Doc - Mary Doria Russell [24]
They served John Henry Holliday as well, for listening to Dong-Sing’s news allowed him to rest up before he continued his journey. That accomplished, he bid Mr. Jau a good evening and walked on, stopping once to catch his breath and to watch the Kansas sunset for a while.
Spring was lovely back in Georgia this time of day. A thousand miles away, lilac and pine and honeysuckle scented the air in the stillness that followed short, soft afternoon rains. When the sun went down on an afternoon like this, it glowed scarlet in a pink-and-orange sky, turning the red clay fields coppery. Fresh green shoots of new cotton shone as though they were lit from within, and everywhere there were magnolia and dogwood and peach blossoms, delicate as angel wings …
Five years in September, he thought.
Five years since he’d seen home.
“Afternoon, Doc,” Bob Wright said when the dentist came in. “Lot of mail for you today. Philadelphia Inquirer. The Scientific American. Dental supply catalog. I can place the orders for you, you know. The Atlanta Constitution, and—wait, now!—a parcel from Atlanta, too.”
Bob found the package and laid it on the counter before he cleared his throat. “That was a shock, about Johnnie,” he said sincerely. “Real sad. He was a fine young man.”
“And a daisy with a deck,” Doc said, but he was looking at the package. One finger lightly touched the handwriting on its return address: Miss Martha Anne Holliday. “If you would be so kind, Mr. Wright, I’d appreciate the use of your scissors.”
Bob handed them over and watched Doc cut through the neatly knotted string. Many years later, as a very old man, Robert Wright would tell people about that day. “Bat Masterson always claimed Doc Holliday was a cold-blooded killer. I never saw that in Doc, myself. He was quiet. Soft-spoken. My first wife—God rest her soul—Alice always used to say that Dr. Holliday had beautiful manners and that he was a gentle dentist who never made the children cry.”
Not to quibble, but it was Bob’s daughter Belle—God rest her soul, too—who always said that. Of course, the elderly do sometimes mix things and the rest of Bob’s story was fairly accurate. He would go on to tell about the slow way Doc unwrapped the book Miss Martha Anne Holliday had sent, and how the dentist’s eyes filled with tears that did not fall.
“I asked him, ‘What is it, Doc?’ And he said, ‘The Aeneid.’ The book was all in Latin. Doc was a real educated man.”
John Henry Holliday turned away from the storekeeper and stared out at the dirt and raw gray wood of Dodge, at the treeless prairie, and at the empty sky beyond. The cattle season had only just begun, but already the air was heavy with the odor of manure, monotonous with the buzz of swarming flies, loud with cowpunchers’ shouted curses and the bellowing protests of cattle being run up wooden planks into the railway cars that would haul them off to Chicago for slaughter.
“Doc just stood there,” Bob Wright would recall, “looking outside, you know? And then he said—real soft, his voice was always real soft—he said, ‘I am in hell, but my Beatrice has sent me Vergil to be my guide.’ ”
When Doc Holliday left the store, Bob’s daughter Belle emerged from the back room, where she had listened to all that passed between the dentist and her father.
“Oh, honey,” Bob said when he saw that she’d been weeping. “Don’t cry!”
“Why not? Somebody ought to cry!” she snarled, glaring at him with angry, red-rimmed eyes. “Johnnie deserves that much, at least!”
At fifteen, Isabelle Wright was a small, slender, dark-haired girl who ordinarily carried herself with the grace and dignity of a young woman. The Belle of Dodge, people called her, and she was as justly celebrated for her beauty as for the charity work she did among impoverished Ford County farmers. In form and face, Belle was fortunate to have taken after her pretty little mother and not her gangling, chinless, homely father. Bob never ceased to marvel that he had sired such a pretty child,