Whichever way the wind did blow, it carried the smell of the war’s greater malignity.
“You boys hear what Abe Lincoln said after he come off a five-day drunk?” Sock Johnson poses the question as the column trots along a hog path through the wildwood.
“All right, I’ll play the fool,” says Fulton the Sailor, riding alongside him. “What’d he say?”
“I freed the who?”
Few of them have heard this one before and the men within earshot of Johnson all laugh.
“I’ll tell you what,” Buster Parr says, “if that bloody-mouthed son of a bitch ever did say that, I’d still want to kill him, but I might not take as much pleasure in it.”
“And if a frog ever did grow a pair of wings,” Fletch Taylor says, “he wouldn’t bump his ass as much.”
At the Saline County farm of a secessionist named Walston, where they took what by then seemed a lavish supper of beans and fatback and warm biscuits, they learned that George Todd had come through only two days before. He was said to be encamped near the mouth of the Sni-a-bar.
The next day they found him, and the two outfits had a festive reunion. Todd was in high spirits, and when Bill saw so many of Quantrill’s men among his company, he knew why. His guess was confirmed over a jug and a plate of beans.
“It come to a head a few weeks ago,” Todd said. “We were playing seven-up one night and the son of a bitch accused me of cheating. Truth to tell, I was, but I’d anyway had about enough of him, and if it hadn’t been the cheating it would’ve been something else, but the time had come for sure. Bastard always thought he had me buffaloed, but I stood right up and said he could pull his pistol or his knife, whichever way he wanted to have at it—or he could put his ass on that crazy damn horse and get out of my camp.” He took a drink and grinned.
“And so?” Bill said.
“And so he got on his horse and left. Not twenty men went with him.”
He said Quantrill was now in Howard County, on the north side of the river, hiding in some deepwoods camp with his meager band. “I heard he had tooth trouble real bad, had to have a couple cut out,” Todd said. “Heard he was in some goodly pain. About breaks my heart, don’t it yours? They say Kate the Cunt’s with him now, playing nursie.” He never referred to the woman anymore except as Kate the Cunt.
“Well, she’s your company now,” Bill said. “Congratulations, Captain Todd.”
“Thankee kindly, Captain Anderson.”
Dave Pool’s boys had been raising hell from Jackson County to Saline, Todd told him, and Dick Yeager and his band were somewhere in Chariton. “We bunch up together every now and again,” Todd said, “mainly me and Pool.” He’d recently met a bushwhacker captain named Clifton Holtzclaw, whose company of hardcases had made a fearsome name for themselves all through Boone and Howard and Cooper counties. “When I told him I knew you, that’s all he wanted to talk about. It’s like that everydamnwhere we been for the last three weeks. ‘Bloody Bill did this, Bloody Bill did that.’ Bloody Bill and his scary-ass scalpers. I could get jealous.”
“I’ve heard plenty about your doings lately too, George.”
Todd grinned. “We’re promoting a lot of bad Unionist dreams, ain’t we? You and me, old son, we’re who the bastards are scared of.”
“And I say we keep it that way,” Bill said, grinning back at him.
There was plenty of busthead whiskey on hand and they celebrated late into the night. They told tales and jokes and japed each other freely around the fires. Sometimes the japing got rough, as when a Todd man named Tuckett said the company was lucky to have him in it because he’d been raised in this region of Missouri and the country was as familiar to him as the feel of his sweetheart’s ass. “Well hell,” another man said, “by that reckoning, half the company ought to know its way around here real good.” And the fight was on.
At one point in the evening, Frank James stopped by the fire where Bill and Todd were sitting with some of the other men and said he wanted Bill to meet a new recruit. He beckoned a young man forward into the firelight.
“I tried my damnedest to warn him off the likes of us but he’s a willful pup,” Frank said. “All of seventeen years old and reckons he’s too grown up to heed his older brother anymore.”
The boy was young and lean. He tipped his hat and said, “Captain Anderson, I’m proud to ride with you.” His voice was high and thin.
“Another beardless pushhard,” Bill said with a smile. He asked the boy his name.
“Jesse, sir.”
“There’s two rules, Jess. Stand by your fellows and don’t ever bring me a Fed prisoner.”
LETTERS
Came a morning when Jim brought to Bill’s attention an editorial in one of the Lexington newspapers. It exhorted the local citizens of town and country to do all in their power to assist the Union army in overcoming the guerrillas, even to take up arms against them.
“The other Lexington paper did the same thing a few days ago,” Jim said. “Bad enough we got fewer friends than ever to spare us a fresh horse or a little food now and then. We sureshit don’t need any farmers being gulled into believing it’s their patriotic duty to shoot at us when we show up at their door. Some of them are dumb enough to do it.”
Bill was incensed. He wrote a lengthy letter and addressed it to the editors of both papers, upbraiding them, saying that their advice to the locals was “only asking them to sign their death warrants.” What the people really wanted, Bill said, was protection from thieves and robbers, which his men were not. On the contrary, his guerrillas were the best protection the populace had against such bandits, who were even more afraid of bushwhackers than they were of Federals.
He then addressed the locals directly: “Listen to me, fellow-citizens, do not take up arms if you value your lives and property. If you proclaim to be in arms against the guerrillas I will kill you. I will hunt you down like wolves and murder you. You cannot escape.” He smiled at the menacing lines.
Reading over his shoulder, Jim chuckled and said, “That ought to keep the yokels away from their shotguns.”
He sought to make the good folk understand his righteous cause and see that he was but another victim of the war, a man driven to his present circumstance by Yankee brutality: “I have chosen guerrilla warfare to revenge myself for wrongs that I could not honorably avenge otherwise. I lived in Kansas when this war commenced. Because I would not fight the people of Missouri, my native state, the Yankees sought my life, but failed to get me. Revenged themselves by murdering my father, destroying all my property, and have since that time murdered one of my sisters and kept the other two in jail twelve months.”
On rereading these words, he heard in them the timbre of self-pity, which even as rhetorical device he’d always found disdainful. The perception so vexed him that he reverted to the minatory mood: “Take arms against me and you are Federals. Your doctrine is an absurdity and I will kill you for being fools. Beware, men, before you make this fateful leap. I feel for you. You are in a critical situation. I have no time to say anything more to you. Be careful how you act, for my eyes are upon you.”
Boo! he thought. Jim was grinning large.
The letter included an aside to a Colonel McFerran, whom he ridiculed for his grossly exaggerated lies of victory in a pair of skirmishes with Bill’s company, and one to General Egbert Brown, Commander of the Central District of Missouri, whom he criticized for the recent jailing of southern women who had assisted guerrillas and tried to help Confederate prisoners escape:
“I do not like the idea of warring with women and children, but if you do not release all the women you have arrested in Lafayette County, I will hold the Union ladies in the country as hostages for them. I will tie them by the neck in the brush and starve them until they are released. General, do not think I am jesting with you. I will resort to abusing your ladies if you do not quit imprisoning ours.”
He signed, “W. Anderson, Commanding Kansas First Guerrillas.�
�
“You don’t mean it about the women?” Jim said.
“If old Egbert really thinks I’m the devil he says I am, maybe he’ll believe me enough to set the southern ladies loose. I don’t guess it’s real likely.” He looked up at Jim. “What do you think?”
“I think if Momma had named me Egbert, I’d still be wondering why she hated me so damn much.”
Bill laughed. “If she’d named me that, I never would’ve answered to it. She wanted my attention she would’ve had to point and say, ‘Hey, you.’”
His letters to Bush and hers to him were no different in their lyrics from those of any lovers perforce apart—as heavy with the hoary sentiments and worn banalities of all lovers through the ages, yet no less precious to either of them, as to any lover, for being so.
His were short and intermittent, as he had told her to expect. He reminded her to burn each in its turn as soon as she’d read it, the better to avoid all chance of them ever serving as evidence of her complicity with guerrillas. He always wrote of the most recent Federal abuses in Missouri and rendered pitiful descriptions of the victims, of families bereaved, of their destroyed properties and ruined crops. “The countryside sounds of the weeping of new widows and fatherless babes,” he wrote. He entered quick catalogs of the company’s latest acts of retribution. He would always close with a reminder of how deeply he loved her and how much he missed her, how he often dreamt of them embraced in their steaming bathtub by the amber glow of the fireside, enclosed in their own small portion of the world and with no need of any of the rest of it. His closing line was ever the same: “I think of you only when I breathe.”
Her letters contained descriptions of the property in its splendid summer flowering—the shady creekside bursting with cardinal flowers and creamy morning blooms of rain lilies, the fields thick with bluebells and spiderwort, the meadows alighting each evening with buttercups like little pink lamps. She was grateful for the presence of the Hundley boy, who’d proved a great help in keeping up the place. She always shared with young Lamar whatever news of the company and its victories Bill posted in his letters. She said she missed him more than she could properly express and so would not even try to. Her closings were an echo of his own: “I think of you only when my heart beats.”
ACROSS THE MUDDY
On an early morning hazed with river fog they swam their horses across the Missouri into Carroll County. Clinging to the saddlehorns, many of the men shivered from cause other than the water’s chill, having heard since childhood that river mist was inhabited by the spirits of the drowned. As his horse pulled him sloshing from the water and onto the bank, Riley Crawford looked near to demented with fright. He swore he’d felt a hand trying to grab him by the ankle and pull him under. Some of them laughed at him for a superstitious child, but others nodded with big-eyed belief and couldn’t distance themselves from the river fog fast enough.
They made their way to a farm off the main road. Bill kept most of the men back in the trees while Sock Johnson and Oz Swisby went to the house. After a time they returned with a man named Hamer, whose farm it was and who had come along with Sock and Oz thinking he would be aiding a troop of Federals. Then he saw the rest of the company and the sudden sag of his face bespoke his realization.
He led them to the home of a man named Potts, whose name was on a list Bill carried. Provided by spies in Carroll County, the list bore the names of men belonging to the local home guard, an organization that rankled Bill for its overweening notion of itself. “Bunch of farmers wanting to wear Federal blue and play at war, to be guerrilla killers all day and then go home to a warm supper and a ready wife.” Fifteen minutes after arriving at the Potts place, the guerrillas were on their way again, Mrs. Potts’ wails falling faint behind them.
By midafternoon they had visited eight farms and at each one killed the home guardsman who lived there. The rest of the men on the list resided in neighboring Chariton County, but Hamer said he wasn’t very familiar with that region and pleaded to be relieved of his guide duty.
“All right then, Mr. Hamer,” Bill Anderson said. He affected to regard his list with hard concentration. “H-A-M-E-R. Is that the correct spelling? Gregory Hamer, of the Sixteenth Missouri Home Guard that last month burned the home of a Confederate hero who lost a leg at Vicksburg? Whose wife was bad sick at the time you boys fired the house and has since died? Whose children now live in a lean-to?”
Hamer blanched. He half-raised a hand as if he would make a point, but already Butch Berry was dropping a noose around his neck and snugging it tight in the same motion, dallying the rope to his saddlehorn and hupping his horse into a hard sprint, snatching Gregory Hamer of the Sixteenth Missouri Home Guard off his saddle and out from under his hat. The man bounced flailing and scraping over the ground, losing first one boot and then the other. A hundred yards down the road, Butch reined up and cut the rope. As the company trotted past the corpse, they shared amusement at the sight of its grotesquely attenuated neck.
They impressed another guide in Chariton and over the next days they left men of the Sixteenth Home Guard hanging from trees and barn rafters, shot dead in fields and corrals, throatcut in dooryards, on porches.
One late forenoon they reined up before a young farmer repairing a boundary fence. His eyes were an agitation of uncertainty as they cut from man to man and saw a blue coat on every one. Bill asked if he were a Union man, and the man nodded. “Are you certain, now,” Bill asked, leaning forward in his saddle. “For sure, you’re a champion of Mr. Lincoln?”
The man nodded again, though with less vigor.
“Ah,” Bill said tiredly, “how sad for you. We are true sons of Missouri and cannot stand the notion of a Union man breathing our air.”
The man’s eyes sprang wide. “No, not a Union man!” he cried. “Secesh! I am secesh! I thought you was Union!”
“Could be this one’s telling the truth, Bill,” Sock Johnson said.
“He’s lying,” Arch Clement said.
“No, not lying! Believe me! Please! Bitte!”
“Bitte?” Butch Berry said. He leaned from his saddle and spat. Guerrilla eyes narrowed all around.
Sock Johnson shook his head and said, “Oh hell, Dutchy, you done it now.”
As he reined his horse back toward the road and the others swung their mounts after him, Bill said, “Persuade that Dutchman to give up his informing ways.”
Arch Clement’s bowie was already in his hand.
“The devil is loose in Chariton and Carroll counties with scarcely three feet of chain to his neck.” Thus spake The Missouri Statesman in these deepening summer days.
They ranged east into Randolph and into his one-time home of Huntsville. Former neighbors displayed smiles, professed gladness at the sight of him, but he cursed them for cowards, for not taking arms against the Federals. Accompanied by Jim and Arch and the two James boys, he stalked into the main street bank and when they came out again Jim carried a sack containing more than $40,000. Frank James felt his little brother’s elbow in his ribs and heard him whisper, “Hot dang, Buck!”
Down into Howard County. They got word that a detachment of Yankees was in Fayette and bragging they would wipe out Bloody Bill’s gang and scalp every man of them just as they had been scalping Federals. Bill set up an ambush on the Fayette road and waited for the Feds to come along in the morning. But the informer who had brought word of the Federals to Bill had taken back word of the ambush to the Yanks. The Federals tried to catch the guerrillas by surprise from behind, but a vidette spotted them and gave the alarm.
The fight was short and fierce and the Feds abandoned the field, leaving a handful of dead comrades and one killed guerrilla, a man named Luckett. Riley Crawford lost a little finger to a passing pistol ball and searched the ground for it in vain, distressed by the thought of ants or some crow making supper of it.
Bill himself was shot in the hip but the bullet broke no bone. Jim and Butch would cauterize the wound that night w
ith a heated pistol barrel and grin at Bill’s yowls and curses and loudly agreed with each other that he was lucky the round had just missed his ass or it might have done brain damage.
Bill put $35 in Luckett’s pocket, together with a note instructing that he be given a proper burial. Then he had the dead man strapped over his horse and the animal was sent loping down the road toward town. The fallen Yankees were left where they lay. When a wagon party came out to collect the bodies, they found them capped with blood. Between the teeth of one was a folded note: “You come to hunt bushwhackers. Now you are skelpt. Clement skelpt you.”
This sultry morning they are moving slowly through a region of shadowed bottomland. Crows calling. Frogs clangoring in the river reeds. Dragonflies wavering above the high grass. The air heavy with the smell of mud and verdure. As they ride, the young James boy is lecturing on the hoop snake.
“There’s just no getting away from a hoop snake if it takes a mind to go after you,” Jesse says. “It’ll take its tail in its mouth and make itself into a wheel, and it’ll roll faster than any horse can run.”
“Lord Jesus,” Frank James mutters. He spits and drops farther back along the column, beyond earshot of his brother.
“I’d ride my horse up a steep hill, what I’d do,” Hi Guess says, beaming with his cleverness. “See it get me then.”
“It’ll roll right up that hill after you,” Jesse says. “Hoop snake can roll uphill, can roll over water, can roll right up a danged tree. It can bite you dead right through your boot.”
“Is it any way to keep from dying of its bite?” Buster Parr says. “You know, like how you treat a rattler bite?” He’d been the one to bring up the subject—and was sorry he had—after seeing a snake slither across the road ahead of them. The sight had reminded him of his baby sister’s claim, years ago, to have seen a hoop snake rolling along the hog path behind their barn. He hadn’t believed her, but Jesse said he should have, and had commenced his monologue on the mythical creature.
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