The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday Read online

  “I told you—”

  “No, really, think about it. Who does that?”

  “The guy who bought some of the most laughable forgeries ever made was a mathematician and astronomer. Smarter than the average bear. And yet it never occurred to him that letters written by Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, and Lazarus wouldn’t be written in French. People want what they want.”

  “Wow. There’s a newsbreak.”

  “Nico—”

  “What if this yahoo gets his nose out of joint when it actually dawns on him: ‘Hey, this is bullshit.’ What if he’s got a screw loose, takes the whole gunslinger thing way too seriously? Thinks collecting stuff is a contact sport.”

  “It’s Arizona, Nico, not Westworld. I realize our specialty’s ‘creative’ law, but you’re sounding a little…I dunno…overboard.”

  “It’s called being concerned. I’m concerned about you. I’m concerned that this thing could go sideways. And slam into a rock.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “Said the blind girl.”

  “Oh, come on—seriously?”

  He collected their bowls. “Just come back in one piece, okay?” At the sink, he started scraping leftovers into the compost tin.

  Lisa stared at his back for a while, then in the gentlest voice, “You know the hard part, right? It’s not thinking this is all a scam. That’s easy. Anybody can manage that. The hard part’s allowing yourself to accept the fact that those stupid letters might just be real.”

  “You don’t think they are?”

  “I honestly, truly: Do. Not. Know.”

  “Dangerous enough if they aren’t,” he said. “Remember the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? They weren’t real. Look what happened.”

  ***

  An hour later, she sat at her desk, once again wearing the white cotton gloves, feeling a need to inspect at least a few more of the letters. The impulse went beyond mere curiosity—she needed to determine for herself whether the letters rang true, seemed credibly authentic—real. After shuffling them into what appeared to be proper chronological order, she selected the very first one, from Mattie to Doc, and gently opened the envelope.

  ***

  June 20, 1873

  My Dear John Henry:

  As I pick up my pen to write, I feel a terrible apprehension that every word that appears on the page will be wrong, confessing a meaning I do not intend, or perhaps intend too much.

  I would have written you much sooner, but I lacked confidence you would wish to hear from me given the harsh words we shared shortly before your abrupt departure. I assure you that I have confided the content of our quarrel to no one, nor have I allowed myself to be drawn into the endless speculation as to the true reason you found it necessary to leave us in such haste.

  There is considerable gossip on that point, mind you. Tongues have been wagging at both ends as to which young lady you robbed of virtue, which powerful man you insulted, cheated, or shot.

  Uncle John has tried to stamp out the grassfire by telling any and all with a mind to listen that the trip west was in hopes of an improvement in climate, given the consumption that has come upon you, just as it did poor Francisco and, of course, your precious mother.

  Not that this has silenced all murmurings. The family is not alone in realizing that, if it was salutary environs you desired, you could have easily decamped to Hamilton County, to live with Uncle James and the rest of your mother’s family. The local springs, they say, rival those of Saratoga.

  If not there, then Atlanta near Uncle John and Aunt Permelia, where the Ponce de Leon Springs are famous for their curative powers. Your condition, to anyone who bothered to give the matter a moment’s thought, cannot explain your sudden need to flee us, your family.

  Fortunately, people credit Uncle John for truthfulness, given his standing and his honorable nature, and so many have decided the more scurrilous rumors are just so much bosh. As for the others, what can be done?

  Your father is silent on the matter, which surprises no one, given the hardness between the two of you since your mother’s passing, and his remarrying so shortly thereafter. As for that woman, the one he wed, she and her kin cannot slander you enough, telling anyone who will listen that you are nothing but a scandalous drunk.

  If what I hear is true, she reminds her little circle of rumormongers as often as possible that Uncle John, the man who now speaks so charitably of you, in fact turned you out of his home given your inability—or refusal—to rein in your more unruly inclinations, or distance yourself from disreputable company.

  Regrettably, there is also the unfortunate incident at the washhole near Uncle Tom’s property in Troupeville, which continues to generate talk. Depending on the unrestrained extent of the taleteller’s imagination, you either fired over those colored boys’ heads, shot one in the back, or murdered them all.

  Uncle Tom has managed to keep a watchful eye on the matter, and so far, it seems, no reports of the incident have found their way into the papers, nor has anyone from the local Negro garrison or some scalawag from the Freedman’s Bureau come snuffling around.

  I do not believe, however, given the constant level of tension throughout the region and the ongoing injustices of the occupation, that anyone in the family feels confident that this misfortune has been put to bed once and for all.

  Thus is the general nature of what is said regarding your journey west. But you and I know the real reason you left.

  If you only knew how many hours of every day I sit by myself and remember your unannounced visit here, and your shocking, stammered proposal. If you only knew how often I see again the heartbreak in your eyes as I whispered my answer, then suffered your hurtful words and watched your abrupt retreat from the house before I could compose myself and articulate my reasons.

  I assure you, I do not invoke my faith out of some perverse inclination to trump your love with God’s. The simple truth remains, however, that the Church forbids marriage between first cousins, no matter how profound and true their love.

  Nor, as I suspect you might secretly believe, was it disdain that prompted my refusal, disdain at the wastrel turn of your nature. Yes, I could detect the air of spirits coming off your person that day, and noticed the haggard redness of your eyes.

  These, however, I could forgive, thinking you needed to brace up your nerve with liquid courage. Such are the forgiving deceptions women in love indulge.

  Finally, do not entertain for an instant the notion that your affliction in any way influenced my heart. On the contrary, I sometimes wonder if your consumption is not a kind of stigmata, like that bestowed on God’s most beloved saints, as testament to great sacrifice made in the name of holiness—I speak of the heartfelt concern and care you showed your lovely mother as she lay in prolonged agony, awaiting her death.

  I wish I had words to express how greatly that sad and lonely devotion, the greatness of heart you demonstrated in such a despairing time, carved out the place you hold in my heart. I cannot, however, turn my back on the doctrines my mother so devotedly instilled in me, in all her children. Even Father, moved by the passion of her faith, converted before he died.

  I will not bore you with a recounting of all the travails she managed to endure during the war solely through the strength of her love for God, and the many benevolent signs from Him she received throughout her ordeals.

  Of such small miracles and trustworthy blessings is a great faith forged. You cannot ask me to lay it aside no matter how much my heart breaks to refuse your offer of lifelong devotion.

  In fact, I must confess that in your absence, my fondness and longing have only intensified. It is not just that I miss you. I fear for you, fear for your life and your soul. If I could convince myself that, as you suggested to Uncle John, your journey west was intended in part to escape the temptations that afflicted you here, and that you now intend to follow the path of rectitude, believe me, I would kneel before you like the Magdalene and wash the dust f
rom your boots with tears of joy.

  Could I marry you? I would nurse you, comfort you, devote the whole of my life and my heart to you. Please believe it. Come home. I am waiting. As much as I confide, believe me, there is always more, depths beneath the depths.

  Yours forever,

  Mattie

  ***

  September 30, 1873

  Dearest Mattie:

  Please excuse my delayed response to your letter. I have moved from Dallas to pursue opportunities some eighty miles north in a railhead town named Denison. It took a while for the post to follow.

  Thank you for filling me in on the general jingling as to why I left Georgia. I suppose I should not be surprised at the willingness of so many to swallow the hogwash. As Professor Varnedoe might say, quoting his beloved Livy, “The populace is like the sea, motionless in itself, but stirred by every wind, even the lightest breeze.”

  The idea I would have made a path to Dallas for reasons of health is particularly laughable. How could anyone be so dull as to believe the air is better here? They suffered an outbreak of yellow fever only two weeks before I arrived, and they let their pigs roam free in the streets to scarf up the horse dung. Sadly, they lack a similar methodology for the filth the hogs leave behind. Such is the meaning of hygiene in Texas.

  I was moved by your professions of affection, and your offer to nurse me to the end. I asked you to share my life, however, not ready me for the grave.

  Regardless of how wretched I become on account of my condition, I want to live a life that feels like life, not an ambulatory wake, pacing death’s anteroom. I cannot merely wait out the end, like my lovely, unlucky mother.

  Nor could I bear the thought of having to look up into my father’s eyes as I breathed my last, knowing the faithless coward would claim victory in outlasting his prodigal son. I have always known that, given the puny and deformed boy I was, he would have much preferred the Spartan method of childrearing, which is to say pitching me at birth into the chasm of Apothetae.

  Nor could I bear feeling you so close to my hand and heart, and yet with that scolding interloper, Holy Mother Church, playing chaperone.

  Such are my reasons, along with those you identify in your letter, for leaving behind the home I once knew and striking out for the edge of nowhere.

  If I may be honest, I wondered if your rejection of my offered hand, followed by your delay in writing, were not meant to stir my doubts concerning your affection, and thus intensify my ardor in proving myself worthy.

  Your behest that I rectify my ways and come home also served to further clarify my understanding of how matters stand between us. In my idler moments, I have imagined us beholding each other from afar, me on my weary horse, you atop your shimmering tower, before which you have so artfully arranged a thousand dragons. Plus a pope or two.

  Do not mistake my candor for bitterness. Given your letter, however, I feel compelled to confess—that word the Roman faith so cherishes—that you will likely find wanting my news on the matter of self-rectification.

  Make no mistake, I arrived with every intention of following through on my promises, to you and Uncle John and everyone else. I regularly attended services at the local Methodist church and joined the local Temperance Society. I humbly apprenticed myself to the esteemed Dr. Seegar, whose stern Baptist soul glows like a furnace with good old southern sanctimony. I feel certain that my father, though a modest Presbyterian, would no doubt find the doctor’s example equal to his own in its capacity for quick and pitiless judgment.

  And there, precisely, lies the problem. The path of righteousness too greatly resembles cowing to my father.

  Or, to once again invoke Livy, let us say that I am the living embodiment of the maxim that we can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.

  First came drink, for medicinal purposes initially—patients tend to get put off when the esteemed dentist cannot take control of his cough.

  It is not just disease crackling inside my chest, however. Despair abides there as well. And so one drink becomes two, two becomes three, at which point the siren call of the gambling parlor grows irresistible.

  Do not take that as blame. Accuse me of pride, fair enough, but I am not so shallow as to lay fault for the state of my soul at your doorstep. That said, I also refuse to concoct a dumbshow of virtue to please those who otherwise find me repugnant, undignified, or unworthy.

  I have been dealt a bad hand, Mattie, and yet refuse to leave the table, for I am enchanted by reckless chance. The only eternity I seek is that of this very moment, which is the only truth of time I know. Give me the sacrament of immediacy, the unholy reckoning of the cards and luck.

  If you were here, perhaps I could resist. Let me end, then, with that plea. Damn the scandal. Come. We will marry. Convert to Methodism, my mother’s faith—would that be such a tragic sin? She converted back to that faith on her deathbed, doing so for my sake, wanting me to escape the heartless doctrine of election so central to Father’s Presbyterianism. “Deeds, not creeds,” she whispered to me so often in her final days, urging me to live. Live! Because our actions matter. Life matters.

  Do you find it otherwise? If not, why not convert as well? I cannot imagine you would blaspheme my mother’s memory by claiming she lacked for kindness or grace or virtue. So would you have me believe your God would cast her down into Hell for the sake of one baptism over another? Does the Almighty really take stock of such minutiae in culling the saved from the damned? Then he’s an accountant, not a Deity, and like our dear, beautiful Confederacy, not at all what we imagined.

  Forgive me if my words seem harsh. It is passion, not anger, inspiring them. Please believe that. Believe as well the sincerity of my plea. Come join me here, far away from the damning eyes of nicety. We can begin anew in this place beyond history. We can live this brief, unfathomable life together. We can, finally, love.

  With all my heart,

  John Henry

  PART II

  It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and

  imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.

  ~ Baruch Spinoza

  CHAPTER 6

  Prior to boarding the flight for Tucson, if anyone had asked Rayella Vargas what her life’s motto might be, she would have answered: Aim Low. Then Miss.

  The only child of a seamstress who did, indeed, always seem stressed—dead at age thirty, complications from diabetes—and her father some house painter that deportation took care of, Rayella had never enjoyed much in the way of stability.

  Her kind and generous but extravagantly odd Grandma Savannah never took her in, so Rayella passed from uncle to aunt, the occasional family of a friend, her life packed into a single blue suitcase.

  She’d never known the privilege of beauty, either. She’d spent her middle-school years in the vicinity of cute, and for one short but delicious year in high school she’d actually qualified as hot—exotic with her coffee-colored skin, her twist-out afro, her suddenly magnetic body. But then some things kept growing while others did not.

  Her center of gravity lowered. Of course, some guys loved a girl with a little jam on the roll, hefty thighs, a killer badonkadonk. But she wanted to be sleek. Impossible, not just because of the chunkiness down low.

  Her face had a moonpie shape, salvaged only by the deadly eyes, which were a tawny brown, like autumn pears. That earthy pale color made them seem especially raw and open, almost scarily so.

  “Like your soul’s right here,” Rags told her once after making love, “not deep inside but inches away, every second I look at you.”

  Rags—Connor Trapnell, ex-marine, bit of a train wreck himself—had provided the one good thing in her life up to now. The one thing that didn’t fit with aiming low. Or missing. Then again, she hadn’t been the one aiming. He had.

  With his war-torn body and tripwire mind, he’d been desperately searching for just one safe place. And he’d found it, he said. He�
��d found her.

  Together they’d found a place away from damning eyes, found it in each other’s arms, and at long last allowed themselves to love, to be loved.

  But it wasn’t Rags looking at her now, this moment. It was the attorney, Lisa Balamaro, sitting beside her in the aisle seat, trying to explain herself.

  ***

  “I’m lucky, I guess you could say. I have the luxury of being able to choose my clients. I don’t really need the money.”

  Rayella couldn’t take her eyes off the thin jagged scar around the woman’s eye. “Meaning what,” she said, “you’re here out of pity?”

  Boom. Like she’d been kicked. “Oh. No. That’s not what I mean at all.”

  Her voice fell off at the end. Way it does, Rayella thought, when there’s no denying you’re the one better off. And not that much older than me, neither.

  “I mean, yes, I suppose you could say I’ve done okay. And my parents were well off. I never really wanted for anything.”

  Like it could happen to anybody.

  Pretty lady, not just because she could afford to look good. Little chunky in the calves, otherwise fit and classy and nicely put together, a glow in her skin, shoulder-length hair just so, a double-breasted suit, dark blue.

  But that scar…

  “Anyway, my practice centers on artists, all kinds—”

  “Musicians?” Rayella once had dreams of singing. Who didn’t?

  “My partner is the specialist there. Represents almost every indie band in the Bay Area, plus a handful in LA, Portland, Seattle. He’s also a major player in the Sundance scene, filmmakers, people like Ryan Coogler, Cary Fukunaga.”

  Like I’d know who that is, Rayella thought.

  “I tend to focus on the plastic arts, painters and sculptors, but some designers too. Most have been struggling a long time and have no idea about insurance or contracts or derivative rights. It’s one big reason I love the work, helping them make that step up.”