Wildwood Boys (14 page)

They’d been at the farm nearly two months when they told Uncle
Angus they would be going away for a time. The supper meal was
done with and the girls were in the house, helping Aunt Sally with
her spinning and sewing, the men out on the porch, a jug making the
round.

 

“The farm’s in good order now and you’ll have the girls to help

you keep it up,” Bill Anderson told his uncle. “Jim and me are
obliged to you for giving them a home. It’s a comfort to us to know
they’ll be with you till we get back. Could be we’ll be back directly,
could be a while longer, all depends.”

Angus’ face made no secret of his surprise. “Well, you’ll pardon
me for asking, but where all are you going?”

 

“We figure it’s better we don’t say,” Bill said. “That way, nobody
can ever hold you to any part of it.”

 

“Oh horseshit!” the old man said. His gaze narrowed. He
glanced at the open window and then said in lowered voice, “It’s that
Kansas business, ain’t it?”

 

The Andersons and Berrys traded looks and then all of them
grinned at Uncle Angus. “We ain’t told our sisters nor Aunt Sally
exactly where we’re going either,” Bill said, “but I guess they probably got as good a notion as you.”

 

“Well, you boys got to do what you got to do and I’ll not ask ye
anymore about it,” Uncle Angus said. He coughed hard, hawked,
spat over the railing. “Just don’t think you fool me. I know none of
you cares even a little bit for farming, and if it wasn’t this Kansas
business taking you away it’d just be something else.” He hacked
hard and spat again. “Hell, I never liked farming neither—that’s
exactly why I spent the years I did driving a stagecoach. You know, I
used to be sorry I hadn’t gone to fight the Mexicans, and I’d be lying
if I said I still wasn’t. Now we got this new war, and I mean to tell
you, if I wasn’t so stove up nor so damn married—” He was taken
with a fit of coughing so intense it seemed to them all he might pitch
out of his chair. Gradually the fit subsided and he was left gasping
and wiping at his tearful eyes. “Ah hell, it’s what I get for flapping
my mouth so much.” He took a long drink.

 

“You know, boys, I believe if Uncle Angus was a younger man
he’d be riding with some wildwood bunch this minute,” Butch Berry
said.

 

“Hell, he’d be riding at Quantrill’s right hand,” Jim Anderson
said.

 

“You all saying it, not me,” Angus said, grinning in the weak
light.

 

They sat on the porch a while longer and said little else. They
drank and stared out at the darkness and listened to the steady drone
of insects, the rustle and swoop of owls hunting in the near woods,
the sudden quick cries of prey caught up and carried off in the night.

Before dawn they had their mounts saddled and ready. The women
had prepared small bundles of food and the men tucked these into
their saddle wallets. They shook hands with Uncle Angus and then
hugged Aunt Sally and each of the girls in turn. Butch stood before
Josephine an awkward moment before smiling wryly and showing
her his palms in a slack invitation to hug that expected rejection. She
stopped his breath when she stepped into his arms and even deigned
to put her hands lightly to his back. “You watch after my brothers
good, you hear?” she said.

“I promise,” he whispered. His voice tight at the feel of her, his
heart jumping at being asked to do something for her. He wished
she’d ask for more, wished she’d ask him to bring her the man’s ears,
his balls, anything she wanted.

“Go on, boy,” she said, patting his back and stepping away. He
tipped his hat and went to his horse.

Lex talionis

 

Then she was clinging hard to Bill’s neck and whispering in his
ear, “I could go with you. I can ride, I can shoot—you know I can,
you taught me.”

 

He held her and stroked her hair, spoke in low voice that none
else could hear. “Your sisters need you to keep them brave.”

 

“I know it’s true but it feels like a trick to keep me here,” she
said. “Will you be back soon?”

 

“Soon as we can.” He felt her tremble under his hands. “If you
cry now, I’ll be disappointed.”

 

“I don’t
cry,
” she said, stepping back so he could see her tearless
eyes.

 

He stroked her cheek, then turned and mounted up. She blew
him a kiss and he smiled and winked. Then hupped his horse away
and the others followed after him.

They rode out of Missouri and into Kansas, staying well south of the
Santa Fe, traveling by routes remote and roundabout. They at various times saw raised clouds of dust in the distance but could not
have said if they were looking on troop detachments or wagon
trains, bands of vigilantes or spiraling dust devils come together in
the vagaries of the summer wind. Their nightfires leaned and swirled
in the prairie breeze. The high and fattening moon paled the luster of
the proximate stars but the lower skies sparkled in a rich stellar spill.
The orange sun rose at their backs and they rode after their quartet
of elongate shadows to overcome them at noon and then play them
out behind as the day drew down to reddening eve.

On their fourth morning in the saddle a brown cloud rose off the
distant southern expanse and gained height and breadth as it closed
on them. They covered their lower faces with bandannas against the
storm but the dust whipped under their hatbrims and burned into
their eyes. The horses shrilled into the wind. The world grew
enmurked in a rushing tide of dust that blurred visibility to a few
yards around and rendered their figures ghostly. The noon sun was
an umber wafer in the hazed sky. The storm persisted into the late
afternoon and then suddenly quit. The dust fell away and the prairie
once more rolled out to its horizons and the sun was restored to
incandescence in a clear and blue-pink firmament. But Butch Berry’s
mount was gone blind in one eye and all the horses were in bad temper the rest of the day. For hours thereafter the men were coughing,
and even after they crossed the Dragoon River at sundown and made
camp for the night, they were still spitting mud.

The following day found them in a vast field of sunflowers as tall
as the horses’ chests and the party looked like four small ships with
equine figureheads making way through a saffron sea. They struck
the Marais des Cygnes that afternoon near the Lyon County line and
followed the river upstream past a hamlet of name unknown to them
and that evening crossed the Santa Fe Trail in the light of the moon
and camped in a grove of cottonwoods.

At daybreak they set off into the woodlands west of the river,
pacing themselves so they would not arrive at their destination
before sundown. A pearl moon round and low against the blue sky
in the west. They held to a wagontrace that would pass them north
of Agnes City. They reined up to watch hawks hunting on the grassland, and then again to study the cumulus clouds and tell each other
the things they saw in the altering shape of them. In the late forenoon
they turned off the trace and made their way through the trees so the
Anderson brothers could have a true last look at their home of former days when their parents were yet alive, days not three months
past but feeling to the brothers as distant history. They sat their
horses at the edge of the still woods and saw smoke rising in a
straight line from the kitchen chimney, watched a man in red longhandle sleeves and suspenders working at splitting logs, his grunts
and the whunks of the ax mingling with the steady crying of a baby
from within the house. They watched unseen and wordless and after
a time reined around and returned to the trace and resumed their
westward progress.

Bill asked the Berry boys if they wanted to go by their old place
but neither one did. “Doesn’t feel to me like we ever even lived
there,” Butch said. Him neither, Ike said.

Just after sunset they came out of the woods and onto a narrow
but well-defined lane. The gathering twilight rendered their faces
indistinct under their hatbrims. The soft air was plaintive with the
calls of mourning doves. Less than a hundred yards to northward
was the boundary fence of Arthur Baker’s farm. The outbuildings
already dark but for a weak light at the open barn door. The main
house showed bright yellow windows.

“Place does look peaceful and prosperous, don’t it?” Ike Berry
said. He spat.

 

They had reviewed their plan once more as the sun lowered, and
now Bill Anderson sat his horse and stared off at the Baker house for
a long moment before turning to the others and saying, “Let’s do it.”

Arthur Baker had never met either of the Berry boys, so they’d
flipped a coin to decide which of them would go to his door, and Ike
won. He followed the lane along the fence to the open gate of the
Baker place and then turned onto the wagon path to the house. He
dismounted at the porch steps and went up to the front door and
worked the iron knocker. A Negro manservant came to the door and
eyed him narrowly by the light of an oil lamp in hand. Before Butch
could ask for Arthur Baker, the man himself appeared, wiping his
chin with a napkin and saying, “Who is it, Grover?”

Ike Berry introduced himself as Alston Berryman and claimed to
be assistant to a wagontrain boss. He said they had a train from
Independence due to arrive at the Baker store at Roan Creek Crossing within the hour.

“Some of the families who signed on at the last minute are in
want of essentials,” Ike said. He patted his shirt pocket and said, “I
got a list right here. You can make yourself a nice dollar, Mr. Baker,
if you can provision us this evening. Better for my boss too, since it’ll
be quicker to supply them at your store tonight than at Council
Grove tomorrow. That Council Grove station’s always so damn busy
it takes near half the day to get your goods and move on.”

“Mind your language, young sir,” Arthur Baker said. “My wife
is within.”

 

Such exigencies of the wagontrain trade were familiar to store
owners all along the Santa Fe, and as men of business they knew that
profit did sometimes present itself at an awkward hour. Baker said he
would be ready to go in a few minutes and left Ike standing on the
porch in wait.

 

A farmhand brought a pair of saddled horses around to the front
of the house. Now Baker returned with a husky young man whom he
introduced as his brother-in-law George. The boy’s mouth had a
peculiar cast and he stared at Ike with a curious aspect, and Ike figured him for the softbrain Segur son he had heard about. Baker
stood in the door with his hat in hand and called into the house:
“We’re away, dearest.”

 

A woman with thick auburn hair bunched and ribboned at the
back of her neck came hurrying from the other room, holding her
skirts hiked slightly before her. She went to Baker and hugged herself
to him. Ike Berry was struck by her prettiness. Over Baker’s shoulder
her gaze fell on him for a moment where he stood at the bottom of
the porch steps. But her eyes were as unintelligible to him as a foreign language and he had no notion what she might have thought of
him, if anything at all, before she cut her look away.

 

Baker kissed her on the cheek and assured her he would be gone
but briefly. The three men mounted up and hupped their horses out
to the gate and turned to the south. Ike Berry looked back at the
house and saw the woman still standing in the brightly lighted doorway and looking after them. He felt a moment’s touch of pity—and
then the sentiment was fled and he did not look back again.

***

 

They trotted their mounts down the moonbright lane, the night now
fully risen around them. Ike and Baker rode abreast, the softbrain
slightly behind. Fireflies wavered on a gentle nightwind and flared
greenly yellow against the blackness of the flanking brush. Baker
breathed deeply and said, “It’s a lovely evening, don’t you agree, Mr.
Berryman?” Ike Berry allowed that it was. The softbrain was humming a tune unheard before by anyone else in the world.

The lane from Baker’s house ended at his store on the Santa Fe, a
short mile from the house and a stone’s throw east of Roan Creek.
When they got there, the trail showed naught but moonlit emptiness
in both directions. To the south, the country was scrub prairie and
the only trees were thick and deeply shadowed growths of willows
along the creek.

“Your train looks to be farther behind than you figured, Mr.
Berryman,” Baker said, sitting his horse and peering down the eastern stretch of road. The softbrain leaned forward in the saddle and
whispered into the ear of his sagging horse and giggled softly as if
sharing with the animal a special joke.

“They’ll be along directly,” Ike said. He dismounted and hitched
his horse and took a piece of paper from his pocket. “We can start
pulling together some of these necessaries while we wait on them.”

Baker and the softbrain stepped down from their saddles and up
onto the porch and Baker worked his key on the lock and they all
three went inside. The storekeeper lighted four lamps at various
points in the store for ample illumination. The place was full of an
assortment of smells but the dominant odors were of coal oil and
new leather and freshly sawn lumber. The walls held shelves of
canned goods and were hung with harnesses and wagon parts and a
variety of farm implements. There were bins and kegs and sacks of
every sort of supply necessary to long-distance wagon travelers. The
main counter was set toward the rear of the store and faced the front
door. Behind this counter were still more shelves of goods as well as
the canted door to the cellar where the whiskey barrels were stored.

Baker went behind the counter and hung up his coat and tied an
apron around his waist. “All right, then,” he said, fitting a pair of
spectacles to his face, “let’s see that list.”

Ike Berry handed it over and the storekeeper studied it a moment
and then called out, “Three twenty-pound sacks of sugar.” The softbrain hastened to that part of the store where the sugar was kept and
piled three sacks one atop the other and then hefted the stack back to
the front of the store as easily as if it were of feather pillows and set
it on the counter.