Mary Doria Russell - Doc

Dreamers of the Day

A Thread of Grace

Children of God

The Sparrow

Doc is a work of fiction. Though some incidents, dialogue, and characters are based on the historical record, the work as a whole is the product of the authors imagination.

Copyright 2011 by Mary Doria Russell

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Russell, Mary Doria
Doc: a novel / Mary Doria Russell.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60439-6
1. Holliday, John Henry, 18511887Fiction. 2. Earp, Wyatt, 18481929Fiction. 3. Dodge City (Kan.)Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.U76678E54 2011 813.54dc22 2010015062

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design: Marietta Anastassatos

Photo illustration: Steven Youll, based on images

Iain McKell/Reportage/Getty Images (chair) and

Matthias Clamer/Stone Collection/Getty Images

(room and piano)

v3.1

For Art Nolan, who told me what Wyatt knew; for Eddie Nolan, who showed us what John Henry had to learn; for Alice McKey Holliday, who raised a fine young man; with thanks to Bob Price and Gretchen Batton.

This book is fiction, but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

E. H EMINGWAY , A M OVEABLE F EAST

The Players

Fictional characters are listed in italics.

John Henry Holliday, D.D.S., later known as Doc Holliday
Alice McKey Holliday: his mother
Henry Holliday: his father
Wilson and Chainey: brothers, born into his familys possession

John Stiles Holliday, M.D.: JHHs uncle
Permelia: his wife
Robert: his younger son, later a dentist
George: his older son; sent to care for JHH in Texas in 1877
Sophie Walton: his foster child; taught JHH to play cards

Martha Anne Holliday: JHHs childhood sweetheart

Henry Kahn: a bad-tempered gambler; shot JHH in 1877
Mary Katharine Kate Harony: a prostitute; JHHs companion
David W. Dirty Dave Rudabaugh: a train robber
George Hoyt: an inexpert assassin
Tobias Driskill: a Texan with a grudge
Billy Driskill: his son, arrested for assault in Dodge

Morgan Earp: a policeman; JHHs closest friend
Louisa Lou Houston: his girlfriend

James Earp: Morgans brother, a brothel manager
Bessie Bartlett Earp: his wife, the madam

Wyatt Earp: brother of Morgan and James; a policeman
Urilla Sutherland Earp: Wyatts wife, deceased
Mattie Blaylock: a Dodge City streetwalker

Lawrence Fat Larry Deger: the Dodge City marshal (chief of police)

Ed Masterson: chief deputy to Marshal Deger; deceased

Marshal Degers deputies:

Morgan Earp

Wyatt Earp

Jack Brown

Chuck Trask

John Stauber

William Barkley Bat Masterson: sheriff of Ford County; half owner, Lone Star Saloon and Dance Hall

Robert C. Bob Wright: proprietor, Wrights General Outfitting Store; member, Kansas House of Representatives

Isabelle Belle Wright: his daughter

Alice Wright: his wife

Hamilton Ham Bell: proprietor, Hamilton Bells Famous Elephant Barn

Chalkley Chalkie Beeson: proprietor, the Long Branch Saloon

George Deacon Cox: proprietor, the Dodge House Hotel

James H. Dog Kelley: mayor of Dodge; proprietor, the Alhambra Saloon

George Big George Hoover: proprietor, Hoovers Cigar Shop and Wholesale Liquors; leader, Dodge City anti-saloon reform movement

Margaret: his wife; formerly the prostitute Maggie Carnahan

Edwin Eddie Foy Fitzgerald: vaudeville comedian
Verelda: his girlfriend, a prostitute

Jau China Joe Dong-Sing: proprietor, China Joes Laundry and Baths John Horse Sanders: a young faro dealer

Charles Sanders: Johnnies father, deceased; a black man killed in Wichita after defending his wife from two Texans

Father Alexander von Angensperg, S.J.: an Austrian Jesuit; Johnnie Sanders favorite teacher at the St. Francis Mission School for Indians, near Wichita

Father John Schoenmakers, S.J.: a Dutch Jesuit; superior of St. Francis

Brother Sheehan, S.J.: an Irish lay brother; taught farming at St. Francis

Father Paul Maria Ponziglione, S.J.: an Italian Jesuit, missionary to the Plains Indians

Captain Elijah Garrett Grier, U.S. Army: stationed at Fort Dodge, Kansas; owner of Roxana

John Riney: tollgate operator, Dodge City toll bridge

Mabel: his wife

John Jr., called Junior: his eldest son

Wilfred Eberhardt: a German orphan

Thomas McCarty, M.D.: a Dodge City physician and pharmacist

Nick Klaine: editor, Dodge City Times

D. M. Frost: editor, Ford County Globe

Dick Naylor: Wyatt Earps horse
Roxana: an Arabian mare owned by Elijah Garrett Grier
Michigan Jim: a quarterhorse owned by Mayor Dog Kelley
Alphonsus: the Jesuits mule

H e began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle. The disease took fifteen years to hollow out his lungs so completely they could no longer keep him alive. In all that time, he was allowed a single season of something like happiness.

When he arrived in Dodge City in 1878, Dr. John Henry Holliday was a frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who wanted nothing grander than to practice his profession in a prosperous Kansas cow town. Hopecruelest of the evils that escaped Pandoras boxsmiled on him gently all that summer. While he lived in Dodge, the quiet life he yearned for seemed to lie within his grasp.

At thirty, he would be famous for his part in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. A year later, he would become infamous when he rode at Wyatt Earps side to avenge the murder of Wyatts younger brother Morgan. To sell newspapers, the journalists of his day embellished slim fact with fat rumor and rank fiction; it was they who invented the iconic frontier gambler and gunman Doc Holliday. (Thin. Mustachioed. A cold and casual killer. Doomed, and always dressed in black, as though for his own funeral.) That unwanted notoriety added misery to John Henry Hollidays final year, when illness and exile had made of him a lonely and destitute alcoholic, dying by awful inches and living off charity in a Colorado hotel.