Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  “When you see Bloody Bill in Texas,” old man Pinker said, “tell him nothing he does to these sonofabitches can ever be mean enough.”

  Jack Henry plodded off on the old mule and followed the Pinkers’ directions to where his two comrades still dangled from the cottonwood close to the razed barn. The weathered warning sign was still on the tree. Jack Henry pulled it off and flung in the bushes. The dead men were but rags and bones anymore, their hides withered stiff and black, their faces long since taken by the crows. But there was no mistaking Ike Berry’s white hair nor Val Baker’s wild black tangle. He cut the bodies down and took a lock of each man’s hair. Then he went to the charred barn and gently kicked through the ashes and soon enough uncovered Ned Smith’s blackened bones.

  “I’m real sorry I couldn’t bury them, Captain,” Jack Henry said. He gestured with his arm stump as if such explanation might be necessary. “I’m sorry, mam,” he said to Bush. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and nodded.

  He was now on his way to Fort Worth, but had wanted to stop here to let them know what happened to their fellows, and to hand over the small portions of them he’d brought back so they might have something to bury.

  He withdrew something from his shirt pocket and handed it to Bill. “It’s from Ned.’

  It looked like a dark stub of a thin cigar. Bill passed it to Bush. She looked at him in question and he held up and waggled his index finger. Her lips parted as she understood, and she held the bone as if it were some rare object of glass.

  He had already given Ike’s lock of hair to Butch Berry. When he got to Fort Worth, he would give Val Baker’s lock to his widow in Johnson County.

  Now Jack Henry was gone, Jim too, and Bush asked Bill if he would give her some time alone. The drizzle had abated and he went walking in the misted woods, his thoughts mostly of Ike Berry, dear as a brother, who had died in love with a pretty blonde Union girl he’d never even met. He’d never had the pleasure of dancing with her, kissing her, knowing her scent or the feel of her hair. Bill’s fury was like ice in his belly.

  When he got back to the cabin she was sitting as before and he could see that she’d been crying. She asked him to sit down and please just listen to her without saying anything until she was finished.

  She had been thinking very hard about Ned. At first all she could think was how much she wanted the men who killed him to die terrible deaths. Her desire for revenge felt like a corset snugged so tight around her she could hardly draw a proper breath. She had considered giving him a ribbon of her own to put knots in like he did with Joey’s.

  “I’ll do it,” Bill said. “You—”

  “Please, Bill,” she said. “Just listen.”

  It was the notion of the ribbon that made her realize she was feeling the same sort of terrible hatred that was always tearing at him, that seemed to be at large over the whole country like a craziness. She recalled the things she’d asked about his desire to avenge Joey, wanting to know if it was even possible to satisfy that desire. Then she remembered somebody she’d known in the days when she was living with the Jeffers family in Kansas, a neighbor widow named Sarah Raulerson, who sometimes came to visit. The Jeffers hated to see her buggy coming toward the house because they knew what they were in for. She was never in the house but a short time nor halfway through with her tea before she began talking of how much she hated the damned Yankees for killing her husband at the first Bull Run and how she prayed every night for the Good Lord to strike dead every Union man, woman and child walking the earth. It was a lament everyone in the surrounding countryside had heard from her many times over, and always, as she proceeded in the telling of it, she became increasingly agitated until she was at once sobbing in her grief and cursing in her hatred.

  Today was the first time she had thought of Sarah Raulerson since before she’d left Kansas. And as she’d considered the pitiful memory of Sarah and her bitter anguish, she imagined countless other women all over the country, Southern women and Yankee women both, and all of them telling the same story and all crying their hearts out and all of them cursing countless men and women and children they did not know, yet hating them so bitterly they wished them all dead. She imagined them cursing and crying that way for the rest of their awful lives.

  She had been looking at her hands in her lap as she spoke, but now she looked up at him and her aspect was utter resolution.

  “I wish you weren’t going back to it,” she said. “I wish it more than I ever wished for anything. If I thought there was some way to stop you, I’d do it. You’ll do what you must, but I want you to know that every minute you’re away I’ll be hoping that you’ll change your mind and quit that damned war and come home to me. I don’t care about the war or who wins or who loses or for revenging Ned or for anything else. I care about you. But I swear to you, Bill, I swear I will not be another Sarah Raulerson. Whatever happens, I will not live the rest of my life with nothing to it but weeping and hating. I will not.”

  She stood up and came to him and kissed him fully on the mouth.

  He wanted to tell her that he understood, but before he could speak she put her fingers to his lips and said, “No, please. It will all go as it goes.”

  Then she grinned and said, “And where I think it should go right now is directly to the bed over there. What do you think, Captain?”

  He laughed and swept her up and to it.

  Two weeks later, Bill’s scouts reported that Quantrill had departed the Indian Nations for Missouri, and George Todd and his band had gone with him.

  Bill told Jim they’d be moving out themselves in two days, but the day before they were to leave, there came a hard storm and the rain did not let up for five days and the country turned to mud. Bill said there was no need to set out in such dismal weather, they’d wait till things dried out a little. But the rain kept coming, off and on, and the mud remained, and for the next ten days the men were miserably wet and daily more restless, their tempers drawn to such fine edge that every day saw several fistfights. The horses stamped and lunged in the corrals, as tense and agitated as the men, as ready to go.

  He spent every hour of the delay in the private company of his wife. They were touching each other constantly, stroking, caressing, holding close. They spoke little for there was little need. He snipped a lock of her hair and bound it with a sturdy thread and kept it in his shirt pocket. He said he would write to her when he could and send the letters by one of his men, but there was no telling how regularly he could do it or if the rider would get through to her—and if he did, whether the carrier would get back to Bill with her letter in turn. She said she would expect no letters from him at all. That way, any she received would come as a grand surprise.

  She had attached a clasp to her brother’s fingerbone and wore it as a brooch on her breast. Few of those to see it in years to come would realize on sight what the ornament was made of. “Now I have you both close to my heart,” she said, one hand fingering the brooch, the other the necklace locket in which she carried Bill’s photograph. She had turned the picture upside down in deference to the superstition that such was a way to make sure an absent lover kept you in his thoughts.

  Bill asked Jim to pick somebody to stay behind and watch over Bush and help her with the heavier chores, and Jim selected a fifteen-year-old recruit named Lamar Hundley. The boy at first protested, saying he wanted to go to Missouri too, that he could kill Yankees as good as any man. But when Jim said that Captain Anderson had specifically asked for him to be his wife’s protector in his absence, the boy said oh well, all right then, and could not keep from beaming. He swore to keep Miss Bush safe from all harm and do her bidding without question.

  At last came a sunwashed morning when they embraced on the porch and Bill kissed her and she put her hand to his face in farewell. Then he descended the steps and mounted Edgar Allan and led his men away.

  V

  The Casualties

  1864

  OF RAIN AND RIVER C
ROSSINGS

  They had four days of fair weather after they crossed the Red, and then the sun once more gave way to a dark and rumbling sky and they did not see sunshine again for three weeks. All through the first week they were beset by daily storms of furious thunderclaps and bright serpent tongues of lightning that sometimes struck trees in shimmering pale blasts and terrorized men and horses and left the trees smoking. The wind heaved hard and cold and slung the rain sideways. The horses cried at its whipping sting in their eyes and the men rode with heads bent against it. Their greatest effort was at keeping the breeches of their firearms dry. They held their hats to their heads and their clothes were plastered to them and their boots were heavy with water.

  The storms at last ceded to a steady rain that sometimes came down hard and straight for hours—clattering in the trees and crackling on the risen waters of the bottoms and the swales, drumming on the men’s hats and streaming off their brims—and sometimes eased to a misty drizzle. The noon skies looked like churned lead. The horses were spooked by sudden blooms of blue fire at the metal of their harness, by blue streaks on the gun barrels. “Saint Elmo’s fire,” a bushwhacker named Fulton called it. He’d been an able seaman on a merchant ship and had often witnessed the phenomenon—but after one too many harrowing storms on the high seas, he’d chosen to put as much distance as possible between himself and Mother Ocean and therefore moved to Missouri.

  Their pace was plodding through the deep mud. They could not raise a campfire in that sodden world, could only lie rolled in their drenched blankets on the highest ground they could find and sleep fitfully if at all and shiver through the long nights of solid gloom. Bill heard Sock Johnson muttering to no one in particular that he would go back to religion if Lord Jesus would let him at least remember what it felt like to be dry.

  They forded the Spring River into Missouri in the last days of May, under an afternoon sky the color of old tin that showed but a vague paling where the sun might be. This stonebottom ford was rarely more than a foot deep but now the water was up to the horses’ bellies and running fast. They slogged their slow and careful way up into Vernon County and the border district razed by General Order11. Ike Berry had been killed somewhere this side of the Marmaton River and who knew whether his bones yet lay under the hanging tree where Jack Henry had left them or if they had been scattered by scavengers or perhaps come upon by Christians and properly interred. Butch Berry was riding as the forward scout and out of sight of the rest of the company, but Bill Anderson knew what dark thoughts must be writhing in the boy’s head.

  The border district had become even more of a wasteland than they had witnessed the previous summer. In this season of relentless rain the gray countryside was as ghostly as the column of riders moving through it like forty-one maledict shades. The ruins and deserted farms looked like relics of a time far more distant than last year. With exception of Jackson County, the war on the border was fairly well done with. There was nothing or no one left here to fight for. The war had moved downriver into the central counties flanking both sides of the Muddy, and toward that new badland did Bill Anderson lead his men.

  Every river crossing was more perilous than the one before, the ferries even more dangerous than swimming the horses across, which they did at the Marmaton. Most of the bushwhackers couldn’t swim, and so clung wide-eyed and desperate to the saddlehorns. They crossed the same way at the wider and faster Osage, but this time some of the horses panicked badly and one broke loose of its rider midway across the river. The men nearest him caught a quick last glimpse of the boy’s white face as the spuming brown current whirled him off and pulled him under and he never made outcry. He was new to the company and none knew anything of him except that his name was Hammett, but whether it was his Christian name or surname was a point of debate. No part of him would ever surface except for his slouch hat, which an old Negro would find caught in the bankside roots of a willow two miles downstream and get good use of for the rest of his days.

  The South Grand was booming so fiercely they dared not try to swim the horses and instead rode five miles upriver until they came to a wooden bridge. It was wide enough for a wagon, but the structure was worn to such frailty they could see it trembling with the force of the rushing water. They tested its endurance one rider at a time, every horse white-eyed at the sway and quiver of the planks underfoot. Bill was the last man to go over. By then the bridge was shaking so badly he’d had to keep a tight rein on Edgar Allan and talk to him all the way across.

  At last the rain ceased altogether. The clouds broke apart and a glaring afternoon sun reflected so brightly silver on the wet world around that they were forced to squint against it all the rest of that day as they plugged on through the heavy mud and dripping woodlands.

  NEW BLOOD

  Some days later and just before dawn, Butch Berry reported an outfit of thirty militiamen encamped a few miles to northward. Bill led the company at a lope and in single file along a hog trail through the thickest part of the woods and they came to a brushy rise overlooking the militia camp just as the sun was beginning to redden the trees. Butch sneaked up on foot behind one of the pickets and the dozing man did not have time to be surprised when an arm snaked around his throat and a knifeblade slid through his backribs into his heart. At the same time, Buster Parr was bringing down the other picket on the far side of the camp.

  A quarter of an hour later, twenty-four militiamen lay dead under a drifting blackpower haze and only six of their fellows had escaped the sudden storm of wildwood boys. Arch Clement and Butch Berry took three scalps each, and fresh Federal hair hung from Buster Parr’s boottops. Riley Crawford began putting together a new ear necklace, but he was chased away from some of the bodies by the bushwhackers who’d killed them and wanted the ears for themselves. Bill formed three new knots in Josie’s ribbon. The guerrillas stripped the dead men of their uniforms, complaining of the blood they would have to wash out of them. They left the litter of naked bodies to bloat under the rising sun, then sat to the militia breakfast still warm at the cookfires—coffee and hoecakes and bacon and beans, their first hot meal since Texas.

  A sunbright morning of pale sky and thin shreds of rose clouds. Flowering dogwoods draped in white, crabapples in pink. Crows tittering at irate mockingbirds, watchful of a hawk at high spiral. Fields flooded yellow with black-eyed Susan. The scent of dog fennel on the soft wind.

  They were navigating eastward, moving at a trot, bridle rings chinking and hooffalls thudding the ripe earth, scouts out right and left, all of them now in Federal blue. Butch Berry far ahead on point.

  And then Butch was loping back down the trail to them. “Yanks coming. Fifty.”

  As the two companies came in sight of each other, Bill raised his hand in greeting, one Yank officer hallooing another from a distance. They closed to within ten yards before the Yank captain’s face showed suspicion and he caught sight of Bill’s long hair and the scalp on his bridle. He had just enough time remaining to him in this world to look sad before Bill’s bullet passed through his neck and sent him sprawling from the saddle. Then all the guerrillas were pouring fire into them and twenty-two Federals littered the ground after the rest had fled the smoky field.

  The wounded pled for quarter. Arch Clement stood over one and said, “Ah, Yank, don’t beg, it’s just too pitiful”—and shot the man at such close range the Federal’s hair smoked from the powderblast.

  Butch Berry went from one fallen blue to another, seeking any who still breathed, and the three he found might have been entreating a deaf man for all the heed he paid them before cutting their throats.

  So it went through June and into July. Where they found no Feds to fight, they did whatever mischief they might to harass Union operations. They cut telegraph lines, burned bridges on the Yank supply routes, felled huge trees across army wagon roads. They posted themselves along the wooded riverbanks and shot up passing steamboats. The Union controlled the Missouri newspapers, of course, and editor
ials across the state thundered with outrage at guerrilla “barbarisms” and lauded every act of Federal “reprisal.” The guerrillas were not soldiers, nor even men. They were savages, brute creatures as far removed from Christian notions of honorable warfare as wild Indians, entirely deserving of extermination, and editorials from Kansas City to Saint Louis called for Union forces to rid the country of them by any means necessary.

  They mostly stayed south of the Missouri River in those weeks of early summer, roaming the hills and vales and woodlands of Johnson and Lafayette and Saline counties. Though they did not know that territory as well as the border country most of them called home, they knew it well enough. Nor did they lack for friends in this region to feed and shelter them, to give them news of other guerrilla companies and information about Federal movements.

  Some of the other bushwhacker bands were not faring so well. Every few days the Anderson men came on yet another woodland gravesite where a body—sometimes several—had been buried in such haste that a hand or foot still jutted from the freshly turned ground. Some of the shallow graves were laid open, the scavengers having already been there and fed on the carrion, the flies still thick and droning, the crows heavy in the trees, and the ragged guerrilla shirts of the moldering remains were sufficient testament to who they’d been and how they came to be there.

  They heard of guerrilla bands annihilated by Yankee ambush, of captured bushwhackers stood against barn walls and shot, or hanged in the deeper woods and left to rot till they fell free of the rope and then decomposed into the earth out of which they’d been raised. They heard of secessionist folk being forced to attend executions of guerrillas and to bury the bodies—or, in some cases of hanged bushwhackers, to keep watch on the dangling dead men and report to the Federals anyone who ignored the warnings and cut them down.