Doc: A Novel (8 page)

They served John Henry Holliday as well, for listening to Dong-Sing’s news allowed him to rest up before he continued his journey. That accomplished, he bid Mr. Jau a good evening and walked on, stopping once to catch his breath and to watch the Kansas sunset for a while.

Spring was lovely back in Georgia this time of day. A thousand miles away, lilac and pine and honeysuckle scented the air in the stillness that followed short, soft afternoon rains. When the sun went down on an afternoon like this, it glowed scarlet in a pink-and-orange sky, turning the red clay fields coppery. Fresh green shoots of new cotton shone as though they were lit from within, and everywhere there were magnolia and dogwood and peach blossoms, delicate as angel wings …

Five years in September, he thought.

Five years since he’d seen home.

“Afternoon, Doc,” Bob Wright said when the dentist came in. “Lot of mail for you today.
Philadelphia Inquirer
. The
Scientific American
. Dental supply catalog. I can place the orders for you, you know. The
Atlanta Constitution
, and—wait, now!—a parcel from Atlanta, too.”

Bob found the package and laid it on the counter before he cleared his throat. “That was a shock, about Johnnie,” he said sincerely. “Real sad. He was a fine young man.”

“And a daisy with a deck,” Doc said, but he was looking at the package. One finger lightly touched the handwriting on its return address:
Miss Martha Anne Holliday
. “If you would be so kind, Mr. Wright, I’d appreciate the use of your scissors.”

Bob handed them over and watched Doc cut through the neatly knotted string. Many years later, as a very old man, Robert Wright would tell people about that day. “Bat Masterson always claimed Doc Holliday was a cold-blooded killer. I never saw that in Doc, myself. He was quiet. Soft-spoken. My first wife—God rest her soul—Alice always used to say that Dr. Holliday had beautiful manners and that he was a gentle dentist who never made the children cry.”

Not to quibble, but it was Bob’s daughter Belle—God rest her soul, too—who always said that. Of course, the elderly do sometimes mix things and the rest of Bob’s story was fairly accurate. He would go on to tell about the slow way Doc unwrapped the book Miss Martha Anne Holliday had sent, and how the dentist’s eyes filled with tears that did not fall.

“I asked him, ‘What is it, Doc?’ And he said, ‘
The Aeneid
.’ The book was all in Latin. Doc was a real educated man.”

John Henry Holliday turned away from the storekeeper and stared out at the dirt and raw gray wood of Dodge, at the treeless prairie, and at the empty sky beyond. The cattle season had only just begun, but already the air was heavy with the odor of manure, monotonous with the buzz of swarming flies, loud with cowpunchers’ shouted curses and the bellowing protests of cattle being run up wooden planks into the railway cars that would haul them off to Chicago for slaughter.

“Doc just stood there,” Bob Wright would recall, “looking outside, you know? And then he said—real soft, his voice was always real soft—he said, ‘I am in hell, but my Beatrice has sent me Vergil to be my guide.’ ”

When Doc Holliday left the store, Bob’s daughter Belle emerged from the back room, where she had listened to all that passed between the dentist and her father.

“Oh, honey,” Bob said when he saw that she’d been weeping. “Don’t cry!”

“Why not? Somebody ought to cry!” she snarled, glaring at him with angry, red-rimmed eyes. “Johnnie deserves
that
much, at least!”

At fifteen, Isabelle Wright was a small, slender, dark-haired girl who ordinarily carried herself with the grace and dignity of a young woman. The Belle of Dodge, people called her, and she was as justly celebrated for her beauty as for the charity work she did among impoverished Ford County farmers. In form and face, Belle was fortunate to have taken after her pretty little mother and not her gangling, chinless, homely father. Bob never ceased to marvel that he had sired such a pretty child, but now her lovely lips were swollen and her porcelain skin was spoiled by the purple blotches that had always spread across her face when she cried, ever since she was a baby.

“ ‘A fine young man,’ ” she mimicked sarcastically. “You didn’t even like for me to
talk
to him, Daddy!”

Bob Wright prized this daughter above all else on earth, but lately nothing he did was right in Belle’s eyes. Sometimes it seemed that she held him personally responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened in Kansas.

“Odd, wouldn’t you say, Daddy?” Belle remarked in a voice far too cold for a girl so young. “Why, there must have been two dozen drunken drovers asleep in that barn last night. They all woke up and got the horses out. Johnnie Sanders didn’t drink, but he was the only one to die.”

“Honey, it’s not—”

“It’s not your fault,” she finished for him, though that wasn’t what he’d meant to say. “It’s never your fault!” she sobbed. “Nothing is ever
your
fault!”

Three blocks away, catching his breath in the lobby of the Dodge House Hotel, John Henry Holliday rejected the notion of leaving
The Aeneid
behind the front desk, having concluded that such an act of cowardice would only postpone Kate’s reaction.

Arriving in their second-floor room, he tossed the book, his shirts, and the other mail on the bed. Kate glanced at Martha Anne’s gift before returning her gaze to the game of solitaire she had laid out on the small table in the corner.

“That girl again,” she observed. “You said you’d break it off.”

He didn’t deny it.

Kate’s Magyar accent was noticeable only when she spoke English. Her Latin was elegant when she continued. “Your behavior is dishonorable. I consider it an injustice to her.”

“Red jack on the black queen,” he said.

She went back to her game. This was a considerable relief to him.

“So,” she said, in English again, “was it someone you worked on, that body?”

“Johnnie Sanders.”

Her hand stopped, a seven of spades hovering above the table. “You’re sure?”

“I never forget a smile, darlin’.”

“Oh, Doc.” She set the deck aside. “I’m sorry.”

Kate could be kind. It always caught him off guard.

He stepped to the open window, bracing his right hand high against the frame while he recovered from the stairs. The posture opened up his intercostals and gave his diaphragm more leverage with which to work. Anyone out in the street who happened to look up would have seen a slim, well-dressed young man lounging, not a sickly boy grieving.

It was surprising, really, how much he felt the loss. It wasn’t as though he and Johnnie were close, though they might have become so. He’d admired Johnnie’s skill dealing faro, recognizing some of the mechanics and suspecting others. He was impressed by Johnnie’s cleverness and curious about his unusual education, that was all.

As much as anything, it was the boy’s accent that had drawn him. Johnnie Sanders himself wasn’t from Georgia, but his paternal grandmother was. Her legacy of absent
r
’s and gerunds with no terminal
g
had been passed down intact for two generations. For John Henry Holliday, Johnnie’s voice was like a visit home.

Johnnie had recognized the kinship as well. “I can always tell Southerners,” he told Doc at the barbershop. “Northerners’ll tell you where they’re goin’, not where they’re from. Southerners’re like Indians. They’ll ask who your relatives are until they find out, oh, my mother’s sister married your father’s uncle, so we’re cousins!”

When Doc inquired about the boy’s own background, Johnnie thanked him for being polite about it.

“I confuse people,” Johnnie admitted. “They look me up and down, and then it’s ‘What in hell are you?’ ”

“Prairie nigger,” Texans called him.
Un pardo
, Mexicans said, or
un moreno
. He’d heard the term
grif
or something like that, once or twice. Johnnie didn’t know what that meant. “Couldn’t find it in my dictionary,” he said. All by itself, the idea of that boy owning a dictionary was enough to endear him to Doc Holliday.

“
Half-breed
’ll come to mind for some, but
breed
usually means Indian and white,” Johnnie said. “My Granny Sal was half white, but that don’t show a whole lot in me.”

What in hell are you? That’s what everyone wanted to know, and Johnnie would try to tell them sometimes but it was complicated and hardly anybody wanted to listen that long. Course, listening was the pleasure of it for Doc and to make it a fair exchange, he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.

“You’re a map,” Johnnie said judiciously. “Me? I’m a mixed multitude.”

His family had an interesting story, and Johnnie thought it was true. His daddy had told him over and over, “Don’t you forget this, boy. You tell your children and granbabies every word I say.” So Johnnie listened hard every time, though the story was always the same.

“Daddy was a Black Seminole,” he told Doc. “Seminole ain’t a tribe. It’s a word. It means ‘runaway’ in Indian. Seminoles was rebel Creeks, and Muskogee and Yuchi, and some was fugitive slaves. None of them would bow down. Daddy said that was important: the ancestors wouldn’t never bow down. Seminoles lived way off deep in the swamps of Florida. Florida is a jungle, like Africa, with deadly snakes and gators. Gators’re big lizards,” he informed Doc helpfully, “longer than a man stretched out.”

Johnnie’s grandaddy was named Yusif and he came from Africa, so he knew all about jungles and wasn’t scared. “Yusif could read and write Arab, Daddy said. I don’t know if readin’ Arab is the same as bein’ Arab. What do you think, Doc?” he asked, and he was a little disappointed when “Not necessarily” was the best the dentist could do.

“Granny Sal was a Georgia slave what run off,” Johnnie told him. “Her daddy was white and he tried to get her back because she was worth a lot of money, but she joined up with the Seminoles.” Sal married Yusif and taught their children the English that Johnnie learned from his father, which accounted for the boy’s accent. Johnnie said he’d cleaned up his grammar at St. Francis, a mission school near Wichita that he’d attended until recently. Time spent among the illiterate here in Dodge had evidently undermined the improvement some.

“My daddy didn’t get no schoolin’,” Johnnie told Doc, “but he could talk Mexican and Creek, and some Arab from Grandaddy Yusif. Daddy always told me, ‘You come from educated people. Don’t never believe white folks tell you Africans was ignorant.’ ”

The Spanish and the English and the Americans all sent armies into Florida to fight the Seminoles. Georgia slave owners sent militia in, too, hunting fugitives like Yusif and Sal. “Didn’t matter a lick who they sent to Florida,” Johnnie said. “White folks’d get lost, or die of sicknesses, or get killed by Seminole warriors.”

“Remember the names, boy,” his daddy always said. “They had Andrew Jackson and General Gaines and General Jessup and Zachary Taylor, but we had Billy Bowlegs and Osceola and Wild Cat and John Horse. And we was always tri
-un
-fant.”

That’s how his daddy said it. Tri
-un
-fant.

At some point, Wild Cat and John Horse led their people from Florida to Mexico. Johnnie was a little hazy about that part, but he was sure that Texas hunters started raiding into Mexico, thieving livestock and dragging Black Seminoles back to sell them for slaves in America.

“They was a war about it,” Johnnie told Doc. “Daddy said Seminoles fought twenty battles ’longside the Mexican army and whipped them Texans every time.”

As far as Johnnie knew, the only thing that ever beat the Seminoles was smallpox. Smallpox carried off his Granny Sal and two of his uncles and his aunt, who Johnnie never got to meet, and it had marred his daddy’s handsome face.

When slavery was done in the United States, it was John Horse who led the Black Seminoles into Fort Duncan in Texas, where the menfolk joined the United States Army. “They was called the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts,” Johnnie said, head high. “They was four thousand of them, Doc! They could track anybody, they could fight anybody, and they was—”