Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  Another scream—and a woman rushed out and dropped to her knees and cradled the bloody head and raised a high keening. A pair of children, a boy and a girl, stood at the door and looked from their parents to the two men sitting their horses—and then past them to the other riders coming out of the woods and toward the house.

  Quantrill asked the woman her dead husband’s name but she ignored him in her loud grief. He was about to ask again when the older child, the girl, said, “My daddy is Morton Winstead.” Her little brother hit her with his elbow and glared at her, then turned his fierce stare back to the men fronting the house.

  On his thigh Quantrill held his notebook open to a page containing the names of farmers and townsmen and merchants and men of law against whom the guerrillas had personal briefs, or whom southern loyalists had identified as informers to the Federals. He drew a line through “Winstead.” The list was constantly under revision, names crossed off, new names added. The Federals had their own list, the militia had theirs, the redlegs theirs. In this part of the country, the war was this personal and had been from the start.

  “It’s not solely that your husband was a Unionist, Mrs. Winstead,” Quantrill said in a voice raised high enough to be heard over her lamentations. “What killed him was his unwise decision to inform on secessionist neighbors, telling the Federals of their kindness to us. He was responsible for three families losing their father to a Union noose and seeing their farms burned. Tell your friends this is what they can expect to reap if they sow as your husband did.”

  He paused as if he would give her the opportunity to address him if she wished, but she only continued in her loud grief over her husband’s body.

  Quantrill looked at the children. “You tell them.”

  The girl nodded, but the boy just stared in hate.

  They came to the farm of another Unionist who’d been warned of their approach. They soon enough found him hiding in a cornfield and there left him lifeless, his blood seeping into the black earth and nurturing a crop he would never bring in. They did no damage to the farm itself. A soft breeze carried the calls of crows passing the news to each other, the high cries of another family bereaved—lorn remnants of a kind of calamity as natural to the world as wildfire and flood and windstorm, as old as the sons of Adam.

  On their list too were the names of three men who lived together with a Choctaw woman in a cabin about a mile off the main road. The men professed to be ruffians dedicated to the theft of Kansas horses, but many complaints had reached Quantrill that these men thieved from Missourians as well.

  When the guerrillas reined up in front of the cabin and hallooed, the squaw was sent out to see what they wanted. Quantrill told her to get away from the house and she scampered into the trees and out of sight. The three men then came out without further solicitation, calling out effusive greetings and showing stiff grins, explaining to Quantrill that a body couldn’t be too careful anymore about greeting strangers with open arms. They apologized for not having recognized him sooner, but they were sure glad to see him because it so happened they had a fresh bunch of good horses they wanted to give him as a present, and, no sir, don’t even think about offering to pay for them, his money was no good with them. They were still blathering in this fashion when Quantrill gave a signal and a fusillade of revolver rounds hushed them for once and all.

  They found eight horses corralled in a clearing behind the cabin, only two worth taking. The others they left for the Indian woman. And left too—hanging by their heels from the lower limbs of an oak, arms and hair adangle, coattails bunched at their armpits, their dripping blood blackening the ground beneath them—the three dead men, one of them with a note affixed to his shirt: “Behold the wages of thievery.”

  A DISCOURSE

  As they rode through the gold light of late afternoon, a guerrilla pointed to a huge and leafless oak tree and said it was the tree on which some years ago had been hanged the notorious killer Bedford Wills. “It’s why that tree’s gone dead,” he said. “A tree a murderer’s hung from will die inside five years.”

  Some agreed with this belief but others jeered it as an old wives’ tale. Some said they knew of hanging trees that had been in use for years and years and they hadn’t died yet—but several of them argued that some trees died slower than others, just like some men, and a tree could be dying on the inside for a long time before it gave any sign of it on the outside.

  Sock Johnson said the whole thing was bullshit, the same as believing that the way to end a drought was to kill a snake and drape it belly-up over a fencepost. This opinion raised several loud assurances that the snake cure for a dry spell was a true fact and had more times been witnessed to prove true than Sock Johnson had hairs on his face.

  They argued whether sunny days could be counted on if you spied a rabbit a long way from its hole, and whether a pig with a stick in its mouth meant a bad storm coming—a portent which Ike Berry said he had never known to fail. Was it really a sure sign of death in the family if a bird flew into the house, as many of them did believe, or good luck if a redbird made its nest nearby? They snickered lewdly as schoolboys in debating Cole Younger’s claim that a woman could snare a man to her will by seasoning his food with her intimate female secretions—and Dave Pool raised a loud laugh all around by exclaiming, “Sweet Jesus, so that’s how that Greene County bitch got me to play the fool!”

  They argued about countless supposed sources of bad luck, but when Will Haller claimed that a cross-eyed person was bad luck, especially if encountered at an intersection of roads, Cole Younger nudged him and nodded at Butch Berry. Haller hastened to assure Butch that he didn’t mean him, because after all, he wasn’t really cross-eyed, just off-eyed, which was a whole different thing and only affected one eye anyway, not both, like cross-eyed did. The others all agreed with this distinction and said so. Butch looked around at their serious miens, then grinned and shook his head and said, “I got to say, that’s a heavy burden off my mind”—and they all broke out laughing.

  At the head of the column, Quantrill smiled.

  A REUNION AND A FRACAS

  The company numbered eighty men when it came together that night at the Red Creek camp—a meadow engirt by heavy forest and hard by the Blue River. Their various fires swirled and wavered in a fitful breeze. In the dark distance a lobo called high and keen under a low amber moon and the high spangle of stars, under paledust clouds of constellations already ancient beyond reckoning at the advent of men and their stone-ax antagonisms.

  Every fire held a circle of men and there were rounds of visitation from one fire to another. Introductions were made and old friends greeted, rumors passed on, whiskey jugs shared, new clothes and weapons displayed. Larkin Skaggs exceeded all descriptions Bill Anderson had heard: the old man looked like a mad-eyed prophet wandered in from a wildland unknown to any history or map. Andy Blunt seemed wary on meeting the Andersons, expecting them perhaps to be seeking redress for his offense against Josephine. But Bill simply asked if he’d learned any recent lessons in the proper use of his hands. Blunt smiled wryly and rubbed the eye Josie had clouted and said, “Damn right I have.”

  Dick Yeager was hearty and friendly, his yellow teeth often bared in laughter through a drooping muleskinner mustache. The Andersons would come to know that his family had owned a prosperous wagon business in Kansas until jayhawkers raided one day while Dick was gone to Santa Fe. They took every wagon and mule on the place, burned everything they didn’t steal, killed Dick’s little brother and crippled his father, distracted his younger sister near to madness. Even in his loudest laughter, Dick Yeager’s eyes seemed to Bill as coldly isolate as a winter field.

  Fletcher Taylor had been with John Jarrette’s small band of guerrillas when it joined with Quantrill. Short and near to handsome in his close-trimmed copper goatee, Taylor was a thoughtful and practical-minded man given to the frequent observation that if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bump its ass so much. For his part, Jarrette was now o
ne of Quantrill’s best officers. A lean man of high cheekbones and pointed black imperial and eyes blue as sulfur fire. This devilish aspect all the more pronounced by his black guerrilla shirt and its strange yellow stitchings—crescent moons and stars, triangles, mystical symbols whose meanings he admitted not to understand, but his sister, he said with a grin, swore they would protect him in battle.

  The Anderson brothers too were now garbed in guerrilla shirts. Josephine had presented Bill with a dark blue shirt bedecked with flowerwork in red and silver, the ammunition pockets lined with soft leather. Jenny surprised Jim with a guerrilla shirt too—gray, with black-and-brown embroidery—and it would have been hard to say which brother received the handsomer garment. Annette and Hazel promised to have shirts ready for the Berry boys on their return.

  Jarrette was now showing off his latest prize, a weapon he’d found in an Englishman’s hotel room in Independence—a Maynard smoothbore doublebarrel which, in addition to the Colts he carried on hips and belly, he wore in a sling holster across his chest. The barrels were aligned one under the other and each was five inches long and both of cavernous .64-caliber. He charged one barrel with a solid ball and the other with scrap metal and small coins, and either load could remove most of a man’s head. He called this gun his Widowmaker.

  Others too gave names to certain of their firearms. Andy Blunt’s cutdown shotgun was Alice Malice. Cole Younger’s Army Colt was Chopper. Dave Pool’s monstrous LeMat pistol, chambered for nine .44 rounds from its top barrel and a .60-caliber ball or shotcharge from the underslung, carried the name Hellgate. Dick Yeager addressed his Sharps carbine as Mr. Graves. Some in the company would give no appellation to a gun, but every man’s knife had a name. Most of them carried bowies—some the size of small swords—but popular too was the tapered poniard known as the Arkansas toothpick. There were Green River knives and clasp knives and skinners, fighting knives of all sorts. And because killing with a knife entailed closing with your foe so that you smelled him and saw his wild eyes and heard his breath and felt his blood spatter you even as you sometimes stained him with your own, because a knife, in brief, was a far more intimate weapon than a gun, it was generally regarded as female. They called their cutters by the names of wives and sweethearts—Sally, Molly Jean, Annie, Rachel, Maggie May—and of women they knew as deadly legend: Jezebel and Delilah and Bloody Mary, Salome and Lady Macbeth.

  At the fire where Bill Anderson now sat, a bushwhacker named Lionel Ward was telling of the marriage he’d been forced into at the points of various long guns after the woman’s father caught them in the act in the barn. “She wasn’t no spring chicken, you see,” Lionel Ward said, “twenty-five if she was a day, and like as not was getting fearful of the fates. I suspicion she had a hand in planning with her da and brothers for that little surprise in the barn. Truth to tell, I didn’t mind, for she’d mostly been such a sweet thing to me. But once we’d been stood in front of that preacher, oh Lord, didn’t that woman reveal herself for the queen of fishwives! Had a temper she’d kept from me, you see, but now it was off the leash.” He stood it for three months, he said, and one night couldn’t stand it anymore. He sneaked out and saddled his horse and rode off without a look back. “Took naught but me good Dan and me rifle and the scars on me poor heart.”

  “Could say you seceded from that union too, hey Lionel?” somebody called out, and everybody laughed.

  Now came a sudden outbreak of yelling and hollers of “Fight! Fight!” from a group at another fire, and they all ran to witness the scrap.

  George Todd and Will Haller were locked together on the ground, grappling in a firebright haze of dust, snarling and punching and each trying to get a chokehold on the other. The bushwhackers formed a wide circle about them, clamoring like harrying hounds, shouting bets one to the other, exhorting the fighters to do their worst.

  Todd was the stronger man and now had Haller in a headlock with one arm and was punching him repeatedly with his free fist. Haller’s face distorting under the blows, smearing with blood, then he managed to lock his teeth into Todd’s forearm and Todd cursed and punched him faster but the bite loosened his hold and Haller slipped free.

  Both men on their feet now and gasping, hair askew, eyes in red rage—and then abruptly locking together again and pulling each other down. They rolled to the edge of the fire and the back of Todd’s shirt began smoking and he yelped and rolled them hard away from the flames. Haller kept trying to ram his knee into Todd’s crotch and now Todd was biting hard on his ear and the top part of it came away in his teeth. Haller howled and bucked wildly and shook loose and they both scrambled to their feet again. Todd still had the portion of Haller’s ear in his mouth and he turned and spat it into the fire. Haller steadily and lowly cursing. Then they were clenched again and Todd wrestled Haller to the ground and finally managed to straddle his chest and pin Haller’s arms down with his knees. The back of Todd’s shirt was scorched from the fire and the taut fabric was embossed with the outline of the sheathed bowie he wore back there on a sling around his neck. He reached back under his collar and drew the weapon forth.

  Both men were variously armed but neither had reached for a weapon till now. Some might have thought it understood between them that the fight was one of brute strength and not weapons, but of all men anywhere, none knew better than this bunch the fallacy of fighting by rules. Not even Quantrill, looking on with his arms crossed, said anything in protest of Todd’s introduction of the knife.

  The bowie’s blade was a foot long and three inches wide in its upper portion and its curving saber point was honed top and bottom so it could cut both upward and down. Todd put the tip to Haller’s throat and a bulb of blood formed at the indention and then rolled in a thin line around his neck.

  “I’m gonna…get off you, punkinhead,” Todd said in a gasping breath. “You can pull your knife or your gun…either one. Or you can…get yourself gone.”

  Todd rose quickly and stepped away from Haller, one hand brandishing the bowie, the other gripped on a holstered pistol. Haller got up slowly and warily. He spat blood. He stood facing Todd, his battered face working with tics, then looked around at the others, some of them solemn-faced, some agrin, all of them quieted now and waiting to see what he would do. He muttered, then spat again, then limped off to where the horses were picketed.

  The following morning Todd was elected the company’s new first lieutenant. The rest of the day the men were at cleaning their weapons and seeing to their horses, at telling tales and jokes, passing the time until the sun was fled below the horizon and dusk rolled up out of the east like a purple tide. As the last pink streaks faded from the western sky Quantrill called them to mount up and then led the way over the border and into enemy country.

  REBEL YELLS

  They rode ahead of their raised dust like specters at roam on the dark land. The pale half-moon was in the west when the town’s lights came in view. A mile from town, scouts were waiting to report the presence of a hundred Kansas militiamen, though the unit was composed almost entirely of green recruits. “The spies say not a man of them’s heard a shot in battle,” a scout said. “Say the name of Quantrill puts a goodly white in their eye.”

  Quantrill conferred with his officers, then sent Gregg with twenty men to deploy around the town and cut off any messenger the Yanks might try to send out.

  The town blazing with lamplight this Saturday night as they trotted down the street in a double column, looking ghostly in the haze of dust, raising no sound but the clumping of hooves and the jingling of ringbits and armaments. They had of course been spotted as they closed on the town, and the militiamen were formed up in two ranks on the far side of the central square, the front line down on one knee and both ranks with muzzleloaders ready. The street clear of civilians but there were spectators at every window.

  “Stay easy, boys,” Quantrill said softly to the men nearest him. “If they wanted a fight, they’d have started it by now.”

  At the
square, the column split off to right and left to form a line facing the soldiers some thirty yards across the way. The officer in command was a goateed major standing slightly to the fore of the ranks with a saber in his hand. A beardless lieutenant was close beside him. They stood like farmers gauging a dark storm in the distance.

  Bill Anderson heard Quantrill whisper to Todd, “Look at them. They’d rather be anywhere but here. Would they were all this easy.” He raised his hand and every guerrilla brought up a pistol in each fist and the cocking of more than a hundred revolvers at once was a sound to prickle Bill’s neck hairs.

  “Halloo the commander!” Quantrill called out.

  The militia officers were agape—and then the major stepped forward and said, “I am Major Wilbur Halltree, commanding the—”

  “Your choice, sir,” Quantrill cut in, “is to live or die. Lay down your weapons and I promise parole to every last man.”

  “Ah now, Captain Quantrill, they don’t want no parole!” Cole Younger called loudly. “They want to die for Old Abe Lincoln, so let’s oblige them to the last man!”

  Quantrill smiled and Younger grinned at the men nearest him. Bill Anderson recognized Cole’s outcry for a ploy to let the Feds know who they were dealing with. The militiamen stirred uneasily and exchanged nervous looks and whispers. The lieutenant ordered them to be silent and stand fast.

  “You are Quantrill?” the major said.

  “Captain Quantrill, sir, and his partisan rangers of the Confederacy,” Quantrill said. “I’ll have your answer quick or choose it for you.”

  The major looked around as if searching for someone he could charge with making the choice. He stared back at Quantrill and said, “But what assurance…” and gestured vaguely.

  “If I were bent on killing you, sir,” Quantrill said, “you would already be over the river and all of your men with you. Now choose.”