In the top drawer of Dr. Tom McCarty’s desk, there was an envelope labeled J.H.H. Inside it was a folded sheet of heavy rag paper bearing three lines of neat, copperplate handwriting.
DR. JOHN STILES HOLLIDAY
66 FORREST
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Beneath that, in Tom McCarty’s own scrawl, was a note: Pt requests: notify post-mortem; ship body per instructions.
At the end of September, John Holliday had given Tom that envelope and ten dollars to cover his final expenses. “I would like to be buried next to my mother,” he said, buttoning his shirt over a chest dwindled down to bone. Tom tried not to show what he was thinking, but the dentist saw the look and recited, “Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies …”
“Goddammit, John! If you would take better care of yourself, I am sure you could retard the progress of the disease. Dodge is no good for you, son. Too much dust, too much excitement! And the winters here are brutal. You need clean air and decent meals and complete rest. Now, there’s a sanatorium near Las Vegas that’s had some success with cases every bit as advanced as yours and—”
“How much does it cost?”
“Two hundred a month, but that’s room and board and doctors and—”
“Haven’t got it,” John said.
They’d had discussions like this before. Tom McCarty respected John Holliday as a gentleman and a professional, but the boy was plain stupid about money, spending it like a drunken drover when he had it and then acting like it was just his fate to be poor when it was gone. As for that woman he kept … Well, Tom knew better than to say anything, though he’d made his opinion known: Kate was a nymphomaniac and a hysteric and a drunk who had mined John Henry Holliday like he was the Black Hills. When Tom heard Kate had taken up with Bob after Alice Wright left town, he thought, Well, she knows when the vein is played out, damn her, but John’s better off without the slut. Now Kate was back again, weeping and frantic, when what the boy needed was calm, quiet care.
Mattie Blaylock was no angel, but she was the sort of stolid, unemotional woman who made a good nurse, and Tom was grateful for her help. “Mattie,” Tom said, lifting his chin toward Kate, “get her out of here.”
“Go on, now, darlin’. I’ll be fine,” John mumbled.
“John, keep quiet!” Tom ordered.
Wiping his hands on a towel, the doctor waited until Mattie had pulled Kate out into the front room, closing the door behind her. Then he sat on the bed to collect his thoughts. The room looked like the aftermath of a birth, or an abortion, or a shooting. Bloodied, muddied clothes—rags now—were heaped in the corner. John was in the chair, propped up with pillows, hunched over an enamel basin half-filled with foamy red fluid. Almost naked, slick and stinking with sweat, ribs visible from spine to sternum.
The stench of gore and necrotic lung tissue was suddenly overwhelming. Tom cracked the window open, in spite of the chilly rain. “Tell me when you get cold.”
Eyes closed, John whispered, “Still hot.”
That would change soon: anemia competing with fever for ascendancy.
“Well,” Tom said, sitting again, “my guess is that we can rule out Rasmussen’s aneurysm.”
“Dead by now,” John agreed. “So: Roki—”
“Rokitansky’s hemorrhage, yes, I think so too, and dammit, I told you not to talk! The active bleeding’s stopped. That’s a good sign. If you can hold your own a while longer, we can try the lycopin extract, and you’ll be able to get some sleep—Oh, hell! Now what?”
Out in the front room, Kate was in full cry. They heard Mattie Blaylock tell her sharply to shut up. The door to the bedroom opened. Two of the Earp brothers looked in. Morgan again. And Wyatt, who appeared to have been hit by a train. Already distorted by bruising and cuts, his face twisted when the smell hit him.
Then he saw Doc. “My God,” he said.
“You see?” Kate was yelling. “You see what you did to him, God damn you! You killed him, you lousy sonofabitch!”
At the sound of Kate’s curses, John’s eyes fluttered open. “Wyatt,” he said, sounding pleased to see him. “Kate, darlin’ … Don’t fuss … Not his fault.”
“John! Keep quiet!” the doctor snapped. “And Kate, if you can’t stop running your mouth, I’ll throw you out of this house myself. Calm down, all of you! Wyatt, I don’t know what in hell Kate’s yelling about, but nothing you did caused this. Bleeding episodes are not unusual in consumptives. This has been coming on for weeks—maybe months! The disease has eaten out part of his left lung. The resulting cavity impinged on an artery, but a clot has formed. For the moment, the crisis has passed, but if he starts coughing again, he could bleed to death or die of apoplexy.”
Hugging herself, Kate doubled over with a little moan of fear.
“Jesus, McCarty!” Morgan cried. “He’s sitting right there! He can hear you!”
“He knows what’s going on as well as I do—better!” Tom said. “I’m just telling you people what’s happening, so you will shut up, and get out, and let him rest! Am I making myself clear? Everybody! Get the hell out!”
Over the next couple of hours, the bleeding started up twice more. Kate was banished to Bessie Earp’s house. Morg and Wyatt and Mattie stayed at Doc’s. Around three in the morning, Chuck Trask came by to tell Tom McCarty he was needed to sew up a knife wound.
“Spurting or oozing?” Tom asked.
“Just kinda leaking,” Chuck said. “Wyatt? Morg? Are you coming to work? We’re real shorthanded.”
“I quit,” Wyatt told him. This was news to Morg, but Wyatt said, “Nothing to do with you. Go on.”
So Morgan left with Chuck, but before Tom McCarty followed them, he took Mattie and Wyatt to the kitchen and showed them how to measure out four grains of dried lycopin extract and stir it into a glassful of water.
“It’s effective against the cough and mildly narcotic,” he told them, pulling his coat on. “When he wakes up, you make him drink a glass of the mixture, but no more than one glass every two hours. Mattie, can you write?”
She nodded and shrugged: A little.
“Well, try to keep track of when you give him a dose, so he doesn’t get too much. If he’s cold, cover him. If he’s hot, open the window again. I don’t think he’ll be hungry, but I’ll stop by Delmonico’s and have them send over some beef broth with plenty of salt. If he asks for anything, offer that.”
Mattie said she’d keep watch the rest of the night. Wyatt knew he ought to stay, but this was so much like when Urilla was dying … So he went home and slept at last, but poorly. He was already up and dressed when Mattie came in a few hours later.
“Kate came back after McCarty left,” she told him, hanging a damp shawl up on the peg next to the door. “Morg’s back, too. He’s staying with Kate so she won’t be alone when Doc dies.”
“So, you’re sure? He’s …?”
“Never saw anybody that sick who didn’t. Why’d you quit?”
He almost said, Because you were right about George Hoover. Because my father is right and I’ve got shit for brains. Because I don’t know who my friends are. Because I don’t know who to trust anymore, except my brothers.
What came out was “Politics.” Which was true enough.
For the first time since she moved in, he wished that Mattie would talk more, for his own thoughts were loud in his mind. Maybe McCarty was right. Maybe what happened to Doc wasn’t Wyatt’s fault, just like it wasn’t really Wyatt’s fault when Urilla got typhus, but it sure felt like it was, and Mattie wasn’t one to tell him different.
“I’m going next door,” he said.
Morg answered the knock. Kate was slumped at the table, her head in her hands, too weary to look up. Wyatt’s eyes went to the bedroom where Doc lay, dead white and so motionless beneath the covers Wyatt thought that he’d been laid out. It took a moment to see that Doc was breathing in shallow little gasps, but breathing all the same.
Morg said, “If you can stay with him awhile, I’ll take Kate back to Bessie’s so she can get some sleep.”
Probably the first time a woman ever got any sleep in that place, Wyatt thought, but he told Morg he’d sit with Doc, and that Morg should get some rest, too.
“You know about the medicine?” Morg asked.
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go on.”
“Wyatt … you really quit?”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go on.”
For the rest of the day, he kept watch by himself, listening to the clock tick, dozing sometimes in the chair. Late in the afternoon, there was a short, quiet dream about Urilla, probably brought on by sitting in a sickroom like this. He was telling her, “If I made more money, I coulda done better by you,” and in the dream, he felt more than heard her say, “Don’t fret, Wyatt.”
He woke up slowly, feeling calm. Then he saw where he was, and straightened, and winced, aware of every bruise and cut and aching joint.
Doc was awake, his face expressionless.
“You snore,” he told Wyatt, sounding feeble and aggrieved.
Wyatt started to smile, but it hurt too much and he quit.
Doc seemed to gather himself to say something important, and spoke as firmly as he could, though his voice was somewhere between a whisper and a whine. “Wyatt, I cannot make you another denture. No more fights. You get that mad again, shoot the bastard. Promise me.”
“I promise. How do you feel, Doc?”
Doc’s eyes closed. “Anyone makin’ book?”
“Luke Short was giving ten to one you wouldn’t make it through the night.”
It was a joke. Luke was a gambler who wasn’t even in town anymore, but Doc murmured, “Bet against me? I would’ve.”
Wyatt made him drink a glass of water with lycopin and got him settled back down. A few minutes later, Doc roused again.
“God damn Henry Kahn,” he said, sounding briefly normal. “If he’d been a better shot, he’d have saved us all a lot of trouble.”
There was nothing more for a while, and Wyatt supposed Doc had fallen asleep until a tear formed in the corner of the sick man’s eye and slipped sideways toward the pillow. Wyatt got a handkerchief to dry the pale, bony face. Doc’s eyes opened at the touch, but he was looking at something beyond the room.
“My poor mother …”
This is it, Wyatt thought. When they start talking about their mother, it’s over.
A few minutes later, Doc spoke again.
“Oh, Wyatt,” he whispered, too breathless to sob. “This’s a terrible way to die.”
He said very little during the week after the hemorrhage. “What’s the date?” he asked once. Told it was October 13, he said clearly, “I was supposed to go to St. Francis. Wire my regrets to Alex von Angensperg.”
There was a return telegram the next day. NIL DESPERANDUM STOP 152 CHILDREN 3 PRIESTS 7 NUNS PRAYING STOP MAY I VISIT STOP
It was Morgan Earp who answered. NO VISITORS YET STOP KEEP PRAYING STOP
A routine developed. Kate and Mattie took the nights. Morgan and Wyatt split the days. Lou kept them all fed. Tom McCarty came by to check on Doc, morning and evening.
No one else was permitted into the sickroom, but China Joe appeared each afternoon with a bowl of noodles and left instructions that Doc should eat them for a long life and to fatten up. The first time that happened, Doc came close to crying again.
“How thoughtful,” he said. “Thank him for me, please.”
On the first of November, China Joe showed up at the door as usual, only this time he insisted on waiting until Doc was awake. Morgan offered to take a message in, but the Chinaman would not go away until he was allowed to speak to Doc personally, and when he went into the bedroom, he shut the door behind him to keep the conversation private.
Dong-Sing had heard about the rebellion of Doc’s lungs, of course, and now a single glance was enough to tell him that all Doc’s yin organs were functioning poorly. He was as white and fragile as a porcelain bowl, and you didn’t have to be an herbalist to see that he was in a dangerous condition.
“Mr. Jau,” Doc said softly. “How kind of you to visit.”
“You no talk!” Dong-Sing ordered. Coming closer, he sat on the edge of the chair by Doc’s bed. “You no worry!” He looked around the little room and waved his hand at the roof and walls. “I no charge rent.”
Doc’s eyes widened.
Dong-Sing held his head up proudly. “All these my house. You no tell!” Leaning close to Doc, he whispered, “That nigger boy? He rich: he dead. Teach me big damn lesson. Colored fella get rich in America, no good! George Hoover, he front man! Nobody know China Joe rich fella. So I safe.”
Having unburdened himself of more English than he had ever successfully strung into a single speech, Dong-Sing took a deep breath and let it out abruptly. Then he nodded once, emphatically, like an American. There. I said my piece, by God.
“Kill a chicken …” Doc remembered. “Scare a wolf …?”
“Wolf more damn smart than chicken! Me? I know what what. Now I tell George Hoover, No rent for Doc!” Dong-Sing got even quieter. “You no tell Kate! She got big mouth, tell everybody.”
“You have my word, sir,” Doc told him. “And my gratitude.”
Jau Dong-Sing stood up and made ready to go, but Doc was looking at him with the strange intensity of the very weak, and Dong-Sing was moved to add one thing more.
“I do you big damn favor,” he said, his eyes full of pride and pleasure. “This one big damn happy day for me!”
A little while later, Kate came in with a mug of beef broth. “What did the Chink want?”
Doc was looking out the window, watching a cloud move across his field of view. “Nothin’,” he said, in tones of wonderment. “Nothin’ at all.”
She set the mug down on the dresser and helped him sit up so he could drink the broth without choking, holding the cup for him, making sure he drank it all. When he was done, she fixed the pillows and bustled around, straightening the room.
“Kate.”
She stopped what she was doing and looked at him, her lovely aquamarine eyes shadowed, the skin around them spidered by fine lines of worry and fatigue.
“Viens te coucher,” he said.
She frowned, the lines deepening, but he asked again, so she came to his side and lay down, nestling under his right arm, her hand cool against his chest.
“Talk to me awhile,” he said. “Tell me about … tell me about a day when you were happy.”
For a long time she was quiet, her breathing regular and deep. Poor soul, he thought. This has been hard on her … When he felt the chill of her tears, he said again, “Talk to me. Tell me about it.”
“It was right after the baby was born. Silas was gone, that bastard.” She sat up, and reached for one of his handkerchiefs, and blew her nose, and smiled briefly. “Anyway, I was working again. The baby kept crying and crying. I didn’t know what to do! Nobody wants a whore with a crying baby,” she said wearily. “One of the girls said, ‘There’s a hospital that takes charity kids. You can bring him there, and the nuns’ll take him.’ So we went to the hospital, and I gave the baby to one of the sisters. I knew what she was thinking, but I was so tired … I didn’t give a damn what she thought of me. And it was such a relief. Somebody who knew about babies was going to take care of him!”
Her face was pale and scrubbed. Her fine, fair hair was pulled back artlessly. He could see the scared girl she’d been at fifteen, and the hard woman she would be at fifty.
“The other girls took me out drinking, after,” she told him. “We pooled our money and bought a bottle. For the first time since I was a girl—since before we left Mexico—I was happy. All us girls got drunk and we laughed and laughed, and I thought, I can’t remember when I was so happy! This is the happiest night of my life!”
Kate stopped and cleared her throat. Her voice was ordinary when she went on. “I went back to the hospital, a couple of days later. To visit him. One of the nuns came out. She told me the baby was dead. He died the night I left him. While I was having such a good time.”
Poor child, he thought. Poor child.
The baby. Kate. Either. Both.
“You did the right thing, to bring him to the nuns,” he told her. “And you were happy because that little baby stopped by to bless his mamma on his way up to heaven.”
She looked at him, and barked a bitter laugh, and wept. They slept together afterward. Side by side.
All through November, whenever anyone came to sit with him, Doc would say, “Talk to me. Tell me about a day when you were happy.”
In the beginning, nobody was sure that Doc was really listening. The lycopin kept him asleep a great deal of the time, but hearing people talk seemed to soothe him, and it seemed harmless enough. Eventually, Morg realized that Doc was saying that same thing to everyone. Talk to me about a day when you were happy.
“What did you tell him?” Morg asked Wyatt.
“Oh, hell,” said Wyatt. “I don’t know.”
He had spoken of Urilla. How she was stronger than he expected, looking at her. More determined to get her way than he’d imagined when he fell in love, but good-natured and good-hearted. When he gave up trying to read the law, she didn’t hold him a failure for it. The happiest day was when he found out about their baby. Urilla’s eyes were shining, like she was giving him a gift.
“And getting my teeth fixed,” he told Doc. “And Roxana. That was good, too.”
Doc didn’t say anything. He gazed at Wyatt. Just … waiting.
“The good of things is always kinda mixed,” Wyatt said then.
Looking out the window in Doc’s room, he had tried to remember Urilla’s laughter, but the sound of it was lost to him. Truth was, she and the baby were gone almost before he knew he had them. And getting his new teeth reminded him of losing the real ones. And riding Roxana always made him think of Johnnie Sanders.
That was when it came to him that the only unmixed happiness he could think of was when he quit his job with the city after that fight with Bob Wright. So he told Doc that, too, and said, “I never meant to be a lawman. Stumbled into it, really. When I quit, it was a weight off.”
Dealing faro was better. No politics. Just the cards and the money. Nice of Bat to give him a job like he did. Not a lot of business this time of year, but even with winter coming, there was enough going on at the Lone Star to keep one dealer working full-time.
He was embarrassed to think so much about his own life, and embarrassed that he’d told so much to Doc. He asked Morg, “What’d you say?”
Morg got that big, boyish grin of his. “Oh, I said it was hard to name something particular. I’m happy a lot of the time. James said it was when Bessie agreed to marry him. Bessie said it was the third time James told her, ‘Don’t worry, honey. I’ll take care of it.’ First time he told her that, she didn’t believe he would, but he did. The second time, she still expected him to forget or not do it, but the third time, she thought, I can count on him. I don’t have to do everything myself. She said that was the first time in her whole life she believed she could count on a man. And Lou? She told Doc she’s happy every morning when I get home safe from work. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Mattie say anything?”
Morg hesitated. He wanted to tell Wyatt that Mattie was happy on the day Wyatt said she could stay with him, or something like that. But Wyatt could always tell when Morgan was lying.
“She’s still thinking,” Morg said.
“Seems kinda strange, Doc asking people to talk about things like that.”
Morg thought it over. He and Doc were the same age, and Morg tried to imagine being so sick, but it was hard. When you’re young and strong, it seems like you’ll live forever just the way you are, but Doc probably couldn’t even remember what it felt like to be healthy.
“I guess—You know how people say, Don’t borrow trouble? Well,” said Morgan, “I guess it’s the opposite of that. Doc is borrowing happiness.”
The weeks passed. The patient’s color improved. His chest pain abated.
Tom McCarty eased off on the lycopin; John still managed to sleep a good deal of the time. When he sat up, he didn’t cough much. The cough itself was drier. His appetite began to return.
When the dentist felt well enough to complain about being bored, McCarty partially lifted the embargo on visitors, but restricted him to no more than one a day. It was imperative that the boy not tire himself out just as he’d begun to make some gains.
Eddie Foy was the first to visit, but it was to say good-bye. His contract at the Commie-Q was over. He was going back to Chicago, where he had work lined up at a theater over Christmas and New Year’s.
Isabelle Wright came by as soon as she heard it was permitted. She offered to read books to Dr. Holliday during his convalescence, but for some reason he wasn’t willing to let her see him. When Morgan asked why, Doc said, “I am the ghost of Christmas yet to come.” That didn’t make any sense, but Doc wouldn’t explain. “Just thank her for me,” he said. “Tell her I am not yet fit company for a young lady.”
Morgan wired Alex von Angensperg that Doc could have visitors, and the priest arrived by train two days later. “He was real glad to hear you were coming,” Morg told Alex as they walked to Doc’s from the depot. “He looks bad, but he’s better, honest. Kate sleeps over at my place, days. She’ll be back later. Her and Mattie and Wyatt and me take turns with him. Don’t let him get wound up. He’s not supposed to get excited.”
Morgan left Alex in Doc’s room. The weather was still pretty nice, and Morg went outside to sit on the front porch so they could talk without him hearing. Things stayed quiet for a while, but the conversation got louder and more lively. Finally Morg decided he’d best go back in and settle the two of them down.
By that time, the priest was laughing so hard he was almost crying, though Doc was only smiling, propped up on a pile of pillows and lying under a heap of quilts that Mabel Riney brought over when she first heard that he was sick.
“Why, hello, Morgan!” Doc said, sounding mildly surprised to see him, like they hadn’t spent damn near every day of the last six weeks together. “Father von Angensperg and I were just discussin’ the vagaries of translation from Greek and Latin to English.”
“We were speaking of Handel’s Messiah,” Alex told Morg.
“Which I heard for the first time when I was ten—” Doc said.
“—and the text was He gave his back to smiters, but Doc heard the choir wrong—”
“And I spent a very long afternoon wonderin’, Now why would Jesus give his hat to spiders …?”
Alex busted up laughing again. Then Morgan asked how a handle could have a messiah and the priest laughed even harder, but Doc explained about how the Messiah was music, and a man named Handel wrote it. Morgan told the two of them to behave themselves and not let Doc get overtired.
About half an hour later, Wyatt arrived for the afternoon shift just as Alex came back out into the front room, pulling the door closed behind him. “He’s sleeping,” Alex reported. “Hello, Wyatt. Good to see you again.”
For a time they all spoke quietly about how ill Doc had been, how near to death.
“I hope you know how much he appreciates your care,” Alex told the Earps.
“For I was sick, and you came to me,” Wyatt said.
“Nah,” Morgan said. “It was selfishness.”
Wyatt and Alex were both surprised, but Morgan just shrugged.
“Doc doesn’t have any brothers,” he told Alex. “So we took him for our own.”
November ended. Doc continued to make gains. Explanations varied.
Perhaps it was the prayers of Indian children that saved him.
Perhaps it was simply rest and care. And Jau Dong-Sing’s noodles.
Most likely James Earp came closest to the truth.
“That’s why it took us four damn years to beat them rebs,” he said. “Skinny, inbred sonsabitches are tougher than they look.”
Whatever the reason for his survival, by early December John Henry Holliday was laying plans to defy his doctor’s orders to stay home and stay quiet. Two months cooped up in a little rented house were all that he could bear. He craved bright lights and noise, more company and livelier conversation. He became determined to celebrate the eve of his twenty-seventh Christmas by escorting Kate to a party that Bat Masterson was throwing at the Lone Star Dance Hall that night.
And nobody could talk him out of it.
Wilfred Eberhardt was paid a dime to shine the dentist’s boots to a fine black gleam. Jau Dong-Sing was called upon to take in the seams of Doc’s best suit. A note was sent to Wright’s General Outfitting Store, ordering a burgundy cravat and a silk shirt in pale pink, to set off the newly fitted frock coat of fine dove gray wool.
Doc wanted Kate to order a gown for the party as well, but they were still living off the two grand she’d won from Eli Grier. With no money coming in, Kate was concerned about expenses. She insisted that her blue silk would do for Bat’s party, but Doc would not take no for her answer and wore her to a nubbin on the topic.
On the evening of the twenty-fourth, she made him wait in the front room while she took her time getting dressed. When she emerged, she was glowing like a bride in a grass green satin that brought out the aquamarine of her eyes.
Doc got to his feet. “Sweet Jesus,” he breathed. “Darlin’, you are a vision, and I am a lucky man.”
He helped her into her wrap and offered her his arm. They strolled toward town, stopping now and then to let him catch his breath and to gaze upward, for the west Kansas sky is black velvet on clear, cool December nights, and the Milky Way is strung across it like the diamond necklace of a crooked banker’s mistress.
Turning onto Front Street, they could hear Beeson’s Famous Cowboy Band and agreed that the musicians were pretty good. Chalkie had provided them with first-rate instruments and imported a decent conductor as well. Bat had rented their services for the evening.
“Is that Strauss?” Kate asked.
“Does anyone else write waltzes?”
“Oh! Speaking of Vienna! I saw Alex von Angensperg today. He came on the afternoon train.”
“He stayin’ longer this time?”
“Overnight at least. He’s here to do midnight Mass for the Germans. He’ll be at the party tonight.”
Presuming that he had the strength, Kate stepped aside and let Doc open the door of the dance hall for her. They stood in the entry for a minute, letting their eyes adjust to the dazzle.
“Well, now,” Doc said. “Looks like Sheriff Masterson takes the prize.”
It was Bat’s widely reported goal to spend more on his Christmas party than Doc Holliday had famously squandered on Johnnie Sanders’ wake. By all appearances, he had achieved his ambition. The Lone Star was festive with drapery, blazing with candles and lamps, jammed with couples dancing. At dozens of tables crowded around the edges of the large main room, guests were taking full advantage of expensive booze and lavish food brought in by train from St. Louis, and made available in abundance. Hundreds of people were crammed into the place. Even the more prosperous German farmers had been invited, for they were becoming an important voting block that liked its beer and opposed the temperance reforms. Bat was courting votes.
Word got around that Doc Holliday and Kate had arrived. People started coming over to say hello to the dentist and to lie about how well he looked. Christmas Eve was a big night at the brothel, so Bessie and James were working, but Wyatt and Mattie led the way to a table where Morg’s girl, Lou, was saving a couple of places for Doc and Kate. Wyatt told Kate quietly, “We got a table near the door, so you can leave easy if he gets tired,” while Doc told Mattie that she looked ravishin’. Even if she wasn’t sure what that word meant, Mattie could tell it was nice and said, “Thank you,” with a smile.
The band started a polka. Wyatt asked Mattie if she’d like to dance.
“No,” she said. “Dance with Lou.”
Clapping her hands, Lou jumped up. “Thank you, Mattie—I’ll just borrow him until Morg gets here! Come on, Wyatt!”
Grabbing his hand, Lou pulled Wyatt toward the dance floor. Foot tapping to the music, Doc watched them for a time. Wyatt was surprisingly light on his feet, and Lou was very good.
“We should go to Las Vegas,” Kate decided.
Doc looked at her. “Las Vegas?” he said, as though she were mad, and that settled it.
“This town’s played out. Ain’t been a decent game since September.”
“Wait five months. The cattlemen will be back.”
The polka ended. Lou and Wyatt stayed on for a reel.
“How many two hundreds in fourteen hundred eighty?” Kate asked.
“A little more than seven. Why?”
“Then we still got enough money! Let’s try five or six months at that sanatorium.”
We, he thought.
“Are you—the goddess of parsimony—seriously suggestin’ that we spend two hundred dollars a month so I can lie around listenin’ to lungers cough night and day?”
“You get used to it,” she told him and pointed out, “Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit.”
What ends well is wholly good.
Her Latin was always a treat.
“God a’mighty,” he said when he noticed: “That piano’s been tuned.”
Kate was smiling. “Merry Christmas. I brought in a man from St. Louis. Go on! Play something.”
He couldn’t seem to move. “I’m out of practice,” he said.
“So? If you hit a wrong note, ces sauvages ne sauront pas connaître la différence.”
She watched his face, and her own softened.
“Play, Doc,” she said again, more gently this time. “Play something for me, mon amour.”
Dodge was big enough now to need a few policemen even over the winter, though most of the saloons on the south side of the tracks were shut for lack of business this time of year. Tonight pretty much everything in town was closed, but Morgan Earp walked his rounds, checking locks and making sure nobody had decided to break in and help himself to a few bottles while everyone else was over at Bat Masterson’s party.
Morg still felt strange wearing a badge when Wyatt wasn’t, but Wyatt insisted he was “retired” and swore he’d never put a star on again. “It’s all politics,” he’d tell folks who asked why he resigned. “I’m just a faro dealer now,” he’d say. Sometimes he’d add, “Money don’t lie to your face.” Course, everybody knew Wyatt would have been fired if he hadn’t quit after his fight with Bob Wright. It was Bat who convinced the city council to keep Morgan on during the off-season. (“He tried to stop that fight. Just ’cause they look alike don’t mean they’re the same man. Morgan didn’t do anything wrong.”) No arguing it, though. Dodge was pretty much done for the Earps. They’d be moving soon.
With Doc so sick this fall, they’d missed the good weather for traveling, but come spring, James was set on going all the way south to Tombstone. Every week there was more news about the big silver strike down there, and Bessie had finally agreed to go. For a while, Wyatt had talked of how him and Morg and Virgil could start up a stagecoach service between Prescott and the silver towns in the south of the territory, but Morg said he wasn’t sure it was a good idea to compete with Wells Fargo, which was already well established in that part of the territory. So Wyatt worked all the figures again. The plan now was to stay in Dodge until Roxana foaled in the spring. In the meantime, they’d all save as much cash as they could from the brothel and Morg’s salary and Wyatt’s cut at the Lone Star so they’d have some capital when they arrived in Arizona and could take advantage of opportunities.
Lou came around to the move after she got a letter from her father making it plain that the family was still against her marrying a Methodist. Mattie Blaylock didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Asked about going to Prescott or Tombstone, she shrugged and said, “Whatever Wyatt decides.”
“I wish she’d say what she wants,” Wyatt told Morg once, but Mattie wasn’t that sort.
Over at the Lone Star, a cheer went up at midnight, and everybody yelled, “Merry Christmas!” Morgan and Alex von Angensperg had talked that afternoon about meeting up at Bat’s party, but now Morg figured they could walk over together when the service let out, so he drifted toward the Union Church to listen to the Catholics singing.
The songs were real pretty, even if you couldn’t understand a word of what anybody said, and he could still keep an eye on Front Street while sitting on the church steps. When the doors opened, Morg got to his feet, and tipped his hat to the ladies and said “Evening” to the men, and went inside to wait while Alex took off the fancy robes he wore when he was working.
The priest had a regular suit on underneath. That surprised Morg, and he was going to ask about it when Wil Eberhardt and one of the Riney boys ran into the church, yelling, “Mr. Earp! Your brother says come quick! It’s Doc Holliday!”
“What’s wrong?” Morg asked. “Is he sick again?”
“Morgan, go!” Alex cried. “I’ll come as soon as I can!”
The kids took off running. Morgan followed. The Famous Cowboy Band had stopped playing, and Morg pushed through the doors of the Lone Star, asking, “What’s the trouble?” because everybody was standing up, like they were watching a fight or something.
Kate turned and shushed him. That was when he heard the piano.
Alexander von Angensperg was right behind him. Sounding thunder-struck, he said, “Mein Gott … It’s the Emperor!”
Which made no sense to Morgan, but Kate looked stunned.
“Are you sure?” she asked Alex, and when he nodded, her hands went to her lips. “But that’s—That’s what Doc used to play for his mother …”
Doc? Morg thought. Except it couldn’t be only him, because there were two people playing, it sounded like. He eased around until he could see better, and damn if it wasn’t just Doc, all alone at the piano, his back to the crowd, and he was playing something … something so … wonderful that Morgan didn’t even notice when Wyatt came over to stand beside him.
“Did you know he could play like that?” his brother asked.
“Hell, Wyatt,” Morg murmured. “I didn’t know anybody could play like that.”
For he had never heard anything like it—did not know such music existed in the world—and it was hard to believe that a man he knew could play it with his own two hands. There were parts of it like birdsong, and parts like rolling thunder and hard rain, and parts that glittered like fresh snow when the sun comes out and it’s so cold the air takes your breath away. And parts were like a dust devil spinning past, or a cyclone on the horizon, and all of it cried out for words that he had only read in books and had never said aloud.
Glorious. Majestic. Sublime.
Everyone else—even those who’d had too much of Bat’s liquor—must have felt the same, for they had all fallen silent: all of them watching Doc Holliday sway and bend and reach, as his hands flew and darted and skimmed across the keys.
When it seemed that the music had come to its end, everyone began to clap, but Alexander von Angensperg held up his hand. In a quiet, urgent voice, he told them, “Wait!” And sure enough, the music went on, but it was softer now, and simpler.
Morgan felt Lou’s hand steal into his own. “Look!” she whispered.
He followed her gaze and saw Kate’s face crumple, and Morg felt like crying himself, especially when Alex drew Kate toward his chest and held her like a weeping child.
Eyes closed, the priest began to sing to her, wordlessly crooning the melody that Doc played. Slowly, slowly, the notes began to rise and come together, until … they turned into the saddest, prettiest thing Morgan Earp had ever heard.
When the music could not have been lovelier or more moving, it changed again: first, like it wasn’t sure what would come next, and then like it had made up its mind, by God, and turned itself into a sort of thrilling waltz.
Alex said something in German.
Kate wiped her face, and answered him in kind.
With his hand held high and her palm upon his wrist, a shabby Jesuit missionary led a hardened cow-town harlot to the center of a tawdry dance hall in Dodge City, Kansas. Standing taller and straighter, the priest took on the martial bearing of the cavalry officer he would have been, had the voice of the Holy Spirit not seemed so strong and so insistent. Dropping into a deep and graceful curtsy, the whore lifted her arms to him, like the imperial lady-in-waiting that she might have become, had Maximiliano Primero not been overthrown. There, before a thousand eyes, the two of them began to dance, first alone, then joined by Lou and Morgan, and then by another couple, and another, and another, until the Lone Star Dance Hall had become a grand Viennese ballroom filled with whirling dancers and swirling, sparkling music.
Ghost lives, Wyatt thought, and Mattie must have been moved as well, for she was weeping, so Wyatt took her hand.
“Mattie,” he said, “would you like to dance?”
“Yes,” she said, and then she broke his heart. “Yes, but I don’t know how!”
So he held her instead, and they stood together, letting themselves be lifted away, carried outside themselves toward a time and place beyond their imagining as the music raced and tumbled and sailed out through the darkness toward the Kansas prairie, demanding more and more of the man who played it—
Going cold, Wyatt thought, He can’t keep this up. He’ll start to cough. His lungs will bleed again.
But it was Wyatt himself who could not breathe, gripped by a fear so strong, it seemed to stop the beating of his heart. Fear that this dance would end too soon. Fear that this music would be wrenched away from Doc—from all of them—before it was meant to end.
And though none of Wyatt’s prayers had ever once been answered, and though he knew that his soul was not pure and his faith was not strong, and though he could not understand why God always took the best and the sweetest to his bosom and left the dregs to get meaner and worse—in spite of it all, he began to pray. Dear Lord, please, give him time! Please, Lord, let him finish!
But John Henry Holliday was praying too, just as earnestly and to any god who might listen. Now. Now. Now. Take me now.
Now: with this music beneath his hands. Now: while he was still a gentle man who might have made his mother proud. Now: while beauty could still beat back the blind and brutal disease that was eating him alive.
So he held nothing back, tempting the Fates, defying them, seducing them.
Now: as he bent into thunderous, muscular chords.
Now: as he drew back for brilliant, chiming fantasies.
Now: as he hurled his hands into the impossibly swift runs across the keyboard.
Now, now, now, he prayed when the music darkened and fell, and spun and caught itself, and rose again, until at last—Orpheus to his own soul—he climbed beyond Hades’ grasp, beyond himself, beyond the terrifying, suffocating horror that awaited him, until exhaustion and peace had claimed him, as the music floated—softly, lightly—downward, and he let it end on the quiet chords before the final arpeggio.
Breathless and blinking like a newborn, he came back to the world around him, awakening first to rapt silence as the last notes died away, and then to applause and cheers and amazement.
“Well, did you ever!”
“I had no idea he could—”
“By God! Now, that was something!”
And he was surprised to see that sometime during the concerto, Kate had come to sit beside him on the bench, and that she was sobbing.
“Ne meurs pas, mon amour! Don’t die on me!” she begged as he took her in his arms. “Don’t die, Doc. Please, don’t die.”
“I am doin’ my best, darlin’.”
“Promise you won’t leave me!”
“You have my word. Hush, now. Hush. Don’t cry.”
“Promise you won’t leave?”
“I promise.” He gave her a handkerchief.
“Liar! Everyone leaves,” she muttered bitterly, and blew her nose. “Or they die.”
“You have me there,” he admitted. “Everybody dies.”
She laid her head against that traitorous, murderous chest of his.
“Oh, Doc,” she whispered, “I want to go home.”
“I know, darlin’.”
“Take me home. Please, Doc, take me home!”
“And where is that?” he wondered. “Where is home for us now?”
Us, she thought.
She started to laugh, and wiped her eyes, and said, “Las Vegas! Please, Doc, let’s try it. Just six months! Please!”
“No,” he told her, though he held her close. “No, and that’s final.”
In late April of 1879, Dr. Robert Holliday received a note postmarked “Dodge City, Kansas.”
Please forgive the long silence. I have been poorly for some time and my health remains brittle. This is to inform you that I will be moving to Las Vegas in the New Mexico Territory. I have made a place for myself in Dodge and I am sorry to leave, but the winter is severe here, perhaps worse for me than summers back in Georgia. There are hot springs near Las Vegas and a sanatorium that is the latest thing in tubercular Society. We club together and pay some quack who pretends to know what’s good for us while we cough our lungs out. I don’t put much stock in the enterprise, but I have a passel of children praying on me and I hate to disappoint them. Tell Martha Anne I will write soon. Give my love to the family, and tell Sophie Walton how much I miss her.
—YOUR COUSIN JOHN HENRY