Epitaph (31 page)

“I will never leave you,” he had once promised her.

He had given his word, and he had broken it.

The weeks after he killed Mike Gordon were filled with discord and misery. He told himself that Kate would be glad to see the last of him, but even then, he knew she would not take it as a kindness. Indeed, when they met again—briefly, in Prescott—her fury was searing. He was a no-good lying goddam sonofabitch who'd slunk out of town while she was asleep and when he went to hell where he belonged, she would by-God dance on his grave.

He turned down the lamp. Lay back against the pile of pillows that made breathing in bed a little easier. Stared out the window toward a sky lightening on the first day of 1881. Spunk up, he told himself. Apologize. She may not care, but now is the time to try.

TWELVE MONTHS LATER,
John Henry Holliday would spend New Year's Eve sitting at Virgil Earp's bedside, waiting for Virg to die. In a state of melancholy deeper than any he had ever experienced, he would go over and over everything that had led to the gunfight in October, hoping to identify some moment, some decision, some choice
that might have made a difference in the way things had turned out. There was plenty of fault to splash around. Wyatt, Ike Clanton, Frank McLaury, Little Willie Claiborne, John Clum, Kate Harony . . . All of them bore some responsibility for what happened. And Doc himself? His involvement could be traced to a wholly innocent event. He went to the library. He struck up a conversation with a fellow reader. Who could have seen the harm in that?

Curious about the landscape around him, he was leafing through a battered copy of Lyell's
Principles of Geology
when a well-dressed young man of perhaps twenty-three years entered the room. Each nodded pleasantly to the other. That might have been the end of the encounter, if Doc hadn't noticed that the book being returned to the shelf was Anthony Trollope's
The Way We Live Now
.

“Did you enjoy the novel, sir?” he asked.

“It was a little close to home,” the young gentleman admitted. “I feel as though I am surrounded by Melmottes and Longestaffs and Carburys these days. Sometimes I wonder if we learned anything at all from the last crash.”

“Yes, there seems to be a great deal of money ridin' on a great deal of optimism. This time it's silver mines instead of railways, but . . .”

“It's still cash chasing dreams.” The young man offered his hand. “Edson Waffle,” he said, sounding resigned.

“Belgian, I presume.”

Waffle laughed, the tension leaving him. “Yes, and a lifelong victim of jokes about pancakes! My wife and I arrived last month from Ohio. I'm a teacher. I just started work at the new school down in Charleston.”

“John Holliday, from Georgia. I am a dentist, though my health prevents me from takin' on as active a practice as I would like—” He stopped. “Pardon me, did you just say there is a
school
in Charleston?”

“Yes, indeed! Drunken rustlers shoot out the lights and murderers walk the streets with impunity, but Mr. Gird employs a number of professional men at the stamping mills. They have families and want
their children to be educated. I've been hired to do the job.”

“Well, sir, that is good news for the future of Arizona!”

They exchanged a bit more small talk, and once again, that might have been the end of it, had young Mr. Waffle not decided to broach a more difficult subject. “Dr. Holliday, if you don't mind my asking, I wonder . . . how are you finding the climate? You see, my wife also suffers from . . .”

“Chest complaints?”

“Chest complaints,” Waffle repeated, grateful for the euphemism. People hesitated to speak the name of the disease, as though to say “tuberculosis” or “consumption” would cede to the illness additional power over the lives it blighted. “That's why I took the Charleston job, you see. The snow and the cold in Ohio were undermining my wife's health. We believed Arizona would be more salubrious.”

“I have not been here long enough to have a firm opinion, I'm afraid. Dust can be a problem, but there may be something to the idea of heliotherapy. I have had no episodes of pneumonia or pulmonary hemorrhage durin' my time here.”

They chatted about the treatments each sufferer had tried and what the outcomes had been, and about what else might help. Edson Waffle was heartened to discuss this with someone who was both knowledgeable and realistic, and it was only natural that the young teacher would want to introduce this pleasant, soft-voiced gentleman to Mrs. Waffle. “Would you consider visiting us in Charleston?” he asked. “I think Clara would love to meet you, and it would be so helpful for her to talk to someone who has dealt with these problems for so long.”

Doc's first visit to their home was in mid-February. “There is a difference between stamina and strength,” he told Edson's pale little wife. “Bed rest harms both, in my experience. No alternative durin' a crisis, but invalidism is not inevitable, Mrs. Waffle.” As evidence he offered the young woman his own presence at her table. “When I started ridin' back in November, a mile was all I could manage. Now,
here I am in Charleston, all the way from Tombstone!”

He had continued to gain ground physically in early 1881. His mind, too, seemed to have recovered, but there remained one last mental hill to climb. He had not played poker since Milt Joyce laid two and a half pounds of iron against the side of his head six months earlier. When he visited the Waffles, they often played cards and he could feel the old skills returning. The concentration and patience. The capacity for strategy.

“Dr. Holliday,” Edson said one Sunday, “I wonder if you would be interested in filling an open seat in a weekly game of five-card stud. One of our regulars is going to be out of town.” It was a ten-dollar ante, the teacher warned. The opponents would be men of substance. An accountant, a hydraulics engineer, and the owner of the biggest store in Charleston. Even young Mr. Waffle had more money than one might have expected, for he had used his teacher's salary to invest in a successful livery stable and was doing quite well for himself.

A ten-dollar ante was serious poker, but John Henry Holliday felt ready. The Charleston game could be an entrée to high-stakes play at the level of society he'd hoped to join in Tombstone before the unpleasantness at the Oriental. And so he had agreed to play poker in Charleston on March 15, 1881.

The Ides of March, Doc would think, looking back on it. That should have been a sign.

F
ARMERS ARE LIKE GAMBLERS IN MANY WAYS.
There's a lot of chanciness in the way they make their living. Like John Henry Holliday, Thomas Clark McLaury was a quiet, thoughtful person who found comfort in routine.

Each evening before bed, Tom would grind some coffee, draw water for the pot, and gather kindling for the morning. He'd clean up the supper things, putting pots and dishes in their places. He swept the floor, too, for moving each day's dust and grit outside made him feel like he was putting that in its place, as well. Before shutting the door, he'd look for signs of rain. At dawn, he'd roll out of his bunk, pad over to the stove, bring up the fire, and move the coffeepot to the hottest plate. While that came to a boil, he'd go outside to take a piss and study the sky again to see if he'd been right about the rain.

Weather down here took some getting used to. When it was winter up in Iowa, Arizona was warm and dry. Then in summer, when Tommy expected things to get even drier, it rained so much Frank joked about building an ark. On any given day of the year, the afternoon heat might be worse than a farmer could imagine up north, then water might freeze that very same night. These were strange conditions and a challenge to agriculture. What kind of crop could you grow in a place that might have summer and winter, both, inside a single day? What should you plant in a desert that was liable to turn into a swamp a few months later?

Not knowing any better, the McLaurys put in sixty acres of corn
their first year. Most of the crop withered before it came near to tasseling, and the rest rotted in the summer wet. After seeing their work and investment come to nothing, Frank was happy to shift his sights toward livestock when Mr. Clanton came around to explain things, but Tommy couldn't quit on the idea of being a real farmer. After the corn failed, his next thought was cotton, though he didn't know much about that, except you needed field hands to pick it. Even after the brothers started taking money for fattening Mr. Clanton's stolen cattle, the McLaurys weren't in a position to hire a crew.

Well, Tom told himself, look around you. What likes to grow here?

Cactus covered the high, sandy slopes. Cottonwood edged the streams. Grass grew in the valley. That natural pasturage was good enough for the local beef market, but when Tom heard that big ranchers like Henry Hooker and Texas John Slaughter were breeding up better cattle, he asked Mr. Hooker about his business plans, just from friendliness and curiosity.

“Chicago meat packers are paying premium prices for premium beef,” Mr. Hooker told him. “I've got the stock—if I could get better fodder, the beeves'd be worth a good deal more up north.”

“What kind of feed would you buy, sir?” Tom asked.

“Rye. Or alfalfa.” Then, seeing what Tom was driving at, Mr. Hooker told him, “Grow either of those, son, and I'll take as much as you can bale.”

Frank was unenthusiastic. “Why in hell would we want to work like mules on a crop when plain old grass just grows itself?” He was against it something fierce when Tommy borrowed money from Mr. Hooker to give rye and alfalfa a try. Tom put in eighty acres of each anyway, just to see.

Rye survived, but alfalfa really
liked
the valley. Tom was able to pay off the loan at the end of 1880 and still had enough left over to make improvements to the farm. Ranchers who'd seen how well Hooker's stock did on good feed placed orders for the next season. Tom planned to skip the rye and go with alfalfa in '81.

It was nice to make decisions without having to argue with Frank, though Tom was saddened about their falling-out. Looking back, it seemed a surprise that the brothers' partnership had lasted as long as it did, for Frank was a real McLaury. Prickly and combative. Ready to go to law over the least little dispute. “I know my rights!” was the McLaury battle cry. You could trace the clan through Irish history just by looking at generation after generation of lawsuits. As far as Tom could see, all they'd ever won in court was hard feelings among their neighbors and bad blood within the family. Nobody but Tommy ever said, “Let it go.” He'd always been the odd man out. A stranger, almost, in his own family.

When Frank announced that he wanted an end to their business association in January, it was kind of a relief. Frank got everything done legally. That was fine with Tom. The farm was his idea anyway, and he preferred a clear title, for he expected to finish 1881 in the black and wanted no cause for future grievance.

After a few weeks alone, Tom realized that he didn't miss his brother. He wasn't even sure where Frank was living now. Charleston, maybe. Or with the Clantons. Frank was drawn to companions who would lead him down the wrong path. Tommy couldn't do anything about that, except worry. It was better not to know.

Tommy liked things quiet, too, and Frank had always got right to talking the moment his eyes opened. It was a wearisome start to the day, especially when Frank had a dream about some floozy. He liked to tell Tommy about such things and show him the stain on his drawers. Which was disgusting. Then he'd nag Tommy about going to a cathouse. “We have earned ourselves some fun!” he'd say.

Tom had tried that a few times, but the girls pawed at him and called him “sweet face” and “handsome.” It was embarrassing, and he couldn't get any pleasure from what they wanted to do with him. He kept thinking about the awful pictures the pastor back in Iowa had showed all the boys in the congregation when they got to be of age. You could get horrible diseases that would cover you in pustules and make you go crazy.

“Keep yourselves clean for the one true love the Lord has ordained
for you,” the preacher told them. “She is out there somewhere, waiting for you.”

Now, at last, Tom McLaury found her: his one true love. Standing in a rocky little square of dirt around a small adobe house, she looked like a lily growing up through a patch of cactus, but she had a shovel leaning against her veranda steps and she was planting a pair of cut-back shrubs with heart-shaped leaves. That's how Tommy knew she was meant to be a farmer's wife.

“Those are lilacs, aren't they,” he said, sitting high up on his buckboard, the wagon bed filled with a month's supplies.

She straightened and clapped the dirt off her gloves and shaded her eyes with her palm. “My sister sent them. They do well by her door.”

“That's may be,” he allowed, “but her door isn't in Arizona, is my guess.”