The Last Woman Standing (11 page)

CHAPTER 13

MARCH/APRIL 1881

I awoke on March 16, swoony and saddle-sore in a house with neither kitchen nor privy—and no John Harris Behan. He was leading Wyatt and Virgil and Morgan and pretty much every leathery local on horseback to capture masked bandits who’d attempted to rob the Benson stage. Outside of nearby Contention, the trio shot driver Eli “Budd” Philpot while miner Peter Roerig caught a stray bullet. The thieves failed to seize the $26,000 in silver bullion on board, thanks to shotgun messenger Bob Paul. The former sheriff of Pima County, moonlighting for Wells Fargo, blasted the assailants while crying, “I’ll stop for no one.” And he didn’t: the spooked horses bolted. A mile later, Paul regained control of the team, saving the silver and the remaining passengers.

This wanton violence scared bankers all the way to San Francisco. I knew my parents would read about the attempted robbery and fear for my life. As for me, my thoughts remained between my legs, as if I were the first woman who’d ever had sex, which meant I was worried for Johnny. Afraid to be alone with the fugitives at large, I returned to Kitty’s house. She snorted when she saw me coming, but softened to give me a hug and a pinch. We were that way with each other, chafing then bonding. Life could be hard, and men could make it harder. If you didn’t have some kind of sister to share your crazy stories with, who would believe you?

While I huddled with Kitty, watching the world go by in newsprint—she read the
Nugget
(recently purchased by Democrat Harry Woods), and I preferred Clum’s
Epitaph
—Johnny chased the bandits, risking bullets and a broken neck in rough country. I missed him more now than ever. In his absence, I felt as if my skin had been peeled away, like he’d taken part of me and ridden off. I went to bed hungry for him like a starving orphan. I awoke craving him like water in the desert.

Lovesickness—I had it bad. Kitty tried to convince me that it was good. At least I felt something. Even my pain made her jealous. She claimed she could do with less of her husband, not more, but the lawyer wasn’t the rugged type to join the posse. As the days passed, riders thundered in and out of town, carrying bits of news. Gradually, Jim Crane, Harry Head, and Bill Leonard emerged as the villains. Luther King had been the fourth man, holding the robbers’ mounts. Some even hinted that Wyatt’s friend Doc Holliday was an accessory before the fact and implicated the Earps. I didn’t believe the rumors.

The weather warmed up. One beautiful day of blue skies and breezes followed the next. While Johnny roamed the countryside on horseback, I was stuck in town with the other posse widows. I spent my days ensuring that Albert attended school, and completing our house. Not with my bare hands, though. I couldn’t hit a nail on the head with a hammer. No one in my family had ever used anything more than a rolling pin. But I was determined. With money and a honeyed voice, I asked Dave Cohn if he could find me a carpenter. He brought me two. Working steadily for cash to pay their overdue rent, the unlucky miners laid the floors with simple local pine and raised the walls. Dave found a worker to dig the privy, and a glazier to fit the windows.

One afternoon in late March, I was feeling pretty proud of my frontier skills, hemstitching gingham curtains to keep the perverts out of my business. Less impressed, Kitty was criticizing my messy stitching when she gasped at an article in the
Nugget
. “Did you know this?” she asked.

“Know what?” I pulled a stitch too tight.

“Johnny just named
Nugget
editor Harry Woods his undersheriff?”

“That can’t be true. Johnny all but promised the job to Wyatt. I was there.”

“Well, he promised it to Wyatt, but according to Woods’s newspaper, Johnny appointed Harry. What does a newsman know about upholding the law?”

The news made me feel clammy. I paused with the needle above the fabric, the only weapon I knew how to use, and that just barely. If Johnny would betray Wyatt, who was packing heat and had brothers at his back, how could I trust his promises to me?

With an unintentional prick of my finger, I marked the moment the tide shifted between Johnny and Wyatt. A person could do a lot of things to Wyatt—the scuttlebutt was that his pal Doc had sorely tested their friendship, constantly getting drunk and courting chaos—but disloyalty was another matter. Lying to his face was intolerable, and Wyatt had just learned before I did that Johnny was capable of saying anything to get his way.

Time passed. The Benson stage robbers evaded capture in the mountainous and vast territory that bordered Mexico. The posse remained on the range. I rarely saw Johnny. Finally, he captured accomplice Luther King and jailed him in Tombstone. Allegedly, King held the robbers’ horses during the crime and, since he could identify the villains, became the prime witness. Meanwhile, Johnny and I made the most of our brief time together. He hardly noticed my home improvements from our bed. Between rounds, when Johnny wasn’t snoring, he grumbled about the conflicts among the posse members, cursing “those damn Earps” for not recognizing who was boss: him! These rising tensions—exacerbated by hunger, thirst, and mistrust—escalated on the night of March 28, when King escaped.

Kitty and I learned of it, and more, when Harry came home at lunchtime the following day, dumping his newspapers on the breakfront and sitting down to Kitty’s tiresome beef stew in silence. He looked like he’d aged five years overnight.

“What happened?” Kitty asked. He just shook his big balding head and chewed his meat like an old mule over his feed sack. Kitty coaxed and prodded, trying to get Harry to talk.

“Kitty, leave off,” he said.

“Tell me, you old fool, or I’ll take your plate away from you.”

“I’ve had enough of your disrespect, Kitty, especially in front of
her
.” He shot me a look, his face flushed with anger. “It’s nothing I can say with Behan’s girl sitting here at our table.”

“I can leave,” I said.

“Sit still, Josephine,” Kitty said, “and don’t break anything. This is not about you. Harry, tell me what happened, and tell me now. Whatever it is, we will work it out.”

“I’ve been hoodwinked,” he said, pushing away his plate with a rare lack of appetite. He reached for his pipe. “I had the wool pulled right over my eyes. I can’t even bear to let you read the newspapers.”

“What do they say?” Kitty asked.

“It’s too mortifying.” He shook his heavy chin with a sigh, tapping out his pipe and pausing in a way that would normally send Kitty into paroxysms. She waited him out. “Luther King escaped from custody last night.”

“How does that involve you? You’re not a lawman.”

“I was in the sheriff’s office drafting a bill of sale for King, who wanted to sell his horse to Johnny’s corral partner John Dunbar. That gabby new Undersheriff Woods was jawing about something or other he’d written in the
Nugget
, and how the Democrats were being robbed worse than the Benson stage. He’d been advised to chain up the prisoner on warnings that King might bolt, abetted by the cowboys swarming into town. While I was finishing the paperwork, King strolled right out the back and disappeared on a horse that was tied behind the office.”

“How is that your fault, Harry?”

“It’s a bad thing, Kitty, and I am deeply shamed. I was there with Behan’s cronies, profiting off the prisoner when he should have been under lock and key. These thieves killed two good men, and King was the link to their discovery. Now I appear tainted, as if I colluded with the escape, as if I freed the rascal myself. How will I be able to show my face in town?”

“You’re exaggerating. It cannot be as bad as you say.”

“Am I ever one for exaggeration? Read the newspaper and weep.” For once, Kitty let her husband have the last word. He was right. King’s escape was a black eye for Woods, and by extension, Johnny. At best, they were negligent; at worst, complicit. The breakout soured Harry’s partnership with Johnny. The lawyer tried to put distance between his reputation and that of the sheriff, and to expand his clientele to the growing law-and-order set rallying around Mayor Clum and his Republican
Epitaph
.

Kitty now began to visit me across the street on the excuse that we were setting up house and needed her assistance. She had a point: I could raise Cain quicker than curtains. As for my opinion of Johnny, ours was not a business arrangement. I was incapable of such distance, as Harry demonstrated. Every day that Johnny pursued Leonard, Head, and Crane on the range was another day my body longed for his. In Johnny’s absence, my love grew exponentially, so that at last his homecoming in April was explosive. Any reservations I had about the man’s integrity hardly concerned me in my rush to return to the sheets beneath the crooked homemade gingham curtains.

Once Johnny returned to our new home—having postponed finding Leonard, Head, and Crane to resume collecting taxes—I wanted to see him as much as possible to make up for lost time. He spent long hours in his office and frequent nights at the Grand Hotel bar, where proper women were discouraged. I begged Johnny to teach me how to ride so we could be together on the range. I loved horses (although I’d never had so much as a pony ride at a fair).

My affection for animals was unique to me: Mama had no patience for pets. She could not comprehend the attention people wasted on their dogs and cats. It was as if there was only so much tenderness in the world, and it should go to family and the congregation. If there was an extra scrap at the end of the week, it should be shared with widows and orphans, not animals.

Like so many young girls, though, I became horse-crazy. I would beg to see the beasts in Golden Gate Park. Mama would occasionally take Hennie and me there for Sunday strolls. I loved sitting on a bench by the bridle path to watch the equestriennes. They balanced high in their sidesaddles, with their backs straight and swan necks elongated—princesses in a pageant that didn’t include a Jewish baker’s daughter. The horsewomen wore tall silk hats with ethereal chiffon veils. They inclined their heads ever so slightly in acknowledgment when a dashing male acquaintance (or possibly a stranger) trotted by in the opposite direction, tipping his hat to prolong the encounter, and perhaps enticing a reciprocal glance from under the veil.

For me, horseback riding exemplified the height of San Francisco sophistication. I aspired to make my way into this larger circle that ignored me on my dingy public bench, my hair in pigtails tied with plaid ribbon. It’s not that I wanted to pass myself off as someone different. I wanted to be recognized for the bold beauty that I was becoming. I felt confident that I could compete, given half a chance. If I had a stylish riding habit and a horse to match, I, too, could rise in society. I don’t think Hennie shared this ambition to break free and move up the caste. But I’d already begun to see the light in men’s eyes when they appraised me. I knew that at least in that way I was different from my sisters and mother.

No one guessed my aspirations; my mother dismissed them as airs. I would sit beside Hennie, my legs dangling beneath my short skirt, attempting a perfect posture I would never achieve, haughtiness inappropriate for my status. Mama would unfold newspaper-wrapped sandwiches or an orange that dripped as we slurped the slices, licking our cuffs like peasants. Our mother had little patience for my raptures, dismissing the riders in her heavy accent: “These women ride and ride and never go anywhere.”

I intended to ride and ride and get somewhere in Arizona. Johnny agreed to teach me. Headed for Dexter Livery Stable, where Johnny owned a half interest, we walked arm in arm (mine shaking in anticipation). Johnny raised his hat to passersby, calling most by name and asking after their kin or business or livestock. Albert lagged in our wake, hidden behind his fringe. He owned a sleek black gelding that Johnny had bought him in Prescott to smooth the parting from his mother. Albert had named him Geronimo, after the rogue Apache chief still at large, and spent his free time currying the horse and mucking out stalls at Dexter’s for ice-cream money.

When we arrived at the corral, Johnny called out, “Hey, Dunbar,” to his partner, a rangy blond with a florid ginger mustache that parted like velvet opera curtains. “Get the swiftest horse for Josephine! She claims to be a fine San Francisco horsewoman, and she’s here to prove it.”

“I said no such thing, Johnny. I’ve never even been on a horse.”

“Modesty doesn’t suit you, Josephine.”

John O. Dunbar led a battered bay named Sally Sue out to the paddock. Johnny’s partner had recently added the title of treasurer to stable owner, a political appointment courtesy of his older brother Thomas, the territorial legislator who introduced the bill to establish Cochise County. And it was thanks in large part to Thomas that Johnny—not Wyatt—had become the new county’s first sheriff.

But I wasn’t considering politics that day, just the sheer mass of this homely old bay. Sally Sue was tall and brick solid; a network of veins stretched across one side of her long face from a previous and brutal owner. She gave me a baleful stare, as if I were a bucket she could kick just out of spite.