Doc - Mary Doria Russell [123]
“Bessie told me you paid for my whole night,” she said. “I’ll work it off.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he told her.
“Don’t take what I don’t earn,” she said, head up. “I’ll pay it off in cash if you give me some time, but I’d rather do it this way. James says you’re widowed. I reckon you loved a girl once, you won’t be mean to one now.”
There didn’t seem to be a good way to tell her no. It helped that she didn’t look anything like Urilla. Mattie was dark-haired, and sturdy, and didn’t seem likely to get sick, though later on he found out she had bad headaches with her monthlies.
After his first time with her, he couldn’t hardly think about anything else. With the long drought over, he welcomed her when she came back the next day. He got bullyragged about it a lot, but he got bullyragged about not doing it, too, so he ignored the laughing, and the jokes, and the snide remarks. A few extra cowboys got bashed for mouthing off. Otherwise, he kept his temper.
James was merciless. It was rich: Wyatt being with a whore after he was so uppity about Bessie, whose husband was, James pointed out with immense satisfaction, lawfully married to the woman he lived with, unlike some brothers he could name.
And Wyatt wasn’t the only Earp living in sin, James noted. Virgil had left his wife to fight in the war. Afterward, he let her think he was dead but hadn’t divorced her, which meant he couldn’t marry that little Allie he was with, down in Arizona. And now Morg and Lou were shacked up, too, because Lou was a Mormon and her parents refused to let her marry a Methodist.
Morg had started calling Lou his wife anyhow, and in his opinion, Wyatt ought to be satisfied with what passed for marriage in Kansas.
“Mattie’s not such a bad person,” Morg said one morning when he and Wyatt were over visiting Doc. “You know, if things had gone a little different, even Lou might have wound up a whole lot worse than a dance hall girl.”
“Say what you will about Mormons,” Doc murmured, lying in bed but paying attention. “They are very fine dancers.”
Doc had been up and around right after the fall on the Fourth, carrying things to the rented house and helping Kate fix the place up the way she wanted it. It was too much, too soon. Tom McCarty diagnosed overexcitement and ordered him back to bed for a few days. The rest was doing him good, but Doc enjoyed having visitors, no matter what Kate or Doc McCarty thought, so Morg and Wyatt stopped by a lot.
“How long ago did Urilla die, Wyatt?” Morgan pressed. “Is it nine years now?”
“Eight,” Wyatt said, halfway between stubborn and sad. “I promised to love her all my life, Morg. I meant to keep my word.”
That shut Morgan up, but Doc’s eyes opened and he gazed at Wyatt for a long time.
“What?” Wyatt asked, a little unnerved by the way Doc was looking at him.
“That is your ghost life, Wyatt,” Doc told him, and closed his eyes again. “That is the life you might have had. This is the life you’ve got.”
Eddie Foy’s favorite girl, Verelda, was pregnant last month, Dong-Sing wrote on Wednesday. Eddie doesn’t know that she got rid of the baby.
Dong-Sing’s father would wonder, Who is Eddie? Who is Verelda? Why does my son tell me such things? Or maybe he wouldn’t wonder at all. Maybe he didn’t even read Dong-Sing’s letters because they had become incomprehensible as the years passed. Maybe he just took the money and sold the paper the letter was written on.
It was hard for Dong-Sing to keep in mind what his father would understand. It was difficult even to remember what his father looked like. Children who were babies when Dong-Sing left Kwantung must be grown by now—married, with children of their own. Dong-Sing himself had noticed some gray hairs recently and realized that he was getting old. He had waited a long time for a bride, but his family never sent one, and now it was illegal to bring Chinese women into America.
I fear I will never have sons, he wrote to his father when the law was passed, in ’75. All the Chinese