Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  Midway between the house and the creek the ground sloped down, and he had just reached the crest of the incline when his left arm was slapped forward and he heard the rifleshot as he spun half-about and went tumbling down the slope.

  He lay stunned and staring up at the crimson sky. Shouts in the distance. A pounding of coming hooves and an outbreak of gunfire. His brother shouting, “Billy—where you at?”

  He tried to sit up but could not—and his arm came awake to such pain that he cursed through his teeth. The house was thirty yards away and from this angle he could see only its roof. It sounded as if the attackers had reined up short of the house, had likely taken cover at the barn and the corn crib. The gunfire was furious. A horseman loped over the crest of the slope and saw him and heeled his mount into a sprint directly at him. He drew up his knees to make himself smaller and he fired up at the animal as it bore over him.

  His next awareness was of looking the horse on its side in the risen dust, shrieking and coughing blood and trying vainly to regain its feet. The rider lay a few yards beyond the animal and was making his own efforts to rise. Bill locked his teeth against a dizzying pain and propped himself on his right elbow, the Colt still in his hand. The man sat up and looked at him. Bill cocked the piece and adjusted its angle and fired and the ball struck the man in the face and he flung backward and lay still. Bill saw now that the man wore red gaiters.

  He fell back. The sky looked askew and the cracking and the popping of gunfire seemed louder now and to be coming from every direction. And at some remove but closing fast came yet another assembly of gunfire and with it a howling to prickle the scalp. Then the red sky reeled and the wild cries seemed as close to his ear as the screams of the crippled horse and then he saw and heard nothing.

  WILDWOOD BOYS

  I am a poor wayfaring stranger

  traveling through this world of woe

  Yet there’s no sickness, toil or danger

  in that bright world where I go.

  He was unsure if he was dreaming the music or was awake and actually hearing the song and the plunking banjo strings, if his eyes were open to darkness or simply closed.

  Going home to see my mother,

  going home no more to roam.

  Going across the River Jordan,

  I’m forever going home.

  His head felt thick and heavy and it was a moment before he became aware of its pulsing pain. And of the pain in his arm. He was lying on his back and his eyes were closed. The strength required to open them seemed more than he could muster and he did not even try.

  I know dark clouds may gather round me,

  I know my way is hard and steep.

  But I must ride the road before me,

  and travel far before I sleep.

  Other voices now. Some loud and nearby, some at a distance, all of them a garble. A hornpipe ditty. Laughter. Nickerings and snufflings of horses, jinglings of bridle rings. His eyes still closed, he put fingers to his head and the sensation was of guiding someone else’s hand. He felt gingerly of a bandage there. Then explored his arm and found that it too had been attended and was bound. His right thigh ached as well but it was unbandaged and felt dry to his fingers and it could stand the hard squeeze of his hand and so he knew the leg was both unbloodied and unbroken.

  “Welcome back to the world, friend.”

  He opened his eyes to the underbranches of a maple tree and through them saw fragments of bright blue sky wisped with white. Sitting crosslegged on the ground beside him was a hatless smiling man with a sandy pompadour, rampant chin whiskers and shaven cheeks. He had been scribbling in a small notebook and now closed it and put it and his pencil in a shirt pocket. Then turned and called to someone, “It’s Lazarus returned to the living.”

  Jim Anderson appeared and hunkered beside Bill and smiled at him. “How you doing, Billy?”

  “Well,” Bill said, “I don’t exactly know.” His own voice sounded strange to him.

  “You hurt anyplace other than your head and arm?”

  “Leg. It’s not broke.”

  “Hell, you’ll be all right,” Jim said. “Bullet bit your arm but didn’t break bone. I thought you’d been shot in the head, but W. J. says it looks more like the horse kicked you. Musta stepped on your leg too is why it hurts.”

  “Who said?”

  “William J. Gregg,” the goateed man said. “I used to go by Bill but every other man in the country’s named Bill anymore so I started going by W. J. Don’t ask what the J. stands for because I’ve never told or intend to.” He carried a revolver on each hip and another tucked in the front of his pants and his gray shirt was oversized and showed four large pockets with a bright pink rose embroidered over each of them. A huge ensheathed bowie was tied to one leg and he carried a Green River knife in a boottop. “You’re lucky, friend. A right horsekick can bust your brainpan sure as a bullet.”

  “Listen, Billy,” Jim said, “the girls are all right. They’re in Westport.”

  “The girls? Josephine?”

  Jim nodded. “All of them.”

  “They’re at the Vaughn place,” Gregg said. “With the sisters to one of our boys.”

  Bill looked at him. “Who in hell are you?”

  “Quantrill men.”

  “They saved our ass, Bill,” Jim said. His voice tight with excitement, eyes aspark. “They put down all them sonofabitches—fifteen of them!—and didn’t lose a man doing it.”

  “Truth be told, we put them all down but two, and you got one of them,” Gregg said to Bill. “Could be the other got away. We’ll know soon enough.”

  They helped Bill to sit up with his back against the tree, pain flaring in his skull with every movement of his head. Someone handed him a canteen and he took an avid drink. He saw the banjo picker sitting on a porch step, saw the farmyard full of men and horses. The horses were superb breeds and better groomed than their wildlooking riders, whose aspect was of displaced pirates, deserters of the Mother Ocean fled to a life ahorse.

  Every man looked to be as heavily armed as Gregg and most of them wore baggy shirts of a cut like his, some in a like gray color, others in butternut or brown or dark yellow, each shirt with a different embroidery but every stitching fanciful. Bill had thought his own hair long for brushing past his collar, but the hair on some of these men hung in wild tangles to their shoulders. Most sported beards and mustaches but many seemed too young yet to do so. He saw Ike Berry talking with someone who looked no more than a child, whose three Colt revolvers on his belt appeared hugely outsized against his small stature.

  “That sprout you’re eyeballing is Riley Crawford,” Gregg said. “Not yet fifteen years old. His momma brought him to us a couple of months back and told us a tale we’ve heard a hundred times before. Jayhawkers fell on them and called her husband a liar when he said he was on their side and then hanged him. They fired all the buildings and burned the cornfield. Took shameful liberties in handling the mother and daughter both. Young Riley went at one of them with a grub hoe and got his front teeth knocked out. They drove off the stock and stole all the goods and carried them away in the Crawfords’ own wagon. Left the momma and children with not a thing to eat. Not a shovel to bury her husband. They dug the grave with their hands and a tree limb. The woman decided to take the girl and go live with kin in Illinois, but first she borrowed a wagon and brought the boy to us. Told the captain if young Riley was old enough to bury his murdered daddy he was old enough to kill the likes of them who murdered him. The captain said he couldn’t refute her argument. You wouldn’t think so to look at him, but that child has since killed some dozen Union men and I don’t misdoubt he’ll dispatch a few more before he’s through. The jayhawks made a mistake not to kill him when they had the chance.”

  “Which one’s Quantrill?” Bill said, scanning the faces of the milling men.

  “He ain’t here, I asked,” Jim Anderson said. “He’s off with the rest of the company.”

  A trio of guerrilla
s was leading a line of thirteen horses into the woods and each horse held a bloodyshirted body draped over the saddle. One of the horses bore two bodies. Every dead man wore red leggings.

  A dapper man with a feather in his hat and a neatly trimmed imperial now joined them, and Gregg introduced him as George Maddox. Maddox said the redlegs would be thrown in the river to float downstream and be fished out by whoever might want them.

  “What happened to Uncle Angus and Aunt Sally?” Bill Anderson said. “What happened here?” He gestured at the surrounding ruin, and the effort dizzied him.

  “Old Angus coughed to death a while back,” Gregg said, “but Sally Parchman, I’m sorry to say, was killed by militia bastards who came raiding a week ago. The girls said it was an accident, but it don’t hardly lessen the sin.”

  Ike Berry heard this as he walked up. “Riley says not a man of that milish bunch is still breathing,” he said.

  “Somebody informed those shitheads we were here,” Maddox said. “We got people making inquiries and we’ll soon enough know who it was.”

  “You all were here?” Bill said. “I mean, before?”

  “Many a time,” Maddox said.

  “We reckoned Uncle Angus was helping you all, but he never would say,” Jim said.

  “He was a good man for keeping his mouth shut,” Maddox said.

  “I only wish we’d still been here when these bastards showed up,” Gregg said.

  “I mean,” Bill said, “have you all been here since we been gone?”

  They had, Gregg said. About three weeks ago they’d come to Parchman’s to tend their wounds and rest up after a bad fight in Cass County. It had been their meanest skirmish yet—against a Federal force outnumbering them three to one. They’d left sixteen dead and hardly a man came away unbloodied. Quantrill himself took a ball in the leg. When they got here, they found the Anderson girls in residence with newly-widowed Sally. “Sally always was a fine one for the surgeon’s trade, even in her mourning dress,” Gregg said.

  “Your sisters were quick apprentices as well,” Maddox said, “especially the darker one, the middle one—Josephine, is it?”

  “She’s good at anything she puts her mind to,” Bill said. His own voice sounded to him as though it were coming from somewhere else. The pain in his head was grown larger.

  “She’s a caution is what she is,” Maddox said. “She was ladling water to some of the hurt boys one time and Andy Blunt gave her a little grab of the hind end as he was passing by. Well sir, she whacked him with that ladle so hard he spun about like a drunk wondering which way’s home. Swole his eye up like a plum. Gave us all a good laugh.”

  “Andy’s a fine fella and didn’t mean any disrespect,” Gregg said. “He was just feeling frisky is all. Soon as he got his wits back he apologized to the girl and you could see by her face she was sorry she’d hit him—or at least that she’d hit him so hard.”

  “Good thing for that fellow she wasn’t chopping wood when he put his hand to her,” Jim said.

  “The girls said you fellas had gone to Kansas to settle a matter,” Gregg said. “They were hoping you’d be back before we left.” Bill and Jim exchanged a guilty glance.

  They had been at the farm two weeks before Quantrill could ride again, and then scouts brought word of a Federal cavalry company that was questioning farmers in the area and burning out those who couldn’t prove they were Union. The Feds were reported to be fifty strong, and there were only twenty-four guerrillas at Parchman’s, including a pair of men too badly wounded to get on a horse. But Quantrill figured he had the advantage of surprise and better knowledge of the country, so they mounted up, leaving their two wounded in care of the women. They found the Yanks camped on the Blue and hit them at first light and dropped more than a dozen before the others went racing back to their post at Independence. Quantrill then split up his party, taking half the men with him to rendezvous with the rest of the company, sending Gregg and the others back to the Parchman place to watch over their wounded and the women until their brothers got back.

  “We were on our way here when we came on a party of milish driving stock,” Gregg said. “Twenty-two of them and each one is this minute stoking a furnace in hell. After we put them down, we saw the horses and mules had Angus Parchman’s brand, and we came here quick as we could, and, well, this…”—he gestured at the burned and broken outbuildings, at the trampled and partly fired cornfields—“is what we found.”

  “The girls had already buried our two boys and Sally Parchman,” Maddox said. “We figured it was best to take them up to the Vaughn place for safekeeping, then come back to see if you boys showed up. I’d say we got here at a good time.”

  “There they be!” somebody shouted.

  “That’s the redleg’s horse! You owe me a dollar, peckerwood!”

  A pair of horsemen were coming down the trail at a trot, the lead rider husky and cleanshaved, his short blond hair showing bright in the sunlight as he took off his hat and wiped his brow. The other man was leading a saddled horse by its reins and Bill Anderson saw now that he was Butch Berry.

  THE STONEMASON

  The blond man was handsome in a hardfaced fashion. He dismounted and smiled around at his fellows’ congratulations for hunting down the runaway redleg. He told Butch Berry to put the redleg horse with the rest of the captured mounts and Butch said yes sir and grinned at his brother and the Andersons as he moved off. The blond man came over to them, slapping dust from his shirtsleeves.

  “Boys,” Gregg said, “meet George Todd.” He introduced Todd to Ike Berry and the Andersons. Todd nodded and fixed an appraising look on each newcomer in turn. The hands thumbed onto his pistol belt were large and strong, the hands of a stonemason, which had been his trade before the war. He’d told little else of his past except that he had been born in Canada. But there were many rumors about him, including one of a murder warrant in Wisconsin for having throttled a man in a fight over a woman.

  “What do you think?” he asked Gregg. “They be bushwhackers?”

  “I believe they’ll do fine,” Gregg said.

  Todd considered Bill Anderson’s bandaged arm and head. “This one don’t look to be doing so fine right now.”

  “I figure he can lay up at the Vaughn place till he’s hale,” Gregg said.

  Todd looked at Jim Anderson and then back at Bill. “You boys got some hardbark sisters. Good girls, the lot.”

  “We know it,” Jim Anderson said.

  “All right then, mount up,” George Todd said. He turned and called out for men named Younger and Pool to take the point.

  Jim and Gregg helped Bill Anderson to his feet. He tested his injured leg, found that it would bear his weight, and limped over to Edgar Allan. He had to use his right hand to hold to the saddlehorn as he stepped up onto the horse. It was a tricky maneuver but he managed it, though the effort broke a rush of sweat on his face and made him go even lighter in the head.

  “Mr. Todd!” Calling out as he came riding toward him was Riley Crawford. Todd smiled and took something from his pocket and tossed it underhand to the boy. Riley Crawford caught it and looked on it and his grin revealed a black gap where his front teeth had been.

  “I want you all to take a good look at that,” Butch Berry whispered to his brother and the Andersons. “I was right there when Todd took it off the redleg.”

  They watched Riley Crawford remove his hat and lift from around his neck a long necklace of thin rawhide that appeared to be strung with pieces of dried fruit graduating in hue from black to brown to rosy nearest the rude clasp fashioned from a pair of ladies’ hairpins. It took a moment for them to realize he was holding a collar of human ears. With his knife tip the boy cut a hole in the ear Todd had just presented him, then held the thing to his mouth and said, “How you like it down in hell, redleg?” He laughed and strung the ear onto the rawhide thong and reclasped it and slipped the necklace back over his head. The horrid garland hung to his belt buckle. Grinning like a gob
lin with a new trinket, he reined his horse about and hupped away.

  Butch Berry laughed as if he’d been told a good lewd joke, and Todd called out, “Let’s go!”

  They navigated along wildwood routes the Andersons and Berrys had not known to exist, holding to deer traces and hog runs wending through the high grass and the thickest and most deeply shadowed portions of the wildwood, and they sometimes had to hug to their horses’ necks to dodge the low overhang of tree branches. Wherever the trails widened sufficiently the riders formed a double column. The Berrys rode directly ahead of the Andersons, and behind Bill and Jim came Gregg and Maddox. The guerrillas bringing up the rear of the column also drove the bloodstained and still-saddled redleg horses. Because the Union army allotted its best horses to the eastern war zones, Yankee mounts in Missouri rarely met guerrilla standards of horseflesh. Redleg horses, however, were mostly stolen Missouri stock of superior breed, and the guerrillas usually kept for themselves any they captured.

  The latesummer air now thickly hot. Bill Anderson’s arm throbbing intensely. His leg ached to the bone. The back of his eyes sparked with white pain at Edgar Allan’s every stride. His hat did not fit his bandaged head and so he had folded it and tucked it under his cantle.

  As they rode, Butch Berry told of how he and George Todd had chased down the redleg who tried to get away. The man made the mistake of bearing for the open country to the southwest rather than heading up the Kansas City Road. When they came in sight of him out in the flats like that, Todd abruptly reined up and slid off his horse, unsheathed and cocked his Sharps carbine, and laid the barrel on the saddle to steady his aim while his mount stood still as a statue. The Sharps could drive a one-ounce bullet through four inches of oak at a thousand yards and had a range of up to a mile. He shot the redleg off his horse at full gallop at a distance Butch reckoned as three hundred yards.

  When they got to him he was facedown and still alive. The round had passed through his right side and destroyed a lung, to judge from all the blood he’d coughed up. Todd dismounted and rolled him over with his foot and Butch saw that he wasn’t much older than himself and didn’t look all that scared. He tried to say something but began to choke on his blood. Todd drew his revolver and leaned down and shot him in the heart from so close up the boy’s shirt smoked with the powder scorching.