Doc - Mary Doria Russell [190]
And though none of Wyatt’s prayers had ever once been answered, and though he knew that his soul was not pure and his faith was not strong, and though he could not understand why God always took the best and the sweetest to his bosom and left the dregs to get meaner and worse—in spite of it all, he began to pray. Dear Lord, please, give him time! Please, Lord, let him finish!
But John Henry Holliday was praying too, just as earnestly and to any god who might listen. Now. Now. Now. Take me now.
Now: with this music beneath his hands. Now: while he was still a gentle man who might have made his mother proud. Now: while beauty could still beat back the blind and brutal disease that was eating him alive.
So he held nothing back, tempting the Fates, defying them, seducing them.
Now: as he bent into thunderous, muscular chords.
Now: as he drew back for brilliant, chiming fantasies.
Now: as he hurled his hands into the impossibly swift runs across the keyboard.
Now, now, now, he prayed when the music darkened and fell, and spun and caught itself, and rose again, until at last—Orpheus to his own soul—he climbed beyond Hades’ grasp, beyond himself, beyond the terrifying, suffocating horror that awaited him, until exhaustion and peace had claimed him, as the music floated—softly, lightly—downward, and he let it end on the quiet chords before the final arpeggio.
Breathless and blinking like a newborn, he came back to the world around him, awakening first to rapt silence as the last notes died away, and then to applause and cheers and amazement.
“Well, did you ever!”
“I had no idea he could—”
“By God! Now, that was something!”
And he was surprised to see that sometime during the concerto, Kate had come to sit beside him on the bench, and that she was sobbing.
“Ne meurs pas, mon amour! Don’t die on me!” she begged as he took her in his arms. “Don’t die, Doc. Please, don’t die.”
“I am doin’ my best, darlin’.”
“Promise you won’t leave me!”
“You have my word. Hush, now. Hush. Don’t cry.”
“Promise you won’t leave?”
“I promise.” He gave her a handkerchief.
“Liar! Everyone leaves,” she muttered bitterly, and blew her nose. “Or they die.”
“You have me there,” he admitted. “Everybody dies.”
She laid her head against that traitorous, murderous chest of his.
“Oh, Doc,” she whispered, “I want to go home.”
“I know, darlin’.”
“Take me home. Please, Doc, take me home!”
“And where is that?” he wondered. “Where is home for us now?”
Us, she thought.
She started to laugh, and wiped her eyes, and said, “Las Vegas! Please, Doc, let’s try it. Just six months! Please!”
“No,” he told her, though he held her close. “No, and that’s final.”
In late April of 1879, Dr. Robert Holliday received a note postmarked “Dodge City, Kansas.”
Please forgive the long silence. I have been poorly for some time and my health remains brittle. This is to inform you that I will be moving to Las Vegas in the New Mexico Territory. I have made a place for myself in Dodge and I am sorry to leave, but the winter is severe here, perhaps worse for me than summers back in Georgia. There are hot springs near Las Vegas and a sanatorium that is the latest thing in tubercular Society. We club together and pay some quack who pretends to know what’s good for us while we cough our lungs out. I don’t put much stock in the enterprise, but I have a passel of children praying on me and I hate to disappoint them. Tell Martha Anne I will write soon. Give my love to the family, and tell Sophie Walton how much I miss her.
—YOUR COUSIN JOHN HENRY
The Bitch in the Deck
In 1930, the Arizona Pioneers’ Home in Prescott admitted an eighty-year-old woman who called herself Mary K. Cummings. By the end of her first week, the old lady was thoroughly disliked by the entire staff. Their antipathy was returned, in spades. Imperious, opinionated, blunt, and profane, Mrs. Cummings would spend the next ten years firing off ungrammatical letters to the