Woe to Live On: A Novel

by Daniel Woodrell

  “I might be.”

  “Good. You won’t go wrong.” Babe’s glazed eyes rolled up and he laughed. “If we do make it home, we’ll be rich with duds and meat.”

  “That’s right,” Ray said. He was slightly older than Babe but more reserved. “They can’t count on gettin’ every single one of us.”

  When the world was black enough to travel sneaky in, we got going. We circled past the post at Spring Hill, and though I believe they noticed us, we encountered no challenges.

  My eyes felt raw and it was hard to hold them open. Old Fog stepped deftly enough, but every jolt was a jolt. In the back of the pack drunks sang until hushed. Odd snatches of laughter drifted around. “I ain’t hardly over gettin’ shot near the jewels at Blue Cut,” I heard someone say. “But I wouldn’t miss this for six chicken wings.” A man I didn’t know tapped my shoulder and held a bottle toward me. “Take a bracer of Old Crow, partner,” he said. “It won’t keep the gnats from your eyes but it’ll make ’em cuter to you.” I tried his medicine and slid further into drunk than I wanted to be.

  Lawrence would take all night getting to. By midnight we were lost. The leaders had a conference and decided to recruit guides. At the next house we saw, the man of it was dragged out and made to guide us as far as he could. When he, too, was lost, a big red-haired man named Pringle slit his throat and we got a new guide at the next house.

  Before long I could barely stay in the saddle. I had Holt lash me in so if I went blank and fell I wouldn’t break my neck. Many of the boys were roped in the same. It was hard traveling.

  I dozed on horseback, awaking in flashes, witnessing scenes more garish than any I’d ever encountered. It was an odd state I was in and my senses were fragmented and my mind ricocheted off of what I did see or thought I saw.

  The whole long trip was passing strange. My eyes opened to see a bald man on his knees beneath a torch, his tongue gripped by the driving hand of one of us. It did not keep me awake. “Yeah, that’s right,” a voice said softly. “I’m from Liberty, with Jarrett. I lived around Liberty ’til I couldn’t no more.” A hand shoved me and I started up to see Cave Wyatt. “Sweet dreams, Dutchy boy?” he asked. “You looked so peaceful I couldn’t stand it.” The rhythm of the horse’s gait could be adjusted to. If you were ready to die, it didn’t wake you. “Mother,” I said in German, out loud or in a dream, “the dishes are in the yard where I tossed them. I won’t do them. Jack Bull doesn’t do them. I want to trap beaver in the mountains like Jim Bridger.” Another torch scene halted my horse, and the end of movement awakened me. “Are you takin’ us in circles, you Dutch bastard?” “No, no,” the man cried. “I swear, I don’t even know any circles.” I saw him bludgeoned, and we went back on the move. I just couldn’t avoid sleep. My eyelids were like weighted shades. Someone near me said, “Oh, don’t mess with him, Jim. He’s a Dutchman, but a good one. He’s been with Black John a long while.” Later, when it was I don’t know, I was nudged awake by Holt. “Remember Jack Bull?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered. “Me, too,” he said, and rode on by me. I went back to where I had been, wondering if we’d actually spoken. The steps kept up. I recognized the voice of Black John as he passed up and down the line. “No survivors,” he said. “The time for them is gone. I don’t want any survivors old enough to cock a gun, boys. None.” A very vivid fiction got done in my mind: I saw Alf Bowden blasting my father in the neck, then booting his old foreign butt along Main Street, blood spurting in a stream, kicking the old fellow past Asa Chiles and Jackson Evans. I saw me and Jack Bull seated on a blanket near a high stoked fire, playing faro with the Dutch boy I back-shot and several mashed sisters.

  That got me conscious. I came awake and stayed there. I searched the ranks for Holt and gained his side. He was asleep. His head hung forward on his chest and he snored. I shook him and said, “Don’t let them bother you, Holt. It’s only dreams.”

  His head nodded slowly, then eased back to his chest.

  A strange Quantrillian in a red shirt drew abreast of me. His head was shaking constantly. “Why couldn’t they leave us be?” he asked. “They have their place, they didn’t need to come roughshod into ours. Why didn’t they just leave us be?”

  I could give him no answer but a red-eyed stare, so he rode up to the next man and said, “Why didn’t they just leave us be?”

  16

  CAPTAIN QUANTRILL HAD timed our march exquisitely. Just as the cocks commenced to crow we came in sight of the hated city. It was spread out before us, peaceful and asleep, as convenient as a one-table banquet.

  “Form into fours,” Quantrill commanded.

  Mount Oread loomed on the far side of the town, and there, on the south pouty lip of the Kaw River, were the households of splendor, made so by our ransacked riches.

  “Burn the town! Kill, kill, kill!”

  Spurs dug into flanks and we came on, all as one, desperate and crazed, in terrible number, bent on revenge by bloody work, fully expecting to take on legions, and my emotions had the range of a rainbow. With my throat choked, clotted by fear and rage, my eyes sprang leaks, and I looked about me, trembling with some sort of occult joy, for we were men and unapologetic, dashing down the slope, pistols primed—oh, there was wonder in it!

  I saw the first man fall, a doughty, salt-haired, surprised man, milking a cow, and he died right there beneath the teat.

  Yip-yipping for all we were worth, we ravaged into the town. Men in long johns, sleepy still, were chased into their yards and pistoled down. I saw a whirl of men split off and ride into a camp of recruits near the center of town. They were yet in slumber inside their white tents, and we fired into their bedrolls and brought them crawling out. It was all niggers. Uniformed niggers raised extra frenzy in the boys, and the hectic potshotting and dodging went up a notch. I think two or three of the niggers made it to the brush bottoms of the river and escaped. I don’t know. I thought they were an army, and I guess I got one.

  By now the citizenry was coming awake and was scrambling or skulking after hiding places. Everywhere you turned, they were being shot. Voice was given to many agonized sensations. The women wailed. Children screamed.

  There was no army in sight. The citizens never even fired a shot to defend themselves. A great many of them stood on the streets and looked on us dumbstruck, as if they couldn’t believe we were just who we looked like we were.

  Why didn’t they hide? Why didn’t they flee? Why on earth did they not fight us?

  The women tried to shield their men; then, when that failed, to beg for mercy. It just wasn’t going to come. This place was well hated, and had talked tough about us for years, and sent Jayhawkers all over us and ours. The day had come for us to give it back.

  In the melee I found the Hudspeths at the delicacy shop they had mentioned, tying hams and greatcoats to their mounts. Other men had broken open the saloons, and pretty quick all of us were drunk again. Yankee flags were knotted on horse tails and dragged down the dirty streets. There was constant gunfire and pandemonium.

  At the north end of town I saw about twenty white recruits mowed down in the sun. Their rifles weren’t even loaded. They were not set up to fight. They never got their chance at us.

  Pretty soon the place was in flames.

  Quantrill, Black John and Clyde raced all over bellowing brutal strategy: “Burn ’em out, they’ll come!”

  I saw Holt at The Eldridge House, standing with Quantrill’s nigger, an older man called Nolan. To me it seemed all of this drunken revenge might overfill the bucket and slop onto them. They understood that, I think. They weren’t going anywhere.

  The Eldridge House was for some reason special to Quantrill, so he didn’t want it burned yet. I went up to Holt and Nolan.

  “Let’s us get some eggs,” I said.

  The two of them were sharing a bottle. Holt’s eyes were bloody.

  “Yeah, Jake. Let’s get all the eggs they got and some ham.”

  We went inside. The owner and his wife wer
e frantic trying to feed all the boys who were already in there. Customers of the hotel were lined up to a wall and were being robbed by Arch Clay, Turner Rawls, Payne Jones and some others. A pair of dead men were crumbled to the floor. Even ladies’ handbags and wedding rings were taken.

  “Give me some,” I said, and took the bottle from Holt. A long pull on it convinced me I really was there and it really was happening. I said, “I ain’t hungry no more,” and went outside.

  I saw men flushed like rats from burning houses right into the harsh embrace of the end. I saw all the varieties of robbery there could possibly be getting done. I saw women shoved in the dirt of God’s green earth, and little boys shot in the head.

  Quite a number of the men were not joining in on the fray. They stood about looking shocked, stamping their feet, shaking their heads. This thing was out of hand.

  I went and stood with them.

  “They ought not to murder the children,” a gray-haired rebel said.

  “But pups make hounds,” I said. I had to believe that.

  “If it was your pup, you’d feel different, son.”

  These men were farmers turned fighters and not comfortable with the tableau of a massacre. And that was all this was, easy mayhem on a grand scale.

  “For God’s sake, where are their armies?” I said. “Why don’t they come and fight?”

  But they didn’t do it. There were no legions of soldiers to be found and damned few Jayhawkers were at home. I had come here, as had these other rebels, for a desperate fight, but there wasn’t one to be had. It was only bad-luck citizens finding out just how bad luck can be.

  The gray-haired rebel next to me walked off, followed by a few of the other shocked southerners. I went with them. I don’t know why.

  We walked down the street, stepping around looters who were strapping all manner of plunder to their horses. Glass was shattered everywhere. Oaths were screamed, shots fired, blood let, and a din of loud insane laughter kept up.

  At a hostelry a freckle-faced woman went to her knees and begged Pitt Mackeson not to kill her husband. I stared right into her face and she looked like every woman you’d ever known.

  “I’ll show him the same mercy they showed us,” Mackeson said. He then put the husband through to the other side via a bullet in the ear.

  Around a corner from the main street there were rows of houses. Several of us walked right into one and sat down. There was a wrinkled woman in there, a wrinkled man and a boy who was old enough. All of them were cowering.

  “Feed us,” the gray-haired reb said.

  It fell on the woman to answer.

  “Gladly, men,” she said, about as obvious a lie as I ever heard. “I’ll fry taters for you.”

  I went over to the two shaking men. They weren’t fighters, you could see that.

  “You better hide yourselves,” I said. “It’s getting awful rough.”

  Neither of them moved. I think they feared I was going to make a sport of them and their attempts to hide.

  “As you will,” I said, when they failed to move. “See what you get.”

  I sat on a stick chair. There were six of us in there plus the three of them. I asked my comrades who they were and the answer was a variety. Two were Clay Countians who followed Quantrill, two were with Thrailkill, and the other, the gray-haired reb, was with Dave Poole out of the river district. His name was Rufus Stone.

  “I weren’t in it for this,” he said. He seemed to have no fear of uttering criticisms. “I have been tusslin’ with these infernal Kansans since eighteen and fifty-six. It has been a long war for me. But I ain’t in it for this.”

  Out of the window it all went on. Houses were plundered, then put to the torch, and Kansas men of all descriptions shot down.

  The woman fried potatoes as we waited. The two resident males still cowered in the corner, on the floor.

  “I thought this was going to be a fight,” I said.

  No one replied.

  Before we could eat, Pitt Mackeson and an impromptu gang of liquored avengers rode up to the house. They wanted to know why the place wasn’t in flames.

  “We’re waiting on breakfast,” I said. I didn’t really know these men. They were ugly drunk and had hell in their guts. Pitt came in and saw the cowering citizens. His unlevel eyes got big.

  “Bring those men into the yard,” he commanded. “I want to show them something.”

  Me and Rufus Stone looked glum at each other. After a coughing second or two he stood and said, “I think not. We’ll see to them once we’ve had our vittles.”

  “No, no you won’t! I want them in the yard now, damn it!”

  This springy thing happened to my legs and I found myself standing next to Stone.

  “How’s it feel to want?” I asked.

  Pitt Mackeson seemed rattled by my cheek. A squinty gaze was on him.

  “Why, you little Dutch son of a bitch,” he said. “You do what I tell you.” His comrades had come up behind him and were glowering at Stone and me. “Or I’ll kill you.”

  I put my pistol in his face as a response.

  “When you figure to do this mean thing to me, Mackeson?” He backed up a step, and it was the first time I’d felt like a fighter all day. “Is this very moment convenient for you? It is for me.”

  Someone behind Mackeson said to just shove in there and take the men out.

  “No, that won’t work,” Rufus Stone said. Two of the other men in the house stood to back him on that. “They’re stayin’ in here.”

  Some angry expressions got tried out on opposite audiences. I still held a tight bead on Mackeson.

  “Aw, the hell with it,” he said. “There’s plenty other houses to burn.” He turned and took a step, then whirled around on me, his long arm and a big finger aiming at my face. “I’ll see you back in Missouri, you tiny sack of shit, you.”

  “You know where I can be found,” I said.

  After an unnecessary extra added look of evil, Mackeson and his crew moved on to dose out some flame.

  I sat back on the stick chair and did a great, jaw-stretching false yawn.

  “That man is an oaf,” I said.

  “That’s Pitt Mackeson, ain’t it?” Stone asked. “I hear he’d as soon kill a man as mash a tick.”

  “My, what a scary fellow he is,” I said.

  “Haw haw! I like you,” Stone said. He clapped my shoulder. “But that bastard will have your scalp if you ain’t careful, son.”

  “So be it,” I said.

  The older citizen we protected, a long-nosed skinny creature, said, “Mister, mister, there ain’t enough thanks in the world.”

  “Aw, you go to hell!” I shouted. “Just keep your damned stinking mouth closed—you hear me?”

  Well, by noon Lawrence was a charred tombstone of a place, and the scouts could see a cloud of cavalry dust buzzing toward us from the north. This made it time to go, so we did. Behind us we left a ruined settlement and a hundred fifty corpses.

  Almost everybody was drunk on whiskey and bloody elation. A merchant trait had come out in the boys. There were trunks lashed ambitiously to horses, and dresses, coats, hams, rifles, whiskey, chairs, rugs and extra saddles drug along, too. We made quite a business spectacle, lugging so many oddities of supposed worth.

  Not long after the sun went straight in the sky, more signs of cavalry appeared in the east. We were awful tired. The horses were jaded and the heat had risen. Now that it seemed a fight was coming our way fast, all talk of fighting was over. Flight was now the thing.

  I had to always watch out for Pitt Mackeson, and I reckon I worried him some in the same regard.

  The cavalry behind us gained ground. I could see them. They must’ve come thundering down from Leavenworth. There was enough of them, too.

  The leaders said we must pick up the pace, so many of the brand-new rich had to agonize over which riches to dump when lightening their load. Greed prompts comical expressions, I noted.

  Close to
the Missouri border the Federals drew so near us that we halted and formed a battle line. The bluebellies did the same, and both parties just stood there staring across the field like bashful twits at a barn dance.

  I think they had caught up to us only to realize that maybe that wasn’t their truest desire. Both sides hooted and bleated rough appraisals of the other.

  Nothing happened.

  It was right after we gave up on insults and got moving again that Black John Ambrose rode alongside of me. Cave Wyatt had said that Black John killed eighteen men in Lawrence, and he looked it to me. My leader was berserk. This was troubling knowledge.

  “Roedel,” he said, hoarsely. “I hear disappointing words on you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Some of the boys tell me you spared two men you could’ve killed back there. Is it so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a traitor, Roedel?”

  “You know I ain’t.”

  “Well, you spared, boy. I told you not to.”

  I looked right at him. He might have killed me and I wanted to watch him do it.

  “I know that,” I said. “But I did.”

  He bored into me with those bottomless insane eyes. I was made nervous by his intensity, but then he said, “Don’t ever disobey me again, boy. I command and you obey. That’s the path to victory.”

  Victory, I thought. What world did he inhabit anyhow?

  “I understand you,” I said.

  17

  WITH BUSTHEAD, POPSKULL and rotgut as our scouts, we straggled home. A handful of slowpokes were caught by Federals, but for the rest of us it had been a painless foray. Not the suicide we had anticipated at all. Once we got into Cass County we dissolved into small bands. It was understood that all the armies would be after us, and we needed to hide.

  I went with George Clyde, Holt, Turner Rawls, the Hudspeths, Cave Wyatt and Howard Sayles. Clyde slowly swung us to the center of the state, then up to the Big Muddy. There were still citizens there who would take us in and feed us corn cakes and rumors.