Epitaph

by Mary Doria Russell

  It wasn’t just the big shots who were getting killed. When credit was easy, working men with families bought their own little piece of the dream, and lost everything when they lost their jobs.

  Foreclosures clogged the courts. There were burglaries in the dark and holdups in broad daylight. Before long, people were packing up, sneaking out of town at night, leaving homes and mortgages behind. Whole sections of the city were abandoned. Arson became epidemic. Small stores failed. So did big ones. Banks went over the edge and took depositors with them.

  And exactly twenty years after the Crash of 1873, the whole dismal catastrophe repeated itself.

  IF ANYONE HAD ASKED WYATT EARP for financial advice in those days, he would have said, “Invest in sin.” Vice is always the last to leave a dying town, for desperate men will rent female solace for an hour, slam down a shot of whiskey, and throw their last five dollars onto a craps table, hoping for a miracle.

  On paper, his real estate investments were hit hard, but he had income from a whorehouse and saloons. He owned his horses outright and continued to race them. Like his father-in-law before him, he stayed solvent longer than most, and he was pretty sure he could ride the downturn out.

  “Good times always end,” he’d learned to say, “and bad times never last.”

  But the depression dragged on, year after year. One by one, he sold the properties and the horses off. Sadie’s gambling debts mounted—a fair measure of his own drinking and philandering, which did not achieve the level of Johnny Behan’s but were nothing to be proud of, either. They had a real battle once. He caught her stealing cash from his wallet. She laid into him for the women.

  By that time, San Diego’s business district was a ghost town. And there was a lawsuit over a promissory note that Wyatt was likely to lose. Then they got word that Sadie’s father was sick.

  “Suppose . . .” Wyatt said one night. “Suppose we move up to San Francisco. Might be nice for you. Living closer to your family.”

  So they moved on.

  SAY THE PRAYERS. HEAL THE WOUNDS.

  WYATT, I’M SO GLAD YOU’RE HERE,” MRS. MARCUS whispered, her soft old face blotched with crying. “It’s his heart, Sadie. He don’t got long.”

  Leaving Wyatt with her mother, Sadie went into the bedroom and found her sister sitting at the bedside. “Oh, so now you come!” Hattie said bitterly. “Now, when you can be the heroine?”

  “Girls!” their father whispered. “Don’ bicker.”

  Inside the old man’s chest, was a heart as swollen and hollow as a cream puff. Even so, his eyes sparkled when he asked Sadie about the racehorses and the journey from San Diego. Her answers were full of inaccurate cheer, but it wasn’t long before he murmured, “Go on now, girls. Go help your mutti.”

  Hattie left. Sadie watched at his bedside until she was sure he was asleep, then crept out and closed the door behind herself.

  “How is he?” Wyatt asked. She shook her head and broke down, weeping silently in his arms, her whole body shaking.

  Then, without a word, she went to the kitchen, put on an apron, and began to cook as though lives depended on it. Sometimes she let her mother or her sister help. Mostly it was just Sadie in the kitchen by herself. Chopping, peeling, mashing, stirring, beating, scrubbing. Flour up to her elbows. Hands in dishwater.

  “Nobody’s hungry,” Wyatt would tell her. “Sadie, take a rest!”

  “We gotta eat,” she’d say, sounding just like her mother. And that was that.

  Henry died a few days later. For a week, streams of visitors trooped into the apartment above the bakery to be with the Marcus women. Sitting shivah, it was called.

  Josie never left the kitchen. There was too much food. A lot of it was going to waste. Wyatt was at a loss until Hattie’s husband, Emil—the other odd man out—clapped him on the shoulder one night.

  “Our job is to say yes to whatever our wives want right now. Whatever it is, just agree!”

  “But why does she keep cooking?” Wyatt asked.

  “It’s what she has to do,” Emil said. “Grief takes everyone different.”

  It could be worse, he meant. At least she’s not shooting anybody.

  FOR ALL THE SADNESS OF HENRY’S PASSING, they would remember that island in time fondly. In the cramped little apartment above the bakery, in tears and in memories, in simply holding one another and being together after frantic years of hustle and distraction, Wyatt Earp and Sadie Marcus found each other again.

  Then, on December 2, 1896, the newspapers found Wyatt.

  It was just supposed to be a night out on the town—some fun after all the sadness. Wyatt had agreed to referee a $10,000 championship prizefight between Tom Sharkey and Bob Fitzsimmons. There was a nice fee involved. They needed the money. Sadie had no interest in boxing, but she dressed up and they went to dinner at the Grotto Café. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, fifteen thousand people had gathered to see the fight.

  At ten P.M., Wyatt stepped into the ring and took off his coat. The audience gasped. Wyatt frowned. A police captain in charge of the event approached, but Wyatt still didn’t understand what the fuss was about.

  “Mr. Earp,” the officer said, “you can’t wear a pistol in here.”

  Wyatt promptly handed over the revolver that he routinely shoved into his waistband at the small of his back. “Forgot all about it,” he told the cop, and that was true. His life had been under threat for fifteen years. Keeping a weapon at hand was habit.

  Both managers came into the ring to argue about disqualifying Wyatt. Then the fight promoters joined the dispute. Wyatt stood back and let them have at it. He’d stay or go. Whatever they decided.

  The delay lengthened. The crowd got drunker and angrier. Finally, the contest got under way, but in the seventh round—just as the spectators began to enjoy the mayhem they’d paid for—Wyatt called a foul on the favorite and awarded the decision to the underdog, Tom Sharkey.

  There were screams of “Fix!” and “Payoff!” Ringside doctors, who’d witnessed the viciousness of Fitzsimmons’ low blow, called the decision fair. Sharkey went to the hospital. Bookies got hammered on long-shot bets. The next morning, Bob Fitzsimmons’ manager filed a lengthy complaint, alleging collusion between Tom Sharkey and Wyatt Earp to throw the fight and split the prize money.

  Seven doctors testified in court to the seriousness of Fitzsimmons’ foul. The lawsuit was dropped. Wyatt paid a hefty fine for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. That should have been the end of it, but the controversy simply wouldn’t die. There was too much money in it. A bartender could say, “Fitzsimmons was robbed,” and half his customers would yell, “I’ll drink to that!” Newspapers lavished an ocean of ink on the affair. The San Francisco Chronicle—whose owner had lost big on Fitzsimmons—was brutal, lampooning Wyatt Earp as a gun-toting, backsliding Methodist, selling booze and girls, up to his ears in corruption and bribery. Wyatt couldn’t go anywhere without being harassed.

  Hattie and Emil canceled their newspaper subscriptions and put on brave faces in public. The Lehnhardts had already welcomed Hattie’s widowed mother into their home. Now they invited Wyatt and Sadie to move in as well. Emil’s candy and confections business was fabulously successful, and their new house was big enough to keep everyone comfortable.

  Three months later, Sadie announced that she was expecting. She was thirty-six, so this was something of a surprise, though all the more reason for celebration. Names were discussed, but the choices were obvious. For a girl: Virginia, after Wyatt’s mother. For a boy: Henry, after Sadie’s father. Wyatt admitted he was hoping for a daughter, and Sadie understood. As much as she liked the idea of a son carrying on her father’s memory, she knew what Wyatt was thinking. A girl could marry and escape the Earp name, which would always be a burden.

  The child—a boy—was stillborn three months later. Rushing to the hospital, Wyatt slipped on the rain-slicked pavement after jumping off a trolley car and fell on his ass, right in front of a reporter.
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  Ridicule was added to public opprobrium and private sorrow.

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1897, it began to seem that nothing would ever displace Wyatt Earp in the newspapers. In fact, it took just one screaming headline. “GOLD IN THE YUKON!”

  Wyatt listened as Sadie read. When she finished the article, she looked up. “Suppose . . .” she began. “Suppose we go north.”

  “That would be good,” Wyatt said carefully, for this was the first sign that she had recovered from their loss. “We could make a fresh start.”

  So they moved on.

  THE SNOW WAS ALREADY FALLING and the rivers were freezing up when they got to Alaska. They disembarked on the coast and traveled by dog sled to their first destination, a Yukon River settlement named Rampart. The town had begun as a Russian outpost. Decades later, it was sold to a group of San Francisco Jews, who’d built it into a profitable trading post. They were willing to gave Emil Lehnhardt’s notorious brother-in-law a job there. Wyatt was grateful. So was Sadie.

  They found a one-room log cabin before the winter closed in and furnished it with simple handmade furniture. Sadie made the cabin cozy with blankets and down comforters and calico curtains, layering furs on the floor to keep the chill out. Dressed like an Inuit, Wyatt hunted for food that first season and trapped for pelts.

  “Snug as a bug in a rug,” he’d say when he opened the door to the perfume of fresh bread and the aroma of roasting ptarmigan or moose stew.

  “Eat!” she’d say, sounding just like her mother. “You’re too thin! Eat!”

  He was almost fifty. She was nearing forty. Age was mellowing them both. There were no reporters in Rampart. No scandals, no drinking binges, no gambling, no silent brooding. They were content together, and they welcomed others into that contentment.

  Most of the men who headed to the Klondike had been thrown out of work by the Panic of ’93. A hundred thousand started the journey north; barely a third would reach the gold fields. Some turned back. Many died along the way. Overloaded ships went down in storms or were crushed by ice floes. Men were buried alive in avalanches or simply got lost and froze to death.

  Fifteen hundred miles from the nearest doctor, injuries were often fatal. So were failure, liquor, and loneliness. Men killed themselves in Alaska, but not in Rampart, where the Earps saved lives in their own way. Bright lights and warm food could make all the difference to someone considering a bullet to the head. Men left Sadie’s table determined to endure another day of numbing cold and darkness. On their way out the door, such men would tell Wyatt what a lucky fella he was. He agreed, and Sadie was pleased.

  In the deep blue Arctic nights, beneath glowing green ribbons of light, they put their troubles behind them and made a genuine home for each other. Amid the birch and aspens and spruce that descended low mountains to flat and frozen water glistening with snow, they were granted a season of happiness.

  There would be other dreams to chase, other booms, other busts. Over and over, they would move on, but no matter where they went, memories of that first winter in Alaska would sustain them.

  Until memory itself began to fail.

  ON THE SAD THRESHOLD OF OLD AGE

  HOLLYWOOD WAS THEIR LAST BOOMTOWN.

  That’s where they met John Flood. They met actors like Tom Mix and William S. Hart there, too. Charlie Chaplin said hello to them once, and so did the famous writer Jack London. But John Flood was the important one. John would be the son they never had.

  After Alaska, they spent years in the California desert, prospecting for silver and gold and oil, but settled life grew more alluring as they grew older, especially after they saw their first movie. They were in town buying supplies when The Great Train Robbery came out in 1903. Fascinated, they returned to the theater over and over, trying to work out what was fake and what was real.

  “The office is just painted canvas and props,” Sadie whispered, “but they must have put the set right next to real train tracks.”

  Wyatt muttered about the things the movie got wrong. “You wouldn’t hit anybody if you waved a gun around like that,” he’d say, but what bothered him most was the way the actors pretended they were shot. “Nobody throws their arms up in the air and staggers around like that. You just fall.”

  “They need someone like you to tell them how it really was,” Sadie decided.

  Wyatt scoffed, but when Sadie got an idea in her head, you couldn’t pry it loose with a crowbar. Whenever they were anyplace near a movie theater, they’d go see the newest Westerns and she’d start in on her consultant notion again. Eventually she wore him down and when Wyatt was in his sixties, the idea began to seem like it might pay off.

  “Suppose . . .” he began one night. “Suppose we try Los Angeles.”

  She was past the change by then, plump and plain, but Sadie screamed and clapped her hands like a little girl. “Oh, Wyatt, it’s going to be grand! We’ll meet movie stars and live in a real house and I can bake and maybe they’ll even put you in a movie! You’re handsomer than any of those actors.”

  They packed up and headed for Hollywood in the summer of 1911 and rented a little house on the edge of town. Wyatt started hanging around the back lots where the weekly one-reel Westerns were being filmed, hoping that studios making movies about the “Old West” would pay him well for his firsthand knowledge.

  To his dismay, nobody seemed to give a damn about getting things right, so he fell back on faro, as he always had when they hit a new town and needed a stake. Sadie was having fun fixing the little house up—recutting quilts for curtains while the bread dough rose—when a policeman came to inform her that her husband was in jail.

  She had to use the rent money to bail Wyatt out. He wouldn’t tell her what happened. Wouldn’t speak at all until they got home. He seemed stunned. Not befuddled, but weary. “Faro’s illegal here,” he said finally, and that was all she could get out of him.

  With the faro bank confiscated as evidence, they had no cash for rent or an attorney. Then the press dredged up Tombstone and the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight again, and the next morning, it was all over the papers: NOTORIOUS MARSHAL ARRESTED IN RAID ON BUNCO GAME!

  Wyatt was ready to go back to the desert, but Sadie wasn’t willing to give up on Hollywood before they’d had time to make a mark there. Taking matters into her own small hands, she whipped up a chocolate-caramel layer cake and brought it to their landlady, in lieu of rent.

  “It isn’t fair!” she cried as the landlady forked into the cake. “There were two other men involved, but my husband got all the terrible publicity. Everything was put on him because he’s Wyatt Earp! Now we need a lawyer, and we are not rich people. Please, could you just wait a week or two our payment? Hattie Lehnhardt is my sister. I know she’ll send us something to tide us over. My husband would be so grateful if you could give us a little time.”

  Doing the notorious Wyatt Earp a favor had a certain risqué appeal. Hattie Lehnhardt was the wife of the fabulously wealthy Emil Lehnhardt, “California’s Candy King.” And the cake really was good.

  “Well,” the landlady said, finishing a second piece, “I can wait a few days for the rent. In the meantime, we have a neighbor who might be able to advise you.”

  “A lawyer? One who’ll work for free?” Mrs. Earp asked. “Have another slice! This is one of my husband’s favorite recipes.”

  “Mr. Flood is a mining engineer, not a lawyer, but he’s so smart and very organized! He is an orphan and a bachelor, poor man. He has a roommate, but I think he’s lonely. And much too thin! He’d benefit from some of your baking, Mrs. Earp. Would you like an introduction?”

  The answer was yes, so the landlady invited Mr. Flood over that evening and offered him a piece of Sadie’s cake.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Earp haven’t any children, and they are getting on in years,” she told him. “I think they’d enjoy it if you visited them now. Why not say hello and see if there isn’t something a nice young man like you could help them with?”

  THI
RTY-THREE IN 1911, John Flood wasn’t all that young, nor was he as lonely as that friendly matchmaker believed, though he was indeed a very nice man.

  He was only three when the famous gunfight took place, but he’d read the papers and knew the stories. Naturally, he was curious about the infamous Wyatt Earp. So when Mrs. Earp sent a note asking him to visit the following Sunday, John accepted the invitation.

  There was coffee and a plate of perfectly browned macaroons set out on a crisply ironed tablecloth. Everything was neat as a pin and spotlessly clean in the ramshackle little house, though the coffee was in chipped mugs, the faded tablecloth had been repeatedly mended, and the table beneath it was a rickety old thing, tipsy on the uneven floor.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Mrs. Earp said, all pudgy warmth and bustling hospitality. “How dreary! What a dreadful little place!”

  “Oh, no, it’s lovely,” John lied.

  “Well, believe you me,” Mrs. Earp confided, putting a flirtatious hand on his arm, “after all those years out in the desert—prospecting for gold and oil with Mr. Earp—any place with a roof and no snakes is a palace in my book. Wyatt, come and meet Mr. Flood!”

  Dressed simply in khaki trousers, his white cotton shirt buttoned all the way up, Wyatt Earp was tall and trim, with a full head of silver hair and a neat white mustache. Straight as a lodgepole pine, he towered above John, who was thirty years younger and a slender five feet four. Looking up at that suntanned, handsome face, John was for a breathless instant eight years old again, the age he’d been when his father died.

  He took the large, strong hand the old man offered and . . .

  That was that. He fell in love.

  “SHOULD I BE JEALOUS?” Edgar asked when John came home, burbling about the visit.

  “No!” John cried, startled, as he often was, by the way Edgar just seemed to know things. “No, but . . . it’s nice, somehow. I fixed their table, and they were so grateful!”