Epitaph Page 21

  As Curly Bill passed Wyatt Earp on the way out of the courthouse, he spat at the lawman’s boots. Which surprised Wyatt, for he hadn’t expected thanks, exactly, but he sure hadn’t see that coming.

  The next morning, a young man named James Johnson took the oath in the Pima County Superior Court and testified that he was the mysterious “Henry Johnson” who’d certified 104 predominantly fictitious votes for Charles Shibell in Precinct 27. On the basis of this testimony, Robert Havlin Paul was ruled to have won election as sheriff of Pima County. Mr. Johnson took the first train out of town and was not seen in the Arizona Terrority again.

  Charles Shibell immediately filed an appeal of the decision overturning his election, which would require some months to work its way through the courts. In the meantime, Bob Paul took a job with Wells Fargo, riding shotgun on stagecoach runs carrying silver bullion and company strongboxes, splitting shifts with Morgan Earp.

  Down in Tombstone, John Philip Clum announced his intention to run for mayor in the January 4 municipal election. His platform was to “defeat corruption while bringing peace and prosperity to our city by taking on the audacious depredations of the Townsite cabal of Clark and Gray.” With clean government, Clum promised, Tombstone’s underground riches would attract the investment capital needed for continued growth. “Tombstone,” he wrote, “will become the city upon the hill: a beacon as bright as ancient Rome.”

  Reading this declaration in the Epitaph, Dr. John Henry Holliday was heard to murmur, “Ah, the glory that was Rome! Tiberius. Caligula. Nero. Domitian. Commodus. Elagabalus . . .”

  This sally was met with blank stares.

  Kate would have gotten that joke, he thought.

  THE GAIETY OF NEW YEAR’S EVE often feels a little forced. After six weeks of parties beginning in late November, a general weariness of festivity sets in, replaced by a yearning for plain food and a more ordinary routine. When he reserved the Cosmopolitan’s music room for December 31, Doc had modest expectations for the evening. He simply meant to give the Earps’ ladies a chance to dress up and step out on the town. He would play piano for them and see the New Year in with friends.

  In retrospect, his last-minute decision to include Josephine Marcus might have been more carefully considered. He had noted Deputy Sheriff Behan’s departure from town on the thirtieth, realized Miss Josephine would be alone the next night, and hoped that she might renew her study of the piano. So he’d invited the young woman and Sheriff Behan’s son without anticipating the attitude of the other ladies at the party. The results were mixed. Allie was a bit stiff, but Morgan and Lou were always taking in orphans—Doc himself among them—and Lou seemed pleased to spend time with someone new and interesting. She and Josie passed much of the evening talking and giggling in the corner, apparently unaware that Mattie Blaylock was looking daggers at them.

  Josie and Wyatt rarely came within three yards of each other, though at one point, Doc noticed them approach the buffet table at the same time.

  Standing at Wyatt’s side as she lifted an hors d’oeuvre, Josie turned away to face the rest of the room. “Suppose I were to leave Johnny . . .”

  Wyatt’s eyes remained on an assortment of sweets. “There’s still Mattie,” he said, his voice quiet with resignation.

  At midnight, a magnum of champagne was shared around. Josie asked for her cloak a few minutes later. Morgan and Lou said they’d walk her and Albert home, and left with their hands entwined, a more private celebration on their minds. Virgil and Allie went home as well, similarly inclined, followed by Wyatt and Mattie, who were not.

  Alone again, John Henry Holliday played half a nocturne, paid the bill, and made his solitary way back to Molly Fly’s boardinghouse. There, he lowered himself onto the front stoop to catch his breath before he climbed the stairs to his room.

  The cacophony of the steam engines down at the mines and the routine carousing east of Sixth Street were occasionally loud enough to be heard out here on the northwest corner of town. Most of the time, however, wind carried city sounds away. Pay attention to the hush of a breeze passing through a nearby stand of palo verde, and there was a certain solace to be found. Gaze at the glittering intensity of the Milky Way in this desert air, and a useful clarity of thought could sometimes be attained.

  His first four months in Tombstone had gone well, apart from that early unpleasantness at the Oriental. As the effects of the concussion dissipated, he had established a sensible daily routine. Mrs. Fly served up regular meals and he was getting enough rest in her house, for she was strict about noise and selected her boarders with an eye to their manners. He was dealing faro on commission at the Alhambra, and John Meagher was kind enough to allow him to break the work into three-hour stretches. He took short walks to stay limber and practiced piano to stay sane.

  At Wyatt’s urging, he’d begun riding again. His stamina was improving, though his damaged hip gave him trouble—a problem that would recede as his legs strengthened. Wyatt wanted him to buy that sorrel Duchess, but it made more sense to rent her for a few hours a week. Miss Kate would be proud of me, he thought, for Mária Katarina Harony had always been the one to keep expenditures in check when she and Doc were together. With a fairly reliable income from faro, he was building up a decent stake. At this rate of savings, he could retire to a sanatorium at the end of ’81, though he’d begun to wonder if that was really necessary.

  His breathlessness was permanent—once cavitated, lung tissue is gone forever—but it wasn’t getting worse. His cough was drier. With the chest pain diminishing, he was drinking less. Why not settle in Tombstone? The winter climate was close to ideal. Sunny, pleasant, with occasional rain that kept the dust down. Why endure the sterile boredom of a sanatorium if he could stabilize his health right here? He had friends in Tombstone. He had music and books. He had even accepted a few patients who could be helped with quick extractions; there was a great deal of satisfaction in that, though hardly any money.

  Objectively, it was as good a life as he’d managed to construct for himself since leaving Dodge City. And yet, as 1880 drew toward its close, he had grown increasingly melancholy. Emptied out. Hollow at the center.

  Easing to the edge of the stoop, he gripped the porch rail with one hand, pulled himself to his feet, and let himself in. The stairway to the second floor was steep, but he was not yet reduced to pausing with both feet on each tread.

  Once inside his room, he lit the oil lamp and sat on the edge of a narrow monastic bed. Only then—when he was settled and calm—did he lift the latest letter from his cousin Martha Anne from its place on his bedside table.

  Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy

  St. Vincent’s Convent

  Savannah, Georgia

  The return address wasn’t a surprise. She had entered the novitiate some time ago. He had thought himself accustomed to the idea, but until this letter, there had always been a possibility that . . .

  That what? That he would find a cure and go home someday? That Martha Anne would still be there, waiting for him? That the life he’d left behind when he was twenty-two would somehow resume, as though seven years had not passed for anyone but himself?

  “Idiot,” he muttered. “Sentimental, self-important, self-deluded fool.”

  Even if the progress of his disease stopped tomorrow, there was nothing left for him in Atlanta. There would be no marriage, no children, no prosperous dental practice to support a growing family. That ghost life had been consigned to its grave by an unfamiliar signature in a dear and familiar handwriting: Sister Mary Melanie.

  From the day he left home in 1873, loneliness had been nearly as constant as his cough, and it now felt just as permanent. The only time it had ever lifted was when he and Kate were together.

  Was that it? he asked himself. Was that what all this enervated despond came down to? He tested the idea like a man with a broken tooth, tonguing the jagged surface, and . . . Yes. He missed Kate.

  He missed the intimacy of their
partnership, the way she found a town’s best poker games for him, and rolled his cigarettes, and kept his shot glass filled with honeyed tea while he was playing well and with bourbon when the cough was bad enough to break his concentration. He missed her childlike glee when he won, her tough confidence when he lost, and even her snappish annoyance when he played poorly. He missed the husky contralto rasp of her voice when she tossed off a Greek quotation or a Latin proverb, or murmured French in bed. He missed the back of her neck, the ripe-peach softness of her hips. He missed her energy and her impatience, her decisiveness and her practicality. She was difficult, profane, abrupt, and unsettling, but she gave his days and nights color, shape, taste, surprise.

  “I will never leave you,” he had once promised her.

  He had given his word, and he had broken it.

  The weeks after he killed Mike Gordon were filled with discord and misery. He told himself that Kate would be glad to see the last of him, but even then, he knew she would not take it as a kindness. Indeed, when they met again—briefly, in Prescott—her fury was searing. He was a no-good lying goddam sonofabitch who’d slunk out of town while she was asleep and when he went to hell where he belonged, she would by-God dance on his grave.

  He turned down the lamp. Lay back against the pile of pillows that made breathing in bed a little easier. Stared out the window toward a sky lightening on the first day of 1881. Spunk up, he told himself. Apologize. She may not care, but now is the time to try.

  TWELVE MONTHS LATER, John Henry Holliday would spend New Year’s Eve sitting at Virgil Earp’s bedside, waiting for Virg to die. In a state of melancholy deeper than any he had ever experienced, he would go over and over everything that had led to the gunfight in October, hoping to identify some moment, some decision, some choice that might have made a difference in the way things had turned out. There was plenty of fault to splash around. Wyatt, Ike Clanton, Frank McLaury, Little Willie Claiborne, John Clum, Kate Harony . . . All of them bore some responsibility for what happened. And Doc himself? His involvement could be traced to a wholly innocent event. He went to the library. He struck up a conversation with a fellow reader. Who could have seen the harm in that?

  Curious about the landscape around him, he was leafing through a battered copy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology when a well-dressed young man of perhaps twenty-three years entered the room. Each nodded pleasantly to the other. That might have been the end of the encounter, if Doc hadn’t noticed that the book being returned to the shelf was Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.

  “Did you enjoy the novel, sir?” he asked.

  “It was a little close to home,” the young gentleman admitted. “I feel as though I am surrounded by Melmottes and Longestaffs and Carburys these days. Sometimes I wonder if we learned anything at all from the last crash.”

  “Yes, there seems to be a great deal of money ridin’ on a great deal of optimism. This time it’s silver mines instead of railways, but . . .”

  “It’s still cash chasing dreams.” The young man offered his hand. “Edson Waffle,” he said, sounding resigned.

  “Belgian, I presume.”

  Waffle laughed, the tension leaving him. “Yes, and a lifelong victim of jokes about pancakes! My wife and I arrived last month from Ohio. I’m a teacher. I just started work at the new school down in Charleston.”

  “John Holliday, from Georgia. I am a dentist, though my health prevents me from takin’ on as active a practice as I would like—” He stopped. “Pardon me, did you just say there is a school in Charleston?”

  “Yes, indeed! Drunken rustlers shoot out the lights and murderers walk the streets with impunity, but Mr. Gird employs a number of professional men at the stamping mills. They have families and want their children to be educated. I’ve been hired to do the job.”

  “Well, sir, that is good news for the future of Arizona!”

  They exchanged a bit more small talk, and once again, that might have been the end of it, had young Mr. Waffle not decided to broach a more difficult subject. “Dr. Holliday, if you don’t mind my asking, I wonder . . . how are you finding the climate? You see, my wife also suffers from . . .”

  “Chest complaints?”

  “Chest complaints,” Waffle repeated, grateful for the euphemism. People hesitated to speak the name of the disease, as though to say “tuberculosis” or “consumption” would cede to the illness additional power over the lives it blighted. “That’s why I took the Charleston job, you see. The snow and the cold in Ohio were undermining my wife’s health. We believed Arizona would be more salubrious.”

  “I have not been here long enough to have a firm opinion, I’m afraid. Dust can be a problem, but there may be something to the idea of heliotherapy. I have had no episodes of pneumonia or pulmonary hemorrhage durin’ my time here.”

  They chatted about the treatments each sufferer had tried and what the outcomes had been, and about what else might help. Edson Waffle was heartened to discuss this with someone who was both knowledgeable and realistic, and it was only natural that the young teacher would want to introduce this pleasant, soft-voiced gentleman to Mrs. Waffle. “Would you consider visiting us in Charleston?” he asked. “I think Clara would love to meet you, and it would be so helpful for her to talk to someone who has dealt with these problems for so long.”

  Doc’s first visit to their home was in mid-February. “There is a difference between stamina and strength,” he told Edson’s pale little wife. “Bed rest harms both, in my experience. No alternative durin’ a crisis, but invalidism is not inevitable, Mrs. Waffle.” As evidence he offered the young woman his own presence at her table. “When I started ridin’ back in November, a mile was all I could manage. Now, here I am in Charleston, all the way from Tombstone!”

  He had continued to gain ground physically in early 1881. His mind, too, seemed to have recovered, but there remained one last mental hill to climb. He had not played poker since Milt Joyce laid two and a half pounds of iron against the side of his head six months earlier. When he visited the Waffles, they often played cards and he could feel the old skills returning. The concentration and patience. The capacity for strategy.

  “Dr. Holliday,” Edson said one Sunday, “I wonder if you would be interested in filling an open seat in a weekly game of five-card stud. One of our regulars is going to be out of town.” It was a ten-dollar ante, the teacher warned. The opponents would be men of substance. An accountant, a hydraulics engineer, and the owner of the biggest store in Charleston. Even young Mr. Waffle had more money than one might have expected, for he had used his teacher’s salary to invest in a successful livery stable and was doing quite well for himself.

  A ten-dollar ante was serious poker, but John Henry Holliday felt ready. The Charleston game could be an entrée to high-stakes play at the level of society he’d hoped to join in Tombstone before the unpleasantness at the Oriental. And so he had agreed to play poker in Charleston on March 15, 1881.

  The Ides of March, Doc would think, looking back on it. That should have been a sign.

  A VIRTUOUS MAN

  FARMERS ARE LIKE GAMBLERS IN MANY WAYS. There’s a lot of chanciness in the way they make their living. Like John Henry Holliday, Thomas Clark McLaury was a quiet, thoughtful person who found comfort in routine.

  Each evening before bed, Tom would grind some coffee, draw water for the pot, and gather kindling for the morning. He’d clean up the supper things, putting pots and dishes in their places. He swept the floor, too, for moving each day’s dust and grit outside made him feel like he was putting that in its place, as well. Before shutting the door, he’d look for signs of rain. At dawn, he’d roll out of his bunk, pad over to the stove, bring up the fire, and move the coffeepot to the hottest plate. While that came to a boil, he’d go outside to take a piss and study the sky again to see if he’d been right about the rain.

  Weather down here took some getting used to. When it was winter up in Iowa, Arizona was warm and dry. Then in summer, whe
n Tommy expected things to get even drier, it rained so much Frank joked about building an ark. On any given day of the year, the afternoon heat might be worse than a farmer could imagine up north, then water might freeze that very same night. These were strange conditions and a challenge to agriculture. What kind of crop could you grow in a place that might have summer and winter, both, inside a single day? What should you plant in a desert that was liable to turn into a swamp a few months later?

  Not knowing any better, the McLaurys put in sixty acres of corn their first year. Most of the crop withered before it came near to tasseling, and the rest rotted in the summer wet. After seeing their work and investment come to nothing, Frank was happy to shift his sights toward livestock when Mr. Clanton came around to explain things, but Tommy couldn’t quit on the idea of being a real farmer. After the corn failed, his next thought was cotton, though he didn’t know much about that, except you needed field hands to pick it. Even after the brothers started taking money for fattening Mr. Clanton’s stolen cattle, the McLaurys weren’t in a position to hire a crew.

  Well, Tom told himself, look around you. What likes to grow here?

  Cactus covered the high, sandy slopes. Cottonwood edged the streams. Grass grew in the valley. That natural pasturage was good enough for the local beef market, but when Tom heard that big ranchers like Henry Hooker and Texas John Slaughter were breeding up better cattle, he asked Mr. Hooker about his business plans, just from friendliness and curiosity.