Doc - Mary Doria Russell [192]
A single letter from Kate has been preserved. Written in the last year of her life, it includes an outline of her time with Doc and an unflattering portrayal of Wyatt Earp, whom Kate considered an illiterate bumpkin. She hardly mentioned Morgan; that might seem odd, but Kate was the kind who remembered animosity more passionately than affection, and it was impossible to dislike Morgan Earp. He and Kate had forged a bond at Doc’s bedside back in Dodge, and she always appreciated the way Morg could tell when his own easy strength and robust health were a comfort and a support to Doc, and when they felt like mockery and an undeserved rebuke.
That first hemorrhage was neither the last nor the worst that Doc survived, but it remained the most frightening—for Doc himself and for those who cared about him. “You get used to it,” Doc always said. “You can get used to anything.” Used to the gnawing pain; used to the sudden taste of iron and salt; used to the struggle to pull air in as blood from his lungs rose. After 1878, Kate and the Earps knew what to do when Doc started coughing blood and they, too, got used to the way he would rally and recover. “Cheatin’ the Fates is gettin’ to be a habit,” Doc would say, but his cough and breathlessness worsened steadily, and each successive episode of bleeding left him weaker than before.
Please thank the children for their prayers and tell them I am not dead yet, he wrote in a letter to Alex von Angensperg after a bout of pneumonia in December of 1879. That said, I appear to be decomposing considerably ahead of schedule. Kate finds me poor company.
And so did everyone else.
When he was sober, intensifying pain left him sleepless and short-tempered, so he drank to get relief, and it took a lot of bourbon to do the job. When drunk, he found it difficult to govern his sly, teasing tongue. Either way—sober and snappish or drunk and droll—he was accumulating enemies. Warned, he was defiant. Kate began to feel that he was courting death and left him twice, but came back again when he asked her to join him in Tombstone.
By then liquor had begun to erode the quick wit and thoughtful intelligence that Morgan had liked so much in Doc. He, too, was worried by the chances Doc took, but no matter how difficult Doc became, Morg stuck by him. “He is a brother to me,” Morg always said. That loyalty was mutual. When the Clanton and McLaury brothers faced off against the Earps at the O.K. Corral in October of 1881, John Henry Holliday stood at Morgan’s side.
In Kate’s opinion, the men involved in that shoot-out were spoiling for a fight and they got what they all wanted. Her account of the showdown in Tombstone is remarkable for its focus on the aftermath, when Doc retreated to their hotel room, sat on the side of their bed, and wept. He seemed stunned that what started as a misdemeanor arrest had gone so wrong, so quickly. Three men dead; Morgan and Virgil Earp badly wounded. “Doc was all broken up,” Kate recalled, “and he kept saying, ‘This is awful. This is just awful.’ ” Kate herself was worried that Wyatt and Doc would be lynched by Ike Clanton’s friends.
Morg and Virgil recovered. Doc and the Earps were exonerated of wrongdoing by a judge, but Kate was right. Ike’s friends weren’t the kind to forgive and forget. On the night of March 18, 1882, Morgan Earp was shot in the back while playing billiards: retaliation for the deaths of the three men killed during the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
When Morgan died in Wyatt’s arms, no one—not even Virgil or James—understood the depth of Wyatt’s loss or shared his grief and rage and guilt as fully as Doc Holliday. It was Doc who bought the blue suit that Morgan was buried in. And when Wyatt Earp left Tombstone to avenge his brother’s murder, Doc Holliday