Doc - Mary Doria Russell [9]
The stagecoach to Beaumont, Texas, was far cheaper than the ferry; it was also two hundred miles of jarring, bruising, dust-choked punishment. Waiting for the train from Beaumont to Houston, he mailed a second note, this one to the elderly brothers Wilson and Chainey Holliday, in care of his Aunt Martha. I wish that I had been sensible enough to accept your kind offer of help on this journey, he wrote. It would have made all the difference.
Too late now, he thought. In any case, the expense of three travelers would have been ruinous. And from what he’d seen so far of Texas, it was no place for colored folks.
There was one last stretch of track from Houston to Dallas. He found a telegraph office, intending to wire his arrival time to Dr. John Seegar, the dentist who had offered him a position. While John Henry was writing out the message, the telegrapher announced to the room that one of the big northern railways had just gone bust.
“After what them damn Yankees done to us,” someone remarked, “it serves the sonsabitches right.”
John Henry was inclined to agree with the sentiment, but railroad trouble didn’t concern him as long as the Houston train still went to Dallas. He submitted the form, paid for the wire, and gathered himself for another effort. He had sent his baggage on ahead, but simply walking unencumbered to the platform now seemed herculean.
Dr. and Mrs. Seegar were waiting for him at the Dallas depot. He had done his best to make himself presentable, but judging from the looks the couple exchanged, a good first impression was not in the cards. His throat was so raw, he could hardly be heard above the noise of the crowd when he introduced himself.
Appalled by what eleven days and sixteen hundred miles had done to a boy who’d been sick when he’d started the trip, Mrs. Seegar clapped little gloved hands to plump, pink cheeks. “Oh, honey, don’t even try to talk!” she cried. “You look ready to drop, child! See to his things, darlin’,” she ordered, and her husband did as he was told.
Her accent was balm. John Henry wanted to tell her so, but he could only gesture at his neck, grimace an apology, and croak, “You’re from—?”
“Georgia, honey. You can tell, can’t you! I grew up in Lovejoy, just down the road from Jonesboro. Your mamma had kin there, didn’t she?”
He tried to say something about his father’s sister Mary Anne, but Dr. Seegar told him brusquely to be quiet and insisted on examining John Henry’s throat, right there in the street.
“I thought so. Completely ulcerated—all that damn coughing! Our buggy’s right around the corner,” Dr. Seegar said, gesturing to a porter to bring the bags.
“Are you hungry, honey?” his wife asked John Henry. “You must be perishin’! Our girl Ella has a ham and greens and biscuits waitin’ for us at home. You are gonna eat your fill, and then go straight on up to bed. Don’t you dare argue with me! I won’t hear a word!”
The final leg of the journey was a short drive to the Seegars’ home, during which Mrs. Seegar did the talking for all three of them, naming friends in Lovejoy and kin in Macon and acquaintances in Decatur, hoping for a connection. She was thrilled when John Henry whispered that he had indeed met a lady she knew in Atlanta.
“Why, she is my second cousin!” Mrs. Seegar cried. “Do you know her husband, too? Oh, but he was a handsome man when they married!” Her voice dropped to confide, “He was disfigured in the war, poor soul. Dreadful, just dreadful …”
When he was able to slip a word in, Dr. Seegar spoke a little about the practice (“Thriving, my boy! Thriving!”) but allowed as how he could wait for some relief from the workload until young Dr. Holliday had recovered from his travels.
“Say! Did you hear the news?” Seegar asked as they pulled up to a large frame house on a treeless lane called Elm Street. “Jay Cooke’s bank went bust!”
“Oh, now, don’t you go botherin’ the poor boy with all that money nonsense,” Mrs. Seegar said breezily. She led the way up a boardwalk, waited for