Epitaph (62 page)

“Half a dollar,” the clerk said quietly. “I'm sorry about your brother, sir. I'm sure he's in a better place.”

“No,” James said, his voice ragged and fierce. “No! Wherever my brother is, that place is better because he's in it.”

DOC HOLLIDAY NEVER LEFT LOU'S SIDE
in the hours after Morgan's death. All that night, they waited in the mortician's office while Morgan's body was embalmed.

“I can't leave him,” Lou said over and over, as though apologizing for keeping Doc from going to bed. “I just can't leave him.”

“We'll stay here,” Doc always replied. “We won't leave him alone.”

When the body was prepared, they went in together, arm in arm, to view the remains. “So cold!” Lou whispered when she touched Morgan's hands. He was dressed in the suit Doc had bought him. Weeping, she ran a hand down Morgan's arm, along the sleeve. “It matched his eyes,” she said.

Doc nodded to the mortician, who cut a curl of Morgan's hair and then took a snippet of marine-blue gabardine from a place where it wouldn't show. These mementos were wrapped in tissue paper, tucked into a little envelope, and pressed into Lou's hand.

“I can't leave him!” she said again. “Doc, I can't—”

“We'll stay right here,” he told her. “We won't leave Morg alone.”

At dawn, the coffin was loaded onto a flatbed wagon, wedged in tight with the family's valises and bedding so it wouldn't shift as they
traveled over the rutted, gully-riven road between Tombstone and Benson. Lou and Doc would sit in the back with Morgan. Allie made beds up for Virgil and Bessie in a second wagon; Mattie would ride with them. The wagon drivers and a mounted escort were armed with rifles, pistols, double-barreled shotguns, and enough ammunition to fight off a concerted attack by the Cow Boys.

Already in the wagon bed, Virgil sat up, his boneless, aching arm strapped tight to his chest for the journey. “Where's Wyatt?” he called, and you could hear the panic in his voice. “Has anybody seen him?”

“He's over at the church,” Jack Vermillion said. “Chased everybody else out.”

“He's all right, Virg,” James soothed. “Don't worry. I'll go get him now.”

THE DOOR WAS OPEN.
James looked inside. It was Sunday but there was no minister, no congregation. It was just Wyatt by himself, wet-faced and pacing in front of the plain white wooden altar. James recognized the rhythm of what he was saying, for it was Wyatt's favorite psalm.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew the right spirit within me.
Then the rhythm broke and the words became angrier.

“Why him?” Wyatt cried. “Answer me! Why
him
?”

James backed away from the door and crept down the stairs, waiting until he was a good distance out in the street before he called, “Wyatt? We're ready to go!”

A few minutes later, Wyatt came outside. His eyes looked raw, but he pulled his hat down low, and now there was no other sign of distress. “You get Mattie?”

“Yeah, but she's drunk. Brought a bottle with her.”

“SHOULDA BEEN YOU,
not Morgan,” Mattie sneered when she saw Wyatt. “You brought us all down here to die. You ruined my life! You ruined everyone's life—”

It was Bessie who slapped her. “He never shoulda taken you in.
I'da sent you right back to the street where you belonged. So you just shut your mouth, get in that wagon, and be glad we don't leave you here alone.”

THE WILDFLOWERS WOULD BE GLORIOUS
in the spring of '82. Seeds that had lain dormant for years had soaked up the unprecedented moisture of the previous summer. Soon buds would swell, blossoms would explode, and the stony Arizona sand would offer up a lavish display of color and scent.

In a few weeks, Louisa Earp's garden would be an oasis of verbenas and primroses, lupines and gold poppies and larkspur, but on the twentieth of March, there was nothing more promising than a few green shoots along the side of the house.

With one hand on her husband's coffin, Lou watched their home disappear as the wagon made the wide turn out of town, rolling past the cemetery and a farmer's grave.

Exhausted by grief, she closed her eyes and saw Tom McLaury's face. Beautiful in death. Cold and white as marble in the snow.

You were right about my sister's lilacs, she thought. They died, too.

MAYBE THE COW BOYS
were down in Charleston, celebrating Morg's death. Or maybe they were around but didn't care to take on the Earps' armed escort. Whatever the reason, there was no trouble on the road, and Wyatt believed the worst was over when they reached the railway depot.

All he had to do was get Virgil, James, and the women onto the train to Tucson with Morgan's body. When that was done, he'd go back to Tombstone with Sherm McMasters and Texas Jack Vermillion and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, collect the warrants, and begin the pursuit.

“I'm goin' with you,” Doc told him after Lou was on the train.

“No,” Wyatt said. “You're not.”

“I am not askin' for permission, Wyatt.”

“Good, 'cause I'm not giving it.” I don't need a sick man who might collapse or cough at the wrong time, he meant. I can't stand to see my grief in your face.

Doc looked like he'd been slapped. Wyatt softened. “Doc, my brothers can't take care of themselves, let alone the girls. I need somebody I trust to look after them.”

So it was decided: Doc would travel on to Tucson with the family. When the Earps were on the train that would take them to California, he'd continue north to Denver, as he'd meant to do before all this happened.

He and Wyatt shook hands, and Doc climbed aboard the train. He had just gotten settled into a seat by the window when a breathless messenger ran up to Wyatt Earp and handed him a telegram.

That's when everything changed.

W
HY
THAT
MOMENT? WHY NOT WHEN MORGAN
died? Perhaps because the shock was too great, the loss too sudden and profound. But there was this as well: a lifetime of denying his own nature.

Wyatt Earp had been born, and born again, and now there would be a third life, for the iron fist that had seized his soul in childhood had lost its grip at last. The long struggle for control was over, and in its place, he found a wordless acceptance of a truth he'd always known. He was bred to this anger. It had been in him since the cradle. He'd never bullied neighbors or beaten a horse. He'd never punched the front teeth out of a six-year-old's mouth or hit a woman until she begged. But he was no better than his father, and never had been. He was far, far worse.

Gazing out the window of the train that was about to pull away, John Henry Holliday saw the moment when a pure, cold rage transfigured a man he thought he knew: a man who nodded to the messenger, who dismounted, who pulled his shotgun from its scabbard, who tossed Dick Naylor's reins to Sherm McMasters and hopped aboard the train, yelling, “Wait here!” to the rest of the posse as the locomotive jerked forward and the train began to pick up speed.

“Bob Paul sent word,” that man told him, swaying slightly in the aisle. “Ike Clanton is in Tucson with Frank Stilwell and Hank Swilling, They're
laying for Virgil at the depot. They think they're gonna kill a cripple.”

The words were factual. The tone was unemotional and cool, but what John Henry Holliday thought was
Rubicon.

Wyatt moved up the aisle to warn Virgil and James, and to make plans with them for what came next.

He passed Mattie Blaylock on his way. “It's all your fault,” she muttered again. Then she, too, saw what Doc Holliday had seen, for Wyatt rounded on her and clamped one big hand around her throat, and it was all there, in those cold, unblinking eyes. How many times he could have snapped her neck like a twig. How many times he had left the house instead and let her live. How that was over now because there was no mercy left in him. None.

“Yes,” he said. “It's all my fault. And I'll have more to answer for, when this is done.”

“SHIT,” FRANK STILWELL WHISPERED.
“See that great big sonofabitch? That's gotta be Bob Paul. This place is lousy with law.”

Hank said, “I count eight . . . No, ten. Two more, over by the restaurant.”

Stilwell swore under his breath. “Somebody musta talked.”

Hours ago, he and Ike Clanton and Apache Hank Swilling had climbed on top of a sidelined boxcar. Lying on their bellies, staying out of sight, they'd kept watch on the Southern Pacific. It was leaving for California at dusk. The Earps would show themselves sooner or later.

“Somebody musta talked,” Ike said.

Florentino Cruz, Frank was thinking. That half-Mexican bastard probably figured he'd get off easy if he sold the rest of us out.

“There's the coffin,” Apache Hank murmured.

A little gaggle of women appeared, along with a pair of tall blond men who had just two good arms between them. Wyatt was behind them, carrying a scattergun.

“Somebody talked,” Ike was saying. “Somebody musta talked.”

“Shut up, Ike!” Stilwell whispered.

He tried to line up a shot, but Wyatt was hustling everybody along, and the Earps were quickly lost to sight. Porters loaded the casket into the mail car. For a few moments, you could see that lunger Holliday helping a woman dressed in black climb in beside it. She turned back and reached out a hand to him. Holliday kissed it, and Stilwell was about to say, “Now ain't that sweet!” when the depot gaslights came on, up and down the platform.

Hank scrambled backward, out of the glare. It must've been the movement that caught Holliday's eye, for he looked up, and pointed, and yelled. That's all it took to send Ike running. Apache Hank was right behind him.

Which left Frank Stilwell all by his lonesome. Staring into Wyatt Earp's eyes.

Long afterward, men would ask, “Why didn't Stilwell kill Wyatt then and there? He had the high ground, up on that boxcar.” But those men had never looked into eyes that told you, plain as speech,
There is no place you can go that I will not follow. I will find you, and I will pull your heart from your chest, and I will eat it raw.

That's what Frank Stilwell saw, and that's why he clambered down off the far side of that boxcar, and then he by-God ran, and wished that he'd run sooner. Mexico, he was thinking at first, but soon there was nothing in his mind at all, except for
Run. Run. Run.

He was maybe two hundred yards down the tracks when the buckshot hit his thighs. He tumbled over and rolled down the shallow embankment and came to rest on his back in the weeds. There were stars at first, and then there was Wyatt Earp, looking down at him.

“Please,” Frank said. “Please, don't kill me. Please.”

Wyatt blew out a little snort of air, white in the mountain cold, and let the second charge go.