett Grier, U.S. Army: stationed at Fort Dodge, Kansas; owner of Roxana

  John Riney: tollgate operator, Dodge City toll bridge

  Mabel: his wife

  John Jr., called “Junior”: his eldest son

  Wilfred Eberhardt: a German orphan

  Thomas McCarty, M.D.: a Dodge City physician and pharmacist

  Nick Klaine: editor, Dodge City Times

  D. M. Frost: editor, Ford County Globe

  The Animals

  Dick Naylor: Wyatt Earp’s horse

  Roxana: an Arabian mare owned by Elijah Garrett Grier

  Michigan Jim: a quarterhorse owned by Mayor Dog Kelley

  Alphonsus: the Jesuits’ mule

  Playing for Time

  He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle. The disease took fifteen years to hollow out his lungs so completely they could no longer keep him alive. In all that time, he was allowed a single season of something like happiness.

  When he arrived in Dodge City in 1878, Dr. John Henry Holliday was a frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who wanted nothing grander than to practice his profession in a prosper
ous Kansas cow town. Hope—cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box—smiled on him gently all that summer. While he lived in Dodge, the quiet life he yearned for seemed to lie within his grasp.

  At thirty, he would be famous for his part in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. A year later, he would become infamous when he rode at Wyatt Earp’s side to avenge the murder of Wyatt’s younger brother Morgan. To sell newspapers, the journalists of his day embellished slim fact with fat rumor and rank fiction; it was they who invented the iconic frontier gambler and gunman Doc Holliday. (Thin. Mustachioed. A cold and casual killer. Doomed, and always dressed in black, as though for his own funeral.) That unwanted notoriety added misery to John Henry Holliday’s final year, when illness and exile had made of him a lonely and destitute alcoholic, dying by awful inches and living off charity in a Colorado hotel.

  The wonder is how long and how well he fought his destiny. He was meant to die at birth. The Fates pursued him from the day he first drew breath, howling for his delayed demise.

  His mother’s name was Alice Jane.

  She was one of the South Carolina McKeys, the third of eleven children. Fair-haired, gray-eyed, with a gentle manner, she came late to marriage, almost twenty at her wedding. Alice was pretty enough and played piano well, but she was educated in excess of a lady’s requirements. She was also possessed of a quiet, stubborn strength of character that had discouraged beaux less determined than Henry Holliday, a Georgia planter ten years her senior.

  Alice and Henry buried their firstborn, a sweet little girl who lived just long enough to gaze and smile and laugh, and break her parents’ hearts. Still in mourning for her daughter, Alice took no chances when she was brought to bed with her second child. This time, she insisted, she would be attended by Henry’s brother, a respected physician with modern ideas, who rode to Griffin from nearby Fayetteville as soon as he received her summons.

  Labor in Georgia’s wet mid-August heat was grueling. When at last Alice was delivered of a son, the entire household fell quiet with relief. Just moments later, a dreadful cry went up once more, for cleft palates and cleft lips are shocking malformations. The newborn’s parents were in despair. Another small grave in the red north Georgia clay. But Dr. John Stiles Holliday was strangely calm.

  “This need not be fatal,” the physician mused aloud, examining his tiny nephew. “If you can keep him alive for a month or two, Alice, I believe the defects can be repaired.”

  Later that day, he taught his sister-in-law how to feed her son with an eyedropper and with great care, so that the baby would not aspirate the milk or choke. It was a slow process, exhausting for the mother and the son. John Henry would fall asleep before Alice could feed him so much as a shot glass of milk; soon hunger would reawaken him, and since his mother trusted no one else with her fragile child’s life, neither slept more than an hour or two between feedings, for eight long weeks.

  By October of 1851, the infant had gained enough weight and strength for his uncle to attempt the surgery. In this, John Stiles Holliday was joined by Dr. Crawford Long, who had begun developing the use of ether as an anesthetic just three years earlier. After much study and planning, the two physicians performed the first surgical repair of a cleft palate in America, though their achievement was kept private to protect the family’s good name.

  With his mother’s devoted care, the two-month-old came through his operation well. The only visible reminder of the birth defect was a scar in his upper lip, which would give his smile a crooked charm all his life. His palate, on the other hand, remained unavoidably misshapen, and when the toddler began to talk, Alice was the only one in the world who could understand a thing he said. Truth be told, everybody but his mamma suspected the boy was a half-wit, but Alice was certain her son was as bright as a new penny, and mothers always know.

  So she shielded John Henry from his father’s embarrassment and shame. She forbade the house slaves and John Henry’s many young cousins to poke fun at his honking attempts at speech. She studied Plutarch on the education of children, and with Demosthenes as her guide, Alice Jane set out to improve her child’s diction. All on her own, she analyzed how the tongue and lips should be placed to produce the sounds her little boy found impossible. She filled scrapbooks with pictures and drawings, and every afternoon she and John Henry paged through those albums, naming each neatly labeled object, practicing the difficult words. In that way, Alice taught her son to read by the age of four, and though correction of his speech required years more, their diligence was rewarded. In adulthood, if his difficulty with certain consonants was noticed at all, acquaintances were apt to ascribe it to his lazy Georgia drawl. Or, later on, to drink.

  He was quiet and rather shy as a child. Hoping to counter this natural reserve, Alice started John Henry’s piano lessons as soon as he could reach the keyboard, and she was delighted to discover that he had inherited from her an accurate musical ear and a drive to master any skill to which he set his hand. Left to himself, the boy would have whiled away his hours reading, or practicing piano, or daydreaming, but Alice knew that was no way for a Southern gentleman to behave. So when John Henry turned seven, she began to encourage the other Holliday boys to spend more time with him. It wasn’t long before he held his own in their rowdy, noisy games, riding as recklessly and shooting as well as any of them.

  “He ain’t big and he ain’t strong,” nine-year-old Robert Holliday told his Aunt Alice, “but that boy’s got a by-God streak of fight in him.”

  And he was going to need it.

  When she was confident that John Henry would not be ridiculed for his speech, Alice enrolled him in a nearby boys’ academy. She had taught him well at home; from the start he excelled in mathematics, grammar, rhetoric, and history. Latin and French came easily. Greek was a struggle, but with characteristic determination, he kept at it, year after year, until he could read Homer in the original.

  Like all Southern girls, Alice Jane had made a thorough study of the male of the species. She knew the rules by which boys played and wasn’t much surprised when her son’s diffident aloofness and scholastic success combined to provoke his classmates beyond toleration. The first time John Henry came home bloody, all Alice asked was “Did you win?” Later that evening, she told the story of the Spartan mother seeing her son off to war. “Come home with your shield or on it,” Alice reminded him the next morning when he left for school.

  His cousin Robert followed that moral lecture with another involving applied physics. “Don’t start nothin’,” young Robert advised, “but if some ignorant goddam cracker sonofabitch takes a swing at you? Drop him, son. Use a rock if you have to.”

  John Henry never did make many friends at school, but the other boys learned to leave him alone—and to copy his answers on exams.

  And what of Henry Holliday? Where was Alice’s husband while their only surviving child practiced phonemes and piano, learned to ride and shoot, and came home from school with bruised knuckles and excellent marks in every subject?

  At a distance. Away. At work. At war.

  In the 1850s, there was foolishness being talked on both sides of the Mason-Dixon. Throughout John Henry’s childhood, the word secession had come up in conversations among the men. His cousin Robert thought the whole idea of war was glorious, but John Henry’s father and his many uncles were unenthusiastic about the notion, even after the North elected Lincoln in 1860 and as much as told the South, “Secede, God damn you, and be done with it!” When the hotheads of Charleston opened fire on Fort Sumter, his Uncle John remarked, “South Carolina is too damn small to be a country and too damn big to be an insane asylum.” That got a laugh, though the Holliday brothers agreed it was unfortunate that a dispute over cotton tariffs had become such a tangle. Still, they expected practicality to win out. Why, the entire nation’s economy was based on cotton! Naturally, the Yankees would have to make some token response to the attack on Sumter, but cooler heads would surely prevail. There’d l
ikely be a trade agreement signed by Christmas.

  Certainly, nobody imagined that Mr. Lincoln would order an armed invasion over the affair. When he did exactly that, the entire South exploded with defiance and patriotism, cheering the new nation—sovereign and independent—that had just been born.

  In April of ’61, Henry Holliday and six brothers rode away to join the 27th Georgia Volunteers. John Henry was still four months shy of ten years old, but he was told, “You are the man of the house now.” He and his mother were not left alone, of course. The household staff was presided over by the aging brothers Wilson and Chainey, who’d been in the family since their own birth and who would have fought the hounds of hell for Miss Alice and her boy. Even with Henry and a half dozen uncles gone, there were all the aunts and the older Holliday menfolk and the younger cousins near, and Alice Jane’s many relatives as well. Hollidays and McKeys never lacked for kin.

  Young as he was, John Henry took his responsibility for his mother’s safety seriously, and his solicitude warmed Alice as much as it amused her. She was especially pleased by the very great deal of thought he gave to an outing she proposed when he was eleven, with the war well into its second year. The great Viennese virtuoso Sigismund Thalberg was coming to Atlanta to perform Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto at the Athenaeum Theater. “Sugar,” Alice told her boy, “I wouldn’t miss this concert for all the tea in China! And I do believe you are ready to meet the Emperor.”

  “The emperor?” Frowning, John Henry looked up from The Gallic Wars. “Did something happen to President Davis?”

  “Mr. Davis is fine. The Emperor is the concerto’s nickname—you’ll understand why when you hear it. The concert is to benefit the Georgia Volunteers,” she added. “What do you think, shug? Shall we chance it?”

  Alice watched her somber, spindly son think the matter through. He presented a number of objections. The weather might be bad, and Alice had not gotten over the bronchitis she’d developed last winter. Griffin was a good distance from Atlanta; twice this spring, the front axle on their ancient carriage had been repaired and it could not be considered reliable.