Doc: A Novel (4 page)

After much anxious consideration and a flurry of letters, a plan developed. John Henry would accept a partnership offered by a Dallas dentist. While his cousin recovered his health in the West, Robert Holliday would finish his studies with a different preceptor. Just before John Henry left, the boys purchased an office building together so that Robert could establish their Atlanta practice in his cousin’s absence. The sign above the door would bear both their names, in anticipation of John Henry’s return.

Aunts and uncles and cousins came together for another farewell party, but this time their confidence in John Henry’s prospects seemed glittery and artificial, their cheer more resolute than giddy. He himself spent most of the evening sitting at the piano, playing Chopin.

At the depot the next morning, Martha Anne wept.

John Henry promised to write.

He boarded the train.

And his life cracked in half.

The journey soon took on a wearisome rhythm, for the country was a patchwork of independent short-haul railways in those days. Atlanta to Chattanooga. Find a room. Change trains. Chattanooga to Memphis. Find a room. Change trains. Memphis to Jackson. Find a room. Change trains. Jackson to New Orleans. Find a room. Change trains …

At first, he passed the time with game after game of solitaire, laid out on the travel case he kept in his lap. Watching every penny, he’d buy a stale sandwich and an apple from the newsboy, and make them last all day. When the train stopped to take on coal and water, he would get a cup of tea at the railway house. If he could charm a waitress into finding a little honey in the kitchen to sweeten the tea and ease his cough, he’d leave a generous tip.

He sent his first note home from Jackson. It was to Sophie Walton, in care of Aunt Permelia:
I play cards by the hour and imagine myself with you, sugar, sitting at the cookhouse table back in Fayetteville
.

The cinders and smoke were inescapable. By the time he crossed the Mississippi line, his throat was raw and his chest ached from coughing. He ran out of rails in Louisiana, but learned that there was a ferry to Galveston and looked forward to the fresh air of a crossing. When he got to the dock and found how expensive it was, he could only sit on the luggage with his head in his hands, trying not to cry.

Spunk up
, he told himself, but every breath hurt and his chest felt strangely hollow. He was uncertain whether the sensation was physical and genuine or merely morbid imagination mixed with memories of the cadaver he had dissected in dental school. He could sometimes see that body as clearly as if it were still beneath his hands: its cavitated and fibrous lungs laid open, its belly concave, its limbs wasted to ropy muscle and bird-thin bone …

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 her husband to open the door, and hung her hat by its ribbons on a hook in the center hall. “Tote his bags upstairs for him, darlin’. Dr. Holliday, you sit right there, honey. Ella, bring Dr. Holliday something to drink! Just tea, honey? You sure you don’t want something stronger? Children! Y’all come and meet Dr. Holliday!”

There were four ambulatory Seegar offspring and a two-month-old babe in the arms of the oldest, a girl who looked to be about twelve. All of them were excited, vying for the attention of the newcomer. Dr. Seegar begged pardon for the uproar his children made, but John Henry waved the apology off and hoarsely conveyed to the flattered parents that the sound of their children’s voices was music to him, so much did he miss his own young cousins.

Ella, tall and dark, approached shyly with a cup and saucer. He accepted the tea, swallowed carefully, and, clearly as he could, told her how much he regretted that his throat was too sore for anything more, promising that he would do justice to her cooking after he had some rest.

He allowed himself to be put to bed in a state very near prostration.

As awful as the trip had been, he fell asleep believing he’d made the right decision to come to Texas. In a few days, when he felt strong enough to sit up and write, his first note to Martha Anne would tell her that the Seegars could not have been more welcoming. To Robert, he reported that if the Seegar home and its furnishings were any measure, business in Dallas was good.

Otherwise, he hardly stirred and certainly never gave “all that money nonsense” a second thought. Dr. Seegar provided a bottle of good bourbon and prescribed small doses to quiet the cough. Mrs. Seegar and Ella carried light meals up to him: tepid soups, and applesauce, and custards to soothe his throat. When he awoke on the morning of September 19, he had the energy to look at the newspaper Ella brought upstairs with his breakfast.

Later on, he would be grimly amused by his naive bewilderment upon reading the headline that morning, for it made no sense to him at all.

How can a
bank
panic? he wondered.

The economic collapse began in Europe, but financial markets were intertwined around the world; when Jay Cooke’s bank crumbled, America’s postwar railroad bubble burst. Fortunes quickly made were even more quickly lost in the Panic of 1873. Sham prosperity—built on debt—disappeared with shocking suddenness. The resulting depression dragged on year after year, crushing dreams and wrecking lives, John Henry Holliday’s among them.

Robert and Martha Anne continued to write faithfully, their letters full of family news and encouragement. Martha Anne did her best to provide perspective when Dr. Seegar let John Henry go, just a few months after he arrived in Dallas.
Even in times of abundance
, she pointed out,
visiting the dentist ranks low as a form of entertainment. During a Depression, dentistry—along with everything beyond daily bread—becomes a luxury. You must not blame yourself, dear heart
.

She was right, of course. It certainly wasn’t John Henry’s fault that he couldn’t make a living at his profession. No reasonable person would have thought so, but who is reasonable at twenty-two? What prideful Southern boy could acknowledge his own frailty and admit that his prospects of employment in a place like Texas were severely limited?

Gradually his livelihood came to rest entirely upon lessons learned at a cookhouse table from that little mulatto card sharp Sophie Walton. By the end of 1874, John Henry Holliday was dealing faro and playing poker professionally.

He was also drinking heavily.

A conviction of his own disgrace had taken hold of him. He had begun to live down to his opinion of himself. His mother’s devotion, his aunts’ faith, his uncles’ money, his professors’ respect—all that had come to nothing. Worse than nothing, really. There wasn’t a family in Georgia that didn’t own up to at least one male who’d gambled away money, houses, land, and slaves, but John Henry Holliday had done the unforgivable. “A man could gamble himself to poverty and still be a gentleman,” his second cousin Margaret would one day write in her famous book about the war, “but a professional gambler could never be anything but an outcast.”

In letters home, John Henry made comical stories of occasional arrests and fines for gambling, as though these were the result of informal Saturday night card games, but there were hints of his frightening new life.
At the risk of descent into unscientific generalization, I must report to you that ninety percent of Texans give the other ten percent a bad name
, he told Martha Anne after an exceptionally unpleasant encounter that he left undescribed. To Robert, he wrote,
In Texas, rocks are considered inadequate weaponry during school yard scuffles. Dallas children carry a brace of loaded pistols, a concealed Deringer, and a six-inch toadsticker in one boot. That’s the girls, of course. Boys bring howitzers to class
.

Had John Henry been more forthcoming about the sporting life, Martha Anne’s concern for his safety would have increased, but she might not have been quite as scandalized as he feared. Standards of conduct had loosened some, after the war. Martha Anne had learned to play poker from little Sophie Walton at John Henry’s side, and she herself could be ruthless at the table. The Hollidays had always maintained a fairly cavalier attitude toward weapons, liquor, and high-stakes gambling.

A murder indictment, on the other hand …

Well, John Henry never mentioned that, not even indirectly. Several witnesses agreed: the other man drew first. The charges were dropped. John Henry was badly shaken by the event, but he never would have worried the folks at home about such a thing.

When the Fates took their next shot at him, it was in the guise of a bad-tempered gambler named Henry Kahn who sat down at John Henry’s faro table in July of 1877.

Coughing and irritable, young Dr. Holliday caught Mr. Kahn monkeying with the discards and suggested twice that he quit it. Sweating and belligerent in the Texas heat, Mr. Kahn was disinclined to do as he was told. Dr. Holliday, perhaps unwisely, widened the scope of his remarks.

Mr. Kahn left the table, apparently chastened. Ten minutes later, he returned with a pistol. Someone shouted, “Holliday! Behind you!” Before the dentist could fully rise to face his assailant, a shot was fired, and John Henry lay bleeding on the floor. Kahn walked out of the saloon without a word and left town before he could be arrested.

A friend in Dallas telegraphed word of the assault to the Atlanta Hollidays, informing them that newspaper reports of John Henry’s death were inaccurate but that the wound was very serious and might yet prove fatal. John Stiles Holliday wanted to travel west immediately to attend his nephew, but the aging physician was talked out of it by his son George, whom the distraught family sent to John Henry’s bedside in Texas.

George was shocked by his cousin’s pallor and thinness; these he put down to the terrible wound until John Henry admitted that he’d rarely seen the curative western sunlight or breathed the fresh dry western air since leaving Atlanta four years earlier. Far from home, living among uncongenial strangers on the rawest edge of the American frontier, John Henry had allowed his habits to deteriorate. He had become accustomed to playing cards all night in smoky gambling halls. In lieu of the nutritious meals and healthful wine his uncle had prescribed, he lived on saloon snacks like boiled eggs, and tried to calm his worsening cough with immoderate amounts of bourbon. He was not well even before Henry Kahn tried to kill him.