The Last Woman Standing (16 page)

“Who gave you that power?” Still suspicious, I rose from the chair.

“Settle down.” He acted as if he were calming a high-strung mare.

“I detest it when people say ‘settle down.’ When does that work? It aggravates me more. It makes me want to settle up and tell them off.” If my agitation continued, I was never going to make money in this profession, which may have been Wyatt’s point. Subservient I wasn’t (and never would be). Tell me to go right and I’ll go left.

“I’m not going to let this happen to you. It’s a long and winding road that only leads down. I expect nothing in return. But let’s pause for a minute and consider ourselves as two ordinary people—”

“—in a bedroom at Madame Mustache’s.”

“Let’s consider ourselves two people talking to each other, two people who might, just might, have a future together that doesn’t involve a woman with a lip tickler taking a percentage.”

“All right,” I conceded, and settled back in the chair, sitting on my hands so they wouldn’t betray me. “I’m listening.”

“It’s about time.” He smiled again. Two smiles from Wyatt in one day: it may have been a record. I began, just slightly, to unwind in Wyatt’s company. At the very least, he beat Old Man Clanton or whatever gentleman with silver and an itch that might have awaited me in that room. Still, I wasn’t going to make it easy on Wyatt, lying there on the bed wrapped in his infernal confidence with his polished boots and his bright white, newly pressed shirt and his long gambler’s fingers tucked into his belt. I didn’t know who was the cat and who was the canary right then.

“I have a few things I want to get off my chest,” he said. I scooched up in the chair just a little. “I’ve been married once by a justice of the peace. It was in Lamar, Missouri. Her name was Urilla Sutherland. I was just twenty-two, a few years older than you are now, and had made my first stake in a railroad-grading contract—twenty-five hundred dollars. I was feeling pretty manly and old with my pocket bulging. I went to visit my grandparents in Monmouth and catch up with my folks who’d returned from California. I thought I was ready to settle down, and Willa was the one to catch me. She was only sixteen; her brothers weren’t convinced that I was good enough for their sister, but both my parents and hers thought we made a good match.”

I had no idea where this story led, but I kept silent for a change. There was something easily companionable about the moment; it echoed our time in Kitty’s kitchen months before, when I was baking and he was drinking coffee. Still, I never lost track of the tawdry surroundings and the big bed and its purpose.

“Willa was a good girl with a big laugh; I laughed a lot more then.” Just the mention of other women irked me, after Johnny’s indiscretion. I struggled to quiet my jealousy and attend Wyatt’s words. “She was used to being around boys, surrounded by brothers like she was. She looked up to me, but not too much. She was always in motion, singing. We’d hardly moved in together after our wedding before she began to eat me out of house and home. She was pregnant. She cooked corn bread day and night—couldn’t get enough of it, loved the crunchy bits. And she could shoot. Could aim with her left eye and knock a squirrel off a tree at fifty yards. I liked Willa a little wild, and I wasn’t one to button her up like her mother and brothers and tell her to act like a lady. Besides, you can’t be more like a lady than having a baby.”

“Why aren’t you still married?”

“It all went south. She got the typhus and went into labor early. The baby was stillborn. We just carved out one stone for the pair. Her brothers blamed me.”

“Why?”

“Who knows? I didn’t give her typhus, but I got their baby sister pregnant. We were all just so damn torn up about it, so full of love and sadness and anger. We had one big brawl; I guess I figured I deserved getting my ass whipped. But it didn’t change how things were or how I felt. I didn’t want to be in Lamar anymore, and Lamar didn’t want me. I just saddled up and went a little crazy and quiet and rash, shot buffalo because you can’t think of anything else while your rifle’s lined up with the herd. I had my life plowed out before me in neat rows with Willa, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

“I’m so sorry.” I fumbled for words, then reached out and took his hand. He laced his rough fingers with mine. It felt right.

“Not as sorry as I am.”

“I had no idea.”

“No one does except Doc and my brothers.”

“But why are you telling me all this?”

“Isn’t it clear, Josie?” He patted the side of the bed. I confess it wasn’t quite as clear as he thought it was, but I rose and kicked off my slippers. He slid over. “What does your family call you?”

“Sadie, short for Sarah, my middle name.” I was confused and curious about what this had to do with sharing a blanket.

“All right then, Sadie.” He patted the bed again. “I warmed up a spot for you.”

I crawled atop the coverlet wondering whether I should lead with my lips. Wyatt clued me in, patting his shoulder. I rested my head on his rocky bones, trying to find a comfortable spot. I did not know yet where this was leading. I felt off balance even though we were lying down. Other than giving me a squeeze to pull me closer, he didn’t touch me with his hands. It was unclear what we were doing there, but I sensed Wyatt had more to say and that it was difficult for him. He was searching for the right words. And for once I got wise, shut my mouth, and let someone else set the pace.

Staring up at the ceiling, Wyatt inhaled deeply and said, “I guess I’d better explain Mattie, too, as long as I’m carrying on like a woman. That’s harder to justify. We don’t have papers between us, but she’s been with me since Kansas. Mattie tried to coax me out of my misery in Dodge City. She was just there, sitting beside me in the saloon when I gambled, getting me coffee, giving me silence. She didn’t seem to expect anything. And that’s just what I gave her. For a time, that was enough. She wanted shelter, she wanted company, and she wanted out of the game. She wanted family, too, and she got real sisterly with Allie, Virgil’s wife. When it was time for me to leave, I didn’t have to ask and Mattie didn’t have to answer. She came, too. She packed her bag and climbed up beside me on the wagon. No ceremony, no ring.”

I understood the “no ceremony” part. But I didn’t interrupt, I just listened, feeling Wyatt’s heart beating, hardly noticing where he began and I ended, even with all those yards of apricot silk skirt creasing between us.

“Mattie climbed into my life like a stranger climbing into a wagon. We were two people sharing a seat looking forward, facing the same dangers: Indians, outlaws, thirst. There was nothing I could do to shake her devotion, then the guilt that I couldn’t live up to it.”

Wyatt stopped, and I realized that I had not only entered an unfamiliar room for the first time, but into an unexpected level of intimacy with this man. He had a true and troubled heart that he was opening up to me. And his confidence drew me closer to him emotionally, even as our physical positions remained unchanged and unclouded by passion. That night sowed the seeds of a loyalty that would last decades.

“I didn’t love Mattie, but I thought that was all right because after Willa I couldn’t love again. It wasn’t as if I’d rolled over one morning and discovered I’d fallen out of love with Mattie like a child falls out of bed. I never loved her. I never claimed otherwise. I knew the real thing. I just didn’t think I could love again. But I was wrong.”

“Why is that?”

“Because, Sadie, I love you.”

Wyatt took my chin in his right hand and raised my face so that we were looking eye to eye—something we were never able to do while standing because he was so tall and I so short. His feelings were real and as solid as his biceps. For the first time since I’d stepped off the stage last October, I felt truly safe and truly aware of the dangers I’d brought on myself, entering unknown territory without the protection of kin. That was when I began to cry, not even knowing that the tears poured down my cheeks until Wyatt wiped them away with his handkerchief. I let myself go and admitted the extent of my terror. I’d been shouldering such a pile of fears and hurts: Johnny’s betrayal and Bill’s sexual taunt. Here was a man who saw me at my lowest point and opened his arms to me. He let me sob. He didn’t shame me. My emotion was true and so was his. I offered a safe place for him to speak his heart, and in exchange, he would protect mine.

“If this is going to work, I have one rule,” he said.

“What’s that, lawman?”

“You have to be faithful to me.”

“Does that go both ways?”

“It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.”

“Let’s just have one rule then: I’ll be true to you, and you’ll be true to me.”

“I can live and love with that.”

When Wyatt finished talking, he kissed me tenderly on the lips in a way that made me want to climb on top of him, hitch up my skirt, and break the tension. I wouldn’t have been that younger, foolish me if I hadn’t bobbled the moment and asked, “Should I strip now?”

“No, Sadie. You’ll know when I’m ready. I’ll take my boots off first.”

CHAPTER 18

Wyatt carried my bags upstairs at the San Jose Boardinghouse: the secondhand trunk and worn-bald carpetbag, a string of bright hat boxes, and a carton of odds and ends—theater tickets and playbills, framed photographs, a rock that meant something to me at the time. The rent I charged Johnny for the house we built on his Safford Street lot—and Wyatt collected for me—pretty much covered it. I didn’t have the heart to throw Albert out on the street, but I wasn’t ever going to enter that bedroom again.

The San Jose, unlike Madame Mustache’s bawdy house, was legitimate. It housed mining engineers and lawyers and politicians, some sticking their toes in the water to see what all the boomtown fuss was about. Others stayed for months, their suits improving with their fortunes—a lucky strike, a lucky hand, a clever stratagem in real estate or dry goods. House rules banned Wyatt from remaining upstairs: men were forbidden in a lady’s room at the San Jose Boardinghouse. The walls were thin enough that it wasn’t a rule that required policing. I could already hear the rapid gunshots of my neighbor’s sneeze; perhaps he had a dust allergy, so very unfortunate in Tombstone.

“We’ll work this out, Sadie.” When Wyatt saw my face as he replaced his hat in preparation to leave, he said, “I’m only asking you to be a little patient. I love you and only you.
Forever.
”

I understood that he was as good as his word. But I could not get myself to feel the elation that I expected right then. I was in love, damn it. I had tasted the cheap stuff and now I knew the real thing. I loved Wyatt. His every action demonstrated that he shared my affection. Apparently sensing my uneasiness, he pulled a card from his vest pocket and handed it to me, suggesting I call in at the Fly’s Photography Gallery and introduce myself to Mollie if I needed company. Then he was gone, without even a kiss (out of respect for the house rules).

Once the door shut behind Wyatt, I felt abandoned in this little box. I crumpled the card without looking at it. I couldn’t see my way forward. I rose and examined the corner room, which took hardly a minute, it was so plain and small, like a cell, really. And there I was, my hair damp, my eyes drooping, staring back at myself from the plain oval mirror above the stoneware water jug and basin. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this girl. No, this woman: because that’s what I was after my time with John H. Behan. I had to take responsibility for the consequences of my actions.

Sitting on the foot the bed, I picked at a crack in my nail with my thumb. To stop myself from ruining my manicure, I placed my hands on either side of my thighs. Beneath my fingertips, the mattress was of recent vintage, like everything in Tombstone. It was as new as a fresh scab.

Outside the south-facing window overlooking City Market, the deluge continued, cleaning the gutters and washing away the ash, creating ragged rivulets on Fremont Street below. I felt the desperate pang of isolation rumble like hunger in my belly, the kind I could try and fail to stuff with a sweet bun or a sandwich. For most of my life I’d shared a room with Hennie, then slept on a cot in the Joneses’ front room and divided my first double bed with Johnny. Now we had “split the blanket,” as the locals said, parted ways. I was learning that Wyatt’s domestic arrangements were complicated, and I was another complication.

I considered Mattie, sitting in a room somewhere within a mile from here, with that disappointed face of soap she wore. I was aware that Wyatt’s devotion to me came with a price—Mattie’s heart, and her security—even if he deserved joy, too. I’d created another enemy in Tombstone without much effort. Wherever you turned, people were taking sides. By embracing Wyatt, I rejected Johnny, who still sniffed around begging forgiveness. He wanted me back. The feeling was not mutual. I discovered that in such a small, polarized society, taking sides meant you were actively rejecting others, animating opposition. Tombstone was evolving into a town where there was no neutral ground.

To shoo away the new-room blues, I willed myself up off the bed and onto my feet. I had no patience for being stuck. Only later would Wyatt teach me that sometimes sitting still and gathering strength is the best action to take. But this was way before I learned that lesson. I unfastened my trunk and filled the hardwood chest with its dovetailed drawers, rolling my stockings the way Mama had taught me, hiding the most intimate undergarments at the back. Then I changed my mind, placing the satin and the lace up front. Draping a red paisley scarf across the bureau top, I laid out my powder and rouge, my silver hairbrush and comb and hand mirror, my tortoiseshell hairpins. I placed the tin-framed photo of Albert and smiled at his company. It wasn’t the wedding photo of Johnny and me by C. S. Fly for which I’d hoped, but he wasn’t the man for me, I assured myself. And I’d come out of the situation with a son, or at least a younger brother.

Somehow I’d become a woman with a past in ten short months, although that seemed like a lifetime to me right then. I unclasped my carpetbag and removed Papa’s folded letter. I approached it slowly, unfolding the rough stationery, reading my father’s handwriting, labored and sincere. “My Dearest Sadie.” Just those words pulled me up. I was Sadie in his eyes and Wyatt’s, my true self, the big-hearted girl I could be, given half a chance, the one capable of taking and giving back. I read through the letter, which I rarely did because it opened such a well of emotion. Saving it retained its power to move:

. . . You must live in the future. You have my blessing for what it is worth. May you find love, and keep love, and have children of your own, but know that there is always and forever love in my heart for you and shelter under my roof . . .

I was living my present, charting my future at the San Jose. If I surrendered to loneliness, I had my father’s love and faith to lift me up. And while I’d stumbled hard over Johnny, I had also discovered real love and would keep it. Someday I would have children of my own. And even if this roof was strange and the rain pounded atop it, I lived in the shelter of my father’s love and carried his confidence in me even when mine flagged. I was my father’s favorite no matter where I was, whether on Perry Street or Fremont.

Holding on to this unbreakable bond as if it were a locket, I glanced at the writing desk overlooking Fifth Street and considered composing a letter to Papa, but only managed to lay out my stationery on the leather blotter. Where would I begin? I had to inform him of my new address, but that would entail explaining the why of it beyond the what, and the sacrifice of his investment. I lacked the strength to describe my current situation with a plucky tone. The words would dissolve into stronger emotions and raw confidences when the ink merged with the paper. Letters with tearstains and ink smears would disturb Papa for days. That wasn’t fair to him. I would wait until I could compose with more self-control, when I was more settled. If that was the case, I could elevate my mood by stretching my legs.

Thrusting my melancholy aside, I unfolded Wyatt’s card and read in black lettering:

F
LY’S
P
HOTOGRAPHY
G
ALLERY

312 F
REMONT
S
TREET

C. S. F
LY
P
ROPRIETOR

Trusting in Wyatt, I grabbed my cloak and umbrella and tightened my bootlaces. I descended the stairs. After nodding politely to the gentlemen assembled in the parlor who were discussing the price of silver ore, I entered Fremont Street. No longer on the fringe of Tombstone, I found myself in the humid thick of downtown.

I hurried west toward the recently erected Schieffelin Hall, built by Albert Schieffelin, brother to Tombstone’s founder, Ed. In the pelting rain, I distinguished what may have been an actor disappear down the alley toward the stage door. Perhaps he was rushing to a rehearsal of Tom Taylor’s melodrama
The Ticket-of-Leave Man
. Was it intentional that the opera house’s premiere production was about a rube nearly brought to ruin in the wicked city? The producer clearly was trying to match his art to his audience. I would have been more thrilled by a musical: a production of
H.M.S.
Pinafore
,
The Pirates of Penzance
, or
Evangeline, The Belle of Arcadia
.

Ducking out from under the arcades, I cut across Fourth Street. I passed the offices of the
Nugget
to my left and the
Epitaph
across the road to my right, the rival newspapers positioned to face off, even down to the street on which they stood. Pausing to ensure I wouldn’t be knocked over by a horse and rider, I plotted a shortcut down the alley leading to the O.K. Corral from Fremont, which put me squarely before the modest storefront labeled
F
LY’S
P
HOTOGRAPHY
G
ALLERY
(C. S. Fly, P
ROP
.)
on its shabby, two-story facade. Four slender pillars supported the eaves. I ascended the porch, free from the rain and shaking my wet ringlets. I might have turned around and left—I was a mess. However, the rain resumed, achieving the intensity of a monsoon, and meeting strangers seemed the lesser of two evils.

An immediate answer greeted my hesitant knock. The wooden door creaked open. A bell tinkled. I found myself staring eye to eye at a woman with thick black hair pulled into a bun. She had a broad, flat nose and a rounded chin that rose up to meet it, like a crescent moon, and curious eyes that took me in even before she reached out a hand to grab my arm, ending all hesitancy that might have remained.

“Please tell me you are Josephine,” she said as she reeled me into the studio, which smelled of chemicals and mint.

“How do you know my name?”

“Who else would you be but Wyatt’s woman? If someone has a reputation for being the greatest beauty in Tombstone, I have an obligation as a photographer to see her, even if she has not seen me. Call it professional curiosity.”

“I’m flattered.” And flummoxed, too, although I didn’t say so aloud.

Mollie had the ability to read even the densest and most complicated facial expressions like simple prose. Seeing my confusion, she laughed, and said, “I am Mollie Fly, proprietress. Buck—that’s C. S.—is off in a tent somewhere shooting Apaches with his camera and tempting scorpions with his skinny ankles.” She paused to laugh at her own image. “The building says ‘Fly’s Photography Gallery,’ but I’m as much an owner as that gadfly Camillus Sydney. We’re both camera-crazy, even if polite society hasn’t accepted female photographers. It’s easier to give the man credit where it’s not due. Here, what kind of hostess am I? Let me take your wet things.” She carelessly tossed them on a cast-iron hook without stopping when they puddled on the floor.

Mollie looked to be about Wyatt’s age, give or take a year, although her features weren’t as worn by sun and sorrow. Short, bristly brows sheltered sharp, deep-set eyes. The oddity of her visage was how long the canvas of her face was, and how her petite features clustered together in the middle, between a broad forehead and heavy jawline. She was a plain woman if beauty was judged from the outside, but she was far more beautiful than I was if judged the other way around. She would have protested she wasn’t photogenic, but that was likely because she preferred composing the image from behind the camera rather than posing in front of it. And she preferred shadows to sun in general, security to exposure outside the walls of her beloved studio.

“How about I pour you some mint tea and we get acquainted.” She rolled down the sleeves of her white blouse and tucked in the shirttails more neatly around her waist. She walked with purpose, passing the imposing mahogany-and-brass box camera labeled Scovill Manufacturing Company, NY. The contraption dominated the room atop a tripod, its open black bellows forming an impressive proboscis. She led me to a pair of green-velvet parlor chairs—one large, one little—arranged side by side like a married couple. Mollie motioned me to the smaller one while taking a tall wooden stool herself. She winked and said, “I usually need the stool so I can see eye to eye with my customers, but that’s not necessary here. It’s nice to see that you’re human-size, with all these six-footers galumphing around. You are a darling, and I bet you’re photogenic.”

“I’m not,” I said, though the fact was I’d never had my picture taken. Johnny and I had intended to visit Fly’s as a couple for an engagement photo. It was just more writing on the wall that we’d never made the short walk to 312 Fremont Street.

“No false modesty here, Josephine. I am sure the light loves you as much as Wyatt. Why not embrace our virtues as long as we admit our vices, too? Some folks consider me too forthright, but Buck likes me this way, says it keeps him honest. We ditched propriety in Napa when we wed two years ago. We both love photography. We wanted to create pictures together, along with all the other treats of marriage and adventure. My first husband dismissed my passion for cameras over cooking, and that’s why I have a second one.”

Mollie poured tea from a big brown pot into an earthenware mug. That explained the minty scent. The taste made my tongue tingle and warmed me from the inside out. While I drank, my hostess continued her story without giving me the time to realize I was no longer lonely. She said, “We crated our equipment and decided Tombstone was booming, and that’s where we were bound. We began our studio in a tent. You’d be surprised how many lonely men will pay thirty-five cents for a picture to send back to their families. I had sticky fingers with Buck’s carousing money, and we built the studio and the twelve-room boardinghouse.” Mollie paused to refresh my tea. “Now I run them both in Buck’s absence, and typically, in his presence, too. He’s not much for the studio portraits. They bore him to death. But these pictures butter our bread. And I like the job. I’ve met nearly everyone in town, from sinner to saint. While Buck prefers natural light, I am content to shoot my photographs within these four walls, looking for the innate glow within my subjects. Now that I see you, I want you to pose for me. Josephine, you have a glow. Capturing it would please me to no end.”