Southern Son
Page 1
SOUTHERN SON
SOUTHERN SON
The Saga of Doc Holliday
Book One
A Novel
VICTORIA WILCOX
For my mother
Beth Wanlass Peirson
From whom I inherited a love of reading, research, and traveling into the past.
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Copyright © 2013 Victoria Wilcox
Previously published as Inheritance
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Names: Wilcox, Victoria, author.
Title: Southern son : the saga of Doc Holliday : a novel / Victoria Wilcox.
Other titles: Inheritance | Saga of Doc Holliday
Description: Guilford, Connecticut ; Helena, Montana : TwoDot ; Distributed by National Book Network, 2019. | Previously titled Inheritance, published by Knox Robinson (London), 2013, ?2012. The first volume in the Doc Holliday trilogy. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019017955 (print) | LCCN 2019018840 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493044702 () | ISBN 9781493044696 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781493044702 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Holliday, John Henry, 1851-1887—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Western stories. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3623.I5327 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.I5327 S68 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017955
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
The water is wide, I cannot get o’er –
Give me a boat to take me home.
My true love waits on yonder shore,
So far away, so long alone.
But love is gentle and love is kind,
And love can soothe a lonely heart.
The more we seek, the more we find,
Love keeps us strong though we’re apart.
Irish Folk Song
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
Author’s Note
About the Author
Chapter One
FAYETTEVILLE, GEORGIA 1862
JOHN HENRY HOLLIDAY BELIEVED IN HEROES—HE CAME FROM A LONG line of them, after all. From his distant Irish ancestors who had fought English invaders down to his father and uncles who fought Yankee oppressors, the Hollidays were famous for being fighting men. And so it was with some disappointment that John Henry listened to the eulogy being read over his grandfather Robert Alexander Holliday’s grave that gray November day when Grandpa Bob was buried in the family plot in the Fayetteville Cemetery. For though Bob Holliday had been a loyal Southerner all his life and had passed a fighting spirit on down to his descendants, he had never himself raised arms in any kind of fight, and to young John Henry’s way of thinking that was a real shame.
Not that Grandpa Bob had lived a shameful life, as a whole. He was well-loved by his family and well-respected by the little Georgia town he had helped to settle, and as the owner of the most popular tavern on the Jonesboro Road, he was a man of many friends as well. In fact, it was “Uncle Bob’s Tavern” that had helped to put Fayetteville on the map in the first place, giving thirsty travelers a pleasant place to stop on the long ride from Newnan to Decatur. In those early pioneer days, when most of Georgia was still fresh out of the Indian Nation, hotels were few and far between, and a country tavern seemed like the very center of civilization. With his genial personality, and the help of his wife and six living children, Bob Holliday had prospered in the inn-keeping business and in the farming business, as well, with an eight-hundred acre place south of town and even a few hard-earned slaves to help till the soil.
No, there was nothing all that shameful about Grandpa Bob’s life except for the peace of it, and that wasn’t really his fault. He couldn’t help having been born too late to fight against the British and too early to fight against the Yanks. Still, John Henry felt disappointed as the preacher pronounced the eulogy. Not a single battle to his grandfather’s credit! Not even a sword, like the one Great-Grandfather Henry Burroughs had used in the Revolutionary War, to pass down to a hero-worshipping grandson. Just a lot of talk about hard work and responsibility, and Bob Holliday’s word being as good as his bond, and where was the heroism in that?
John Henry sighed as he shivered in the damp November chill, wishing that the funeral would hurry and get over. The sermon had been going on for what seemed like hours already, and there were still the benediction and the burial to go, the clumps of red clay falling with a hard finality on the pinewood box in which his grandfather was laid out. Grandpa Bob’s remains had been in that box for two days now, resting for viewing in the best parlor of Uncle John’s big white-columned house just off the Fayetteville town square, and John Henry had been obliged to stand as honor guard while the whole village came through to pay their respects, a grandson’s duty to his grandfather’s memory. For a restless eleven-year-old boy, standing still for any time at all was difficult; standing with his head bowed and a properly mournful countenance on his face was torture.
But no one could have guessed by looking at him how hard John Henry had to work at being reverent. With his blue eyes downcast under sandy lashes and his lips moving silently in response to the prayers, he was the very model of good behavior. He was a handsome boy, dressed for the funeral in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’ suit, his fair hair pomaded neatly into place. He had his father’s high cheekbones, his mother’s fine narrow nose and expressive mouth, an easy grace about him that matched the rhythm of his slow southern drawl. And if it hadn’t been for the way he kept fiddling with his hands and fussing with the wool cap he held in front of him, one would have thought him a properly placid child. But there was nothing placid about John Henry. He only stood so politely still because he had been trained by his mother to be polite. Left to his own whims, he would have bolted from the cemetery long ago, grabbed the first horse he found tied to a rail, and headed off into the open countryside for a fast ride.
It wasn’t that he didn’t truly mourn his grandfather’s passing, of course. John Henry had loved Grandpa Bob as much as the rest of the grandchildren, though since he lived away off in Griffin, thirty miles to the east, he didn’t get to visit as often as the rest of the Fayette County clan. But his father had brought him to Fayetteville with enough regularity that he knew his grandparents and aunts and uncles well, and considered his first cousins to be his closest friends, and he had actually cried himself to sleep the night he heard that Grandpa Bob had died, though his fat
her would have called that an unmanly show of emotion had he known.
His mother knew, though she never said a word about it. Alice Jane McKey Holliday was a well-bred woman and a dutiful wife, and she would never dream of discussing something of which her husband disapproved. If Henry Holliday had ordered their son to keep his emotions in check, then she would never reveal that she had heard the boy’s weeping as he buried his face in his feather bed pillow in the room next to her own. But the next morning, she had laid her hand on John Henry’s shoulder, and said in her sweet and sensitive voice: “It breaks all our hearts to lose your Grandfather. Why, heaven itself must have been cryin’ some last night.” And John Henry knew that she had heard him, and would keep his confidence.
He stole a glance at his mother, noting how she stood near the grave with her eyes prayerfully closed, her face in pale repose under the dark veil of her silk mourning bonnet. On the bodice of her black mourning dress, she wore the symbol of another death, an ebony broach set with a lock of hair taken from her dead baby daughter. The somberness of Alice Jane’s attire contrasted sharply with the alabaster whiteness of her skin, and emphasized the dark shadows that showed beneath her eyes. The shadows were caused, she said, by too many sleepless nights worrying over the health of her husband, who had recently returned from the War on a medical discharge. But it wasn’t just worry over her husband’s illness that caused her tired and drawn appearance. Alice Jane had been sick for some time herself, suffering from an undulant fever and a nagging cough, and the added strain of caring for her husband in his recuperation was wearing her to the point of exhaustion.
Her husband’s early return from Virginia, occasioned by a long bout of camp sickness, had been the sad ending to a proud military career. As Captain Quartermaster of the 27th Georgia Infantry, Henry Burroughs Holliday had seen action at Williamsburg and Seven Pines, Cold Harbor and Malvern Hill, before being promoted to Major on Christmas Day of 1861. But then his unit moved on to the defense of Richmond, where the spring rains turned the green countryside of Virginia into a muddy bog that trapped the men and spread disease through the camps of tents and shacks, and Major Holliday had taken sick along with his men, suffering from a bout of watery dysentery that threatened to waste him away. The camp doctor tried every remedy he had, but Henry finally had to surrender to the sickness and resign his commission with the Army, returning home to Georgia in the early fall of 1862. For the proud Major, it was a galling defeat. But though his Confederate gray uniform hung loosely on his illness-ravaged figure, Henry Holliday still looked like a hero to his son, with his black Irish hair streaked with silver and his eyes a cool uncompromising blue—eyes that could chastise with only a glance, as John Henry knew only too well. But John Henry didn’t mind his father’s militarily disciplined demeanor. A hero was supposed to be strong, after all, and John Henry was proud to be a hero’s son.
Henry Holliday was the bravest man his son had ever known, beholden to no one, afraid of nothing—a legend and a legacy impossible to follow. Henry had been a fighter since he was old enough to load a gun and had already fought in two wars before the struggle for Southern independence began, winning his first commission at only nineteen-years-old as a Second Lieutenant in the Creek Indian War. When the War with Mexico broke out, Lieutenant Holliday had signed up again and served with valor from Vera Cruz to Monterrey, coming home in glory and full of stories to tell of the great adventure—of rough and wild Texas where longhorn cattle grazed on endless acres of grassland, of strange Spanish Mexico and the fierce Indian warriors of the western deserts. John Henry had been raised on his father’s war stories and thought them even more exciting than the penny-novel tales of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett that were so popular with other boys. When John Henry’s father talked of Texas, there was a gleam in his eyes that made the adventure seem so real that John Henry could almost picture himself there, too.
But for now, Henry Holliday’s eyes were staring dispassionately ahead of him, as he stood beside the open grave, a shovel in his leather-gloved hands. As the oldest of Grandpa Bob Holliday’s four living sons, it was Henry’s right to place the first spadeful of dirt on his father’s coffin as they lowered the box into the ground—a privilege he would have missed if he hadn’t returned from the War just a few weeks before. Now, instead of commanding men, he was at the forefront of a cemetery full of mourners, spreading out around the graveside in a dark and somber circle of family and friends. Grandpa Bob’s sons and daughters stood closest to the coffin, the men wearing black armbands in honor of their deceased, the women with their grieving faces hidden behind the heavy veils of black mourning bonnets. Behind them stood the daughters-inlaw, sniffling daintily into their black-trimmed handkerchiefs and trying to keep all the cousins quiet while the preacher rambled on. Past the family were the neighbors and business associates, hats in hands and heads bowed. And past them, at a properly respectful distance stood the Negro slaves, swaying and murmuring in musical lamentation.
If only the preacher would say a final “Amen” and get on with it! John Henry’s already thin patience was wearing even thinner, and he let out a loud sigh and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, trying to keep himself warm in the wintry chill of the air.
“Stop fiddlin’, Cousin John Henry!” The whispered words came as both a scold and a tease, and he turned to look into the watchful eyes of his Cousin Mattie, who was standing just behind him in the circle of grandchildren. As the oldest of the girl cousins, Mattie Holliday had always made it her business to keep an eye on the others, and especially on John Henry who had no sister of his own to look after him, and he usually didn’t mind too much.
Mattie was all right, for a girl, with a bright sense of humor and an adventurous streak to match his own, though she was getting too grown up and ladylike to show it very often. Young ladies of almost thirteen-years-old couldn’t keep throwing their skirts up to ride horses the way Mattie used to like to do when she and John Henry had been children together. For all her growing up, though, Mattie still looked childlike. She was just a little thing, barely as tall as John Henry though she was eighteen-months his elder, with eyes too large for her little heart-shaped face, too wise for a girl her age. And though she wasn’t really what one could call a beauty, those eyes of hers were beautiful: dark brown flecked with streaks of gray, changing in the changing light, calm and deep as evening shadows in the woods along the river.
“I’m not fiddlin’, Mattie,” he whispered back. “I’m just bored, that’s all.”
“How could you be bored at Grandpa’s funeral? I should think you’d be cryin’ harder than the rest of us, seein’ as how you were his favorite.”
“Says who?”
“Says everybody. You’re the only son of his oldest son, aren’t you? That’s bound to make you the favorite.”
John Henry shrugged, feeling the uncomfortable weight of his special place in the Holliday family: only son of the oldest son, primary heir of the Holliday clan, and future guardian of the family’s good name, as well. For as long as he could remember, he had been taught that it would one day be his responsibility to represent the Holliday family to the world. The family, he knew, would always be watching.
But for now, the only one watching was Cousin Mattie, and sparring with her was more entertaining than listening to the preacher, anyhow.
“And I guess you don’t call that fiddlin’,” he said, “playin’ with those rosary beads of yours.”
“I’m not playin’,” she retorted. “I’m prayin’ to the Blessed Mother for Grandpa’s soul.”
Mattie always took offense whenever anyone derided her Catholic traditions. Though the rest of the Holliday family was Irish Protestant, John Henry’s uncle Rob had converted to Catholicism when he married Aunt Mary Anne Fitzgerald, and their five daughters all worshipped the Virgin Mary and the Roman Pope. Popish, John Henry’s mother called them, though the Hollidays generally tolerated the Fitzgerald’s religion.
“. .
. and it wouldn’t hurt you to do some prayin’, too, you know,” Mattie added.
“Oh, I’m prayin’, all right,” John Henry replied with a grin, “I’m prayin’ this preacher gets done with his preachin’ so I can get to supper soon! I’m starvin’, aren’t you?”
“No,” Mattie answered piously, her brown eyes averted from his mischievous gaze.
“We’re havin’ smoked ham and sweet potatoes,” John Henry tempted, “hot buttered biscuits, pecan pie . . . can’t you just taste it, Mattie? Bet you can! Bet you’re as hungry as me, under all that proper religion of yours . . .”
And just as he had expected her to, Mattie rose to the challenge.
“John Henry!” she said loudly, forgetting herself for a moment too long, “you are just shameful! I don’t know why I even bother to help you behave!”
And as she spoke, her voice rising above the solemn sound of the sermon, the crowd of mourners turned to stare at the auburn-headed girl whose cheeks were blushing crimson with embarrassment. Only the preacher seemed unaware of the disturbance, and kept right on with his sermonizing, quoting endlessly from the Holy Book: “. . . that it is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law . . .”
John Henry quickly bowed his head to hide a laugh, though Mattie heard the sound of it.
“Very funny, John Henry! I hope you’re satisfied now that you’ve made a mockery of me in front of the whole family. Have you no decency at all?”
“Aw, Mattie,” he drawled, “I was just foolin’ around, you know that! I wasn’t tryin’ to get you in trouble. Besides, everybody knows you’re too good to make a fuss in public. I’ll own up, if anybody asks.”
“I still say you’re shameful, not carin’ anything about Grandpa bein’ dead.”
“I never said I didn’t care. But my Pa says a man’s got to quarter his feelings and not cry over somebody dyin’. So I’m not cryin’, that’s all.”