Doc

by Mary Doria Russell

  For Wyatt, the reaction set in while he was sitting in the mud watching Hoyt ride off over the bridge, when he still believed he’d missed his target. Before Bat arrived at his side and started talking, Wyatt was all alone, and what came to his mind was that he’d missed his sister’s birthday. It was a strange thing to think, under the circumstances, but he kept coming back to it, over and over. If young George Hoyt had been a little steadier with his first shot, Adelia would always have remembered that her brother Wyatt forgot to send her a happy birthday, the year that he was killed.

  Funny how much the thought bothered him.

  As the night went on, Wyatt marveled that he’d been wearing a sidearm because it was so unusual for him. Ordinarily, he was just about the only sober man in town, and he counted on that for his edge. He could generally tame a troublesome drunk with a well-aimed bash across the side of the head. Carrying a weighted sap was easier than lugging a big old Colt around all night in the midsummer heat.

  When he got home after his shift, he asked Mattie if she’d heard a rumor that something was going to happen. She denied it but claimed she had second sight, and said she’d had a funny feeling, so she’d handed Wyatt his gun belt before he left for work and asked him to be careful. Which was the only reason he went heeled that night: to make Mattie happy.

  But if you have a gun, you’re inclined to use it. And now a kid was dying.

  Wyatt didn’t go home right away when his shift was over. First he checked on Hoyt, who was still alive. Then he walked out toward the east end of town to watch the sun come up in a sky that had cleared overnight, and shone gold and pink this morning.

  When he heard the familiar cough behind him, he did not turn. Doc Holliday’s steps slowed and stopped. For a while they stood together silently.

  “Now I am farther from heaven than when I was a boy,” Doc said after a time. “Awful, isn’t it.”

  To have someone look you right in the eye and to know that he intends to kill you. To hurt somebody so bad, he was going to die from what you did to him.

  Wyatt asked, “Does it get easier?”

  “No.”

  That was Doc. He didn’t sugar things.

  “The law can relieve a man of guilt,” Doc told him quietly, “but not of his remorse.”

  The next day, before work, Wyatt went back to the jail to check on Hoyt again. By then the boy had been moved to the doctor’s clinic, so Wyatt walked over there and sat with him awhile. Most of the time Hoyt babbled, but once he seemed lucid. He looked at Wyatt—right at him, like before—and said, “You seem like a nice fella. I don’t know why they want you dead.”

  “Who?” Wyatt asked. “Who wants me dead?”

  “They was gonna pay me a thousand dollars, and get the charges dropped, after.”

  “Who?” Wyatt asked. He never got an answer. The boy kept talking, but didn’t make any sense after that.

  Wyatt went to work, like usual, but for the next two days he had a strange feeling of not hearing things quite right, like there was cotton in his ears, or water or something. And thoughts kept coming to him.

  I could be dead instead of walking down this street.

  Morg could be standing at my grave instead of joshing me about the hole in my hat.

  I could be in the ground instead of drinking this coffee.

  Somebody wants me dead, he’d think, and maybe that shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was, for he was just an ordinary man doing his job, and it struck him as unreasonable that anyone would pay so much to get him killed.

  Hell, he thought. Give me the grand! I’ll leave.

  Finally he realized he had to snap out of it before he made a mistake and let some other fool thing happen. Somebody else might get hurt.

  The wire came back the day before George Hoyt died. He was wanted for cattle rustling, down near Amarillo.

  Nobody in Dodge knew Hoyt personally, but the Texans in town that week clubbed together and gave the kid a big send-off. Wyatt watched the funeral procession from a small remove. A lot of the drovers looked at him like they might try something but nobody did, possibly because Morgan had rounded up Dog Kelley and Bat and Doc Holliday to stand right behind Wyatt, just in case. Even Eddie Foy stood with them.

  It was Eddie’s idea to go over to the Iowa House for breakfast after the burial, when the crowd had dispersed. Wyatt had been broody since the night he shot the kid, so Eddie spent the whole meal trying to make the event into a funny story, telling Dog Kelley about how he thought he was pretty agile, don’t you know, until he saw Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday pancake onto the dance floor when the bullets started flying. Then Eddie told about how his brand-new eleven-dollar suit had sustained a mortal wound. When he went back to his dressing room after the shoot-out, he found three bullet holes in the suit and claimed that one was still burning.

  Everyone but Eddie knew that wasn’t really possible. You’d have to fire close enough to have the muzzle flare touch the cloth to make it burn, the way it did when Bat’s brother Ed got shot. Still, nobody was inclined to argue the point—certainly not Bat, who appreciated that changing a few details could make for a better story.

  Eddie’s tale would get even better when he wrote his autobiography, in 1928. By then the theater looked like a giant block of Swiss cheese, holed by a thousand bullets fired by a dozen men. Wyatt himself never found humor in the affair. His version of the incident was grimly laconic decades later, even after his account had passed through the imagination of a biographer who often preferred well-dressed drama to bare-naked fact.

  On the day of George Hoyt’s funeral, Wyatt pushed his plate away, the eggs cold and his toast uneaten, and waited for Eddie to shut up. Then he told the others what young Hoyt had said about being promised $1,000 to kill him, and how Hoyt expected that the Texas warrant against him would be quashed once Wyatt was dead.

  Everybody got real quiet.

  “Well, that narrows it some,” Morgan pointed out, after a while. “Has to be someone with a lot of cash.”

  “Or someone who could give that impression,” Doc said.

  “And clout,” Eddie said, serious now, for he was a Chicago boy familiar with cutthroat politics. “You need a hell of a reach to pull strings in another state.”

  “Jesse Driskill, maybe?” Bat suggested. “Word is, he was plenty hot after you arrested his nephew, Wyatt.”

  Dog Kelley stared at Bat, giving him a chance to add a name.

  Bat looked away.

  He’s bought, Dog thought. I wonder how …

  “Some men never look hot, but they never forget a slight,” Dog said, leaning back to dig fifty cents out of his pocket.

  “Bob Wright,” Morgan said.

  Morg was always about two steps quicker than his brother.

  Dog stood and left the change on the table to pay for his breakfast.

  “Watch your back,” he told Wyatt. “Next time, you won’t see it comin’.”

  Call

  “This’s a terrible hard country for women,” Eddie Foy had told Alexander von Angensperg at the end of May. And it was none too easy on men, judging by recent events.

  One by one, the Jesuits at St. Francis were succumbing to the toil and privation of life on the prairie. Decades of labor in the Kansas wilderness had at last weakened Father Schoenmakers’ heart to such an extent that he laid down the burden of running the mission in June, and could now serve only as chaplain to the Sisters of Loretto at the Indian girls’ school nearby. The loss of Schoenmakers to St. Francis was not unexpected, for his debility had steadily worsened over the years, but when a measles epidemic carried off Father Bax, along with fifteen hundred Osage on the reservation, the brawny Belgian’s death was a great shock. By late June, even the vivacious and indefatigable little Italian Paul Ponziglione had been leveled by exhaustion and illness.

  Which is why, in July of 1878, it had fallen to Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg, S.J., to assume the summer mission circuit that Father
Paul ordinarily rode, and to do so atop Alphonsus, the mule that ordinarily carried Father Paul.

  Both of these experiences were humbling.

  Paul Ponziglione was one of those bewildering creatures born with an extraordinary facility for languages. Since coming to Kansas from Italy a quarter century earlier, Father Paul had added English and German to his native Italian and to the French, Latin, and Greek of any educated person. He also spoke five Indian tongues fluently, and had mastered the nearly universal sign language of the plains as well.

  The transparent joy with which Paul conveyed his own faith—and the Italian’s personal charm—had done much to bring souls to Christ from among the Osage, the Sauk, the Pawnee, the Cherokee, and the Fox.

  Even nearing sixty, the spry little priest traveled relentlessly across Kansas and southward into the Indian Territory as far as the Texas line. Like that of the saint for whom he was named, Father Paul’s missionary work encompassed nascent congregations scattered throughout vast lands peopled largely by those hostile to the Faith. He had begun to reap a small but significant harvest from seeds patiently sown in his youth, and it was his policy to visit every church three times a year.

  In each village, Father Paul baptized catechumens and infants or those in danger of death. He joined young couples in holy (and monogamous) matrimony, heard confessions, and celebrated the Mass. He doctored wounds as well, and danced with merrymakers, and he settled individual and public disputes. When disease and injuries took their toll, he sat by the dying and wept with the grieving.

  Baptized or Wilden, many Indians had come to consider Paul Ponziglione a friend and a brother, or son, or uncle, or cousin, or—indeed—a father. And in the summer of ’78, Alexander von Angensperg was able to take the exact measure of the reverence and affection with which Father Paul was regarded by noting the degree of distress and open dismay that greeted his own arrival.

  Alexander did his garbled, halting best to reassure the Indians of various tribes that Father Paul was neither dead nor dying but merely much in need of rest. There was great relief when this understanding was reached, but that was followed by even more visible disappointment. Told that the sacraments celebrated by a different Black Robe were equally valid in heaven and on earth, the Indians displayed not so much skepticism as disgruntlement.

  Arms crossed over chests.

  Brows wrinkled.

  Lips pursed in annoyance.

  “I wanted Father Paul,” the bride, or the catechumen, or the dying man would say. “Father Paul is better.” And, Alexander was given to understand, he was better in all possible ways.

  Father Paul spoke properly. He didn’t make confusing mistakes when signing.

  Father Paul brought better presents. He was more gracious in receiving gifts.

  Father Paul understood how to be polite, and he knew when to make a joke. He certainly never insulted anybody by accident.

  Father Paul had kinder eyes. He was friendlier and more amusing.

  Father Paul knew how to dance. He was a better singer, too.

  Alexander was beginning to hate Father Paul.

  Alphonsus, on the other hand, was growing on him. And that, too, was a useful measure of his own lingering vanity, for—man and boy, prince and cavalry officer—Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg had owned and ridden some of the finest horseflesh in Europe.

  As long as he was alone on the empty plains, Alexander could appreciate the mule’s easy gait, his surefootedness, and his calm. When a prairie hen whirred into the air, a horse might well have bolted, but the middle-aged Alphonsus merely flicked his long, expressive ears in worldly disdain, for horses are flighty animals who accumulate fears and superstitions with each passing year, whereas mules learn from experience, becoming more sophisticated as they mature. Day after day, Alphonsus picked his way through terrain that would have lamed a horse, traversing ravines and hillocks, negotiating the holes and mounds of vast prairie dog cities without a stumble. A horse would have weakened and grown thin as the grass grew shorter and drier, but Alphonsus remained in fine flesh on poor grazing and was ready to move on each morning. He was a sensible and reliable animal, patient and uncomplaining.

  It was only when Alexander was seen atop this admirable beast that he felt humiliated and embarrassed. And Indians unerringly took notice.

  “Ata! There’s a man with no women to impress!”

  “That horse looks pretty sick! Have you tried a sweat lodge?”

  “I hope you didn’t trade your gold cup for that big rabbit.”

  These sallies, and others like them, were considered the height of comedy. Maybe they were funnier if you spoke the language well, and if you didn’t have to ask for them to be repeated over and over, in a slow and painful effort to understand exactly how you’d just been mocked—an effort the Indians found almost as funny as the mule’s giant ears.

  When he finally understood a joke, Alexander did his best to smile, but there was always one remark that made him blush. More mimed than spoken, it needed no translation. One of the women would look appraisingly at the mule’s ears, then at Alexander’s own, and ask, deadpan, “Cousins?”

  Hilarity, inevitably, ensued.

  Father Paul had warned that such teasing was to be expected among Indians. Paul himself put up with a lot of nose jokes, being Roman in physiognomy as well as in ancestry and faith. So Alexander soldiered on, in baking heat under a glaring sun, with no companion except Alphonsus on the long rides between each round of rejection and ridicule.

  The summer and his own resolve wore away.

  Alexander often prayed for patience and strength, but once, in what he suspected was the actual, factual geographic middle of absolutely nowhere, he lost all momentum and allowed the mule’s pace to slow to a halt. For a time, he simply sat there, his own head the highest thing on earth as far as the eye could see in any direction, and his heart the lowest.

  Perhaps, he thought, it is time to take Schopenhauer’s advice. Eat a toad first thing in the morning; the rest of the day will seem pleasurable by comparison.

  Assuming he could find a toad.

  Staring at the table-flat horizon, he would sometimes watch an electrical storm gather, build, break, and dissipate, often in eerie silence—the entire drama so far away that he hardly heard the thunder, though he could see the lightning. Late on one sweltering afternoon, a funnel-shaped cloud emerged from the bottom of a towering green-gray thunderhead in the distance. Lengthening, reaching toward the ground, the cyclone wobbled and spun drunkenly across the empty land, its journey as useless as his own.

  He had not felt so hopeless since his days as a novice, still learning the community’s ways, still doing everything he could to get thrown out—things that would have gotten him flogged in the military. “Do you want this?” the novice master demanded every time Alexander defied a superior or came to blows with one of his potential brothers in Christ.

  “I want what God wants for me,” Alexander would answer, stubborn, willful, and friendless.

  Which simply raised the question …

  … that was, at last, answered one night on the Oklahoma plains where he lay on the open ground, in the rain and near the mule, probably lost and certainly despondent. To his dying day, he was not sure if he was awake or asleep or someplace in between when he heard a single word: Timothy.

  The next morning, at first gray light, he awoke to the bland curiosity of Alphonsus, who watched, munching weeds, while Alexander rolled creakily onto his hands and knees, swatted insects away, checked his boots for scorpions, scratched a dozen new bites, took a piss, and dug a small New Testament out of his oilskin pack. He opened it to the letters of Saint Paul. Before his eyes, the text turned inside out.

  Every line of Paul’s praise and encouragement whispered to Alexander of the dejection and frustration that Timothy must have been reporting as he followed in the footsteps of the saint. Like Timothy, Alexander von Angensperg was ready to teach the Gospel, willing to end
ure hardship as a good soldier of Christ, eager to receive knowledge and understanding from God in the service of God. Like Timothy, everywhere he went, he was considered nothing more than a poor and unwelcome substitute for a man named Paul.

  Over the next few days, Alexander studied and took to heart the saint’s instruction to Timothy on the teaching of sound doctrine and on being an example of faith in word, conduct, love, and spirit. While Alphonsus found his own way along a trail that the mule had walked three times a year for twenty years, Alexander’s mind was free to compose a sermon that might lead Indian converts to see a connection between themselves and the early Church established by their beloved pastor’s patron saint.

  From then on, in every village, Alexander promised to convey the Indians’ concern, good wishes, prayers, and love to Father Paul, just as Timothy must have promised to convey news of the Philippians and Ephesians and Colossians to Saint Paul. He stopped trying so hard to say everything correctly and learned to laugh at his own mistakes, and learned as well to enjoy the good-humored teasing that marks so much of Indian life. When he stopped talking and listened instead, he found that even the proudest and most recalcitrant of the Wilden believed in a spiritual reality beyond the physical, that they shared his own desire to understand and join with the sacred power alive in this world. And there were moments, now and then, when he sensed strongly the presence of the Holy Spirit amid the souls who had gathered in tiny board churches or simply stood together during the Mass under broad blue skies.

  In early August, Alexander arrived at yet another indistinguishably squalid village and was taken immediately to an Indian girl of fifteen. She requested baptism from Alexander himself, rather than waiting for Father Paul, for she knew she was near death from consumption and wished to join the Church. Though her relatives were heathens, they could not deny this beloved child anything that might ease her passing. Alexander had just enough time for a brief preparation before the girl’s wish could be fulfilled. Then he laid the consecrated Host on the tongue of the newly christened Mary Clare.