Epitaph Read online

  Wyatt was a little embarrassed about how often he ate with the Behans, but not enough to turn an invitation down. Going home to Mattie Blaylock got harder and harder. It was just kind of an accident that he’d let Mattie start living with him. Mattie seemed to think he was stupid for allowing that to happen, and maybe she was right . . .

  Anyway, it was always nice being at Johnny Behan’s house. It was the kind of home any man might like to have.

  “WYATT’S LUCKY TO HAVE YOU as his friend, Johnny,” Josie said one night when their guest had left, and Albert was asleep, and Johnny had rolled off her. “I’m glad you invite him over. He obviously never gets a decent meal at home. And did you see the shirt he was wearing this evening? Why, it’s never been within half a mile of an iron! It’s sad to see a man so uncared for.”

  “Mmm,” Johnny agreed, for he and his son Al were well cared for, and he was smart enough to appreciate it.

  “I think he liked the brisket,” Josie added thoughtfully.

  “Me, too,” Johnny said sleepily. “The candied yams were good, too.”

  “Nice to see him filling out a little.”

  “Not so thin in the face,” Johnny agreed, turning over and going to sleep.

  Another man might have found it surprising that a girl from a prosperous San Francisco family was so good in the kitchen, but Johnny Behan was not one to inspect the mouth of a gift horse who was young, pretty, and (he always heard the words in Pauline Markham’s voice) so athletic. And as much as he enjoyed his private life, Josie’s public esteem was of even greater value to him. Victoria had never understood that part of being a politician’s wife, but Josie’s conspicuous admiration encouraged others to believe that the territorial governorship was within the grasp of John Harris Behan, Democrat though he might be. Yes, Josie was snubbed by the wives of the mining executives and business owners and professional men Johnny was trying to impress and influence, but really—what did that matter? Women couldn’t vote, and Josie had their husbands wrapped around her little finger.

  The funny thing was, Josie had stopped nagging about a wedding, even though Johnny was now inclined to make an honest woman of her. In fact, she’d waved the notion off the last time he’d brought it up, declaring angrily that marriage was old-fashioned and an offense to a modern woman’s love of independence. “I’d have no rights at all! A girl who marries is legally dead!” she informed him with a venom that seemed to hold him personally responsible for this outrageous state of affairs. Johnny didn’t know what to make of that, but he expected she’d change her mind as soon as she found a pattern she liked for a wedding dress.

  In the meantime, he saw no reason to rock the boat, for everything was going his way. He was especially pleased that—after a bad start—Josie and Albert had forged a fine and genuine affection. Better yet, attention to the son did not come at the father’s expense. Even Albert’s partial deafness now seemed lucky, for they never woke him up at night, or in the early morning. Of course, until the school building was finished, Al’s presence in the household would be a problem in the daytime, but there were plenty of bordellos in town if a man felt the urge at noon, say, or three.

  When supper was over and the dishes were cleared away, Johnny liked the way Josie sat at his side reading to the family or listening as he and Wyatt talked about politics or history. He liked the feel of her small hands around his strong right arm and enjoyed the warmth of her slender body leaning against his own.

  If he suffered from any sort of uneasiness, it was the occasional feeling that there ought to be a theater placard outside their home announcing, Miss Josephine Marcus, starring in the role of the Good Little Housewife! Of course, Josie could’ve expressed her flare for the dramatic in worse ways, so he never thought too hard about that. He had forgotten that this was a girl who understood audience sight lines and knew how to hit her mark onstage.

  YOU ARE RIGHT TO BLAME ME!

  JOHNNY BEHAN MIGHT HAVE BEEN BLIND TO WHAT was happening in his own home, but it was plain as day to the women who lived with James, Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp.

  “Biscuits ain’t good enough for him now,” Mattie Blaylock told the others. “‘Why don’t you never make a cake?’” she asked in a whiny voice, like it was Wyatt whining. “He’s always got some mean thing to say when he comes home, too. It’s ‘Fix a button, can’t you?’ or ‘Clean this place up!’”

  Morgan’s girl, Lou, kept her gaze on the tie-down she was whipstitching for the corner of a nearly finished tent, but Allie Sullivan glanced up from her sewing machine for a moment and met Bessie Earp’s eyes. A little housework wouldn’t hurt you none. That’s what they were thinking.

  Allie cleared her throat and lifted her chin toward the puddle of canvas she was working on. “Mattie, straighten that out for me, will you?” she said, mostly to get the woman to quit complaining and do something useful.

  “Oh, all right!” Mattie snapped.

  She made it sound like it was the tenth time Allie had asked her to do something instead of the first. Mattie always did what you asked, but she acted like it was a big chore, so you couldn’t hardly feel grateful. The other three women took the brunt of her moods, but since they worked together most days, keeping the peace was important, especially when they were putting in a lot of hours to fill a big sewing contract.

  Lou got up to run the iron over another set of tie-downs. Bessie was having a bad day—tumors, the doctor said—and she was just rocking in the corner, but Allie pedaled away, attaching a floor to a tent wall while Mattie held the heavy fabric out so the layers would feed smoothly into the sewing machine. Everywhere you looked, bolts of canvas leaned against the walls. Allie had thought about asking the boys to put an addition onto the house just for the tentmaking, but that might cause hard feelings, for she and Virgil already had the biggest place and had ever since the Earps arrived.

  So many boomers had poured into Tombstone in 1879, you couldn’t get a house for love nor money, so at first the Earps had lived out of their wagons. Then early one morning, Morgan spotted some Mexicans moving out of a four-room adobe with a dirt floor. Virgil and James stood guard over the house, scaring off squatters. Wyatt and Morg found the owner before the place could be let out to somebody else, but the monthly rent rocked them back on their heels.

  “Forty dollars!” Wyatt cried. “That’s six times what a nice place back in Dodge fetches.”

  “Feel free to return to Dodge, sir,” the landlord said. “Forty dollars is what a mud hut costs in Tombstone.”

  “Why, the roof ain’t even solid!” Morgan objected.

  “It’s a desert. It doesn’t rain here,” the landlord lied. “Throw a tarpaulin over the hole, if you like.”

  The brothers fixed the roof themselves and stretched out the wagon sheets like awnings, to make a sort of canvas veranda. All eight of them lived together, which was a trial. By and by, other houses opened up nearby. Everyone had their own place now, though the girls still came to Allie’s to sew.

  There had been considerable debate about hauling Allie’s sewing machine down to Arizona. The brothers only had two wagons to transport four households. Each woman had furniture and dishes and clothing she hated to give up. Toward the end, they were arguing about whose rolling pin was better. There just wasn’t any room left for a sewing machine.

  “You’re gonna hafta leave it, Pickle,” Virg told Allie.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll leave that machine here, and you can leave me—sitting right next to it.”

  “I guess we can get it in somewheres,” Wyatt muttered, though he added, “Hell if I know where.”

  It took two days to repack but they fit the machine in somehow, and a good thing, too. None of the boys could find work when they first got to Tombstone, so the girls started making prospectors’ tents with double rows of tight machine-stitching that held up real well in the wind. They took in mending, too, and charged a penny a yard for thread and use of the machine. It added up.

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nbsp; “I don’t think he’s screwing the bitch,” Mattie was saying. “Not yet, anyways. Hell, he still goes to church twice a week!”

  Bessie snorted. “Honey, if it weren’t for ministers and married men, half the whorehouses east of the Mississippi would be outta business.”

  You oughta know, Allie thought.

  Allie still wasn’t quite sure what to think about Bessie Earp. Virgil’s older brother James had married Bess fifteen years ago, but Bessie ran bordellos even after that, and she’d kept working until her tumors got bad last year. James didn’t seem to mind, Virg said, but Allie found it all pretty strange.

  “None of the other Jews in town will talk to her,” Bess was telling Mattie, in a consoling sort of way. “And the quality know she’s just a floozy who calls herself a actress—like that’s any better’n a whore! You know that theater society they got? She went to one of their meetings and said, ‘Why don’t we do Pinafore?’ They cut her dead. Went home with her tail between her legs, I heard.”

  “That’s why she’s got so much time to do all that fancy baking Wyatt talks about,” said Allie. “Nothing else to do.” Pedaling furiously, Allie scowled at the endless line of stitches emerging beneath the needle. “I was buying thread at the mercantile t’other day, and she went by with her nose in the air. Out in daylight with her bosoms half-nekkid. Shameless, I call her, parading around on Johnny Behan’s arm, and all while she’s playing up to Wyatt.”

  “Mattie, honey, you ain’t the first, and you sure as hell won’t be the last,” Bessie told her. “You want to know why a man cheats? Because he can. Simple as that. Anyways, why do you care? I should think you’d’ve had enough of that side of life when you was on the street. Twenty-five years was enough for me, Lord knows, but James is only forty. I hope he is goin’ elsewhere.”

  “Bessie!” Allie cried.

  Bessie shrugged. “It’s true. I’m sick of the whole business.”

  Bess was trying to make Mattie feel better, but the whole conversation was making Allie angry and scared. She was pretty sure Virg stayed out of the brothels when he was transporting prisoners and whatnot, but he had a legal wife up in Iowa somewhere. Nobody would say a thing about it if Virg decided to get himself somebody prettier or nicer or more educated than Allie Sullivan.

  She glanced over at Louisa Houston to see how she was taking all this. Lou was a quiet little thing, fragile-looking and sweet-tempered. She was a good match for Morgan, who doted on her, but Morg rode shotgun for Wells Fargo and he was out of town as much as Virg and Wyatt.

  Lou rarely joined in when the others gossiped, and when she finally spoke of Josie Marcus, she just sounded curious, not angry or spiteful. “I wonder where she learned to bake like that. Morg heard her father’s a banker. Seems odd she’d be so good in the kitchen. Wouldn’t a family like that have servants for chores like cooking?”

  “Well, it don’t seem fair to me,” Allie muttered, pedaling again. “There’s her, out having a nice time, and here’s us, working our fingers raw.” Allie stopped and looked at the three women who were her sisters-in-law, for all practical purposes. “Why should that woman have all the fun? That’s what I’d like to know!”

  GRADUALLY THE IDEA TOOK HOLD. If Johnny Behan’s hussy could do it, then why shouldn’t the Earps’ women fix themselves up and go downtown? For almost a year, they’d heard wagons rumbling past their homes and wondered at the contents of the passing freighters’ crated cargo. Where was the harm in doing a little window-shopping at Tombstone’s splendid stores? Why not see the town’s grand hotels and fancy restaurants for themselves? It was a free country, wasn’t it?

  Still, they hesitated, for this was a greater insurrection than they had ever previously contemplated, fraught with danger and the possibility of disgrace. They’d listened to their men remark upon the rapid progress downtown, but what did the brothers talk about most of the time? Crime, that’s what. Stabbings and shootings and holdups. Fistfights and arrests and prisoners. James wasn’t a lawman, but he ran a tavern for Chinks on the edge of town and white men would come in sometimes just to start a brawl. Even Doc Holliday had been assaulted! And that was in the Oriental, where Wyatt Earp’s name should have protected him! Who was safe in a town like that?

  And while they did not wish to fall to the level of “Mrs. Behan,” none of them had more than the sketchiest notion as to what constituted respectability in Tombstone, Arizona. As the wife of a tavern owner, Bessie was one step from the bottom of the social ladder, so long as no one outside the family knew about her past. Mattie Blaylock was a former hooker. It was a rare john who looked at a whore’s face, but either of them might be recognized by one of thousands of men who’d used them in the old days. Lou had never turned tricks, but she was working in a dance hall when Morg met her. They were living together without the state’s sanction or a clergyman’s blessing—a fact Lou’s father belabored in weekly letters, calling her a harlot, begging her to repent and return home. As for Allie, well, if Virgil Earp hadn’t stopped by the restaurant that day, she’d have been fired for insolence soon enough. Where would she have been then? On the street, is where.

  In all those months, these four women had not once breached the unseen walls of what they believed to be propriety, but a question had been asked and lingered unanswered: Why should that Marcus woman have all the fun?

  Days passed. Then weeks. Finally, the stars aligned. Wyatt was in Tucson, talking to Bob Paul about running for sheriff. Virg was up in Prescott, delivering a prisoner to the feds. Morgan was on a stage run for Wells Fargo. James would be at the tavern until three or four in the morning.

  Neat in ironed shirtwaists with snug, high-buttoned jackets, the Earp women clinked chipped china mugs and drank two fingers of Dutch courage before tying bonnet bows under nice, clean faces. Gathering their nerve and their long full skirts, they set off for town with heads held high, as though they had every right to be out on their own and needed no man’s permission or protection.

  “Lordy! Will you look at that!” Bessie cried when they got to the corner of First and Allen. “It’s like Nashville before the war!”

  “Bigger than Council Bluffs, that’s certain,” Allie said.

  “Bigger than Topeka, too,” Mattie breathed, awed.

  Buoyed by the energy and bustle of the crowds that jammed the boardwalks, they linked arms to keep from getting separated and moved down Allen Street, admiring the merchandise in each store window. They actually went into a furniture shop for a few moments, but the proprietor scared them off, chattering about “Eastlake” and “the Ee-setic movement.” Even if they’d had the cash to buy something, new furniture would have been impossible to explain when the brothers got home, so they retreated back outside.

  “This sun is killing me,” Mattie muttered, squinting into the glare. Bright light seemed to bother her more and more these days, making her eyes water and nose run. Her arms were starting to itch, too, and rubbing them didn’t seem to help. “I think I need to go home,” she told Lou.

  “Oh, not yet!” Lou cried. “Is it a headache, Mattie? I have some laudanum in my purse.”

  “You are a lifesaver! It’s so hot!” Mattie complained, dabbing at her dampening face with a hankie while Lou dug through her purse. “Is this all you have?” she asked, frowning at the little brown bottle Lou offered.

  “I never use much,” Lou told her, adding in a whisper, “It binds me.”

  Mattie turned away from the street and drained the contents, closing her eyes to concentrate on the warmth of the opium-infused alcohol: always a welcome sign that relief was on the way.

  “Mattie’s feeling a little faint,” Lou told the others. “There’s an ice cream parlor over there. That’ll cool us off.”

  They spent a nickel each on dishes of vanilla and sat at a little table by a window, spooning in the cold, creamy treat while taking note of the new fashions. Faces were shaded by parasols, not sunbonnets. Fancy little hats perched on hair that was swept back and p
iled up. Sleeves were tight. Skirts were narrow across the front now, ruffled and swagged in back. Everything was decorated with tassels, bows, and lace.

  “Well, I reckon we can fix our things up with doodads, too,” Bessie said. “We can tell the boys we saw it in a magazine.”

  “Hell, none of ’em’ll notice doodads,” Allie said.

  “Wyatt wouldn’t notice if I grew another arm,” Mattie grumbled.

  “Feeling any better, Mattie?” Lou asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I am,” Mattie said. The itching had stopped, and she wasn’t perspiring anymore.

  “You should be careful when you clean your hairbrush,” Allie advised. “If birds use the hair to build a nest, you’ll have headaches for the whole year.”

  This notion provoked a lively discussion. According to Allie, it was a well-known fact. Not being Irish, the others had never heard of such a thing.

  “You can cure a headache with a piece of sheet that’s touched a corpse,” Allie informed them. “Tie it just above your eyes.”

  “I’d rather have the headache,” Bessie said, but Mattie told her, “If you had them like I do, you’d try anything.”

  Finished with their ice cream, they returned to the boardwalk and started back the way they came. They’d all had enough excitement for one day and were ready to go home, but Allie slowed down and stopped in front of the Occidental Hotel’s restaurant. There, chalked on a blackboard out in front of the Maison Doree, was the longest menu she had ever seen, even back when she was a waitress.

  “Lou, what does all that say?” she asked.

  Morgan’s girl was the only one among them who had more than a passing acquaintance with the alphabet, but even she had trouble reading the impressive list aloud.

  Chicken Giblet and Consome, with Egg

  Columbia River Salmon, au Buerre et Noir