The Last Woman Standing (8 page)

“You don’t know my parents,” I stammered, although she did seem to have a pretty good fix on my mother. “They would welcome me with open arms.”

“Open arms and worried looks, I expect. But still, that would make you a very lucky girl. Of course, there are other alternatives. You could resume your glorious singing career. Find a
Pinafore
troupe and go backstage and see if they’ll have you. Have you been practicing your sailor’s hornpipe? If that doesn’t work, perhaps a magician will come to town and you can be his lovely assistant onstage, pick a card, any card, get cut in two in his Chinese box, show a bit of knee and a length of arm as you dismount to keep the gentlemen returning for a second show. I see in your eyes that won’t do; perhaps you want something more respectable. Can you sew? No. Even if that were an option, you would need to make three shirts a day, a twelve-hour task, and that would only earn you one dollar a week, maybe two dollars if you do really fine work. That would barely keep you in flour and butter.”

Here in this moment, I was more anxious than when I entered the lavender doors with a lynch mob at my back. Madame Mustache leaned forward, her powdered breasts visible from collarbone to nipple. She continued: “Or, my little bunny, should lightning strike, you could take the large room upstairs, beside Delia, and help me entertain. Nothing would make me happier:
très contente
.”

“Albert!” I cried out, upsetting the green liquor on the Persian carpet as I rose. No sound came from the back of the house.

“There would be fine gentlemen lining up down Fifth Street,” the madam went on, “freshly bathed and pockets larded with bills, checking their golden pocket watches as they waited to call on the lovely, lively Miss Josephine Marcus, formerly of San Francisco, star of the stage and famous heartbreaker, the silver queen of Tombstone.”

“Albert!” I shrilled.

“If that doesn’t quite suit, take Delia’s room.”

Albert appeared beside me, cake crumbs on his vest and surprised by my alarm. Miss Dumont took up her cello again. Opening her kimono, she placed the instrument between her thighs and gave Albert his first look at lady parts.

Albert froze in place. I grabbed his wrist and dragged him through the pocket doors toward the entrance where Delia leaned against the front door. She ate a green apple, her wrist loose on her arm, her elbow an infinite weight as she raised the fruit to her pale mouth. She hardly blinked in response to my panic and haste.

“I suggest you leave by the back door,” drawled Delia. She revealed no recognition of Albert or me, though she’d invited us in earlier like a web shot out by that patient spider, Madame Mustache.

CHAPTER 9

“If I were you, Mr. Behan, which happily I am not,” I said, curling my arm around Albert’s shoulders and pointing at Johnny’s chest, “you might rejoice to see us walking down Safford Street with four arms, four legs, and two heads. How are we, you might wonder with concern, if you were husband-and-father material. Are we hungry? Tired? What happened to us?”

“Don’t point your finger at me, Josephine. I know you weren’t at the schoolhouse. We both know it was shut tight after lunch.”

“If you knew that, I wish you’d bothered to warn us at lunchtime before we rolled into the middle of a mob,” I said, climbing on my high horse and adjusting my tiara. After tea with Madame Mustache, I dismissed his reprimand. “We discovered a necktie party is an academic holiday. Did you know that?”

“Don’t get smart with me, Josephine. Where have you been all this time?”

“All this time? We’ve been gone no time at all, and you can see we’re safe and sound. I understand with that irate Charleston crowd, your nerves are on edge. But, please, don’t take it out on us.”

“Here I am, rushing home to ensure you and Albert are safe when I should be accompanying the prisoner to Tucson. You have no idea the danger I was in trying to keep that mob from hanging that foolish kid.”

“I may have some inkling. While you’ve been striding the streets with your pistols and badge for company, Albert and I have been playing catch with stray bullets while that throng serenaded us with the Apache war cry. I’m a bit frazzled myself. You might, God forbid, thank me for preserving Albert for another day of multiplication tables.”

Johnny’s face darkened. He jerked his head toward the Joneses’ cottage. “Albert, go inside.”

The boy clutched my waist with both arms. He was clingier now than he had been on the bullet-strafed balcony. In turn, I felt braver speaking in his defense. He inspired the mama lion in me that I didn’t know existed. We swore we wouldn’t tell Johnny we’d seen Wyatt hold off the mob single-handedly, or found sanctuary with Madame Mustache. I was miserable keeping secrets. Suddenly, there were so many.

I blinked away the ash drifting from garbage burnt in nearby fire pits where yapping dogs fought for scraps. Standing at the crossroads of nowhere and nobody, I missed my gentle father who never raised a hand. Johnny was different. I feared releasing Albert, as much for my own protection as the boy’s.

Johnny stepped closer. “Now, git, son, or you’ll cut me a switch.”

I detached the frightened boy as if unbuckling a stiff leather belt. When Albert dawdled, I gently pushed his rounded shoulders toward his father. Johnny took a swipe at Albert’s head, cuffing his son and causing the boy to stumble. Albert slunk through the whitewashed gate that lacked a picket fence to give it meaning. When he slammed the front door, the facade shuddered.

Kitty peeked out from behind calico curtains. I raised my eyebrows in her direction, not one to mind an audience as long as I didn’t have to carry a tune. If Kitty wanted drama, the sailor from
H.M.S.
Pinafore
would deliver more than an Irish hornpipe. I was tired of her, too, and weary of being bottled up in some fake sense of Christian propriety only a few streets from Vogan’s Bowling Alley and Madame Mustache’s lair.

“You may be my fiancé, John Harris Behan, but you are not
yet
my husband.” I extended my left hand with its secondhand engagement ring. The diamond solitaire had comforted me among strangers from San Francisco to Tombstone, and I had feared it would attract robbers, so extravagant did I consider the gem then. But that was before I viewed Miss Dumont’s topazes and emeralds. Her diamonds sparkled with real fire, not an occasional twinkle if held up to the light. I don’t know how much of Madame Mustache’s voice spoke through me, but she had clearly stoked my gall: “Trust me, Mr. Behan, I won’t be yelled at in the streets of Tombstone as if I were a rabid dog.”

“Don’t use that tone with me, Josephine.” Johnny put his hands on his hips near his holsters, only to inch his right hand higher to apply pressure to his stomach. “I will not have it—not here, not ever. Do you know who you’re fooling with?”

“Is this a trick question? Why don’t you enlighten me, Deputy Sheriff,” I said, harsher rather than softer. I stood taller as if I were willowy Delia rather than shrubby me. “Or do you plan on shooting first and asking questions later?”

“I scared off seven hundred men to preserve the life of Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce today,” Johnny began, with a hectoring voice, “and ensured the poor fool got justice instead of a long neck.”

“Did you accomplish that all by yourself, a posse of one?” I retorted. “I heard that Wyatt had a little something to do with it!”

“Who told you that?” Johnny reached for that stitch in his side again. Recognizing it for the pain it was, I knew I’d pushed too far. I mentioned Wyatt. I promised Albert we wouldn’t reveal what we’d witnessed from the bordello balcony. It dawned on me that all mention of things Earp irked Johnny. I was intended to live in a world that orbited my man and him alone.

“Who told me what?” I played for time as everything but the truth of the afternoon vanished under Johnny’s interrogation. He advanced. He shoved his forehead close to mine, his brows squeezed together, eyes glaring. I retreated. He pursued, making his proximity a physical affront. For the first time since my arrival, I was not only afraid, but frightened of Johnny. If I revealed what I’d witnessed, there would be hell to pay. I opted for the plausible: “That dressmaker Addie Bourland told me.”

“What does that busybody know?” Johnny sneered, still standing uncomfortably close. “Was Addie there with a shotgun? Not likely! She was hiding under her skirts, if I know women! I’m the deputy sheriff. I handle the law, not Wyatt, and I can handle one ill-tempered girl.”

“Do you want me to cut a switch, too?” I’d seen Wyatt in action. He was the law if anybody was. “If so, can I borrow your pocketknife? They discourage women from carrying weapons around here, so we have no choice but to hide under our skirts.”

Johnny smirked. “Can I can trust you with my knife?”

“Can I trust you with my heart?” I had that nasty habit of taking a specific skirmish and exploding it into a larger battle. “If you have a problem with keeping a body waiting, then do tell: When do you plan to marry me, Mr. Behan? Because until that date, I’ll do as I please. I’ll walk where I want, when I want, and with whom I want.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it!” Johnny grabbed my wrist. I tried to twist away but failed as he marched me toward the cottage. Even on that sparsely populated street, a crowd had begun to form. Tombstoners enjoyed their entertainment however they got it. A domestic dispute was a free, standing-room-only drama. It hardly compared to a lynching, but it passed the time at the end of a long day in the mines.

When Johnny and I reached the porch, I wriggled from his grasp. “If we’re getting married, set the date. Are you free tomorrow?”

Johnny’s face fell. To my surprise, the fight drained out of him. He retreated from me and wiped his brow. Injured, he looked like I’d hit
him
with a switch.

“I apologize, Josie. I didn’t want to tell you, but my finances aren’t where I thought they’d be when I trucked you down here. Some investments haven’t panned out. I’m confident they will, darling. I love you till death do us part, but I just can’t afford a wedding yet.”

I choked on the smoky air, ashamed. I’d never seen Johnny so crestfallen. His shoulders sagged. Clearly, his belly ached. I approached him tenderly, as if Johnny were Albert, not his father. I placed my hand on his cheek, rubbing against the stubble. “If only I’d known, Johnny! Why didn’t you confide in me?”

Confronted with Johnny’s wounded pride, I acquiesced, unaware that I was being played with the twin fiddles of his remorse and anger. “If only I’d known, I wouldn’t have pushed you. Let me help. I’ll write my father for a loan. We can get all the money we need from him.” I made it sound like Papa was a banker, not a baker.

“No,” Johnny said with moist eyes. “I won’t permit that, Josie. I’m a grown man. Asking your father for money would be an admission of defeat, that I couldn’t shelter his little girl.”

Johnny continued to protest, but I convinced him there was no shame in requesting help. My family would support us in this time of need, I assured him. We would repay them in the future, with money and grandchildren. I became a woman possessed, intent on proving Miss Dumont wrong, painting myself into a domestic situation for which I was unprepared. Grandchildren? Where had I cooked that up?

Even as I cajoled and reassured Johnny, now cheek to cheek in affection, no longer angry, my thoughts returned to my bitter departure from San Francisco. The ripping sound as my mother tore her collar. The sheet draped over the mirror. Ma’s horrific recounting of her Atlantic crossing, the cat-gruel soup that poisoned my unknown aunts.

To give myself hope, I conjured up Papa’s final embrace. I focused on his letter with two twenties secretly stuffed in my hand, as I assured Johnny that families stood together. Charitable actions during times of need proved our love, not yellow roses or engagement rings.

The next day, I wired Papa. I anxiously awaited his response, Madame Mustache’s ominous warnings playing in my head as I walked Albert to school. On my return, I stopped at the post office, joining the long line out the shanty door—the miners expecting letters from home, the entrepreneurs awaiting cash infusions. Within the week, Papa sent the princely sum of $300. I don’t know how he gathered so much money. I felt like an emotional prospector who’d struck precious ore, which may have been why I failed to register the concern in his letter’s conclusion: “We pray that we will soon hear of wedding bells there, but if there is a glitch, you are always welcome in
your
home.”

I signed the money over to Johnny that day, along with the cash from pawning my engagement ring. Bit by bit, wall by wall, Johnny began to build a three-room frame house on his lot at Seventh and Safford near the Joneses’ cottage. Never attentive to finances, I neglected to worry that while the house was in my name, the deed for the land underneath was in his.

CHAPTER 10

JANUARY 28, 1881

“I have no problem with your Judaism, Josephine, but refusing to enter a Christian house of worship is unacceptable,” Johnny said when I wouldn’t attend the church service for Mrs. John Clum. Mollie, the
Epitaph
editor’s sweet wife, had died a week after delivering a baby girl. Most of proper Tombstone would be there to pay respects. “I do not expect you to convert,” Johnny said, as if that were generosity personified, “but I rely on you to accompany me.”

“I have no problem with you being a Christian, John, but I will never cross a church threshold, not even on our wedding day—or Albert’s, for that matter.”

We stewed on that for a while. Johnny did not want to attend alone, but I refused to kneel beneath a crucifix or hear “Jesus” in the same breath as “Our Lord and Savior.” I never had. I never would.

Our dispute meant we joined the funeral cortege en route to Boot Hill. Silent and at odds, surrounded by hundreds of mourners, we held hands to maintain appearances. At the cemetery, the baby Bessie bawled, her mother in a pine box, the grave a shallow slash in hard earth.

A priest in a shabby suit read from the New Testament. Johnny stood beside me. Together, we made a flimsy family of two without a legal bond. I felt exposed. I yearned for relatives nearby to buffer the pain on that lonesome hilltop. This was my first burial. The infant’s squalling escalated the event into an operatic spectacle. Women cried inconsolably as if they were the chorus and the baby the prima donna. The sound sliced through me like the bitter wind. Bessie’s
geschrei
, her scream, reminded me that I had a living mother, and I was dead to her. Was that separation as final as this? It felt that way on that day when I would have given anything to be surrounded by kin (except return to San Francisco).

The wretched fate of baby Bessie and her brother, Woody, crushed me. Despite my disagreement with Johnny, I now reached for his comfort. He relented, putting his arm around me and squeezing me closer. He handed me his handkerchief. When Johnny introduced me to Mr. and Mrs. Clum on my arrival, I had warmed to them immediately. I’d hoped that after Mollie delivered, we would get better acquainted—and that eventually Mr. Clum and I might produce the amateur theatrical of
H.M.S.
Pinafore
we’d discussed upon meeting.

I recalled first spying two-year-old Woody, half-hidden in his mother’s skirt, the shyest boy I’d ever seen. I tried to blame the stinging in my eyes on the wind. I failed. He’d been such a beautiful mama’s boy, with girlish curls that had never been cut. Now the tragic little lamb, curls shorn, stood beside the stoic grandmother whom he’d just met that winter. Amanda Ware, unlike her daughter, did not let Woody cling to her skirts, detaching him again and again with a bothered expression. She carried the baby but lacked the emotional reserves to comfort the irritable infant. The Cincinnati widow had traveled eighteen hundred miles from Ohio to help her daughter through the birth. According to Kitty, Mrs. Ware had begged Mollie to lay-in with her back East. Mrs. Ware might have expected the unexpected in Tombstone, but even she was unprepared for mourning her only daughter in a barren cemetery, with its wooden markers askew—no marble crosses, no granite obelisks, no stone angels. Here, there were as many old whiskey bottles as jars of dead flowers on the surrounding graves.

As for the widower, the vitality had been sucked out of Mr. Clum. A typically robust and energetic figure, the New York native who’d played football for Rutgers until he ran out of tuition money was often the first to volunteer for civic duty and the last to leave. His time as an Indian agent on the San Carlos Reservation earned him the Apache nickname “Boss with the High Forehead.” Now, that balding head sagged toward his chest. Behind him, Wyatt—Clum’s close friend and political ally (and ever a hero on the pages of the
Epitaph
)—stood sentry. The pair shared a law-and-order sensibility regarding the protection of business interests, with the hope that they would both rise along with the town’s economy.

I hadn’t seen Wyatt since the attempted lynching, but I contemplated him often, a greater disloyalty than shunning church. Then the priest mumbled his prayers and raised a hymn familiar to everyone but me. Afterward, the grave diggers lowered the casket into the ground with a thud. The baby hollered. Mrs. Ware’s stone exterior crumbled. I’d never seen anything like it in public: the sobs of the red-faced granny as she rocked the wrinkly infant at the edge of her daughter’s grave, the rhythmic scraping of a shovel scratching up dirt and tossing it on the cheap casket. Woody stepped forward and began throwing earth into the grave, bigger and bigger clods, at first with one hand, then two. He wouldn’t stop. That was when Clum’s knees buckled; Wyatt caught his friend before he hit the ground. Wyatt whispered something in the widower’s ear that seemed to steady Clum as much as the big, pale hands supporting him.

I snuffled into Johnny’s handkerchief. He gently patted my back with one hand and twisted his mustache absentmindedly with the other. Looking up, I saw him staring keenly at Wyatt and John, as if assessing their bond and what it meant for his plans. But that was speculation, and I was overcome with uncertainty: Would Johnny’s death affect me as Mary’s had cracked Clum? Would Johnny and I ever get that far—become parents and comfort each other through personal tragedy? Would we rest side by side in a cemetery that was neither Christian nor Jewish, just a repository of bones at the end of their usefulness on Earth? I couldn’t envision ending up here, far from my family, amid the whiskey-bottle offerings and the rough wooden memorials, next to this man named Johnny, a man I still wasn’t sure I really knew—or trusted.

Sometimes, when I noticed Johnny in my peripheral vision, it was as if he were a stranger wearing a familiar tie. Who was this divorced father of another woman’s child, so much older and more experienced than I was, with a temper that flared as easily as mine? It bothered me that he expected loyalty and wifely behavior, yet wouldn’t commit to a wedding date. In my uncertainty, I thought of my mother, solid and stable, her hair tightly coiled around her head in the same way every day. Who had she been at my age, and what risks had she taken? I’d never given much thought to her first husband, the red-haired man whose face shaped Rebecca’s. Mama never mentioned him, and Rebecca had only the briefest of memories of a trip to Coney Island. How different would my mother’s life have been had he survived to father more children? Who would my mother have become then?

I keenly felt the pain I’d caused her—and continued to produce from afar. She had declared me dead, but no doubt she still mourned the loss. I did. A loud clacking yanked me from my morbid thoughts. The grave diggers shifted from shoveling dirt to stacking stones atop the coffin. Rocks on the graves restrained predators from desecrating the corpses. Thereafter, at the sound of boulders breaking at the mine, came an echo of clattering rock upon that gentle mother’s grave.

Through Wyatt, I discovered that some men grow in stature when times are hard, refusing to shy away from the rocky soil of heartbreak. It’s their land and they plow it. Wyatt didn’t flinch at sadness, which is a different kind of courage from shooting a rifle at an outlaw when the odds are stacked against you.

Watching Wyatt and Clum, and hearing the baby howl, I, too, began to cry, albeit quietly. I’d never known anyone who’d died. That changed drastically that bloody year.

I glanced away from the grave toward Wyatt’s brothers, Virgil and Morgan. They stood together on the periphery of the mourners. They appeared like slightly inferior carvings of Wyatt—Virgil heavier in the face, Morgan more mischievous and carefree. The pair shifted their feet to stamp out the chill, and looked down toward the raw earth to block the cold wind of such powerful emotion. This wasn’t their first funeral, and there was an impatience to their posture to escape the mound. They escorted two shabby women that I’d never noticed before in town. The scrawny, sharp-eyed prairie hen in front of Virgil could have been mistaken for a girl if it weren’t for the wrinkles on her sour face under her old-fashioned bonnet. She wore Sunday black with shiny patches at the elbows and an awkward, new lace collar ringing her neck. She placed a rough, protective hand through the arm of her big-boned female companion. The taller woman kept her pigeon eyes trained on Wyatt. She was a sad-sack floozy in black-and-beige plaid taffeta with five rows of ruffles at the hem. It was as if she’d insisted on wearing her finest dress, even if it was better suited for a saloon than a funeral.

“Who are those women?” I whispered to Johnny as he rocked back and forth on his heels.

“The little cuss is Virgil’s missus, Allie.”

“Is the taller one Morgan’s wife?” It shocked me that a handsome young charmer would settle for that unpleasant party.

“No, that’s Wyatt’s woman, Mattie.”

“Wyatt’s ‘woman’? They’re not married?” I tried to sound blasé, but a lump formed in my throat. While I’d heard her name mentioned before, I’d never seen her.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t see a ring. I doubt there’s a license. Wyatt did name a claim after her. Now, hush, Josie, people are watching!”

Those same staring townsfolk could say the same about me now—no ring, no license, just airs. I studied Mattie. Her fine shape pushed out the taffeta plaid dress of a bygone year in well-proportioned curves, but above her pressed collar, Mattie’s blunt face was pasty, as if roughly formed from homemade soap. Her deep-set eyes and frown contrasted with the well-kept dark curls that attempted to soften her features. It was an unhappy face rather than an ugly one. Perhaps if she had been animated, she might have achieved the pretty side of plain. Mattie didn’t seem to fit with the meticulous man I was coming to know. He carried himself like a bachelor when he was with me. He behaved as if
I
was the one with obligations he was intent on respecting—not him.

When the preacher shut his book with a dismayed amen, echoed by those on the hill, Virgil’s Allie turned away from the grave and caught me staring at her friend. Her fierceness set me back like a slap. Her glare communicated an incomprehensible rage, as if Allie already knew me for an enemy. It wasn’t impossible: in some ways it was a very small town, and gossip traveled its own paths. I looked away, my eyes darting toward Wyatt, his black frock coat in perfect concert with the day’s event. Wyatt did not look up and catch my eye. We had no more contact that day than we had the day of the lynching, and yet he hovered in my thoughts.

Johnny squeezed my arm, and I returned my attention to him. With his confident hand on the small of my back, Johnny guided me toward Mr. Clum. Wyatt melted into the crowd as we approached the inconsolable widower to offer condolences. We promised baked goods for which he had no appetite, saying words that had no meaning.

As Johnny and I headed back toward town with plans to see the progress of our house, two miners walked behind us. “Well,” said one to the other, “it’s not San Francisco or Cincinnati.”

“Or even Prescott,” said his companion. “We really are at the end of the world.”

The first miner, waxing philosophical, said: “We’re surrounded by crazy optimists, Arthur, all hoping that the next strike, or the next round of cards, or the next horse, will win them forever ease. Mollie’s death reminds me how quickly dreams are snuffed out, and how little justice exists in Tombstone.”

“Women can die in childbirth anywhere, Max. Mollie just happened to die here and not Cincinnati.”

“I sure as hell don’t want to be buried in this dump among the gunshot cowboys and whiskey bottles, Artie.”

“All this talk makes me thirsty, Max.”

“You just want to have something to blame your tears on.”

“Maybe I do,” said Arthur. “Maybe you do, too.”

Johnny, who was eavesdropping, said, “I could use a drink, too, Josephine.”

“Maybe I could, too.” Something wet hit the back of my neck as we traveled back to town. “Let’s walk faster. It may start raining.”

I touched my nape, surprised that the liquid I found there was thick and slippery. I brought my fingers to my nose. They smelled foul. I looked over my shoulder to see that Allie had her lips pursed. I was still busy denying the clear truth of the matter—what could these women possibly have against me?—when Mattie mouthed a single word: “Hussy.”