Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  Then Butch was heeling his horse past the sprawled animal kicking crazily on its side and he just missed trampling the felled man gaping up at him as they went by.

  Bill and Ike kept shooting at the other chasers and another horse went down and its flung rider somersaulted over the ground with arms and legs slinging every which way. As Jim and Butch galloped past their brothers the last two chasers chose the wiser course and quit the contest, turning away and ducking low in their saddles while Bill and Ike fired at them with their second pistols.

  “Let’s go!” Bill hollered, and they set out after their brothers.

  RESPITE

  “You sure it was Bobby Raines?” Bill Anderson said.

  “As sure as it’s you standing there,” Jim said.

  “He know you?”

  “He knew me. It was all over his face he knew me.”

  “In moonlight? As fast as it went?”

  “If I knew him, Bill, he knew me.”

  They were camped by a narrow creek in a dense woods some dozen miles eastward of Agnes City. After crossing the hills aflank of Segur’s rangeland they had borne north for this good hiding place and arrived as the red sun rose up hugely on their right. Now shafts of dusty yellow light leaned through the looming elms and sycamores, and the brothers had seen to their lathered horses and let them water at the riverbank. They had carefully explored the animals for wounds and discovered that Butch Berry’s horse had a ball in its chest. The round wasn’t deeply embedded and Butch extricated it with a pocketknife and then packed the lightly bleeding wound with a bandage of river mud.

  The Bobby Raines they spoke of had been a wrangler for some years on a ranch west of the Anderson farm. Both Anderson brothers were acquainted with him and they had all taken an occasional mug of beer together. A year ago he received notice that his father had died and left him the family farm and so he’d headed back home to Texas. They had not thought of him since—not until last night, when he had stared up wide-eyed at Jim and Butch even as he crabcrawled out of the way of their horse.

  “I guess he couldn’t tolerate Texas,” Bill said.

  “Don’t rightly blame him,” Butch said. “Our daddy used to tell this story where he woke up drunk one morning and didn’t know where he was. It was so hot and dusty he couldn’t hardly draw a breath. He thought he’d died and gone to hell but turned out he was only in Texas.”

  “Maybe he’d ruther wrangle for wages than bust his back on a farm,” Jim said. “Even his own.”

  “Can’t fault him for that either,” Bill said.

  “Of all the shit luck,” Ike said. “The only fella of them who knows you is the one to get a good look. Will he let on to Segur, you think?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?” Bill said. “We’re only somebody he drunk beer with. Segur pays him.”

  “What do we do, Bill?” Jim said.

  “Stay put,” Bill said. “I’ll wager there’s a bunch of Segur’s boys headed for the house this minute.”

  “Daddy’ll tell them a tale,” Jim said, “but they won’t believe the first word of it.”

  “No, they won’t,” Bill said, “but they got no quarrel with Daddy. They might stay close by the house for a day or two watching for a sign of us. If we wait them out they’ll get bored and go home.”

  “They’re bound to tell Sheriff Horner about this,” Ike said, referring to the sole lawman in Agnes City.

  “So what if they do?” Bill said. “It’s only Bobby’s word against all ours. We got no worries with the sheriff.”

  “You really think they’ll head on back when they don’t find us at home?” Jim said.

  “They won’t hunt too long for fellas who didn’t get away with even one damn horse,” Bill said. “From now on he’ll put more men on night watch and we’ll keep our business north of Americus. That’s all that’ll come of this.”

  So they stayed put. Later in the day Ike shot a large doe just a few yards into the trees and Jim helped him to drag the carcass into the clearing. They butchered it and roasted it over a low fire and gorged themselves to greasy satisfaction on the backribs and cut the rest into strips for smoking. That night the moon was hidden in thick clouds and Bill rode out alone and far into the open country. He bypassed the first two farms he came upon, regarding them as too near their camp. Ten miles farther on, he came to a ranch where he spied a corral containing several fine horses. Just before dawn he was back in camp with a fine blood bay to replace Jim’s appaloosa. He’d even prowled into the barn and found a saddle for the animal.

  They passed that day and the next telling stories, napping, tending to guns and horses. They bathed in the creek, washed their clothes and hung them to dry on the trees. At daybreak of their third day in hiding, Bill sent Butch Berry to the Anderson farm to see how things stood.

  THE SEGUR PARTY

  He had sobered but little when Mary came running from the springhouse to inform him of the riders. Sprawled in his porch rocker he squinted in bemusement as she stood over him babbling excitedly. Then he heard the hooffalls and looked to where she was pointing, where the trace debouched from the woods, and saw them coming out of the reddening trees of the late afternoon. More than a dozen and most with a rifle in hand.

  He stood up and felt a nudge at his side and there was Josephine with his twinbarreled shotgun. “I checked it’s loaded,” she said low-voiced. Behind her back she held Bill’s fully charged Walker, its massive heft familiar for her shooting lessons with it.

  He held the shotgun crosswise at his thighs like an ax-wielder paused in his labor and watched the riders coming at a trot, every man of them looking sharply about for telltale of lurking ambush. He did not recognize any of them and thought they might be jayhawkers who had found them out for Missourians. Two broke off from the group and hupped their horses to the barn to have a look within.

  Josephine felt Jenny press up close and she cut her eyes to her little sister and whispered, “We ain’t scared even a little bit and don’t you let them think we are.”

  The riders reined up in a loose line in front of the house so each man’s view of the door and windows was unhampered. Their horses blew and stamped nervously. Most of the longarms were Sharps and there were several Texas Colts in evidence among the belt weapons. Every gaze was wary and hard, but Will Anderson saw no killer’s eyes among them. He intuited they were not jayhawkers but a posse of local lawmen and ranchers with a rustling grievance.

  “You be Will Anderson?” The man to speak sat his horse directly before the porch steps. He was lean and gray but not much weathered and wore a closely trimmed mustache.

  “Who’s asking?” The man slipped the barest bit out of focus and Will forced his face to convey alertness, the better to conceal the whiskey haze in his head.

  “John Segur. I own a place south of here, down near Americus. Rustlers tried to cut out some of my horses last night and my men chased after them. Two of my boys got their horses killed. One of them is laying paralyzed in the legs from the fall he took. Bobby here”—he pointed to a young man with an arm splinted and in a sling—“got a look at two of the thieves. One he don’t know but one he does. If you be Will Anderson, the one he knows is your son, the one they call Jim.”

  Segur paused as if he would hear Will Anderson’s protest but Will held silent. He kept his eyes on Segur and his only thought of the moment was that if this man told him either of his sons was dead he would blast him to hell in two halves and damn what came next. Now the men who had gone to the barn rejoined the party and one shook his head at Segur.

  “I guess your boys ain’t home,” Segur said. He fixed a narrow look on the dark open doorway for a moment, then said, “Can you say where they might be?”

  Will Anderson slowly shook his head. He felt the porch sway slightly with the gesture.

  “Texas!” Josephine said. “They been in Texas for weeks and weeks so it wasn’t them.”

  John Segur turned to her. She spat and fixed him with a cold stare. H
is aspect stiffened.

  “I don’t care a damn what reason a man might have for thinking he can steal from me,” he said. He glanced at Mary and she felt herself flush with angry humiliation. His horse tossed its head to shake off a deerfly and he reined it still and patted its neck. “Artie Baker told me he suspicioned your boys were horse thieves and it appears he was right. If they’re still around, you tell them I been to the law and there’s warrants for them. If they got any sense at all they’ll clear out and truly go to Texas or back to goddam Missouri where they come from. That’s all the warning I’ll ever give them.”

  He reined about and hupped his mount forward and his men followed after in a clattering lift of dust. Then they were into the woods and gone.

  Josephine stalked the porch and muttered curses and felt the Walker’s weight in her hand like a mean dog straining at its leash. Mary held Jenny to her. Will Anderson stared into the yellow dust-haze lingering at the edge of the woods. The hoofbeats of the parting horses had faintly quivered the planking under his bootsoles, but even after the riders were gone he felt the trembling yet.

  WHISKEY AND BLOOD

  His night was sleepless. He sat on the porch with the shotgun propped close to hand and a jug on his knee and stared out at the blackness sparking with fireflies. His thoughts caustic and fearful. He told himself to refrain from rash act, that he’d had enough of rashness in his life. To hell with Baker and with Segur too. Yankee sons of bitches didn’t rate notice and never mind their goddam mouths…. Unless they did harm to his sons…If they put the law on his boys…But they’d have to catch them first, and that would be a job…. Nothing mattered but that his sons avoided harm and capture. The family could resettle elsewhere…. Texas…Texas was the place.

  Such were his ponderings in the passing night as he drained one jug and began on another, waiting to be informed if his sons were dead or alive, seized or at large.

  At daybreak Mary came out with a cup of coffee and set it beside his rocker, but when she returned a half-hour later with a tinplate of ham and cornbread the coffee stood cold and untouched.

  “Daddy, eat something.”

  He gave her no notice. She took up the coffee and left the food in its place by his chair and sometime later found the tinplate spotless and knew one of the dogs had been at it. Sometime later, Josie came out to look at him and then went back in the house and told her sisters there was nothing to do but to let him be. They heard the resentment in her tone. A father ought not to get drunk when he was the only man around to protect his daughters.

  Josie had looped a cord through the Walker’s trigger guard and the weapon hung ponderously from her neck like an awful responsibility. Mary was three years her elder but was feeling like a child beside her. The three of them took turns sitting by the front window where they could keep an eye on their father even as they watched the trail at the edge of the woods in hope that their brothers would show up and in fear the Segur men would come back.

  Will Anderson’s bewhiskeyed mind is a whirl of visions to which attach no clarities of thought, although each image is starkly vivid and each in its turn evokes a sovereign sentiment. Now he sees Segur sitting his horse and flanked by his henchmen, again hears him make threat on his boys, and again tastes a bilious resentment through the mash on his tongue. Now he catches sight of Bill and Jim hanging by their necks from a tree in some desolate landscape ruled by crows and again feels his heart flail with fear. He envisions young Martha in the moonlit window of her parents’ house saying yes she will go with him and be married in Saint Louis, and his chest goes hollow as a waiting grave. He once more perceives Arthur Baker courting Mary under the Anderson roof and telling his smiling lies, again sees the man’s letter and its oily mendacities, and again seethes in his injured honor. One vision follows another before his inward eye, round and round and then round again, all through the morning as he takes drink on drink.

  The sun is at its meridian when one of the passing images fixes in his head as suddenly and securely as the bobbling ball falls into a slot on the turning roulette wheel. The vision is of Arthur Baker. Will Anderson sets down his jug and stares hard at the trees beyond the sunbright cornfield but he is seeing only Baker. But for Baker’s lies to Mary she would not be in her misery. But for the injury to her heart, his sons would not have set upon stealing Segur’s horses. But for that rash rustling foray, Bill and Jim would not now be wanted men and in peril of their lives, nor he himself feeling his world spun out of control….

  The force of this besotted epiphany suffices to launch him from his rocker and he totters for an instant at the earth’s wild reel beneath him. Then steadies and grabs up the shotgun and lurches down the steps and rushes staggering to the stable. Mary cries from the window for him to come back. Jenny’s face is wide-eyed and gaping beside hers. Josephine bounds to the door, sensing in her soul some vague but horrible misfortune to come from whatever manic mission he is bent on, some catastrophe to befall them all unless he is stopped right now. In her terror she raises the Walker in a two-hand grip and puts the nub of the front sight on his distancing back and cocks the piece. She hears her sisters shouting at her as she holds the trembling gunsight on him and feels the trigger under her finger. And then he is into the stable and she lowers the revolver and thumbs down the hammer. Her sisters gape on her with horror—then rush to her to hug her tight. They are clutching to each other as his horse bursts from the stable with his heels in its flanks. He heads for Baker’s house with shotgun in hand and no thought at all but that if Segur is there he will kill him too.

  Arthur Baker’s farm lies a mile north of his Santa Fe Trail store and some dozen miles from the Anderson place. On this midday he is in his upstairs den attending to some business papers, pausing now and then to reflect on lovely Clara and his wedding to her just five days hence. Now he hears a pounding of hooves drawing nearer and his curiosity is piqued, for his farm is a placid place where even a galloping horse is a rare excitement. He goes to the window and sees a rider trailing a plume of dust and coming hard down the road. A pair of men digging postholes pause to stare after the horseman in the risen haze. The rider turns off the road and onto the lane to the house and Baker now recognizes Will Anderson and sees the shotgun in his hand—sees him rein up almost directly below his window and slide out of the saddle and lose his footing and go sprawling and one of the shotgun’s barrels discharges its crunching load into the side of the house and Baker feels himself flinch and his breath wedges in his throat.

  Will Anderson scrambles to his feet, snarling and cursing, and lurches out of sight under the porch roof. Near to panic, Baker hastens to the guncase against the wall and takes up a singlebarrel shotgun and checks the load, which almost falls out of the breech for the violent trembling of his hands. He steps into the hallway as a downstairs door crashes hard against a wall in a thunderous shatter of glass. A high shriek from the housekeeper and low cursing from Anderson. Baker’s legs tremulous as he waits at the top of the walled and L-shaped stairway. Anderson’s maledictions louder, his boots stomping on the lower leg of the stairs. He appears on the middle landing with the shotgun at his waist and looks up and his red clenched face loosens in surprise to see Baker standing there with his own shotgun at the shoulder.

  The walls jar with the blast of Baker’s weapon and the compact load of buckshot enters Will Anderson at a point between the left shoulder and the neck and breaks apart the clavicle and several upper ribs and bores through the torso at an angle traversing an assortment of organs including the heart and both lungs and bursts out just above the right hip to splatter a thick mortal portion of him over the wainscoting. Will in a spasm jerks the trigger of the other barrel and detonates a fistsized hole through the landing wall and then his shotgun clatters as he topples backward to sprawl head-down on the lower stairway, his eyes wide but forever done with seeing. Blood rolling from his gaping wounds and sopping his hair and cascading down the steps to shape a bright gleaming pool on the wooden f
loor. All amid the housekeeper’s continuing screams.

  RIDDANCES

  Butch Berry sat his horse and kept hidden at the edge of the woods as he regarded the Anderson house across the open patch of ground this warm and cloudless midday. Smoke swirling from the kitchen chimney. Chickens pecking in the dirt and the pigs snortling in the wallow. Will’s rocker stood empty on the porch. Butch thought the elder Anderson might be sleeping—or passed out, the way the man had been drinking lately.

  He had been riding hard all morning since departing the camp at daybreak and had not yet eaten. He hoped the girls had something tasty simmering in the cookpot. He chucked his horse forward and out of the woods and rode up to the house.

  He hallooed loudly and dismounted at the front porch and slung the reins round a post. As he started up the steps two men came out the door with cocked pistols pointed at him. Another showed himself at the window and held him in his riflesight. Butch Berry stood fast.

  One of the pistolmen ordered him to cross his arms and then took his revolver off his belt and then reached down and removed his bootknife as well. Voices rose up behind and he turned to see a group of men gathered at the door of the barn and looking at him, all of them armed with long guns and one with his pant leg cut open to the knee and showing a bandage above his boot.

  The man who’d disarmed him now prodded him into the house with a pistol muzzle at his spine. In the center of the lamplit room a body lay on planking set across sawhorses. It took Butch Berry a moment to recognize the colorless waxen face as that of Will Anderson, who now bore but a vague resemblance to the living man. His hair looked stiff and mudcaked and then Butch understood that the crusting was dried blood.

  The sisters were seated on the other side of the body and all three staring at Butch—Jenny weeping softly and Mary redeyed and drawn, Josephine tightlipped, her aspect more outraged than bereaved. Moonfaced Sheriff Horner of Agnes City, a man of amiable and fair reputation, sat over coffee with two men at the table on which lay Bill Anderson’s Walker Colt with a cord looped through the trigger guard. One man lean and grayly mustached. The other Arthur Baker, whose eyes could not hide his fear.