Epitaph
Page 37
Which is what everyone in town was asking, except for the schoolkids who’d been on their way home when the gunfight broke out, and who were staring at the dead men or pointing at Mattie Blaylock because she was wearing nothing but her nightgown and her hair was all wild and she was laughing, like it was the funniest thing she’d seen in years.
“He’s all yours now,” Mattie sneered when Josie came running up First Street. “I hope they hang that coldhearted bastard!”
But Wyatt wasn’t hit, and Josie bent at the waist, trying not to faint with relief. “You threw us, Johnny!” Wyatt was shouting. “You told us you disarmed them! You threw us!” When Josie looked up, Virgil was on his feet, and Allie had slipped under his armpit, supporting him as he hopped on one leg, the other one red with blood. Kate was cursing like a cavalry trooper as she helped Doc limp away. Three bodies were being loaded onto a wagon. Morgan was lying on the ground, pale and still, with Lou next to him, weeping.
Oh, my God, Josie thought, Oh, God, no! Morgan’s been killed! But Wyatt was calling for a doctor and a stretcher, and he barely glanced at Josie when he told her, “See to Lou,” who was crumpled on the ground, hysterical now, crying over and over, “He’s dead! Why did they kill him?”
“Lou, it’s all right,” Josie soothed. “He’s still breathing! He’ll be all right.”
“He’s dead! I saw him die! Why did they kill him? Why is Tom dead?”
“Tom?” Josie asked, bewildered. “Tom who?”
And none of it made sense. None of it. None of it. None of it . . .
PAYMENT FOR MY BROTHER’S BLOOD
HEADLONG DESTRUCTION SWINGS OUR WAY
AN INQUEST WAS CONVENED. WYATT EARP DID not attend. He considered it a legal formality. The fight happened in broad daylight with hundreds of witnesses. How could there be any dispute about what happened?
Wyatt had a tin ear for the vox populi at his best, and he was not at his best in the days that followed the shootout. And while a drinking man might have taken time to belt a few back under the circumstances, Wyatt was teetotal, so he was unaware of the arguments taking place in Tombstone’s smoky saloons.
Doc Holliday started it. No, it was Morgan Earp!
Well, I was there and all of the Earps had drawn their guns before they even turned onto Fremont.
Of course they did! All night long, Ike was going around saying he’d shoot them on sight.
Johnny Behan had already disarmed those boys, I tell you! The Earps shot them down like dogs.
If Johnny Behan already took their guns, who in hell shot Virgil and Morgan and Doc Holliday? Answer me that!
All right, I will! Wyatt shot them himself. They got in the way when he was shooting at Billy and the McLaurys. I saw it with my own two eyes!
Even if he’d known what people were saying, Wyatt would not have cared. He had women and wounded men to protect.
The bullet that passed through the meat of Virgil’s calf hadn’t hit the bone, Virg just needed bandaging and rest, but Morgan was in trouble. A bullet had gone in one shoulder and out the other: a long, terrible tunnel of a wound, sideways across his back. The slug had dragged pieces of Morg’s shirt along with it and Dr. Goodfellow had to open up the track of the wound and dig the fabric out. Nobody said it out loud, but everybody knew if infection set in, there was no way to amputate a man’s shoulders. Doc Holliday’s hip was creased but he was following Goodfellow from bed to bed, making sure the bandages were boiled clean and the instruments were rinsed in carbolic.
“Wyatt, there’s nothing more you can do,” Josie told him some time long past midnight. “Mr. Fronk has guards around everyone. You need rest.”
So did she. He could see it in her face, her dark eyes shadowed with fatigue. That was when his own exhaustion hit him.
“All right,” he said. “All right.”
Josie fell asleep the moment she put her head on the pillow, but tired as he was, Wyatt lay awake hour after hour, going over and over it in his mind.
Nothing like the gunfight had ever happened before, and yet . . . It felt familiar somehow. He tried and tried to place that feeling of being there and doing it before and finally realized that he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t have that trick of folding up into himself.
Going deaf and mute and watchful. Seeing nothing but the hands.
He must have been five or six the first time. Morgan was real little. Who set the old man off? Virgil, probably. Or James. Didn’t matter. Nicholas Earp would beat the daylights out of anybody he could get a grip on. Mother. The girls. Anybody. You had to step back into silence while the old man roared. Let the words go by, empty as a breeze. Watch the hands. Pay attention to what the hands might do next.
In that state of mind, everything slowed down and it felt like he had all the time in the world to make a decision. Step in to protect Morgan and the girls, or let his older brothers—Virgil and James and Newton—deal with the threat to themselves or Mother.
In the dark before dawn on October 27, it came to him that he’d been practicing his whole life for what happened yesterday. The ability to make haste slowly had allowed him to aim and fire without panic, to place each shot carefully—each bullet meant to protect someone he cared for. He had saved Virgil and Morgan. He’d saved Doc.
He’d taken lives to do it.
He was a Methodist. He went to church twice a week. He knew that killing is as bad as sin gets, but he was not sorry. He could not find a way to be sorry.
He was three when Morgan was born. It was thirty years ago, but he could clearly recall standing at his mother’s bedside. “This is your baby brother, Wyatt,” she said. “You have to love Morgan and protect him.”
Later, when Warren was born, Wyatt found out that newborn babies will hold onto whatever touches their palms, but the way Morgan had held Wyatt’s own small finger still seemed special to him. It was like shaking hands. Like making a deal. I’m your baby brother. You’ll take care of me. And Wyatt did. Morgan, so chatty in manhood, had hardly bothered to talk at all when he was little. Wyatt always knew what he wanted. He’s hungry. He needs a change. Pick him up, Ma, he wants to see.
Funny how things turned out, Wyatt growing more silent as Morgan got older. Course, Morg wanted to speak for himself—that was part of it, but only part. Every year, Wyatt had more to keep silent about, more to keep a grip on, more to control so the old man wouldn’t beat the tar out of somebody.
“When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won’t buck him.” That’s what Wyatt told Doc Holliday once, back in Dodge. “He’s trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.”
“And the hundredth boy?” Doc asked.
“We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.”
He didn’t tell Doc how hard it was, trying to be a better man. He didn’t say what it was like, pouring your soul into just . . . not being murderous. He never told anyone what it felt like when his grip on anger loosened.
It felt like honesty.
The shame came later.
The sun was rising by then, its first rays hitting Josie’s face. She stirred and rolled toward him—away from the light—and realized he was awake. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked.
“First thing I can remember,” he told her, “is Morgan holding my finger, the day he was born.”
“He’ll be all right,” Josie said. “Virgil, too. And Doc.”
“What happened . . . It was my fault. I want you to know that.”
She sat up and looked at him in dawn’s pale light, her belief in him and in his decency as fierce as it was uninformed and unquestioning.
“You always do what you think is right,” she said. “That’s the best anyone can do.”
CONFUSION JOINS THE FIGHT
WHO SAID IT FIRST? JOHN CLUM WONDERED. Shakespeare? Cicero? Caesar? A year in politics is an eternity.
A year, he thought with his hairless head in his ink-stained hands. Hah! One day
was enough to change everything in this godforsaken town.
In the first minutes after the gunfight, public opinion was all on the side of the law. An early rumor spread that Deputy Morgan Earp had died in the performance of his duty and there was great sympathy for the Earps on their loss, for Morgan was well liked. Then Ike Clanton was seen leaving the Western Union office and somebody said he had summoned more Cow Boys. Soon it was all over town: They were coming to Tombstone to lynch the Earps and Holliday.
A reasonable person might have expected citizens to rally behind their police force, but Tombstone was about to be invaded by a gang of vengeful outlaws. Suddenly Johnny Behan’s policy of “Live and let live” appeared to be the better part of valor, and folks began to grumble that the Earps had stirred up a hornets’ nest.
Then the doctors reported that Morgan was hurt bad but likely to live. Virgil Earp and Doc Holliday’s wounds were far less serious. An inch of difference in the bullets’ trajectories could have severed Morgan’s spinal cord, or cost Virgil his leg, or left Doc Holliday gut-shot and screaming. Even so, it began to seem as though the police had gotten off easy.
Talk shifted to the argument Holliday and Ike Clanton had the night before the fight. Nobody knew what it was about, but somebody who’d been eating in the Alhambra’s restaurant insisted that Ike Clanton had started it. Then somebody reminded everyone about when Milt Joyce coldcocked Holliday last year and how Wyatt said anyone who laid a hand on Doc would answer to him. When Ike Clanton turned himself in to Sheriff Behan because he was afraid Wyatt Earp would find him and finish the job, the notion did not strike anyone as impossible, or even unlikely.
Virgil was steady, folks said. Morgan was affable. But Wyatt? Hell, he beat a man to death up in Dodge City! Who knew what he was capable of when his friend and two of his brothers had been shot?
Word began to filter out of the inquest: Tom McLaury might have been unarmed. A counterrumor claimed that somebody had picked Tom’s pistol up after the fight and was keeping it as a souvenir. Nobody seemed to know who “somebody” was and no one came forward to show the gun.
Even Earp partisans admitted that Tom wasn’t near as bad as his brother Frank, so why had Wyatt hit Tom a couple of hours before the gunfight? Nobody had a good explanation for that.
Everyone had expected Willie Claiborne and Ike Clanton to blame the Earps, but Johnny Behan’s testimony at the coroner’s inquest was a surprise, and he wasn’t shy about repeating it in public later on. “Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton were the only ones carrying weapons, and they had agreed to disarm,” he testified. “When I saw the Earps come around the corner, I went to them and told them not to fight because those parties had agreed to give me their weapons. The Earps ignored me and began firing without preamble. I heard Billy Clanton say, ‘Don’t shoot me! I don’t want to fight!’ Tom McLaury threw open his coat and said, ‘I have got nothing!’ But Holliday cut him down. That gunfight was little more than murder.”
Hour after hour, the coroner had listened to witness after witness, letting conflicting and ambiguous testimony stand without asking for clarification. By midnight, facts that had seemed clear-cut were in doubt. Those who’d initially supported the Earps lapsed into uneasy silence, leaving only the voices of those who condemned the officers and who now turned on John Clum himself during an emergency meeting of the City Council.
“I lay what happened at the mayor’s feet,” Councilman Milt Joyce declared in what was the opening move of a run for the city’s top office. “He knew what everyone in this town knows: Doc Holliday will shoot without provocation!” Milt held up his own scarred and deformed hand. “And wasn’t it Mayor Clum who told the Earps to disarm those boys? Why not let well enough alone? I’ll tell you why,” Milt offered. “Sheriff Behan was already on his way to the O.K. Corral. Johnny Behan could have settled matters in his own quiet, professional way, but Mayor Clum wanted Wyatt Earp to look good to the voters for next year’s election!”
Which was uncomfortably close to the truth and put the mayor on the defensive. “I said to disarm those men,” he cried, “not to slaughter them!” And while he regretted the phrasing the moment the words were out of his mouth, there was no taking them back.
So there it was. On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, the Earps were incorruptible, intrepid lawmen bravely marching off to protect the city from gun-toting outlaws. The next morning, they were cold-blooded killers who’d murdered three men on a public street because of some kind of personal feud between Doc Holliday and Ike Clanton. And Johnny Behan had become the odds-on favorite to win the sheriff’s office in the ’82 election.
As editor of the Epitaph, John Clum was free to interpret the events as persuasively as possible; his newspaper was on the A.P. wire, so his version of the story would be read by Eastern investors and Washington politicians. As mayor of Tombstone, he had to be seen as impartial. So he put Virgil Earp on medical leave and appointed Deputy James Flynn as acting police chief. Flynn could serve until the Earps were cleared of wrong-doing. As head of the Citizens Safety Committee, however, John Clum was within his rights to authorize a doubling of the guard around the Earps and Holliday, hoping to shield them from retaliation by the cattle thieves, drifters, and thugs who were converging on Tombstone by the hundreds: drinking heavily and talking big about lynch parties and settling scores.
THE NEXT MORNING’S FUNERAL CORTEGE was far larger than the one that accompanied Fred White to his grave. Two thousand people stood in respectful silence along the route to the cemetery, which passed right by the Earp brothers’ homes.
The procession was led by Curly Bill Brocius and Johnny Ringo, who held aloft a large banner made from a bedsheet and bearing a hand-lettered declaration: MURDERED IN THE STREETS OF TOMBSTONE. Behind them were wagons that bore the dead, their pale cheeks brightened by mortician’s rouge. Chief mourner Isaac Clanton came next, eyes reddened, face ravaged. Ike was followed by more than a hundred men, on foot and on horseback, their pace set by a brass band playing a drinking song called “Where Was Moses When the Lights Went Out?”
“Odd choice for a dirge,” Doc Holliday remarked, looking out Morgan Earp’s bedroom window. “Wash your hands, George.”
“John, they are perfectly clean.”
“You can argue with him for half an hour,” Kate Harony told Dr. George Goodfellow, “or you can save us all time and do like he says.”
“C’mon,” Morgan muttered. “Let’s get this over with.”
The physician sighed and washed up. Again. Like it or not, a D.D.S. had trumped an M.D. ever since the president died. For the past six weeks, the American Dental Association had been frightening everyone out of their wits, claiming that Garfield had needlessly succumbed to infection introduced to his body by the unclean hands of his own doctors. Now all around the country, the ignorant and superstitious were convinced that tiny invisible animals caused infection.
At the Earp family’s insistence, any physician tending to Virgil and Morgan’s wounds was shadowed by Dr. J. H. Holliday. All George Goodfellow wanted to do this morning was inspect the incision and change the dressings, but the dentist still insisted on this senseless rigmarole about “antisepsis procedure.”
Mrs. Earp and the Harony woman sat behind the patient to support his back while he swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, face rigid against the pain.
“There are too many people in here,” Goodfellow said, trying to reestablish professional authority. “I need space to work.”
The women left the bedroom. Holliday merely moved into a corner, vigilant as Goodfellow unwound the bandages.
“The itch is driving me crazy,” Morgan complained.
“Itching means the wound is healing,” Goodfellow murmured. “Apart from that, how do you feel?”
“Tired.”
“You lost a great deal of blood. Fatigue is normal.”
“I can’t find a good way to sleep! I like to sleep on my back or my side, but everything hurts.”
Ignoring the dentist, Goodfellow continued his examination.
“Entry and exit are mostly scabbed over . . . Swelling is somewhat reduced across the whole of your back . . .”
Holliday came forward to inspect the incision and met the physician’s eyes. A portion of the tunnel looked angry. In a rare moment of agreement, both doctors made a silent decision not to say anything to Morgan about another surgery until they were certain it was necessary.
“And your own wound, John?” the physician asked.
“Granulation is well along. Kind of you to ask, George.”
The next ten minutes passed in silence while Morgan’s dressings were replaced with fresh bandages—boiled, sun-dried, minutely examined and accepted by Holliday as sufficiently clean. Bidding his patient good day, Dr. Goodfellow left the room, promising he’d return that evening.
MORGAN HAD ANOTHER BAD TEN MINUTES as Kate and Lou got him settled again, but when they were done, he was half-sitting in bed: his arms, lower back, head, and neck supported by pillows with a narrow gap across his shoulders so pressure on the wound was relieved.