Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

  “Then give up your editorializing and your speeches. It’s you who make us unsafe with your secession and your politics.”

  “I? Do you think we’d be safer if I was to turn Unionist? Fat lot of help it was for Frank Kunkel.” He pushed himself from his chair and threw his book on the table.

  “Of course not, but you might keep your opinions to yourself. Maybe then they’d leave us alone.” She knotted her fists and tapped the window sill, scarce knowing what she said.

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Agnes.” His voice was quiet. “You’ve never been shy about either of us expressing opinions before.”

  “I wasn’t a mother before, in the middle of a war. It’s different now.”

  “That’s why you’ll go to Pennsylvania.”

  “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, in my home. With my husband.” She swirled to face him. “John does it. He doesn’t take sides. He manages.”

  She knew that was a mistake as soon as she said it, but she couldn’t take it back. Jabez’s brows drew together, and one side of his mouth lifted in a sneer.

  “John is it?” he said. “Yes, John the saint. You still have a fancy for John, do you?”

  “Jabez—”

  “No,” he said. “You’ll go to Pennsylvania and you’ll stay there until I call for you. And madam, I can assure you, it won’t be before this war is over. And if we survive it, I’m taking my children away from your infernal family and this god-forsaken town.”

  He yanked his coat from the stand by the door and slammed out, and Agnes snatched up the first thing that came to hand and flung it after him. Her precious dictionary. It crashed against the closed door and fell to the floor, spine broken.

  31

  Spring 1862

  Captain Billy Canon’s rear end hurt more than he thought possible. He hadn’t spent this much time on a horse since his summer trip to California, years ago. He thought maybe he’d buy a better saddle in Kansas City. The militia promised to outfit him and his men, but the regular Union army got first crack at equipment, and anyway he figured private outfitters supplied better tack than the army. He could afford a new saddle, storekeeping paid well enough.

  He twisted in the saddle to size up the men. Three rode horseback but the rest straggled along the road afoot. No one wanted to donate a horse to the cause unless necessary, and they’d left their draft animals, saddle horses and buggy nags at home. He congratulated himself for recruiting so many, even if they were a disorderly band of devil-may-cares. He’d raised nearly seventy-five, almost a full company. A fellow he knew over in Andrew County scrounged up no more than fifty. Most of Billy’s boys—and that’s what they called themselves, Billy’s Boys—hailed from Forest City, some from Lick Creek, a couple even from up in Atchison County, all men and boys whose families he knew, men he trusted to jump into a fight with vigor and stick it out to the end.

  He faced ahead again and winced at the sting where the raw place rubbed on the inside of his leg. He’d outfit them and mount them up in Kansas City, and they’d shine as well as any company. They sure as hell couldn’t feel any better. They rough-housed and tussled each other like a litter of pups. The mid-May weather spoke to the blood with its high blue skies and fresh breezes, and the two-day trek to join up with their regiment turned into a camping lark. They’d chattered last night around the supper fires about the secesh they’d kill as if they hunted buffalo or snipe. Some of them even targeted particular names, bushwhackers who’d stolen from or burned out a friend of a friend.

  Billy Canon nursed a grudge himself. The Bigelow boys had torn Lick Creek apart, put his folks in danger. Nellie Kunkel gave witness against Willard Bigelow’s gang, and clearly the same bunch had burned Sam’s barn. And shot the dog. Sam truly loved that old shepherd. Its killing wounded him as much as the loss of the barn. Billy stoked a fury to find those boys and serve them the way they’d served Frank Kunkel. But he never talked about that to anyone, not even Julia, because arbitrary hanging sickened him. There were rules. Maybe those boys would hang, but only after a legal trial. If the Union men lynched, they’d sink to the level of the bushwhackers. But he hankered to lynch them anyway. Hankered to see Wil Bigelow swing.

  He expected he’d not have the pleasure. The regiment would most likely march down south, where the real army fought, far away from Bigelow’s territory. Since the federals won at Pea Ridge and pushed Price back into Arkansas, Missouri became officially Union territory, and the militia’s job was to keep it that way. If he couldn’t have at the Bigelows, Billy hoped he’d get into the fight against the raiders invading the western Missouri counties, Quantrill and William Anderson. He thought of Julia and his daughters, as he did probably no more than once every twenty minutes. They should be safe enough in Forest City, with her folks, and with Sam and Rachel nearby. But the threat of the Bigelow gang raiding Quantrill-like through Holt County boiled his blood and left a stone of fear in his belly that stayed with him night and day.

  

  Billy’s company camped out for three weeks in Kansas City collecting equipment and electing the rest of its officers. Billy found a saddle he liked at Whistler’s Saddlery and paid more than he could afford, but the pain in his back, and his rear end, eased. He spent the time jawing with the other captains in the regiment, Jim Donnell and Henry Davis and Joe Roecker, second-guessing their superiors, and passing the time of day with his own men. Mostly they drilled. They learned formations and how to wheel and where skirmishers should ride. And how to follow orders. Those boys grew up damned independent and following orders wasn't high on their list of what’s most important, but Billy recruited a couple good sergeants in Barney Holland and Willis Freeman. They’d served in the Mexican War and knew how to look a smart-ass kid in the eye and make him do what he should do. Billy never let on, but he learned everything he knew about command from Willis Freeman and followed the old soldier’s lead those first weeks while he grew his army legs.

  The best thing, the men agreed, was the rifles. The governor, the new Union governor, since Claib Jackson scuttled off to Arkansas the year before, convinced the federals to provide Sharps for the militias, and Billy’s company thought they’d died and gone to heaven. They learned to shoot and load and reshoot within a minute, and they challenged the men in Company C and Company E to competition. By the end of the three weeks, Billy was proud as a new daddy of his boys—they’d best the devil himself for him and the Union.

  Good thing, too.

  

  The Little Blue River flowed south out of the Missouri and east of Independence, and Billy’s orders were to scout among its limestone bluffs and rocky defiles for a gang of marauders that had ambushed the mail escort from Pleasant Hill. The escort, a squad from Company C, lost three killed and seven wounded, and its captain, Joe Roecker, rode with Billy in a white heat, talking nonstop about killing rebels. Independence wallowed in secesh, sneaky and dangerous, and the Union militia quartered there fidgeted, alert and on edge. The two captains led a column of fifty of Billy’s men, the track winding through wooded outcroppings heavy with the warmth and ripeness of early summer, leafed out in a lethal curtain of vegetation that might hide any number of enemy.

  Billy deployed outriders to comb the woods on either side of the track throughout the rough terrain, and the column of untried men maintained silence but for the creak and jingle of saddle and bridle. A heavy cloud cover muffled the morning, and the muted gurgle of a creek, the bedeviling buzz and hiss of flies and mosquitoes rose about them. The information they’d cajoled from a farmer three miles back indicated the bushwhackers camped on the east bank of the Little Blue, but Billy suspected the farmer fabricated his story, unreliable as most everyone else in that county, speaking Union to the federals, secesh to the rebels. So though Roecker, experienced on the scout, itched to forge ahead, Billy insisted on caution and convinced himself he was being sensible and not fearful.

 
But when the first shot sounded, fear ripped through him. The trees had thinned and the river’s bank lay ahead of them, the bridge off to the right about fifty yards. Roecker’s horse sank to its knees with a quiet grunt, blood spurting from a hole dead center of its front legs. Billy gathered himself long enough to shout the order to dismount and take cover. His men scrambled from their horses and dove for the underbrush, and Billy swung his carbine in the direction of the shot and fired.

  His aim was off as much as ninety degrees, he soon realized—the echoes distorted direction. But his first shot of the war worked a strange magic on him, it removed him from the immediacy of the scene. He found himself looking on as a spectator, watching himself duck into the brush and yank his revolver, and he calmed and wondered what the script called for next in that instant when the forest hovered, quiet with the promise of storm.

  The storm broke. A fusillade of shots burst over them from the high ledges overhanging the river. Bullets sliced through the trees sending a shower of leaves and twigs and bark raining down on the men of Company B. Roecker was nowhere to be seen. When his horse collapsed, he dove for the north side of the road and into the brush. Billy crouched behind a tree trunk, his carbine in one hand, his revolver drawn, and caught his breath.

  Someone screamed from over by the creek but the sound passed over him without catching his mind. He marveled that the horse holders behind him gathered up the animals and led them back down the trail, out of range, just as they’d been trained to do. But what the devil was he supposed to do next? He ought to order something but what the hell was it? And where in God’s name was the enemy? Their guns had ceased, and it occurred to him that it had all been a chimera, and he’d imagined the noise and confusion of moments ago.

  But the smell of gunpowder and the now-soft mewling of the man in the creek were real enough. The thick mat of dead leaves behind him rustled, and he jumped, revolver swinging around. Sergeant Freeman pushed the barrel aside, amusement glinting in rheumy eyes.

  “Just me, Captain,” he said. “Direct that thing toward the river.” He knelt, waved his rifle north. “See that crease in the bluff over there?” He pointed three hundred yards upstream where the river curled around the toe of a hundred-foot cliff scarred with rockslide and clefts. “That’s where they dug in. Couldn’t tell if any of them shots come from the other side of the river, but I’m betting they got the bridge covered on both ends.”

  “So what do we do?” Billy said. “Unless we crawl back down the trail on our bellies, they’ve got us pinned down.”

  “Well,” Freeman said, “once in Monterrey we had them holed up like this, and we sent a round from a couple dozen rifles straight into the notch. Got enough of them to even up the odds and the rest of them ran.” He rubbed a horny forefinger along the side of his nose. “Course, they was Mexicans.”

  “Let’s give it a try,” Billy said, moving into a squat and casting about for his lieutenant.

  “Asa!” he hissed, and Asa Wagmann lifted his head from a patch of hawthorn bordering the river bank. “See if you can get Heintz and Glavin and a half dozen of the others, the best shots, aiming at that notch up there. Have them blast it all at once, see what we can flush.”

  He turned back to the bluff and wondered vaguely how the hell the rebs climbed into that crease in the first place and whether there was a back way out. Maybe he ought to send some men through the woods in that direction, be sure the rebs couldn’t circle around behind. He suggested the idea to Freeman. The sergeant allowed as it was a good idea and duck-walked off through the brush to take the men himself.

  Wagmann lifted his head and got a shot launched at him for his trouble. He disappeared again, and his disembodied voice rose through the underbrush. “Ready, sir.”

  “On my order,” Billy said, eyes straining to see movement on the cliff face. “Fire!” he roared, and a dozen carbines barked at once. Chips and sparks flew off the bluff, and something bigger tumbled down the slope in a cloud of dust to lie still at the river’s edge. The boys sent up a hurrah. Their first kill. Billy smirked, astonished at how pleased he felt, like when he brought down one of those wily cock turkeys. The kill brought reality back to him and with it confidence.

  He commanded his men to reload and fire. An answering round burst from the cliff, and a man to the right of Wagmann yelped and dropped. He heard calls to his left, over by the creek, Roecker’s voice shouted orders, and gunfire popped from that direction. Leaving Wagmann and his sharpshooters to pin down the rebels on the cliff, he scuttled across the head of the trail and dropped over the bank of the creek.

  Matted vegetation barred the way, and drifting smoke from the guns stung his eyes. Murky figures appeared among the trees and underbrush of the slope, and Billy tried to pick out the uniforms of his men in the flashes from revolvers. Grunts and thuds and revolver shots echoed on all sides, and occasionally a man screamed or swore. Billy discovered Otis Morgan pulling himself behind a tree trunk and nursing his leg, though Billy saw no blood. Morgan waved him on. Then others, unidentifiable, thrashing on the ground, or lying still. Two of the dead men he stumbled across wore civilian clothes. He knew them to be bushwhackers and checked them for weapons, but they’d already been stripped. The sounds of the chase and the fight faded up the hill, and Billy stood alone, not sure of his direction, hearing the roar of Wagmann’s riflemen from a distance. He shook himself and peered into the gloom as forms, dirty and breathless, materialized grinning, stunned, stumbling and choking in the smoke.

  It occurred to him that it was up to him to bring order to the tumult. This was his company, these were his men, and somehow someone had put him in charge. Strange, as he hadn’t even fired his weapon since that first wild shot, in fact his carbine was somewhere back by the river, and all he carried was his revolver. He gazed around at the faces in the shadows and realized they stared at him expectantly, figuring he knew the right thing to do next. So he shook himself, raised his voice and called “Company B, to me!” Oddly enough it worked. More men emerged from the shadows of the trees and clustered around him. Sergeant Holland appeared at his elbow, muttering “Form them up on the trail, Captain, don’t let down your guard.” So he barked out an order to form up on the trail, eyes sharp, and count heads.

  The troop that gathered in the shelter of the trees at the edge of the river’s bank included Wagmann’s men, who’d raised no answering shots for half an hour or more. There were forty-four of them. They included six wounded, two severe, one shot in the breast and one in the belly, and two dead. Billy stared at the dead men, Private Darren Thompson and a boy whose name he should know but couldn’t remember, and felt a piercing stab of pity that passed almost as soon as it hit. The belly-shot would probably die, too, before they got back to Independence, a viciously painful death. The company’s assistant surgeon, who’d waited with the horses during the fire-fight, wrapped a cloth around the man’s torso but the blood flowed too fast to be stanched, and he soon gave it up and turned to the lesser wounds. These boys died in the blink of an eye, Billy thought, and it might have been me. He shrugged it off, this wasn’t over yet, and the men watched him for an indication of their next move. He thought about it a minute.

  “Sir.” Harlan Dow, corporal, stepped up. “We’re missing Sergeant Freeman and the men he took to clean out the snipers.”

  That’s what it was, that’s what he had to do next. Find the missing men, account for them, collect the secesh wounded and bodies, see what else waited out there in the woods. Seemed as if a hand-to-hand fight would serve to chase the bastards off, but they had a way, he knew, of slinking into the woods and the rocks and disappearing, so no one really knew how many skulked out there or whether the job was finished.

  He detailed a dozen men to go with Wagmann and sent Barney Holland with him, to spread out along the west bank of the river and smoke out any remaining marauders, clear out the nest on the cliffs and locate Freeman and his men. He
planned to detail men to cross the bridge and test the east bank, see if the secesh escaped in that direction, but the cliff had to be secured before he’d expose his men. So he posted lookouts and set his men at ease to catch their breaths and scrounge a meal from their haversacks.

  By mid-afternoon, the glowering sky loosed a steady drizzle, and Wagmann returned with three of the five men who’d left with Freeman, one dazed and half out of his mind, two with wounds that would heal if they didn’t fester first. Freeman and the other two were nowhere to be found, but neither were the bushwhackers. The high ledges of the bluff stood empty, the woods quiet. Billy’s Boys collected three dead bushwhackers, which they piled on remounts, and four live ones, two wounded and two feisty. Billy sent a squad of men across the bridge to scour the east bank. They rousted no secesh, but they did find a camp, and liberated six horses with tack, foodstuffs, blankets, a coffee pot and two frying pans.

  Time to head back to Independence. The rain and chill intensified, and every man shivered and grumbled, wrapped in a cloak if he owned one or ducked down into his collar. The euphoria from being under fire dissipated fast, Billy discovered, and the men eyed the dripping forest with misgiving, cast baleful looks on the prisoners. More than one smashed a fist into the dead bushwhackers before mounting up. A wrenching exhaustion settled deep into Billy’s bones.

  The troop moved off through the curtain of wet, retracing their trail of the morning in the early evening gloom. The drizzle soaked into Billy’s trousers and ran under his collar, down the back of his neck. The trail turned to muck under the hooves of scores of horses, and even Roecker clamped his jaw and said nothing. They’d traveled no more than five miles when hoof beats pounding toward them signaled the outrider coming back fast. Billy held up his hand to stop the troop and swore under his breath. Corporal Degroat rounded a thicket and sawed on his reins, white and shaking, his eyes red-rimmed. “Captain, you got to see this,” he said. He bent from the saddle and retched.