Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  “Then he lops his ear off as easy as picking a flower,” Butch said. He looked back at Gregg and said, “How come he gave it to Riley?”

  “The sprout’s been cutting ears from his first day with us,” Gregg said. “Got the idea from tales of the Mexican War. Heard that Texas Rangers used to take the ears and noses off the Mexicaners they killed. Todd, he’ll sometimes dock an ear but he won’t wear it, and I don’t much blame him. Says he’d feel like a damned heathen. So he gives them to young Riley.”

  They had closed to within a half-mile of Westport when Todd halted the column. They could see the haze of the town’s chimney smoke above the trees. Bill Anderson was now so feverish he believed they had been riding most of the day, though in fact they’d been ahorse little more than an hour. His skull felt immense, his brainpan asmolder. His vision was skewed and his hearing muffled. His nerves felt dulled, as though he were wearing heavy clothes and gloves. He was vaguely aware that a horseman had appeared out of the trees along the trail ahead and was talking to Todd. Then clearly heard someone say that the Unionist farmer who’d brought the militia down on the Parchman place had been found out by Quantrill and was this minute hanging big-eyed and bootless from a rafter in his own barn. Now somebody was tugging his sleeve. To turn his head required prodigious effort. He saw Jim looking at him strangely and moving his mouth but the only sound he heard was a low hum. Then he felt the ground tilting under Edgar Allan and himself pitching toward it.

  He woke on a soft bed in a lamplit and sparsely furnished room. His head hurt with every heartbeat. His vision was slightly hazed, but he saw clearly enough the ladderback chair set within easy reach of the bed and hung with his gunbelt and the two Navies. Through a thinly curtained window paled with diffused moonlight came the sounds of hoofcloppings and rattling wagons passing in the near distance. He heard the strains of a fiddle playing low somewhere. Smelled coal oil and soapfresh sheets and the sunlight in which they had been dried. Became aware that he was shed of his stink, had been bathed and bandaged afresh, was wearing but a nightshirt.

  The door softly creaked open. A lean woman stood in silhouette against the brighter light of the hallway behind her and then stepped inside and closed the door and came rushing across the room in a swishing of skirt to descend upon him and tightly hug him. He breathed the smells of her skin and hair and felt her wet cheek on his face. Then her lips were on his and he knew them for Josephine’s.

  THE VAUGHN HOUSE

  Set on the Santa Fe about three miles south of Kansas City, Westport was an outfitting post for wagon parties heading west. The town was centered on an intersection of streets lined with stores and shops and offices, with liveries, eateries and saloons. It included a few residential streets and a scattering of isolated homes along its outskirts. The Vaughn estate stood about a half-mile south of town. The family patriarch, a wealthy shipping contractor and fervent secessionist, had together with his wife succumbed to diphtheria the previous year. They were survived by a pair of daughters, Hazel and Annette, and a son named Jimmy, who early in the spring had gone to join Quantrill.

  The Vaughn house was a spacious three-story structure on an iron-fenced and thickly wooded twenty-acre property fronted by the Westport Road. It was boundaried on its other three sides by heavy woodland. The grounds were kept by a man named Finley and his Negro helper Joshua. They also tended the large stable of horses and mules set far behind the main house and in whose lee lay a well-worn trace into the woods, a path by which parties of guerrillas could come and go unseen. With his prematurely gray hair and pronounced limp—the Vaughns had told townfolk he’d been born crippled—Finley seemed an innocuous figure, but in truth his knee had been wrecked by a jayhawker rifleball during the territorial border war, and both he and Black Josh were men of Quantrill. As they played their public roles of hired men and protectors of the Vaughn girls, they made careful account of Federal and militia movements along the local roads and regularly informed Quantrill about them.

  This was where the Anderson girls had been brought to be sheltered. The Vaughn sisters received them with smiles and kisses and warm embraces and the girls had all taken immediate like to each other. And in a second-floor bedroom of this house was where—not a week later—Bill Anderson found himself ensconced on the night he regained consciousness and received Josephine’s happily tearful kisses before again falling asleep.

  When he woke the next morning the room was brightly sunlit. His fever had broken, and he was greatly relieved by the restored clarity of his vision, his abated pains. Josephine, fully dressed and with her hair veiling one side of her face, slept beside him. He smiled on her and gently brushed the hair from her face and saw her cheek was swollen purple. His instant impulse was to wake her and demand to know who’d struck her—then find the bastard and kill him without discussion.

  But now came giggling from the door and he saw Mary and Jenny standing there and grinning widely—and felt himself smile at them in return.

  “Hey, Billy,” Jenny said, “you sure look funny with that wrap around your head and those whiskers on your chin.”

  Then they were sprinting across the room and clambering onto the bed and hugging and kissing him and both talking at once and Josie was startled awake by their jostling and happy squealing and she told her sisters to be careful of Billy’s wounds, dammit.

  The girls kept interrupting one another as each delivered a breathless narrative of the militia raid on the Parchman farm. He was able to understand that the two wounded guerrillas had been in the barn and that Josephine came by her bruised cheekbone when she tried to protect one of them and a militiaman flung her aside and her face struck a stallpost. Aunt Sally had tried to shield the other wounded man with her own body by lying atop him and hugging him tight to her, but the soldiers rolled them over and one of them shot the bushwhacker in the back even as Sally clutched herself to him. Mary and Jenny thought she was trapped under his weight, but when they heaved the body off her they saw the bloodstain on her breast and saw her dulled eyes and they burst into tears with the realization that she was dead of the same bullet that killed the guerrilla. When the militiamen realized what they’d done, they made away fast.

  “We’d buried Uncle Angus but a few weeks before,” Josephine said, “and here we were burying Aunt Sally too. And two murdered boys. That’s all we did the day after those bastards came—dig graves and put people in them.”

  “Josephine, watch your mouth,” Mary said.

  “If they weren’t the worst days of my life,” said Jenny Anderson, twelve years old and without inkling of the future, “I can’t imagine what might be.”

  “Did Josie tell you about Uncle Angus?” Mary asked Bill. “He started coughing one night like always, only this time he couldn’t stop and he fell dead right there at the supper table.”

  “Poor Aunt Sally,” Josie said. “She didn’t cry a whole lot, but from the minute Uncle Angus died she started looking really old.”

  Bill asked where Jim and the Berry boys were now and Mary said they’d gone with the bushwhackers to meet somewhere with Quantrill. They’d asked Jim to stay, but he was set on joining with the others in whatever mischief they had planned. Besides Bill, the only men on the place were Finley and Black Josh.

  Then the Vaughn sisters were knocking at the open door, and the Anderson girls said for them to come in and meet Billy. At nineteen, Annette was almost two years older than her sister, was shorter and tending to plumpness, but she owned an exceptionally lovely face. Hazel was pretty and warm-eyed and softspoken, well-breasted but leanhipped as a boy.

  It seemed understood by everyone that he was Josephine’s special charge. After he’d been introduced to Hazel and Annette and had given Mary and Jenny several more one-armed hugs and permitted them to pepper him with still more kisses, Josie shooed them all out of the room, telling the tittering Vaughn girls they’d done enough gawking at her brother in his nightshirt, he wasn’t no coochie show.

  When the ot
hers were gone he asked who had bathed him and dressed him in the nightshirt. “Well, who you think?” she said—and only the faintest blush showed through her smile. “And let me just say I have smelled things dead a week that didn’t stink as bad. I about needed a chisel to get some of that filth off you. But I kept the door closed the whole time so nobody else could, you know, get a peek at you all bare-assed.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. He asked if the Vaughn girls knew she’d slept in his bed last night, and she said they did now. They had a brother of their own, the Vaughn girls, also named Jimmy, and they just loved him to pieces. She didn’t have the slightest doubt that if Jimmy Vaughn was wounded and needed close tending, either one of his sisters would sleep beside him in order to be as close as they could to take care of him.

  “I don’t think Annette or Hazel either was looking too terribly shocked this morning, do you?” she said.

  “Don’t mock your older brother.”

  “Oh, pardon me, Squire Anderson,” she said, and smiled brightly. She went to the window and drew back the thin curtains and stared out at the sunbright day chittering with birdcalls.

  “Did you see Butch?” he said.

  She quit her smile and looked at him.

  “I had the feeling he was real eager to see you.”

  She gestured irritably. “The bunch of them were only around long enough to carry you up here and eat some supper. He acted so nervous the whole time, he made me nervous, and I hate that. I said I was glad they’d got back from Kansas all right, but you’d of thought I was singing to him, the way he kept looking at me.” She made a face of slackjawed witlessness.

  “He can’t help it. He’s a smitten man.”

  “Well he can just get unsmitten.”

  “You know what he named his new horse?”

  “Jim told me. So what? It’s not my name.”

  “You’re not going to give that boy the first chance, are you?”

  She fixed him with a look of such sudden anxiety it made his heart sway. A look seeking fearfully to know if that was what he wanted her to do—to give Butch Berry, or any other man, a chance.

  He wanted to tell her what he knew was right, to tell her yes, yes, of course she should, she must, give some fella the chance to prove worthy of her affections, some fella she could marry and make a family with, have a normal life with. He wanted to tell her that he himself was selfish beyond redemption and damned for his sinful desires, to tell her they must nevermore touch each other as they had, to tell her that Butch was as good a man as any and far better than most and would always love her and could always protect her.

  Standing at the sunlit window and staring apprehensively at him, she looked as beautiful as he had ever seen her. And he thought: No, God damn me, no.

  She smiled as if she’d heard him. Then came to him and brushed the hair from his eyes with her fingers and kissed him lightly on the cheek and said, “I bet you’re hungry.”

  He said he could eat a live mule down to its shoes. He felt strong enough to get dressed and go downstairs to the dining table but she wouldn’t hear of it, not on his first morning in her care. She helped him to sit up and positioned pillows at his back, then fashioned a sling for his arm, then went off to get his breakfast. While she was gone he checked the Navies hung on the chair beside the bed and found them fully loaded.

  She returned with a tray holding a platter of ham steak and fried eggs and potatoes, a bowl of cream gravy, a basket of biscuits, a smoking mug of coffee heavily sugared the way she knew he liked it. She tucked a napkin into the collar of his nightshirt, then cut his ham for him into bite-sized pieces.

  While he ate she told of the night a large company of men rode up to the Parchman house and she had no idea who they were and had the big Walker ready until Aunt Sally got a good look at the men through the window and told her to put the thing away, the men outside were friends. “You could of knocked me over with a sparrow feather when she said it was Captain Quantrill and his men and I heard her calling them each one by name.”

  They’d just come from a bad fight somewhere, and over the next days she and her sisters learned to feel bones and tendons to see if they were intact, to cleanse wounds with carbolic solution or turpentine oil, whichever was to hand. Suturing a wound required less skill than sewing a dress, except that a dress never flinched nor cussed when you ran a needle through it. She’d been the one to repair Quantrill’s calf wound and he thanked her for work well done.

  Bill asked what she thought of the man. She pondered a moment, then said, “He’s real polite—and real educated. You should hear the way he talks sometimes. And he must be truly brave—the others look at him like they can’t wait for him to tell them something dangerous to do so they can prove to him how brave they are too. He’s handsome, I guess—but not as much as you.”

  In the time the guerrillas were on the farm she and her sisters got acquainted with most of them. Some were every bit as polite as Quantrill, but some so terribly shy around girls she sometimes wanted to pat them like you do a nervous dog and say hey boy, easy now. Only a few were so coarse that Quantrill had to warn them to mind their language and manners in the presence of the ladies. She said Mary had gone sweet on a boy from Layfayette County named Tyler Burdette. “Jayhawks killed his daddy and his big brother,” she said, “and then the Feds tried to make him enroll in the state militia, so he went off and joined the bushwhackers. It’s a sad tale, but so many of the boys tell a like one.”

  Bill said he’d heard a tale about her and a fellow named Andy Blunt. “I hear you gave him a lesson in manners.”

  Josephine abruptly laughed into her hands. “God, Billy, for a minute I was afraid I’d knocked his brains out his ear.”

  When the bushwhackers rode off and left them with two badly wounded men to care for and no protection but themselves, she hadn’t been afraid. “I just wish I’d kept the Walker in the barn instead of in the house. When the militia showed up I didn’t have a chance to get it.” The Baldwin boy she tried to protect was already so badly wounded he likely would’ve died in another day anyway and the soldiers didn’t have to shoot him again, the cowardly shits. The knock she took on the stallpost left her fairly addled until the soldiers were gone, and then the first thing she saw clearly was Mary and Jenny crying over Aunt Sally.

  “But they didn’t scare me, Billy,” Josephine said. “I wasn’t ever scared of them, just mad—and just sorry to tears for Aunt Sally. The only time I got scared was when the boys carried you in last night and told us what happened. All the while I was getting you cleaned up and all, I was so afraid you’d die. All I could think to do was talk to you. I talked and talked about every fool thing to come in my head. I thought if I just kept talking to you, you wouldn’t quit breathing. After a while, though, I had to pee real bad and I hadn’t brought a pot in here, so I quick went to my room, and when I got back, there you were, looking at me. I guess my gabbing kept you too bored to wake up.”

  Her eyes shone. He lay the breakfast tray aside and put his fingers to her face. She caught his hand in both of hers and kissed it and then held it tight between her breasts and smiled at him like he was the first sunrise she’d seen in weeks.

  That afternoon she changed the dressings on his head and arm and both wounds looked like they would heal well. “You’ll have a scar on your head but your hair’ll hide it,” she said. “Nobody but me will know it’s there.” She applied herself to a careful razoring of his cheeks and neck, then trimmed his mustache and goatee, which she liked very much. She combed his hair back with her fingers and grinned at him as if he were a profoundly simple solution to some complex riddle.

  “What?” he said when he saw how she was staring at him. Her smile widened and she shook her head and went off to attend her chores. He napped for a time and when he woke she was lying beside him and studying his face with a look as mysterious to him as womanhood itself. She kissed his nose and snuggled to him.

  He refused to take anot
her meal in bed, so that evening she helped him get dressed to go downstairs for supper. He insisted his leg was just fine now, it hurt only when he pressed on the bruise, but she anyway held him around the waist as they went down the staircase. Mary and Jenny and the Vaughn girls applauded when he entered the dining room and he beamed and made a small bow.

  They dined on chicken stew, baked yams, sweet corn and rhubarb pie. In the course of the supper conversation he learned that the fiddle music he’d heard on waking up the evening before had been played by Hazel Vaughn. When they were finished with their pie, he asked if she would play a tune, so they went into the parlor and she took the instrument off the wall and asked if he had a request. “Molly Brooks,” he said, and she smiled and started sawing.

  He proved the haleness of his leg by tugging Josephine out on the open floor and swinging her into a dance by his one good arm. She grudgingly allowed Annette to cut in for a turn and then each of her sisters before reclaiming him for her own. By then, however, he had gone light in the head and had to sit down. Josie was furious with herself for letting him overexert and she would not permit him any more dancing, not that evening. He protested that he’d be fine in a minute, but the other girls agreed that he needed to rest, and Hazel retired the fiddle to its wall peg.

  Josephine helped him back upstairs and into his nightshirt and into bed and then left the room for a time. When she returned she was in her nightdress and carrying her clothes which she placed on a chair. She shut the door and went to the lamp to extinguish it and he had a moment’s clear view of her leanly naked silhouette under the thin nightdress. She crossed to the bed by the light of the moon and slid in beside him. They lay face to face as vague shadows and he felt her warm breath.