Doc - Mary Doria Russell [126]
He’d been fighting the cough for a while and gave in to it at last.
“So: there she was,” Doc said, when he could go on. “Orphaned, pregnant, on the run, with no more than a few words of English. She found a man to marry her, but he left. The baby came early, and he died. She’s been makin’ her own way ever since.”
Hearing it made Wyatt feel ashamed somehow, though none of it was his fault. “All these girls have some story,” he said, to make it less important.
“Yes, sir! Yes, they do,” Doc said, suddenly hot. “Every one of them has a story, and every story begins with a man who failed her. A husband who came home from the war, good for nothin’ but drink. A father who didn’t come home at all, or a stepfather who did. A brother who should have protected her. A beau who promised marriage and left when he got what he wanted, because he wouldn’t marry a slut. If a girl like that has lost her way, it’s—because some worthless no-account—sonofabitch left her in—the wilderness alone!”
When he was done coughing, Doc stood abruptly and dropped a dollar on the table, which was far more than he owed. Still, he didn’t leave, tarrying instead to watch a crib girl make a deal with a drover out on the boardwalk right in front of them. Misdemeanor, Wyatt thought, and he’d have gone to arrest her, except for what Doc said next.
“They break my heart, these girls. They are so brave. Wyatt, you have to admire their nerve, at least! They go off alone into alleys and small rooms with violent, dangerous, lustful men twice their own size … Shall I confess my crime, Marshal?”
Wyatt looked up.
“City ordinances be damned,” Doc told him. “I am never entirely disarmed. And I just play cards with the bastards.”
Personally, Wyatt didn’t think it took all that much nerve to lie back and let a man do what he wanted for a minute or two. The whores at his brother’s place seemed to him hard and mercenary, or loose and indifferent, or silly and stupid, but he had to admit he didn’t know much about any of them.
Doc Holliday was an educated and thoughtful man, so Wyatt made an effort to match up what he’d seen with what Doc said. There might be something to it, he guessed.
Later on, he asked Mattie Blaylock about her life before, and what her story was. At first she just looked at him like she couldn’t decide if he was dumb or trying to trick her.
“Honest,” he said. “I want to know.”
“Well, they was doing it to me anyways,” she told him. “Might as well get paid.”
It wasn’t much to go on, but he did his best to treat her like she was a lady, the way Doc treated Kate.
I sent to San Francisco for yue hua wan for Doc. I did this at my own expense, Dong-Sing thought while he worked, though he never would have written such a boastful thing to his father. Doc was grateful. He thanked me for my generosity, but he does not want me to go to such trouble. He has asked for the pharmacist’s address in San Francisco and promised to obtain the medicine for himself.
According to the Chinese pharmacist, Doc’s illness was complicated and difficult to treat. Deficiency in yin accounted for the cough and the frothy pink sputum, while deficiency of yang and damaged Jing Luo combined to produce a tidal fever and night sweats, but also coldness and poor appetite and general weakness.
The pharmacist sent dried milk thistle, sage, kelp, licorice, lavender, ginseng, and sorrel, to be steeped in boiling water with black tea. Jau Dong-Sing brewed the medicine up and encouraged Doc