The Last Woman Standing (4 page)

It was some entrance for a nice Jewish girl from San Francisco.

Morgan, at twenty-nine, was the penultimate and breeziest Earp brother, a six-footer like the pack of them. His fair hair took a swirly curl off to one side with brilliantine, while his handlebar mustache protected his grin from grit and bugs on the range. Morgan gently lifted me by my waist and deposited me on Allen Street. He said with a merry laugh: “You don’t weigh more than a child.”

“But she kisses like a woman.” Johnny stepped forward, scooped me up, spun me around, and kissed me right there in front of everyone. I smooched back without hesitation. I was hungry for his touch, despite the crowd. Back then, folks turned up to see the stage arrive, to appraise newcomers for marks and marriageable prospects. And with that kiss, Johnny trumpeted his message:
This is my woman. Hands off!
At least Johnny wanted me, even if I was no longer welcome in my mother’s house.

From the beginning, kissing united Johnny and me. We weren’t the first couple to have that in common. We’d met the previous year when I ran away from home with Pauline Markham’s Pinafore on Wheels theatrical troupe. I made it as far as Arizona with my best friend, Dora, before the Apache scout Al Sieber dispatched us back to our anguished parents in San Francisco.

I was a lousy performer—I had paralyzing stage fright and couldn’t carry a tune—but I discovered my aptitude for romance. Apaches besieged our convoy, and Johnny was among Sieber’s team pursuing the braves who’d hopped the reservation. Sieber’s crew rescued us from an ambush, and then, while they continued their hunt, sheltered the actors at a nearby ranch and relay station. From the moment Johnny set eyes on me, there was a connection. It flattered me that out of all the beauties, most far more talented and experienced, I attracted his attention. All my theatrical ambitions evaporated with our first kiss. It was foolish of me, I know, but no more foolish than running away from my family with Dora to join Miss Markham’s traveling troupe.

During those two weeks, Johnny sought Apaches by day, returning to the ranch at night. While the other hunters rushed into the building hungry for grub and the dances that followed, the well-mannered Johnny paused to wash up at the trough. Smelling sweet, he changed his shirt, waxed his whiskers, and pursued me. I wasn’t hard to find.

After supper, Johnny and I would ease onto the front porch, leaving Dora and the others behind. It was on those evenings that I discovered one of my true loves—and it wasn’t named Behan. I fell for the desert night, leaning against the porch railing and watching the stars fall fast with my back to the house lights and the raucous music, the stamps and whoops of dancers as the Pinafore on Wheels troupe passed the time.

Just standing there with Johnny smoking by my side, a city girl who’d just loosened her pigtails and lowered her skirts, the night called me up and gave me a sense of the universe’s immensity. Maybe a coyote cried out in hunger and loneliness. A jackrabbit scampered. Tumbleweed scratched the earth’s back. And I breathed in the desert air, sweet and tart and liberating.

Usually, after a bucket of stars had fallen and the men stepping onto the porch to cool off and smoke seemed too close for Johnny, he would lead me away from the lights of the ranch. Something about those desert nights opened me up from the inside out. When I took his hand, I felt an unfamiliar excitement. It was as if my life was actually happening to me, right then and right there. This was why I’d left home: to end the agonizing wait for my life to begin. I might have been a failure onstage, but I intended to be the star of my own life, not the girl with her braids tucked up under a hat (and her chest tightly wrapped), performing the sailor’s hornpipe. Johnny took my hand, gently yet firmly. He knew where he was going, and I followed. I admired his broad shoulders and slim waist, his confident walk as he led me around the adobe dwelling and behind the stables. Once there, he twirled me around and gentled my back against the rough barn wood. He pressed in close against me, blocking out the sky that no longer held my attention.

It was there I had my first real kisses from a man who knew what he was doing—not a little boy playing house in a back bedroom while Ma’s skirts swished nearby. At first, Johnny’s urgency alarmed me. I didn’t know what to do when his tongue pushed between my lips. But I was a quick study. I learned to push my body back, to let my lips play against his—and before long I was leading Johnny back to the spot behind the stables. He’d unleashed a hunger that made every part of me more alive. Miss Markham, belatedly acting the mother hen, pulled me aside and warned that I should not go outside unchaperoned, but I didn’t want any company other than Johnny’s. If this was danger, I wanted more.

A year had passed since those remote desert nights, a year spent cloistered with my family. The Torah boys at synagogue and the widowers Ma considered eligible did not interest me. And now, Johnny’s kiss in front of the Wells Fargo office told me what his letters could not convey: he still wanted me passionately. And, even more, I still wanted him. A year had passed for me without a single kiss, and tasting Johnny again, I didn’t know how I’d survived without him.

Johnny begged my pardon and separated from me in order to help Kitty’s husband load my trunks on his buckboard along with Kitty’s things. I took a breath and absorbed the sights, the mix of roughness and riches, filth and fortune. Tombstone was a boomtown with three thousand residents, give or take. The hoisting works that served the silver mines dominated the view on the hilltop overlooking the town. The crunching and pounding continued night and day, like a giant chewing boulders, interrupted by the whistles that announced the shift changes.

Tombstone bristled with energy. That October the boom was still rising toward its apex. I sensed a gambler’s optimism lacking in my narrow San Francisco: a day in a miner’s life could make the difference between squirrel and beans over a fire, and cassoulet and Champagne at a fine restaurant. Down the road, I saw the squatters’ canvas tents by campfire light set out in uneven rows, inhabited by men who found it easier to wear their clothes until it was time to buy new ones than to wash the soot and slag and sweat from the ones they wore. But the block of Allen Street where I stood was the town’s heart. Surrounding me between Fourth and Fifth Streets were the Oriental Saloon, the Grand Hotel, and the Occidental Saloon—all lit up and wearing luxurious facades that contrasted with the shanty town only tobacco-spitting distance away.

As Johnny roped his horse to Harry’s wagon and Kitty nagged her stoop-shouldered husband, I felt a weight on one cheek. I sensed eyes staring at me. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it happened just that way, as real as the feeling of sunshine while your eyes are closed. That was the first time I saw Wyatt. He was looking straight at me. I stared right back. He was dead handsome with an athletic build on a six-foot frame, made taller by perfect posture. His hair was blond and thick like his younger brother’s, with a matching mustache and unflinching eyes, the same blue as Morgan’s but twice as intense.

Suddenly bashful, I glanced away and flushed. Morgan caught my eye and winked. He’d seen the Earp effect before. “Is everyone so handsome in Tombstone?” I asked him.

“Just us Earps,” Morgan said, showing off a dimple.

“And my fiancé,” I said with a smile. Johnny, realizing he couldn’t leave me alone for a minute, approached and took my hand as if claiming lost luggage. I surrendered my arm, feeling like a naughty child caught out. But instead of leading me to safety, he led me directly over to the tall stranger in the black frock coat. His crisp white shirt seemed like a miracle in a frontier where a layer of soot covered everything. While he was as tall as Morgan, he was rangier: high-waisted and long-legged. A pair of Buntline long-handled Colt revolvers bulged at his narrow hips.

“Josie, meet Mr. Wyatt Earp.” Johnny steered me forward. “If you’re ever in peril, and I’m absent, the deputy sheriff is your man.”

I craned my neck to see Wyatt beneath his black Stetson. He tipped his hat in greeting, nudging it backward enough to give me a look into his appraising eyes. They were deeper set and harder to read than Morgan’s; he seemed as closed as Morgan was open, but that was only a first impression. When he said “Ma’am,” his low, calm voice drew me in. It made me want to stand on tiptoe and listen closely over the street noise—horse-and-mule hoofs pounding, wagon wheels rattling, the sharp cries of street vendors hawking their wares, and the continual growl of the hoisting works.

With a girlish flirtatiousness, I extended my hand. “I hope I never require your assistance, Mr. Earp, but I’m pleased to meet you.” The encounter resembled a play, the words part of a script, my knee dipping so slightly in a little curtsy. The current that went from Wyatt’s hand to mine when he clasped it in his own was unlike anything I felt with Johnny. When I looked up, and up, and up at him as he held my hand for just a moment too long, I saw that his eyes were not guarded, but deep. They held pain and promise. The look was so intimate and searching that I felt naked right there in the middle of Allen Street, with Johnny just a step behind me crowing about my arrival, lost in the cacophony of the main thoroughfare.

I still held Wyatt’s hand when Johnny grabbed my elbow and guided me down Allen Street for a tour of the town before going to dinner to celebrate my first night in Tombstone. In case my fiancé had noticed my interest in Wyatt, I whispered, “Well, he’s serious as death.”

“Even death laughs occasionally.”

I laughed loudly but recognized the hollowness in my teasing. I considered Papa’s letter, and his encouragement to find a man to love and love me back. Meeting Wyatt, I experienced a charge I’d never felt before—but I didn’t trust it. I considered what I felt for Johnny love. I lacked the experience to know otherwise. I chastised myself for behaving toward a dedicated man like Johnny as if he was no longer good enough—too short, perhaps, too glib, secondhand. Fearing I was too much my mother’s daughter, I tried to stuff my misgivings down in that soul cellar where I kept her disapproval and my worries that my heart wasn’t nearly as good as Papa claimed. I gave Johnny’s hand a squeeze. He squeezed back twice.

CHAPTER 4

As we linked arms and strolled Allen Street’s boardwalk, Johnny firmly shook hands with passersby. He looked each one in the eye. In return, they smiled and nodded and replied with cordial small talk. Some men promised to meet up later that week and raise a glass at the Grand Hotel where Johnny tended bar. He seemed to know everybody—their names and, if they had children,
their
names, as well as their hometowns and their aspirations—and he’d only arrived a month before. I shared the glow of Johnny’s popularity, smiling widely in return at these strangers, mostly men. They looked back at me with appreciation and welcome despite my travel-worn appearance. Although I craved a bath, Johnny had other plans—and I couldn’t disappoint now that we were united. I felt as if I’d spent the last year like a troll under the stairs, hiding from the world in my mother’s disapproving shadow. Now I could finally stand upright. It felt fantastic to shake out my bones, raise my head, and stare straight at the world without shame. The trip’s exhaustion bubbled up into exhilaration. Here I stood, finally, on the road to becoming who I really was, ready to give all my love to Johnny and unfold in his arms.

As we passed Barron’s Barber Shop with its candy-striped pole, the proprietor saluted with his shears. Johnny tipped his hat, revealing a fresh cut, a walking advertisement for the shop. Two grisly customers covered in trail dust cooled their boots on a bench outside, awaiting a shave and a haircut to return them to some semblance of civilized manhood. Johnny politely said, “Gentlemen,” to the gnarly strangers as if they were Eastern bankers.

“I don’t plan on tending bar forever, Josie. There’s no money there. I’m running for sheriff. That’s why I introduced you to Wyatt. I’m thinking of deputizing him. He’s the best lawman in town, even if he is a damned Republican.”

The political parties made little impression on me; if Johnny was a Democrat, so was I. However, in the coming months as tensions climbed in Tombstone, I learned that the conflicting allegiances between Johnny and Wyatt reflected the deep divide between North and South—even on the Western frontier. Only fifteen years had passed since Union General Ulysses S. Grant accepted Confederate Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. While the officers officially ended the Civil War, they failed to cauterize wounds still seeping into the conflicts between cowboys and lawmen in the Arizona Territory.

On that first day, I was oblivious to these opposing forces that would shape our future. Instead, I savored the weight of Johnny’s arm around mine. I’d never been part of a couple before. I floated beside Johnny like the heroine of a stage musical singing in a duet with the handsome tenor. When we approached a warped board on the walk, he encircled my waist to lift me over the obstacle. A shock of electricity shot through my body, reaching the crown of my head and bouncing back down my spine to, well,
that
place. Deep breath. And another.

We then encountered Mr. and Mrs. Clum, the editor of the
Tombstone
Epitaph
and his pregnant wife. Their son, Woody, clutched his mother’s skirts, disappearing into the blue calico when I smiled at him. Mr. Clum—five feet nine, barrel-chested, and athletic with a receding hairline—reached out his hand, then retracted his inky fingers and laughed, saying, “The stain of the truth since May 1, 1880.”

“What’s the latest news?” asked Johnny.

“Today we have the arrival of that famed
Pinafore
actress and fiancée of John Harris Behan,” said Clum, “Miss Josephine Marcus, lately of San Francisco.”

“I’m hardly famous,” I said. “I was merely the cabin boy, and had stage fright at that.”

“You’re too modest,” said Clum. “Will you help us form a
Pinafore
troupe?”

“My professional dancing days are done,” I said, patting Johnny’s arm. “But an amateur production wouldn’t hurt, would it, Johnny? I assume you’d join in, Mr. Clum?”

“John has a beautiful baritone,” said the fine-boned Mrs. Mollie Clum, her mouth curvy and eyes shrewd. Mollie’s dress strained over the large bump she supported with a veined and reddened hand, her ring finger swollen beneath a square-cut sapphire on a gold band. Glancing down, Mollie said, “But we must take our curtain calls for this production before we launch another. Right, John?”

“I do fancy singing ‘I am the monarch of the sea,’ but you’re right, Mother. First things first. Come, Woody,” Clum said. The boy sidled out from his mother’s skirts, revealing possum eyes, big and wary. Clum reached down and swung the lad up only to have the shy child bury his face, so that the boy’s girlish curls wiggled at his father’s neck.

We bid good-bye, making vague promises for future get-togethers. As we continued, Johnny hailed ranchers and cowboys by name—among them Ike Clanton and his younger brother Billy, Tom McLaury, and William “Curly Bill” Brocius. They strutted toward us on the boardwalk with the bowlegged swagger of men who spent long days in the saddle and then cut loose in town. I’d never seen anything like them in their bright-colored bibbed wool shirts and leather pants tucked into boots tooled with stars and playing cards. They resembled the rowdy chorus of sailors in
H.M.S.
Pinafore
, and I couldn’t keep myself from staring. The men clearly took my stares for something more, looking right back at me with eyes bright from liquor. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or frightened, so I chose flattered. I felt secure with Johnny beside me. When Curly Bill winked, I even winked right back. Tom McLaury reached out for a pinch, which Johnny blocked good-naturedly as if it were a game among friends.

As the cowboys proceeded on their saloon crawl, I wrinkled my nose at the odor of horse and booze that trailed after them. Although my experience with
shickers
was limited—no one in my house drank alcohol for pleasure—I could tell there would be a demand for a sheriff with men like these running wild. As if he read my mind, Johnny said, “I’ve got a plan, Josie. The territorial government is creating a new county called Cochise. Tombstone will be its seat, and I have the inside track for sheriff.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Less perilous than prospecting in Apache territory, darling girl.” The endearment warmed me. “Besides, a smart lawman knows how to shoot a gun, but he’ll live longer if he knows when to holster it. A silver tongue is a better weapon than a silver bullet.”

“Not if you’re hunting Apaches.”

“You might have a point there.”

“I’ll say I do. Arrows have points, too, Johnny.”

“Ouch!” he said as we passed the Oriental Saloon. The square, one-story wooden building, lined with glass-paned arcade doors on two sides, squatted where Allen crossed Fifth Street. Barflies buzzed on the front walk, laughing and spitting tobacco in the general vicinity of cast-iron spittoons. Johnny said of the saloon, “You couldn’t see anything finer in San Francisco,” as if he himself had erected the bar and hotel and crafted the crystal chandeliers.

“Nor anything finer than me, Johnny Be-Handy,” said a green-eyed redhead in a taunting Irish brogue. She sauntered through the Oriental’s swinging doors, then stood before us clutching her slim hips and clucking at Johnny like a schoolteacher disappointed in her pet’s misspelling. She dwarfed us both, six feet tall if she was an inch, even without the lemon-colored lace-up boots she tapped impatiently. Freckles splashed her square face, framing prominent cheekbones. A deep dimple cleaved her pointy chin. She filled out a green silk evening dress that would have suited a night at the opera. She scolded Johnny with a familiarity that chafed: “I see you’ve brought Albert’s mother along. She’s awfully young to have such a big boy.”

“I don’t have a son,” I corrected, pulling myself up all five feet (which had never before felt so inadequate to the task). Who was this gentile giant to know my business? And anyone who examined my waist, or my smooth skin, could see I was no mother of a nine-year-old, no mother at all. I’d swung from elated to furious in seconds. I could feel that thing boiling up in me that preceded a hard stamp of my right foot, or the slamming of a door. But I was not keen to show that part of my personality before Johnny and the green goddess. The barflies had begun to laugh, though, furthering my fury. In Tombstone, everything on the street was a show, and a fight between two women always got a big audience, given the town’s ratio of roosters to hens.

Johnny tipped his hat and said “Delia” in a conciliatory manner while tightening his grip on my elbow until it pinched. He backed me off the boardwalk onto Allen Street, then swiveled me around, narrowly avoiding a mule-drawn water wagon that barreled past. I flinched, and that, too, made the barflies howl with laughter.

“Hey, Albert’s mum,” Delia called as Johnny moved us along, “if you ever need a job dancing, tell them Delia sent you.”

I tried to pull away from Johnny to fling back the response that was lurking in the bottom of my throat, but Johnny resisted. He tugged my arm and my body followed, but he couldn’t keep me from hearing her sing a popular
Pinafore
song. She had a rich, relaxed soprano I envied:
“I’m called Little Buttercup, dear Little Buttercup, though I could never tell why, but still I’m called Buttercup, poor Little Buttercup, sweet Little Buttercup I.”

“Nice voice,” I said sourly as we climbed the boardwalk on the opposite side of the street. Delia held a high
C
without strain, projecting across the noisy road with its speeding horses and staggering drunks. Her talent frosted me. She was probably a better dancer, too, with all that leg. “Friend of yours, Johnny?”

“Delia’s no friend of mine, sweet pea.”

“Then why does she know our business?” I sounded nearly as shrill as the mine whistle that announced the shift change just then, giving Johnny an excuse to exchange the topic of Delia for the more welcome subject of dinner. Johnny had reserved a prime table at the Grand Hotel, where he tended bar. We approached the brand-new two-story building conveniently located down Allen Street from the Oriental and across from the more established Cosmopolitan.

Johnny opened the hotel’s frosted-glass door for me, and then followed close enough to blow warm breath on the curls at my nape. It sent a shiver down my spine. I reached back for his hand, and my palm accidentally landed somewhere high on his thigh. Awkwardly, I pulled it back. The gilded full-length mirror that dominated the foyer reflected my surprise and embarrassment. But as Johnny unwound my woolen paisley shawl, I relaxed at the sight of the familiar, pearly-skinned oval face I knew so well, even if it was not as refreshed as I would have liked.

Seeing my reflection bolstered my confidence. That’s who you are. That’s who I am. That’s why I’m here. Beneath a whisper of a widow’s peak, my widely spaced eyes rimmed with dense lashes held my gaze beneath bold, dark brows, my left higher and just a little more bowed than my right. I arched that sable eyebrow with an appraising look, raising my chin to enhance the effect of high cheekbones and full lips, the lower falling open to reveal just the hint of the part between my two front teeth. Some would say that my nose was too wide, too heavy at the tip—my brother Nathan had often teased me, calling it “bulbous,” picking as siblings will on one small flaw to spite the whole—but it was the strength of that feature that held the rest in balance.

“My beauty,” Johnny whispered, his mouth brushing my curls. I smiled over my shoulder, raised my chin a little higher, inviting him closer, then turned back to the mirror that now captured us both. We looked into each other’s eyes in the reflection, his warm and amused, framed by the lines of many past smiles radiating out. He tried to match my serious expression, sucking in his cheeks and pursing his cupid lips, but he couldn’t maintain the pose. His lopsided, happy grin returned. He squinted merrily at me. I shut my eyes to save the image, as if I was a photographer composing our engagement photo: the future Mr. and Mrs. John Harris Behan, of Tombstone.

Spinning around and opening my eyes, I found myself in a setting as grand as the gilded and rouged opera houses I’d visited in San Francisco with Rebecca, only on a more intimate scale. Instead of rushing to the cheap seats, feeling like an interloper in a world of gentiles, I held my head up proudly as I had in the mirror and surveyed the scene with newly privileged eyes. I had just as much right to be in Tombstone as anybody else seeking fortune and adventure, refusing the hand-me-down destinies of all our hometowns—east and west, north and south. There wasn’t a soul in the room born in Tombstone. There wasn’t a plot of inherited property.

Here, in the soft light of etched-glass oil lamps, I had a chance to become who I really was. While I wasn’t entirely familiar with that Josie yet, I could feel her at the edge of my fingertips. When I looked deep inside myself, I knew this excitement I felt was just the beginning. Every action I took would bring that new Josie closer to me. The first step had been making my way against the current to Tombstone, to this spot where a sparkly chandeliered dining room stretched out to my left. To my right, beyond a swinging door, the hum of the fancy bar where Johnny worked most nights could be heard. Directly before me, a wide staircase rose gracefully, leading, I presumed, to private hotel suites.

When we entered the dining room, all heads swiveled in my direction, from newly minted silver millionaires to Eastern investors and bachelor bankers. There was an intake of breath that left the cigar smoke hanging beneath the heavy crystal chandeliers. Starved for attention, I smiled and nodded at the strangers, freely making eye contact, feeling like Princess Beatrice. And many gents—for men dominated the room—smiled back warmly, but with the canny eyes of silver-ore assessors. A stiff, aged maître d’ with shoe polish–black hair above a pallid face appeared before us in black tie and tails. He addressed us in a European accent that I couldn’t quite place, but that I knew was neither German nor French, since I was familiar with both. Thanks to a coin Johnny slipped into his hand, the man was overly solicitous. He led us over a plush carpet, gesturing with gnarled arthritic hands to a prominent circular table for two swathed in white damask linen.