Doc - Mary Doria Russell [191]
The governor’s replies, if any, have not survived.
Mary K. Cummings was merely the last in the old woman’s impressive collection of names. The baby who began life in Hungary as Mária Katarina became María Catarina in Mexico, Mary Katharine in Iowa, and just plain Kate in Kansas. Her maiden surname was certainly Harony. Or perhaps Haroney. Whether she really married Silas Melvin as a pregnant teenager is unclear. She used the surname Fisher for a while and was also known as Katie Elder while a working whore in Kansas, Texas, and Arizona. Nobody ever called her Big Nose Kate to her face.
Not twice, anyway.
In her old age, Kate sometimes claimed that she had married John Henry Holliday. That was wishful thinking, though it was true that they were together, off and on, for the final nine years of his life. After Doc’s death, Kate did marry a blacksmith named George Cummings; he turned out to be a mean drunk so she left the bastard, though she kept his name. Finally, at the turn of the century, she became the housekeeper for a mining man named John J. Howard. With no disrespect to the dead, we may wonder if Kate was more to him than a housekeeper, for she stayed with Mr. Howard for three decades; upon his death, in 1930, she became both executrix of his will and sole heir to his modest estate.
In 1939, a year before she died, Kate was approached by two publishers who wanted her to write a memoir about the legendary gunman Doc Holliday. She was surprised to find that anyone was still interested. Doc had been briefly famous, along with the Earp brothers, after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but nearly sixty years had passed since that half-minute shoot-out.
Doc himself and his family back in Georgia were deeply distressed by the notoriety that attached itself to his name after the events in Arizona. He moved to Colorado and he did his best to live there quietly, but his efforts to drop out of sight were only partially successful. Toward the end of his life his name was in the newspapers again when he shot a man named Billy Allen. For all Doc’s reputation as a deadly pistoleer, he only wounded Allen. After he was arrested for attempted murder, John Henry Holliday’s entire defense was to sit in a Leadville, Colorado, courtroom—all 122 pounds of him—coughing relentlessly. When it came time to speak, he admitted that he was destitute. In desperation, he had borrowed five dollars from Billy Allen and was unable to repay the debt on time. Allen, who outweighed Doc by fifty pounds, had declared to all who would listen that he planned to kill Doc over the matter.
“If he got hold of me, I’d have been a child in his hands,” Doc said, and everyone in court could see that was true.
Sick as he was, Doc testified, he still valued his life, and so he had defended himself. After a few minutes’ deliberation, the jury voted to acquit, but the trial was a sorry affair that made humiliating headlines and added misery to Doc’s last months.
Thirty years later, Bat Masterson earned Kate’s everlasting contempt by pimping Doc’s memory in a magazine article that portrayed the dentist as a bitter, bad-tempered drunk who killed without cause or conscience—libel that would be repeated for a hundred years. Then, in 1931, a successful posthumous biography of Wyatt Earp reminded people of Doc’s part in the Tombstone gunfight. It was Wyatt’s defense of Doc’s good character that sent those two publishers to Kate when they heard that Doc Holliday’s woman was still alive.
After some thought, Kate concluded that Doc would have been pleased if she could turn his misfortune to her advantage. She had almost signed the book contract when she found out the cheap bastards weren’t going to pay her for the work, so she told the publishers to go to hell.
Nevertheless, thoughts of Doc preoccupied Kate at the end of her own long life. Of all the men she’d been