Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  “It’s anyway no excuse for me to’ve acted low,” Butch said. “I thought it over and all I can say is I’m sorry and I wanted you to hear it from me. And now I’ll be getting back to camp.”

  As Butch made to mount up, Bill said, “Hey boy, you’ll really be sorry if you pass up a hug from Bush and a cup or two of her cinnamon cider. If I was you, I’d get in here and get my share of both.”

  Butch lowered his foot from the stirrup and stared at Bill a moment—then grinned and said, “Hell, I thought you’d never ask.”

  They spent the rest of that day together, the four of them, sipping cider and smoking, talking and telling jokes. After a time, they started lacing the cider with Bill’s jug and after a while longer dispensed with the cider altogether. Bush began preparing a big kettle of rabbit stew and two large pans of cornbread. The little room was soon thick with savory aromas and Jim and Butch did not have to be argued into staying to supper.

  They told Bill and Bush about Christmas Day, when a bunch of guerrillas went into town and got fairly well drunk in their celebra tion of the Good Lord’s birthday. They galloped up and down the streets, howling and shooting the bells in church steeples, shooting rooftop weathercocks into a spin, shooting the knobs off doors. Ben Christian, the owner of the only hotel in town and a friend of Quantrill, hastily sent a rider out to Mineral Springs to fetch Quantrill while he went out to remonstrate with the guerrillas.

  The bushwhackers laughed at the innkeeper and said they’d show him what a real disturbance was—then rode their horses into his hotel and scared the living God out of everyone within. The animals knocked over and broke up furniture, tore the carpeting with their hooves, chewed up the potted plants. Women shrieked as the guerrillas shot apart the lamplights and a chandelier, showering the lobby with glass.

  The bushwhackers then repaired to a photography studio to have their pictures made. They posed in groups and individually, brandishing pistols and bottles and cigars and fearsome aspects. But then the photographist ran out of plates, and in their anger the bushwhackers who’d not yet had their pictures taken made ruin of the man’s studio and equipment.

  Then Quantrill arrived, accompanied by George Todd and three dozen men—including Jim Anderson and Butch Berry—and the celebrants were rounded up and driven back to camp, laughing and regaling their sober comrades with the details of their spree, George Todd laughing as hard as any of them, most of them entirely unmindful of Quantrill’s disapproving glare. The next day, however, when they’d sobered somewhat, Quantrill took them back to town and ordered them to apologize to Ben Christian and the photographist and to pay for the damages to their establishments.

  Even some of the men who hadn’t been on the spree thought Quantrill was going too far to make the roisterers pay for the damage. “We been fighting the Yanks so these people can sit home all safe and get rich,” Fletch Taylor had said. “And we’re making them even richer with all the money we spend in their damn town. But let us do a little whooping and they’re quick to complain on us and put their hand out for more money. That don’t speak of a proper gratitude, you ask me.”

  Jim said it surely did look like Quantrill was more concerned with Ben Christian’s property than with his own men’s right to have a little fun. One of the new boys asked George Todd if he would’ve made the fellas pay and apologize, and Todd just spat and shook his head. The new man turned to a friend and said, “See? I told ye.”

  Bill said if Quantrill wasn’t careful, he might lose his whole company to Todd one of these days. Jim said Quantrill seemed to be thinking the same thing, and that was probably why W. J. Gregg wasn’t with the company anymore—which was news to Bill. About a week ago, Jim said, W. J. and Todd had got into a bad argument over some money Gregg said Todd owed him. Todd got so hot about it he told Gregg he’d kill him if he didn’t get out of camp before morning and never come back. Gregg’s friends saw the quarrel as a personal matter between him and Todd and were keeping out of it, but Todd had a lot of new wildboys in his bunch ready to do anything he said, and Gregg was sure he would put some of them up to killing him. He went to Quantrill and asked him to intervene, but Quantrill said he couldn’t. He said it wouldn’t do any good to cause splits in the company over a personal difference between two men. His advice was for Gregg to leave the camp. Gregg was saddling up to go when he told all this to Jim. He said he’d never been as disappointed by any man as he was by Quantrill. A dozen friends were leaving with him. He said for Jim to tell Bill so long, and then he was gone, off to join Jo Shelby’s regulars.

  “W. J.’s a damn good man,” Bill said. “I hate to see him gone. He’s been with the company as long as anybody, and it’s a bad sign for Quantrill not to back him.” He had not seen Quantrill since his wedding day. Nor dismissed the insult of his presumptuous counsel against his marriage. Or forgiven his absence from his wedding celebration. Or forgotten the implication of his remark to Todd that Kate had never been a whore.

  “Ah hell, enough of this,” Bill said. “Who cares a damn about Quantrill’s troubles, anyway? Let’s kick our heels.”

  And so they did. Jim Anderson took out his harmonica, and Butch Berry produced his Jew’s harp, and they started in on “Drunken Hiccups.” Bill and Bush whirled around on the small span of cabin floor. After a while Jim cut in on Bill and handed him the mouth organ, and then Butch too claimed his turn with Bush as Bill filled in with twanging the harp. And though this woman could not but remind Butch Berry of the lost Josephine he’d so hopelessly loved, he did not feel the desperate flailing of his heart he’d felt in dancing with Josie, but only the swirling joy of it.

  So it went into the early darkness. Someone passing in view of that cabin in its white landscape under the full winter moon would have seen its chimney smoke rising in a gentle blue column and smelled the redolence of the supper stew, seen the warm yellow glow at the window and heard faintly the music and the laughter—and would surely have envied those within.

  Cole Younger was the next to go. He hallooed the house from the dooryard fence one late morning and turned down Bill’s invitation to dismount and come inside for coffee. A half-dozen men were with him, all of them outfitted for a long journey. Cole said he was tired of the bushwhacker life and anyway didn’t care much for the sort of recruits coming into the company nowadays. Most were half-crazed young boys, naturalborn killers and thieves who’d joined the guerrillas for no reason but the occasion to murder and steal more freely. When he told his men he was leaving, most of them had gone over to Todd’s bunch, which had become about the worst collection of hooligans he’d ever seen. He didn’t see much difference anymore between a gang like Todd’s and any gang of redlegs, and he didn’t even want to imagine how much worse the meanness would get come next summer. The war was anyhow lost, and he didn’t feature getting killed for a cause without a hope in hell left to it.

  Bill said Cole was waving the white flag a little too soon, in his opinion. Cole said he would never in his life wave a white flag but he wouldn’t wave a black one anymore either. The way he saw it, once the war was done with, there would be Yankee banks everywhere, and it would practically be his sworn duty as an unsurrendered rebel to rob as many of them as he could. Until then, he believed he would pass the time in California. Bill said he was sorry to see him go. Cole said he was sorry to see him stay. Then he was gone.

  Not two weeks after that, Jim brought word that John Jarrette had quit the company too. He’d been promised the rank of captain in the regulars and had gone off with thirty of his men. Of his boys who stayed behind, most of them joined with Todd.

  Still another seasoned bushwhacker lost to the company was George Maddox. He’d received word that his wife had been taken seriously ill, and so had returned to Missouri to be with her. But someone peached him to the Federals and he was arrested as one of the bushwhackers who’d been recognized at Lawrence. He would spend the rest of the war behind bars and finally come to trial in Ottawa, Kansas, the only guerrilla
ever tried for the Lawrence raid. But as rumor would have it in the years to come, unknown associates of Maddox visited with members of the jury and money changed hands. For a fact the jury would acquit Maddox of all charges and howls of outrage would shake the courtroom as he was hustled out a rear door and onto a horse held by his waiting wife.

  The winter deepened. The farmers had been right in their predictions of heavy snow, and the world seemed to slow under the weight of it. When he went out to the stable in the mornings to fork hay for the horses, he would pause in the yard and breathe deep aching lungfuls of the chilly air. His breath rose in blue billows. The trees stood bare. Nothing moved in that gelid landscape but a few curious crows looking like oiled shadows on the naked branches, snickering and whistling.

  They went for long walks into the skeletal woodland, holding to each other, giggling at their slips on patches of ice, at their clumsy missteps in the snow. They made running slides on the frozen creek and each hooted at the other when the slide ended in a sprawl. They engaged in snowball skirmishes. They constructed snowmen so ill-formed that Bush felt as sorry for them as cripples. He built a sled and pulled her on it and they’d ride it tandem down the hill, holding tight to each other and whooping all the way, sometimes capsizing in a tangled laughing heap before reaching the bottom.

  One late afternoon of long shadows under a rosy sky he brought down a deer at sixty yards with a single pistolshot to the head, a big buck with a wide rack. Bush helped him to lug it home on the sled. They dressed it by firelight on a frame behind the house and for weeks after feasted on venison.

  Sometimes he would take out his battered volume of Shakespeare and read to her from the sonnets. His favorite was the one in which the poet tells his lover that even when he is in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes and almost despising himself, the very thought of her makes him feel so rich that he wouldn’t trade places with a king. Hers was the one comparing the lover to a summer’s day.

  He bought a bathtub in town, an oversized clawfoot model, and with the help of Jim and Butch carried it home on a flatwagon they commandeered from the camp. They had to cut the doorway wider to get the tub inside, and they set it next to the hearth. They then added a plank to the door and cut it to fit the expanded doorway and they felt like expert and clever craftsmen when they were done. Jim and Butch stood looking at the tub and then looked at Bill, who grinned and winked. Bush smiled at them and said, “What are all you wicked boys thinking?” Then all of them broke out laughing, and Butch said, “Come on, Jimbo, let’s go over to the Moon and pay the girls our respects. What I’m thinking won’t allow for a damn thing else till I do that.”

  The nights were long now and they were glad of it. The wind keened under the eaves and fluted at the edges of the windows and door. Almost every evening, they would boil large kettles of water until the tub was full and steaming. She’d knot her hair up on her head and let him relieve her of her clothes. He’d take his time about it, pausing in the process to kiss portions of her as they came exposed, breasts, belly, buttocks, the backs of her knees. Then she’d undress him as slowly and with as much caress. They’d inhale through their teeth against the bathwater’s heat as they gingerly sank themselves in it. They’d take turns bathing each other, one of them now standing, now kneeling, now on all fours, now giggling or sighing, as the other ministered with soapy hands and cloth. They would joke about being the cleanest two people in Missouri. She’d recline against his chest, his arms around her, their knees jutting from the water, and they’d softly sing songs of their own making as the walls around them quivered with firelight and shadow. When the tubwater turned cool they’d step out and dry each other and sit naked on a quilt in front of the fire. He’d unloose her hair and brush it gently as he’d been taught by his sisters until it hung straight and loose and shining. She’d comb his hair free of its knots and sometimes braid it for the pleasure it gave her. She’d trim his beard and his mustache. They’d pause now and again to kiss like they were trying to breathe each other’s soul. Then they’d take to the bed and make love, and afterward lie entwined under the blankets and looking through the frost-bordered window at the night sky, some nights seeing the moon or some portion of it and some nights only its glow and some nights a blacker sky clustered with stars. The first time they saw a falling star together, she’d squeezed his hand and whispered, “Momma always said to make a wish.” But all he thought was, Joey, and he’d hugged Bush more tightly to him and buried his face in her hair.

  He rarely dreamt, but when he did, it was often of a crashing building, of falling bricks and rising dust and the mortal screamings of young women. He would come awake without sound to the dim glow of the lowered hearthfire, Bush snugged against him, her easy breath of sleep soft on his neck. He’d lie open-eyed until his heart slowed and the comforting warmth of Bush’s skin and the scent of it and of her hair were all he was aware of, and then he’d sleep again. But one late night when he went into the dream, her hand was on his chest and even in her sleep she felt his heart’s sudden jumping and she came awake too. She heard his halting breath and knew he was crying and knew why. She put her hand to his face and said softly, “You didn’t kill her, Bill. You didn’t. I think she’d cuss you like a fishwife if she knew you thought so.”

  He drew her closer and said it was all right, to go on back to sleep. They lay in silence for a time before he said , “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  They lay awake for a long time but said no more, only held each other close and felt the beating of their hearts.

  One night she asked if the men he’d sent after Ned shouldn’t have returned with him by now. He said the rascals might’ve made the acquaintance of some affectionate Missouri girls and decided to wait out the winter as near to them as they could. Ike might even have found the girl whose picture he’d fallen in love with, and she might have introduced Ned and Val to friends of hers—although Val likely would have gone back to stay with his wife.

  “After all, why spend the winter in a bushwhacker camp—in Texas or anywhere else—if you could spend it in close company with a girl?” Bill said. “Or even better, with your wife?”

  Bush waggled her brow and said, “Like somebody we know?”

  Bill made a face of mock innocence and put both hands to his chest in a gesture of “Who, me?”—and she broke out laughing and fell on him with her hands to his throat, affecting to choke him, saying, “I swear I’m going to wring that thoughtless boy’s neck just like this!”

  Thus did the months of their winter pass by.

  BREACHES AND RECOGNITIONS

  Through the winter, Jim and Butch made frequent visits, and they always brought tidings and news.

  The problems between the guerrillas and the residents of Sherman had grown worse. The bushwhackers resented the townfolk’s seeming lack of gratitude for their defense of them against the Yankee nation. They were bitter about the constant protests to Quantrill and General McCulloch, mostly about misdeeds the bushwhackers saw as harmless fun. They were outraged by price gougings for everything from blacksmithing to supplies to restaurant meals to saloon whiskey. When the girls at the Purple Moon tried to raise their prices too, George Todd and Dave Pool said they would tie every one of the bitches to a bed and burn the place down before any of their men would pay a penny more to get laid. The girls had said nothing more of a price increase.

  For their part, the good citizens complained of the bushwhackers’ increasingly brute misconduct, of their nightly drunken howlings and terrorizing of the town. They had no respect for private property. They held shooting contests and horse races in the streets, and they bullied and sometimes thrashed any man who made objection.

  To try to occupy the guerrillas and keep them out of Sherman for a time, General McCulloch had ordered Quantrill to go in hunt of Confederate deserters, whose number had been increasing through the winter. Quantrill had replied that he’d be proud to take on the mission b
ut could not begin right away because most of his men were suffering from the flu. McCulloch was suspicious, but there wasn’t much he could say except for Quantrill to get started as soon as possible. When Quantrill told the men about the exchange of messages with McCulloch, they all laughed and affected to have bad coughs.

  “He wasn’t about to make the company go hunting deserters,” Butch Berry said. “He knows the boys don’t fault any fella who takes leave of the regular army and all its rules and regulations. Hell, there’s a couple of dozen deserters in the company.”

  Jim said there was more to it than that. Quantrill knew how popular George Todd had become with the men, especially the younger and wilder ones, and he was doing all he could to keep himself in favor with them too.

  “True enough,” Butch said. “The trouble is, there’s lately been more townfolk complaints about robberies and bullyings and such. And Todd’s been letting the boys get away with it. If Quantrill puts a stop to it, a lot of the boys’ll get blackassed. If he doesn’t make them quit, he’ll look like he’s scared of standing up to Todd.”

  “And McCulloch will really come down hard on him,” Jim said.

  “He’s got a problem is what he’s got,” Butch said.

  “I’m real sorry to hear it,” Bill said with a smile.

  The sun arced higher every day. The frozen creek cracked open, then broke apart in the forming current. The snow thinned, lingered in patches, then was gone for good. The hard ground commenced giving way to mud. The air softened. The trees put forth their first leaves. Bill regarded the burgeoning greenery and could not help thinking that it would soon enough grow its way up to Missouri.

  On a late and chilly afternoon of red sunlight filtering through the new leaves, Jim Anderson and Butch Berry arrived at the cabin with urgent news. Quantrill had arrested one of his own men, Payne Jones, for the murder of a Confederate officer, a major related to Ben Christian, the hotel owner and Quantrill’s close friend.