The Last Woman Standing (21 page)

Wyatt protected me to be my true adventurous self. I held his heart in my hands, blowing light and life where there had been ashes and the tiniest of embers. Our kiss was a quiet breath held together. A soft knock at the internal door interrupted us. Doc whispered, “Wyatt, we have to go.”

CHAPTER 24

Wyatt nailed it: our lasting devotion—and his fleeting hero status. Tombstone awoke on the morning of October 27 with a horror hangover. The folks living in the town named for a grave marker—with a newspaper named the
Epitaph
—had boasted about having their men for breakfast. But it had rarely happened. Now we had three corpses for supper, which inspired mass indigestion.

The initial response had been pro-Wyatt. The
Epitaph
ran the headline
“T
HREE
M
EN
H
URLED INTO
E
TERNITY
. . .”

Editor and Mayor Clum wrote:

The feeling among the best class of our citizens is that the Marshal was entirely justified in his efforts to disarm these men, and that being fired upon they had to defend themselves, which they did most bravely.

Since the
Epitaph
was syndicated, Clum’s favorable opinion echoed across the country—and would likely have been read out loud by Mama to Papa. Even the
San Francisco Exchange
hailed my Earps:

Marshal Earp and his assistants deserve well of their fellow citizens, and we hope the Tombstoners appreciate the fact. The cowboy class are the most despicable beings on the face of the earth. They are a terror to decent people and a disgrace to even frontier civilization.

But local opinion in the saloons and stables, the tobacconists and sewing circles, was woefully split. Nothing made that clearer than two days later when Ritter and Ream, City Undertakers, displayed the bodies of Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Ike’s little brother, Billy, in their picture window following their date with the coroner. Above the three corpses hung the sign
M
URDERED ON THE
S
TREETS OF
T
OMBSTONE
. As I hurried by on an errand to the shops, avoiding the crowds, it became abundantly clear that a difference of opinion existed within the town limits about who were the heroes of the gunfight, and who were the victims. My concerns for Wyatt grew along with the gawkers outside Ritter and Ream.

When I dropped by Fly’s and told Buck what I’d seen, he set aside his whiskey, grabbed his camera equipment, and headed for Fifth Street in a visible adrenaline rush. Buck had moved to Arizona to be the first photographer on the scene at just such events. He planted his tripod center front of the plate-glass window, shooing away the growing crowds with an air of self-importance and entering what Mollie called his “fugue state.”

According to Mollie, Buck left his camera outside and entered the funeral parlor, where the undertakers had propped the cowboys up in their three identical silver-trimmed ebony caskets adorned with leaf motifs. The victims wore formal suits and ties. Their bloody wounds had been tidied. Ignoring the throng outside, Buck began setting the scene with an officiousness that took the undertakers aback. Ignoring their protests, he removed his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and composed his death photograph. He tucked a collar here, smoothed a cowlick there, and crossed pale hands over chests with an eye toward visual harmony. He ordered the undertakers to raise the wooden boxes higher so that the faces became more visible, without the bodies sliding in an ungainly posture from their final resting places.

The clean-shaven Billy looked impossibly young, a spring leaf fallen prematurely from a great oak. The McLaury brothers might have been twins, with their identical black mustaches and goatees, their dark brows over sunken, sightless eyes. The trio could have been biblical martyrs in their serene seriousness.

Buck, with Mollie assisting, exposed plate after photographic plate to create a photo that would become nearly as legendary as the gunfight itself. In death, the corpses rose again, and Tombstone flooded with aggrieved cowboys and ranchers from the outlying territory. The influx climaxed with the largest funeral procession ever seen in Tombstone. A brass band led the cortege from the funeral parlor to the cemetery at Boot Hill. Clanton reposed in one hearse. The McLaurys followed in another. Three hundred pedestrians, a four-horse stagecoach, twenty-two buggies and carriages, and a string of men on horseback filled the funeral procession, while onlookers occupied the sidewalks. The event’s scale, the outpourings of sympathy and grief, the tears and outrage, shocked me and surprised the local law-and-order crowd. Even the cowboy-friendly
Nugget
seemed taken aback, running this headline:
“A
N
I
MPOSING
F
UNERAL
,”
followed by the text:

While it was not entirely expected, the funeral of Billy Clanton and Thomas and Frank McLowry yesterday was the largest ever witnessed in Tombstone.

The crowd gawked and mourned the dead, but I feared for the living. In the funeral’s aftermath, curses filled the street. Well-heeled horsemen itching for a fight converged on Allen Street. That night, an endless wake flowed from one saloon, one long bar to the next. Quiet reigned at the Cosmopolitan, the Earps’ territory.

From what I gleaned from Mollie and the newspapers, the town feared cowboy retribution, which in turn made businessmen jittery. The entrepreneurs and miners needed peace to draw cash investments from Eastern bankers, and all that money flowed down into small concerns like the studio and the boardinghouse. The merchants and miners only supported my Earps to the extent that they kept the peace, and did not necessarily have the backbone to support them once violence broke out.

True to form, Ike Clanton took the opportunity to behave despicably. He had drunkenly threatened Doc and the Earps from one bar stool to the next all over town on the eve of the fight and deep into that morning. Wyatt had let him leave the yard because Ike alone was unarmed, which was when I saw him flee through Fly’s with crazy eyes. Yet, within days, Ike filed murder charges against the Earps and Doc, and Sheriff Johnny had the nerve to carry them out now that public opinion was swaying his way. He’d played his political cards like a true gambler. On November 1, Johnny arrested Wyatt and Doc. Those Earp brothers who were bedridden remained free under the watchful eye of Virgil’s wife, Allie.

November was bitter and difficult. The tide of town sentiment turned against Wyatt and his brothers following the funeral. The fear of cowboy reprisal was palpable, and it was only going to worsen with Johnny fanning the flames against my man.

Wyatt and Doc hired high-profile lawyer Thomas Fitch for their defense. After Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer set bail at $10,000 each, they raised the money from their supporters and their own pockets. Even after their release, I rarely saw Wyatt, although I read about him daily. He sent me a single “I love you, Sadie” scrawled on a scrap torn from a legal document. I tucked it into the envelope with the letter from Papa. I had to have the strength—his strength—to cling to what that represented. Meanwhile, Judge Spicer convened a preliminary hearing to determine if the facts warranted a murder charge and a formal trial. Although I wanted to attend, I laid low. My presence would have made the courtroom hotter for Wyatt, particularly since Johnny was the key witness for the prosecution.

Johnny first testified on November 2. When I read the newspaper account, my jaw dropped. I had seen Johnny in Fly’s. He had fled when he should have disarmed the cowboys and protected the town. Instead, he let others do his dirty work, waited for the smoke to clear, and double-crossed them. Johnny was a coward. He was a liar. I knew this! He had reneged on his vow to make Wyatt undersheriff. On the stand, he asserted that Billy Clanton and the McLaurys were unarmed victims shot with their hands in the air. I knew that was false. I witnessed Buck removing Billy’s pistol from his bloody hand.

But there was Johnny, in the power of print, alleging that he’d met the Earps on Fremont Street and attempted to dissuade them from entering the yard, to no avail. Despite his best efforts, they’d murdered three harmless innocents. What slayed me was that Johnny smooth-talked the court into believing his version of events. His testimony, backed by his authority as sheriff (the high-paying position that he’d weaseled from Wyatt), sabotaged Doc and the Earps in the courtroom. Dropping the newspaper, I became furious, then nauseated. I knew Johnny was in bed with the Clantons, the McLaurys, Curly Bill, and Johnny Ringo, and knew all too well how persuasive he could be. If he could convince the court in the same way he had snookered me, Wyatt would hang.

Under cross-examination, the defense failed to shake Johnny, shifting the tide of public opinion away from the Earps and Holliday. The prosecution scored a victory when Judge Spicer revoked bail on the strength of their case. Johnny jailed Wyatt and Doc.

Johnny, a lesser man, had shamed Wyatt in public and now held the key, not only to his cell but to his future. I empathized with Wyatt, knowing the disgrace of his incarceration, a lawman treated as a murderous criminal with Doc railing at his side. Wyatt had infinite patience, and yet it stabbed to be stuck behind bars, robbed of his agency, reduced to a caged gorilla. And why—for protecting the town against armed outlaws while defending his brothers and Doc against threatening, murderous thugs?

This was justice turned on its head, and all Wyatt wanted to do was right it. Adding salt to the wound, it was fork-tongued Johnny who triumphed in Wyatt’s catastrophe. The moment I heard that Wyatt had been taken prisoner, I wanted to run from the San Jose to the jail, hatless, uncombed. I needed to reach through the bars and touch his hand—to comfort him, I told myself, but it was my own desperation to feel his skin’s warmth, the muscle beneath, the solidity and certainty that was Wyatt.

That urge was shabby of me: to desire his protection and comfort when it was he who needed salvation. I forced myself to accept the bitter truth: I was incapable of consoling him in jail. He did not want me to see him reduced to criminal status, unwashed, defeated, surrounded by lesser men in more powerful positions. My arrival would embarrass him in front of the throng, my inevitable tears forcing him to raise a brave face—and show his hand. I struggled to maintain my promise: to leave him be in jail and wait to celebrate his inevitable freedom. But that freedom felt anything but certain, given Johnny’s testimony. I rose and rushed to the door multiple times, ready to fly to him, ready to break my oath. I made it as far as the landing only to return to the edge of my lonely bed and look out the window, waiting, picking at the coverlet, anxious and crawling out of my own skin. Panic was my only company.

Heightened nervousness ran like a current through town. Johnny, apparently fearing that the Earps’ allies would spring the prisoners—I would have done so if I could—charged the inept editor turned Undersheriff Woods with assembling a heavy guard. But lynching was as likely as a jailbreak. Despite Woods’s guards, the citizens’ vigilance committee encircled the jail to ensure the prisoners would remain safe from external threats. There were many sore-headed men anxious for payback now that Wyatt and Doc were unarmed and vulnerable. I could hear the angry calls for the noose from my window. Even when I went downstairs for supper, the talk among the gentlemen residents of the San Jose was of a possible necktie party, and how this was bad for business, although the discussion ended when I entered the room. I had seen this bloodlust bubble up for Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce, and only Wyatt had saved him from the mob. That November day, “murderers” was a common cry. If I heard it, Wyatt did, too. Again, I lamented for his state of mind. I knew my own was shattered.

The following day, Johnny brought Wyatt and Doc to court in shackles. Billy Claiborne took the stand to hammer another nail into the defense’s coffin. Clearly, Claiborne and Behan had synchronized their stories. The cowboy testified that he had been in the yard for sixteen to eighteen shots before he entered Fly’s. He claimed both Clantons raised their hands up before Virgil, and that Tom McLaury was opening his coat to prove he was unarmed when the shooting started. This contradicted what I’d seen: the panicked Claiborne running through the studio after only two rounds. Yet he testified that Doc shot first, Morgan second, and, together, the Earp side fired the first six bullets. Coupled with Johnny’s testimony, this was damning evidence.

The defense experienced their darkest hour.
Hanging
was the word that seeped out from the courtroom into the streets.

CHAPTER 25

NOVEMBER 1881

The night that Billy Claiborne testified, there was partying in the streets and the sound of pistol fire. Every time I heard a shot, I didn’t know if it was a liberating or lynching party at the jail. I had to do something.

I couldn’t visit Wyatt. I considered visiting Morgan and Virgil, but instantly knew that a rancorous encounter with Allie and Mattie would be inevitable. Wyatt would not want me to stir up that hornet’s nest of resentment. But I could no longer sit on my hands as darkness fell and the night lengthened and cold chased the revelers into the saloons and brothels. The only way to escape my panic was to take action, and the only leverage I had to spring Wyatt was with Johnny.

My thoughts spun: Could I move Johnny’s conscience to save Wyatt from the noose without placing myself in a dangerous and vulnerable position? I had no clarity, only fear and loss and a need to make things right, as Wyatt would if I were at risk. Only my skills were not in my steely nerves or sharpshooting.

All I could think, in my plain bedroom overlooking Fremont Street, was that I had to act.
The walls were closing in on me. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the familiar features: the heavy lashes, the eyebrows—one higher than the other—the full lips, and the dilated eyes of fear. Thanks, in part, to Mollie’s labors in the photography studio, I saw a woman, not a girl, and I saw my power over men. I looked away when I thought of how that power had emboldened me and then let me down when I found Johnny twisted around Mrs. Dunbar. Wyatt had rescued me with his love and unleashed a depth of feeling in me that I’d never known, but he could not erase the shame embroidered in dark thread on my heart. I felt it tug as I put on my armor, strapped on my holsters, my weapons of beauty: I painstakingly created a series of small braids and twisted them around my heavy curls in an ornate hairstyle. I rouged my cheeks. I plucked my brows. I struggled by myself with my corset to constrict my waist even tighter than the norm. I doused myself in cologne. I tried on one dress in front of the mirror, fussed at a stain. I exchanged it for another, the red taffeta, the one Johnny favored, the one that was cut lower at the bust than the rest.

Once dressed and powdered, I resisted catching my own eyes in the looking glass. I would see the woman who loved Wyatt judging back at me. I could not afford to face her disapproval. I could not sit and do nothing. I could not pine patiently, knowing that Wyatt was passing the time on a hard bunk with Doc bellyaching, surrounded by gloating jailers, and gawkers stopping by to see the mighty fallen. Even though I knew that Wyatt had the patience to see the preliminary hearing through and wait for the right time to act, sit tight, or fold—and would disapprove of my impulsive actions—act I did.

Concealed beneath a silk paisley shawl, I descended the San Jose stairs. As I passed the parlor, I again overheard guests discussing hanging and the price of silver, and the sound of newspapers being flapped and folded. Wordlessly, I snuck out into the brisk night air bound for Sixth and Safford Street. On the way, I jumped at every shadow, shuddered at a mongrel’s growl. I hewed to the darkness approaching the town’s outskirts, shivering from cold, fearing my safety as I passed the empty lots on Safford Street, the lonely canvas tents, the campfires whipping up sparks.

Damn the court: I would see Johnny to plead my case.

On our familiar corner, I paused in the blackness to observe the sweet house with the lacy fretwork on the eaves that I had called mine. I had loved the hopes of that house, planned every corner and cornice, felt an affection for every window for which I’d fought against the constraints of the budget. I had envisioned planting climbing pink roses and baking birthday cakes for the children who would inevitably arrive, buying the best oven possible in the Montgomery Ward “Wish Book.” Now, from across the street, even the cottage betrayed me, with its welcoming lights and a lantern hung from the porch, as if I’d never left. I could see the gingham curtains I had stitched and bled over. I would rather share a thousand campsites with Wyatt than spend one more night under that roof with Johnny, yet here I was, and I could already feel Johnny’s pull, remember the first time we’d made love, and how that freed a wild self in me that I never wanted to contain.

Contain. Jail. Wyatt.

My fury rose as if it were yesterday when Albert and I caught Johnny with that floozy. How could someone uphold the law and betray his beloved and shame his own son? Johnny had robbed me of my home and heart—and arrested other men for lesser burglaries. Even as I blamed him, I had only myself to chide for returning to his door in my current reduced state: standing in the shadows in red taffeta and rouge, a beggar with only beauty in my basket. While my jaw stiffened with my resolve, my feet dragged up the narrow path whose construction I had overseen myself. I climbed the porch on tiptoe, raised my fist to rap on the front door. This had been my door. I had chosen its height and girth. I had always opened it freely—and I remembered how it slammed when I left for good, still holding Albert’s hand in mine, stunned by the carnality and betrayal that had confronted us.

Rage and jealous fury fueled my urgent knock. Johnny had stolen my heart, dragged me to Tombstone, and ditched me. I wouldn’t let him steal Wyatt. I was not the wide-eyed girl I had been when Johnny first grinned at me with those shiny teeth and I mistook him for the tenor to my soprano in a fantasy operetta of love.

The door opened and there they were: the shiny teeth in Johnny’s welcoming, even cocky, smile. His eyes were merry upon realizing it was me at his door. I swallowed, overwhelmed by how swiftly my rage dissipated. Seeing him again revived all those old feelings: how handsome he was, how warm his eyes that looked straight into mine without shame, his hair barbered, his mustache combed. I’ve always liked a man with a small waist and broad shoulders, and that was Johnny. He reached to embrace me, front to front. I retreated from the precipice in time, fronting him a cheek to buss. Slipping past, I entered the parlor, our parlor, with the suite I had so carefully picked from the catalog. I noticed a cigar burn on the red Renaissance Revival gentleman’s chair. A dark stain of unknown origin crawled across the settee. I’d had such pretentions, such baseless hopes for Mr. and the second Mrs. Behan. Seeing the nearly new furniture already marred, I said, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

“It could use a woman’s touch,” Johnny said. “What brings you to the old neighborhood so late at night?”

I had not considered even my first move, the pawn of my attack, through all the long time I had braided my hair and changed my clothes and plucked my brows. Was there not a strategic bone in my small body, besides my small body?

“Am I unwelcome in the house I built and paid for?”

“Money is so important with you and your kind.”

“And what kind is that?” A religious slur. Now I would see how low Johnny could stoop, as if I needed more proof.

“Womankind,” he said, raising his thick eyebrows and observing my response. “You claimed your father was rich.”

“And
you
said you’d marry me.”

“You left me, Josephine, not the other way around,” he said, as if my departure had been a rainy-day whim rather than a desperate exit on seeing him mounted upon another woman. Just thinking about that afternoon brought the image to my eyes. I recoiled.

“I suppose you could say that I am not good at sharing.” I could hardly bear hearing myself, so weak, so defensive, while standing on my back foot.

“As you explained to me,” Johnny said wryly, “this is still your house in deed. Regardless of your opinion of my behavior under our roof, you know that the bedroom door is always open.”

“It is much too crowded for my taste.” I must have been probing for remorse on his part, for a way to gain his sympathy and then try to parlay that into mercy for Wyatt. I thought Johnny owed me, but I sensed the feeling was not mutual.

“I like a full house over a pair,” Johnny said. “I’m not alone in that. What you call a crowd, I call a party. You cannot deny that we’re a good match, although we love better than we fight. I admit: I did the horizontal dance with someone else. You caught me. Guilty as charged. Now you have bedded down with Wyatt. We’re even. I won’t hold that against you. You can only lose your virginity once. You gave that to me, thank you very much.”

I sputtered. Johnny’s words reduced what we had to less than nothing, and I feared they were truer than the last illusions I carried. His cavalier attitude shocked me. I had been in love with him. I had believed we would marry and remain together. And yet he had never shown me this side of him, his morals nowhere near as tailored as his suit. I said, “You betrayed me, Johnny, all while pretending it was true love.”

“OK, maybe I strayed. Maybe I strayed more than once. But I only
love
you. I only
adore
you. I brought you here. You were mine first. We butt heads, but we also make love. We fight, but we also make up.”

“How dare you! We are not getting back together, Johnny,” I said with a tremor in my voice. “We are as through as Billy Clanton.”

“We’ll never be through, Josie. I know you. I know how you like your nipples rubbed.” I blanched. He did—and how many men had he told? “I know how you scream and sigh for more. Your nightmare is awakening in your mother’s house without my arms around you. You can’t return to San Francisco, an unmarried lady with a wife’s worth of experience. We can only go forward. Now you truly know me,” he said, opening his palms in front of me. He smiled his most winning, cunning, ingratiating smile. “The gloves are off.”

It suddenly hit me that I’d made no headway. I’d wandered off the track and landed in the territory of the wolves and coyotes. My purpose had never been reconciliation, but protecting Wyatt. “Are we having an argument, Johnny? That was never my intent. Tell me, instead, that you are incapable of letting Wyatt hang, knowing the truth as we do.”

“Wyatt hangs, we get back together. Why should I separate the two? You have an inflated notion of Earp. You think your deal with Madame Mustache escaped me? I might have played a little fiddle there, expecting you to return to me, but Wyatt beat me to the punch. He scooped you up. Wyatt is not the hero you think; he is an opportunist of the first order.”

“You, sir, are the opportunist,” I said, “putting Wyatt’s life at stake for your gains.” Shaking, I gripped bunches of my skirt in my fists, tempted to shred the fabric. I longed to slap his smug face.

“Josie, I can feel you trembling across the room. Even your anger is an invitation. You can’t stay away from me forever. Wyatt is in jail for a single night. Where do you run? To my arms, that’s where you come. What do you
want
from me, then, Josie, in your red dress and your rouge?”

His question, calling me on my bluff, humiliated me. I was no seductress. This woman he saw before him disgusted me. He’d seen through me from the moment I banged on the door, and had set out to exploit my desperation. Even when I wore a corset, he’d seen me naked and loose-limbed, wild-haired, flushed. I’d tried to seduce him to free Wyatt; he’d known that he held the winning hand. Perhaps he expected me to return to him for protection. That was not going to happen, not by the chin hairs of Curly Bill. There was no going back. Still, one last time, I tried to appeal to Johnny’s conscience, to the honorable man with whom I believed I’d fallen in love.

“I insist you tell the truth on the stand,” I said, straining to keep from shouting, as I’d seen my mother do so often at home.

“Or what will you do, little lady? I am telling a truth—my truth,” he said, relaxing now that I’d begun to play my hand and lose my temper. “It’s very compelling, and I don’t need a pistol in my hand to enforce it. Would you join me in a cognac? You look like a little peaked. Can I pour you a digestif?”

“No, thank you. I read your testimony, Johnny, and caught you out in your self-serving lies. You promised to appoint Wyatt as undersheriff if he dropped out of the sheriff’s race. I was there. You welched on that deal when it no longer suited your schemes. You made an enemy where once stood an ally.”

“Not much of an ally steals your girl,” Johnny said.

“Wyatt had nothing to do with your losing me. You did that all by yourself,” I said. “The day of the gunfight, I saw you and Billy Claiborne skip into Fly’s after two shots. Again, I was there.”

“Who will believe that story? And to whom will a woman of your reputation tell it?”

“And who ruined my reputation?” I said, finally releasing the shout that I’d contained until now.

“I did not abduct you, Josie. We are a long way from San Francisco.” He sipped his drink and thumbed his vest pockets in search of who knew what. As we talked, he inched between me and the entrance, preventing my exit and herding me toward the bedroom. “My love has not abated. Come, feel me. My ardor for you remains. Tell me: What do you want from me?”

“The truth, Johnny, I want the facts,” I said, retreating. “Wyatt is no murderer. Four men’s lives are at stake in Judge Spicer’s courtroom, three of them brothers.”