The Last Woman Standing (20 page)

CHAPTER 22

The worry became deafening as Camillus “Buck” Fly entered the studio from the street. Ike’s barrage of threats that had been carried through the town like the sound of tom-toms had forced the hand of Virgil, who, with three years of active Civil War experience, was at that time both city marshal and deputy US Marshal, and often deputized Morgan and Wyatt. Now all the parties were up and out of bed, some shaved, some not. It was illegal for civilians to wander the streets armed, and Ike had flaunted the law with his Winchester. Fly reported that first Virgil had disarmed and buffaloed Ike, who held his own bleeding head and told the marshal, “If I had seen you a second sooner, I’d have killed you” before being hauled before a judge by the three brothers.

Buck talked to Mollie and me as he cleaned and loaded his own rifle, shaking ammunition from a box and inserting bullets into his empty bandolier. That was nearly as frightening as anything he said. A county clerk at the courthouse had told Buck that Wyatt had finally blown his cool and told Ike off, saying something along the order of, “You cattle-thieving sonofabitch, you’ve threatened my life enough, and you’ve got to fight.”

Ike volleyed, unfazed by his bloody skull. “Fight is my racket, and all I want is four feet of ground.”

Buck, getting the drift of the rising tensions, had hurriedly concluded his errands. While he was heading home, he heard a rumor that Wyatt had left the courthouse, encountered Tom McLaury on the street, and pistol-whipped the brother during an escalating argument. With this new information, Buck detoured at Spangenberg’s gunsmith shop to top off his ammunition. There he saw Ike and Tom, both with bandaged heads, weapons shopping. On the way out, he encountered their brothers, Billy and Frank.

Back at the studio, Buck readied his rifle and then prepared his portable camera equipment. Mollie helped him pack the lenses while I drank brandy. She forbade me to leave the studio to walk the streets alone in search of Wyatt, or news of him. She explained if we just remained where we were, most news and gossip would arrive in the safety of those four walls. We received the odd assortment of men and women who stopped by to share information or to learn the latest from Buck. Around about 2:30 p.m. it got oddly quiet. Mollie noted the pause in horse traffic in the alley that led to the O.K. Corral. A mining engineer who had an appointment for a portrait failed to arrive.

Buck stepped out on the porch with his rifle to assess the situation (he was a better shot with his camera), then swiftly retreated behind the door. “I can’t explain it, Mollie, but I count five men congregating in the vacant lot. Ike and Billy Clanton, the McLaury Brothers, and Billy Claiborne—and two horses besides. Those boys look jumpy, which I don’t like to observe in a man with a gun. When Billy Clanton saw me, he put his hand to his pistol. I’m mystified why they’d pick this godforsaken spit of dirt.”

“Doc,” Kate said, as she returned through the boardinghouse door, “I think they’re lying in wait for Doc.”

“Josephine,” Mollie said in a high, tense voice, “maybe I should have dispatched you to the San Jose.”

“It’s too late now.” I tried to keep my panic at bay. Wyatt was out there somewhere on hostile streets, nearby but unreachable. I knew he was less vulnerable without me. Still, I wanted to run to him immediately. Armed men, some whom I’d welcomed into my own house, loitered just outside with malicious intent. They were wicked and unrestrained, as I experienced on poker night with Curly Bill. And I had heard them speak ill of Wyatt and all he stood for: the rule of law, a fair fight over an assassin’s bullet.

My hands shook as I raised the brandy to my lips. The wind whistled through the cracks in the siding. No horses trotted down the adjacent alley. An uneasy quiet settled among us in the large rectangular room. Buck rechecked his camera equipment. Few things clarified love’s potency more than the threat of imminent, violent loss. I wished I’d never encountered Johnny, but then I never would have met Wyatt. How could a thing so bad lead to one so good?

Despite the chill, my palms began to sweat. My eyes teared up. I couldn’t stop myself. The fact that I could not protect the man I loved unhinged me. I had seen him risk his life to preserve Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce, and now, only his brothers and Doc stood with him against a cowboy mob. My tears became wild, uncontrollable, followed by gulps and sniffles. I remembered Delia the day of the near-lynching, sucking at the laudanum bottle, shrinking into the wallpaper, disappearing in plain sight.

I could not recover my composure. I tried to talk myself down, to explain that my outburst did Wyatt no good, nor did it help us, stranded as we were in the studio surrounded by long-simmering hostility soaked in alcohol and vengeance. As my weeping bubbled over and my sobs grew louder, Kate crossed the studio from the entrance, moving fast. Squaring off before me, she looked down and backhanded me across the face with the force of a strong follow-through. It stung. No, it hurt and stunned and shamed. This was not the first time Kate hit somebody. She’d been taught, and had practiced, that maneuver.

My cheek blazed like sunburn. Kate’s angry, pale-moon visage eclipsed mine as she got right up close to me and said, “There may be a riot outside, but don’t you start one in here. I can’t hear what’s happening in the yard with your blubbering. You’re not a widow yet. Stop, or I’ll shoot you myself before you ever become a bride.”

Kate’s act was uncomfortably intimate—she hadn’t just whacked a stranger; she’d hit
me
. My mother had slapped my face, but with the intention, if she was that aware, of exorcising her anger and shaming me—not causing physical pain. Kate acted out of necessity. We were only as safe as our weakest link and, at that moment, that was me. When I looked around the room—at Buck and Mollie—I saw exasperation and impatience on their faces, not sympathy.

A seething anger at Kate burnt through my veins, which prompted adrenaline and chased away the tears and sorrow and despair. Now all I felt was antagonism, but less for Kate than for the outlaws outside acting as judge, jury, and executioner of the man I loved and the brothers who resembled him in a way that made them all larger and more powerful. They were a pack—Kate’s man, Doc, included for his devotion to Wyatt and deadly aim—and they were in mortal danger.

Kate cracked open the door, stepping out onto the narrow porch and allowing us all to eavesdrop on the angry discussion between the McLaurys and the Clantons in the vacant lot. “I’ll kill Virgil on sight,” said one, and “I’ll kill the whole lot of them Earps,” said another. The wind carried a yell from Fremont Street: “Here they come!”

Kate ducked back inside and closed the gallery door.

“What did you see?” asked Buck.

“Looked like Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton cocked their pistols. Maybe Tom McLaury stepped behind his horse and reached for his rifle.”

“You sons of bitches,” called a deep male voice that could have been Wyatt’s, “you’ve been looking for a fight and you can have it.”

“Throw up your hands,” a voice that could have been Virgil’s shouted to the cowboys.

I heard two shots so close together they were nearly one. It was so concussive it felt like my eardrums were being smacked. The explosion echoed off the nearby buildings. A horse screamed and a rider said, “Whoa.”

A pause of an instant followed, and then gunshots exploded simultaneously, impossible to count, with the added percussion of a shotgun blast. I retreated to the farthest corner from the action where I typically posed, ducking behind the props and the chaise. Someone flung open the gallery’s street door and shoved Billy Claiborne inside at a run. Claiborne had gunpowder on his pants leg, but I could see no blood. Johnny tumbled in behind him, flushed and florid, hardly the dapper man I knew.

Johnny saw me across the room. He ran over and snatched a rough kiss, turning me around physically and emotionally. I shoved him away. “Sheriff Behan, go out there with those guns on your hips and stop this slaughter.”

“I can no more stop the snow,” he said as shots burst outside, “than these bullets flying.”

“Coward.”

“You’d prefer corpse?”

“Yes,” I said, indignant and on fire in my ridiculous senorita costume, the heavy silver earrings straining my lobes. “Once again, you plan to arrive at the curtain call to take credit while other men risk their lives.”

“Talk to me when you’ve faced gunfire, Josie. I need a drink.” Johnny showed me his back, fleeing to the sideboard with the decanters beside the interior passage to the boardinghouse. “Mind if I pour my own, Mollie?”

Johnny sucked down the first shot of whiskey and had poured his second when the interior door banged open, admitting Ike—unarmed, his bandaged head bleeding, his eyes wild. (I made the connection that this wasn’t the first time that Fly’s, Doc’s home in town, had been used as an escape route or hideout.)

Ike pried the glass from Johnny’s fingers. He gulped the dregs and tossed it to the wood floor, where it shattered. Then he recklessly threaded his way through the studio, nearly upsetting the one standing camera. He left the battle he’d started at his back. Grabbing the brass doorknob, he took the customer exit opposite, letting in a lick of cold from the vacant lot and a sulfurous smell.

On the far side of the room from where I stood, Mollie and Buck busily tried to protect the precious photographic equipment from flying glass. A round of bullets smashed outside beyond the row of shuttered windows on the studio’s west side and ricocheted against the walls. The sound slammed my inner ears, but I didn’t flinch, although I felt the rounds deep in my belly.

The bullets stopped. The quiet held. Each one of us in the room registered if we’d been shot, or any of our companions. The battle lasted no more than thirty seconds, although terror had stretched time. The photographer, now carrying his rifle, exited the gallery door that opened onto the vacant lot. I foolishly followed him, running to Wyatt.

In the narrow lot between Fly’s and Harwood’s House (a shack, really) hung acrid smoke, the iron tang of blood, and the odor of horse crap dumped by a frightened animal in flight. I had never seen such carnage. That bloody mess Billy Clanton sank down on his haunches against Harwood’s. He was trying to reload his pistol with his left hand, hampered by his bullet-shattered right wrist. Buck walked straight over through the heavy haze of white gun smoke to Ike’s younger brother. He took Billy’s empty Colt Frontier revolver. Billy, clean-shaven and not yet twenty, keened in pain from his wounds. It would come out that he’d also been shot near his nipple and navel, so that a pierced lung made breathing labored. The sound of injured men groaning came from Fremont Street. A whistle pierced the cries from the steam hoisting works.

Wyatt stood in the middle of the lot, alone, the last man standing with his guns loose at his sides. This was the stranger I’d seen from a distance that day so many months ago when he stood off a lynch mob, solid and steely in danger. Morgan was down, and Virgil clutched his own bloody calf. Doc was absent. I watched Wyatt in profile as he looked through the haze assessing the damage, focused and steady. A bullet hole pierced his long coat, but I witnessed no matching bloodstain. I ran toward him. When he turned and saw me, I read confusion in his eyes, and the ferocity behind it. He didn’t recognize me immediately. I was still in costume, a senorita in Marietta’s peasant dress, my curls slicked back. But he was only bewildered momentarily, as I ran to him and his sadness. “You’re alive!” I said, embracing him shamelessly in public.

“I am.” He was stiff to my touch in the scorched air. He didn’t holster his guns. And yet he bent down to give me one kiss, heavy and sure, to communicate our connection when words failed and the sky had fallen. This was truth and reality, live flesh. This was love worth living for. Billy Clanton and the McLaury Brothers were scraps of beef, dead or nearly there. Doc could be heard cussing on Fremont Street. Nearby, Billy’s unceasing groans sent shivers through me. A second whistle filled the streets with armed men, joining the curious who appeared on the street from their houses and businesses. The local vigilance committee made their first appearance too late to alter the outcome.

“I have to get Morg and Virg home.”

“How can I help you?”

“Go back to the San Jose right now. Sit tight. I’ll send word.”

I jumped. Johnny had crept up behind me. “I want to see you, Wyatt.”

Wyatt pressed me behind him. “You deceived us, Sheriff. You said they were unarmed. I won’t be arrested, but I am here to answer what I have done. I am not going to leave town.”

CHAPTER 23

OCTOBER 27, 1881

A soft rap came at my bedroom door, followed by the porter’s urgent statement: “Miss Marcus, a visitor downstairs.” I bolted upright. A knock this late boded ill—the portent of sudden death and imminent disaster. Good news can wait until morning. Dread followed me up from the pit of my dreams, where I wandered strange, empty rooms hewn of rough, warped boards, one chamber in a line with the next. Not a single exit presented itself. I’d begun to search for windows, and slashed my hand on broken glass. Awake, gripping my right hand, I lay fully dressed on my bed at the San Jose. Marietta’s Mexican costume rested on a side chair, the ghost of another woman.

I snatched my heavy cloak and stuffed my stockinged feet into my boots, leaving the laces for later. In my haste, I nearly tumbled down the stairs carrying my candlestick. That would have been memorable: I would have become the careless girl who set Tombstone aflame.

Downstairs, in the parlor, a tall man with close-set eyes awaited me, his hat in his right hand and held over his heart. I sensed his reluctance to be there. He carried worry along with the war wound that had shattered his left shoulder, leaving the attached arm dangling below, his fingers twisted and withered.

We’d never met. Shyness overcame me. I tried to smooth my hair out of a nervous reflexive vanity and nearly set the curls afire with my candle. He removed the light with his able hand to set it on the mantel. It was 3:00 a.m., according to the clock.

The stranger didn’t introduce himself, but I knew he was James, Wyatt’s older brother, the outlier, the bartender. I’d seen him across the road from Madame Mustache’s balcony during the lynching, stepping out from Vogan’s Bowling Alley to whisper in Wyatt’s ear. In the sparse candlelight, he looked much older to me now, the creases in his forty-year-old face deepened in shadow. A half twitch in his right eye came and went, which would have made him useless at the poker table.

“How are Virgil and Morgan?” I asked.

“You’ll learn soon enough, Miss Marcus,” James said. He sounded like Wyatt, his voice deep and rich, but cracked by fear. He lacked the wherewithal to shield me from it, the way Wyatt would have. “Accompany me to Fly’s. The town is too hot for Wyatt.”

“Is he all right?” I asked, suddenly uncertain if more disaster had befallen him since we’d parted in the bloody yard beside Fly’s.

“He is what he is,” James said cryptically. And then there was an awkward pause during which I clumsily laced my boots. “Since I’m here, I have my own message for you, Miss Marcus. Wyatt was a lonely man until you arrived in Tombstone. You changed that. We brothers appreciate that you gave him something to live for. What makes Wyatt happy matters to us boys. We’ll protect you to the death.”

“I hope it doesn’t go that far, James.” I smiled at him but got none in return. “I am deeply touched.” I’d been accepted into the Earp clan by the power of Wyatt’s love. Here was another sign that his affection was true. Despite the fear in the room, I floated up inside myself, raised by Wyatt’s affection and by my own powerful reciprocal feelings. Death circled us with jagged claws and bloody teeth, with savagery, and forged the untried steel of our love into something stronger. I had to see Wyatt. “Let’s go.”

James led me out of the San Jose, keeping silent as he guided me skulking through the darkness of Fremont Street. We dodged the few windows that still had light at this late—or early—hour. We made slow progress, as James paused to check that each new shadow didn’t conceal an armed enemy, and glanced up at every second story for potential snipers. His fear became contagious, particularly in light of the fact that this tall man had enlisted, and ridden into battle, with the Union army. I wanted to fly in the opposite direction, back to the safety of the San Jose. But I would have to pursue that alone, and I couldn’t bear that, either, so I clenched the rough fabric at his elbow as he picked our way through the darkness, seeing hazards I never would have recognized.

James stopped twice to attend to sounds in front of us, or check for tails behind us. At last, we arrived at the familiar back alley that fed into the O.K. Corral. Hearing distant gunfire and rough laughter, we flattened ourselves against the cash-store wall, and he placed his right arm protectively across me. I could hardly breathe. I didn’t want to fail Wyatt, but the thought of going farther brought the image of Billy Clanton, bloody and dying, to my mind. One minute he was standing, belligerent in the backyard, the next broken, bleeding, bellowing. How easily that could happen to me without even a pistol to protect myself.

James and I had paused in an inky pool beneath the eaves to listen. When he seemed satisfied, we ran across the alley, him pulling me faster than I had ever run. At the familiar door to the gallery, James knocked twice, then once, then opened the door slowly and pushed me ahead of him.

I could smell cigar smoke mixed with the photographic chemicals as we entered. And then I spotted Wyatt at the opposite side of the room, perched on the green-velvet man chair, smoking a cigar visible only by the light of its ember. His eyes appeared as he inhaled, disappeared into smoke when he exhaled. The door to the boardinghouse shut, possibly behind Doc.

Rushing across the room, I felt ahead of me like a blind woman for tables and chairs that had shifted since I’d first arrived the previous morning. “Come,” Wyatt said. “Sit on my lap.”

I stumbled toward his voice until I felt his strong gambler’s fingers, his muscular arms, his hard knees. I crawled into the cave he created, holding my heart to his, my face hidden in his neck. It was a reunion both physical and emotional. He was sanctuary to me, and all the dangers around us disappeared. I believe for him, that connection gave him a reason to rally, to stay and fight and scheme, to raise his head one more day in the war against the sons of bitches, the cattle thieves. Because we knew, sitting together in the dark, guarded by James and Doc and who knows who else, that the gunfight that afternoon had not been an ending but a beginning. There were casualties on our side and fatalities on theirs. But that was recognition of an external danger, and this was intimacy in the moment, sitting crossways over Wyatt’s long legs, his arms pulling me closer and tighter, smelling the bitter cigar smoke. I threw my right arm around his neck. We were a unit. We were love.

Wyatt offered his cigar. “Want a puff?”

I took a drag and coughed it out. When I’d stopped hacking, he kissed me long and hard. The cigar taste wasn’t so foreign because it clung to my tongue, too. I had never known a kiss so powerful and communicative, which wrapped up caring and compassion, fear and ferocity. He would do anything to save me, his kiss said, and I responded that if he did not survive, my life was not worth saving. Our kiss was as secure as a fortress, as flammable as gunpowder. Nothing has ever meant more to me than that connection.

Wyatt pulled back, first gently caressing the curls that had escaped in my rush to meet him, then lacing his fingers deeply into my hair. “Sadie, we never wanted a war. James can tell you that.”

“I know,” I said. “You did not start this fight.”

“Now, Morgan took a bullet that entered one shoulder and exited his other. Virgil took a hit to the calf.”

“Will they be OK?” Terrified, I knew the agony they must be suffering and the fickleness of frontier doctors. If the country’s best medics could not save President Garfield from his gunshot wounds, how would these two survive?

Wyatt shared their pain: These were his brothers, his arms and legs. They carried his memories and hopes. Together, they formed a pack. “Virgil is better off than Morgan. Recovery will take time. I pledged to protect my brothers, and then this happened. We did not stir the pot, and yet it is stirred by these Southern, cattle-thieving sons of bitches. I feel a weight of guilt that I was unscathed, and a responsibility to set things right. This town has become twisted, and I don’t know how to put it straight.”

“It will become clearer in the morning,” I said, a salve with only placebo properties.

“We came here to buy land and mines and businesses, to sink roots and prosper together. Keeping the peace is something we have a knack for, but marshaling wasn’t our original plan: to be guns for hire, a shooting gallery of cowboys popping up like targets at the fair. We wanted to maintain the peace for ourselves, but that seems unlikely now.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked. “You’re heroes.”

“Today, maybe, but tomorrow? Together, we’re the Earp brothers, but the Clantons and the McLaurys are brothers, too. Every time a cowboy dies, a harsher enemy rises among his kin. I’m not worried about our actions, but our opposition.” He paused to puff on his cigar. I felt the weight of his free hand on my knee. There was no filter between us, no scrim.

“Before we entered the yard,” he continued, “your Johnny ran up, warning us there would be trouble. When Virgil told him he was going down to disarm them, we both heard Behan say, ‘I have disarmed them all.’”

“The
liar
!” The familiar seething anger of betrayal drew new blood, a thumb twisted in an old wound.

“After that, Virgil put away his rifle and grabbed Doc’s walking stick in his right hand, and we turned the corner into the yard at a walk. But those boys were armed.”

Johnny had betrayed me in the bedroom. Now he had betrayed Wyatt, Doc, and the brothers on the streets, a battlefield with no boundaries.

“Tonight, Johnny called at Virgil’s house uninvited. That two-timing sheriff sat right there by my brothers’ sickbeds and claimed, ‘I was there
for the purpose of
arresting and disarming them.’ That’s quite a different tune. We walked into danger, and Behan muddied the waters. We may be considered heroes for a moment, Sadie, but I’m uncertain for how long. We acted in self-defense in a fair fight, but—”

“But what? Doesn’t that end the matter?”

“Johnny intends to arrest me. He said as much—you heard him—if not today, then soon.”

“But you did nothing against the law.”

“Tell me this, Sadie. What’s the most direct route for Behan to dispose of a rival?”

Horror gripped me. “Get him killed?”

“Or get him arrested. Wrong or right, if I get sent to jail, please, Sadie, don’t visit me.”

“It won’t happen, Wyatt. I won’t let them take you.”

“I cherish the sentiment, but I don’t see you having any sway in this department. Stay clear of the jail. I couldn’t bear up if you saw me behind bars. I will send messages to you here, through Buck and Mollie.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Wyatt.” But I knew he wasn’t one to exaggerate. I feared we would be separated so soon after we came together. If Johnny jailed him, he jailed me, too. I could not bear to be ripped from this man who meant everything to me, and have him living on display in shame like some caged beast with John Harris Behan as his zookeeper.

“Let’s face the reality of the situation together, Sadie, the bitter and the sweet. We have to stop and look the future in the eye. I have to know: Are you with me all the way?”

“What does it look like? I could not be any closer if I was your eyelash.”

“That’s true now, but I need to know you understand the ramifications of remaining true. This morning, Tombstone may have our backs. We have the
Epitaph
in our corner, even if we can’t trust Behan. But I don’t know where we’ll stand by sundown. There are real risks: jail, assassination, loss, exile. I’m staring down a hard road. I need you to contemplate that before you commit. If you leave this room allied to me, which means to my brothers and Doc, too, then our burdens become your burdens.”

“Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?”

“It is and it isn’t. My life is in danger. Doc’s a wild card. Virgil and Morgan are bedridden. They should recover, but there are no guarantees. I’m going to have to shift them to the Cosmopolitan Hotel for safety, and that will include Allie and Mattie, too. So that’s going to mean no room at the inn for you and me. It’s going to get really ugly, really fast, around here now.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I am here to make a vow,” he said, and then he paused, his voice catching, “or cut you loose.”

“I’m not leaving.” My throat tightened. Tears swelled my eyeballs. “What’s the vow?”

“I have one rule for us, and only one.”

“What’s that?” I asked, and nervously joked, “Don’t shoot each other?”

“You wouldn’t stand a chance.” He gently lifted me up off his lap and settled my feet on the floor, then slid off the chair and down to his knees. Taking my hand, he said, “I vow to be loyal and faithful to you alone from this day forward. Do you agree?”

I kneeled with him, the darkness above us a
chuppah
, a canopy. There were no witnesses. We didn’t need anyone else. In a strong, clear voice, infused with affection, I said, “I vow to be loyal and faithful to you alone from this day forward.”

We remained kneeling in the dark for a long time, knowing that this was our choice, to be together, my little hands in his callused ones, my large spirit dancing around his heavy weather. Slowly, the room lightened with the dawn, and the tumble of camera equipment, the photos of strangers that covered the walls in witness, became visible. When we dropped each other’s hands, we could not guarantee our future together, but now there was an “
us
,” a “
we
.” I was an Earp. This was real, as real as the shooting at the yard and the puddles of fraternal blood that darkened the raw earth. And it was sanctified—not by a rabbi or a priest—but the true feelings in our hearts, and the sacred vow we’d exchanged.