Wildwood Boys (20 page)

They had closed to within a half-mile of Westport when Todd halted
the column. They could see the haze of the town’s chimney smoke
above the trees. Bill Anderson was now so feverish he believed they
had been riding most of the day, though in fact they’d been ahorse
little more than an hour. His skull felt immense, his brainpan asmolder. His vision was skewed and his hearing muffled. His nerves felt
dulled, as though he were wearing heavy clothes and gloves. He was
vaguely aware that a horseman had appeared out of the trees along
the trail ahead and was talking to Todd. Then clearly heard someone
say that the Unionist farmer who’d brought the militia down on the
Parchman place had been found out by Quantrill and was this
minute hanging big-eyed and bootless from a rafter in his own barn.
Now somebody was tugging his sleeve. To turn his head required
prodigious effort. He saw Jim looking at him strangely and moving
his mouth but the only sound he heard was a low hum. Then he felt
the ground tilting under Edgar Allan and himself pitching toward it.

He woke on a soft bed in a lamplit and sparsely furnished room. His
head hurt with every heartbeat. His vision was slightly hazed, but he
saw clearly enough the ladderback chair set within easy reach of the
bed and hung with his gunbelt and the two Navies. Through a thinly
curtained window paled with diffused moonlight came the sounds of
hoofcloppings and rattling wagons passing in the near distance. He
heard the strains of a fiddle playing low somewhere. Smelled coal oil
and soapfresh sheets and the sunlight in which they had been dried.
Became aware that he was shed of his stink, had been bathed and
bandaged afresh, was wearing but a nightshirt.

The door softly creaked open. A lean woman stood in silhouette
against the brighter light of the hallway behind her and then stepped
inside and closed the door and came rushing across the room in
a swishing of skirt to descend upon him and tightly hug him. He
breathed the smells of her skin and hair and felt her wet cheek on his
face. Then her lips were on his and he knew them for Josephine’s.

The Vaughn house

Set on the Santa Fe about three miles south of Kansas City, Westport
was an outfitting post for wagon parties heading west. The town was
centered on an intersection of streets lined with stores and shops and
offices, with liveries, eateries and saloons. It included a few residential streets and a scattering of isolated homes along its outskirts. The
Vaughn estate stood about a half-mile south of town. The family
patriarch, a wealthy shipping contractor and fervent secessionist,
had together with his wife succumbed to diphtheria the previous
year. They were survived by a pair of daughters, Hazel and Annette,
and a son named Jimmy, who early in the spring had gone to join
Quantrill.

The Vaughn house was a spacious three-story structure on an
iron-fenced and thickly wooded twenty-acre property fronted by
the Westport Road. It was boundaried on its other three sides by
heavy woodland. The grounds were kept by a man named Finley
and his Negro helper Joshua. They also tended the large stable of
horses and mules set far behind the main house and in whose lee lay
a well-worn trace into the woods, a path by which parties of guerrillas could come and go unseen. With his prematurely gray hair
and pronounced limp—the Vaughns had told townfolk he’d been
born crippled—Finley seemed an innocuous figure, but in truth his
knee had been wrecked by a jayhawker rifleball during the territorial border war, and both he and Black Josh were men of Quantrill.
As they played their public roles of hired men and protectors of the
Vaughn girls, they made careful account of Federal and militia
movements along the local roads and regularly informed Quantrill
about them.

This was where the Anderson girls had been brought to be sheltered. The Vaughn sisters received them with smiles and kisses and
warm embraces and the girls had all taken immediate like to each
other. And in a second-floor bedroom of this house was where—not
a week later—Bill Anderson found himself ensconced on the night he
regained consciousness and received Josephine’s happily tearful
kisses before again falling asleep.

When he woke the next morning the room was brightly sunlit. His
fever had broken, and he was greatly relieved by the restored clarity
of his vision, his abated pains. Josephine, fully dressed and with her
hair veiling one side of her face, slept beside him. He smiled on her
and gently brushed the hair from her face and saw her cheek was
swollen purple. His instant impulse was to wake her and demand to
know who’d struck her—then find the bastard and kill him without
discussion.

But now came giggling from the door and he saw Mary and
Jenny standing there and grinning widely—and felt himself smile at
them in return.

“Hey, Billy,” Jenny said, “you sure look funny with that wrap
around your head and those whiskers on your chin.”

 

Then they were sprinting across the room and clambering onto
the bed and hugging and kissing him and both talking at once and
Josie was startled awake by their jostling and happy squealing and
she told her sisters to be careful of Billy’s wounds, dammit.

 

The girls kept interrupting one another as each delivered a
breathless narrative of the militia raid on the Parchman farm. He
was able to understand that the two wounded guerrillas had been in
the barn and that Josephine came by her bruised cheekbone when
she tried to protect one of them and a militiaman flung her aside and
her face struck a stallpost. Aunt Sally had tried to shield the other
wounded man with her own body by lying atop him and hugging
him tight to her, but the soldiers rolled them over and one of them
shot the bushwhacker in the back even as Sally clutched herself to
him. Mary and Jenny thought she was trapped under his weight, but
when they heaved the body off her they saw the bloodstain on her
breast and saw her dulled eyes and they burst into tears with the
realization that she was dead of the same bullet that killed the guerrilla. When the militiamen realized what they’d done, they made
away fast.

 

“We’d buried Uncle Angus but a few weeks before,” Josephine
said, “and here we were burying Aunt Sally too.
And
two murdered
boys. That’s all we did the day after those bastards came—dig graves
and put people in them.”

 

“Josephine, watch your mouth,” Mary said.

 

“If they weren’t the worst days of my life,” said Jenny Anderson,
twelve years old and without inkling of the future, “I can’t imagine
what might be.”

 

“Did Josie tell you about Uncle Angus?” Mary asked Bill. “He
started coughing one night like always, only this time he couldn’t
stop and he fell dead right there at the supper table.”

 

“Poor Aunt Sally,” Josie said. “She didn’t cry a whole lot, but
from the minute Uncle Angus died she started looking really
old
.”

 

Bill asked where Jim and the Berry boys were now and Mary said
they’d gone with the bushwhackers to meet somewhere with
Quantrill. They’d asked Jim to stay, but he was set on joining with
the others in whatever mischief they had planned. Besides Bill, the
only men on the place were Finley and Black Josh.

 

Then the Vaughn sisters were knocking at the open door, and the
Anderson girls said for them to come in and meet Billy. At nineteen,
Annette was almost two years older than her sister, was shorter and
tending to plumpness, but she owned an exceptionally lovely face.
Hazel was pretty and warm-eyed and softspoken, well-breasted but
leanhipped as a boy.

 

It seemed understood by everyone that he was Josephine’s special
charge. After he’d been introduced to Hazel and Annette and had
given Mary and Jenny several more one-armed hugs and permitted
them to pepper him with still more kisses, Josie shooed them all out
of the room, telling the tittering Vaughn girls they’d done enough
gawking at her brother in his nightshirt, he wasn’t no coochie show.

 

When the others were gone he asked who had bathed him and
dressed him in the nightshirt. “Well, who you think?” she said—and
only the faintest blush showed through her smile. “And let me just
say I have smelled things dead a week that didn’t stink as bad. I
about needed a chisel to get some of that filth off you. But I kept the
door closed the whole time so nobody else could, you know, get a
peek at you all bare-assed.”

 

He couldn’t help but laugh. He asked if the Vaughn girls knew
she’d slept in his bed last night, and she said they did now. They had
a brother of their own, the Vaughn girls, also named Jimmy, and they
just loved him to pieces. She didn’t have the slightest doubt that if
Jimmy Vaughn was wounded and needed close tending, either one of
his sisters would sleep beside him in order to be as close as they
could to take care of him.

 

“I don’t think Annette or Hazel either was looking too terribly
shocked this morning, do you?” she said.

 

“Don’t mock your older brother.”

 

“Oh, pardon
me,
Squire Anderson,” she said, and smiled
brightly. She went to the window and drew back the thin curtains
and stared out at the sunbright day chittering with birdcalls.

 

“Did you see Butch?” he said.

 

She quit her smile and looked at him.

 

“I had the feeling he was real eager to see you.”

 

She gestured irritably. “The bunch of them were only around
long enough to carry you up here and eat some supper. He acted so
nervous the whole time, he made
me
nervous, and I hate that. I said
I was glad they’d got back from Kansas all right, but you’d of
thought I was
singing
to him, the way he kept looking at me.” She
made a face of slackjawed witlessness.

 

“He can’t help it. He’s a smitten man.”

 

“Well he can just get
un
smitten.”

 

“You know what he named his new horse?”

 

“Jim told me. So what? It’s not my name.”

 

“You’re not going to give that boy the first chance, are you?”

 

She fixed him with a look of such sudden anxiety it made his
heart sway. A look seeking fearfully to know if that was what
he
wanted her to do—to give Butch Berry, or any other man, a chance.

 

He wanted to tell her what he knew was right, to tell her yes, yes,
of course she should, she
must,
give some fella the chance to prove
worthy of her affections, some fella she could marry and make a
family with, have a normal life with. He wanted to tell her that he
himself was selfish beyond redemption and damned for his sinful
desires, to tell her they must nevermore touch each other as they had,
to tell her that Butch was as good a man as any and far better than
most and would always love her and could always protect her.

 

Standing at the sunlit window and staring apprehensively at him,
she looked as beautiful as he had ever seen her. And he thought: No,
God damn me,
no
.

 

She smiled as if she’d heard him. Then came to him and brushed
the hair from his eyes with her fingers and kissed him lightly on the
cheek and said, “I bet you’re hungry.”

 

He said he could eat a live mule down to its shoes. He felt strong
enough to get dressed and go downstairs to the dining table but she
wouldn’t hear of it, not on his first morning in her care. She helped
him to sit up and positioned pillows at his back, then fashioned a
sling for his arm, then went off to get his breakfast. While she was
gone he checked the Navies hung on the chair beside the bed and
found them fully loaded.

She returned with a tray holding a platter of ham steak and fried
eggs and potatoes, a bowl of cream gravy, a basket of biscuits, a
smoking mug of coffee heavily sugared the way she knew he liked it.
She tucked a napkin into the collar of his nightshirt, then cut his ham
for him into bite-sized pieces.

While he ate she told of the night a large company of men rode
up to the Parchman house and she had no idea who they were and
had the big Walker ready until Aunt Sally got a good look at the men
through the window and told her to put the thing away, the men outside were friends. “You could of knocked me over with a sparrow
feather when she said it was Captain Quantrill and his men and I
heard her calling them each one by name.”

They’d just come from a bad fight somewhere, and over the next
days she and her sisters learned to feel bones and tendons to see if
they were intact, to cleanse wounds with carbolic solution or turpentine oil, whichever was to hand. Suturing a wound required less skill
than sewing a dress, except that a dress never flinched nor cussed
when you ran a needle through it. She’d been the one to repair
Quantrill’s calf wound and he thanked her for work well done.

Bill asked what she thought of the man. She pondered a moment,
then said, “He’s real polite—and real educated. You should hear the
way he talks sometimes. And he must be truly brave—the others
look at him like they can’t wait for him to tell them something dangerous to do so they can prove to him how brave they are too. He’s
handsome, I guess—but not as much as you.”

In the time the guerrillas were on the farm she and her sisters got
acquainted with most of them. Some were every bit as polite as
Quantrill, but some so terribly shy around girls she sometimes
wanted to pat them like you do a nervous dog and say hey boy, easy
now. Only a few were so coarse that Quantrill had to warn them to
mind their language and manners in the presence of the ladies. She
said Mary had gone sweet on a boy from Layfayette County named
Tyler Burdette. “Jayhawks killed his daddy and his big brother,” she
said, “and then the Feds tried to make him enroll in the state militia,
so he went off and joined the bushwhackers. It’s a sad tale, but so
many of the boys tell a like one.”