Epitaph

by Mary Doria Russell

  His friends’ kindness and generosity had been almost limitless, but there comes a time when a proud man would rather die than ask for more. So he’d used the last of his savings for the last of his expenses. He laid in a supply of bourbon and laudanum, paid Mrs. Fly for a month in advance, hoping that would be long enough to finish the job, and took to his bed.

  There was a time when he hated laudanum. The taste was bitter and nauseating, but this hemorrhage was deep in his chest. The pressure and pain had never been worse, and bourbon couldn’t touch it.

  Once, Mattie Blaylock came to see him. “I told you laudanum was good,” she said. That might have been a dream.

  There were a lot of dreams. One of them was beautiful. It was a dream of his own death. Not of dying itself, for he’d watched this disease kill his mother and knew how terrible his end would be. The dream was of . . . afterward, and in the dream, he could breathe again. Easily. Fully. Thoughtlessly.

  “This is heaven,” his mother told him. “We are in heaven now, sugar.”

  No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes. The way it grinds you down. The sheer damnable tedium of it.

  His mother was waiting for him, but his friends would not let him go.

  Eat this, they said. Drink this. Keep fighting, Doc.

  We love you. Don’t give up.

  WOULD THAT THIS FRAILTY HAD AFFLICTED SOMEONE ELSE!

  LATE SUMMER RAINSTORMS ARE NORMAL IN ARIZONA, but not even Chiricahua elders had seen anything like the drenching August downpours of 1881. Thunder that year did not boom or rumble and roll; it exploded like a bomb. Lightning bolts flashed blindingly, terrifyingly close. It was one storm after another, every afternoon, each more astonishing than the last. Day after day after day.

  In Tombstone, packing crates floated down the flooded streets. Gales ripped off new awnings and sent freshly painted signs flying. Water poured into mine shafts, clogging the pitheads with rubble. Ore wagons bogged to the axle before rolling three yards and stamping mills had to be shut down. Roads washed out and repairs were impossible. Even when laborers could get to the damage, the next storm would undo all their work. Stagecoach service and mail delivery ceased. The city was cut off from resupply.

  Vagrants stood around under leaky wooden galleries, watching busier men splash across streets holding squares of tent fabric over their heads. Merchants passed the time making lists of stock on hand and of stock to be ordered, if the damnable rain ever ended. In livery barns, harnesses were mended and leather was cleaned, to pass the time. In homes, wobbly chairs were fixed and stockings were darned. New shirts were sewn and old ones were cut up for quilts by those imaginative enough to believe they might be cold again someday, for the rain did nothing to abate the heat.

  Sweating and wretched in Lou and Morgan’s front room, propped up with pillows on their chaise, John Henry Holliday tried and failed to be grateful for his rescue.

  There were frightening, snarling outbursts that took everyone by surprise, even Doc himself. He would weep afterward, ashamed of his bad temper, powerless to control it. Then he’d curse Morgan’s meddling in a voice halfway between a whisper and a whine. “Damn you, Morgan! Damn you! If you’d just . . . let me go, this would . . . be over by now.”

  “It’s the pain,” Morg would say. “He don’t mean it.” But Lou suspected that Doc meant every word and sometimes she, too, thought it might have been kinder to let Doc go.

  I love Morg, she would remind herself when Doc was at his worst. I love him. I do.

  How could you not admire a good-hearted man who, seeing that a friend was sick, would, without a moment’s hesitation, bring him home to be cared for and looked after? Even if Morgan had thought to ask her first, it wasn’t as if Lou would have refused. She was as fond of Doc as Morgan was. But everything was so much harder this time!

  Back in Dodge when he was ill, Doc had a lot of friends to care for him. Now Kate Harony was gone. Mattie Blaylock was worse than useless. Allie was busy helping Bessie, whose tumors were getting worse. The brothers did what they could, but they all had jobs. There was no one to share the burden with Lou here in Tombstone, and no way to escape it, either. In Dodge, Doc and Kate had a place of their own. Lou could stay a few hours and then return to a home that was neat and clean and didn’t smell of fever sweat. Here, the sick man was an inescapable presence, no matter how quiet he tried to be.

  Doc himself was different now. Peevish, contrary, abrupt. Beaten down by his illness. More hopeless, less stoic. As awful as it had been then—watching the poor man fight for air, hour after hour, trying not to drown in his own blood—it was worse now, with the bleeding trapped inside his chest.

  They didn’t want him to end up a hophead like Mattie Blaylock, so Lou had to refuse when he begged for more laudanum. It broke her heart, but she was hot and irritable herself, and weary of his misery.

  “I don’t . . . want to die,” he whispered once, “but I don’t . . . want to live like this.” And Lou knew exactly how he felt.

  THEN ONE GLORIOUS MORNING, Josephine Marcus showed up at the door with a basket of groceries.

  “Doc has always been so nice to me,” Josie said. “When I heard he was sick, I just had to visit. And I thought of some things he might like to eat. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind?” Lou cried. “Oh, Josie, I could throw myself at your feet and kiss your hem!”

  Across the street, Mattie Blaylock was standing on the porch, her hair snarled, her wrapper untied. “Jew slut! I know what you’re doing! First Wyatt, now Morgan!”

  “She’s visiting Doc,” Lou called.

  “You want ’em all, don’t you!” Mattie yelled. “Greedy goddam Jew.”

  “Has she always been crazy?” Josie asked, but before Lou could respond, Josie was inside and in motion, unloading her basket, laying out ingredients. “You are doing me such a big favor! The only thing I miss about living with Johnny Behan is having an oven. Well, I miss seeing Albert every day, too,” she amended wistfully, but shook that off swiftly. “I’m going to make a cheesecake for Doc. Very easy to digest. It’ll put some weight on him, too.”

  She came again the next morning, and the next, and soon they had a routine. Lou and Morgan were up at sunrise, for Morgan was working the day shift at the Alhambra, which was busier than ever because the miners had nothing to do except gamble and drink the beer that was still being brewed locally. Morg left for work at seven. Josie arrived at eight and while she looked after Doc, Lou did laundry, washing sweat-sodden sheets and shirts, hanging them on the line. Happy to get out of the sickroom for a while, Lou would just sit in the porch rocker afterward, waiting for the sheets to dry, which only took an hour or two. Then she’d bring them in and get them ironed before the next cloudburst.

  At noon, she and Josie had a meal on the table. Wyatt often came for lunch and to visit the dentist. Afterward, Lou cleared and washed the dishes. Josie read aloud until Doc fell asleep. Wyatt liked to listen, too, but he worked nights—as Josie did, though no one ever talked about that—and he sometimes fell asleep in the heat, like Doc. Tired herself, Josie would gaze at the two men for a time and then whisper to Lou, “I’ll just sneak out now—before the rain starts. Time for the cuckoo to sing.”

  That had become their nickname for Mattie Blaylock. The cuckoo. When Mattie was awake, she spent her time peering through her curtains, keeping tabs on everyone’s comings and goings. Rarely dressed, often drunk, always angry, she still had enough sense left not to yell at Wyatt, but when she saw Josie, she’d pop out onto her porch, like the little bird in a German clock, yelling, “Bitch! Jew slut! I see what you’re doing. You’ve got to have them all, don’t you! First Wyatt, now Morgan.”

  Which was absurd. Josie hardly ever saw Morgan, and she rarely spoke to Wyatt. In fact, her entire attention seemed quite focused on Doc, and Lou began to wonder if he wasn’t the one Josie had her heart set on.

  Josie was really good with him. “Sick people are like
that,” she’d say when Doc was fretful or despondent. “Besides, in this weather—who isn’t a little crabby?” She was full of energy and chatter and good cheer, but somehow she didn’t set Doc’s teeth on edge. Maybe it was because she complained about things, too, and that gave Doc permission to feel as bad as he really did, instead of trying to pretend that he was fine.

  “I’d have thought all this rain would cool things down,” Josie said one morning. “Dry heat is bad, but this!” She waved at her face with both hands and laughed at her own discomfort. “This is horrible! And poor you, with a fever! I don’t know how you stand it, Doc.”

  “I might as well’ve . . . stayed home, in Atlanta,” he muttered, “instead of comin’ all . . . the way to Arizona to die.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Lou said automatically, but while Josie didn’t exactly change the subject, she always found ways to distract Doc.

  “The weather is awful in Washington, too,” she told him. “They’re hoping to make Mr. Garfield more comfortable with a new machine. It’s an air blower that pushes an artificial breeze over a big chest of ice. A navy engineer invented it, just for the president. They say it brings the temperature in his room down by twenty degrees! I wonder if we could set up something like that here?”

  Nothing came of the notion, but she got Doc interested in how such a device might work, and that gave them all something fresh to talk about.

  She always stopped at Western Union on the way to Lou’s. The morning bulletin from Garfield’s doctors was good for half an hour of discussion every morning. Once, however, she reported that the latest attempt to remove the bullet from the president’s body had led to an infection, and the dentist flew into a sickly, startling rage.

  “His surgeons . . . are killin’ him! Idiots . . . still think a filthy . . . gore-spattered frock coat is . . . evidence of their . . . vast professional experience. They won’t even . . . wash their hands, let alone rinse . . . their instruments in carbolic!”

  “Doc, please!” Lou cried. “Don’t upset yourself—”

  But Josie asked, “What’s carbolic?” Which made for nearly fifteen minutes of more reasonable conversation before Josie got up and took something out of the oven.

  “Here,” she said, bringing Doc a dish of something bland and custardy-looking. “Try this.”

  “Not hungry” was always his first reaction, but when Josie pouted, he always gave in. “All right. I surrender. What have you . . . made for us today?”

  “Noodle kugel. Try one bite and I promise I won’t nag anymore!”

  “You are . . . a shameless liar.”

  Which was true, of course. Josie never gave up until he finished everything on the plate.

  “It’s a match made in heaven,” Josie told Lou once. “Doc needs to eat. I love to cook. Every bite he takes feels like a curtain call.”

  Lou smiled at that, but she couldn’t help thinking, Maybe she’ll marry him and he’ll be off my hands forever.

  The idea made her very happy, for reasons both kindly and selfish.

  “MR. GARFIELD IS BEING MOVED to the Jersey shore,” Josie reported one morning. “They’re hoping ocean air will help.”

  It didn’t, and a week later, a national day of prayer and fasting was declared. “Tombstone’s ahead of the times,” Josie noted. “We’re already fasting!”

  The roads remained impassable and food supplies were dwindling. There was no starvation, for beef was available in monotonous quantity, but it took real thought to make the most of a narrowing selection of ingredients if you wanted more than meat. Josie’s “night work” sometimes gave her access to hoarded delicacies, which she shared with an exuberance that made Lou forget how the girl had earned them. One day she arrived with a miraculous can of peaches and declared, “God knows what we’ll do tomorrow, but today? I think we’ve got just enough flour for cobbler! We’ll use the juice to sweeten the batter and save the last of the sugar to sprinkle on top.”

  Later, when she stooped to take the cobbler out of the oven, Josie said, “You know you’re in Arizona when the oven is cooler than the kitchen!” But she and Lou had fun.

  IT WAS STILL HELLISHLY HOT IN LATE AUGUST, but the thunderstorms gradually became less frequent and the cloudbursts shorter. Road crews were able to make repairs and on September 1, supplies began to reach Tombstone again. Everyone’s mood lifted, though drinking remained the town’s most popular pastime.

  At the Alhambra, a drunk named Howell Creevey entertained the entire saloon by taking bets that he could put a live tarantula in his mouth.

  “Saw it myself,” Morgan told Doc. “He did it three times without getting stung.”

  “Self-preservation,” the dentist murmured. “I have seen . . . Mr. Creevey’s mouth. The tarantula . . . would have died.”

  That was the first real sign that Doc had turned the corner. He could say only three or four words at a time, but the fever had abated. The chest pain had diminished. He was quiet-eyed and calmer now.

  The president’s condition, by contrast, continued to deteriorate.

  “If Mr. Garfield’s . . . doctors had left that poor soul alone,” Doc told Josie one afternoon, “he’d be up . . . and walkin’ by now.”

  “And so would you be, if you’d stop talking and eat more— Oy, mein Gott! I keep hearing my mother’s words coming out of my mouth. ‘Eat! Eat! You’re too thin! I made this just for you!’”

  “Tell me about her,” Doc suggested. Stop shoving food at me, he meant.

  “She’s too boring to talk about.” Then, struck by a thought, Josie sat still. “It just now occurred to me that she moved from Prussia to New York to California. Across Europe, and across the Atlantic, and around the Horn to the Pacific . . . No wonder she wanted life to be boring! She’d enough adventure already.”

  “When did you . . . see her last?”

  “Goodness! Almost three years. I should write more often, but . . .”

  “You’re not sure . . . what to tell them.”

  She shrugged and changed the subject. “There was another telegram from Kate this morning.”

  Stopping as she did to get the latest news from Washington, it was natural for her to take delivery of the telegrams and bring them to Doc. This morning’s message was in Latin: SINE AMOR NIHIL EST VITA STOP.

  “What does that mean?” Josie asked.

  “Without love, life is empty. My own words . . . comin’ back to haunt me.”

  Josie sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Doc,” she said, “be honest. Do you still love Kate?”

  He looked away, his face hardening in the effort to stop tears that still lay near the surface.

  “I thought so,” Josie said. “Listen, what Kate did was awful, but Johnny Behan put her up to it. And believe me—when that louse wants to be charming, he is impossible to resist.”

  They were both thoughtful for a time. Then Josie put her hand on Doc’s. “Yom Kippur’s coming,” she told him. “On the Jewish calendar, it’s a day to ask forgiveness but . . . also a day to grant it.”

  THAT WAS WHAT WYATT AND LOU SAW through the front window on their way in for lunch: that moment of quiet intimacy.

  “A match made in heaven,” Lou murmured, not realizing how deep those words would cut.

  “I just remembered something I gotta do in town,” Wyatt said. “I’ll eat over at the hotel.”

  Hell, he meant. I waited too long, and now I’ve missed my chance.

  ONCE THE ROADS WERE DRY AND SOLID, the ore wagons began rolling again and the mines and mills returned to full capacity. Stagecoaches were back on schedule by early September. Robberies resumed.

  The Bisbee coach was the thieves’ first target. They got away with jewelry and cash from the passengers, along with a strongbox containing $2500. Deputy Sheriff Billy Breakenridge, Deputy Federal Marshal Virgil Earp, and special officers Morgan and Wyatt Earp, promptly tracked down robbers, who turned out to be none other than Deputy Sheriff Frank Stilwell and a friend o
f his named Pete Spence.

  “Shall I tell Sheriff Behan you’ve resigned?” Billy B. asked Stilwell.

  “Go to hell,” Frank said.

  Bail was set at seven thousand dollars. Which should have been enough.

  The summer heat moderated from lethal to merely brutal. The worst seemed to be over for Doc Holliday, and he had made his intentions clear. He would begin a careful exercise regime and go back to work at the Alhambra as soon as he’d regained some stamina. The moment he had any kind of income, he’d stop imposing on Morgan and Lou and move back to Mrs. Fly’s boardinghouse. Morgan had his doubts about the wisdom of this plan, and despite her eagerness to get some privacy back, Lou fretted about a relapse. But when Doc told Josie, she said, “Good! Because I’ve been working on a surprise for you, and you have to walk all the way to Sixth and Allen to find out what it is.”

  And that, he realized, was Josie’s most endearing trait: She approved. Whatever you wanted to do, she believed that it was good and that you were right to do it.

  By September 5, Doc Holliday was seen again on the streets of Tombstone, leaning on his cane, visibly weakened but walking a little farther every morning on those broomstick legs of his.

  “Hey, Doc! I thought you left town!” the tactful would say, while the more bluntly honest might admit, “Damn, Doc! I thought you was dead.”

  “Not far from it,” he’d tell them. And yet, all odds against, he’d lived beyond his thirtieth birthday, and now he had two simple goals: add distance to his walk each day and find out what Miss Josephine was up to. Often she accompanied him on these walks, a tiny dynamo, chattering and cheerful.

  So many new buildings had gone up since the fire in June, he hardly recognized the town, but when he finally rounded the corner of Sixth and Allen, he stood still, startled to see that a large two-story building being constructed on the very spot where Fred White had been shot.