Doc: A Novel (37 page)

He had seen this thrice, he believed, with his own eyes. The first time was in the summer of 1878, just outside Dodge City.

That August, after the crops were in and before the harvest began, a two-week platform convention for the Republican Party of Kansas was held in Topeka. Among the delegates was Wyatt S. Earp (occupation: policeman; residence: Dodge City, Ford County). Neatly dressed in black and wearing a decent pair of freshly polished boots, Deputy Earp was accompanied by a quiet woman whose age was difficult to guess. She was not young, but neither was she more worn than might be expected of a farmer’s wife, and she was well turned out in a deep blue that complemented her hair and complexion. Wyatt would introduce her as Mattie Earp but did not call her “my wife,” for they were not married then and never would be. He let her use his name for the occasion and did not tell her to quit it afterward.

The morning Mattie and Wyatt left for Topeka, Morgan and Lou and Doc and Kate came to the Dodge depot to see them off. Morgan had been on Wyatt’s back all week about letting Doc exercise Dick Naylor while Wyatt was away. Wyatt still hadn’t said yes or no. He didn’t want any trouble with Kate—there’d be hell to pay if anything happened—but he hated to disappoint Doc.

Morgan was giving it one last try as the warning whistle shrieked. “Come on, Wyatt! Doc knows to be careful, and I’ll watch out for him.”

Kate didn’t say anything, but she was standing right behind Doc, where Wyatt could see her scowl and Doc couldn’t.

“I don’t know,” Wyatt said, glancing at Kate. “What if Dick gets spooked by a coyote or something? He might throw you again, Doc. And you’d be out on the prairie—”

“I won’t go far,” Doc promised. “And I’ll stick to trails with traffic on them. And I’ll tell Morg when I’m leavin’. If I don’t get back in a couple of hours, he can come lookin’ for me. Did you read that
Scientific American
article I gave you?”

Doc doesn’t know! Mattie realized with some surprise. Wyatt hasn’t told him!

Which meant Wyatt was embarrassed that he couldn’t hardly read. And
that
was the first sign she’d had that Mr. Wyatt Earp wasn’t quite so perfect as he seemed. It made Mattie feel a little better about him.

She had listened while Morgan read the article to Wyatt. There was a new notion about how to cure consumption: a combination of hard exercise and cold baths was supposed to “build resistance to the illness” and give people like Doc the strength to get over it. Doc’s idea was that he could take Dick Naylor out for an hour or two of riding every day while Wyatt was out of town. The horse would stay in condition for a race that was coming up at the end of the month, and Doc would have a couple of weeks to find out if he got any better. “We’ll see if that punishment fits my crime” was how he put it. If the exercise didn’t help or if he felt worse, he’d give it up and let Morgan take over Dick’s care until Wyatt got back.

Mattie knew her place. She had no right to mix in, but Doc had been helpful to her and she wanted to take his side. The only reason she was going to Topeka was because Doc showed her how to pick out dresses and told her about table manners and things like that. Otherwise she’d have found an excuse, even though Wyatt thought she’d enjoy the excursion and claimed he really wanted her to come with him.

Mattie rarely said a word in public, and not much more in private. It took her until the train was almost ready to go before she found the nerve to touch Wyatt’s elbow. “He’ll break down or he’ll toughen up,” she said. “Let him find out which.”

Everybody looked at her like she was a pig that up and flew.

Wyatt blinked a couple of times and finally said, “Oh, hell. All right, then,” probably because Mattie had never asked for anything before and he didn’t want to say no to her the first time. Morg grinned that big happy smile of his. Kate narrowed her eyes and glared. Doc told Wyatt he wouldn’t regret it, then took Mattie’s hand and kissed it like she was a lady, and leaned over to whisper, “Mattie, honey, I am in your debt.”

The conductor was hollering, “Board!” by then. Wyatt tried to help Mattie up the long first step, but she told him, “I ain’t crippled.” She meant that she wasn’t some fragile little thing that needed to be treated like a china doll, but Wyatt looked kind of hurt, so she shrugged and let him take her arm, if that’s what he wanted.

Inside the car, Wyatt was going to have her sit on the aisle so she wouldn’t get dirty from the ash or get holes in her clothes from the cinders. Feeling bolder, she told him, “I’d like to see,” so he let her be by the window instead.

Doc was still standing on the platform when the train pulled away. Mattie gave him a little wave. He swept off his slouch hat, held it over his heart, and bowed, his shining eyes on Mattie’s own.

It would have annoyed her if Wyatt did that, but somehow … Doc was different.

His first foray on Dick was enjoyable and uneventful. True to his word, he didn’t ride far, turning back after half an hour, while he still had enough starch left to unsaddle the horse himself and brush the animal down.

The second day was harder, for he had stiffened some. The third, it was a real struggle to tack up. As he approached the Elephant Barn on the way back, he was sufficiently whipped to consider paying the oldest of the Riney boys to take care of the horse. Instead, he rested for a few minutes after dismounting. Then he managed on his own.

Things got better after that.

With some experimentation, he determined that the best time to ride was just past sunup, before the summer heat set in. By the end of the first week, he found it noticeably easier to lift the saddle from the rack, carry it to Dick Naylor’s side, and settle it onto the horse’s back. Even Kate had to admit that riding was good for him. He was stronger, no doubt about it. And he was hungry again—genuinely by-God
hungry
. For food. For music. For Kate.

Nights, he was content to deal faro, building up a stake for the next big poker game. Kate was relieved to see easy money accumulating, and her mood brightened as well. She kept a couple of special clients, but when she went over to James and Bessie’s now, it was usually a social call. That made Doc happier.

Less anxious about his health and its consequences for her own life, Kate was able to think more clearly about his day work. It was she who suggested that Doc have the Eberhardt boy keep an eye on the office in the mornings. It wasn’t necessary for Doc to sit around waiting for patients, she pointed out. If someone showed up first thing in the morning, Wilfred could run down to China Joe’s and let Doc know that he should go straight to No. 24 after he cleaned up from his ride. If nobody was waiting, Doc could come home and be on call instead of sitting around in the office.

And Kate made sure that they found a better use for his time.

Mabel Riney wasn’t taking any excuses on the morning of August 14, 1878. “It’s your job, John,” she told her husband, rousting him out of bed. “Get up and do it.” And if his head pounded with every hoofbeat as drovers crossed the bridge and went back to their herds after their own long night, well, that was just too bad.

Doc Holliday rode up to the tollgate on Wyatt Earp’s two-dollar horse a little past dawn. Wincing into the sun, John held out his palm and parts of some fingers to collect the toll.

Handing over two bits, the dentist looked out across the river and said in a singing kind of way, “
Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away
.” Then, in a regular voice, he said, “I’ll be followin’ the cattle trail south for a couple of hours, Mr. Riney. If I don’t come back across the bridge by eight, you should probably ask Morgan Earp to ride out and collect my corpse for shipment back to Georgia.”

Years later, after Mabel Riney was dead, when John Riney was old and toothless and a hopeless drunkard, he would let punks buy him beers while he told about the day the infamous
Doc Holliday
spoke of his bones whitening on the prairie.

“Doc got off his horse about halfway over the toll bridge, see? And he stood there at the railing, watching the river. I reckoned he was about to drown hisself because he was so sick,” John would tell anybody who’d pay for a drink. “Don’t do it, Doc! That’s what I hollered, and I guess I saved his life that day. But y’see, that’s why Doc was so fearless down there in Tombstone! Because he was going to die soon anyways, so he might as well get it over with.”

The funny thing was, nobody really believed that John Riney had ever met Doc Holliday, but they all believed what he said about the dentist hoping to die sooner than later. Of course, John Riney did know Doc—not well, but they had a nodding acquaintance. And Doc did speak of the possibility of dying out on the prairie south of Dodge, but it was a joke that John didn’t get because he tended to take things at face value even when he hadn’t been drinking most of the week, and in John’s defense, Doc did make the remark straight-faced.

So John nodded solemnly and said, “Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”

Head throbbing, he watched the dentist start across the bridge and then dismount halfway across. John came to his own conclusions about that, for there was no way he could have known that it was Doc’s birthday, or that the dentist was in fact feeling remarkably cheerful.

“Twenty-seven years old and not dead yet!” John Henry Holliday had marvelled while saddling Dick Naylor that morning. “Let’s go see what’s south of that bridge this mornin’,” he suggested, flipping the stirrup leathers down.

Responding to his rider’s high spirits, Dick was prancing and full of himself coming out of the Elephant Barn into the cool of early morning, but the roadbed of the toll bridge was unfamiliar and Dick didn’t like it much. Rather than get bucked off by a skittish horse, John Henry dismounted and spoke soothingly to the animal, letting Dick come to terms with the situation. In the meantime, the arch of the bridge provided a slight rise in perspective he enjoyed.

“Dick, if you want a hill in Kansas, you have to by-God build it yourself,” he remarked.

It was a pretty morning. A thunderstorm the night before had cleared the air. Graceful in the breeze, bluestem grass rippled under a sky the color of Kate’s eyes. Phlox and mallow and goldenrod added lavender and pink and yellow to the scene. Red-winged blackbirds trilled in the cattails along the river.

It was a wonder to him now that he’d once failed to appreciate the beauty of this land. The trick of it, he’d lately realized, was to pay attention to the sky as part of the landscape. The rising sun was gilding high cottony clouds from below. In a few hours, as the light shifted upward, those clouds would send amethyst and turquoise shadows racing over the emerald ground, and their sweep across the land would reveal subtle undulations in terrain that only appeared flat to the careless observer.

His own quiet contentment calmed Dick. Soon the horse felt ready to walk over the scary, hollow-sounding surface with the noisy, glittery water below, and to let his rider remount when they reached the solid ground beyond. Swinging easily onto the saddle, sitting comfortably fifteen and a half hands above the earth, gazing at the country south of the Arkansas, John Henry found himself engulfed by a sense of his own well-being. He was grateful to Kate for insisting that they come to Dodge and glad the two of them were working things out. He was pleased that he had made friends here and elated to have returned at last to a useful profession that provided him with so much satisfaction.

And—God a’mighty—to be
riding
again!

Since coming West, he had been neither well enough nor prosperous enough for long enough to consider keeping a horse to ride for pleasure. Now, with Dick Naylor beneath him, he felt himself a joyful boy once more: privileged to share in the athletic power of a large and dangerous animal willing to be controlled by the small, frail strength of a mere human being.

It came to him then that if things worked out the way he hoped, he might just buy a colt from Wyatt Earp one day. By Dick Naylor out of Roxana.

For the first time since he’d begun his practice in Atlanta at the age of twenty-one, John Henry Holliday was beginning to think of the future as though he had a right to it. And why not? Outside, in the growing warmth and the brilliant sunshine, rocking in the rhythm of a ground-eating lope, he was aware of his body from his head to his heels and he felt
fine
.