Doc

by Mary Doria Russell

  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 co
ugh 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,” s
he 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.