Wildwood Boys (17 page)
“Like they say,” a horseman in a well-tailored suit of white linen
remarked, “it’s too thick to swim in but not enough to walk on.”
son and two small children. The man was explaining to the ferryman
that they were bound for Iowa. The marauding along the border was
worse than ever, he said, and they’d had the ill fortune of living on a
farm hard by a favorite route of the guerrillas. The wildwood boys
had time and again cleaned them out of everything there was to eat,
and finally the man and his family could endure it no longer and so
they would spend the rest of the war at their cousins’ farm near
Ottumwa.
and if it was only bushwhackers to come down on ye,” the third
horseman said. He wore a black wool cap and a much stained tan
coat. An ulcerous red sore the size of a silver dollar ate into his cheek
just above his mustache. “A party of bushwhackers showed up at my
uncle’s farm in Cass County and said they needed his wagon, and
when he tried to stop them from taking it they shot him in the leg.
Not two weeks later, a party of jayhawkers—jayhawkers, mind!
Unionists!
—come along and stole every animal on the place. My
uncle kept telling them he was Union but them hawkers called him a
puke liar and come yay close to hanging him.”
is all the same, be it jayhawk, bluebelly or dumbshit farmer.”
“Why, you secesh son of a bitch . . .”
from his boottop.
for an instant seemed a pistol of gross proportions—and then clarified itself as a two-barreled shotgun, each muzzle as round as a shot
glass, the barrel sawed off not twelve inches from the breech and the
stock cut down to a pistol grip. Not a man on board was ignorant of
the weapon’s capacity to clear most of them from the deck with one
yank on its triggers. The ferryman held his push pole in his other
hand, but without his effort joined to theirs the rest of the family had
to labor harder to try to keep on course for the opposite landing.
moment to further consider the gaping muzzles of the shotgun, then
shrugged and slipped the blade back into his boot.
won’t stand for fighting on my vessel,” the ferryman said, looking
from the graybeard to the Unionist. “You want to fight, wait till
you’re on the other side or I’ll put you off right here in the river.”
and told the Unionist to position himself at the front. He returned
the shotgun to whatever holstery he’d arranged under the duster,
then renewed his poling and the ferry began to recover the distance it
had lost to the current. He glanced now and again at the antagonists
to be sure they kept apart.
have us an entertainment.”
about the near fight when the water alongside them broke with a
splash and showed a passing of something pale gray before closing
up brown again.
Berry said. “Butch caught one in the Crooked River one time
weighed onto eighty pounds, but it was a baby compared to what
they say’s in here.”
“Back before we moved to Kansas, Daddy and us saw a catfish they
caught over in Glasgow that weighed three hundred pounds if it
weighed an ounce. Whiskers on it like ropes. They hung it up on the
dock and sawed its belly open and all manner of things came out.
Some animal—maybe a dog, maybe a coon—it was hard to say
because it was mostly digested by then, but I ain’t ever forgot the
smell. There was a hat in there. A tin cup. There was a saddle stirrup
with the strap still on it. Remember that fish, Billy?”
out of that thing’s stomach,” Bill Anderson said. “The rest of the
horse
.”
They debarked into Clay County—the graybeard, the last to come
off the ferry and spitting at the sight of the blackcapped man already
well down the road—and an hour later arrived at the town of Liberty. The western sky was reefed with clouds afire at their core. They
went into a restaurant and took a supper of cabbage and ham and
then rode on again. They kept to the road in the gathering twilight
until just before nightfall and then turned off onto a wagontrace flaring with fireflies and rode a quarter-mile farther and made their
camp in a clearing. The air was softly fragrant of the day’s warmed
grass.
They raised a large fire and settled themselves around it. Bill
Anderson got out the volume of sonnets and selected one at random.
“ ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ ” he began. But the Berry
boys were unfamiliar with Shakespeare and his language, and Jim
had never been partial to the Bard despite his mother’s insistence on
his glory, and by the time Bill arrived at the closing couplet—“ ‘So
long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this
gives life to thee’ ”—Ike was hissing and Jim was calling for the
hook. Later and privately, Butch would confess to Bill that he hadn’t
understood all of the poem but he liked it anyway, don’t ask him why.
“You and me, Butch,” Bill would tell him with a grin, “we got
the true poetry in our souls. Our jughead brothers got nothing in
theirs but stringband music.”
Ike insisted that Bill read something with a damn
to it, by
Jesus. So Bill opened the Poe collection and leafed through its pages,
scanning the opening lines of each tale in search of the one most
promising. The night around them had drawn closer, the shadows
gone deeper. An owl made hollow calls in the high darkness.
Bill settled on a tale, took a sip of whiskey to lubricate his
tongue, and began to read, captivating his audience with the very
first sentence:
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best
could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed
revenge. . . .”
They rode the next day through thickly wooded country yielding
sporadically to grassy prairie redolent of dog fennel, meadows
brightly white with Queen Anne’s lace. That afternoon the clouds
grew thick and dark and came together in a high purple roil that
spread across the sky and swallowed the sun and then loosed a hard
windless rain to soak them in minutes and turn the ground to sucking mud. The rain ceased before sundown and they dried their
clothes that night by the heat of a crackling fire billowing smoke for
the wetness of the wood.
The next day they arrived at the Berrys’ former home, a farm a
few miles south of Burns Hollow. They took dinner with the
Crashaws, the people who had bought the place from Alston Berry
and who greeted the Berry boys like their own homecome sons.
When the Crashaws heard of Alston’s hard death at the hands of the
jayhawkers, the woman wept and the husband’s face drooped. “I
never been one to say to nobody I told ye so,” Mr. Crashaw said,
“but I told Alston it were a bad mistake to go to that damn Kansas.”
They slept in the barn that night and then the next day politely
took their leave, claiming they had various other families to visit.
The truth was that they would have felt obliged to lend a hand with
chores if they’d stayed with the Crashaws any longer than one day—
and farm work was what they sought to avoid for a while. They
made a comfortable camp for themselves on the Crooked River in
the woods about a half-mile from town.
There was a dance in the public square the following night. The
Berrys had been popular boys and their old neighbors were glad to
see them. The brothers were obliged time and again to tell of their
father’s killing and of the vengeance they had exacted, to inform of
their mother and sisters having gone away to Arkansas. Every
recounting of Alston Berry’s murder roused in their listeners a new
round of imprecations toward all Kansans in general and the
damned jayhawkers especially—and prompted yet more backslaps
and proffered jugs in admiration of the way the Berry boys had settled the account.
Ike and Butch introduced the Andersons all around. With so
many of the town’s able men gone to soldiers, there were plenty of
unattached women to notice the handsome strangers, and in the
course of the evening Bill and Jim danced with them all. They reeled
and waltzed and squaredanced, the fiddlers sawing and grinning as
the caller sang out his commands:
Haint been drunk since away last fall,
swing your partner and promenade the hall!
Promenade eight till you get straight,
swing that gal like you’re swinging on a gate!
The question of whether they would return to work their uncle’s
farm or join the army was sometimes posed discreetly by men who
offered them a jug, and sometimes more directly by the girls they
danced with. It was a matter the four had discussed among themselves, and their unanimous inclination was neither toward farming
nor soldiering but for renewing their rustling enterprise. It would not
do, of course, to make public this ambition, and so their ready
answer was that they had come to Burns Hollow to report the news
of the Berry family and as soon as Ike and Butch were done with visiting old neighbors they were all four off to enlist in Sterling Price’s
Missouri Brigade. The venerable name of Old Pap had the expected
effect of making the men nod with satisfaction and brightening every
girl’s eyes.
Over the next weeks the Andersons attended still more dances. They
called on young women and sipped lemonade with them on front
porch swings. They went on picnics in the company of one or
another pair of pretty sisters, sometimes accompanied by the Berry
boys and their own fetching companions. As his ladyfriend peeled a
boiled egg for him in the shade of a maple one fine afternoon, Ike
Berry kissed her ear and made her giggle and blush and slap at him
playfully. Ike winked at the others and said, “Now don’t this just
beat purple hell out of pushing a plow?”
When they were not dallying with girls, the Andersons and
Berrys were often fishing on the banks of the Crooked River or sitting in the taverns, drinking and playing cards, chatting with the
locals. They always fished from the same spot on the river where the
Berrys had caught the monstrous catfish they’d told of. They would
set out the baited lines and lie down in the shade of the trees and pass
a jug around and tell each other that life was a pleasant enough
arrangement for men who knew how to deal with it. On their best
day they caught nine catfish but were agreed that the biggest of them
would not have scaled much above thirty pounds. Ike and Butch
could only mutter in embarrassment. “Biggest ones must’ve all been
caught while we were away in Kansas,” Butch said.
The tavern talk was chiefly of the war and the region’s good fortune to date. No local farm had suffered much beyond losing some
of its stock to a few raiding redlegs and to thieving squads of passing
militia. No one had yet been murdered, praise Jesus, although in the
instance of stealing Walter Finley’s horses a redleg bunch had
clubbed him down with riflebutts when he protested the theft and
Walter’s wit had been somewhat dulled ever since.
One night after a dance, Bill and Jim offered to take a pair of blonde
sisters home on horseback by the light of a low full moon. The girls
swore to secrecy the giggling friends they’d come with in a wagon
and then swung up behind the Andersons on their mounts. They
hardly protested when Bill and Jim suggested they stop by the riverside and enjoy the sweet night. At a distance from each other, the
couples spread blankets on the shadowed bank of the river running
silver in the moonlight. Bill told his girl that if he was destined to die
while serving with Old Pap he wanted this moment to be his last
memory. Then began softly to recite Poe’s “Dream Within a Dream.”
By the time he reached the part about golden grains of sand slipping
through his fingers “ ‘While I weep—while I weep!’ ” the girl was
hugging him around the neck and then he could speak no more for
her kisses in his mouth.
Even as Bill was enjoying the girl he could faintly hear his
brother at the other blanket: “ ‘For alas! alas! with me / The light of
life is o’er! / No more—no more—no more—’ ” And then heard
clearly the clink of a buckle. And then soft pantings that shortly grew
to gasps.
Oh Mister Edgar, Bill thought, your poetry is more potent than
you know. The girl smiled up at him in the glow of the moon and
stroked his newly grown goatee, her pleasure bright in her eyes.
They afterward helped the girls to readjust their clothes, to re-tie
shirtlaces and smooth their skirts. They had to make do with their
fingers for hairbrushes. When they finally got them home, there was
a light burning in the front window. They reined up at a distance and
the girls gave them quick goodnight kisses and slid off the horses and
made off in the moonlight like raiders stealing up on an enemy
fortress. As they ambled back to camp the brothers agreed it had
been almost too easy.
Such pleasant days and nights do fleetly pass. They had been in Ray
County nearly a month when Bill Anderson began to feel uneasy
about his sisters having no protection but frail Uncle Angus. And his
apprehension had been heightened by reports of an increase in Federal outrages against border folk suspected of secessionist leanings.
His distaste for farming suddenly seemed to him poor reason for
having put his sisters at such risk.