Doc - Mary Doria Russell [193]
From that day forward, legend would link their names as halves of an iconic frontier friendship, but Kate knew the truth. Without Morgan to draw them together, Wyatt and Doc had little in common apart from the desire to see Morg’s killers dead in the dirt. When that was accomplished, Wyatt and Doc split up and soon lost contact.
Kate was glad of that at first. She had never liked Wyatt, but with Morgan gone and the Earps scattered, the full burden of Doc’s care soon settled onto her own small shoulders. That load was sometimes more than she could bear.
Doc understood why she fled and never held it against her. Kate is gone again and it is my fault, he wrote to Alex von Angensperg in a copperplate hand loosened by drink. She is weary of life with a man who has been dying for years and cannot seem to finish the job. The strain of a long illness will exhaust the most compassionate.
Despite Kate’s occasional interference, John Henry had continued to correspond with his cousins, though his notes became brief and infrequent as his condition deteriorated. When Martha Anne wrote of her decision to enter the Catholic Order of the Sisters of Mercy, it made no great difference between them. Distance and time had worked their changes. Their childhood romance had long since mellowed into cousinly caring. John Henry’s last letter to Sister Mary Melanie was dated May 5, 1887, and postmarked in Leadville, Colorado. Thank you for your prayers, dear heart. I have nothing happy to report. I will be moving to Glenwood Springs when I am well enough to stand the journey. Mountain air may help.
If anything, Glenwood’s thin air and sulfur springs hastened his decline. In September, Doc wrote to Kate, asking her to join him. She could tell from his handwriting how weak he was and came as quickly as she could. He was waiting on a bench at the stagecoach depot the afternoon she was due to arrive. Kate walked right past him.
He called her name. The effort set off a coughing fit more recognizable than the man himself. Eyes hollow, cheeks sunken, John Henry Holliday was a fragile old man at thirty-six: bent and emaciated, his fine ash-blond hair now thinned and silver-white.
He had beaten the odds before and believed that, with Kate’s care, he could do it again. But there are games that cannot be won, no matter how cleverly they are played. Consumed by fever, weakened by pneumonia, undermined by alcohol and laudanum, exhausted by the violent cough that shook him day and night, John Henry Holliday died, like his mother before him, too young, after a terrible struggle with tuberculosis.
Kate was at his side.
He had wished to leave some sort of legacy but he was penniless at the end. Kate used her own savings to pay his bill at the Glenwood Springs Hotel. In memory of Doc’s ruinous, reflexive openhandedness, she even gave small cash gifts to members of the hotel staff who had been especially kind to them during the last days of Doc’s life.
The Deadly Dentist’s malign reputation had grown larger as the man himself dwindled, but people in Glenwood Springs would remember Doc Holliday with respect. As the hotel bellhop told a reporter, “We all liked him. He bore his illness with fortitude, and he was grateful for the slightest kindness. Doc was a very fine gentleman, and he was always generous when he tipped.”
It was his hands that Kate would remember.
After that autumn back in Dodge, Kate was always aware of how loose Doc’s grip on life was, of how easily life could be pulled away from that frail, fierce, proud man. For years, she had feared that one day he might simply let go of life, or fling it away in a moment of disgust or despair, but to the very end, those skillful, talented, beautiful hands remained the strongest part of him. It was only as he lay dying that she understood just how much John Henry Holliday had wanted to live.
After Kate’s own death in 1940, scraps of notes were found in her belongings. Several appeared to be part of what might have become a longer account of her life with Doc. He was considered a