Territory (30 page)

Jesse woke to thunder. But the rains weren’t due for months. And if it was thunder, it was right overhead and he was outdoors. He certainly wasn’t outdoors. This was his bed at Brown’s Hotel.

When the thunder came again, it was someone pounding on the door of his room. “All right, all right,” he shouted.

He sat up and remembered that he’d fallen down on the bed in his clothes, so at least he was decent. As he stumbled to the door, he noticed that the sun was setting. He’d slept the clock ’round. He wondered how long he’d have slept if this pounding wasn’t going on.

He opened the door just wide enough to look out. At first he didn’t recognize the boy in the hall. Then he remembered.

“Chu, right?”

The Chinese boy, Lung’s servant, was wide-eyed and pale. Beyond him he saw the inhabitants of the other rooms up and down the hall peering out, scowling.

“Mr. Fox. Come now, please!”

Suddenly he was awake. “What is it?”

“Please, you come!” The boy turned and bolted down the hall, down the stairs, gone.

Jesse grabbed his coat and hat and followed him.

By the time he got to the street, the boy was nowhere in sight. But there was plenty to make up for his absence. Tombstone was wide awake.

Hafford’s Saloon was crowded, and men lounged on the sidewalk outside, smoking and talking. Music rolled out the doors of the Grand Hotel across the street. Down the street at the Eagle Brewery, a drunk complained loudly, unintelligibly. Brightly dressed women leaned over a balcony railing, smiling and calling to men on the sidewalk. A handsome Negress in orange ruffles shouted to him, “Over here, good-lookin’!” A coach rattled around the corner, its four horses piebald with foam.

He couldn’t run; it was too crowded. He forced a path through knots of people and heard angry voices behind him. He bolted across a street under the nose of a horse, and the buggy driver swore as he dragged on the reins.

Then the faces glaring at him were mostly Chinese, the swearing in Chinese in a handful of dialects. He saw Lung’s sign with its gilded edges, the knot missing from the bottom. Chu stood in one corner of the porch. Jesse’s boots sounded like carpenters at work as he leaped up the wooden step.

The door was ajar. There was splintered wood, raw and white, on the latch side. His heartbeat roared in his ears as he pushed the door wide.

Lung lay on the floor, on his back. His arms were flung out, as if he’d tried to catch himself as he fell. His eyes were open below the bullet hole in his forehead.

Jesse felt the floor under his knees.

“Mr. Fox?” he heard Chu say behind him. He could hear the tears in his voice. “Mr. Fox, what you want me do? Mr. Fox?”

They need me. If he finds you, he can shoot you in the back. So solly. Loyalty, friendship.
Jesse couldn’t blink. His muscles were so tight they’d begun to quake.

If you undo his work, it will warn him. You want me to show you what is already in front of you. Your ghost at my heels.
The clamor in his head bore little resemblance to thinking. He’d start to think again soon. He dreaded it.

Someone grabbed his shoulder and shook it. “Mr. Fox!”

The sensation that went through him was more fluid than water. The boy hissed and yanked his hand away.

I should have asked him where he wanted to be buried.

 13 

Mildred breathed in the scents of the cedar boughs and lilies in her arms. Where had the Methodist church ladies found lilies? Lilies liked their feet in the shade and their heads in the sun, and there was precious little shade to be had anywhere south of Prescott at the end of May. She thought of Decoration Days in Philadelphia, bright green and smelling of crushed grass and lilacs and the peonies that grew on her grandfather’s grave. Decoration Day in Arizona was more like living on a blacksmith’s anvil, with a red-hot hammer poised overhead.

Well, wherever they’d come from, there were lilies, and Mildred was pleased. David had been fond of them. The Baptist and Catholic ladies must be gnashing their teeth, though, and planning their next year’s revenge. If it was a slow news day, she’d give Harry and Richard a nudge about mentioning it in the tit-bits.

Oh, but it was hot, and at seven in the morning, too! She couldn’t carry a parasol with all this greenery, and wasn’t about to ask Lucy Austerberg, who had no graves to visit here, to give her a ride in their surrey. And the cemetery hadn’t a stick of shade. She was glad she’d lost a little weight since last summer; a bit of space between her skin and her clothes was a welcome thing.

Two dry-stone pillars flanked the cemetery entrance. She saw a few people decking graves, and two little boys chasing each other between the markers. She grinned, remembering how much she’d wanted to do that when she was small, and a cemetery seemed like a grand green meadow.

This one wasn’t green, except for the decorations. But it had the most beautiful view in town. The cemetery lay at the north end of Goose Flats like the prow of the ship of Tombstone, sailing toward the Dragoon Mountains. The ground dropped sharply away beyond it, down to the big wash and the valley beyond, gray-green and tan-green with summer. The morning sun made the Dragoons a misty purple island, almost featureless. The afternoon sun
would pick out the details in rosy light and blue shadow, and show the shape of a reclining lamb in the upthrust faces of rock.

If the departed were tethered to their grave sites and aware of their surroundings, she could think of worse places to spend eternity.

She walked between the rows of dead to David’s grave. It was a good-sized village, Tombstone’s Boot Hill, its population swelled by the nature of frontier life. Killed by Apaches, dead in a wagon accident, taken by the influenza, shot by a lawman or a bad man. Even a few suicides, as if it might be better to beat hardship at its own game. The town was too new to have lost many people to old age. No, by far the most common cause of death in Boot Hill was bad luck.

David’s wooden tablet was sun-bleached, but still in fine shape. She laid out the cedar in a herringbone pattern like a blanket over the grave, and wove the lilies into the boughs. If a breeze came up, the whole thing would stay put.

Mildred sat on her heels at the foot of the plot. Her first Decoration Day with a husband’s grave to adorn. Shouldn’t the occasion freshen her grief, give her cause for a good cry? She ought to have things to say to him, at least.

She did; but he was dead and beyond hearing them. Instead of grief, she found a thread of irritation in her thoughts, surprisingly dear for its familiarity. She was annoyed at David in death as she’d been in life. Feckless man, given to mad projects he couldn’t complete, committing their money and strength to plans that, if they needed to be carried out at all, would have been better done by someone who had even a pinch of experience in the subject. Their marriage had turned out to be one of those uncompleted projects.

She smiled and shook her head. She’d loved him so much, for his idealism, his wild flights, his ardent soul, his vivid conversation, his passion for her. And he’d exasperated her with his occasional snobbery, his naiveté, his inflexibility. He became her dear friend during their life together. If there’d been any provision in her youth for a young lady to be dear friends with a man she wasn’t married to, she and David would likely have settled for friendship. Even so, she wondered if they would have married if her parents hadn’t forbidden it.

But she was spoiled now for the company of the more down-to-earth man she probably ought to have. Where was one to find a mate who offered fireworks of the mind and heart
and
knew how to fix the pump?

She blew a little kiss to David’s grave marker and stood up. There was an hour yet before she needed to be at the
Nugget
office, and there was no telling what waited for her there. It had been a quiet month. There’d been a shooting in Galeyville, involving Curly Bill Brocius as, unexpectedly, the victim. But Brocius was recovering, and his friends had chosen not to lynch the man who shot him. Sheriff Behan had deputized men to stand guard at the Mountain
Bay mine after a dispute sprang up about its ownership, but that settled peacefully. Though she’d had little to write about besides the progress on the city water supply, Richard Rule continued to give her assignments.

She hadn’t mentioned to Harry what she’d heard at Virgil Earp’s house. Kate Holliday wasn’t the most reliable source, and eavesdropping wasn’t enough to base a story on, not without some corroboration. Officially, there was no mystery about who had attacked the Benson stage in March: William Leonard, Harry Head, and Jim Crane, with Luther King and Arthur Ortega to hold the horses. But the rumors continued to fly that Doc Holliday had been involved, that the Earps had emptied the Wells Fargo strongbox before it was loaded and had engineered the holdup as a cover-up, that James Earp’s real purpose in taking his wife on a visit to California was to take the stolen money away.

And who was fueling that fire, anyway? The holdup had failed; if the strongbox had arrived empty, it would have been discovered. Mildred had said as much to Harry. He’d replied that the emptying-the-strongbox story was nonsense, but that Holliday was still the likely fourth shooter in the robbery attempt. Had Mrs. Holliday been covering for her man when she suggested the fourth robber was Morgan Earp? If so, what good did it do her to make the suggestion to an audience as hostile as the Earp women?

The only certain facts were that Wyatt Earp was a hard man to like, and that a lot of people in town had found reason not to make the effort. Mildred found it very easy indeed to like the Earp women, and watched, troubled, as the bad feeling over Wyatt spread to his brothers and their wives.

She hadn’t told anyone about meeting Jim Crane, either. It troubled her; but Tom McLaury’s name would come out if she did. And people would ask, rightly, why hadn’t she spoken sooner? Tom McLaury wasn’t a coward, but she wasn’t so sure about herself.

It had been a quiet month—but the sort of quiet that left the whole town holding its breath. A hundred head of rustled cattle or an Apache raid might have relieved the pressure.

She gazed north for another view of the Dragoons to take back to town. A man stood at the far end of the cemetery, a straight dark brushstroke against the cloudlike mountains. He was hatless, and seemed familiar. When he turned his profile to her, she realized it was Jesse Fox.

Mildred walked toward him, trusting the crunch of her steps and the swish of her skirts to warn him. The graves around him were Chinese ones. Perhaps he’d come to admire the view.

“Good morning, Mr. Fox,” she said, when she was close enough not to need to call.

Fox turned. He wasn’t startled, but for a moment Mildred thought he didn’t recognize her. His face was cool and empty. Something gave her heart a curious pinch; the sensation made her feel guilty and foolish, and her face grew hot.

Then Fox blinked, or rather squeezed his eyes shut as if they pained him, and opened them again. “Mrs. Benjamin. Good morning. Your husband’s grave?”

“Yes. David’s buried over there.” She turned and pointed.

“You seem too young to have been married to a soldier.” He shook his head sharply and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry, that’s no business of mine.”

“David was older than me. And a passionate abolitionist, so he felt he ought to leave school and enlist. He was with Sherman in Georgia.”

“Dear God.”

“He said something very similar. But he was wounded and discharged, and I met him when I was eighteen.”

Fox was silent. Mildred saw the distance in his eyes, and wondered if she’d said too much. “What brings you to Boot Hill at this hour?” she asked, to smooth over the awkward place.

One corner of his mouth twitched, a half smile. “Decoration Day.” He nodded toward the slope at his feet.

There was a new grave there, with Chinese characters on its marker. Pinned to the marker was a strip of paper with rows of calligraphy in black ink.

“A friend of yours?” Mildred asked, confused. Such a fresh grave, such stillness in the way Fox held himself.