Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  Butch turned to her but she was watching the dancers as she spoke. “I think she’s crazy and I’ve told her so. Mary too. You can’t have your brother for a beau! Not a for-real beau. You can’t marry him or, you know, anything, so what’s the use? But all she says is, ‘I don‘t care.’”

  She giggled at her mimicry and turned to Butch and her smile wavered at the look on his face. But he recovered handily, draining the rest of his beer at a gulp and belching hugely to restore her grin. “What say, Jenny Lightfoot?” he said. “Got it in you for another turn?” The words were barely out of his mouth before she was tugging him by the arm to hurry along back to the dancefloor.

  For nights thereafter, Butch would long lie awake before falling asleep. He could shape no thought to ease the hollow ache in his chest. He tried not to think at all, but he could not quit accusing himself for a fool. How had he been so blind? The moment Jenny told him about Josie, he had seen the truth of things. He stared into the darkness and saw her with Bill, saw them dancing, saw her hugging him, clinging to his arm, petting him, kissing his ear. Fool! To have believed he might someday receive such affections from her.

  Would any man besides Bill? The question hissed in his head like a snake. He lay sleepless into the night with suspicions so dreadful he didn’t know what to think. He could not have said if the impulse he felt at his core was to weep in pity or howl in rage at this base and unfair world.

  A LEAVE-TAKING

  On a chilly dusk a few days after their Westport visit, they heard Finley and Josh calling halloos behind the house and they looked out to see W. J. Gregg and a dozen guerrillas reining up at the stable. Socrates Johnson was among them and as he came toward the house Jenny ran out and into his arms with a happy shrill and he swung her around like a favored daughter. There was much backslapping and corks were pulled and everybody was talking at once except for Butch Berry, who’d been closemouthed the past few days.

  The girls laid out a large fine supper, and the talk at the table was mostly about the ten-day chase the company had led the Federals before making it to the Sni-a-bar. The men then took jugs out to the spacious front porch and pulled chairs in a close circle and conversed in low voices as the misty night chirped and hooted around them.

  Gregg said the company was camped at the south end of Jackson County, a couple of miles below the Santa Fe. Quantrill was in a lingering fury about losing the Olathe spoils.

  “He’s always talked about making a raid into Kansas that nobody’ll ever forget,” Gregg said, “but now he’s talking about it a lot more. He wants a raid that’ll scare the bejesus out of every goddam Yankee and abolitionist for the rest of time. And one that’ll even a lot of scores.”

  “And one that’ll get us more loot than Olathe ever saw,” Andy Blunt added.

  “That’s a lot to ask of one damn raid,” Bill Anderson said. “Where’s he got in mind?”

  Gregg took his time about firing his pipe, puffing blue billows into the dim light issuing from the front room windows. He looked around at the Berry boys and Jimmy Vaughn and the brothers Andersons. “Lawrence,” he said.

  Bill Anderson grinned like he’d been told a mild joke. “Bullshit,” he said.

  Gregg shook his head and puffed his pipe. Bill looked to John Jarrette, to Socrates Johnson, and neither man disputed Gregg.

  “Lawrence is forty miles into Kansas and too much of it open country and there’s a thousand Federals in between,” Jim Anderson said. “No bunch of raiders can make it halfway to Lawrence.”

  “Going ten miles over the border to Olathe is one thing,” Jimmy Vaughn said. “Going to Lawrence is something other.”

  “Why don’t you wise men tell me something I don’t know,” Gregg said. “I’m just saying what the man’s been talking about. Wants to do it come the spring. Cole Younger about laughed in his face, but Todd thinks it maybe can be done.”

  “Todd would think so,” Bill Anderson said.

  “It’s anyway nothing to debate on for a while,” Gregg said. “A hard winter’s coming on and we’ve got to clear out before we lose the leaf cover. We’re going to Arkansas and camp with Jo Shelby’s outfit. A few of the boys are staying in Missouri and laying low—Cole Younger, for one. What about you fellas?”

  “My sisters are here and I intend to watch over them,” Bill said. “We’ll be waiting for you boys when the wildwood greens up again.”

  “Well, truth to tell, me and Butch are for Arkansas with the captain,” Ike said.

  This was news to Bill. He looked at Ike, who shrugged and cut his eyes at his brother to let Bill know it was Butch’s idea to go south. Bill knew at once the reason was Josie, and saw at a glance that Jim knew it too. He guessed the boy had had enough of her indifference and had decided to put distance between himself and the cause of his heartache, at least for a time. He felt sympathetic but also suspected Butch might be feeling a touch sorry for himself. You don’t know the half of it, he thought, staring at Butch, who would not meet his eyes. Try feeling that way with your sister. See how much distance you can put between you and that.

  “Well,” Bill said, “the company’s better off for you boys being with them. You send word on how you’re keeping, you hear?”

  “We’ll do that,” Ike said. “And you boys take good care of the girls.”

  And at daybreak the bunch of them were gone.

  III

  The Captains

  1862–1863

  WINTER MOONS

  The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon.

  They hiked deep into the barelimbed woods to targetshoot, lumbering in their heavy coats, their breath pluming white, the men wearing their newest boots to break them in. They worked their horses and curried them. They practiced rope tricks. They played penny poker and finally capitulated to the girls’ entreaties and let them sit in and were chagrined when Hazel Vaughn proved the sharp of the party. Snow fell steadily for several days and they went out and romped in it and shaped comic snowmen and constructed bulwarks and waged a snowball war. Evenings they would gather in the parlor with harmonicas and fiddles and Jew’s harps and sing and dance in the light of a crackling fire.

  The Vaughn library was admirably stocked, and one night they held poetry recitations. Taking turns reading from Poe, Bill and Jim both provoked laughter and catcalls with their histrionic deliveries of such as “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “Ulalume.” They teamed up on the jangling monotony of “The Bells,” alternating the lines between them for maximum effect, and Jimmy Vaughn threw a boot and Jenny shouted “Get the hook!” But then Jim recited “Jenny Kissed Me” from memory, and Jenny did indeed jump from her chair and kiss him for it, and promised never to call for the hook on him again.

  Annette was partial to Cavalier verse and moved herself to tears with Lovelace’s “To Lucasta,” but Hazel’s penchant ran to spooky Romanticism, and her presentation of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” held the room enthralled. Jimmy Vaughn liked Pope, who’d been his father’s favorite, and his witty readings of the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” got loud applause, and so too did Mary’s rendition of Shelley’s “To a Skylark.”

  Then Jenny provoked the men to lascivious laughter—and Mary and Annette to blushing chides—when she read “A Sweet Disorder in the Dress.” Mary shook a finger at Josie and said, “You put her up to th
at, I know you did. You are corrupting this child, Josephine Anderson.” Josie laughed and winked at Jenny, then added weight to Mary’s accusation by reading with much passionate inflection another Herrick verse—“Upon Julia’s Clothes.” At the poem’s conclusion the men clapped and whistled and stomped their feet like they were at a Kansas City coochie show, and Josephine took bows like an actress at a curtain call.

  Some frosty evenings they sat bundled on the porch steps and regarded the glittering sky and watched for shooting stars. Hazel and Jim would perch on the bottom step with their arms around each other, their whisperings and gigglings rising as blue mist against the moonlight. They enjoyed each other’s touch, had in fact become lovers, but they were agreed that their sexual affection did not describe the true love they each expected to find someday. They made no secret to the others of their intimacy, yet none of them, not even young Jenny, was troubled by this unconventional friendship which would have roused brimstone condemnation in the larger world beyond the Vaughn place.

  True love had, however, again found Mary Anderson. She sat one porch step below Jimmy Vaughn and leaned back into his embrace. The others were pleased by her recovery of heart and renewed delight in the world. Annette sometimes sat beside them and brushed Mary’s hair and once remarked that it was like brushing the moonlight itself.

  On those cold front-porch evenings, Josephine would cuddle up to Bill and sometimes slip her hand under his heavy coat and secretly make bold with his person and then laugh softly when he’d growl low in her ear to quit, dammit, there were people around. But she would comport herself properly whenever Jenny joined them and snuggled on Bill’s other side.

  One day they went to Kansas City, the men taking turns at the reins while the rest of the party huddled together for warmth in the wagonbed. The countryside was layered with snow that day, the sky bright with sunshine and so deeply blue it made them dizzy to stare up into it. The city’s frozen streets rang under the horses’ shoes. The air was hazed with coalsmoke. The town was thick with Yankee soldiers, but in this season of respite from the guerrillas the feeling of the place was much relaxed, and the only attention their party drew were looks of admiration for the girls.

  The girls delighted in the chance to show off their pretty dresses once they were out of the cold and shed of their coats, and the men cut dashing figures in their fine suits. They attended a performance of John Howard Payne’s “Home Sweet Home,” then went to a minstrel show, then a puppet show, and finally to a sideshow where they marveled at a swordswallower and a boy with skin like a lizard’s and a woman with a long black chinbeard that they were permitted to tug on to see that it was real.

  They had dinner in a fancy restaurant and dared each other to be the first to eat an oyster off the half-shell. Bill did it and said he loved it and vowed he would henceforth have oysters with every meal he took in Kansas City. Jenny picked up a shelled oyster and examined it closely, then made a face of repugnance and said “Eee-yew!” and put it back on the tray of crushed ice. Except for Josephine, the others also refused to put such a thing in their mouths. Annette said she couldn’t stand to even look one in the eye, wherever its eye might be. But Josephine followed Bill’s example and slurped one off the shell. She rolled it around in her mouth and nodded and murmured “Umm, gooood.” But even Bill had to laugh at the obvious strain of her smile—and she suddenly spat the mouthful into her napkin and said, “Lord Jesus, Billy, how can you swallow that!”

  They browsed the stores of the city. The women bought dresses and hats and rings and hairbrushes. The men bought smoking pipes and honing stones and fobs for their watches. In one place, Bill spied a black silk ribbon a yard long and not a half-inch wide, and that evening at supper he gave it to Josephine as a present. She kissed him on the cheek, then folded the ribbon and did something with it in her hair, then dropped her hands and showed him, and the vision of her with the ribbon looped in the spilling gleam of her hair was the most beautiful he’d ever beheld.

  “I love it,” she said. “I’ll treasure it till the day I die.”

  But even in these isolate months when the world seemed to spin more slowly and to curl into itself against the encompassing cold, the borderland war went on. The Westport Sewing Circle had suspended its meetings until spring, so the Vaughn place was without the women’s weekly provision of news and hearsay and rumor, but each time Finley went into Westport for supplies he also brought back newspapers and reports from neighbors and stories he’d heard in liveries and barbershops and saloons. In the bushwhackers’ absence from the region, Kansas redlegs and the Missouri militia were settling old scores with secessionist enemies of long standing and wreaking hard times on those they suspected of being guerrilla allies.

  The only Missouri newspapers still in business were pro-Union, and they avidly endorsed the aggressive policy of seeking out and punishing bushwhacker supporters. The meanest details of that policy were in the stories Finley brought back from town. Redlegs had this winter burned a dozen farms along the border from Jackson County to the Osage River. In several instances they played a favorite game of putting a rope around their victim’s neck and hoisting him off the ground again and again while his wife and children looked on and pled for his life. They’d finally hang the man for once and all, then fire the house and outbuildings before riding away and leaving the family without shelter in the freezing cold.

  The militia was not without its own breed of malice. They burned farms and killed stock and now and then cut off a thumb as a reminder not to give helping hand to the wildwood boys again. When they severed a thumb from Milt Charles down in Bates County, he cursed them for sorry sons of bitches even as his wife worked to stem the bleeding and begged him to shut up. He said he couldn’t wait to tell Quantrill who’d done this to him. “Well, let’s see you tell him who did this,” the militia officer said, and shot him where he stood.

  They hanged Raleigh Watts in the woods about a half-mile from his farm in Jackson County, hanged him from a high oak branch and put a sign around his neck warning that they would kill anyone who took down the body. Nobody dared do it. Winter preserved him against decomposition but not against the crows, and every day his widow wept to see them feeding on his face. Not until spring would the blackened thing that had been her husband at last come down at the break of the weathered rope, and she would gather into a burlap sack the jumble of rotted clothes and flesh and disjointed bones and carry it home for burial.

  There was no end of the terrible stories. Linus Weatherford was roped and dragged to death behind a redleg’s galloping horse. Boland Jones was tied to the tail of a mule and kicked to death when the animal tried to free itself of him. Jordan McCollum was shoved into his well and large rocks were dropped on him until he was crushed or drowned and nobody knew which…. There was no end of the terrible stories.

  In the final weeks of that winter, after the snow had gone for good, Cole Younger came to visit. He’d been hiding out in a small cabin in Cass County, near Harrisonville—where his rich father had once been mayor before he was murdered by Yankees, and near where, this selfsame winter, the militia had driven his mother and sisters out of their house and forced her to set it on fire herself. The soldiers watched the house burn until the roof fell through and then rode off. The women then walked eight miles through darkness and blowing snow to reach Harrisonville and refuge with relatives.

  Cole looked to have grown even beefier in his winter idleness. He’d had various visitors these past months, including some of the men who’d gone to Arkansas with Quantrill and then chosen to return early, and so he had plenty of news to share as he sipped at a steaming mug of cider sweetened with whiskey. He said the guerrillas served as Jo Shelby’s scouts in Arkansas and acquitted themselves well in hard winter fighting. But Quantrill had not been with them. No sooner had they arrived in Arkansas than he’d left for Richmond, taking Andy Blunt with him and leaving George Todd in command of the company. The way Cole heard it, Quantrill had asked
the Confederate secretary of war for a commissioned rank of colonel, but the secretary said no, not unless he put himself and his men under the authority of the regular army.

  “He musta been keen disappointed not to get that commission,” Cole said, “but he sure as hell wasn’t going to join the company to the regulars. Hell, he doesn’t want to be under army regulations any more than the rest of us, and he don’t give a damn about them cotton-king sons of bitches either. It’s why we became bushwhackers in the first place—to fight for Missouri without answering to a bunch of Virginians with brass buttons.”

  Quantrill hung on in Richmond for weeks before he finally returned to Arkansas and found W. J. Gregg in charge of the company. Todd had quickly got his fill of army rules and gone back to Missouri with a dozen men. They’d been sheltering in an abandoned half-burned mansion a few miles from Cole’s cabin.

  Jim Anderson asked if he’d had any word of the Berry boys.

  “Oh my, yes,” Cole said. “Everybody says those two been a pair of devils in the fighting. But hey, listen to this story Gregg told me about…” He paused and glanced at the girls, then gave Bill an arched look. Bill told the girls to leave the room. They whined and grumbled but got up and went out and closed the door behind them.

  “This was in Springfield,” Cole said, “where things got so hot they was fighting house to house. What happened was, the off-eyed boy, Butch, he goes busting into a house with Gregg right behind him and there in the parlor stands this woman wearing nothing but a smile and a little shimmy. Trouble was, she was real skinny, no more than skin and bone under a big hank of hair is the way Gregg describes her. No tits to tell of, ass like a board. Well sir, she looks at them boys and says, ‘Ravish me if you will, I won’t resist nor raise a cry.’ Gregg swears that’s exactly what she said. He’d never seen a woman wanted it so bad, but not only was she terrible skinny, she had this smell, like it’d been a goodly while between baths. W. J. said that all in all he just couldn’t raise the enthusiasm for it. He was trying to think of how to turn her down polite-like, when that Butch boy says: ‘Truth to tell, mam, I wouldn’t go poking in there with a borrowed dick.’”