Going cold, Wyatt thought, He can’t keep this up. He’ll start to cough. His lungs will bleed again.
But it was Wyatt himself who could not breathe, gripped by a fear so strong, it seemed to stop the beating of his heart. Fear that this dance would end too soon. Fear that this music would be wrenched away from Doc—from all of them—before it was meant to end.
And though none of Wyatt’s prayers had ever once been answered, and though he knew that his soul was not pure and his faith was not strong, and though he could not understand why God always took the best and the sweetest to his bosom and left the dregs to get meaner and worse—in spite of it all, he began to pray. Dear Lord, please, give him time! Please, Lord, let him finish!
But John Henry Holliday was praying too, just as earnestly and to any god who might listen. Now. Now. Now. Take me now.
Now: with this music beneath his hands. Now: while he was still a gentle man who might have made his mother proud. Now: while beauty could still beat back the blind and brutal disease that was eating him alive.
So he held nothing back, tempting the Fates, defying them, seducing them.
Now: as he bent into thunderous, muscular chords.
Now: as he drew back for brilliant, chiming fantasies.
Now: as he hurled his hands into the impossibly swift runs across the keyboard.
Now, now, now, he prayed when the music darkened and fell, and spun and caught itself, and rose again, until at last—Orpheus to his own soul—he climbed beyond Hades’ grasp, beyond himself, beyond the terrifying, suffocating horror that awaited him, until exhaustion and peace had claimed him, as the music floated—softly, lightly—downward, and he let it end on the quiet chords before the final arpeggio.
Breathless and blinking like a newborn, he came back to the world around him, awakening first to rapt silence as the last notes died away, and then to applause and cheers and amazement.
“Well, did you ever!”
“I had no idea he could—”
“By God! Now, that was something!”
And he was surprised to see that sometime during the concerto, Kate had come to sit beside him on the bench, and that she was sobbing.
“Ne meurs pas, mon amour! Don’t die on me!” she begged as he took her in his arms. “Don’t die, Doc. Please, don’t die.”
“I am doin’ my best, darlin’.”
“Promise you won’t leave me!”
“You have my word. Hush, now. Hush. Don’t cry.”
“Promise you won’t leave?”
“I promise.” He gave her a handkerchief.
“Liar! Everyone leaves,” she muttered bitterly, and blew her nose. “Or they die.”
“You have me there,” he admitted. “Everybody dies.”
She laid her head against that traitorous, murderous chest of his.
“Oh, Doc,” she whispered, “I want to go home.”
“I know, darlin’.”
“Take me home. Please, Doc, take me home!”
“And where is that?” he wondered. “Where is home for us now?”
Us, she thought.
She started to laugh, and wiped her eyes, and said, “Las Vegas! Please, Doc, let’s try it. Just six months! Please!”
“No,” he told her, though he held her close. “No, and that’s final.”
In late April of 1879, Dr. Robert Holliday received a note postmarked “Dodge City, Kansas.”
Please forgive the long silence. I have been poorly for some time and my health remains brittle. This is to inform you that I will be moving to Las Vegas in the New Mexico Territory. I have made a place for myself in Dodge and I am sorry to leave, but the winter is severe here, perhaps worse for me than summers back in Georgia. There are hot springs near Las Vegas and a sanatorium that is the latest thing in tubercular Society. We club together and pay some quack who pretends to know what’s good for us while we cough our lungs out. I don’t put much stock in the enterprise, but I have a passel of children praying on me and I hate to disappoint them. Tell Martha Anne I will write soon. Give my love to the family, and tell Sophie Walton how much I miss her.
—YOUR COUSIN JOHN HENRY
The Rake
The Bitch in the Deck
In 1930, the Arizona Pioneers’ Home in Prescott admitted an eighty-year-old woman who called herself Mary K. Cummings. By the end of her first week, the old lady was thoroughly disliked by the entire staff. Their antipathy was returned, in spades. Imperious, opinionated, blunt, and profane, Mrs. Cummings would spend the next ten years firing off ungrammatical letters to the governor of Arizona, informing him of graft, corruption, inefficiencies, and generalized malfeasance by the employees of the Arizona Pioneers’ Home and demanding an official investigation of conditions there.
The governor’s replies, if any, have not survived.
Mary K. Cummings was merely the last in the old woman’s impressive collection of names. The baby who began life in Hungary as Mária Katarina became María Catarina in Mexico, Mary Katharine in Iowa, and just plain Kate in Kansas. Her maiden surname was certainly Harony. Or perhaps Haroney. Whether she really married Silas Melvin as a pregnant teenager is unclear. She used the surname Fisher for a while and was also known as Katie Elder while a working whore in Kansas, Texas, and Arizona. Nobody ever called her Big Nose Kate to her face.
Not twice, anyway.
In her old age, Kate sometimes claimed that she had married John Henry Holliday. That was wishful thinking, though it was true that they were together, off and on, for the final nine years of his life. After Doc’s death, Kate did marry a blacksmith named George Cummings; he turned out to be a mean drunk so she left the bastard, though she kept his name. Finally, at the turn of the century, she became the housekeeper for a mining man named John J. Howard. With no disrespect to the dead, we may wonder if Kate was more to him than a housekeeper, for she stayed with Mr. Howard for three decades; upon his death, in 1930, she became both executrix of his will and sole heir to his modest estate.
In 1939, a year before she died, Kate was approached by two publishers who wanted her to write a memoir about the legendary gunman Doc Holliday. She was surprised to find that anyone was still interested. Doc had been briefly famous, along with the Earp brothers, after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but nearly sixty years had passed since that half-minute shoot-out.
Doc himself and his family back in Georgia were deeply distressed by the notoriety that attached itself to his name after the events in Arizona. He moved to Colorado and he did his best to live there quietly, but his efforts to drop out of sight were only partially successful. Toward the end of his life his name was in the newspapers again when he shot a man named Billy Allen. For all Doc’s reputation as a deadly pistoleer, he only wounded Allen. After he was arrested for attempted murder, John Henry Holliday’s entire defense was to sit in a Leadville, Colorado, courtroom—all 122 pounds of him—coughing relentlessly. When it came time to speak, he admitted that he was destitute. In desperation, he had borrowed five dollars from Billy Allen and was unable to repay the debt on time. Allen, who outweighed Doc by fifty pounds, had declared to all who would listen that he planned to kill Doc over the matter.
“If he got hold of me, I’d have been a child in his hands,” Doc said, and everyone in court could see that was true.
Sick as he was, Doc testified, he still valued his life, and so he had defended himself. After a few minutes’ deliberation, the jury voted to acquit, but the trial was a sorry affair that made humiliating headlines and added misery to Doc’s last months.