Epitaph Read Free Page A

cake.
    An hour later, she was emotional again and frighteningly queasy.She’d begun wondering if the butter had gone off and was making her sick when a much worse possibility occurred to her. Unbidden, a dismal future rose up. A squalling baby. A sad little stepson. A thick waist. A husband who liked slender girls. Exactly the kind of dreary, domesticated life she’d fled.
    Face in her hands, she began to cry again.
    A LIFETIME LATER, when she was a stout old woman, all by herself for the first time in nearly fifty years, she would bury her face in one of Wyatt’s shirts and weep hour after hour. For Wyatt. For herself. For their blighted lives.
    It was all gossip and slander and libel—newspapers calling Wyatt a killer, a cheat, a bunco man. And now he was gone, and she was the only one left to defend his good name. If only she could get Mr. Hart to make a movie about Wyatt! William S. Hart was a big star, and he admired Wyatt so. He could set the record straight.
    â€œMy husband was a hero,” she told the nice man who always visited on Sundays. “None of it was his fault.” Or mine either, she thought. “All I did was love him. Never be sorry for loving someone, Albert.”
    â€œI’m John Flood,” the man reminded her, “not Albert Behan.”
    Wiping her eyes, she snapped, “Of course you’re not Albert. Albert’s only eight. I know that.”
    â€œI’m sure you do, Mrs. Earp.”
    â€œMrs. Earp!” she muttered, staring resentfully at ringless fingers. Then she shrugged. “All the world’s a stage. That’s what dear Mr. Hart would say. You just have to learn your lines. I helped Wyatt learn his after the gunfight.”
    She giggled then—a naughty little girl remembering sailors—and put a flirtatious hand on the nice man’s arm.
    â€œIt’s not lying,” she told Albert, or John, or whoever he was. “It’s just pretending. That’s what Papa said.”

A THOUSAND SHIPS

    N OW, WHAT YOU GONNA TELL YOUR MUTTI ?”
    â€œI was helping you at the bakery.”
    She was rewarded with fond eyes.
    â€œThat’s my girl!” her father declared. “I can always count on my Sadie.”
    She wasn’t quite seven when they started sneaking off to the Brooklyn docks together. Her father never explained why Mutti shouldn’t know, except to say, “She got enough worries. Why give her tsuris ?”
    For a while, they stood with their backs against a warehouse wall, trying not to get in the way of swearing sailors and sweating stevedores. The docks were scary and exciting. There were rats and stray dogs. Hopeful new immigrants and hopeless old women with painted faces. Casks of stinking whale oil. Huge coils of rope almost as thick as her father’s arms, which were heavy with muscle that came from kneading big batches of dough.
    â€œWhy not?” her father decided. “We go take a look. No harm in that.” He scooped her into his arms, grunting, “Oy, you getting big,” and carried her out to the end of the central pier. There he turned slowly on his heel, Sadie clinging to him like an organ grinder’s monkey.
    They were surrounded by ships tied up at the dock or anchored out in the harbor. More ships than she could count, though she’d recently counted all the way to fifty-three before she got bored and quit.
    â€œLook at all them masts!” her father cried. “Like a forest, eh, Sadie?”
    â€œWhat’s a forest, Papa?” She was a city child, after all.
    â€œYou seen trees, right? Well, you gotta imagine places big as Brooklyn—bigger, even—with nothing but trees and trees and trees.”
    After her father explained it, she could sort of imagine a forest. Except rigging didn’t look a bit like leaves. Rigging looked like scribbles.
    â€œYou want a good heavy ship for passage around the Horn,” he told her as they