Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  REQUIESCAT

  Came an April daybreak when Martha Anderson was beset by a pain in her stomach and the affliction worsened through the morning. In the late forenoon Mary noted the strain in her mother’s face and asked what was wrong. Martha gestured irritably and said she felt like she had a big bubble of gas in her belly she couldn’t get shed of. Josie joked that she sure hoped for a warning before that gas came loose so she could quick scoot out of the kitchen. Mary gaped and said, “Jo-sie! You awful thing!”

  Young Jenny giggled and Josie grinned at her and then said to her mother, “You reckon all that gas might come busting out so loud Daddy and the boys’ll hear it at the corral and think it’s a Yankee cannon firing at them?”

  Jenny squealed with mirth behind her hands and Martha gave Josie a look of mock outrage and took a playful swipe at her with a dishrag and they all giggled even as they blushed.

  Martha’s pain persisted and by that afternoon she was sick at her stomach and began to feel weak and feverish. Her joints hurt. She had never been ill in her life and was as much vexed as distressed by this sudden malady. At supper that evening she ate but two bites before rushing from the table and out the door to throw up over the porch rail. The girls put her to bed and bathed her face by candlelight with a cool washcloth. Jenny offered to read to her from the Bible or a volume of poems but Martha waved away the idea. They placed a bowl close to hand and she was sick into it several more times that evening before she finally fell into a sweaty and fitful sleep.

  They could fix on no cause for her sickness but the cup of milk she had taken that morning shortly after rising. No one else had drunk of that morning’s milking. Now Will Anderson wondered if their cow might have fed on snakeroot.

  “We ain’t hunted out that damned snakeroot in a while,” he said. “Could be some sprouted since we last cleared it. Son of a bitch!”

  He went out to the barn and closely inspected the cow by the light of a lantern and determined that the animal was indeed infected, its milk poisoned. In the house they heard the shotgun blast. Will reappeared at the door and told Bill and Jim to bury the animal first thing in the morning. In order that his wife might rest more comfortably with the bed to herself he would sleep in the barn that night.

  Martha began to moan in the later hours and the girls took turns sitting at her bedside and mopping the fever sweat off her face and neck. When Bill and Jim came into the room at daybreak she looked ghastly. Her mouth was tight with pain and she lay with her eyes closed and her hands pressed to her stomach. Her breathing was strained. The girls were redeyed and Bill and Jim offered to tend their mother through the morning so they might get some rest but the girls said they could manage all right. Will Anderson came in the house and stood over the bed and looked down at Martha for a time without saying anything and then he went out again.

  She nevermore opened her eyes nor spoke another word. Just before noon she died.

  Will took the front door off its hinges and set it on a pair of sawhorses in the center of the room and the brothers raised their mother’s body from the bed and gently laid it on the cooling board. The men then went out and the girls set to washing and preparing their mother. They put her best dress on her and smoothed her features and brushed her hair and folded her hands on her breast. The brothers took turns digging the grave in the shade of a sycamore while Will constructed a coffin in the barn.

  The only ones to join the family at the wake that evening were the Berry boys. Jim Anderson had carried the news to Arthur Baker, who sent his condolences and an explanation that he did not wish to intrude on the family’s private grief and so would for a time refrain from visiting. Mary thought he was being overly solicitous, but Will told her the man was just being considerate and not to trouble herself about it.

  At daybreak they placed Martha in the coffin and the men carried her out to the grave and settled her in it. Will deferred to Bill in the reading from the Psalms. He then spaded earth over the coffin until it was covered and then Bill and Jim took over and finished filling the grave. At the head of the gravemound they implanted a simple wooden cross which Will Anderson would replace in another week with a gravestone bearing an inscription he himself chiseled into it:

  Martha Anderson

  1823–1862

  Beloved Wife and Mother

  Following the burial the Anderson girls wept and comforted each other, but by sundown they had quit their tears and were busy with preparing supper for their father and brothers and the visiting Berry boys. The men passed the afternoon sitting on the porch and pouring cups from first one jug and then another and they now and then spoke in low voices of the war news from the border. When they came to the table all of them were slackfaced with drink. The Berrys were not such practiced imbibers as the Andersons and Ike periodically and abruptly would sway in his chair. Butch had difficulty finding his mouth with his fork and portions of his supper streaked his shirtfront. Despite themselves the Anderson men grinned at the Berrys’ bewhiskeyment. Even the girls had to bite their tongues against smiling and all three blushed at their own failure to hold to a proper solemnity.

  Midway through the meal Will refilled the men’s cups and doled a splash of whiskey to each of the girls, even a wee one for Jenny, and then raised a toast to the memory of Martha Anderson and they all drank to her. By the time they were done with supper Will was telling affectionately funny stories about his twenty-three years of marriage to Martha and they all laughed at every tale. He was in the middle of another when he suddenly fell silent and looked all about as if thinking to catch sight of her somewhere in the room. Then stood and took his jug outside and told no more tales of her that night or ever again. The others traded looks over the table. Bill raised his brow in question at Mary. She leaned over the table and whispered, “We ought just let him be for now.” They all nodded. Soon the girls were chatting in low voices about Mary’s upcoming wedding and the pairs of brothers talking of the latest rumors of Quantrill.

  And so their lives went on. Mary Anderson wrote a brief letter to their Aunt Sally in Missouri informing her of Martha’s death. But in the following days widower Will became less inclined to conversation. He turned laconic, was distant at the family meals, detached even from talk of Mary’s impending marriage. He had always enjoyed his jug at the end of a day’s work but he now nipped from it the day long. They had sold all the horses from their last raid and Bill and Jim were keen to rustle up some more, but when they asked if they should get the Berry boys and go on a foray, Will Anderson said no, they’d wait a while yet, and he gave no explanation. The brothers grew disheartened at his seeming lack of interest in everything but his jug and his own morose company. Mary said he was still grieving. She said that whenever she watched him sitting in his porch rocker and staring out at nothing, she could just about see the sorrow holding to him like a chilly mist. They just had to wait a while longer, she said, before he’d get back to being his old self. But none of them had known him for a sentimental man, and so all of them were surprised by the might of his loneliness in a world lacking Martha Anderson.

  A PROMISE BREACHED

  Two weeks after Martha’s burial Arthur Baker still had not come calling nor even sent word of when he might. With the wedding date barely six weeks away Mary wrote to inform him that he should again resume his visits and she looked forward to his help in completing the nuptial plans. Three days later one of Baker’s hired men arrived with a sealed letter. The horseman spurred off again without asking if he should wait to carry back a reply.

  Mary thumbed off the wax seal right there on the porch and laughingly spun away from Josie who wanted to read on tiptoe over her shoulder. But as her eyes sped down the page her smile withered. She looked up at the others, her face gone slack—and then hastened to read the letter again, her aspect abruptly desperate, as if she might have misunderstood it the first time. Then let the paper fall and rushed sobbing into the house.

  Josie picked up the letter but Will And
erson snatched it from her. He read it slowly, then muttered “Shit” and handed it to Bill. Jim and Josie pressed in at his sides but Jenny was yet too short to see that high and said, “Let me see,” and he lowered the letter to his belly so that she might read it too.

  My dear Miss Anderson—

  This is a most difficult Letter. In this bleak Period of Mourning, following the sorrowful Occasion of your dear Mother’s Demise, I have had ample Time to reconsider carefully our Proposal to wed,—and the sore Truth of the Matter, dear Lady, is that I am as unready for Matrimony as a Man can be. You deserve the best of Men, which, I readily confess, I am not. Perhaps, one Day, should Fortune smile upon me, I might be worthy of the Affections of Someone at least in Part so fine and noble as Yourself. At Present, however, I lack such Worthiness. It is, therefore,—and with the deepest Regret,—that I hereby make formal Renunciation of our Betrothal.

  I most deeply and humbly apologize for any Distress this Decision may impose upon you,—and I beseech you to be assured that my Affections toward you are, and have always been, most truly honorable and sincere.

  I remain,

  your humble Servant,

  Arthur I. Baker

  “What in the world is he talking about?” Jenny said.

  “The man’s changed his mind about getting married,” Jim said.

  “I know that,” Jenny said. “But how come?”

  “Because he’s an asshole,” Josie said.

  “Mind your mouth, Josephine!” Will Anderson said.

  “Worthless shithead,” Bill Anderson said softly.

  “I believe I’ll go whip his ass,” Jim Anderson said.

  “Do it, Jimmy,” Josie said. “Go over there and kick him in the plums—if he’s even got any damn plums, which I truly do doubt.”

  “Josephine!” Will Anderson said. “I won’t have a woman of this family talking low.”

  “Well dammit, Daddy, it’s just exactly what somebody ought to do to him!”

  Will Anderson glared at her. Jenny put an arm about Josephine’s waist and whispered, “Quit now.”

  Will Anderson hawked and spat. “He’s a weak excuse for a man, all right, and I’m sore disappointed to learn it,” he said. “But I ain’t never in my life held with forcing a man to marry a woman except if he got her in the family way, and all this one’s done is change his mind about getting married. He gave his word and broke it and proven himself for a shithead, and I’m sorry for Mary—Lord knows I am—but it ain’t a thing to draw blood over.”

  It was the most they’d heard him say at one time since they’d buried their mother. They had grown used to his taciturn and melancholic mood, but his voice now seemed strained, as if he didn’t believe his own words, as if he were uncertain of purpose, he who had not hesitated to impale a man with a pickax for touching his daughter.

  Will Anderson rubbed his face and sighed tiredly. “I ain’t been keeping out of the war with the Union just to get into one with some peckerwood for crawfishing on a marriage promise,” he said. He fixed Bill and Jim with a stern look. “We couldn’t win it no way. If we kill him we’d have to stand trial or run. The man’s got friends all over and the jury’d be full of them. And I’ve run enough. So that’s an end on it.”

  Mary Anderson wept all that day and night, but by the following morning she had settled her mind about the situation and penned a brief note to Arthur Baker without salutation or signature:

  The sooner you drop dead, the sooner you will go to hell—and the sooner I will rejoice.

  Thus did the matter seem concluded. Until a Sunday evening two weeks later when the Berry boys came by with an interesting tale to tell. They had recently made a visit to Miss Juliette’s house of pleasure in Emporia some thirty miles southeast of Agnes City, an establishment they deemed to be worth every mile of the ride. The Anderson brothers were known to Miss Juliette’s girls too, having patronized the place now and again for a change from the Reedy sisters. It was only natural that the whores the Berrys consorted with—a frolicsome pair named Ida and Brenda—would inquire after Bill and Jim, and only natural that the girls, vast repositories of gossip and rumor, had heard of Arthur Baker’s jilting of Mary Anderson. They thought it was a damn shame, the fella asking Mary to marry him just because he was having a tiff with another girl and then throwing poor Mary over when he made up with the first one, who happened to be the sole daughter of a rich daddy and whose only brother was a born halfwit. Thus did the Berrys learn of Arthur Baker’s betrothal to Clara Segur, daughter to John Segur, a horse rancher in Lyon County. Three weeks ago, Segur had invited all his friends to his ranch for a picnic in Baker’s honor and there announced Clara’s engagement to him.

  As Ida and Brenda told it, Baker had started courting Clara back in autumn, but he hadn’t yet proposed to her when they had a quarrel of some kind in February and stopped seeing each other. That was when he met and began calling on Mary Anderson. The gossip conveying from the Segur ranch was that Clara knew he was visiting some girl who lived near Agnes City, but she thought he was only trying to make her jealous. When she heard about his engagement to the Anderson girl, however, she thought he might be angry enough to go through with it if she didn’t act fast, so she wrote him a long and sweetly apologetic letter. Shortly afterward came her daddy’s picnic and his announcement of the engagement.

  “This is the same fella who wrote to Mary he’s unready for marriage as a man can be,” Jim Anderson said sardonically. “Bastard went and got engaged to that other girl before he’d even broke it off with Mary.”

  “I never met the shithead myself,” Butch said, “and he best hope I never do.”

  They were sitting on the porch, each man sipping from his own jug, and they were all a little drunk but for Will, who was very drunk, having been drinking since morning. Now his face was drawn, his eyes gone narrow and bright and fixed on some outraging vision in his head.

  “There’s more,” Ike Berry said. “Somebody asked Baker where you all were from, and he said Kentucky, but somebody else said you were from Kentucky like Abe Lincoln was from Atlanta. Said he knew for a fact you all were from Missouri and so he could hardly blame you for lying about it. The way the story goes, Baker was mighty put out. He said marrying into a family of pukes would’ve been the most shameful thing he ever did.”

  For a moment no one spoke, and then Jim Anderson said, “Pukes?”

  They held silent again for a time before Will Anderson said, “His wife’s got no sisters and but one brother and him a softbrain. So I guess everything belonging to his new daddy will be his some day.”

  His words were slurred but clear enough. The others exchanged looks.

  “All that good horseflesh this Segur fella’s got,” Will said, “it’ll someday belong to Baker, won’t it?” He took a deep pull off his jug. “Well, I believe we maybe ought slide on down there and lay claim to some of those horses Baker’s due to inherit. I believe it’d be nothing but proper settlement for the man’s goddam breach of promise.”

  His grin was reflected in every face.

  A FORAY

  They did not wait for a moonless night nor even until they were sober. Will had intended to accompany them, but he was so rough in bridling his horse that he frightened the animal and the spooked horse shied hard and knocked him down. He had to be restrained from attacking it with his fists. Bill and Jim ushered him back to the porch and sat him there and put a jug in his hands and assured him they could manage the rustle without him. Then they were mounted and on their way.

  The Berry boys knew where Segur’s ranch lay and the four of them rode hard to the southwest under a high half-moon of polished silver. They passed a bottle among them as they rocked along in their saddles and they drank and made jokes and laughed into the warm night wind pushing back their hatbrims.

  Just before midnight they crested a low hill and hove up and saw below them a moonlit herd they guessed to number a hundred head milling on a grassland the Berry boys said was S
egur’s north pasture. They spied no campfire to indicate a guard camp. Had they been less drunk they would have scouted for guards more carefully. If they’d spied any, they would have sent one man around to the far side of the herd to create a distraction and lure away the lookouts while the other three swiftly cut out horses from the unguarded side and made off with them. If necessary, the decoy could have fired in the air to frighten the remaining herd into stampeding and occupy the guards in rounding it up while the gang got away clear. That’s how they would have done it had they not been quite so drunk.

  They hupped their mounts forward and rode down to the herd and began to cut out horses. They were laughing and loudly admiring the fine quality of the animals when Butch shouted, “Riders!”

  They were ten or more, at a distance of about a half-mile and coming at full stride in the moonlight over a bare western rise.

  “Damn,” Bill Anderson said, suddenly much sobered. He heeled Edgar Allan around to the east and yelled, “Go!” As they galloped away they fired in the air to spook the herd into a clamoring stampede for the open range to the south. Most of the pursuing riders swung off to chase down the horses, but some kept coming behind the rustlers.

  Far ahead, the low silhouette of a line of hills showed blackly against the weaker darkness of the sky and Bill Anderson led them toward it. Pistolshots cracked behind them. He heard Ike Berry yell and turned to see him slowing up and looking rearward. Jim’s horse had been hit and had slowed to an awkward stagger—and now he slid off the saddle just as the Buck horse collapsed. Butch Berry had already turned around and was headed back.

  Bill and Ike reined up so short their horses almost sat. They watched Butch and the pursuers closing on Jim from either side.

  “They’re coming hard,” Ike said.

  “Shoot the horses!”

  They opened fire on the four chasers as Butch slowed his horse and leaned from the saddle with his hand outstretched and Jim caught it and swung up behind him. The lead chaser was almost on them, his pistol sparking—and then his mount abruptly plunged groundward and both horse and rider went flailing past them in a shrieking raise of dust.