“Goddammit, John! If you would take better care of yourself, I am sure you could retard the progress of the disease. Dodge is no good for you, son. Too much dust, too much excitement! And the winters here are brutal. You need clean air and decent meals and complete rest. Now, there’s a sanatorium near Las Vegas that’s had some success with cases every bit as advanced as yours and—”
“How much does it cost?”
“Two hundred a month, but that’s room and board and doctors and—”
“Haven’t got it,” John said.
They’d had discussions like this before. Tom McCarty respected John Holliday as a gentleman and a professional, but the boy was plain stupid about money, spending it like a drunken drover when he had it and then acting like it was just his fate to be poor when it was gone. As for that woman he kept … Well, Tom knew better than to say anything, though he’d made his opinion known: Kate was a nymphomaniac and a hysteric and a drunk who had mined John Henry Holliday like he was the Black Hills. When Tom heard Kate had taken up with Bob after Alice Wright left town, he thought, Well, she knows when the vein is played out, damn her, but John’s better off without the slut. Now Kate was back again, weeping and frantic, when what the boy needed was calm, quiet care.
Mattie Blaylock was no angel, but she was the sort of stolid, unemotional woman who made a good nurse, and Tom was grateful for her help. “Mattie,” Tom said, lifting his chin toward Kate, “get her out of here.”
“Go on, now, darlin’. I’ll be fine,” John mumbled.
“John, keep quiet!” Tom ordered.
Wiping his hands on a towel, the doctor waited until Mattie had pulled Kate out into the front room, closing the door behind her. Then he sat on the bed to collect his thoughts. The room looked like the aftermath of a birth, or an abortion, or a shooting. Bloodied, muddied clothes—rags now—were heaped in the corner. John was in the chair, propped up with pillows, hunched over an enamel basin half-filled with foamy red fluid. Almost naked, slick and stinking with sweat, ribs visible from spine to sternum.
The stench of gore and necrotic lung tissue was suddenly overwhelming. Tom cracked the window open, in spite of the chilly rain. “Tell me when you get cold.”
Eyes closed, John whispered, “Still hot.”
That would change soon: anemia competing with fever for ascendancy.
“Well,” Tom said, sitting again, “my guess is that we can rule out Rasmussen’s aneurysm.”
“Dead by now,” John agreed. “So: Roki—”
“Rokitansky’s hemorrhage, yes, I think so too, and dammit, I told you not to talk! The active bleeding’s stopped. That’s a good sign. If you can hold your own a while longer, we can try the lycopin extract, and you’ll be able to get some sleep—Oh, hell! Now what?”
Out in the front room, Kate was in full cry. They heard Mattie Blaylock tell her sharply to shut up. The door to the bedroom opened. Two of the Earp brothers looked in. Morgan again. And Wyatt, who appeared to have been hit by a train. Already distorted by bruising and cuts, his face twisted when the smell hit him.
Then he saw Doc. “My God,” he said.
“You see?” Kate was yelling. “You see what you did to him, God damn you! You killed him, you lousy sonofabitch!”
At the sound of Kate’s curses, John’s eyes fluttered open. “Wyatt,” he said, sounding pleased to see him. “Kate, darlin’ … Don’t fuss … Not his fault.”
“John! Keep quiet!” the doctor snapped. “And Kate, if you can’t stop running your mouth, I’ll throw you out of this house myself. Calm down, all of you! Wyatt, I don’t know what in hell Kate’s yelling about, but nothing you did caused this. Bleeding episodes are not unusual in consumptives. This has been coming on for weeks—maybe months! The disease has eaten out part of his left lung. The resulting cavity impinged on an artery, but a clot has formed. For the moment, the crisis has passed, but if he starts coughing again, he could bleed to death or die of apoplexy.”
Hugging herself, Kate doubled over with a little moan of fear.
“Jesus, McCarty!” Morgan cried. “He’s sitting right there! He can hear you!”
“He knows what’s going on as well as I do—better!” Tom said. “I’m just telling
Over the next couple of hours, the bleeding started up twice more. Kate was banished to Bessie Earp’s house. Morg and Wyatt and Mattie stayed at Doc’s. Around three in the morning, Chuck Trask came by to tell Tom McCarty he was needed to sew up a knife wound.
“Spurting or oozing?” Tom asked.
“Just kinda leaking,” Chuck said. “Wyatt? Morg? Are you coming to work? We’re real shorthanded.”
“I quit,” Wyatt told him. This was news to Morg, but Wyatt said, “Nothing to do with you. Go on.”
So Morgan left with Chuck, but before Tom McCarty followed them, he took Mattie and Wyatt to the kitchen and showed them how to measure out four grains of dried lycopin extract and stir it into a glassful of water.
“It’s effective against the cough and mildly narcotic,” he told them, pulling his coat on. “When he wakes up, you make him drink a glass of the mixture, but no more than one glass every two hours. Mattie, can you write?”
She nodded and shrugged: A little.
“Well, try to keep track of when you give him a dose, so he doesn’t get too much. If he’s cold, cover him. If he’s hot, open the window again. I don’t think he’ll be hungry, but I’ll stop by Delmonico’s and have them send over some beef broth with plenty of salt. If he asks for anything, offer that.”
Mattie said she’d keep watch the rest of the night. Wyatt knew he ought to stay, but this was so much like when Urilla was dying … So he went home and slept at last, but poorly. He was already up and dressed when Mattie came in a few hours later.
“Kate came back after McCarty left,” she told him, hanging a damp shawl up on the peg next to the door. “Morg’s back, too. He’s staying with Kate so she won’t be alone when Doc dies.”
“So, you’re sure? He’s …?”
“Never saw anybody that sick who didn’t. Why’d you quit?”
He almost said, Because you were right about George Hoover. Because my father is right and I’ve got shit for brains. Because I don’t know who my friends are. Because I don’t know who to trust anymore, except my brothers.
What came out was “Politics.” Which was true enough.
For the first time since she moved in, he wished that Mattie would talk more, for his own thoughts were loud in his mind. Maybe McCarty was right. Maybe what happened to Doc wasn’t Wyatt’s fault, just like it wasn’t really Wyatt’s fault when Urilla got typhus, but it sure felt like it was, and Mattie wasn’t one to tell him different.
“I’m going next door,” he said.
Morg answered the knock. Kate was slumped at the table, her head in her hands, too weary to look up. Wyatt’s eyes went to the bedroom where Doc lay, dead white and so motionless beneath the covers Wyatt thought that he’d been laid out. It took a moment to see that Doc was breathing in shallow little gasps, but breathing all the same.
Morg said, “If you can stay with him awhile, I’ll take Kate back to Bessie’s so she can get some sleep.”
Probably the first time a woman ever got any sleep in that place, Wyatt thought, but he told Morg he’d sit with Doc, and that Morg should get some rest, too.
“You know about the medicine?” Morg asked.
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go on.”
“Wyatt … you really quit?”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go on.”
For the rest of the day, he kept watch by himself, listening to the clock tick, dozing sometimes in the chair. Late in the afternoon, there was a short, quiet dream about Urilla, probably brought on by sitting in a sickroom like this. He was telling her, “If I made more money, I coulda done better by you,” and in the dream, he felt more than heard her say, “Don’t fret, Wyatt.”
He woke up slowly, feeling calm. Then he saw where he was, and straightened, and winced, aware of every bruise and cut and aching joint.
