Doc - Mary Doria Russell [89]
A year after that, James would have even more to reproach himself with, for the aftermath was his fault, too. He would piece everything together during those awful hours after Morg’s funeral, listening to his mother weep.
Virgil newly crippled, worse off than James himself.
Poor young Morgan, cold in his grave.
Wyatt and Doc, fugitives from the law, wanted for killing the bastards who murdered Morg.
All of it, James would think, numb and silent. All of it is my fault.
The irony is that Big Nose Kate had a reputation for meddling and for bossing other people around, but if James Earp hadn’t stuck his big nose into something that was none of his business back in Dodge, Kate would have done all right for herself. She was attractive, resourceful, and ruthless, and she did indeed make her own way all her long life, beholden to no one to the end of her days.
And Doc? Well, none of them could have known it, but absent James Earp’s well-intentioned interference in his life, Dr. John Henry Holliday would have dropped by Bob Wright’s store to pick up his mail on the afternoon of June 10, 1878, and Miss Isabelle Wright would have been waiting for him, behind the counter.
“Dr. Holliday, we are having dinner next Sunday at two,” Belle would have said. “I wonder … would you care to join us?”
That was the fork in the road.
That was when everything might have changed.
Decisions—genuine, deliberate decisions—were never John Henry Holliday’s strong suit. In youth, he’d sought the advice and consent of his large family. In manhood, poor health and a poor economy had dictated his plans, such as they were.
Things happened. He reacted. Sometimes he took a rebellious pride in the cold-blooded courage of certain unconsidered deeds; just as often, he repented of his rashness afterward. There is, for example, nothing quite like lying in a widening pool of your own blood to make you reconsider the wisdom of challenging bad-tempered men with easy access to firearms.
For all his private discipline and the countless hours of practice he devoted to the mastery of useful skills, John Henry had been borne along by ad hoc-ery and happenstance since leaving Atlanta. If questioned, he might even have admitted that part of Kate’s allure was her fearless decisiveness, which left no room for doubt or second-guessing.
“We should go to Dodge,” she said. “That’s where the money is.”
So. Here he was. In Dodge.
Standing in Wright’s General Outfitting on June 10, with a letter from Martha Anne, a copy of Harper’s Weekly, and an intriguingly large envelope from the St. Francis Mission piled on the counter before him, John Henry would not have accepted Isabelle Wright’s invitation immediately, for he would have known that it was extended under a serious misapprehension.
Belle was a Yankee girl. That clouded her judgment in matters of character. Yankees were customarily rude to their inferiors, a fact John Henry found shocking and bewildering while he lived in Philadelphia. In the North, he discovered, courtesy was considered a barometer of genuine esteem; for any decently brought-up Southerner, good manners were simply habitual. Belle Wright undoubtedly believed that his courtesy to Johnnie Sanders and China Joe stemmed from an admirable democratic conviction that they were every bit as good as he was. In reality, he thought himself no