Southern Son

by Victoria Wilcox

  “We will, of course, be looking forward to the final receipt of your diploma,” Henry said in closing, as though he looked forward more to that than to the arrival of his son.

  But John Henry was determined not to let his father’s cool correspondence detract from the glory of his final night of dental school. And it was a glorious night, with the Germania Orchestra playing a rousing overture while the faculty, alumni, and graduates marched into the Hall and took their places in rows of seats on the gaslit stage. There was an invocation by the Reverend William Blackwood, and a reading of the impressive accomplishment of the graduating class: 5,036 patients treated in the Clinic and 1,591 cases mounted in the Dental Laboratory. Then, one by one, the students stood and walked across the stage to shake hands with Dean Wildman and be awarded the Doctor of Dental Surgery Degree. And though John Henry’s diploma did indeed have the words Provisional Certificate printed where the date should have been, at least his name was written properly, and as it would be known forever more—Dr. John Henry Holliday.

  His mother would have been proud.

  Chapter Ten

  ST. LOUIS, 1872

  HE HAD EXPECTED THE RIVER TO BE BIGGER, AFTER ALL HE’D HEARD OF it. But here where the ferry crossed the muddy waters, the Mississippi was hardly wider than the Savannah River back home in Georgia. It was a quarter of a mile across maybe, not much more, and flat as a fishpond. Yet for all its seeming calm, the Mississippi flowed swiftly southward, carrying a crowd of river commerce along its three-thousand mile run from Minnesota to New Orleans.

  On the western bank of the river, midway on its course, the city of St. Louis rose in smoky splendor, the stacks of its factories thrusting up into the coal-gray haze that hung overhead. Along its crowded, cobblestoned levee, teamsters maneuvered delivery wagons, stevedores unloaded freight, mud clerks checked shipping lists, and roustabouts threw down gangplanks from riverboats moored so close together that they could have scraped paint from each other’s hulls. In the shadows of the Ead’s Bridge pier, a curious group had gathered to poke sticks at an old alligator, while nearby one man was beating another man with a spade so hard it looked like he might kill him.

  The St. Louis riverfront was less of a grand entrance than a back door, flanked by those rows of factories and warehouses and the requisite saloons and gambling parlors along Levee Street. The city proper turned its face westward, toward the prairies and the wild frontier.

  But it was no frontier town that Jameson and John Henry entered as they made their way from the river and Levee Street up the long hill of Market Street. Though St. Louis was less populous than Philadelphia, it was civilized enough to have horse-drawn streetcars on its graveled macadam roads and rows of tall brick business buildings and fine new hotels. On the south side of the city, where Jameson lived, the shops and restaurants gave way to homes and boarding houses, livery stables and schools. It was a comfortable city, like a big Atlanta, John Henry thought as they made their way to Fourth Street. At least, he thought so until Jameson knocked on the paneled door.

  “Ja? Was wollen Sie?” A small gray-haired woman stood in the doorway and peered at them, her eyes appraising John Henry first before turning to Jameson. Then she let out a squeal of delight. “August! Liebchen!”

  “Tante!” Jameson answered back as the woman’s arms were flung around him.

  “Ich habe dich sehr vermisst, mein kleiner August!” the woman exclaimed. “Bleibst du diesmal hier? Dein Zimmer ist schon fertig.”

  “Ja, Tante, ich bliebe jetzt fuer immer.”

  Then the woman turned those appraising eyes back to John Henry.

  “Und wen hast du hier mitgebracht?”

  “Das ist ein Freund von meiner Schule aus Philadelphia. Er ist auch ein Doktor, John Henry Holliday. Ich hoffe du hast auch Platz fuer ihn.”

  John Henry guessed that to be an introduction, and when Jameson gestured toward him he quickly pulled off his hat and swept it down into a bow. The woman smiled and curtsied, then to John Henry’s surprise, she flung her ample arms around him as well.

  “Ach!” she exclaimed again, “jeder Freund von unserem August ist hier willkommen.” Then she nodded and said in heavily accented English: “Doctor, come in, come in. We are all family here,” and she pulled both young men into the house, baggage and all.

  “Who is she?” John Henry whispered as the woman took their things and bustled away into an adjoining room. “What does she mean ‘we’re all family’?”

  “She’s my mother’s cousin,” Jameson whispered back. “We all call her Tante—that’s German for Aunt—in respect for her age. She owns this house and takes in borders to help make ends meet.”

  “German? But I thought you said your family was French. I thought you were born in New York City . . .”

  “I was born in New York,” Jameson said defensively, “and my Father was born in France, as I said. But his parents were German, like my mother and her family. My full name is Auguste Jameson Fuches Junior, after my father. Everyone here calls me Auguste, like him.” Then he added in a lowered voice, out of his aunt’s hearing. “I only used Jameson in Philadelphia, because it seemed so much less . . .”

  “German?” John Henry said, completing the unfinished thought, and Jameson’s fair face reddened right up to his pale-blonde hair.

  “My family is still only one generation off the boat,” he explained apologetically, “and you know how those Philadelphians are about society and all. One has to have the right background to be considered really American . . .”

  John Henry knew just what Jameson was talking about. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d been called Johnny Reb, mostly in jest, but often by way of an insult, as well. But finding out that his friend was something less than he seemed still didn’t sit well with him. Being Southern was one thing, but being so close to foreign was something else again . . .

  “Well, here in St. Louis, everyone is German!” Jameson said proudly. “There’s Prussians, and Saxons, and Bavarians—it’s the water they all come for. Not the muddy Mississippi, but the artesian water from caves under the river. Best beer-making water outside of Germany! And Tony Faust’s restaurant has some of the best beer in St. Louis. We’ll be having dinner there tonight with Dr. Judd to celebrate my graduation from dental school. Tante!” he called to the old woman. “Kannst du uns ein Bad einlassen?” Then he turned back to his friend. “We’ll have to wash off some of this road dirt before we meet with Dr. Judd. Though as you’ll see, our city water isn’t as pure as the artesian springs. As Mark Twain says, There’s an acre of soil in dilution in every tumblerful of St. Louis tap water.”

  “And who is Mark Twain?” John Henry asked. “Another German relative?”

  Jameson answered with a laugh. “He’s just a journalist who used to live here abouts. He’s got a sense of humor and a clever way of writing about things. Maybe you’ve heard of a book he wrote: The Innocents Abroad? It got some good reviews. But it seems to me that what he ought to write is river stories. That’s what he really knows.”

  Tony Faust’s famous beer was supplied by the brewery of Eberhard Anhauser, a former soapmaker who won the beer business in a poker game and gave it to his son-in-law Adolphus Busch to manage. After several trips back to Germany looking for a good malt recipe, Adolphus had finally found one in the little village of Budweis. “The Beer of Kings” the Budweisers called their lager, but Adolphus turned the name around to “The King of Beers,” and it was making the family brewery a small fortune back home in St. Louis. But it was dentistry, not beer brewing, that Dr. Homer Judd wanted to discuss as he met his former student Jameson Fuches and young Dr. Holliday at Tony Faust’s restaurant that night.

  Dr. Judd was a quietly serious sort of man, his eyes as solemn and gray as his neatly-trimmed gray goatee. He seemed bookishly brilliant but otherwise dull, as he and Jameson discussed the merits of higher dental education and how Dr. Judd had devised the Greek nomenclature that identified the surfaces of the thirty-t
wo teeth in the adult mouth. For anyone other than a dentist, it would have been a deadly boring conversation, and even John Henry was only halfway listening. With a whole new city to explore, discussing dental terminology seemed like a shameful waste of time.

  So when Dr. Judd mentioned that he’d spent some time in the California gold fields back in the rush of ‘49, walking away from a prosperous medical practice in Ohio to go off fortune hunting, John Henry was suddenly paying attention.

  “Of course, packing up my medical office didn’t require much but a medical bag, as I had already bought a portable head-rest and Pocket Dental Office in case I should need to make house calls in Ohio.”

  “A Pocket Dental Office?” John Henry questioned. He knew, of course, of the portable headrests which itinerant dentists used, attaching them to any convenient armchair to turn it into a dental surgery chair. But the other was something he hadn’t encountered.

  “A tiny box,” Dr. Judd replied, “only as big as a daguerreotype case, holding a boned handle and attachable instruments: miniature-sized probes, lancets, carvers. There’s a company in Chicago that manufactures the cases, custom-fitted. I thought the traveling tools would come in handy when I reached California. If I didn’t make my fortune right away, I could practice a little medicine or dentistry on the miners in the gold camps. I soon discovered that a miner with a toothache and a little gold dust in his pocket would gladly part with some of the latter to relieve some of the former.”

  “And did you make your fortune, Sir?”

  Dr. Judd took a sip of his beer before answering. “I learned a fortune’s worth about the world,” he replied. “But no, I didn’t bring home any gold. Just a back worn from bending over a sluice run all day taking up panfuls of Sacramento River water. That and a heart disillusioned with the nature of mankind.”

  “How is that, Dr. Judd?” Jameson asked.

  “It was the greed of gold that drew me across the plains. Crossing the plains was an adventure in itself in those days, but for myself, as for so many thousands of others, it was the greed of the gold that made the trip seem worthwhile. Though somehow, personal greed is easy to justify. I needed the riches that California would bring, I told myself, so that I could establish a school where I could share my knowledge of medicine with others. I reasoned that my desire for gold was good, unlike the ugly greed I saw all around me there in the gold fields. The others only wanted the riches to buy themselves fine clothes, or fast horses, or more liquor than they already had. I didn’t see, at first, that we were all after the same thing: personal gratification. It matters little what the end of the journey brings, if the journey itself has been poorly made.”

  He was silent for a moment, staring down into his foamy beer, and something made John Henry push for more.

  “And how did your journey go, Dr. Judd?”

  “Not well,” the doctor said quietly. “Not well at all.” Then he looked up and the sorrow in his solemn gray eyes sent a shiver through John Henry’s soul. “I shot a man there, in California. It was over nothing, of course; the right to a particularly profitable stretch of the river. We were all armed, as one is in frontier territory, and when I disputed the man’s claim, he pulled his weapon on me. I didn’t even think before reaching for my own. I didn’t expect it to go off, really, only to point it at him in my own defense. But I hadn’t understood that self-defense is also offense; that as soon as the weapon is drawn, the end is inevitable.”

  “What do you mean?” Jameson asked, his pale face growing paler still in apprehension.

  “I killed the man,” Dr. Judd said quietly. “I pulled the trigger and shot him through the heart. But there’s something somehow disconnected between the pull of a trigger and a bullet slamming into an enemy, as if the two actions aren’t really cause and effect. I shot in self-defense; I didn’t mean to shoot him down. I watched him fall and couldn’t believe what I had done. I still can’t believe it. And only because we were in the wilderness with no law at hand did I escape retribution. But I pay the price, nonetheless. I live everyday with that man’s death hanging on my soul.”

  “But you had to pull on him, Sir,” John Henry said quickly. “That miner might have killed you . . .”

  “Then the blood would have been on his hands, not mine. He died innocent, at least of my death. Pray you never have to live with a thing like that, young Dr. Holliday.”

  Jameson was shaken by his preceptor’s confession and worried over it for days after, as if the Dr. Judd he had known before and the one he knew now were two different men entirely. But John Henry found the story daring. He’d have drawn his pistol too, under the circumstances, and likely have fired the shot as well. There wasn’t much sense in having a firearm for protection, after all, if one didn’t plan to use it. The real lesson of the story, in his opinion, was that a man had to choose his companions wisely and not find himself at odds over a mine claim.

  But there wasn’t much time for the two young men to discuss the tale, as they saw to the patients in Jameson’s newly opened dental office. Tante had given up her parlor for his use and he’d turned the small space into an efficient operating arena, with an old dental chair positioned near the front windows to catch the sunlight and a long table to serve as a laboratory. A chair in the narrow downstairs hallway served as a waiting room, and as soon as Jameson hung out his shingle, that chair was rarely empty. The neighborhood was glad to have a local boy practicing dentistry, and it seemed like half of his Fourth Street neighbors had been nursing tooth-aches and broken teeth, just waiting for their own Dr. Fuches to return from Philadelphia. There was even enough work for John Henry to handle some cases, and for the first time in his life, he had some pocket money of his own, money his father knew nothing about and couldn’t control. It was fine feeling to be a young man of means in an exciting new city.

  The spring was sultry, the sky hazy with humidity carried on the warm wind from New Orleans. Cyclone weather the locals called it, though there was not so much as a rain cloud in sight, and a little rain would have been a welcome relief, clearing the air and watering down the gravel and macadam streets that seemed dusty all the time. Even the horses that pulled the Fourth Street rail cars were dusty-maned, billowing brown clouds with every shake of their heads. John Henry wondered idly if the brick buildings that crowded the downtown streets got their distinctive ruddy-red color from the brickmaker’s clay, or from the cloud of dust that rose up so endlessly from the streets below and came into Tante’s parlor along with the patients.

  When the two young dentists weren’t working, they took in the sights of St. Louis: restaurants and beer-gardens, steamboats plying the muddy waters of the Mississippi, horse-drawn rail cars and the new horse racing track on the outskirts of town. But the biggest amusement in St. Louis was the theater—because of the city’s favored location as the gateway to the west, every traveling show in the country passed through town, from P. T. Barnum’s Great Traveling Museum Menagerie billed as the “Greatest Show on Earth,” to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show starring the Indian fighter William Cody and a lot of shooting and roping and riding, along with real wild Indians.

  But not everyone in St. Louis appreciated such extravaganzas. Jameson’s Tante did not approve of the theater, and did her best to stop her nephew and his friend from taking in a traveling equestrian show at the Comique Variety House the last afternoon in March.

  “Ach! Full of lewdness!” she exclaimed. “You boys stay home tonight. I cook for you something special, ja? Apfelkuchen, maybe?”

  “Whatever you cook is special, Tante,” Jameson said fondly. “But John Henry will only be here for a few weeks and he wants to see some entertainment before he goes. Don’t you want me to be a good host and show him a good time?”

  “A good time is the Beergarten in the park on Sunday. You sing some, you drink some beer. You meet nice girls there, too. Good German girls who will make fine wives for you both. You go to the Beergarten for a good time, Auguste,” she said, call
ing him by his German name.

  Jameson put his hands on her shoulders, smiling down into her motherly face. “Ja, Tante. We could meet nice German girls there. But John Henry isn’t German, so what good is the Beergarten to him?”

  “But the Variety Theater!” she exclaimed. “Better you should go to the Opera House and see some Wagner. Even Verdi, that Italian. No varieties, with those dancing girls and lewd tales. Better you should stay home.”

  “Now Tante, if I didn’t know better I’d think you were jealous! But don’t you worry, I’ll bet none of those dancing girls can cook like you! My vest is already getting tight since coming home to St. Louis. With your cooking, soon I’ll be so fat not even the Beergarten girls will want me!”

  Tante laughed with pleasure at that, then her smile turned to a frown as she looked at John Henry, her matronly eyes sizing him up and down from sandy blonde hair to polished leather boots. “Ja, Auguste, you are getting nice and fat, like a good German man, but your friend . . .”

  “I’ve always been a little lean,” John Henry said defensively, though he knew the old lady meant no harm.

  “You look too thin to me, Dr. Holliday,” Tante said, addressing him formally as she always did. “And you cough too much in the night.”

  “It’s the river air,” he replied quickly, uncomfortable with her sudden attention. “I’ll be fine once I’m back in Georgia.”

  But Tante shook her head again. “You boys stay home. There is bad weather coming, I think, a storm maybe. And the Comique Theater is so far, eighteen blocks on the horse rail cars. Better you should stay close and go to the Beergarten around the corner. And this one,” she said, looking John Henry over once again and laying her hand on his arm, “I am afraid he will be carried away in the storm. You be careful,” she said, “you watch out for the Valkyrie.”