THE STROKE OF DEATH WILL NOT COME QUICKLY

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SHE WAS HAPPY WITH THE BURNS BOOK IN SOME ways. She liked that Johnny Behan was portrayed as vain and ineffectual. She was immensely relieved that there was no mention of a southwestern Helen of Troy. Nor was Mattie Blaylock even hinted at. None of the Earps’ women figured in the story. Tombstone was a story about men, written by a man, meant to be read by the kind of men who wore suits, and worked indoors, and chafed at the modern world’s restrictions, and sometimes thought yearningly about just plain shooting some sonofabitch who richly deserved it.

Even so, she kept circling back to the lawsuit. Pacing, fuming, crying. “We have to sue that lying sneak! That low-down, lying phony! How could he sit at our table and tell my husband he was writing one thing when he was writing another? It’s not fair! This can’t be legal!”

When Edgar visited, he let her repeat these complaints three times before he said, “Mrs. Earp, your husband is a public figure. Walter Burns has written a story that’s the opposite of libelous. Mr. Earp is portrayed as a fearless lawman meting out frontier justice to bad men. It’s a nice clean tale,” he could not help saying, “with a great deal of peppy dialogue.”

Temporarily derailed, Mrs. Earp stood still, but her face remained set in what was becoming a permanent scowl of bewilderment and pique.

“But there’s not a penny in it for us!” she cried, pacing again, off on a new tangent. “And if there’s a movie made, we won’t get anything from that, either! We are not rich people. My husband is old and ill. We have no savings, and there’s no pension from any of the towns he served. Now that this book is out, there’ll be no market for an authorized biography. What is to become of me?” she demanded, wringing her hands. “What is to become of me?”

Tired of the drama, Wyatt excused himself to lie down for a nap. Mrs. Earp hardly paused in her vilification of Walter Burns. Edgar listened a while longer, then signaled to John that it was time to go home.

“She’s bats, dear boy,” he warned when they left. “This won’t end well.”

“I can’t just walk away from Mr. Earp,” John said stubbornly. His voice was rough when he spoke again. “He hasn’t got much time left. I will see this through.”

JOHNNY BEHAN’S SON, Albert, had kept in touch with Sadie over the years, but when he saw the Earps in Los Angeles at the end of 1927, he was startled by the changes in them. At seventy-nine, Wyatt was alarmingly thin and obviously sick. The state of Sadie’s house was almost as shocking. Dusty, disordered, and just . . . not clean.

As always, there was cake on the table, only it was store-bought—not bad, though not as good as the marble cake Sadie used to make for him. When he finished his second piece, he declined the third and came to the point of his visit.

“I hate to bring this up, but Billy Breakenridge is working on a book with a ghostwriter. He told me they plan to do right by my father. Mr. Earp, they’re going to say you and your brothers were all corrupt and the gunfight was an outlaw dispute that my father tried to stop. They’re going to say all the men who died at the O.K. Corral were unarmed.”

Wyatt stared at him, astonished. “But . . . Judge Spicer went over all that in the hearing! If they was unarmed, how did Virg and Morgan and Doc get shot?”

“They’re going to say you shot them yourself, by accident.”

“But . . . that’s plain stupid!”

“That evil little queer,” Sadie muttered. “Albert, Billy Breakenridge sat right where you’re sitting, just last summer! ‘I want to talk about old times!’” she said, making her voice high and whiny. “I made him breakfast! Biscuits and strawberry jam, and eggs and bacon and coffee—”

“Al, I don’t understand,” Wyatt said. “Me and my brothers, we always worked fine with Billy B. Why would he say that about us?”

“Because he’s an evil little queer, that’s why,” Sadie muttered.

“There’s money in controversy,” Al said. “His writer thinks everybody who bought the Burns book will buy Billy’s, too. They’re calling it Helldorado. It’s a catchy title.”

“Billy’s probably broke, too.” Wyatt sighed. “We’re all old and broke, Al. The best of us died young. The rest of us have lived too long.”

Sadie was still muttering. “That evil little queer! He’s an evil little queer.”

“Sadie! Stop it,” Wyatt said sharply. “You’re stuck again.”

“It’s our story, and everyone is making money but us,” she said, breaking through one circle maze only to wander into another. “We are not rich people! My sister has money. People think we don’t need anything because Hattie is rich, but my husband is old and ill, and we have no savings, John!”

Wyatt met Al’s eyes before he said, “This is Albert Behan, Sadie, not John Flood.”

She didn’t even pause. “There’s no pension from Dodge or Wichita or Tombstone. We have nothing! And now that evil little queer is going to take the bread from our mouths!”

Albert left a few minutes later, but Sadie kept on about Billy Breakenridge and how people were stealing from them, and no pension, and so on. Wyatt told her that things weren’t as bad as she thought, but when she got like this, it was more useful to say, “I’m hungry,” or “Take laundry off the line,” or “Read me the paper.” Sometimes chores distracted her, but this time she was hooked good and solid.

Come Sunday, she was still nerved up about Billy B.’s book and started in on it again the moment John Flood came in the door.

“Billy Breakenridge sat right where you’re sitting, just last summer! ‘I want to talk about old times!’” she said, her voice high and whiny. “I made him breakfast! Biscuits and strawberry jam, and eggs and bacon and coffee. And now that evil little queer is going to take the bread from our mouths! You sit right down at that typewriter,” she ordered. “You’re going to write a letter to Houghton Mifflin. Tell them we want every copy of that evil little queer’s book destroyed, or we’ll sue. If they publish it, we’ll get a lawyer and we’ll sue them and that evil little queer for damages. He won’t get away with this,” she vowed. “We’re going to stop him in his tracks. That evil little—”

“Sadie!” Wyatt roared.

Shocked into silence, she stared at him.

“I’m out of tobacco,” Wyatt said, slowly and distinctly. “Go to the store—right now—and get me some tobacco. And when you get back, I want you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

She stood there. First blank, then confused, then defiant. She settled on belligerent capitulation. “Of course,” she said with theatrical lightness. “Whatever you say. I’ll let everyone steal from us and run roughshod over you, if that’s what you want. I’ll just go get tobacco for you! I’ll be your little errand girl.”

Muttering, she put on her hat and gloves, snatched up her purse, and stalked out of the house, leaving two silent men surrounded by dusty furniture and piles of newspapers and unwashed dishes—so unlike the tidy home John Flood had first visited sixteen years earlier.

“I’m sorry, John,” Wyatt said, scrubbing at his face. “She was never mean like that, before . . . She gets these ideas and just goes around and around. She’s younger than me, but . . .” He looked away, helpless. “Old age takes people strange sometimes.”

Milk-white, John stood. “I—I think I have to go.”

Wyatt got to his feet, which wasn’t easy anymore, for his insides hurt something fierce and no amount of whiskey seemed to help.

“You’ve been real patient with her, son. And real kind to me. I hope you can forgive her and . . . I hope you’ll come back.”

John was at the door by then, reaching for his hat. When he turned, it was all on his face. Everything he’d felt. Everything he’d never said.

Coming close, Wyatt offered his hand and when John took it, Wyatt held on for a few moments.

“Give Edgar my best,” he said. “He’s a good man. So are you.”

“Yes, sir,” John said, his voice thready. “Thank you, sir. I’ll see you next Sunday.”

“HONESTLY, DEAR BOY, I can’t decide if you’re a saint or an idiot,” Edgar said.

“Mr. Earp is dying,” John said. “I won’t abandon him now.”

“The question is, What happens when the old lion leaves us? What on earth are we going to do about his wife?”

We, John thought. We. I’m not alone in this.

ON GOOD DAYS, she was as cheerful and perky as a parakeet. Her habits of hospitality remained intact, and visitors sometimes brought out her old sparkle. Thoughtless pleasantries bubbled out of her. She could be charming, as long as you wanted what she wanted you to want. But if you refused a fourth piece of cake or disagreed with her about something, there’d be a stunning avalanche of emotion. Uncomprehending surprise, weeping reproach, furious denunciation. She had trip wires, too. Topics that set her off. She was endlessly worried about money and convinced the neighbors were stealing from them. She told horrible kike jokes and laughed uproariously at them herself.

She was different before, you’d remind yourself. Poor Wyatt, you’d think as you left the house.

“How do you stand it?” John asked him once.

“I was no prize, John,” Wyatt said. “She put up with a lot from me.”

THE MAN WHO WOULD IMMORTALIZE Wyatt Earp didn’t know about Mrs. Earp’s peculiarities, but Stuart Lake knew other things in 1928. He knew Lowell Thomas was still making a lucrative career out of selling Lawrence of Arabia. He knew the public remained hungry for stories of individual heroism—even now, a decade after losing a generation of nameless men to the Great War’s senseless slaughter. He knew people were still fascinated by the Tombstone gunfight, and he knew Mr. and Mrs. Earp thought they’d been cheated by Walter Burns.

So right off the bat, Stu Lake offered to split the proceeds of a biography down the middle. I’m proposing a fifty-fifty, horse-high, bull-strong, hog-tight deal, he wrote, demonstrating the lively style he intended to bring to the project. You do the telling, I’ll do the writing and the whipping into shape. As his bona fides, he offered his experience as Teddy Roosevelt’s press agent at the turn of the century: playing up TR’s cowboy persona, framing his adventures so they had maximum political appeal. I am the man for the job, Lake wrote. Give me a chance and I’ll do you proud.

The reply came from a Mr. John Flood, who said he acted as the Earps’ secretary. Mr. Earp was not in good health; Mrs. Earp would need income after his passing. Mr. Flood himself had spent three years interviewing Mr. Earp about his life, but his own manuscript had not been acceptable for publication. He would make his notes available to Mr. Lake. I am not interested for one moment as to financial remuneration, Flood wrote. The purpose is to square Mr. Earp and make provisions for his wife.

Which was damn decent of the man. Or really naïve.

Given Mrs. Earp’s many and shifting concerns, the contract negotiations were something of an ordeal but a week after signing, everything John Flood had written was on Stu Lake’s desk. It took all summer to sift through the material, separating what seemed factual from a great deal of bad dialogue. In September, Lake was ready to meet Wyatt himself in Los Angeles.

Perhaps he should have gone sooner, but Stu Lake hadn’t realized how sick the old man was. And traveling was difficult. Meeting new people meant acknowledging his leg. “Shrapnel,” he’d say briefly. “France, 1918.” His femur had been shattered; survival cost him two years in military hospitals. A long series of awful operations had left Stuart Lake with a heavy limp. His right leg was four inches shorter than his left.

“Virgil’s arm was like that,” Wyatt said. “He’s dead now. They all are. I’m the last.”

Which turned out to be the longest statement Wyatt Earp would make to his biographer. Of course, Wyatt had never been much of a talker, and in his final months, he was fighting a chronic infection and worsening pain.

“He was delightfully laconic,” Lake would recall. “Exasperatingly so.”

Mrs. Earp provided far too much pastry while her husband doled out bare facts, a few words at a time. Stu Lake pumped for names, dates, details. It was like pulling teeth—a process with which Wyatt Earp was familiar, and one that he enjoyed about as much as answering questions. By the end of ’28, the writer considered it more productive to mail written questions, even knowing that Mrs. Earp was answering them on Wyatt’s behalf.

Mr. Lake, my dear husband is not at all well, she wrote the first week of January 1929. Do visit again soon, for I am afraid he is not long for this world.

For once, she was not exaggerating a situation to heighten the dramatic effect.

HE DIED AS HE’D LIVED, nearly silent at the end.

All my life, he thought, lying in bed, waiting for it to be over. On the move. On the run.

A year. Two. Three at the most, and we’d move on. Monmouth, Illinois. Pella, Iowa. San Bernardino, California. Lamar, Missouri.

Wichita. Ellsworth. Abilene. Dodge.

Tombstone.

Denver. Gunnison. El Paso. Austin. San Antonio. Aspen. Salt Lake. Ouray. Coeur d’Alene. Eagle City.

San Diego. San Francisco. Rampart. Nome. Los Angeles.

Forty-seven years more than Morgan got.

Shoulda been me, he thought.

Sadie was at his side when the old desire to leave everything behind rose up in him again.

“Suppose . . .” he began. “Suppose . . .”

Then he moved on, one last time.