Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  “Blunt?”

  “Lawrence. And make of it what Lane made of Osceola.”

  “Jarrette?”

  “Lawrence. And kill every male big enough to hold a gun.”

  “Gregg?”

  “I guess there’s no selection anymore. Lawrence it is.”

  Quantrill’s eyes glittered into Bill’s. “Anderson?”

  “Lawrence.”

  When they got back to the White Oak camp, Dick Yeager called the men together to tell them the plan. Bill and Jim Anderson headed directly for the other side of the camp, where Bill’s prisoners were under guard in a makeshift pen of tree limbs.

  The Berry boys fell in beside them and nodded their greetings. Jim grinned and clapped them on the shoulder. As they strode across the campground, Ike said that as soon as they’d heard what happened, he and Butch had left Pool’s camp and come to the White Oak breaks. “They were like our sisters too,” Ike said. “If you’ll have us back, we’d be proud to ride with you.”

  “You boys never have to ask,” Bill said.

  Ike’s white hair had grown to his shoulder blades and he was now cleanshaved. Butch’s mustache had thickened. His off eye looked further skewed and his good one seemed much aged. His necklace of ears had grown heavier, and the driest, lowest ones clicked against his belt buckle. His cheekbone showed a fresh scar which Bill and Jim would come to learn was made by a Federal rifleball. They would learn too that his Joey horse had been killed from under him a month ago and he was now riding a paint, which he believed hid better in the bush and which he had not given a name nor would.

  The prisoners saw them coming and those who’d been sitting rose quickly to their feet. As the pairs of brothers drew closer, the captives read their faces and shrank from the front of the pen. Some began pleading for mercy, swearing they’d never harmed anybody in Missouri, that they’d been forced to wear the Yankee blue against their will, that they would never take up a gun against the South again. The guards moved out of the way just as each of the brothers pulled a pair of Colts and started shooting.

  In ten seconds the eight revolvers were emptied and all the prisoners down and done with screaming. But a few still twitched or groaned. Bill and Butch put up their empty guns and filled their hands with loaded ones and went into the pen and delivered one more shot to each of them, square in the head.

  Butch then set about cutting an ear from each of the men he’d killed. Bill watched for a moment and then calculated that he himself had done for five of the prisoners, then took from his jacket pocket Josephine’s long ribbon of black silk and into it tied five tight knots.

  DIES IRAE

  Regard the town. Its clean wide streets and neat sidewalks deserted at this gray hour before daybreak. Everywhere is evidence of a thriving community. Consider the newly cleared lots, the commercial buildings under construction, the rising frameworks of new houses. Imagine the day-long clatterings of hammers and raspings of saws in their workaday anthem of civic expansion and prosperity on the increase. Behold the hill of Mount Oread and the splendid homes along its shady base, a neighborhood of leading citizens, including the state’s first governor, including Senator Jim Lane. Pay notice to Ridenhour & Baker’s, the largest grocery store in the state. Admire the Eldridge House, four stories high and luxuriously appointed, the grandest hotel, it is said, west of the Mississippi. Look on the many shops and restaurants, the handsome office buildings, the stately courthouse and its immaculate square. Attend the shadowy arboreal beauty of South Park where Massachusetts Street runs through it. See there the tents of the twenty Negro soldiers of the Second Kansas Colored Regiment, and two blocks to the east observe the camp of the Fourteenth Regiment of Kansas Volunteers, presently manned by twenty-two white recruits. Remark the easy passage of the Kaw River under its layer of light morning mist. A few windows and livery doors now showing yellow lamplight as the town comes slowly awake. But none of these early risers will prove correct in his expectations of the day, except as concerns the weather. It has been a sweltering summer, and as the eastern sky shows its first thin streaks of red, the air is still and already warm, presaging another day of scorching heat.

  They sat their horses on a brushy rise and looked on the town in gray dawnlight. Quantrill sent W. J. Gregg with two men into town to find out if it was really as unaware of their presence as it seemed.

  The company stood impressed by its own achievement. Few among them had truly expected to arrive at Lawrence. They would be intercepted by Federal forces, there would be a ferocious fight, and they would retreat to Missouri before Yankee reinforcements showed up—such had been the general anticipation. Yet here they now were, nearly four hundred strong, the town unwarned and Federal regulars nowhere about except for the small local garrison. They’d been two days on the move, with videttes a mile out to every direction and reporting to Quantrill every hour. They’d come into Kansas just south of Aubrey, the moonless night as dark as ink, and slipped past the local outpost in a long lean quiet column of twos. Quantrill then broke up the company into various bunches and dispatched them in different westward directions so anyone who tried to track them would not know which trails to hold to. Miles farther on, the bunches came together again. But the darkness was so nearly absolute they had finally not been sure where they were, and they’d been obliged to impress one guide after another at gunpoint as they went from farm to farm. And here they now were—redeyed and haggard. And grinning like wolves.

  As the town began to clarify in the light of the rising day, Bill Anderson heard Larkin Skaggs intone in a low rasp: “‘Thou mighty city, in one hour hast thy mighty judgment come, and the light of a single lamp shall shine in thee no more.’”

  Skaggs had asked to ride with Bill after hearing of his execution of the Yankees at White Oak. He was one of an increasing number in the company who objected to Quantrill’s occasional taking of prisoners in hope of trading them for captive guerrillas. Everyone knew the Yanks rarely made deals—when they caught a bushwhacker they killed him on the spot or took him to Leavenworth for hanging. Most of the wildwood boys expected no less if they should fall into Union hands, and so believed in a black flag war—no quarter given, none ever asked. Jim had objected to Skaggs as a lunatic, but Bill said lunatic or no, the man was a capable killer of Federals, and accepted him into the bunch.

  Now Gregg and the scouts returned and reported that all was well. “They got no notion at all we’re here,” W. J. said.

  Quantrill turned to his officers and said, “Remember: I will not have a woman harmed. The man who injures a woman today will answer directly to me. Be sure your boys bear it in mind.”

  He stood in his stirrups and looked back along the column and raised his right fist high, his brown guerrilla shirt adorned with the beautiful blood-red stitchwork of young Kate King. “For justice and Missouri!” he bellowed. “Aut vincere aut mori!”

  And they fell on Lawrence like a biblical wrath.

  They came howling down Massachusetts Street, shooting to left and right, shooting every man fool enough to come outside to see what was happening, to show his face at a window or an open door. There were cries of “Remember Osceola!” and “Remember the girls!”

  Quantrill had neatly laid out his plan and his captains executed it exactly. Andy Blunt’s men went to block the west end of town while W. J. Gregg’s bunch swung away to cut off escape from the east. Dave Pool took a dozen men directly to the top of Mount Oread to watch for Federal cavalry. In minutes they had the town closed off.

  Bill Anderson turned his men off Massachusetts and onto a side street and bore toward the camp of the Fourteenth Kansas Volunteers. The white recruits heard the pandemonium and came scrambling out of their tents in their underwear. Their mouths fell slack at the apocalyptic vision of wildhaired guerrillas galloping at them on mad-eyed horses showing huge teeth. The frontmost Yankee raised his hands in surrender and Bill Anderson’s bullet struck him above the eye and slung him out dead. Some of the soldier
s were too frightened to come out of their tents and so were trampled when the raiders rode over them. Half the boys were killed on the guerrillas’ first pass, and then the bushwhackers came around and set to dispatching the wounded and to looting the meager camp.

  A recruit with a bloody hip was on his knees, hands clasped and stretched up to Bill Anderson, pleading for his life as Bill walked Edgar Allan up to him. The boy could not have been more than sixteen years old. “When you enlisted for the blue,” Bill said, “you gave up every claim on mercy.” And shot him. He reckoned his tally at five, withdrew the black ribbon and tied the new knots. They’re paying, Joey, he thought, they’re paying.

  Twenty yards beyond the camp, a barechested recruit was running hard for the woods, but Butch Berry loped his horse after him. When he came even with the boy he laughed down at him. The recruit looked up as he ran and Butch shot him and the boy’s legs quit altogether. Butch reined up and dismounted and unsheathed his shortblade.

  Larkin Skaggs ripped down the Union banner from its pole in the center of the camp, tied the flag to the end of his horse’s tail, then rode about the camp whooping and trailing the Stars and Stripes in the dust, his horse shredding it under its rear hooves.

  While the Anderson bunch was at killing the white soldiers, the Negro troops bivouacked to the west were taking flight into the surrounding woods. They’d heard the gunfire and the screams and knew a bad reckoning was at hand. By the time the guerrillas arrived at the colored camp, it stood deserted.

  Bill at last regrouped his bunch and they went trotting back out to Massachusetts Street. The town clattered with gunfire and quivered with rebel yells, rang with the cries of wounded and dying men, the keening of witnessing women. The air was misting with woodsmoke and assuming a scent of blackpowder. The streets were littered with bloodstained men at awkward sprawl. Wherever a fallen townsman was trying to regain his feet or crawl away to some imagined haven, a guerrilla rode his horse over him and then shot him again. Bill saw two dogs lying dead but no sign of others anywhere.

  The government and newspaper offices were the first targets put to the torch. Now the guerrillas were at looting the banks and stores and business offices, bearing away money, jewelry, whatever of monetary worth they came upon, then setting afire each ransacked place. The entire business district was ablaze, the dark smoke rising straight as pillars into the windless sky. Many of the wildwood boys wore new boots, new hats, new clothes with the price tags still dangling from them. Bill spied George Todd galloping across the intersection ahead, bedecked in a handsome new suit and hat.

  Some of the raiders carried lists of the names and addresses of the town’s politicians and lawmen, its newspaper editors, its traffickers with jayhawks and redlegs—death lists compiled by Quantrill’s spies—and they were hunting these men all over town. As Bill and his men made their slow way down the street, their attention was pulled in every direction by sudden concentrations of gunfire and shrieks and death screams. Everywhere stood houses in flame, and more being fired. Women were trying to save what possessions they could, shoving furniture out into the yard, flinging clothes from the windows, and some were assisted by the same men who’d set the fires. At the addresses on the death lists, guerrillas sat their horses in front of the burning house and waited for the people within to come running out, coughing and crying, and then shot the men among them and every boy too who looked old enough to use a gun.

  Mortal dramas were playing out on every street. Women interposing themselves between their men and the men who would kill them, pleading with the guerrillas, arguing, trying to bargain, even cajoling them in their efforts to save their men’s lives. In some few cases they would succeed, in most not.

  They came to a street where three guerrillas were crowfooting around a shrilling woman trying desperately to protect a man from them with her body, holding him tightly to her as a mother hugs a frightened child, whirling with him this way and that in her efforts to keep her back to all their guns at once.

  “Please,” she begged, “have pity!”

  The bushwhackers laughed. “We are fiends from hell, woman,” one said. “There is no pity today.”

  Bill rode past them and seconds later heard the gunshots behind him and the woman’s wail of grief rising to mingle with so many others. And in that moment was aware of the ache in his jaws, so tightly were they clenched.

  The saloons were the first places many of them had hied. They’d cleared off the shelves and then rolled whiskey barrels out to the sidewalks and stood them in upright rows and smashed away the tops so a man could dip himself a schoonerful without even having to dismount.

  Larkin Skaggs galloped ahead of the bunch in his haste to get at the nearest row of sidewalk liquor, the shredded Union flag still dragging behind his horse. He was already on his second mugful of whiskey when Bill and the others reined up and stepped down from their horses. Mugs were passed to them and they each dipped a drink. The surrounding din was incessant—the gunfire and rebel yells and bushwhacker laughter, the screams of fear and pain and sorrow.

  “Sweet baby Jesus,” Ike Berry said, glancing up and down the street. “I never even dreamt the like.” His look was troubled.

  Bill Anderson was surprised by his sudden irritation at Ike’s remark. Then he saw the look on his brother’s face and snapped, “What are you so hangdog about?”

  “I ain’t,” he said. Then shrugged. “It’s just, I don’t know. I guess…I wish there was more soldiers to fight, I don’t know.” He looked off across the street.

  “If at least these people were Dutchmen,” Ike said. “Daddy used to say the damned Dutch always got it coming, no matter they fight back or not.”

  Butch Berry stood apart from them, his necklace of ears holding three raw additions he’d taken at the Federal camp. He was watching a drunken bushwhacker trying to make his horse stomp on a hatless man with a bloody head who was struggling to drag himself off the street. He spat.

  Bill stalked into the saloon and snatched a nearly full bottle from a bushwhacker so drunk he didn’t even object, then commandeered a table at the back of the room. A minute later Jim and the Berrys came in with refilled mugs and sat with him. They drank in silence and none looked into the eyes of another.

  He knew now what was chafing him. He’d heard its timbre in Ike’s remark and seen its shadow in his brother’s face. He’d been quick to volunteer his men for the attack on the army camps in town because he was set on killing Federals, and if the only ones to be found here were recruits, so be it. Recruits were anyway the seeds of seasoned veterans. But the men of this town had proved to be cowards who would not fight and looked to their women to protect them. Men so despicably weak as that were unworthy of such effort of destruction as this. The scale of hate being visited on this craven town felt to him so excessive it was itself a show of weakness. Give him men of war to kill, not such contemptibles as these. Give him redlegs who hanged farmers…militiamen who burned the homes of widows…Federals who murdered girls….

  Frank James came in from the sidewalk and asked Bill what he wanted the bunch to do. “Tell them suit themselves,” Bill said. Frank shrugged and went outside.

  They drank without talking, the din from the streets relentless, the smoky air now carrying into the saloon the distinct odor of burning flesh. Their fellows came and went, hollering brags of how many Unionist sons of bitches they’d killed so far this day and how much loot they’d reaped. Larkin Skaggs came in, listing with drink, and grabbed up an unattended bottle. He bellowed that the Great Jehovah was this day cleansing the sinful stain of Lawrence from the earth—then lunged back out into the maelstrom.

  Quantrill entered and grinned at the cheers that met him. He spied Bill’s group and came over to the table to sit with them. He said he’d been to Jim Lane’s house with a dozen men but found only his wife and daughter at home. The woman claimed the senator was in Saint Louis and would not return home for several weeks more. Quantrill expressed his disappoi
ntment and informed her that the senator would have no home to return to. He had some of the boys help her remove the preserved foods from the house so she and the girl would not go hungry, then set the place afire and took pleasure in watching it burn.

  He didn’t believe Lane was in Saint Louis, Quantrill said, but his men had not turned up a sign of him anywhere in town. The mayor too had eluded them. But the entire business district was aflame and much of the rest of the town was now burning and most of the men on the death lists were even now swinging their picks in hell, so the day was not without its consolations. “The Yankee nation will long remember it,” he said.

  He paused to light a thin cigar and only now seemed to notice the table’s subdued mood. He sighed and stared at the open doorway admitting the cacophony of destruction without. “I know,” he said. “It does not gladden a man’s spirit to meet with such cowards. The women of this town are brave and plucky to the last one, but the men are less than rabbits.”

  He turned back to Bill and said, “But then, who thought we’d even get here? Who knew for certain there wouldn’t be a thousand Yankee soldiers waiting for us this side of the border? They have their spies too, after all.” He turned up his hands in a gesture of mystification with fortune’s turns. “Yet here we are. And not here are a thousand Yankee soldiers. Should we have turned back for the lack of them? Should we have refused to kill these vermin because there were no soldiers to fight for them? Because they will not fight for themselves?”

  “They’re not worth all this,” Bill said, gesturing toward the door. “Most of the boys don’t share that opinion,” Quantrill said. “Sufficient unto them that they are killing men of the same Yankee persuasion that has brought grief to their families. They are exacting their portion of what Sir Bacon calls ‘a wild justice.’ It’s a madness, William T., and I must say I wasn’t sure you didn’t have it too. Since the tragedy at Kansas City, I mean.”