Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  “The animal have a brand?” Bill Anderson said.

  “H with a P pressed to it,” the sheriff said.

  “You can see that’s exactly what this was,” Cyrus the redhead said, pointing at the gray’s haunch, “before somebody tried to make it look like a double B. Jackleg piece of work, you ask me.”

  “Look here, Sheriff,” Bill Anderson said, “I got a herd of cows a mile south I got to get to Kansas City. I don’t have time to waste. Henry here’s been with the outfit about six months and I haven’t known him for a thief yet.” He turned to Ike Berry. “Tell me true, Henry, you steal that horse?”

  “Hell no,” Ike Berry said. “That badface peckerwood is crazy. I bought the horse off a fella in Emporia three months ago.”

  The redhead spat and scowled. “I’ll just bet you did. If you ain’t a Missouri horsethief I’ll kiss your ass.”

  “You can kiss my ass anyhow, you ugly sonof—”

  “Hush up!” the sheriff said. “Both you.”

  The word “horsethief” went muttering through the spectators and there came a clear utterance of “pukes.”

  The sheriff glared at the onlookers. “You people get on about your business.” The assembly retreated a small distance in both directions but did not disperse.

  “I guess you got a bill of sale,” the sheriff said.

  “Damn sure do,” Ike Berry said. “It’s with my possibles at the cow camp. I’ll just go and get it.”

  The sheriff told him to stand fast. Ike sighed hard and shook his head in the manner of one sorely burdened by unfair accusation. The sheriff peered down the street and said, “What’s taking that fool so long to get Porter? I can’t give him the simplest damn job—”

  “Tell you what, Sheriff,” Bill Anderson said, stepping off the sidewalk and taking his horse’s reins from the hitch post. “I’ll go get that bill of sale myself and we’ll get this done with.” He stepped up onto the saddle and said to Ike Berry, “You best be telling the truth, Henry. I don’t find that bill in your possibles I’ll know you for the horsethief they’re saying you are.”

  “It’s there,” Ike Berry said. “I ain’t no damn rustler.”

  “And you boys,” Bill Anderson said, pointing at his brother and Butch Berry. “Who gave you leave to stand around here admiring the ladies? I want you back with the herd right now.”

  Some of the onlookers chuckled at Jim Anderson’s and Butch Berry’s looks of disappointment as they stepped down off the sidewalk and mounted up.

  “I’ll have your man over at the jail,” the sheriff said. He pointed down the street. “Just around the corner there.”

  Bill Anderson unholstered and cocked a Navy and pointed it at the sheriff’s face and said, “I’ll have him now.”

  Mouths came open—and Jim leaned down and grabbed the shotgun from the startled deputy. Ike laughed and hopped off the sidewalk, snatched away his reins and stepped up onto the gray. Butch held a revolver on the others and said, “Turn loose of them, boys—now!” Three of the deputies let their guns fall—but the redhaired deputy jerked up his pistol and fired at Bill Anderson and passed a ball through his hatbrim. Butch shot the redhead in the face and the man sat down hard on the sidewalk with a black hole under his eye and a look of profound astonishment and Bill shot him above the same eye and he pitched onto his back like he’d been yanked by the collar.

  The onlookers scattered amid women’s shrieks and the shrilling of horses lunging against their posted reins and the patrons gathered behind Coogan’s big window ducked out of sight. The deputy called Junior fired twice at Ike Berry and both times hit his horse and Ike managed to jump clear as the gray buckled under him with a rasping grunt. Jim Anderson discharged both shotgun barrels and the buckshot stripped Junior’s lower leg to the shinbone and ricocheted off the sidewalk in a spray and shattered Coogan’s window and a falling shard gashed the arm of a woman crouched inside. Sidestepping the frighted horses, the sheriff saw Butch Berry loom before him and shot him in the side. Butch clutched hard to his saddlehorn as Ike shot the sheriff in the arm and in the hip and the man went down. Ike grabbed the reins of a tall buckskin and swung up into the saddle and Bill yelled “Go!” and they put heels to their mounts and sprinted away in a hammering of hooves and flying dirtclods.

  They pounded like racers past an encamped wagon train just outside of town and every settler’s face was agape in the billow of their trailing dust. They rode at full stride until they were miles from the town, then reined up on an open rise and stared hard behind them but saw no sign of chasers. Each saw on the others’ faces his own wild grin.

  “You holding all right?” Bill Anderson asked Butch.

  Butch took his bloody hand from his side and considered his wound. He nodded.

  “Then let’s move,” Bill said.

  A DECISION

  They rode through the rest of the afternoon and into the rising dusk and made camp alongside a creek in a dense wood. They could not have said whether they were in Kansas or Missouri. They’d shot a pair of rabbits and dressed and split them, and the four halves were now roasting on spits over a wavering fire, juices dripping and hissing.

  Butch Berry sat shirtless with his back against an oak trunk and his bloody side to the light of the fire, Ike and the Andersons squatting beside him. The round had only scraped his ribs, and the wound looked more like a nasty cut than something done by a bullet. Ike was the best of them with needle and thread and he set to sewing up his brother.

  “You were lucky,” Jim said. “Couple of inches over and it might’ve been serious.”

  “If I was lucky,” Butch said, “it would’ve missed me.”

  As Butch endured his brother’s rude surgery with grit teeth and low profanities, Bill said he wasn’t sure if they should return straightaway to the Parchman farm. “I mean, what if there’s trackers coming behind? We got Aunt Sally and the girls to consider.”

  “That’s right,” Jim Anderson said. “We don’t want to lead some posse to the farm and them think it’s a haven for outlaws. Kansas sonsofbitches would fire the place in a minute.”

  Ike paused in his stitchwork. “I’m with you boys,” he said. “I say we keep a distance from the farm for a time.”

  “So where do we lay up?” Jim said. “We can’t stay here for long. It’s Union men patrolling all up and down this border.”

  “Ain’t you boys always said we’d get a fair welcome in Ray County?” Bill Anderson said to Ike.

  “Damn right,” Ike said. “We had plenty of good neighbors back there. We won’t ever lack for a full plate of dinner nor a dry place to sleep.”

  “Let’s do it,” Jim said. “Only let’s make a stop in Kansas City. They say that town’s got sporting ladies to make Helen of Troy look like a mangy dog.”

  “All right, then,” Bill said. “Ray County it is—by way of Kansas City.”

  Ike resumed his surgery and Butch took up his muttered cursings. In truth, none of them was eager to get back to a life of farming, not even Butch, whose reveries entailed vague wooings of Josephine on his return to the Parchman place.

  Bill uncorked the jug and took a pull. He passed the whiskey to Jim, who had a drink and then held the jug out to Ike, who again left off from his sewing. “You know,” Ike said, “I was just wondering if I did in that sheriff. I hit him twice but I don’t believe I hit him mortal.”

  “No question we did in the badface,” Bill said. He took off his hat and poked a finger through the hole in the brim. “I want you all to look here what that jackleg did to my hat.”

  “I know I made a cripple of that one deputy,” Jim said.

  “Maybe the sheriff bled to death,” Ike said. “You reckon?” He took a drink and passed the jug to Bill.

  “You all don’t quit this gabbing and give some attention here,” Butch Berry said, “I’m like to bleed to death. And how about letting the only wounded man here have a pull off that damn jug.”

  Ike Berry affected to harken to so
me distant sound. “You boys hear something? Like some naggy woman at complaining?”

  Bill Anderson smiled and cupped a hand to his ear. “More like a baby mewling, I’d say.”

  “I don’t know,” Jim Anderson said. He cocked his head in an attitude of hard listening. “Sounded to me like some little girl crying. Maybe skinned her knee, something like that.”

  “You sorry sonofabitches, all you,” Butch Berry said. And grimaced with the pain of joining in their laughter.

  KANSAS CITY

  They rode into Kansas City on a night of sodden rain. Its official name was City of Kansas and would remain so for another twenty-seven years, but even now everyone called it Kansas City.

  The enclouded sky looked like violet smoke in every shimmer of haze lighting. The rain had fallen steadily through the day but was now eased to a drizzle. Federal soldiers everywhere in black slickers, horsed and afoot, resembling conjured shades bound for dire and dark appointments. The wagon traffic heavy despite the inclement weather, muleteers cracking whips and cursing at teams lunging against loads bogged in the mud. Blazing yellow doorways of saloons and bawdy houses open wide and issuing a cacophony of music into the night. Strains of piano and fiddle and banjo, songs abused at a bellow. Laughter of every sort—high and happy, hoarse and lewd, shrill and near to demented.

  They trotted past a clutch of onlookers withstanding the weather to witness a pair of men grappling clumsily in the mud and cursing in gasps, vowing each to kill the other, though neither man was sober enough to stand unassisted or armed with more than bare hands and bad intention.

  They stalled their horses in a livery and gave the boy instructions to feed the animals and rub them down. As they slogged across the street toward the nearest saloon they were hailed by a pair of cajoling young women leaning out of a brightly lighted second-floor window. The girls wore ribbons in their hair and lip paint bright as blood and yellow pantalettes of thin cotton that clung to their haunches like fruitskin and they wore nothing else. They held one hand to their breasts and blew red kisses at them with the other. Ike Berry waved vigorously in return and slung kisses back with both hands. The girls laughed and turned around and waggled their bottoms at them and withdrew into the room.

  “Sweet baby Jesus,” Ike said. “I believe I’m in love.”

  The din pressed on them like a thing of substance as they shouldered through the crowd and up to the bar. Men conversing in yells, greeting each other in hollers, bellowing profanities in earnest and in jest. There were two pianos, one to either side of the room, each playing at full volume and each a different tune. A half-dozen young women in uplifted ruffled skirts were bouncing about on a small stage in rude and risqué semblance of French-dancing, singing with no hope of harmony to an audience whooping its admiration and lobbing coins onto the stage in proof of it. The air of the place was humid and hot as breath, woven with the smells of smoke and whiskey and lamp oil, of men long between baths, of perfumes and powders and pomades.

  They stood drinking and admiring the huge gilt-framed copy of The Rape of the Sabine Women hung above the backbar mirror. They pointed out to each other various of the painting’s notable qualities—mostly pertaining to its bounty of female nakedness. When they had exhausted their store of art criticism, they stood with their backs against the counter so they could study the room.

  They drank, sang along to the piano tunes, pitched coins to the dancers. A half-hour later each of them went upstairs with a whore. When they reconvened at the bar, Ike and Jim were manic with delight and couldn’t stop talking about the goodlooking cyprians they’d sported with. Bill said his girl had lacked a proper enthusiasm, but this failing had been somewhat offset by her breasts, as lovely as any he’d ever known. “All in all,” he said, “if she gave me back one of my two dollars and I gave her a feather up the ass, we’d both be tickled.”

  Asked about his girl, Butch shrugged and said she was all right but nothing special. The others traded looks and smiled in their sad knowledge that he was in love, a sore affliction that can imprison a man in thoughts of the beloved and make dull for him all readier pleasures, a condition the more vastly pitiful when a man’s love was unrequited, which they knew his to be.

  They moved on to other establishments. At the saloon next door they had a drink and then another just to be sure the first one did its duty. Then to another emporium, and then another, and they took a drink at every saloon they entered and tapped their feet to the music of piano or fiddle or a string band entire. In every place they went they called for favorite tunes, Ike exhorting for renditions of “Darlin Corey,” Jim Anderson for “Shady Grove.” In this manner did they work their way down one side of the street and back up the other.

  They took rooms in a hotel that night, and in the morning had a breakfast of beefsteak and eggs in a raucous restaurant full of teamsters and roustabouts and Union soldiers. Then the Berry boys and Jim Anderson went off to the docks to look at the steamboats and watch the passengers boarding and debarking, and Bill went in search of a bookstore. He inquired of a storekeeper on Grand Avenue who was sweeping the walkway fronting his establishment and the man directed him to a place called The Bookworm, just around the corner. Every wall of the store was covered with shelves from floor to ceiling and every shelf was spilling with books.

  As he browsed, other customers came and went, almost all of them women and all of them piqued by the rough aspect of this lean and handsome presence whose muskiness pervaded the room and whose idle glances their way sent their own eyes blindly scampering over the stacked titles before them. He settled on a collection of Poe’s tales. At the front desk, the aged and bespectacled proprietor with skin the color of watery milk consulted the inside of the front cover for the book’s penciled price. “Strange fella, this one,” he said.

  Bill jutted his chin at the book lying open in front of the man and said, “What about him?”

  It was a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. “He’s another,” the old man said, and they both laughed. He went out with both volumes under his arm.

  A FERRY CROSSING

  The next day they moved on, following the river road to eastward along the top of a low pale bluff. The caramel-brown Missouri was in full view below them, gently rippled and a hundred yards wide at this stretch. The high ground gradually declined and some miles farther on they spied a ferry landing and whooped at their good timing—the ferry was on the near side of the river and taking on passengers. They paid a dollar apiece to hup their horses aboard in a clattering of hooves and join three other horsemen and a family with a wagon and a two-mule team. The vessel was a capacious log-and-plank construction and was operated by a heavy-muscled man in a sleeveless yellow duster, assisted by his wife and a pair of strapping sons both in their early teens. As soon as they were aboard, one of the boys set the stern rail in place and cast off the mooring ropes and the family went to work with the push poles.

  The current along this stretch was slow but strong enough that the family crew had to pole at an upriver angle to compensate for it. The Andersons and Berrys patted their nervous horses and whispered to them. Up close the river was even darker brown than it had looked from the bluff. It smelled of raw earth and rotted vegetation. One of the passengers, an old man holding to the bridle of a horse as gray as his beard, remarked that Big Muddy was sure the right name for it.

  “Like they say,” a horseman in a well-tailored suit of white linen remarked, “it’s too thick to swim in but not enough to walk on.”

  The family consisted of a man and wife, their fourteen-year-old son and two small children. The man was explaining to the ferryman that they were bound for Iowa. The marauding along the border was worse than ever, he said, and they’d had the ill fortune of living on a farm hard by a favorite route of the guerrillas. The wildwood boys had time and again cleaned them out of everything there was to eat, and finally the man and his family could endure it no longer and so they would spend the rest of the war at their cousins�
� farm near Ottumwa.

  “Ye can count yourself lucky if all they done was steal your food and if it was only bushwhackers to come down on ye,” the third horseman said. He wore a black wool cap and a much stained tan coat. An ulcerous red sore the size of a silver dollar ate into his cheek just above his mustache. “A party of bushwhackers showed up at my uncle’s farm in Cass County and said they needed his wagon, and when he tried to stop them from taking it they shot him in the leg. Not two weeks later, a party of jayhawkers—jayhawkers, mind! Unionists!—come along and stole every animal on the place. My uncle kept telling them he was Union but them hawkers called him a puke liar and come yay close to hanging him.”

  “Damn well what he deserved,” said the old man. “Union trash is all the same, be it jayhawk, bluebelly or dumbshit farmer.”

  The blackcapped man gawked at him—then started toward him. “Why, you secesh son of a bitch…”

  The old man hopped back and stooped and snatched a knife from his boottop.

  “Stand fast!” From under his duster the ferryman produced what for an instant seemed a pistol of gross proportions—and then clarified itself as a two-barreled shotgun, each muzzle as round as a shot glass, the barrel sawed off not twelve inches from the breech and the stock cut down to a pistol grip. Not a man on board was ignorant of the weapon’s capacity to clear most of them from the deck with one yank on its triggers. The ferryman held his push pole in his other hand, but without his effort joined to theirs the rest of the family had to labor harder to try to keep on course for the opposite landing.

  “Put up that cutter,” the ferryman said. The old man took a moment to further consider the gaping muzzles of the shotgun, then shrugged and slipped the blade back into his boot.

  “I don’t care a damn who’s a niggerlover and who’s secesh but I won’t stand for fighting on my vessel,” the ferryman said, looking from the graybeard to the Unionist. “You want to fight, wait till you’re on the other side or I’ll put you off right here in the river.”