Epitaph

by Mary Doria Russell

  “You can have any man you want,” Randolph Murray had told her the night after the Markham troupe left San Francisco. “Just look into his eyes. Think, I want you, and he’ll be yours.”

  She hadn’t quite believed him then. Now she knew that it worked like a charm, except with the one man she really wanted.

  She had imagined it a thousand times. The knock on the door. Wyatt standing just beyond it, twisting his flat-brimmed hat around and around in his hands.

  “This is wrong,” he would say. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  She would pull him inside and change his mind. She would make him forget that woman he lived with. Even in her imagination, he would finish too soon the first time. She would make allowances: the long waiting, the urgency.

  “You’re rushing,” she would tell him. “It is more tender when you take your time.” Then she would teach him what a woman wants.

  When they were done—both drowsy, both satisfied—she would ask, “Wyatt, are you sorry?”

  “No,” he would say. “No.”

  The next day, they would leave Tombstone together. She would send Albert a letter to explain everything. Your father needs women, she would write. Wyatt needs me.

  Over and over, she thought: I want you. Come to me.

  But the knock on the door was never Wyatt’s.

  MY HEART IS BALANCED BETWEEN TWO PATHS

  IT WASN’T LIKE HE DIDN’T KNOW. AT NEW YEAR’S, JOSIE had told him straight out that she was thinking about leaving Behan. He’d figured she was just mad at Johnny again. Fighting was part of what kept the fire going for couples like Doc Holliday and Kate Harony. The Behans were battlers, too.

  Besides which, the governor still hadn’t announced his appointment for sheriff of Cochise County, and if Johnny Behan got the nod, Wyatt could be working for him soon. That was a $10,000-a-year bridge he didn’t want to burn.

  He had no intention of getting tangled up with a flighty girl who changed her mind four times an hour. Sure, there was a spark—he wouldn’t deny that. But he was used to keeping a tight rein. It was a mistake to let your feelings get away from you. Look what happened when he let himself feel sorry for Mattie Blaylock! He ended up living with her, and they were miserable, but he didn’t see any way out of it. He had enough trouble at home without borrowing any from Johnny Behan.

  So he’d stayed well clear of the Behans’ mess until the afternoon he found young Albert standing in the middle of Sixth Street with his little head cranked back and his face all smeared with dirt and tears.

  “Sadie? Sadie! Come home!” the kid was hollering up at a second-floor window. “Sadie, please! Come home!”

  Wyatt had worked all night at the Oriental. Then he’d taken Dick Naylor out for a few hours of exercise. All he wanted was to go to bed, but he couldn’t just ride by like he didn’t see the kid.

  “What’s the trouble, son?” he asked.

  The question seemed to make things worse. Snot running, mouth wide, the child was gripped by soundless sobbing until he pulled in a big, gasping breath and wailed, “It’s n-n-ot my fault! It’s my f-f-father’s fault!”

  “What is? What’s your father’s fault?”

  “Everything!” Al yelled, rage trumping sorrow. “He’s a cheater! A-a-and he cheats, and I hate him! A-a-and now he made S-S-Sadie go, too!”

  Confused, Wyatt asked, “Who’s Sadie?”

  “She’s Josie!” Al screamed, as if Wyatt had misunderstood on purpose. “Sadie is her se-e-cret name, and you can only use it if you love her, and she’s up there, and she won’t come home!”

  Hell, Wyatt thought. What’s she doing in a hotel like that?

  He knew the answer but couldn’t dwell on it—not with Albert gulping and hollering and crying so hard he could hardly breathe. Wyatt had all but raised Morgan, and he knew that when a kid gets that worked up, all you can do is wait it out—unless you’re the kind of grown man who’d belt a child until he’s hurt too bad to whimper.

  Wyatt Earp had spent his whole life trying not to be that kind of man, so he dismounted, and got Al out of the street, and made him sit on the boardwalk, and sat down next to him, and tried to patch the story together. Al seemed to think that the problem started after Fred White was shot, though the boy didn’t understand why that was so.

  “Sadie stopped talking to him,” he said, still weepy. “And Dad knew he was in trouble and he was trying to make it up to her, but then—it was like she was scared of him. And I knew everything was getting ruined, because that’s what happened before my mother left! He stays out late, and they cry, and then they get scared, and then they leave! And it’s his fault!”

  It took some work not to laugh when the boy called Johnny “a no-good son of an itch,” which was probably Al’s first attempt at vulgarity. Another man might have bawled the boy out because the Bible said to honor your father. But some fathers don’t deserve it, and nobody knew that better than Wyatt Earp.

  “You like ice cream?” he asked when Al ran out of steam. He nudged the boy with his elbow. “Course you do. Everybody likes ice cream, right?”

  “And cake.” Al wiped his nose on his sleeve and sucked in a shuddering breath. “You love Sadie, too. I know you do.” He started to cry again, but it wasn’t anger anymore. It was sadness. “You know what I wish?” the boy asked. “I wish you were my father and Sadie was my mother.”

  Wyatt set his jaw and looked away. Then he cleared his throat. “Al, that’s the nicest thing anybody ever said to me.” He stood then and unwrapped Dick’s reins from the post. “Wanna ride him down to the stable?”

  “Sure,” Al said, brightening up. “Ice cream after that?”

  Wyatt nodded, though his face was still. “Sure,” he said. “Ice cream after that.”

  It took three dishes of peach before the boy was willing to go home. He was still mad at his father, but what choice did he have? His mother had a new husband and a new baby. She didn’t want him back. “Sometimes you just have to make the best of things,” Wyatt told him. He took Al home, and when they got there, he had to sit and listen to Johnny tell how he was fed up with Josie and glad she’d left, and how she was more trouble than she was worth, and so on. Course, Johnny always said everything about six times, so it was well after dark when Wyatt finally got back to his own place.

  And there was Mattie, sitting in that rocker of hers.

  Waiting for him, like a rattler.

  “Last,” she said, her voice low and tense, like she’d been patient all this time and was just beginning to lose her temper. “I’m always last.”

  He hung his hat on the peg and kept his back to her, afraid of what he might say if he looked at her.

  “Everything comes before me,” she said, still quiet. “Your brothers. Your friends. Your investments. Your horses. Your whore.”

  He turned at that. “If you’re talking about Josie—”

  “Yes, I’m talking about her!” Mattie said, getting louder. “Yes, I’m talking about that Jew bitch! She was always a tramp, and now she’s your whore.”

  And you were a two-bit streetwalker before you moved in on me, he thought, but there was no point in pouring kerosene on a fire.

  He took off his coat and hung it next to his hat. “Mattie,” he said wearily, “I have never laid a hand on that girl. Hell, I haven’t laid eyes on her since New Year’s.”

  “You expect me to believe that? You must think I’m as stupid as you are. Behan’s using you, Wyatt! It’s just like up in Dodge, and you’re too dumb to see it. Behan and that little Jew tramp. You think I don’t know what you’re doing, but I know. I see what you’re doing.” She was hitting her stride now. “You leave me alone for days, but you never leave me any money. Why do I have to go begging for my medicine? You want me to crawl, don’t you. You want me to beg that Jew at the pharmacy for my medicine. Goddam Jews—they’re all in on it! They’re trying to kill me, so you can marry your little Jew whore.”

  In years to come, people would say he�
��d stolen Johnny Behan’s girl, and that was the reason for the bad blood between them. They’d say he abandoned poor Mattie Blaylock for that hussy Josie Marcus, that he’d jumped from one woman’s bed into another’s. But on the night he left Mattie, all he wanted was quiet. An orderly home. A pleasant word when he got there. A decent meal. Was that too much to expect? Was that too much to want?

  “You’re probably turning Jew, too.” Mattie was saying. “You’re such a goddam tightwad, you’ll fit right in.”

  It came to him: He could afford to walk away from this house. He had mining interests. Gambling concessions. Good prospects of an excellent political position. He could take a room over at the Cosmopolitan, where maids kept the place clean. Restaurants would be glad of his business, and he wouldn’t have to pretend to like the food. He could come and go as he pleased, without all this endless, hopeless, pointless strife.

  Silent, almost in a trance, he went to the bedroom and reached up for the carpetbag slumped on top of the wardrobe. Out in the front room, Mattie kept on about the Jews and her medicine and how stupid he was, but when he didn’t come back out into the sitting room, things got quiet.

  She was right behind him. He could hear her breathing.

  “Don’t you dare leave me,” she said, her voice low and mean.

  He wondered if she’d stab him. That’s how bad things were between them. He thought she might pull a knife and stab him in the back.

  Turning, he said, “Mattie, I can’t live like this anymore. You can stay here. I’ll give you money to live on. But I’m going to leave.”

  Her face was white. “You bastard,” she whispered. “You cold, rotten, heartless bastard.”

  He didn’t even shrug. He went back to packing while she yelled and wept. When his bag was full, he returned to the front room for his coat and hat.

  “Go on, then! Leave!” she snarled. “Go to your Jew bitch! That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it! You never wanted me!”

  “I kept you off the street for a while. That’s gotta count for something, Mattie.”

  Her face crumpled, and she began to cry. “But . . . why? Why did you bring me here if you never wanted me anyways?”

  He paused, one hand on the doorknob. When he had an answer for her, he opened the door and spoke the only truth he could offer.

  “Mattie,” he said, “I am damned if I know.”

  “I TOLD YOU SO,” Allie said, standing at the front window. “Maybe now you’ll believe me when I tell you what’s in the cards.”

  Virgil hauled himself out of his chair with a groan and came to her side. Wyatt—carpetbag in hand—was walking away from his house. Mattie was standing on the veranda, face contorted, hands fisted. You could hear her cursing through the window glass.

  “Hangman, upside down,” Allie reminded Virgil, for she’d been casting tarot all afternoon. “I told you Wyatt was due for a change.”

  Well, hell, Virg thought. That could mean anything! A change of shirt. A change of job. A change of luck. A different haircut. Anything.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Allie added smugly. “Morgan needs to tend to his business at home.”

  Virg looked at her sharpish.

  “I laid the cards for Lou,” Allie said. “Lovers, reversed. She’s got someone on her mind, Virg. And it ain’t Morgan she’s thinking about.”

  THAT WINTER, Tom McLaury went for days at a time without another human being to speak to, but it was no hardship. He enjoyed the quiet companionship of his draft horses, Peggy and Bob. He talked to the dogs, too, and to a pair of Mexican pigs he’d bought recently.

  “Your babies’ll be meat someday,” Tommy told the pigs when he fed them, “but I’ll give them a good life until then. That’s about all a pig can ask for.”

  As the weather warmed, Tom got out into his fields every day, keeping track of the growth and taking note of wildflowers growing along the edges of his fields. Later he would dig them out and pot them up in old coffee cans. Lifting each plant from the earth, gently teasing the roots loose, he would talk to Louisa Earp in his mind, planning what he’d say when he saw her next.

  He would tell her, “Most folks here take what they want from the land and move on. I love you because you are trying to make things better.”

  He would tell her, “The Lord meant you for me. I know you’re married, but you are with the wrong person.” If she disagreed, he’d say, “I will be patient and wait for you. A good farmer knows how to do things by littles.”

  One day he would load the buckboard with sand verbenas and primroses, with lupines and gold poppies and larkspur, and drive to Tombstone and knock on her door. “You see?” he’d say. “I have brought you a wagon filled with spring and love.”

  AMID JUTTING CLIFFS AND STEEP RAVINES

  BETTER THAN NIGHT FOR A THIEF

  LISTEN TO THIS, BUDD!” MORGAN EARP SAID AROUND a mouthful of lunch.

  Budd Philpot was a patient young man, but everyone has his limits and Budd was reaching his. “Jesus, Morgan! Lemme eat in peace, willya?”

  “You’ll like this,” Morg promised. “It’s in a book, but it’s just like what we do.”

  Morgan was the second of the Earp brothers to serve as the shotgun guard on the stages Budd drove between Benson and Tombstone. Most folks liked Morgan better that Wyatt, but Morg could be a talker and a lot of the time, he talked about books. Worse yet, he would read to you from the books, like you were just as interested in them as he was. Which was not the case.

  “There’s a stagecoach called the Dover mail, see, and it’s in England a long time ago, but it carries passengers and the mail just like we do. There’s a driver like you and a guard like me because—” Morgan held up the book and began to read aloud. “Robbery was ‘the likeliest thing upon the cards.’ And then it says that the guard had an arms chest with ‘a loaded blunderbuss’ and ‘six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a . . . a substratum of cutlass.’ See? That’s just like our box, except I’ve got a shotgun and revolvers. No cutlasses, though.”

  “What in hell’s a stradum?” Budd asked irritably. He motioned to the waitress for more coffee.

  “Beats me,” Morg admitted after a few moments. “We can ask Doc Holliday when we get back to Tombstone.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with that sonofabitch.”

  “C’mon, Budd! Doc’s not so bad.”

  Budd grunted. He was friendly with Milt Joyce and not inclined to be forgiving about what happened in the Oriental last September. Milt hadn’t lost his hand to Holliday’s bullet, but his fingers were never going to work right again. Morgan claimed the shooting was a misunderstanding, but Budd Philpot knew what he knew. Holliday was a bad-tempered, argumentative drunk who left bodies in every town he got run out of, and Budd didn’t give a damn if all the Earps in the world thought different.

  Morg went back to reading aloud about the Dover mail coach, and even if Budd didn’t say so, it was kind of interesting. He admired how the book talked about horses, for example, especially about how the lead horse would shake his head and rattle his harness because he was “an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill.” That was pretty funny. Budd liked another part about how the horses drooped their heads when they were pulling uphill and how “they mashed their way through the thick mud.” Mashed. That was good. That said it just right. That was just how it was, getting a team over the hills between Benson and Tombstone where the road skirted the San Pedro River near Drew’s Station. The track was sandy there and washed out whenever it rained. Gullies crosscut the road, and there were ditches on either side and steep little rises. Budd Philpot had earned his reputation as the Kinnear Stage Company’s best driver, but he hated that part of the run as much as anyone. You were between towns, a long way from the law in either direction. Those hills and gullies provided plenty of cover for robbers on horseback, so Budd listened with more interest than usual to what Morgan was reading that day, until lunch was
over.

  They had a full coach for this run. Two salesmen, a lawyer, and another batch of whores on their way to Tombstone. The girls were all aflutter because Morgan was a good-looking sonofabitch, though if Morg ever took advantage of that kind of thing, Budd never saw it. Word was, Morgan Earp had raised his share of hell when he was younger, but now he said he was as good as married, and that seemed to be the case.

  “Will you protect us if there are robbers?” That’s what passengers always asked a shotgun guard, and Morgan always said, “I will do my best.” Which was sort of a lie. Drivers like Budd worked for the stagecoach company, but Morgan worked for Wells Fargo. His job was to protect the strongbox. Kinnear’s passengers were a secondary consideration at best. Truth be told, passengers were in a lot more danger when the stage was carrying a Wells Fargo shipment, which everybody could see when they did. Put a man with a heavy, short-barreled shotgun across his knees up next to the driver, and you might as well paint a big sign on the side of the coach that said, “There’s something worth stealing on board.” Silver bullion, payroll for miners, bank deposits. If they unloaded the strongbox at the Benson train station and if there weren’t many passengers, Budd would ask the guard to sit inside on the way back to Tombstone so thieves would see there wasn’t any money and leave the coach alone.

  Once he was up on the bench, Morgan wasn’t any chattier than Wyatt, which is why it was a surprise, and an unwelcome one, when they were a few miles out of Benson and Morgan said, “Well, now . . . what d’ya spose these boys want?”

  Budd glanced at him.

  “Left side,” Morg said. “Just past that white thorn.”

  Budd squinted through the late afternoon dust and swore.

  “Two more, right side,” Morgan said.

  “Give ’em the goddam box,” Budd suggested. He wasn’t joking, either.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Morgan was grinning, but his eyes were on the horsemen. “They call halt—you drop down into the boot, but hang on to those ribbons, y’hear? I’ll take the ones on the left first, and then I’m gonna swing right and put the other barrel into that pair. Stay low till I tell you different.”