Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  He ordered the old man to take his horse to the rear of the ferry and told the Unionist to position himself at the front. He returned the shotgun to whatever holstery he’d arranged under the duster, then renewed his poling and the ferry began to recover the distance it had lost to the current. He glanced now and again at the antagonists to be sure they kept apart.

  “Hoo,” Ike Berry said with a grin. “Thought for a minute we’d have us an entertainment.”

  They were standing at the starboard rail and still joking quietly about the near fight when the water alongside them broke with a splash and showed a passing of something pale gray before closing up brown again.

  Butch Berry pointed. “You all see that?”

  “Catfish,” Bill Anderson said. “Looked good size.”

  “They say there’s some cats in this river bigger then me,” Ike Berry said. “Butch caught one in the Crooked River one time weighed onto eighty pounds, but it was a baby compared to what they say’s in here.”

  “You ain’t telling us a thing we don’t know,” Jim Anderson said. “Back before we moved to Kansas, Daddy and us saw a catfish they caught over in Glasgow that weighed three hundred pounds if it weighed an ounce. Whiskers on it like ropes. They hung it up on the dock and sawed its belly open and all manner of things came out. Some animal—maybe a dog, maybe a coon—it was hard to say because it was mostly digested by then, but I ain’t ever forgot the smell. There was a hat in there. A tin cup. There was a saddle stirrup with the strap still on it. Remember that fish, Billy?”

  “It wouldn’t have surprised me to see the rest of the saddle fall out of that thing’s stomach,” Bill Anderson said. “The rest of the horse.”

  They debarked into Clay County—the graybeard, the last to come off the ferry and spitting at the sight of the blackcapped man already well down the road—and an hour later arrived at the town of Liberty. The western sky was reefed with clouds afire at their core. They went into a restaurant and took a supper of cabbage and ham and then rode on again. They kept to the road in the gathering twilight until just before nightfall and then turned off onto a wagontrace flaring with fireflies and rode a quarter-mile farther and made their camp in a clearing. The air was softly fragrant of the day’s warmed grass.

  They raised a large fire and settled themselves around it. Bill Anderson got out the volume of sonnets and selected one at random. “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’” he began. But the Berry boys were unfamiliar with Shakespeare and his language, and Jim had never been partial to the Bard despite his mother’s insistence on his glory, and by the time Bill arrived at the closing couplet—“‘So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’”—Ike was hissing and Jim was calling for the hook. Later and privately, Butch would confess to Bill that he hadn’t understood all of the poem but he liked it anyway, don’t ask him why.

  “You and me, Butch,” Bill would tell him with a grin, “we got the true poetry in our souls. Our jughead brothers got nothing in theirs but stringband music.”

  Ike insisted that Bill read something with a damn story to it, by Jesus. So Bill opened the Poe collection and leafed through its pages, scanning the opening lines of each tale in search of the one most promising. The night around them had drawn closer, the shadows gone deeper. An owl made hollow calls in the high darkness.

  Bill settled on a tale, took a sip of whiskey to lubricate his tongue, and began to read, captivating his audience with the very first sentence:

  “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge….”

  RAY COUNTY SOJOURN

  They rode the next day through thickly wooded country yielding sporadically to grassy prairie redolent of dog fennel, meadows brightly white with Queen Anne’s lace. That afternoon the clouds grew thick and dark and came together in a high purple roil that spread across the sky and swallowed the sun and then loosed a hard windless rain to soak them in minutes and turn the ground to sucking mud. The rain ceased before sundown and they dried their clothes that night by the heat of a crackling fire billowing smoke for the wetness of the wood.

  The next day they arrived at the Berrys’ former home, a farm a few miles south of Burns Hollow. They took dinner with the Crashaws, the people who had bought the place from Alston Berry and who greeted the Berry boys like their own homecome sons. When the Crashaws heard of Alston’s hard death at the hands of the jayhawkers, the woman wept and the husband’s face drooped. “I never been one to say to nobody I told ye so,” Mr. Crashaw said, “but I told Alston it were a bad mistake to go to that damn Kansas.”

  They slept in the barn that night and then the next day politely took their leave, claiming they had various other families to visit. The truth was that they would have felt obliged to lend a hand with chores if they’d stayed with the Crashaws any longer than one day—and farm work was what they sought to avoid for a while. They made a comfortable camp for themselves on the Crooked River in the woods about a half-mile from town.

  There was a dance in the public square the following night. The Berrys had been popular boys and their old neighbors were glad to see them. The brothers were obliged time and again to tell of their father’s killing and of the vengeance they had exacted, to inform of their mother and sisters having gone away to Arkansas. Every recounting of Alston Berry’s murder roused in their listeners a new round of imprecations toward all Kansans in general and the damned jayhawkers especially—and prompted yet more backslaps and proffered jugs in admiration of the way the Berry boys had settled the account.

  Ike and Butch introduced the Andersons all around. With so many of the town’s able men gone to soldiers, there were plenty of unattached women to notice the handsome strangers, and in the course of the evening Bill and Jim danced with them all. They reeled and waltzed and squaredanced, the fiddlers sawing and grinning as the caller sang out his commands:

  Haint been drunk since away last fall,

  swing your partner and promenade the hall!

  Promenade eight till you get straight,

  swing that gal like you’re swinging on a gate!

  The question of whether they would return to work their uncle’s farm or join the army was sometimes posed discreetly by men who offered them a jug, and sometimes more directly by the girls they danced with. It was a matter the four had discussed among themselves, and their unanimous inclination was neither toward farming nor soldiering but for renewing their rustling enterprise. It would not do, of course, to make public this ambition, and so their ready answer was that they had come to Burns Hollow to report the news of the Berry family and as soon as Ike and Butch were done with visiting old neighbors they were all four off to enlist in Sterling Price’s Missouri Brigade. The venerable name of Old Pap had the expected effect of making the men nod with satisfaction and brightening every girl’s eyes.

  Over the next weeks the Andersons attended still more dances. They called on young women and sipped lemonade with them on front porch swings. They went on picnics in the company of one or another pair of pretty sisters, sometimes accompanied by the Berry boys and their own fetching companions. As his ladyfriend peeled a boiled egg for him in the shade of a maple one fine afternoon, Ike Berry kissed her ear and made her giggle and blush and slap at him playfully. Ike winked at the others and said, “Now don’t this just beat purple hell out of pushing a plow?”

  When they were not dallying with girls, the Andersons and Berrys were often fishing on the banks of the Crooked River or sitting in the taverns, drinking and playing cards, chatting with the locals. They always fished from the same spot on the river where the Berrys had caught the monstrous catfish they’d told of. They would set out the baited lines and lie down in the shade of the trees and pass a jug around and tell each other that life was a pleasant enough arrangement for men who knew how to deal with it. On their best day they caught nine catfish but were agreed that the biggest of them
would not have scaled much above thirty pounds. Ike and Butch could only mutter in embarrassment. “Biggest ones must’ve all been caught while we were away in Kansas,” Butch said.

  The tavern talk was chiefly of the war and the region’s good fortune to date. No local farm had suffered much beyond losing some of its stock to a few raiding redlegs and to thieving squads of passing militia. No one had yet been murdered, praise Jesus, although in the instance of stealing Walter Finley’s horses a redleg bunch had clubbed him down with riflebutts when he protested the theft and Walter’s wit had been somewhat dulled ever since.

  One night after a dance, Bill and Jim offered to take a pair of blonde sisters home on horseback by the light of a low full moon. The girls swore to secrecy the giggling friends they’d come with in a wagon and then swung up behind the Andersons on their mounts. They hardly protested when Bill and Jim suggested they stop by the riverside and enjoy the sweet night. At a distance from each other, the couples spread blankets on the shadowed bank of the river running silver in the moonlight. Bill told his girl that if he was destined to die while serving with Old Pap he wanted this moment to be his last memory. Then began softly to recite Poe’s “Dream Within a Dream.” By the time he reached the part about golden grains of sand slipping through his fingers “‘While I weep—while I weep!’” the girl was hugging him around the neck and then he could speak no more for her kisses in his mouth.

  Even as Bill was enjoying the girl he could faintly hear his brother at the other blanket: “‘For alas! alas! with me / The light of life is o’er! / No more—no more—no more—’” And then heard clearly the clink of a buckle. And then soft pantings that shortly grew to gasps.

  Oh Mister Edgar, Bill thought, your poetry is more potent than you know. The girl smiled up at him in the glow of the moon and stroked his newly grown goatee, her pleasure bright in her eyes.

  They afterward helped the girls to readjust their clothes, to re-tie shirtlaces and smooth their skirts. They had to make do with their fingers for hairbrushes. When they finally got them home, there was a light burning in the front window. They reined up at a distance and the girls gave them quick goodnight kisses and slid off the horses and made off in the moonlight like raiders stealing up on an enemy fortress. As they ambled back to camp the brothers agreed it had been almost too easy.

  Such pleasant days and nights do fleetly pass. They had been in Ray County nearly a month when Bill Anderson began to feel uneasy about his sisters having no protection but frail Uncle Angus. And his apprehension had been heightened by reports of an increase in Federal outrages against border folk suspected of secessionist leanings. His distaste for farming suddenly seemed to him poor reason for having put his sisters at such risk.

  They were lazing on the bank of the Crooked one early afternoon, their catfish lines out, when he suddenly sat up and said, “Boys, I’m for heading back.”

  “About damn time,” Butch Berry said. He flung the coiled slack of his handline into the river. “I’ve been for heading back.”

  “Well I’m ready too,” Ike said. “Some of these folk have begun to wonder out loud if the war’ll be over and Old Pap Price retired to a rocking chair before we go off to join the fighting like we said. I believe we’re starting to be looked on with a suspect eye.”

  “When do we go, Billy?” Jim Anderson said.

  An hour later they were saddled and saying goodbye to the Crashaws and then riding hard to the south.

  NEWLY TURNED GRAVES

  The tangerine sun was almost descended to the treetops and the air was hazed in gold as they closed to within a half-mile of the Parchman place. When they saw there was no show of chimney smoke above the trees in the direction of the farm, they halted and looked at each other, then chucked up their horses and went forward with pistols in hand. The birds were holding silent, the only sounds the fall of hooves and the low chink of harness metal.

  They advanced in pairs along the narrow trail through the heavy woodland, Bill and Jim in the lead, the Berry boys some twenty yards behind and watching their backs and all of them alert for ambush. Where the path entered Parchman property it was flanked on one side by a stone wall and on the other by a fence of split rails.

  They reined up at the edge of the farmyard and looked upon a place made shambles. The barn was a charred ruin with three black walls still upright and casting long shadows. The house was intact and looked unburned in any of its visible parts, but the front door hung askew on its lower hinge and the window shutter was fallen onto the porch and the porch roof was partly collapsed at one end where the support post had been knocked away. The corn crib was absent several of its side slats and stood emptied. The hog pen railings were down, and most of the rails of the horse corral. There was no stock in sight, no sign of the red hounds. Bill put his index fingers to the corners of his mouth in some secret fashion and let a whistle so high that none but dogs could hear it, but no dog answered his call. Beyond the outbuildings, portions of the cornfield had been burned and much of it trampled by horses and most of it lay in a blackened tangle of broken stalks and ears.

  “Sonofabitches,” Butch Berry said. He hupped his horse out of the trees and headed for the house at a lope. Bill Anderson heeled Edgar Allan after him. Ike and Jim came behind at a slow trot, warily scanning to right and left as they advanced into the open.

  Bill and Butch dismounted at the house and went up the porch steps with their Colts cocked. Every item of furniture lay broken. The floor was littered with clothing, some of it the Parchmans’, some belonging to the Anderson girls.

  “Josephine!” Butch Berry shouted. He hastened to the door of the kitchen room and looked within, then went to the loft ladder and climbed it high enough to see that no one lay hidden or dead up there. He came down and kicked the wall, then stalked to the door and yelled, “Josie!”

  “Quit hollering,” Bill Anderson said. “If they were around they’d let us know.”

  Butch glared at him, then stepped to the railing and spat. Despite his rebuke, Bill did not fault him for his rage. His own chest was weighted with a dread fury, his breathing tight, his grip aching on the Colt. He studied the sky—bloodcolored in the west, deep purple to eastward—and held hard to the thought that somewhere beneath it Josie was this minute alive and hale and telling her sisters to be brave or she’d without mercy ridicule them to their brothers.

  Jim came around the corner of the house. “Billy, come look.” His face bespoke bad news. As they followed him to the burned barn, crows cawed in the higher branches and a nearby mockingbird echoed them in a fair mimicry.

  In the twilit maple grove beyond the blackened barn walls were four fresh gravemounds, one to either side of the pair of small graves holding the bones of the long-dead Parchman children, the other two a few yards farther away and side by side. Of the mounds flanking the children’s graves, one showed fresher, more recently turned earth than the other. The pair of farther graves were more recent as well.

  Ike was squatted by the darker of the nearer gravesites and working a handful of its dirt, assaying it as a man might the soil of a field for planting. The grave bore a wooden cross into whose horizontal piece was awkwardly carved the name of Sally Parchman and the year 1862. The cross on the neighboring grave informed that it was Angus Parchman’s. The two farther crosses carried the names of Tobe and Baldwin and no other information. Butch blew out a long breath and Bill leaned against a tree.

  “This one wasn’t dug even a week ago,” Ike said of Sally Parchman’s grave. “Probably right after the place was raided.” He duck-walked to the grave of Angus Parchman and scooped some of its dirt and felt of it. “This one’s about a month old.”

  “Hell, Old Angus probably died just after we left here,” Jim Anderson said.

  Ike stood up and brushed the dirt from his hands. “I wouldn’t reckon the raiders for burying Sally, so had to’ve been the girls.” He glanced from one Anderson brother to the other. “I’d look on it as good news. They’
re likely gone to someplace safe.”

  “Who in the hell is Tobe and Baldwin?” Jim Anderson said. “Who buried them?”

  Ike shrugged.

  Butch said he’d had enough of this jabber. He wanted to go looking for the girls right away, but Bill said they should wait until morning. “If they’re hiding in the woods, they won’t see it’s us,” he said. “They might think it’s raiders and keep hid from us. We could pass right by them and never know it. Better we wait till morning, and then we’ll ask at every farm roundabouts. Could be they’re sheltering with one of them”

  Butch Berry cursed and spat. Then raised and dropped his arms at his side in a gesture of capitulation.

  REDLEGS

  They tethered the horses alongside the house and put down their bedding amid the ruined furniture within. The pantry of course stood bare. The root cellar too had been cleaned out. But the creek was still running clear and so they had plenty of fresh water. They went out to the trampled cornfield and by the weak light of a crescent moon collected a dozen intact ears and roasted them for supper over a firepit they dug in front of the house. They took turns keeping watch on the porch steps through the night and each man in his turn heard the others tossing on the floor in fitful sleep.

  Bill Anderson’s was the last watch before dawn. He sat on the porch steps and observed the eastern sky as it lightened to gray above the silhouetted treeline. Somewhere a cock crowed and he wondered if the rooster was one of theirs that had escaped the raiders. The trees began to take form in the receding darkness. As the eastern sky reddened he set about raising a cookfire. He thought he would go into the woods and see what he might shoot for breakfast. He checked the Navy’s loads and tucked the pistol in his waistband and started for the near woods just the other side of the creek.