Epitaph

by Mary Doria Russell

  “Did you call for Virgil?” he asked, shocked.

  “Yes, but Virg was gone, too! Allie came over with a shotgun, but what if she hadn’t heard me? This neighborhood is getting worse and worse, and it’s just not right to leave me alone so much! Why can’t you find a job in town? You’re thirty years old, Morgan! What have you got to show for it? When are you going to make something of yourself?”

  “I’m making three-fifty a day with Wells Fargo. And Wyatt’s got a lot of irons in the fire—”

  “Oh, Morgan!” Exasperated, Lou put the wriggling puppy down. “Wyatt’s a dreamer! First it was going to be a stagecoach line. Then it was going to be a race track. Then it was going to be water rights. Now it’s the sheriff’s office. His big plans never amount to anything. You just drift along, waiting for his nothing to turn into something, and it never does!”

  Suddenly she was in tears, and it wasn’t Tom McLaury, or Wyatt’s big plans, or Morgan’s job anymore. It turned into “What am I to you, Morgan?” and “Are we ever going to get married?” And “I want a baby, Morgan! Why don’t any of us have any children?” She was sobbing by then, and Morgan was so stunned, he just stood there, gawping, until he finally said, “Damn, Lou. I didn’t know you was so unhappy!”

  “Well, how would you know?” she cried, stamping her foot. “You’re never home! You just expect me to wait until you get back from Benson or billiards or the Cosmopolitan, and I hate it! I hate Tombstone, and I hate Arizona, and I miss you! Even when you’re in town, I miss you, Morgan.”

  It went on like that for a while. Her telling him how they’d been together almost four years and she was still waiting for something to happen—and she didn’t even know what she was hoping for! Just something that would lead to something else. Progress. Movement! Not just drifting from day to day. Him saying he was sorry and promising things would get better and swearing off billiards. He’d quit Wells Fargo and look for work in town. He told her they could go find a preacher right now, right this minute, if that’s what she wanted, but she only cried harder and said that would make Allie feel bad because Virgil couldn’t marry her.

  By that time, the puppy was yapping for attention and making fierce little growly sounds and flinging himself about. It was comical, and when she was calmer, Lou wiped her eyes and picked him up again. “I’m keeping him,” she warned.

  “He got a name?” Morg asked cautiously.

  “Higgs,” she decided.

  Why Higgs? Morg wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to risk getting her started again. “Higgs,” he said. “Higgs is good. Higgs it is.”

  “DOC,” HE ASKED A FEW DAYS LATER, “you ever think about kids?”

  “My cousins Robert and George send me photographs of their children now and then.”

  “No, I mean having kids. Of your own.”

  Arched brows rose high over slate-blue eyes. “Well, now. Is Miss Louisa . . . ? ”

  “No. She’d like that. We’re not doing anything to prevent it, but . . .”

  They were taking a break, sitting amid the beer kegs and crates behind the Alhambra. Now that Morgan had quit Wells Fargo, Doc was training him on the faro table. Wyatt was going to bank Morg when he got good enough to deal on his own, but that seemed a long way off. Doc said faro was a stupid game, but it was fast. Morg found the bets hard to follow and hated being indoors so much.

  “It’s kinda strange,” Morg said. “Six of us brothers, and Newton’s the only one with kids.”

  Doc took out one of those thin, black cigars he favored now because they were easier on his lungs than cigarettes. “Newton’s children were born before the war, were they? Before he enlisted?”

  “Now that you mention it. Why?”

  “‘A night with Eros, a lifetime with Mercury . . . ’”

  Doc stopped, choking on the first draw, as usual. What happened next was so much a part of him that you hardly noticed. The cough. The handkerchief. The flask uncapped. A sip or two of bourbon to dull the pain in his chest. Everything back into his pockets. Then he’d pick up with whatever he was saying as if nothing had interrupted the thought.

  “Folks had bigger families before the war, in my observation. If men were lucky enough to survive the fightin’, they were usually unlucky enough to bring a souvenir home to their wives and sweethearts. Venereal disease has run rampant ever since. The damage is internal, but it can interfere with what Mr. Darwin calls reproductive success. Children may not be in the cards for any of us whose lives have not been pure.”

  “Oh,” Morgan said. “Damn.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Doc said softly. He looked at Morgan sideways. “Thinkin’ about ghost lives, are we?”

  “Yeah,” Morgan said. “Maybe.”

  Not his own so much but Lou’s, for she was not the wife of a clean-living, hardworking, sweet-faced farmer with a big spread and a good future ahead of him. No, Lou was shacked up with a man who meant well. A man who was good-natured, if not ambitious. A man who had just realized that Higgs might be the closest thing to a baby they’d ever have.

  Doc was leaning back in his chair, eyes narrowed in speculation. “You know what you need, son?”

  “What?”

  “A decent suit of clothes. Marine-blue gabardine, I should think. With a chalk stripe perhaps. That, and a justice of the peace.”

  “Doc, what in hell are you talking about?”

  “You. Marryin’ Lou.”

  “Lou doesn’t want to get married,” Morg said, a little too quickly. “She said a wedding might make Allie feel bad because Virg can’t marry her.”

  “Very thoughtful. Very considerate. I would expect nothin’ less of Miss Louisa, but two witnesses are all you need. Nobody else has to know.” He looked away. “Make her your wife, even if you can’t give her children.”

  Morgan chewed on that awhile before he asked, “What about you, Doc? You ever think about being married?”

  “All the time,” Doc said, “but she’s in a convent now.”

  Morgan just about fell off his barrel. “Kate’s in a convent?”

  Doc’s wheezy laugh lurched into a serious coughing fit, but his eyes were merry over the handkerchief. “God a’mighty, Morgan! If you could see your face! No, not Kate. There was a girl back in Georgia I might have married if I hadn’t come out here for my health. Martha Anne will always be dear to me, but she is a bride of Christ now. At my best, I could not have rivaled Lord Jesus, and I am a long way from my best.”

  Doc ground the stub of his little black cigar into the dust. Morgan stood and offered the dentist an arm for leverage.

  “As for Miss Kate,” Doc concluded wryly, “she is a foul-mouthed, pigheaded Hungarian harridan who has made it amply clear that she would not have me on a silver platter.” He looked northward, toward Globe, Arizona. “Even so . . . I miss her.”

  BITCH THAT I AM—A CAUSE OF EVIL AND A CURSE!

  THERE ARE WOMEN WHO DO NOT WISH TO BE PURSUED. During a dozen years of active frontier prostitution, Mária Katarina Harony had often declared, “I pick and I choose!” That was no idle boast. In the grim world of two-dollar house girls, Kate Harony had always named her price, getting what she demanded and doubling the fee if a john dared to argue.

  “I know what I’m worth,” she’d declare. “If that’s more than a cheap bastard like you can afford, be damned to you.”

  Men had lined up, year after year, hoping to be accepted. How many of them? Four thousand? Five? Maybe more. Too many, that’s for sure. She was thoroughly tired of men and their lust. Tired of the whole damn business.

  It’s a rare whore who anticipates that the market for her wares will turn. Rarer still: a whore who saves her cash and makes plans for what comes next. Kate Harony was a realist who’d always kept an eye out for the next opportunity and in the beginning, that’s all Doc Holliday was. A way out. A way up.

  Of all the men who’d had her, Doc alone asked the right questions and showed an interest in the answers. He alone knew her for what
she was: the pampered, well-educated daughter of a Budapest physician. Fluent in four modern languages, familiar with the Greek and Latin classics. Exiled by war, impoverished, orphaned, fostered out. Ruined by the guardian who should have protected her, she’d run away, and it was in a string of frontier brothels that she learned her seventh language: a vulgar and ungrammatical English. Doc, too, had lived with luxury in childhood, with poverty in adolescence, and with hardship in adulthood. He admired the nerve and self-possession she brought to the only work a girl could get paid for on the frontier. His respect meant a great deal to her. So did his cash. So, eventually, did he.

  She never meant to love him.

  He didn’t make it easy, for if Doc deplored the way Kate made her money, she was infuriated by how he spent his. They had traveled together off and on since 1878, a pair of souls chained together in the fourth ring of the Inferno—the miser pushing a boulder up a hill while the spendthrift shoved it down. Doc could win in an hour what Kate earned in six months, but he’d spend it just as quickly. He insisted that they live in a town’s best hotel, that they eat in the finest restaurants. It was French frocks for her, English suits for him, lavish parties for his friends. And then there was the stupid way he’d slip a few bucks to anyone he felt sorry for! She understood that he was trying to recapture childhood’s careless abundance, but they weren’t aristocratic children anymore, and the way he squandered money drove her crazy. The very fact that he had walked away from their saloon in Las Vegas—just gave her his interest in it—proved what an idiot he was about finances. And how could he possibly believe it was wrong to kill a dangerous, crazy, drunk bastard like Mike Gordon? Doc did the world a favor when he shot that mad dog down, but she couldn’t make him see that.

  She had no reason to stay near the sanatorium after he left, so she sold out and cleared enough to buy a six-bedroom boardinghouse in a silver camp in northern Arizona. She’d gone from silk to calico before, but this time she wasn’t drudging for an Iowa bastard who called himself a foster father but worked her all day and rode her all night. This time, by God, she was on her own and liked it that way.

  She divided the six rentals into two twelve-hour shifts. “You don’t need no bed when you’re working,” she told each miner. “I’ll give you a discount to share.” That was a lie but one they fell for, each of them hoping that she was part of the deal. She hired a cook, learned to make plain, cheap meals in quantity, fired the woman, and did the work herself to reduce expenses. “The goddess of parsimony,” Doc called her once, and he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

  Then, he started sending all these telegrams, each one more provoking than the last. Why did he waste money on Western Union when a penny stamp would have sent a whole letter? Was he afraid she would see from his handwriting that he was sick again? Was he trying to trick her into coming to Tombstone so she would nurse him like she did in Dodge? “George Sand was an imbecile,” she’d mutter at night, rereading the stack of messages before she turned down the lamp and went to sleep.

  The telegrams finally stopped coming at the end of April. In what appeared to be a final contact, Doc had sent a pair of earrings. Indian turquoise set in Mexican silver. “I thought of your eyes when I saw these,” he wrote, his beautiful copperplate handwriting firm and controlled. “Perhaps you will think of me when you wear them. In the meantime, dum spiro, spero.” That seemed to be the end of it. Which was a relief at first. But as the weeks passed, she began to wonder if he really was sick. Dum spiro, spero: While I breathe, I hope. Was that some veiled reference to his disease?

  She was too damn busy to sit and read a newspaper these days. They were just advertisements and bullshit anyway. Still, when a month had passed with nothing further from him, she asked Florence at the grocery store if there’d been anything in the news lately about Doc Holliday.

  Learning that Doc was a suspect in a stage robbery back in March confirmed her opinion of journalism. Doc hated dealing faro because it made him feel like a thief to take money from men who didn’t stand a chance of winning a game they didn’t understand. Kate was about to tell Florence, “I know Doc—he’d starve before he’d steal!” But before she could, the man behind her in line piped up.

  “Yeah, ole Doc, he’ll shoot you just to see if his gun works. He’s wanted in Las Vegas, too. Killed his wife. Took her up into the mountains and—bang! Shot her right in the head.”

  Kate choked a little on this “news” but played along. “That poor woman!” she cried, making her eyes round and serious. “Except . . . I heard Doc Holliday, he always uses a knife when he kills women. How do you know he shot her?”

  “I helped bury her,” the man said, proud of this swift invention.

  Kate lowered her voice. “I wouldn’t noise that around, mister. They’ll call you accessory to murder and string you up!”

  Doc would have thought that was a wonderful story.

  IN MAY, she began to think that it would be nice to get away from Globe for a while. She’d certainly earned a rest. Twelve men meant twelve breakfasts, twelve lunch pails packed, and then twelve dinners. Fifteen thousand meals, with all the shopping, cooking, serving, and cleaning that entailed. And then there was the laundry, and all the beds, and making sure the miners settled up with her before they gambled and whored and drank their pay away.

  A little trip to Tombstone might be nice. Everybody said it was a real city, not a shit hole like Globe. She could stay with Bessie and James Earp—she’d known them for years professionally and counted them as friends. Florence was tired of working for the son of a bitch who owned the grocery store, and she’d been asking about Kate and her going partners on the boardinghouse. This would be a good time to see how that might work out; Flo could look after the business while Kate was gone.

  A few days later, when she’d made all the arrangements, Kate went to Western Union and used one of Doc’s paid-reply forms to send a telegram to Bessie Earp.

  ARRIVING BY EVENING STAGE MAY 25 STOP DONT TELL DOC STOP

  She knew Bessie would ignore the second part of the message. She knew Doc would be waiting for her at the depot and that he’d treat her like a princess—he always did. She would be haughty, perhaps a little scornful at first. Then she’d relent, and they’d have a few drinks, and the fun would begin. She’d take some cash down with her, too, and let Doc parlay it into something more. Maybe even set up a few poker games for him. It’ll be just like old times, she thought.

  And to everyone’s misfortune, she was right.

  THERE WAS A LONG LIST OF PEOPLE who’d died abruptly in and around Tombstone during its first three years of existence. When Mária Katarina Harony awoke on May 27, 1881, she did so with an absolute certainty that she would soon be counted among them. This conviction did not come to her from the abstract philosophical assurance of the famous syllogism arising from the premise “All men are mortal.” It arose instead from two objective facts: Someone angry was banging on a door, and the noise was going to kill her.

  The need to rid herself of that last shot of whiskey battled with dread of the spasmodic violence that would precede relief, but the mere thought of vomiting was now enough to trigger the act. Rolling onto the side of the bed, she threw up over the edge.

  This would be the high point of her day.

  I will never drink again, she thought. It was a vow she had made before. This time she meant it.

  “Kate! Damn you, open the door!”

  She recognized the voice. It was Wyatt Earp’s. And he had just cursed her. Wyatt never cursed.

  She tried briefly to open her eyes, but daylight felt like a knife in her skull, and she sank onto the pillow. Ó, Krisztus! she thought. What have I done this time?

  “Doc?” she called in a tiny voice. “For pity’s sake, get the door.”

  There was no answer.

  Out in the hallway two men were exchanging tense, quiet words. A key was fitted into the lock. An instant later, the door was flung open with such force that it sla
mmed against the wall, and there stood Wyatt like an avenging angel, his face twisting when he smelled the puke.

  Next thing she knew, he was jerking her upright, not caring when she cried out in pain and fear. “You are trouble,” he said, his voice low and mean. “You’ve always been trouble, but you have really done it this time. Get up and get dressed.”

  She was still drunk. Her fingers were clumsy on the buttons, her mind three steps behind what was going on. Glimpses of the past thirty-six hours flickered by.

  Champagne, she remembered. She and Doc had started with champagne.

  No. Not champagne. They had started with dismay.

  She’d given no thought to appearances while running the boardinghouse, working in comfortable cotton dresses, leaving her corsets and silks stored away until the day she packed for Tombstone. Doc had always had an eye for fit and registered the straining fabric around her middle, but if she had waxed, he had waned. They were the same age—not quite thirty—but he was gray and thinner than ever. She had forgotten how bent he had become, his bones weakened by his disease. My God, she’d thought, he’s an old man! And he knew what she was thinking. And yet, within moments, all that was forgotten. There was the quick, murmured banter in French and Latin and Greek: shared amusement at absurdities they saw all around them in that striving, busy, bumptious town. A swirl of hotel staff. The door closing behind them, the bed before them . . . His merry cry, “Not dead yet!” in the laughing, breathless aftermath, and the drowsy ease that followed. Room service, and the first bottle of champagne. And then what? What went wrong this time? Something about her being a walkin’ abacus. “I can see you addin’ it up in your head! It’s my money, darlin’. I’ll spend it as I please.”

  Later, he had to go to work, and she went with him to the Alhambra. And then . . . Oh, Jesus. That girl! Kate thought, as Wyatt gripped her arm and propelled her down the hotel stairs. It was about that girl!