Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  The Berry boys made quiet inquiries, and over time they learned the names of the trio of jayhawks who had ganged on Alston Berry. On a dark night a month after their father’s maiming, they hid themselves in the bushes beside the Emporia house of one of those men. When he passed by a lamplighted parlor window they fired their Sharps rifles and the thunderous muzzle flares illumined the bushes and the pair of .52-caliber bullets removed the top portion of the man’s head and slapped it across the wall in a scarlet paste of hairy bone and brain. As the brothers ran through the shadows to their tethered horses they heard the rising screams of the man’s wife and children.

  Three weeks later they set up in the brush alongside the trace leading from Americus to the wooded cabin of another of the three jayhawkers. When the man came riding along in the last of the evening twilight they hupped their horses out onto the trail and forced him to rein up. The man thought they were highwaymen and said they would be fools to rob one of Jim Montgomery’s men. If they had any sense at all they’d ride away right now and never show themselves to him again. Angelfaced Ike Berry smiled at him, his lank pale hair hanging to his collar. “Mister,” he said, “we promise you won’t never see us again.” Then brought his Sharps up and shot him in the belly and the man went off his mount as though he’d been yanked from behind by a pullrope. They walked their horses to where he lay moaning in the grass, hugging himself tight, his knees drawn up. Butch Berry had his five-shooter in hand. He said “Hey!” and the man cast his eyes up and Butch shot him in the head.

  The third man they were denied. He was killed in a drunken brawl in Topeka before they could attend to him.

  Will Anderson was much impressed by the Berry boys’ revenging of their daddy. He suggested they join him and his sons in the horse-brokering business. The Berry boys didn’t have to think about it. They said they’d be proud to ride with them. Then proved quick to learn the trade and fearless in the practice of it.

  Shortly after the first frost of autumn Alston Berry woke his wife with a strangled cry in the middle of the night and she fired the lamp in time to see his last breath rising palely on the chill air. The Andersons helped to bury him under a wide oak overlooking Wabaunsee Creek on a day denied all color by a leaden sky. Ike Berry read the passage from Matthew his mother had selected wherein men are reminded that the Almighty makes His sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends down His rain on the just and the unjust alike.

  The next day the Widow Berry announced she’d had enough of Kansas and Missouri too and was going home to Cross County, Arkansas, where she was born and still had plentiful kin. She would take both daughters with her. The Berry boys bought a covered wagon and an ox team and paid for a place for it in a small well-guarded train taking hides and corn and other goods to Saint Louis for shipment down to New Orleans. Their mother would sell the wagon in Saint Louis and then steam down to Memphis and ferry over to Arkansas. On a cold blue November morn, Ike and Butch stood at the trailside and waved goodbye to their mother and sisters as the teamsters cracked their whips and the train clattered into motion and the Berry boys never saw their women kin again.

  A SISTER IN LOVE

  As he’d grown to manhood Bill Anderson had naturally become acquainted with various farm girls of the region and he now and again enjoyed sportings with many of them. On two occasions, however, each with a different girl, an outraged father had suddenly come stalking into the barn in a rush of curses and brandishing a shotgun, and Bill had both times been obliged to take flight with pants in hand—once leaping from the loading door to a full hay-wagon below, the other time shinning down a ready rope, both times his good Edgar Allan saddled and waiting behind the barn. He was twenty and the girl fifteen on the second of these instances and it had been a very near thing. He forevermore would carry five blue shot-scars on his right buttock as a consequence of it. He enlisted his brother’s raw doctoring skills to extract the pellets and repaid him for the service with a detailed account of the adventure.

  Jim was sixteen by then and still untried with a woman, and he ached to remedy that sorrowful state. It happened that Bill had recently met a pair of sisters in Agnes City and needed somebody to occupy the one while he gave his attentions to the other, and so the first time he got together with the Reedy girls his brother was with him. Jim had afterward blathered about the experience so happily and at such length as he and Bill rode for home through the sunrise-reddening woods that Bill finally reached out and yanked his brother’s hat down over his eyes and said that if he was going to keep talking so damn silly he might as well look it too.

  They had been paying periodic visits to the Reedys for nearly two years now. The sisters had survived a smallpox plague in childhood that struck their whole family at once and carried off their father and enfeebled their mother and robbed her of all interest in the remaining world. The disease had left the girls with badly scarred faces, but they were both fullbreasted and slim of waist and so enthusiastic for sexual play that Bill and Jim hardly noticed their disfigurements. The girls helped their mother run a small cafe in Agnes City and lived with her in the upstairs flat. Every now and then Bill would get word to them that he and Jim would be in town on a given evening, and after the cafe closed and their mother shut herself in her room for the night, the girls would slip out and meet them in the alley below. They would repair to a spot beside a creek in the nearby woods and there put down blankets and share a bottle and generally have a fine time until just before dawn when they’d put their clothes back on and kiss goodbye until their next tryst.

  Each time the brothers returned home from one of these all-night gambols, everybody at the breakfast table knew what they’d been up to. Their mother would fix them with accusatory tightlipped stares while their father grinned and usually made some remark about the rough day’s work ahead for anybody who might not have had his proper rest the night before. Their eldest sister Mary could never help smiling either, even as she shook her head at them, and twelve-year-old Jenny would grin and waggle an admonishing finger.

  Of their sisters, only Josephine, now fourteen, was unamused by their tomcat times in town, though she never expressed her disapproval vocally but rather by ignoring the two of them utterly for the duration of the breakfast meal.

  On the dawn following their most recent night of sporting with the Reedys, the brothers arrived home still chuckling about their good time. They continued to talk about the frolic as they unsaddled Buck and Edgar Allan and rubbed them down and forked hay into their stalls and occasionally glanced toward the house lest their mother or one of their sisters be coming to fetch them and overhear their salacious talk and jesting. As they started out of the stable they heard a soft rustle around the corner and they pulled their Colts and ran out and saw Josephine dashing for the woods with her skirt hiked to her knees.

  “I guess she got an earful,” Jim said.

  Bill Anderson stared out at the woods where she’d vanished into the shadows. “I guess,” he said. He holstered his pistol and headed for the woods.

  Jim watched him go. The whole family had long known that Bill and Josephine shared a singular kinship that excluded the rest of the world, but only Jim knew just how special that kinship had become.

  From the time she was an infant Josephine had taken a special comfort from Bill that no one else could give her, not even their mother. She could be strident with crying and refusing Martha’s teat and then eight-year-old Bill would take her up in his arms and she would immediately fall quiet and stare up at him in bright-eyed rapture. From earliest childhood she owned an independence of spirit and freedom of expression that sometimes prompted Will Anderson to threats of stropping her with a belt for her sass, though he never made good on them. Her mother, however, did sometimes order her to stand with her nose in a corner as a penance for her disrespect. Josephine could be scathing with her sisters, could drive Mary to a shrieking rage and little Jenny to tears—and yet every neighbor child learned early that to speak ill of
either sister in Josie’s earshot was to risk a severe thrashing.

  Her only object of veneration was ever and always Bill. She loved Jim dearly and was never a smart-mouth with him except in obvious playfulness that he clearly enjoyed, but whenever Bill was nearby she had eyes for him alone. As she grew older she hurried through her daily chores so she could offer to help with his, or at least sit by and watch him tend to them. She hung on his words, was avid to learn whatever he would teach her about the ways of the woods and skies and rivers, about animals and people, about the Walker Colt she so admired. No discussion on any point however trivial could start up at the supper table but she would immediately cast her vehement opinion on Bill’s side and only his raised finger signaling her to hush would save her from yet another session in the corner.

  She liked to show him how strong she was by toting his tools or, as she grew bigger, by helping him to heft rocks or trim timber for a new fence. She showed off her good wit by memorizing some of the poetry he liked so well. He might be shirtless and dripping sweat and hammering out a red-hot horseshoe and she would sit close by and entertain him with renditions of his favorite poems. He would pause in his labor and applaud her at the end of each performance and she would beam proudly. Sometimes he joined her in the recitations as he worked, and sometimes Jim would be working with him and would chime in as well, all of them dramatically intoning passages about Poe’s Annabelle Lee or Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.

  Whenever he finished with some stretch of hard work she hastened to him with a towel and would insist on drying him herself. She could not get enough of touching him. From the time she was a small child she missed no opportunity to sit on his lap and cling to his neck and put her head on his chest. She had only just learned to walk the first time he placed her feet on top of his and danced her about the porch. She was four years old when he set her astraddle in front of him on a horse and held her tight to his chest as they galloped over the countryside and she had laughed with exultation as her hair flew back in his face. By the time she was twelve she could ride better than any woman and most men in the region, but she still delighted to have Bill swing her up in front of him on Edgar Allan and hold her tight and go riding tandem.

  Although physically brave, she was from earliest childhood given to inexplicable anxieties. She was only five when a fierce winter storm woke her one midnight and upset her so much that she eased out of the bed she shared with her sisters in the loft and silently descended the ladder into the room where her parents slept and went out into the freezing wind in the dogtrot and then into the other room that contained the kitchen and the dining table and where her brothers slept on narrow bunks against the wall. She got under the covers with Bill and there slept snugly with her face nestled against his neck. The next morning her big sister Mary joshed her for a fraidycat and everybody grinned but she didn’t care.

  She thereafter made her way to Bill’s bed every time she wakened in a late-night fright. Will and Martha were aware of this new practice from its start but only shrugged at it since the comfort she took from a night with Bill seemed also to ease her usual fantods and make her less inclined to sassiness—sometimes for weeks at a time. If cuddling to her big brother could calm her that much, it was fine with them. For his part, thirteen-year-old Bill didn’t mind at all. “That girl puts out heat like a pony stove,” he said at the breakfast table one morning after an ice storm had howled at the doors and windows through the night. He smiled at her and tousled her hair. “You’re better than my own private hotbrick, girl.” She grinned and grinned. But even when spring and summer came on, the nights were never too warm to discomfort him when thunderclaps brought her scooting to his bunk.

  In the years after they moved to Kansas she continued to make her way to Bill whenever she had such fearful night wakings, and their parents seemed still to think little of it. Then one morning at breakfast Will Anderson looked up from his ham steak and cornbread just as Josephine leaned over the table to refill his coffee mug and the front of her dress drooped to disclose small but ripely rounded breasts with nipples like raspberries. He cut his eyes to his breakfast to hide his rush of embarrassment. Later that morning he asked Martha how old the girl was now and was surprised to hear she was already thirteen—and then envisioned her breasts once again and marveled that thirteen was all she was. He didn’t know what to think. In this day and part of the world, wives of sixteen were not uncommon, brides of fifteen hardly unknown. Martha sensed what was troubling him and confided that she had lately begun to wonder about Josie’s habit of going to Bill’s bed whenever she had the nightspooks.

  “She’s a child no longer, William,” she said. “And Bill’s for some time been a man. It ought to quit.”

  He could only nod in agreement and mumble that he’d talk to Bill about it.

  A few days later when he and Bill were splitting logs, Will Anderson loudly cleared his throat and spat and looked all about to ensure they were alone and then told Bill about his mother’s concern regarding Josephine.

  “What it comes down to is, she ain’t a little girl no more,” he said. “It ain’t fittin, Billy.”

  Bill leaned on his ax and looked perplexed. “Oh hell, Daddy, Momma doesn’t think…I mean, Sweet Jesus, Joey’s my little sister. I’d never in hell…you know…”

  “Well of course not, goddammit. It’s just your momma thinks…well…it ain’t fittin. You know? It ain’t”—he gestured vaguely—“fittin.”

  Bill tamped the ground with the nose of the ax head. “No…I guess it ain’t.”

  “I know she’s special to you and it’s hard to deny her,” Will said. “She’s always been prone to the jimjams but she takes ease from you and Lord knows she’s one to have her way or know the reason why. I don’t understand the first thing about her and won’t pretend I do. Mary’s always done like she’s been told and never been one to back-sass, and little Jenny the same. But that Josephine, I swear…” He shook his head and again made the vague gesture.

  “I’ll tell her quit it,” Bill said.

  The next day as he was reinforcing a cracked windlass post she sat on the well rim to keep him company and he told her about his talk with their father.

  “I guess they’re right,” he said, keeping his attention on his work as he talked but sensing the intensity of her gaze. “You ain’t a baby anymore, you know.”

  He chuckled to try to make light of the matter but she was having none of it. She irritably brushed her brown hair from her eyes as if it hampered understanding.

  “I can’t go and hold to you the next time I wake up scared in the dark?”

  “They don’t think you ought,” Bill said.

  “What do you think?”

  He turned and looked at her. She would always lack the social grace and the conventionally rounded prettiness of her big sister Mary, who was the only blonde of them. And she was certainly not the naturalborn beauty or charmer that little Jenny had already proved. But she was keenly striking in her dusky complexion and leanly supple form, her dark violet eyes. Since early girlhood she had carried a mysterious air that unsettled him even as it quickened his blood whenever she stared at him intently. As she now did.

  He gave his attention back to the windlass post and said, “I think it’s how it’s got to be, Joey.” He was the only one she permitted to call her by that nickname.

  As he hammered a support board in place against the post he could feel her gaze still on him. Her fingers lightly brushed his forearm under his rolled sleeve but he kept his eyes on his work. When he looked up a minute later she was headed back to the house.

  A few weeks later there struck a mean storm in the night and he was wakened by the crash of thunder. He listened to it for a brief while and then had just fallen back to sleep when he was waked again, this time by the press of Josephine against his back. He turned to face her and she hugged his neck tightly and her freshly washed hair was in his face and he could feel her trembling under her thin nightshirt.


  “I told you quit this,” he whispered.

  “I just got to hold to you, Billy,” she said. Her breath was warm against his neck. Their voices so low they could barely hear each other.

  He raised his head and looked over at Jim’s bunk and concentrated intensely but did not sense that his brother was awake.

  “You’re way too grown up to be scared of a storm, goddammit.”

  “I’ll get back to my bed before anybody else wakes up,” she said. “I can make myself wake up real early, you’ll see.”

  “Joey…”

  “Biiillll.” She hugged him tighter, snuggled closer into him.

  Now one of her hands left his neck and gently stroked his face. He was still cleanshaved back then and her fingers felt cool on his cheeks and jaw. Then she searched out his hand and brought it to her hip and she whispered, “Hold to me, Billy. I’m scared.”

  He held her.

  She sighed softly. “That’s nice.”

  “Hush up,” he whispered. He stroked her back and gently patted her bottom. “Go to sleep.”

  But they neither one went to sleep and after a time her hand was into his underclothes and found him as it had found him for the first time some months before. And just as he had not pushed her hand away then or any of the times since, he did not push it away now but only lay there in quickened pulse with her hand on him and felt her smiling against his neck.

  “I know you like it,” she breathed into his ear, her fingers moving gently on him. She kissed his cheek and caressed his neck with her free hand and just as they had first done those months ago they kissed softly and couldn’t help smiling as they did. His hands went under her shirt and he felt of her small breasts and fondled her bottom and it was all they could to keep from giggling out loud with their pleasurable play.

  It never went beyond that. He was sworn to himself never to let it go beyond the kissing and stroking and he would forever be true to the vow.