They got up a wrestling tournament and every man was required to ante two dollars to enter it, whether he wished to wrestle or not, and the champion would receive the full kitty. The matches in each elimination round were determined by lot and without regard to differences in size. They took place in the late afternoons with most of the company in attendance and clamoring with cheers and sidebets. Not a man refused to wrestle in his turn, not even little Riley Crawford, who within seconds of entering the ring against Dave Pool was slammed unconscious and didn’t come to for twenty minutes.
Disqualification was common in the early rounds. Arch Clement had to forfeit after losing his temper in a match with Valentine Baker and kicking him so hard in the balls that Baker couldn’t walk properly for a day. Buster Parr was ejected for biting off a portion of Dick West’s ear when it looked like Dick was about to pin him and others had to intervene to keep Dick from getting a gun and shooting Buster.
Both of the Berrys reached the third round and then Butch lost to Cole Younger and Ike lost to George Todd. Quantrill surprised most of the men by making it to the fourth round, then came up against Todd, who repeatedly and enthusiastically threw him and seemed to prolong the match deliberately before at last pinning him down. Bill Anderson did not lose until he went up against Oz Swisby in the fifth round, and Jim made it to the late rounds before losing to big Hi Guess.
When Hi defeated Oz, and Todd at last defeated Cole Younger in an epic two-hour tussle, they were matched for the championship. Their contest lasted nearly three hours before Todd finally forced Hi’s shoulders to the ground. Both of them had to be helped to their feet. Quantrill presented Todd with the prize of eight hundred dollars, and Todd raised the poke over his head with both hands and grinned at the cheers—which went even louder when he announced his intention to buy every man of the company a turn with a Sherman whore. Some of them put him on their shoulders and paraded him around the camp with others following behind and all of them singing:
“Hurrah, hurrah! For southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the bonnie blue flag that bears the single star!”
Jim Anderson nudged Bill and nodded toward Quantrill, who stood looking after the celebrant Todd and his crowd of admirers with the mien of a man watching a funeral train.
Some days later came a notice from General McCulloch’s headquarters that General James G. Blunt, United States Army, was alive and well and ensconced at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. According to accounts in the Kansas City newspapers, he had escaped the guerrillas at Baxter Springs in civilian clothes and in the company of a woman. There was no more to the message, and Quantrill asked Cole Younger and Bill Anderson if they sensed a frostiness to it.
“Got a cool tone, all right,” Cole said. “Probably thinks we were lying. Hell, we didn’t know.”
“The man’s disappointed is all,” Bill said.
“That’s no reason to call us a liar,” Cole said. “He’s no more disappointed than I am.”
No one was more disappointed than Butch Berry. When he learned the man he’d killed was not General Blunt but only Major Somebody with a penchant for ornate uniforms, he took the man’s scalp off his horse’s bridle and flung it in the fire.
Toward the end of their second month in Texas the men began to get restless. They more often rode into town to take their pleasures in the cathouses and saloons. The local merchants welcomed them like heroes and saw their profits soar.
Quantrill rarely went to Sherman with his men. He preferred long solitary rides on Charley, and where he went no one knew. He spent much time at reading, in writing daily letters to Kate. She was living with her father in Blue Springs while the guerrillas were away. He sent a rider to Missouri every week with his accumulated letters, and the courier would return with her letters to him.
But now he began to receive complaints about his men‘s conduct in town—reports of raw profanities bellowed within earshot of women and children, of loutish public drunkenness, of firearms discharged inside the city limits. When a sheriff’s deputy tried to arrest a pair of bushwhackers who were fistfighting in an alley while some of their fellows stood by and made bets, the brawlers turned on the lawman and plunged him into a water trough and might have drowned him if W. J. Gregg hadn’t come along and made them stop.
By the end of November, Sherman was lacking deputies and the sheriff rarely showed himself on the streets. While there was no denying the prosperity the guerrillas brought to Sherman, some of its citizens were having second thoughts about these wildwood boys with their rough manners and dangerous shifts in mood.
Quantrill went into town and had a talk with the mayor, then with the newspaper editor, who relayed in print his assurances to the townfolk that his men would henceforth comport themselves in better fashion. Back in camp, he called the company together and warned them against harassing the citizens. Some of the men looked sidewise at each other and arched their brows. George Todd smiled around at them and yawned behind his hand.
At first, Bill more often chose to keep to the camp than to go larking in town. Evenings he sat by a lantern with his books, days he went for walks in the woods and passed the hours along the upstream creek with no company but the chittering crows. One day he idly began to scale stones over the creek surface and the exercise suddenly put him in such vivid mind of Josephine he felt his breath seize in his chest. She had always excelled at this game and he remembered the beautiful grin she’d give him whenever she made a good throw. The memory made him feel so achingly hollow he did not return to the creek again, and started going to town with the others.
IN THE PURPLE MOON
A cold and windless December night of unseasonable rain a few days before Christmas. The small room was on the second floor of the Purple Moon Emporium and was dimly lighted by a candle on a corner shelf. The room’s plank floor only partly muted the din from the saloon downstairs—the ceaseless piano plunking and lusty singing, the laughter and bellowed conversations, the sporadic smash of glass and intermittent rebel yells. The guerrillas had bought the whole place for themselves on this night and none of the locals dared to intrude on their fun. The proprietors were a married couple named Preston, but only the missus was mingling with patrons this rowdy eve, exhorting the boys to have fun but please don’t break the furniture, making sure the Negro maids kept the girls supplied with fresh towels. The rulesman—whose duty it was to ensure a proper decorum in the guests—had been granted the night off. The mister had shut himself in his office and sat listening to the guerrillas at their frolic, hoping they would not burn the place down nor maim any of the girls who were making him rich.
The room’s only furniture consisted of a bed, two ladderback chairs on which hung the woman’s dress and Bill’s clothes and gunbelt, and two small tables, one holding a washbasin and some folded towels, the other an oil lamp with the burning wick turned down low so that the room was cast in dim amber light. The girl Bill had bought for the night was named Amanda. She was plumper than he preferred and she talked too much, but she had a pretty face and a pleasant disposition and he liked her well enough. She didn’t like to be in a completely enclosed room and had asked if she might leave the window sash slightly open despite the cold weather. He’d said all right and was glad he did. He liked hearing the rainwater spattering on the ground below the window, liked the cold earth smell mingling with the warm scents of camphor and the girl’s perfume. The blanket slid off his shoulders as he joined himself to her, and the chill air on his back was not unpleasant as they rocked together in the ancient rhythm.
They afterward sat propped against the pillowed headrail with the blankets pulled up to their chests and Bill smoked a thin cigar and shared his bottle with her. Except when she’d pause to take a drink, she kept up a steady patter about various subjects of little interest to him. She lived on the premises—only a few of the girls did not—and as usual she was complaining about the greedy Prestons and the high room rent they charged on top of the thirty percent t
hey took from each girl’s nightly income.
The rain was falling with a harder clatter now and when there came a rapping on the door they barely heard it for the rain and the raucousness downstairs.
“Who’s there?” Amanda called. The door partly opened to admit a narrow cast of brighter light from the hallway and show a portion of silhouetted woman in a shimmy who said, “It’s me, Mandy.” She slipped inside and shut the door.
Amanda got out of bed and went to her. “Honey, what is it?”
The woman stood against the far wall, and palely naked Amanda put an arm around her shoulders and held her close. Bill could not clearly make out her features in the dim lamplight. She said a big drunk jasper might be coming after her. The fella had been too drunk to get it up, and after about fifteen minutes of trying to help him out, she’d told him that was enough, there were other fellas waiting to come up and he’d have to leave now. But the fella wouldn’t go, and when she insisted, he shoved her back on the bed and climbed on top of her, holding her down with one hand and trying to put his limp thing in her with the other. She reached down beside the bed and got hold of the chamber pot and swung it up against the side of his head.
“You should’ve heard it,” she said. Her voice was slightly raspy but Bill heard no fear in it. She knocked him clean off the bed, and when he rose up on his knees she let him have it again, harder, on the same ear, and down he went. She jumped over him and snatched up her shimmy and ran out into the hall and couldn’t think what to do but come in here to hide.
“You did right, honey,” Amanda said—then heard Bill laughing low and both women looked his way. He could not see their expressions in the dim light. “It ain’t funny,” Amanda said. “He might’ve hurt her.”
“I’d say he’s lucky she didn’t beat him to death,” Bill said—and grinned wide when he heard the girl chuckle.
Now a man in the hallway was shouting, “Where you at, bitch?” There was laughter and somebody yelled, “Quit that damn hollering and go down and get another one!” There was a succession of banging doors and various voices swearing at the intrusions. Bill slipped a hand under the pillow and gripped his Navy.
Their door abruptly swung inward and hit hard against the wall and the doorway showed the silhouette of a large man holding his pants up with one hand and gripping a pistol in the other.
“You little cunt!” the man said. He pointed the gun at the woman and cocked it and Amanda jumped aside.
The room shook with the flaring blast of Bill’s Colt and the man lurched sideways against the door jamb and his knees almost buckled but he held upright. He turned toward the bed and started to bring his gun up again and Bill shot him again and the man fell out of view into the hall and his pistol clattered on the floor.
Bill flung the blanket off the bed, swirling the gunsmoke haze, and got up and went to the door and saw the man sitting spraddle-legged with his back against the hallway wall, his palms turned up at his sides, his chin on his chest. There was little blood, only a thin streak from a hole in his side and a thicker one from the wound over his heart. Bill stepped into the hall and pulled the man’s head up by the hair to look at his face in the light of the hallway lamps. He recognized him but didn’t know his name. A recent recruit to Todd’s bunch. His eyes were half-closed as if he were puzzling over some difficult question. His left ear looked like a flattened plum. Bill let go the man’s hair and his head dropped forward and he slid over onto his side.
Men and women in various states of undress had come rushing our of their rooms all along the hall and bunched up around Bill and the dead man, all of them talking at once and wanting to know who it was and asking Bill what happened. Some of the girls to the rear of the crowd were saying let me see, let me see, and others were saying quit shoving, goddammit. One girl said, “I like your outfit, Bill.” All the men were holding guns and most wearing only pants and boots and all of them pale-skinned as ghosts. The hallway air was woven with cloying perfumes and a rankness of sweat and sex. Amanda had put on her shimmy and pulled a sheet off the bed and now helped Bill to secure it around his nakedness.
The clamor of the revelry downstairs was undiminished. Bill thought it unlikely the gunshots had even been heard down there.
His brother eased up beside him and whispered, “You hit?” Bill shook his head.
He heard George Todd say, “Make way,” and the crowd hushed a little and opened up to let him pass. Quantrill had as usual not come to town, and Todd was in charge of the reveling bunch. He was in his undershirt and had a revolver tucked in the front of his pants. He stood beside Bill and looked on the upturned face of the dead man.
“Mick McCourt,” Todd said. “Deserter from the regulars. Showed up in camp two weeks ago and seemed to have sufficient sand, so I took him on. What happened?”
Bill told him. Todd nodded and said, “Well, he had it coming.”
He told two of the recent recruits to bear the dead man to the undertaker’s. As the body was lugged away, the others started back to their various rooms, the women chittering excitedly, the men once more giving them their full attention, fondling their asses, every man and woman of them feeling more pleasurably alive for Mick McCourt’s reminder of how abruptly life might take its leave.
Todd started away too, then looked back at Bill and the sheet he was wearing. He grinned and said, “Hail, Caesar.”
Bill had to grin back. “The hail with you too, George.”
Amanda tugged on Bill’s arm and said, “Come on, sugarboy.”
They went back in the room and closed the door. The chilly air smelled of gunsmoke. The other girl was standing by the window and looking out at the falling rain. “Say, girl,” Amanda said as she went to the oil lamp to raise the wick. “You know who this is just saved your pretty ass?”
The other girl turned from the window just as the room brightened with yellow light, and Bill saw her clearly for the first time.
Imagine Josephine Anderson as she might have appeared had she lived another three years. True, the eyes are green rather than violet, and the hair is so much lighter it is almost blonde. But Josie might well have grown these three inches or so taller, and might well have rounded thus in the hips and gone this much fuller of breast. Might have somewhere acquired the white scar indenting her lower lip. But see how the cast of mouth is hardly unchanged, is poised as always to smile or go wry in displeasure, to make sharp mock or to laugh in delight, to give or receive a kiss. And see the familiar intensity and fearlessness of her gaze. Just so—granting the impossible difference in eye color—might she have come to look in face and form had she lived to age nineteen.
Just so did Bill behold this girl. He felt the beat of his heart in his throat. Her own eyes widened at the way he was looking at her, but she did not seem uneasy, only curious about what might be in his head and what might come next.
Amanda finally got the wick just where she wanted it, and now turned to the woman and said, “This here, I’ll have you know, is none other than Bloody Bill Anderson.” Then she saw how they were looking at each other. “Say…you two met already?”
The girl smiled at Bill and his chest went tight in a way it had not since he’d last looked on Josephine’s smile.
“I can’t speak for the captain,” the girl said, her eyes moving quick and bright in the way Josie’s did when she was mischief-bent, “but maybe we have. What do you think, Captain?”
“Hey, girl!” Amanda said. “You can just quit making those eyes. Matter of fact, you can just get your ass back to your own room.”
“Amanda, honey,” Bill said, “I want you to go over to my poke and take another ten from it and go someplace and have yourself a time.”
“Aw, Bill,” Amanda said. “We were having a good time.”
“Do it now, Amanda.”
“Aw, Billy…damn.” She went to the chair where Bill’s clothes lay and dug into his poke and extracted ten dollars. Then folded her dress over her arm and went to the door and
looked back at them. “Say, Bill, how about the both of us?”
“Good night, Amanda,” Bill said. He and the other girl had not stopped looking at each other.
“You can use my room if you want, Mandy,” the girl said.
“Goddamn you, Bush Smith!” Amanda said. “I wish the son of a bitch shot you!” She slammed the door so hard behind her the lamplight wavered on the walls.
“Bush Smith?” Bill said.
“That would be me,” she said.
“Nor a real likely name, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Is that so? Maybe I ought to change it to something more likely—to Bloody Bill, maybe.”
“Maybe you should take off that shimmy.”
“Maybe you should take off that silly-looking sheet.”
They both did as they should. Then stood looking at each other for a long moment. Then were in each other’s arms and could not kiss deeply enough as they staggered toward the bed and fell into it.
They made love through the night, pausing now and then to sit up crosslegged on the bed and puff Bill’s pipe and have a sip or two of whiskey and sometimes they talked and laughed softly and sometimes they simply stared hard at each other before again joining together. Now the window was showing the first gray hint of dawnlight and the room was cold enough to show their breath and the Purple Moon had at last fallen quiet. They were moving together very slowly and tenderly, both of them worn and sore but in no way that called for complaint, and when they climaxed this time, it was with soft sighs and the gentlest archings and flexions.
His weight rose off her and she opened her eyes and saw him braced on his arms and staring down at her. He was crying without sound, tears running down his face, dripping from his beard.
“Oh honey, what?” she said. And pulled him down to her and rocked him and crooned to him as he clung and clung to her and surrendered to all his pent grief.
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