Wildwood Boys (13 page)

They were passing through a hackberry grove when they caught
a thin stink of decayed flesh mingled with a strong smell of burnt
wood. They emerged into a clearing where stood the blackened ruins
of what had once been a farm. All that remained upright of the house
were one charred wall and the stone chimney. Where the barn had
stood was a black carpet of ashes shedding lightly into the breeze.
Next to it a skeletal bovine carcass with rotted skull and ribcradle
exposed to the placid sky. A fat crow picked at the scraps of hide yet
on the bones.

The men stepped down. Josephine with the Walker in both hands
started to follow after Bill but he told her to stay and watch her sisters. She made a face but did as he said.

They treaded carefully through the ruins but saw nothing resembling human remnant. Then came on three gravemounds in the
shade of the trees behind the remaining wall of the house.

“Whose doing, you think?” Jim said.

Bill Anderson shrugged. “There’s so many bunches of jayhawks
and Union milish and Federals, hell, it could’ve been any of them.”

 

“Could be these were Unions and it was Quantrill done it,” Ike
Berry said. “Or maybe some other band of bushwhackers.”

 

“I ain’t going to stand here feeling sorry for anybody who
might’ve been Union,” Butch Berry said.

 

“This place wasn’t Union,” Bill Anderson said. He stooped
beside a shrub at the foot of an oak and extricated a blue cap with a
black visor and a U.S. Cavalry insignia on its crown. There was a
hole in the side of the cap and a dark stain they all knew to be
blood. On the band along the inside of the cap was inked the name
GALLAGHER
.

“Yankee bastards,” Ike Berry said. “At least one of them got put
down.”

 

“Wish to hell they’d all been,” Jim Anderson said.

 

“Hold that thing out here, Bill,” Butch Berry said. He dug a
block of matches from his jacket pocket and broke one off and
struck it alight in a burst of sulfur and put the flame to the cap. Bill
Anderson held it by the bill until it was fully ablaze and then let it
fall. They watched it burn till only the visor was intact and then Ike
Berry put his bootheel to it and ground it in the dirt.

They moved on. Advancing upcountry through a midafternoon of
wavering heat, they late in the day arrived at Brushy Creek. They
checked the line of the lowering sun and agreed that their course had
brought them more to westward than they had intended. So they
turned east and held to a narrow road along the creek and in a cool
hollow of tall cottonwoods and limp black willows.

At sundown the entire reach of the western sky was a riot of
crimson streakings. The trees seemed afire and were clamorous with
roosting birds. They spied a thin wavering line of chimney smoke a
half-mile to southward and figured it for the Parchman place. They
got onto a branching wagontrack off the creek road and followed it
through another shadowy hollow. Now there was a stone fence on
one side of the track and a rail fence on the other, and then they were
out again into the gold light of evening, and there the farm was.

A short lean man with a bucket of water in each hand was hobbling up from a narrow creek at the bottom of a shallow slope, heading for the house, when the clatter of the coming wagons raised a
pair of yowling red hounds on the run from under the porch steps.
The man let the buckets drop and he hurried to the house in an awkward half-crippled scurry and snatched up a longrifle from where it
leaned against a porch post.

Bill Anderson reined up. The mules stamped in their traces and
laid back their ears at the clamoring closing dogs. Sharply as a quirt
snap Bill ordered “Quit!” and the dogs instantly fell mute and nearly
tumbled over each other, so abruptly did they arrest their charge.
They gawked inquisitively at Bill and offered tentative tailwags. Bill
smiled on them and said, “It’s friends, you jughead sons of bitches.”
Their tails blurred.

In front of the house the little man stood with the rifle at his hip.
“Who’s there?” he called raspily. “Name yeself!”

At the Parchman farm

 

Even at this distance and though the man seemed of more wizened aspect than he showed in his studio portrait of four years earlier, Bill Anderson recognized Angus Parchman. “Say now, Uncle,”
he called, “do you intend to put holes in your own wife’s bloodkin?”

 

Now a stout gray woman came rushing out the door and down
the steps and handed her own rifle to the little man as she passed him
by. Aunt Sally with her arms wide, hurrying to them and weeping in
her joy, saying “I know you! I know you!”

She did in fact know much about them, all of it by way of correspondence with their mother over the years. She had always been
avid for news about her nephews and nieces, and in her letters
Martha had always reported their doings and misdeeds. “I could’ve
described all of you to a hair before ever I set eyes on you,” Aunt
Sally said at the supper table that first night. “Mattie loved telling me
what you looked as you were growing up.”

They had never before heard their mother called Mattie. The
sobriquet conjured visions of her as a young girl who had not yet
even imagined her children to come.

Sally Parchman smiled at the Berry brothers. “She mentioned

you
boys now and then. I knew you on sight by that buttermilk hair,
Ike Berry. And you, young Butch . . . well, I recognized you right off
too.”

Butch redfaced and nodding. He knew what she meant but was
too polite to say. She’d known him by his wayward eye.

 

When she received Mary’s letter last month telling her of Martha’s
death she had wept through the night. She’d written in response but
was not now surprised to learn Mary never got the letter.

 

“It’s a wonder
your
letter made it to the Raytown postmaster,”
Aunt Sally said. “Hardly any mail ever gets through along the border
anymore, what with one wildbunch or another robbing the carriers
all the time.”

 

Bill Anderson recounted to his aunt and uncle the circumstances
of his father’s death. As he told of Baker’s jilting of her, Mary’s face
reddened and Aunt Sally reached over and patted her hand in sympathy. He told of their failed try at rustling Segur’s horses as redress,
but he did not reveal that it wasn’t their first essay at horse theft—
and neither did any of the others volunteer this information to the
Parchmans. He concluded with an explanation of the bargain he’d
made with the sheriff in order to retrieve his father’s body and collect
his sisters.

 

Uncle Angus cursed all Kansans for low bastards. He said he
meant no disrespect to their father’s memory, but a man seeking
after requital was making a bad mistake to try to get it when he
was drunk and a double bad mistake to try to settle things on the
other fella’s property, where the other fella had all the advantage.
“I guess he wouldn’t of done it that way if he hadn’t been bad
drunk to start with,” Angus said sadly. “Being bad drunk is the
mother of wrong ideas.” His tone suggested personal acquaintance
with this truth.

 

Bill Anderson said he didn’t doubt his daddy would agree with
him. He said he hoped they weren’t imposing themselves on the
Parchmans by coming to them without notice. Uncle Angus waved a
dismissive hand and Aunt Sally said of course they weren’t. “Good
lord, boy,” she said, “you’re
family
. All of you got a home here for as
long as you want it—and I mean you Berry boys too.”

 

The Parchmans were childless, although they had produced two
children, the first a girl named Delia, the second a boy called Bellamy
who was born dead. Their graves lay side by side in the shaded earth
of a maple stand behind the barn. After she delivered Bellamy, Sally
went barren, a turn made the worse by little Delia’s death at age four.

 

“She got took by the Saint Vitus dance,” Aunt Sally said. “She
laid in bed for three days, burning up and twitching all over and crying with the pain until finally her little heart just quit. These twentyfour years now it’s been just me and the mister.”

 

The mister himself faring none too well. Returning home on the
Raytown Road one afternoon last winter, Angus Parchman had been
set upon by a band of jayhawkers led by none other than tall-capped
Doc Jennison. The little redbeard had demanded to know Angus’
allegiance, but would not accept his sworn word that he was a loyal
Union man. He said the fine for telling a lie to an agent of the Federal
government was one horse and saddle and ordered him to dismount
and hand the reins over. Angus protested and Jennison didn’t say
another word, he just pulled a pistol and shot him in the chest.
Angus would forever remember the ball’s breathtaking punch and
the sudden tilt of the sky. Next thing he knew, he was lying bootless
in the bed of a wagon and being driven to a Raytown doctor by a
family who had found him left for dead in the road. He’d been shot
in the chest and in the knee—he’d not even been aware of receiving
the second wound—and he was weeks in recovering sufficiently to
get back on his feet. But he would evermore limp and his lungs had
since been prone to chronic inflammations that made hard labor of
breathing. Sometimes the infections were so severe he would nearly
drown in his own mucus.

 

“Jennison was right about me lying, of course,” Uncle Angus
said in his wet rasp. “I ain’t no more a Union man than that red
hound yonder. I’ve hated hawkers from the start, I’ll have you know,
but truth to tell, all I wanted was to stay clear of the whole thing if I
could. Then I run into Jennison and he sure enough made a true
believer out of me—made me truly believe I’d like to see every last
jayhawker dead and him the deadest one.”

 

“You still staying clear of it, Uncle?” Jim Anderson said. “Or
have you maybe got into it some kind of way?”

 

Aunt Sally cleared her throat loudly even as she held her attention on her supper and Angus glanced at her and then looked at each
of the men in turn, as if he had something more on his mind but was
unsure if he should say it. Then said: “I think you boys ought to give
close thought to something before you decide to stay here with us.
Might make a diff—” He was abruptly beset by a fit of coughing that
raised the veins of his neck and darkened his face and filled his eyes
with tears.

 

The fit passed but left him gasping and hawking bloody sputum
into a bowl at hand for just that purpose. Aunt Sally said, “You rest
yourself, Angus.”

 

Their farm was so far from the main road and so deep in the bush,
Aunt Sally said, that they had never yet been visited by Union forces.
But that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen tomorrow or the day after or
the day after that. Jayhawkers and militia and Federal troops were
constantly scouring the region in search of guerrillas. “This is your
home if you want it to be,” she said. “You boys can stack another
pair of bunks atop the two already in the kitchen and the girls can put
pallets in the loft above our room. But you ought to know it can get
mean if the Unions come by. You have your sisters to think of.”

 

“Your sisters, that’s right,” Uncle Angus said breathlessly. “Can
be awful mean country. Just look how it’s done me.”

 

“Well sir,” Bill Anderson said, “it was jayhawkers killed the
Berry boys’ daddy and it was a son of a bitch protected by Kansas
vigilantes that killed ours. Pardon my language, Aunt Sally. What I
mean is, I guess we know something about how it can get mean.”

 

The three sisters nodded to assure their aunt and uncle that they
too knew about meanness.

 

“I guess you do at that,” Uncle Angus said. “So I’ll just say welcome to home, all you.”

In the months since Uncle Angus’ maiming, the farm had fallen into
disrepair and now the Anderson and Berry brothers applied themselves to replacing fallen fence sections and the railings on the corral,
to reshingling the barn roof and restoring to soundness the hog pen,
the corn crib, the henhouse and its run, the springhouse. They rebuilt
the jakes. They baled hay, gathered ready corn, plowed the fields,
completed construction of the smokehouse their uncle had begun.
The Anderson girls were also a boon to the place—so many able
female hands made short work of domestic chores, and the men were
fed plenty and well. The daily dinner was a sumptuous affair.

The Anderson and Berry boys were all now cultivating mustaches. The first time Josephine sneaked a kiss with Bill since he’d
begun to grow his, she joked about the feel of it. “It’ll take some getting used to,” she said. He leered melodramatically and affected to
twirl its ends, and she laughed and kissed him again.

On several occasions—sometimes in the bright light of day,
sometimes in the night’s deep hours—they heard shooting, each time
near enough to make them pause at their labor or at their meal or sit
up in their beds and listen hard for notice of danger closing on them.
But it never did.

“You see the meanness?” Uncle Angus said one day when they
spied a distant smoke spiral. “Two families we used to know just
yonder of the creek woods got burned out in the past year. Jayhawkers got one and the state militia the other. Now there’s another put to
the torch.”

“How come they burned them out?” Butch Berry said. “Were
they helping bushwhackers?”

 

“That’s what was said,” Uncle Angus said. “That’s what the Feds
always say.” He spat and turned back to work, ending the conversation.

 

In their first days on the farm, all the young men had at one time
or another raised the subject of Quantrill, but neither Uncle Angus
nor Aunt Sally showed any interest in discussing him. The brothers
believed the Parchmans knew more about the bushwhackers than
they were letting on, but if the old couple did not want to speak of it,
there was nothing to do but be polite and respect their wishes.