Bloody Season (17 page)
Dr. and Mrs. Silas Melvin booked steamboat passage on the Mississippi, she no longer a stowaway but a large handsome woman in stays and taffeta with a flat flowered hat pinned to her short hair, part of a modest trousseau presented to her by an admiring husband. At Vicksburg, a town rising slowly from mortar-smashed rubble and blasted trees, they transferred to a sleeper car and clattered over polished steel through scorched fields tangled with the rusty twisted corpses of old rails torn up by Sherman’s troops on the way to Atlanta. There the couple settled.
In the late 1860s that town was still reeling from Sherman. Most of the burned blocks had been cleared, but for the rest of Kate’s life the stench of char would remind her of her first marriage. Widows took in washing, and so many backyards were crisscrossed with burdened clotheslines she wondered that any men were left in Atlanta. But they were in the streets, straggle-haired and bitten-bearded in rags of Confederate shoddy with sockets for eyes and stumps on display and filthy palms outstretched. At night they grew fangs and preyed on their daytime benefactors in alleys stinking of slops. For all that, Atlanta was rebuilding. Professional men were desperately needed, but because no one could afford to pay for their services they were rare. Soon after Silas nailed up his shingle he had a full practice. Although there was no money, the Melvins dined on pork pies and venison roasts and baskets of eggs and flasks of milk brought by his patients. Kate gained weight rapidly.
Before long it became evident that the rich food was not to be blamed for this. Concerned when his wife became too ill mornings to eat breakfast, Silas brought home a doctor who had served as surgeon with General Bragg and who examined her and congratulated them both while accepting a large apple pie in lieu of his fee.
She bore him a son.
The son died.
No one knew why he died. Not Kate, who bathed and cared for him as lovingly as she tended Silas’s instruments, which had to be boiled on the cookstove in the kitchen between usings, and the basin that had to be scoured of blood and iodine. Not Melvin, who wanted to send the boy to Baltimore to learn dentistry as soon as he was through with public school and looked to the day when he would be Old Doc Melvin to his son’s Young Doc Melvin. Certainly not the doctor, who signed the death certificate and shook his head and said that the war was still claiming victims in Atlanta. Baptized Presbyterian, the boy could not be buried out of the Catholic Church as Kate requested, but the local priest, a patient of Silas’s, agreed to preside at a secular ceremony in the couple’s house, after which a Presbyterian minister officiated at graveside.
Silas died soon after. Yellow fever was sweeping the city, and as the symptoms were in keeping with the disease, Bragg’s old surgeon wrote it on the certificate. Kate knew it wasn’t that, or even the broken heart suggested by the doctor in private. It was Uncle Death come back to pay his respects to her family.
Industry had come to Atlanta, and with it northern money. Kate buried Silas next to their son and sold their house and his practice to a dentist from Vermont with a birdlike wife and three pale children and went west. As she watched the green southern scenery sliding past the train window she could not know that she was tracing the steps of another Atlanta exile whom Uncle Death had compelled to leave some months earlier, a dentist like Silas, although that was where the resemblance ended; as indeed it did to anyone else she would ever know.
When they met, the year was 1877 and the place was a clabber of adobe dugouts and unpainted shacks swept up against the base of Government Hill below Fort Griffin, Texas. He was a picket-thin man of twenty-five, with a phlegmy cough and a preference for colored shirts and gray suits of good material that flapped on him. She was Big Nose Kate, hefty at twenty-seven and developing a roll under her chin but a long way from fat, and working John Shanssey’s saloon on a financial arrangement with the beetle-browed ex-pugilist. Dentists were an interest, and although this one had swung a board from the peak of his tent on the edge of town with JOHN HENRY HOLLIDAY, D.D.S. inexpertly painted on it, he spent most of his time playing poker and dealing faro in Shanssey’s. The men with whom he played were all big and filthy and stank of guts, but they bought their chips with fist-size wads of crisp bills obtained from the Fort Griffin paymaster in return for buffalo hides. The kill was so lush that year they lost hundreds of dollars and got up from the table lurching and laughing. Sometimes they didn’t, but the way Holliday played, smiling as he pulled in the chips and telling nigger jokes in his soft drawl and sipping frequently from the tumbler of whiskey that was always at his elbow, the mood around the table remained guardedly genial.
She began as his partner. Some of the buffalo runners had wives and sweethearts back in civilization for whom they held back hide money not required for food and supplies. It was her role to make their acquaintance and get them to buy her drinks and jolly them into trying to double and treble those reserves. Kate was good with the quiet ones. She charmed and bullied and shamed and groped at them—for she had learned a long time before that a man who was drunk and aroused was more likely to spend money than one who was just drunk—and Sister’s Private Instruction had taught her that no oath was equal to the demands of the body. And if, after dropping the earnings of an entire season’s shooting and skinning on the turn of a pasteboard, a player showed signs of becoming truculent, a trip upstairs with Kate was usually all that was required to put him back on his feed, as Doc put it. For this she received a cut of the winnings after Shanssey had sliced his off the top.
At sunup they went back to Doc’s tent, where she rubbed his back with alcohol and held his head when his coughing gutted him and lay with him when he had the strength for it. He was a fitful lover, stronger than he looked, and he kept at it with the same concentration he displayed at his table until he exploded and then collapsed wheezing. When he stirred she would have a tumbler ready for him and he would drink it off in two swallows and go to sleep. Her business fell off after that. She knew it was because the other Fort Griffin men, who spent all day with their bare arms inside buffalo carcasses to the shoulders and made breastworks of them when the Comanches came looking to strip off their skins, were afraid of catching what Doc had from her. She didn’t care. Doc’s action supported them both, and caring for him when he was low fed something in her that had been cheated when her son and husband died so suddenly. Every afternoon that Doc climbed out of his roll to put on a fresh shirt and take his place behind the cue box in Shanssey’s was ground held against the terrible Uncle.
They shared secrets insofar as their self-protective natures allowed. Once when drinking he told her of his cousin in an Atlanta convent—she recognized the name of her alma mater’s old rival—to whom he still wrote letters, and beat Kate up for mentioning it when he was sober. After that she didn’t bring it up again, even at times when he looked at her and she knew she was being measured against the angel of the Lord back home and felt the urge to enlighten him as to what went on in convents. It wasn’t fear. If she gave any thought to such things at all, she would suppose that she loved Doc.
Kate wasn’t present in the saloon when Doc and Ed Bailey fell out. Bailey was a buffalo runner and a sometime scout for the army who wore an issue Colt’s in a cavalry scabbard with the strap unbuttoned. Doc caught him looking at the deadwood—sneaking a peek at Doc’s discards during poker—and admonished him quietly to “play poker,” which was the gentleman’s way of asking an opponent to refrain from cheating. Bailey withdrew his hand from the pile, drew two cards from the deck, then resumed his inspection of Doc’s deadwood. When Doc laid his cards facedown and began pulling in the pot, Bailey challenged him, his hand dropping under the table. Doc jerked a pearl-handled knife from his inside breast pocket and eviscerated him.
A marshal’s deputy was present, and threw down on Doc and relieved him of the knife and two pistols while Bailey was still trying to keep his entrails from spilling over his belt. Doc was removed to a hotel while a wagon was readied to take him to the Shackleford County seat at Albany for a hearing.
The story that got told later was full of lynch mobs and vigilantes and had Kate dressing up in man’s clothes and setting fire to a stable and then taking Doc away at gunpoint from the deputy left to guard him while the others were fighting the fire. The part about the man’s clothes and the fire was true enough, but they were just gestures to keep the glare off the deputy, an old customer whom Kate paid a hundred dollars to watch the blaze outside the window while she and Doc walked out. At dawn John Shanssey brought two horses to the cottonwoods by Collins Creek where the fugitives were hiding. From there they rode four hundred miles to Dodge City, Kansas, where cowboys were squalling for more games to lose money on and where Doc had a friend named Earp.
That was four years ago. Kate missed Dodge; not the town itself, clapboard huts on a grass street studded with cow flop, and certainly not the profitable understanding Doc had as a gambler with Wyatt Earp, a man she distrusted, on the local police force, but rather the several weeks during which Doc practiced dentistry for real out of a walk-up office and introduced Kate to acquaintances as Mrs. Holliday. It all blew up when Doc stopped coming home nights, staying up drinking with Wyatt’s kid brother Morgan and betting on whether the next man through the door of the Long Branch would be wearing a kerchief or a cravat. She and Doc fought over it. He broke her nose; she clawed his face and decamped for Ogallala. He said she’d be back. She said he’d write begging her to come back. They were both right. He would get in a bad way and write her in his fine hand—always immaculate, whether he was drunk or sober—saying he needed her, and she would respond by returning. It was a pattern they would repeat in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, with Uncle following them all the way. He and Doc were old acquaintances.
The first time she left him in Tombstone, Kate had gone to the copper-mining center of Globe and spent the five hundred dollars he had given her on a down payment on a hotel, which became a whorehouse with very little alteration and an arrangement with the girls that pleased everyone. During her reunion with Doc she had left the books in care of her brightest girl. Despite detailed instructions the girl had made a mess of them, wandering outside’s Kate carefully ruled lines and getting the debits mixed up with the credits or just plain neglecting to record transactions, and since her return Kate had been involved in reconstructing the past month’s finances. That the girl had been robbing her blind was a certainty, but she couldn’t concentrate long enough to determine by how much. Her eye was still tender where Doc had hit her this time and her bruised ribs hurt when she moved or drew a deep breath. Worse, she felt guilty for having left him with the investigation into the deaths on Fremont Street still pending. That was why, when the mail came bearing a letter in the familiar flowing hand, she got up so quickly to accept it the pain doubled her.
November 5, 1881
Dear Kate,
Well, they have got me in jail again.
Chapter Twelve
J
ohn Charles Fremont, arithmetic teacher-cum-Northwest explorer-cum-soldier-cum-senator-cum-gouty and doting governor of Arizona Territory, stepped down, spurs clanking, from that position on October 15, 1881, under relentless encouragement by President Arthur to do so. John J. Gosper was appointed to fill the gap until a permanent successor could be chosen, but as no portrait of Gosper was forthcoming, the framed likeness of a bilious Fremont clutching a sword and a rolled map remained on the wall behind the justice’s bench in the Cochise County courthouse on the street named for its model. As in life the old eagle’s eyes were directed beyond that room and its contents, out past the Whetstones to where glory lay, and with it something more fitting than the custodianship of a rocky desert inhabited by roadrunners and wild Indians.
Beneath the portrait, looking like an unworthy heir, Justice Wells Spicer scratched his head and left the hair standing. His small eyes followed the scribbled lines on the sheet before him and his voice ground on, inflectionless and soporific, an aural projection of his putty-faced dowdiness in gray collar and lopsided cravat and baggy coat with stains on the lapels. In appearance and manner he gave no indication of the jurist who since June 1880 had stood like an iron post between the grasping Towniot Company and the disputed property fronting on Tombstone’s three principal streets. Paintings lie; so too do personal impressions.
“Witnesses of credibility testify that each of the deceased, or at least two of them, yielded to a demand to surrender,” droned Spicer, turning to a fresh sheet. “Other witnesses of equal credibility testify that William Clanton and Frank McLaury met the demand for surrender by drawing their pistols, and that the discharge of firearms from both sides was almost simultaneous.”
Outside, the wind was blowing, rattling hard early snowflakes like dried peas against the windows and fluting around the panes through spaces where the chinking had dropped out, causing the hanging lamps to sway and glow fiercely with each gust. Nevertheless the room was warm, even hot. Deputy Jim Campbell kept the parlor stove charged with mesquite and cottonwood, and spectators jammed the benches, exuding body heat. Rank with wool and sweat, it hung like an invisible cloud over the proceedings.
“There is a dispute as to whether Thomas McLaury was armed at all, except with a Winchester rifle that was on the horse beside him. I will not consider this question, because it is not of controlling importance. . ."
Behind the railing, on the same bench occupied by Ike Clanton on the day of the fight, Wyatt Earp sat plank straight with a high collar supporting his round chin and his hands resting on his thighs, cuffs showing. Doc Holliday slouched on his spine next to him, wearing a pale yellow shirt under dark gray flannel, hands in pockets, boots crossed, the indolent younger prince with no hope of ascending. His eyes were moving, counting the house. On Wyatt’s other side, Tom Fitch, the pair’s attorney, sat with his chin on his chest and his feet flat on the floor, staring at the boards between them. His graying handlebars had a sober curve. Underneath them he was smiling ever so faintly.