Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  They moved on. Advancing upcountry through a midafternoon of wavering heat, they late in the day arrived at Brushy Creek. They checked the line of the lowering sun and agreed that their course had brought them more to westward than they had intended. So they turned east and held to a narrow road along the creek and in a cool hollow of tall cottonwoods and limp black willows.

  At sundown the entire reach of the western sky was a riot of crimson streakings. The trees seemed afire and were clamorous with roosting birds. They spied a thin wavering line of chimney smoke a half-mile to southward and figured it for the Parchman place. They got onto a branching wagontrack off the creek road and followed it through another shadowy hollow. Now there was a stone fence on one side of the track and a rail fence on the other, and then they were out again into the gold light of evening, and there the farm was.

  A short lean man with a bucket of water in each hand was hobbling up from a narrow creek at the bottom of a shallow slope, heading for the house, when the clatter of the coming wagons raised a pair of yowling red hounds on the run from under the porch steps. The man let the buckets drop and he hurried to the house in an awkward half-crippled scurry and snatched up a longrifle from where it leaned against a porch post.

  Bill Anderson reined up. The mules stamped in their traces and laid back their ears at the clamoring closing dogs. Sharply as a quirt snap Bill ordered “Quit!” and the dogs instantly fell mute and nearly tumbled over each other, so abruptly did they arrest their charge. They gawked inquisitively at Bill and offered tentative tailwags. Bill smiled on them and said, “It’s friends, you jughead sons of bitches.” Their tails blurred.

  In front of the house the little man stood with the rifle at his hip. “Who’s there?” he called raspily. “Name yeself!”

  Even at this distance and though the man seemed of more wizened aspect than he showed in his studio portrait of four years earlier, Bill Anderson recognized Angus Parchman. “Say now, Uncle,” he called, “do you intend to put holes in your own wife’s bloodkin?”

  Now a stout gray woman came rushing out the door and down the steps and handed her own rifle to the little man as she passed him by. Aunt Sally with her arms wide, hurrying to them and weeping in her joy, saying “I know you! I know you!”

  AT THE PARCHMAN FARM

  She did in fact know much about them, all of it by way of correspondence with their mother over the years. She had always been avid for news about her nephews and nieces, and in her letters Martha had always reported their doings and misdeeds. “I could’ve described all of you to a hair before ever I set eyes on you,” Aunt Sally said at the supper table that first night. “Mattie loved telling me what you looked as you were growing up.”

  They had never before heard their mother called Mattie. The sobriquet conjured visions of her as a young girl who had not yet even imagined her children to come.

  Sally Parchman smiled at the Berry brothers. “She mentioned you boys now and then. I knew you on sight by that buttermilk hair, Ike Berry. And you, young Butch…well, I recognized you right off too.”

  Butch redfaced and nodding. He knew what she meant but was too polite to say. She’d known him by his wayward eye.

  When she received Mary’s letter last month telling her of Martha’s death she had wept through the night. She’d written in response but was not now surprised to learn Mary never got the letter.

  “It’s a wonder your letter made it to the Raytown postmaster,” Aunt Sally said. “Hardly any mail ever gets through along the border anymore, what with one wildbunch or another robbing the carriers all the time.”

  Bill Anderson recounted to his aunt and uncle the circumstances of his father’s death. As he told of Baker’s jilting of her, Mary’s face reddened and Aunt Sally reached over and patted her hand in sympathy. He told of their failed try at rustling Segur’s horses as redress, but he did not reveal that it wasn’t their first essay at horse theft—and neither did any of the others volunteer this information to the Parchmans. He concluded with an explanation of the bargain he’d made with the sheriff in order to retrieve his father’s body and collect his sisters.

  Uncle Angus cursed all Kansans for low bastards. He said he meant no disrespect to their father’s memory, but a man seeking after requital was making a bad mistake to try to get it when he was drunk and a double bad mistake to try to settle things on the other fella’s property, where the other fella had all the advantage. “I guess he wouldn’t of done it that way if he hadn’t been bad drunk to start with,” Angus said sadly. “Being bad drunk is the mother of wrong ideas.” His tone suggested personal acquaintance with this truth.

  Bill Anderson said he didn’t doubt his daddy would agree with him. He said he hoped they weren’t imposing themselves on the Parchmans by coming to them without notice. Uncle Angus waved a dismissive hand and Aunt Sally said of course they weren’t. “Good lord, boy,” she said, “you’re family. All of you got a home here for as long as you want it—and I mean you Berry boys too.”

  The Parchmans were childless, although they had produced two children, the first a girl named Delia, the second a boy called Bellamy who was born dead. Their graves lay side by side in the shaded earth of a maple stand behind the barn. After she delivered Bellamy, Sally went barren, a turn made the worse by little Delia’s death at age four.

  “She got took by the Saint Vitus dance,” Aunt Sally said. “She laid in bed for three days, burning up and twitching all over and crying with the pain until finally her little heart just quit. These twenty-four years now it’s been just me and the mister.”

  The mister himself faring none too well. Returning home on the Raytown Road one afternoon last winter, Angus Parchman had been set upon by a band of jayhawkers led by none other than tall-capped Doc Jennison. The little redbeard had demanded to know Angus’ allegiance, but would not accept his sworn word that he was a loyal Union man. He said the fine for telling a lie to an agent of the Federal government was one horse and saddle and ordered him to dismount and hand the reins over. Angus protested and Jennison didn’t say another word, he just pulled a pistol and shot him in the chest. Angus would forever remember the ball’s breathtaking punch and the sudden tilt of the sky. Next thing he knew, he was lying bootless in the bed of a wagon and being driven to a Raytown doctor by a family who had found him left for dead in the road. He’d been shot in the chest and in the knee—he’d not even been aware of receiving the second wound—and he was weeks in recovering sufficiently to get back on his feet. But he would evermore limp and his lungs had since been prone to chronic inflammations that made hard labor of breathing. Sometimes the infections were so severe he would nearly drown in his own mucus.

  “Jennison was right about me lying, of course,” Uncle Angus said in his wet rasp. “I ain’t no more a Union man than that red hound yonder. I’ve hated hawkers from the start, I’ll have you know, but truth to tell, all I wanted was to stay clear of the whole thing if I could. Then I run into Jennison and he sure enough made a true believer out of me—made me truly believe I’d like to see every last jayhawker dead and him the deadest one.”

  “You still staying clear of it, Uncle?” Jim Anderson said. “Or have you maybe got into it some kind of way?”

  Aunt Sally cleared her throat loudly even as she held her attention on her supper and Angus glanced at her and then looked at each of the men in turn, as if he had something more on his mind but was unsure if he should say it. Then said: “I think you boys ought to give close thought to something before you decide to stay here with us. Might make a diff—” He was abruptly beset by a fit of coughing that raised the veins of his neck and darkened his face and filled his eyes with tears.

  The fit passed but left him gasping and hawking bloody sputum into a bowl at hand for just that purpose. Aunt Sally said, “You rest yourself, Angus.”

  Their farm was so far from the main road and so deep in the bush, Aunt Sally said, that they had never yet been visited by Union forces. But that didn’t
mean it couldn’t happen tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. Jayhawkers and militia and Federal troops were constantly scouring the region in search of guerrillas. “This is your home if you want it to be,” she said. “You boys can stack another pair of bunks atop the two already in the kitchen and the girls can put pallets in the loft above our room. But you ought to know it can get mean if the Unions come by. You have your sisters to think of.”

  “Your sisters, that’s right,” Uncle Angus said breathlessly. “Can be awful mean country. Just look how it’s done me.”

  “Well sir,” Bill Anderson said, “it was jayhawkers killed the Berry boys’ daddy and it was a son of a bitch protected by Kansas vigilantes that killed ours. Pardon my language, Aunt Sally. What I mean is, I guess we know something about how it can get mean.”

  The three sisters nodded to assure their aunt and uncle that they too knew about meanness.

  “I guess you do at that,” Uncle Angus said. “So I’ll just say welcome to home, all you.”

  In the months since Uncle Angus’ maiming, the farm had fallen into disrepair and now the Anderson and Berry brothers applied themselves to replacing fallen fence sections and the railings on the corral, to reshingling the barn roof and restoring to soundness the hog pen, the corn crib, the henhouse and its run, the springhouse. They rebuilt the jakes. They baled hay, gathered ready corn, plowed the fields, completed construction of the smokehouse their uncle had begun. The Anderson girls were also a boon to the place—so many able female hands made short work of domestic chores, and the men were fed plenty and well. The daily dinner was a sumptuous affair.

  The Anderson and Berry boys were all now cultivating mustaches. The first time Josephine sneaked a kiss with Bill since he’d begun to grow his, she joked about the feel of it. “It’ll take some getting used to,” she said. He leered melodramatically and affected to twirl its ends, and she laughed and kissed him again.

  On several occasions—sometimes in the bright light of day, sometimes in the night’s deep hours—they heard shooting, each time near enough to make them pause at their labor or at their meal or sit up in their beds and listen hard for notice of danger closing on them. But it never did.

  “You see the meanness?” Uncle Angus said one day when they spied a distant smoke spiral. “Two families we used to know just yonder of the creek woods got burned out in the past year. Jayhawkers got one and the state militia the other. Now there’s another put to the torch.”

  “How come they burned them out?” Butch Berry said. “Were they helping bushwhackers?”

  “That’s what was said,” Uncle Angus said. “That’s what the Feds always say.” He spat and turned back to work, ending the conversation.

  In their first days on the farm, all the young men had at one time or another raised the subject of Quantrill, but neither Uncle Angus nor Aunt Sally showed any interest in discussing him. The brothers believed the Parchmans knew more about the bushwhackers than they were letting on, but if the old couple did not want to speak of it, there was nothing to do but be polite and respect their wishes.

  They’d been at the farm nearly two months when they told Uncle Angus they would be going away for a time. The supper meal was done with and the girls were in the house, helping Aunt Sally with her spinning and sewing, the men out on the porch, a jug making the round.

  “The farm’s in good order now and you’ll have the girls to help you keep it up,” Bill Anderson told his uncle. “Jim and me are obliged to you for giving them a home. It’s a comfort to us to know they’ll be with you till we get back. Could be we’ll be back directly, could be a while longer, all depends.”

  Angus’ face made no secret of his surprise. “Well, you’ll pardon me for asking, but where all are you going?”

  “We figure it’s better we don’t say,” Bill said. “That way, nobody can ever hold you to any part of it.”

  “Oh horseshit!” the old man said. His gaze narrowed. He glanced at the open window and then said in lowered voice, “It’s that Kansas business, ain’t it?”

  The Andersons and Berrys traded looks and then all of them grinned at Uncle Angus. “We ain’t told our sisters nor Aunt Sally exactly where we’re going either,” Bill said, “but I guess they probably got as good a notion as you.”

  “Well, you boys got to do what you got to do and I’ll not ask ye anymore about it,” Uncle Angus said. He coughed hard, hawked, spat over the railing. “Just don’t think you fool me. I know none of you cares even a little bit for farming, and if it wasn’t this Kansas business taking you away it’d just be something else.” He hacked hard and spat again. “Hell, I never liked farming neither—that’s exactly why I spent the years I did driving a stagecoach. You know, I used to be sorry I hadn’t gone to fight the Mexicans, and I’d be lying if I said I still wasn’t. Now we got this new war, and I mean to tell you, if I wasn’t so stove up nor so damn married—” He was taken with a fit of coughing so intense it seemed to them all he might pitch out of his chair. Gradually the fit subsided and he was left gasping and wiping at his tearful eyes. “Ah hell, it’s what I get for flapping my mouth so much.” He took a long drink.

  “You know, boys, I believe if Uncle Angus was a younger man he’d be riding with some wildwood bunch this minute,” Butch Berry said.

  “Hell, he’d be riding at Quantrill’s right hand,” Jim Anderson said.

  “You all saying it, not me,” Angus said, grinning in the weak light.

  They sat on the porch a while longer and said little else. They drank and stared out at the darkness and listened to the steady drone of insects, the rustle and swoop of owls hunting in the near woods, the sudden quick cries of prey caught up and carried off in the night.

  Before dawn they had their mounts saddled and ready. The women had prepared small bundles of food and the men tucked these into their saddle wallets. They shook hands with Uncle Angus and then hugged Aunt Sally and each of the girls in turn. Butch stood before Josephine an awkward moment before smiling wryly and showing her his palms in a slack invitation to hug that expected rejection. She stopped his breath when she stepped into his arms and even deigned to put her hands lightly to his back. “You watch after my brothers good, you hear?” she said.

  “I promise,” he whispered. His voice tight at the feel of her, his heart jumping at being asked to do something for her. He wished she’d ask for more, wished she’d ask him to bring her the man’s ears, his balls, anything she wanted.

  “Go on, boy,” she said, patting his back and stepping away. He tipped his hat and went to his horse.

  Then she was clinging hard to Bill’s neck and whispering in his ear, “I could go with you. I can ride, I can shoot—you know I can, you taught me.”

  He held her and stroked her hair, spoke in low voice that none else could hear. “Your sisters need you to keep them brave.”

  “I know it’s true but it feels like a trick to keep me here,” she said. “Will you be back soon?”

  “Soon as we can.” He felt her tremble under his hands. “If you cry now, I’ll be disappointed.”

  “I don’t cry,” she said, stepping back so he could see her tearless eyes.

  He stroked her cheek, then turned and mounted up. She blew him a kiss and he smiled and winked. Then hupped his horse away and the others followed after him.

  LEX TALIONIS

  They rode out of Missouri and into Kansas, staying well south of the Santa Fe, traveling by routes remote and roundabout. They at vari ous times saw raised clouds of dust in the distance but could not have said if they were looking on troop detachments or wagon trains, bands of vigilantes or spiraling dust devils come together in the vagaries of the summer wind. Their nightfires leaned and swirled in the prairie breeze. The high and fattening moon paled the luster of the proximate stars but the lower skies sparkled in a rich stellar spill. The orange sun rose at their backs and they rode after their quartet of elongate shadows to overcome them at noon and then play them out behind as
the day drew down to reddening eve.

  On their fourth morning in the saddle a brown cloud rose off the distant southern expanse and gained height and breadth as it closed on them. They covered their lower faces with bandannas against the storm but the dust whipped under their hatbrims and burned into their eyes. The horses shrilled into the wind. The world grew enmurked in a rushing tide of dust that blurred visibility to a few yards around and rendered their figures ghostly. The noon sun was an umber wafer in the hazed sky. The storm persisted into the late afternoon and then suddenly quit. The dust fell away and the prairie once more rolled out to its horizons and the sun was restored to incandescence in a clear and blue-pink firmament. But Butch Berry’s mount was gone blind in one eye and all the horses were in bad temper the rest of the day. For hours thereafter the men were coughing, and even after they crossed the Dragoon River at sundown and made camp for the night, they were still spitting mud.

  The following day found them in a vast field of sunflowers as tall as the horses’ chests and the party looked like four small ships with equine figureheads making way through a saffron sea. They struck the Marais des Cygnes that afternoon near the Lyon County line and followed the river upstream past a hamlet of name unknown to them and that evening crossed the Santa Fe Trail in the light of the moon and camped in a grove of cottonwoods.

  At daybreak they set off into the woodlands west of the river, pacing themselves so they would not arrive at their destination before sundown. A pearl moon round and low against the blue sky in the west. They held to a wagontrace that would pass them north of Agnes City. They reined up to watch hawks hunting on the grassland, and then again to study the cumulus clouds and tell each other the things they saw in the altering shape of them. In the late forenoon they turned off the trace and made their way through the trees so the Anderson brothers could have a true last look at their home of former days when their parents were yet alive, days not three months past but feeling to the brothers as distant history. They sat their horses at the edge of the still woods and saw smoke rising in a straight line from the kitchen chimney, watched a man in red long-handle sleeves and suspenders working at splitting logs, his grunts and the whunks of the ax mingling with the steady crying of a baby from within the house. They watched unseen and wordless and after a time reined around and returned to the trace and resumed their westward progress.