Doc - Mary Doria Russell [25]
“ ‘A fine young man,’ ” she mimicked sarcastically. “You didn’t even like for me to talk to him, Daddy!”
Bob Wright prized this daughter above all else on earth, but lately nothing he did was right in Belle’s eyes. Sometimes it seemed that she held him personally responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened in Kansas.
“Odd, wouldn’t you say, Daddy?” Belle remarked in a voice far too cold for a girl so young. “Why, there must have been two dozen drunken drovers asleep in that barn last night. They all woke up and got the horses out. Johnnie Sanders didn’t drink, but he was the only one to die.”
“Honey, it’s not—”
“It’s not your fault,” she finished for him, though that wasn’t what he’d meant to say. “It’s never your fault!” she sobbed. “Nothing is ever your fault!”
Three blocks away, catching his breath in the lobby of the Dodge House Hotel, John Henry Holliday rejected the notion of leaving The Aeneid behind the front desk, having concluded that such an act of cowardice would only postpone Kate’s reaction.
Arriving in their second-floor room, he tossed the book, his shirts, and the other mail on the bed. Kate glanced at Martha Anne’s gift before returning her gaze to the game of solitaire she had laid out on the small table in the corner.
“That girl again,” she observed. “You said you’d break it off.”
He didn’t deny it.
Kate’s Magyar accent was noticeable only when she spoke English. Her Latin was elegant when she continued. “Your behavior is dishonorable. I consider it an injustice to her.”
“Red jack on the black queen,” he said.
She went back to her game. This was a considerable relief to him.
“So,” she said, in English again, “was it someone you worked on, that body?”
“Johnnie Sanders.”
Her hand stopped, a seven of spades hovering above the table. “You’re sure?”
“I never forget a smile, darlin’.”
“Oh, Doc.” She set the deck aside. “I’m sorry.”
Kate could be kind. It always caught him off guard.
He stepped to the open window, bracing his right hand high against the frame while he recovered from the stairs. The posture opened up his intercostals and gave his diaphragm more leverage with which to work. Anyone out in the street who happened to look up would have seen a slim, well-dressed young man lounging, not a sickly boy grieving.
It was surprising, really, how much he felt the loss. It wasn’t as though he and Johnnie were close, though they might have become so. He’d admired Johnnie’s skill dealing faro, recognizing some of the mechanics and suspecting others. He was impressed by Johnnie’s cleverness and curious about his unusual education, that was all.
As much as anything, it was the boy’s accent that had drawn him. Johnnie Sanders himself wasn’t from Georgia, but his paternal grandmother was. Her legacy of absent r’s and gerunds with no terminal g had been passed down intact for two generations. For John Henry Holliday, Johnnie’s voice was like a visit home.
Johnnie had recognized the kinship as well. “I can always tell Southerners,” he told Doc at the barbershop. “Northerners’ll tell you where they’re goin’, not where they’re from. Southerners’re like Indians. They’ll ask who your relatives are until they find out, oh, my mother’s sister married your father’s uncle, so we’re cousins!”
When Doc inquired about the boy’s own background, Johnnie thanked him for being polite about it.
“I confuse people,” Johnnie admitted. “They look me up and down, and then it’s ‘What in hell are you?’ ”
“Prairie nigger,” Texans called him. Un pardo, Mexicans said, or un moreno. He’d heard the term grif or something like that, once or twice. Johnnie didn’t know what that meant. “Couldn’t find it in my dictionary,” he said. All by itself, the idea of that boy owning a dictionary was enough to endear him to Doc Holliday.
“Half-breed’ll come to mind for some, but breed usually means Indian and white,” Johnnie said. “My Granny Sal