Doc - Mary Doria Russell [181]
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Beneath that, in Tom McCarty’s own scrawl, was a note: Pt requests: notify post-mortem; ship body per instructions.
At the end of September, John Holliday had given Tom that envelope and ten dollars to cover his final expenses. “I would like to be buried next to my mother,” he said, buttoning his shirt over a chest dwindled down to bone. Tom tried not to show what he was thinking, but the dentist saw the look and recited, “Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies …”
“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