Wildwood Boys (18 page)

They were lazing on the bank of the Crooked one early afternoon, their catfish lines out, when he suddenly sat up and said,
“Boys, I’m for heading back.”

“About damn time,” Butch Berry said. He flung the coiled slack
of his handline into the river. “I’ve

Newly turned graves
been
for heading back.”

 

“Well I’m ready too,” Ike said. “Some of these folk have begun
to wonder out loud if the war’ll be over and Old Pap Price retired to
a rocking chair before we go off to join the fighting like we said. I
believe we’re starting to be looked on with a suspect eye.”

 

“When do we go, Billy?” Jim Anderson said.

 

An hour later they were saddled and saying goodbye to the
Crashaws and then riding hard to the south.

The tangerine sun was almost descended to the treetops and the air
was hazed in gold as they closed to within a half-mile of the Parchman place. When they saw there was no show of chimney smoke
above the trees in the direction of the farm, they halted and looked at
each other, then chucked up their horses and went forward with pistols in hand. The birds were holding silent, the only sounds the fall
of hooves and the low chink of harness metal.

They advanced in pairs along the narrow trail through the heavy
woodland, Bill and Jim in the lead, the Berry boys some twenty yards
behind and watching their backs and all of them alert for ambush.
Where the path entered Parchman property it was flanked on one
side by a stone wall and on the other by a fence of split rails.

They reined up at the edge of the farmyard and looked upon a
place made shambles. The barn was a charred ruin with three black
walls still upright and casting long shadows. The house was intact
and looked unburned in any of its visible parts, but the front door
hung askew on its lower hinge and the window shutter was fallen
onto the porch and the porch roof was partly collapsed at one end
where the support post had been knocked away. The corn crib was
absent several of its side slats and stood emptied. The hog pen railings were down, and most of the rails of the horse corral. There was
no stock in sight, no sign of the red hounds. Bill put his index fingers
to the corners of his mouth in some secret fashion and let a whistle
so high that none but dogs could hear it, but no dog answered his
call. Beyond the outbuildings, portions of the cornfield had been
burned and much of it trampled by horses and most of it lay in a
blackened tangle of broken stalks and ears.

“Sonofabitches,” Butch Berry said. He hupped his horse out of
the trees and headed for the house at a lope. Bill Anderson heeled
Edgar Allan after him. Ike and Jim came behind at a slow trot, warily scanning to right and left as they advanced into the open.

Bill and Butch dismounted at the house and went up the porch
steps with their Colts cocked. Every item of furniture lay broken.
The floor was littered with clothing, some of it the Parchmans’, some
belonging to the Anderson girls.

“Josephine!” Butch Berry shouted. He hastened to the door of
the kitchen room and looked within, then went to the loft ladder and
climbed it high enough to see that no one lay hidden or dead up
there. He came down and kicked the wall, then stalked to the door
and yelled,

“Josie!”

“Quit hollering,” Bill Anderson said. “If they were around
they’d let us know.”

Redlegs

 

Butch glared at him, then stepped to the railing and spat. Despite
his rebuke, Bill did not fault him for his rage. His own chest was
weighted with a dread fury, his breathing tight, his grip aching on the
Colt. He studied the sky—bloodcolored in the west, deep purple to
eastward—and held hard to the thought that somewhere beneath it
Josie was this minute alive and hale and telling her sisters to be brave
or she’d without mercy ridicule them to their brothers.

 

Jim came around the corner of the house. “Billy, come look.” His
face bespoke bad news. As they followed him to the burned barn,
crows cawed in the higher branches and a nearby mockingbird
echoed them in a fair mimicry.

 

In the twilit maple grove beyond the blackened barn walls were
four fresh gravemounds, one to either side of the pair of small graves
holding the bones of the long-dead Parchman children, the other two
a few yards farther away and side by side. Of the mounds flanking
the children’s graves, one showed fresher, more recently turned earth
than the other. The pair of farther graves were more recent as well.

 

Ike was squatted by the darker of the nearer gravesites and working a handful of its dirt, assaying it as a man might the soil of a field
for planting. The grave bore a wooden cross into whose horizontal
piece was awkwardly carved the name of Sally Parchman and the
year 1862. The cross on the neighboring grave informed that it was
Angus Parchman’s. The two farther crosses carried the names of
Tobe and Baldwin and no other information. Butch blew out a long
breath and Bill leaned against a tree.

 

“This one wasn’t dug even a week ago,” Ike said of Sally Parchman’s grave. “Probably right after the place was raided.” He duckwalked to the grave of Angus Parchman and scooped some of its dirt

 

and felt of it. “This one’s about a month old.”

 

“Hell, Old Angus probably died just after we left here,” Jim

 

Anderson said.

 

Ike stood up and brushed the dirt from his hands. “I wouldn’t

 

reckon the raiders for burying Sally, so had to’ve been the girls.” He

 

glanced from one Anderson brother to the other. “I’d look on it as

 

good news. They’re likely gone to someplace safe.”

 

“Who in the hell is Tobe and Baldwin?” Jim Anderson said.

 

“Who buried
them
?”

 

Ike shrugged.

 

Butch said he’d had enough of this jabber. He wanted to go looking for the girls right away, but Bill said they should wait until morning. “If they’re hiding in the woods, they won’t see it’s us,” he said.

 

“They might think it’s raiders and keep hid from us. We could pass

 

right by them and never know it. Better we wait till morning, and

 

then we’ll ask at every farm roundabouts. Could be they’re sheltering with one of them”

 

Butch Berry cursed and spat. Then raised and dropped his arms

 

at his side in a gesture of capitulation.

They tethered the horses alongside the house and put down their
bedding amid the ruined furniture within. The pantry of course
stood bare. The root cellar too had been cleaned out. But the creek
was still running clear and so they had plenty of fresh water. They
went out to the trampled cornfield and by the weak light of a crescent moon collected a dozen intact ears and roasted them for supper
over a firepit they dug in front of the house. They took turns keeping
watch on the porch steps through the night and each man in his turn
heard the others tossing on the floor in fitful sleep.

Bill Anderson’s was the last watch before dawn. He sat on the
porch steps and observed the eastern sky as it lightened to gray
above the silhouetted treeline. Somewhere a cock crowed and he
wondered if the rooster was one of theirs that had escaped the
raiders. The trees began to take form in the receding darkness. As the
eastern sky reddened he set about raising a cookfire. He thought he
would go into the woods and see what he might shoot for breakfast.
He checked the Navy’s loads and tucked the pistol in his waistband
and started for the near woods just the other side of the creek.

Midway between the house and the creek the ground sloped
down, and he had just reached the crest of the incline when his left
arm was slapped forward and he heard the rifleshot as he spun halfabout and went tumbling down the slope.

He lay stunned and staring up at the crimson sky. Shouts in the
distance. A pounding of coming hooves and an outbreak of gunfire.
His brother shouting, “

Billy
—where you at?”

He tried to sit up but could not—and his arm came awake to
such pain that he cursed through his teeth. The house was thirty
yards away and from this angle he could see only its roof. It sounded
as if the attackers had reined up short of the house, had likely taken
cover at the barn and the corn crib. The gunfire was furious. A horseman loped over the crest of the slope and saw him and heeled his
mount into a sprint directly at him. He drew up his knees to make
himself smaller and he fired up at the animal as it bore over him.

His next awareness was of looking the horse on its side in the
risen dust, shrieking and coughing blood and trying vainly to regain
its feet. The rider lay a few yards beyond the animal and was making
his own efforts to rise. Bill locked his teeth against a dizzying pain
and propped himself on his right elbow, the Colt still in his hand.
The man sat up and looked at him. Bill cocked the piece and adjusted
its angle and fired and the ball struck the man in the face and he flung
backward and lay still. Bill saw now that the man wore red gaiters.

He fell back. The sky looked askew and the cracking and the
popping of gunfire seemed louder now and to be coming from every
direction. And at some remove but closing fast came yet another
assembly of gunfire and with it a howling to prickle the scalp. Then
the red sky reeled and the wild cries seemed as close to his ear as the
screams of the crippled horse and then he saw and heard nothing.

Wildwood boys

I am a poor wayfaring stranger
traveling through this world of woe.
Yet there’s no sickness, toil or danger
in that bright world where I go.

He was unsure if he was dreaming the music or was awake and
actually hearing the song and the plunking banjo strings, if his eyes
were open to darkness or simply closed.

Going home to see my mother,
going home no more to roam.
Going across the River Jordan,
I’m forever going home.

His head felt thick and heavy and it was a moment before he
became aware of its pulsing pain. And of the pain in his arm. He
was lying on his back and his eyes were closed. The strength
required to open them seemed more than he could muster and he did
not even try.

I know dark clouds may gather round me,
I know my way is hard and steep.
But I must ride the road before me,
and travel far before I sleep.

Other voices now. Some loud and nearby, some at a distance, all
of them a garble. A hornpipe ditty. Laughter. Nickerings and snufflings of horses, jinglings of bridle rings. His eyes still closed, he put
fingers to his head and the sensation was of guiding someone else’s
hand. He felt gingerly of a bandage there. Then explored his arm and
found that it too had been attended and was bound. His right thigh
ached as well but it was unbandaged and felt dry to his fingers and it
could stand the hard squeeze of his hand and so he knew the leg was
both unbloodied and unbroken.

“Welcome back to the world, friend.”

He opened his eyes to the underbranches of a maple tree and
through them saw fragments of bright blue sky wisped with white.
Sitting crosslegged on the ground beside him was a hatless smiling
man with a sandy pompadour, rampant chin whiskers and shaven
cheeks. He had been scribbling in a small notebook and now closed
it and put it and his pencil in a shirt pocket. Then turned and called
to someone, “It’s Lazarus returned to the living.”

Jim Anderson appeared and hunkered beside Bill and smiled at
him. “How you doing, Billy?”

The stonemason

 

“Well,” Bill said, “I don’t exactly know.” His own voice sounded
strange to him.

 

“You hurt anyplace other than your head and arm?”

 

“Leg. It’s not broke.”

 

“Hell, you’ll be all right,” Jim said. “Bullet bit your arm but
didn’t break bone. I thought you’d been shot in the head, but W. J.
says it looks more like the horse kicked you. Musta stepped on your
leg too is why it hurts.”

 

“
Who
said?”

 

“William J. Gregg,” the goateed man said. “I used to go by Bill
but every other man in the country’s named Bill anymore so I started
going by W. J. Don’t ask what the J. stands for because I’ve never
told or intend to.” He carried a revolver on each hip and another
tucked in the front of his pants and his gray shirt was oversized and
showed four large pockets with a bright pink rose embroidered over
each of them. A huge ensheathed bowie was tied to one leg and he
carried a Green River knife in a boottop. “You’re lucky, friend. A
right horsekick can bust your brainpan sure as a bullet.”

 

“Listen, Billy,” Jim said, “the girls are all right. They’re in Westport.”

 

“The girls? Josephine?”

 

Jim nodded. “All of them.”

 

“They’re at the Vaughn place,” Gregg said. “With the sisters to
one of our boys.”

 

Bill looked at him. “Who in hell
are
you?”

 

“Quantrill men.”

 

“They saved our ass, Bill,” Jim said. His voice tight with excitement, eyes aspark. “They put down all them sonofabitches—
fifteen
of them!—and didn’t lose a man doing it.”

 

“Truth be told, we put them all down but two, and you got one
of them,” Gregg said to Bill. “Could be the other got away. We’ll
know soon enough.”

 

They helped Bill to sit up with his back against the tree, pain flaring in his skull with every movement of his head. Someone handed

 

him a canteen and he took an avid drink. He saw the banjo picker

 

sitting on a porch step, saw the farmyard full of men and horses. The

 

horses were superb breeds and better groomed than their wildlooking riders, whose aspect was of displaced pirates, deserters of the

 

Mother Ocean fled to a life ahorse.

 

Every man looked to be as heavily armed as Gregg and most of