Wildwood Boys (21 page)

Bill said he’d heard a tale about her and a fellow named Andy
Blunt. “I hear you gave him a lesson in manners.”

 

Josephine abruptly laughed into her hands. “God, Billy, for a
minute I was afraid I’d knocked his brains out his ear.”

 

When the bushwhackers rode off and left them with two badly
wounded men to care for and no protection but themselves, she
hadn’t been afraid. “I just wish I’d kept the Walker in the barn
instead of in the house. When the militia showed up I didn’t have a
chance to get it.” The Baldwin boy she tried to protect was already
so badly wounded he likely would’ve died in another day anyway
and the soldiers didn’t have to shoot him again, the cowardly shits.
The knock she took on the stallpost left her fairly addled until the
soldiers were gone, and then the first thing she saw clearly was Mary
and Jenny crying over Aunt Sally.

 

“But they didn’t scare me, Billy,” Josephine said. “I wasn’t
ever
scared of them, just mad—and just sorry to tears for Aunt Sally. The
only time I got scared was when the boys carried you in last night
and told us what happened. All the while I was getting you cleaned
up and all, I was so afraid you’d die. All I could think to do was talk
to you. I talked and talked about every fool thing to come in my
head. I thought if I just kept talking to you, you wouldn’t quit
breathing. After a while, though, I had to pee real bad and I hadn’t
brought a pot in here, so I quick went to my room, and when I got
back, there you were, looking at me. I guess my gabbing kept you
too bored to wake up.”

 

Her eyes shone. He lay the breakfast tray aside and put his fingers to her face. She caught his hand in both of hers and kissed it and
then held it tight between her breasts and smiled at him like he was
the first sunrise she’d seen in weeks.

 

***

 

That afternoon she changed the dressings on his head and arm and
both wounds looked like they would heal well. “You’ll have a scar
on your head but your hair’ll hide it,” she said. “Nobody but me will
know it’s there.” She applied herself to a careful razoring of his
cheeks and neck, then trimmed his mustache and goatee, which she
liked very much. She combed his hair back with her fingers and
grinned at him as if he were a profoundly simple solution to some
complex riddle.

 

“What?”
he said when he saw how she was staring at him. Her
smile widened and she shook her head and went off to attend her
chores. He napped for a time and when he woke she was lying beside
him and studying his face with a look as mysterious to him as womanhood itself. She kissed his nose and snuggled to him.

He refused to take another meal in bed, so that evening she helped
him get dressed to go downstairs for supper. He insisted his leg was
just fine now, it hurt only when he pressed on the bruise, but she anyway held him around the waist as they went down the staircase.
Mary and Jenny and the Vaughn girls applauded when he entered
the dining room and he beamed and made a small bow.

They dined on chicken stew, baked yams, sweet corn and
rhubarb pie. In the course of the supper conversation he learned that
the fiddle music he’d heard on waking up the evening before had
been played by Hazel Vaughn. When they were finished with their
pie, he asked if she would play a tune, so they went into the parlor
and she took the instrument off the wall and asked if he had a
request. “Molly Brooks,” he said, and she smiled and started sawing.

He proved the haleness of his leg by tugging Josephine out on the
open floor and swinging her into a dance by his one good arm. She
grudgingly allowed Annette to cut in for a turn and then each of her
sisters before reclaiming him for her own. By then, however, he had
gone light in the head and had to sit down. Josie was furious with
herself for letting him overexert and she would not permit him any
more dancing, not that evening. He protested that he’d be fine in a
minute, but the other girls agreed that he needed to rest, and Hazel
retired the fiddle to its wall peg.

Josephine helped him back upstairs and into his nightshirt and
into bed and then left the room for a time. When she returned she
was in her nightdress and carrying her clothes which she placed on a
chair. She shut the door and went to the lamp to extinguish it and he
had a moment’s clear view of her leanly naked silhouette under the
thin nightdress. She crossed to the bed by the light of the moon and
slid in beside him. They lay face to face as vague shadows and he felt
her warm breath.

“Listen, Joey, I really don’t believe I need any more round-theclock looking after,” he said.

 

“I believe you do,” she said, and wriggled more snugly against
him. “And if you say the first word about what Annette and Hazel
might think, I swear I’ll take a chamber pot to your skull. I’ll
give
you a head wound to brag about.”

 

Their hands found their way under each other’s nightclothes.
After a time he whispered, “If there’s really a hell, I’m for sure going
to it.”

 

“Me too,” she said, chuckling low and stroking him lightly. “I’ll
be right there beside you shoveling that old brimstone.”

 

“No,” he said. “You’re a child and can be forgiven but—
hey!
Dammit girl!”

 

She’d given him a mean squeeze. “I’m
not
a child,” she hissed.

 

“
Quit!
All right, then. I just meant you’re young enough yet to
be forgiven. But I’m old enough I’m supposed to know better.”

 

“Well, I’m glad you don’t,” she said. And kissed him on the ear,
her low laughter full of happy mischief.

She checked his head wound again the next morning and said it was
scabbing up nice. Hazel gave him an old hat of her father’s which
she’d cut the band on so it would fit over his bandages. His arm felt
so much better he refused the sling. After lunch he said he wanted to
go out to the stable and see how Edgar Allan was faring, and she said
she’d go with him.

The sky was thickening with tall gray clouds and the trees
wavered in a light wind. As they were crossing the grounds, Josephine
stopped short and said, “Oh Lord, Billy, it’s the damn dogs!” Coming at a run from the other side of the property were three large
hounds, coming fast and without barking. They belonged to Jimmy
Vaughn but had lost all discipline since he’d gone away. The Vaughn
girls told Bill they were always at rooting up the gardens and digging
under the henhouse fence to kill chickens for sport and eat the eggs.
Two weeks ago a foolish tramp had trespassed onto the property and
the dogs came around the house and ran him down before he could
get back to the gate. They rent him variously and bloody and might
have killed him if Black Josh hadn’t come running and beaten them
away with a hoe. They were superior watchdogs, Annette Vaughn
said, but they were too wild anymore, and she thought she would
have to tell Finley to shoot them.

Bill Anderson stood his ground and watched them come as
Josephine hastily armed herself with a stick. The dogs were almost
on them, all snarls and bared teeth, and then they saw Bill’s eyes and
drew up so short they nearly went tumbling. They were even larger
than they’d seemed at a distance, the biggest looked to outweigh
Josephine—but now they whimpered and turned in tight circles, then
sat with their heads hanging and rolled their eyes up for quick
glances at Bill but could not hold his stare.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Josephine said, and couldn’t help but laugh.
“Look at me,” Bill said softly. The dogs whimpered again but
looked up. For a moment his gaze was hard, and the dogs’ ears
seemed to droop even lower. And then Bill abruptly grinned and
said, “All right, then,” and the dogs heaved up on all fours and
wagged their tails in a blur and grinned back at him.

“What in the world did you tell them?” Josie said.

 

“Nothing but the truth,” Bill said. “If they don’t quit acting like
worthless eggsuckers, they’re done for. I guess they’ll do better from
now on.” The dogs flapped their tails and smiled.

 

“By the way,” Bill said, “that big one’s Boo, and that’s Foot, and
that’s Ned. You can ask the Vaughns if you don’t believe me.”

 

She shook her head and tossed aside the stick and said she didn’t
need to ask anydamnbody. She hugged him at the waist and they
went on toward the stable, the big dogs jauntily following.

He had always been fast to heal and in a few days more he was shed
of his bandages. The arm was still sore but working well, and though
it was yet a snug fit, he could wear his own hat. Now he and
Josephine were going for long walks in the morning and then again
in the afternoon. They fished with handlines for catfish and perch in
a creek in the deeper woods, then contested at skipping stones on the
water. They gathered raspberries off the bushes, shook walnuts off
the trees. They played hide-and-seek in the underbrush, and Josephine
couldn’t understand how Bill was always able to find her so easily,
no matter how well she’d hidden herself—and then finally realized
he was using the dogs to track her and then telling them to get out of
sight so she wouldn’t know. When she accused him of cheating, he
tried to deny it and to look offended, but he couldn’t keep a straight
face and finally confessed.

They hiked nearly two miles through the forest to a clearing Finley told them about, a perfect place for target shooting. Josephine
had been enthralled by the Navy Colt since the first time she slipped
one of them from Bill’s holsters hanging on the bedside chair and
couldn’t believe its lightness, its smaller grip that so much better fit
her hand than the monstrous Walker. When she fired the Navy for
the first time and discovered its greater accuracy and easier kick,
nothing would do but that she have one for herself.

“Let me have one, Billy. You got
two
!”

He affected uncertainty. “Well ...I don’t know if I can do that,
girl. These guns are awful special to me.”

 

“So am
I
awful special to you.
Please,
Billy? Let me have one?”

 

“They’re hard to come by, you know, and worth an awful lot.”

 

“They worth as much as a sweet sister who loves you better than
anything in the whole wide world?” She hugged herself to him, fairly
purring, pressing her lean belly against him and stroking his neck,
rising on her toes and pulling his head down to blow softly at his ear.
Her ludicrous simulation of a Kansas City siren—as she’d heard the
type described—made him laugh out loud.

 

But when they returned to the house she had a Navy Colt to put
under her pillow and she returned the big Walker to him.

During his recuperation at the Vaughn place he learned that Hazel
and Annette were in their own way serving Quantrill as valuably as
was their brother. Each time the girls went to Kansas City for certain
staples and other supplies, they also bought sizable quantities of ball
ammunition and boxes of percussion caps, tins of black powder and
packets of cartridge paper—bought it all with pursefuls of bushwhacker money. They knew which dealers were Quantrill associates
or, just as well, had no allegiance except to profit and would sell the
girls whatever they wanted, no questions asked. They knew which
days of the week and which hours of the day were the busiest and
therefore the best for smuggling their contraband through the heart
of the city streets and down the Westport Road to home, there to
stockpile the munitions components in a cellar storeroom.

The Vaughn house also served as the weekly meetingplace for the
Westport Sewing Circle, a dozen or so women who all had a son,
brother, husband or sweetheart riding with Quantrill. When the
women came together on meeting days, they went down to the storeroom and sat themselves at several long tables and spent the day
making cartridges. The Anderson girls had been admitted to the club
the day after their arrival and all three had swiftly proved expert at
fashioning ready charges.

The first time Bill went to the cellar with his sisters he was
amazed by the high stacks of powder cans, the dozens of boxes of
caps and balls. The room was illuminated by a pair of oil lanterns at
every table, each lantern screwed down solidly to the tabletop and
covered with a securely latched wire cage over the lampglass to protect against accidental upset. Not a person in the room was unaware
of what would happen if even a few grains of powder were ignited,
and they were as careful of the lamps as of rattlesnakes.

While some of the women made cartridges and stored them in
ammunition pouches, others were charging spare cylinders for the
bushwhackers’ revolvers. All revolvers of the day were cap-and-ball
models, and the standard method of loading one was a lengthy
process of charging the cylinder’s six chambers in turn—measuring
an amount of powder into the chamber, then placing a ball in it, then
seating the ball snugly with the loading lever pinned under the gun
barrel, then fitting the chamber with a percussion cap. The process
was of course faster with ready-made cartridges containing both bullet and powder—and far faster still when a revolver’s emptied cylinder could simply be replaced with a fully charged one.

Josephine sat on a bench at a table and patted the place beside
her for Bill to sit. The table held open cans of black powder, boxes of
.36- and .44-caliber balls, a tin of grease, packets of cartridge paper,
mounds of thread, a supply of smooth sticks called formers—each
six inches long and with a diameter equal to a particular caliber—
and a scattering of small thimbles of varying sizes, each size equivalent to the measure of powder for a specific cartridge.

“First off,” Josie said, “we form a case and choke it.” She took
up a former marked “36” and rolled a patch of paper around it,
shaping it into a casing and leaving a slight overlap at the end of the
stick. She twisted the overlap and sealed it with a piece of thread. She
slid the choked case off the stick and picked up a .36-caliber ball,
greased it lightly and dropped it into the casing, then secured the ball
in place with another strip of thread. Now she dipped a thimble
marked “36” into a can of black powder, shook away the excess
until the thimbleload was level, expertly poured the charge into the
casing, and then neatly twisted and crimped the end of the paper to
seal the cartridge. She handed it to Bill and said, “For your Navy
Colt, sir.”