Doc: A Novel (50 page)

So there is reason to believe that Kate was planning to write a memoir, though she was nearing ninety when she started and didn’t get far. Perhaps she simply didn’t have time to see the project through. Perhaps she found it too difficult to write in English, never her strongest language. Magyar and German were both wrong for the task. Her French and Latin were good; either might have fit her story.

Ultimately, she may have settled upon Greek. There was a short but complete essay about the derivation of the name Odysseus, which Kate translated as “One who, being wounded, wounds.” And then there was this.

O divine Poesy, goddess-daughter of Zeus!
Help me sing the story of
A various-minded vagabond:
Forced by the Fates into far exile
,
Made sport of by heartless Hope
When, all the while
,
His heart hungered for home
.

Thus sang Blind Homer of Odysseus
,
who was wily to begin with
and made more so
by his wanderings
.
And that was the Doc Holliday I knew
.

At the bottom of the page, there was one last line in an elderly woman’s wavering, spidery script.

Calypso did the best she could
.

Author’s Note

When Homer sang of Troy and Vergil wrote of Carthage and Rome, no one expected a bright line to divide myth from history. Arriving at the end of historical fiction today, the modern reader is likely to wonder, “How much of that was real?” In this case, the answer is: not all of it but a lot more than you might think.

To simplify the narrative in the first chapter, I have taken liberties with the details of John Henry Holliday’s childhood, but the portrayal of his character and personality is firmly based on Karen Holliday Tanner’s biography
Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait
(University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1998). A member of Doc’s own family, Tanner had unprecedented access to private records and family documents, including one that recorded Sophie Walton’s memories of John Henry before he went west for his health. Tanner took care to verify or debunk the many claims of murder and mayhem made against the man; her research has allowed me to write about Alice McKey Holliday’s son, and not about the many fictional characters who have borne John Henry Holliday’s name.

Tanner’s biography also provides genealogical charts showing the relationship between John Henry’s first cousin Martha Anne Holliday and the novelist Margaret Mitchell. Mitchell grew up hearing family stories about the war and later used them as background for
Gone with the Wind;
anyone familiar with Tanner’s
Doc Holliday
will notice many elements of Holliday family history in the Mitchell novel.

A great deal has been written about the Earp brothers; both the quality of research and the opinions expressed vary widely. Nearly all of the literature is about Wyatt; hardly any of it deals with the Earps prior to the 1881 shoot-out in Tombstone, Arizona. For example, Casey Tefertiller’s biography
Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend
(John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1997) is nearly four hundred pages long, but only its first thirty-three pages deal with Wyatt’s first thirty-three years. Even less is known about his brothers prior to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. And even
less
is known about the women the Earps lived with. Bessie Bartlett Earp may have been born in either Illinois or in New York State. I placed her in Tennessee in order to address the theme of regulated versus prohibited vice.

In my portraits of James, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp, I tried to stay as close to the facts as possible while allowing myself enough latitude to account for the seeming contradictions in their lives. For my purposes, the telling document is one that barely mentions the boys. In 1864, long before the Fighting Earps were famous, Sarah Jane Rousseau traveled from Iowa to California as part of a wagon train led by their father, Nicholas Earp. Her diary of that journey was recently published by Earl Chafin (
The Sarah Jane Rousseau Diary
, Earl Chafin Press, Riverside, California, 2002). Rousseau provided a contemporary description of Nicholas Earp as a volatile, bad-tempered, profane, and violent man who did not spare the rod. This confirmed suspicions I had already developed regarding the relationship between Nicholas and his sons.

Wyatt’s fictional observation about the making of bullies rests on the insight of Edward Nolan. Eddie and his wife, Chrissie, raised their family in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the latter half of the twentieth century, when Belfast was as dangerous as Dodge in the 1870s. Belfast boys had to be tough without inviting conflict, and Eddie taught his sons that bullies were boys who’d been beaten by their fathers. “Look at them with scorn, the way their fathers did, and they’re small and powerless again, just like their fathers wanted them to be.” (I do not recommend this tactic, even if you are as physically imposing as the Nolan brothers and the Earps. My advice is:
Run
.) Eddie’s son Art Nolan convinced me that I should write this story. Art and his father provided endless encouragement while I worked on the novel, even as Eddie himself was facing down a lung disease as lethal as John Henry Holliday’s tuberculosis. Eddie lived long enough to read the complete manuscript and to express his joy in it; I only wish I’d flown to Belfast to hand it to him. Too late now.

Wyatt Earp wasn’t the only one who had trouble keeping Dodge City’s shifting factions and baroque feuds straight, so I simplified Dodge City history, politics, economy, and social organization.

Details of the 1871–72 curriculum at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery are accurate, as are assessments of John Henry Holliday’s professional skill. I thank Dara Rogers, D.D.S, for her modern insight into nineteenth-century dental procedures. In addition, the following generously shared their areas of expertise with me.

Piano and music theory: Bob Price.

Horse and racing lore: Kristi Cetrulo; Cornelia Chapman; Lynette Hulbert; Beverley McCurdy; Mary Rose Paradis, D.V.M.; Anne Swan; Sara Tidd.

Clinical aspects of untreated pulmonary tuberculosis and advancing respiratory disease: Nancy O’Leary, R.N.

The psychological aftermath of almost getting killed in combat: Captain Timothy Riemann, USMC.

James C. Earp’s wartime service in Company F, 17th Illinois Regiment: Nathan Moran.

Indian one-liners about mules: Ray Bucko, S.J.; Peter Klink, S.J.; and Ron Kills Warrior.

Jesuit missionary history in North America: Mark Thiel; Raymond Bucko, S.J.; and Dave Myers, S.J. Father Myers is also a lawyer who checked legalisms and Latin.

Other languages: May Burl (French); Dr. Ray DeMallie (Osage); Dr. Suzanne Bach (German); Annie Ho Lucak (Chinese). I used T. E. Shaw’s translation of
The Odyssey
(Oxford University Press, New York, 1956) and Robert Fagles’ of
The Aeneid
(Viking Press, New York, 2006), but felt free to recast the poetry to fit Doc and Kate’s interpretations.

For close reading and sensitive criticism of the story, I thank Gretchen Batton, Ellie D’Addio Behr, Ray Bucko, Kari Burkey, Rebecca Chaitin, Dick Cima, Mary Dewing, Miriam Goderich, Jennifer Hershey, Nancy O’Leary, Bob Price, Tim Riemann, Dara Rogers, Dan Russell, Vivian Singer, Kate Sweeney, Bonnie Thompson, and Jennifer Tucker.

Special thanks to Kari and Dave Burkey for a glorious experience at the KD Guest Ranch in Adamsville, Ohio. They taught me to ride with authority, and I had the time of my life learning how to pen calves!

If you have been moved by John Henry Holliday’s story, please consider making a donation in his memory to one of the organizations that change lives around the world by providing free surgical correction of cleft palates and cleft lips. My husband, Don, and I have chosen the Smile Train for our own donations.

M.D.R.

About the Author

M
ARY
D
ORIA
R
USSELL
has studied nine languages, written five novels, and earned three degrees in anthropology. Her novels have won a number of national and international literary awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and the American Library Association Readers’ Choice Award.
The Sparrow
was selected as one of
Entertainment Weekly’s
ten best books of the year, and
A Thread of Grace
was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The daughter of a sheriff, Dr. Russell spent her academic career teaching gross anatomy at the Case Western Reserve University School of Dentistry in Cleveland, Ohio, where she still lives with her husband of forty years. She is at work on her next book.

www.MaryDoriaRussell.net