Wildwood Boys (28 page)

After supper they repaired to the auction hall to dance to the
music of a fine string band. Mary did not want to join in the dancing
at first, saying she’d prefer to sit and watch. But Jimmy Vaughn had
lately begun to show a warm interest in her and to ply her with gentle attentions, and he soon had her out on the floor, whirling and
smiling in earnest for the first time since Tyler’s death. Through the
evening, Jim and Hazel became inseparable partners as well, having
suddenly perceived each other as keenly attractive.

Butch was less timorous that evening about approaching Josie
for a turn, and she accepted each of his invitations without cutting
remark or a look of being imposed upon. But they didn’t speak or
even hold each other’s eyes as they whirled about the floor, and she
was each time quick to get back to Bill as soon as the number was
done. Still, Butch couldn’t help but believe he was making gains on
her heart.

He’d just finished a vigorous turn with Jenny when he went for a
mug of beer to recruit himself, and with no other partner available at
the moment, tireless Jenny sat with him. As he drank the beer and
watched Josephine waltzing with Bill, Jenny said, “He makes the
whole world go round for her, you know. Mary and Jim say he
always has, ever since she was a baby.”

Butch turned to her but she was watching the dancers as she
spoke. “I think she’s crazy and I’ve told her so. Mary too. You can’t
have your brother for a beau! Not a for-real beau. You can’t

marry
him or, you know,
anything,
so what’s the use? But all she says is, ‘
I
don‘t care.’ ”

She giggled at her mimicry and turned to Butch and her smile
wavered at the look on his face. But he recovered handily, draining
the rest of his beer at a gulp and belching hugely to restore her grin.
“What say, Jenny Lightfoot?” he said. “Got it in you for another
turn?” The words were barely out of his mouth before she was tugging him by the arm to hurry along back to the dancefloor.

For nights thereafter, Butch would long lie awake before falling
asleep. He could shape no thought to ease the hollow ache in his
chest. He tried not to think at all, but he could not quit accusing
himself for a fool. How had he been so

blind
? The moment Jenny
told him about Josie, he had seen the truth of things. He stared into
the darkness and saw her with Bill, saw them dancing, saw her hugging him, clinging to his arm, petting him, kissing his ear.
Fool!
To
have believed he might someday receive such affections from her.

Would any man besides Bill? The question hissed in his head like
a snake. He lay sleepless into the night with suspicions so dreadful he
didn’t know what to think. He could not have said if the impulse he
felt at his core was to weep in pity or howl in rage at this base and
unfair world.

A leave-taking

On a chilly dusk a few days after their Westport visit, they heard Finley and Josh calling halloos behind the house and they looked out to
see W. J. Gregg and a dozen guerrillas reining up at the stable.
Socrates Johnson was among them and as he came toward the house
Jenny ran out and into his arms with a happy shrill and he swung her
around like a favored daughter. There was much backslapping and
corks were pulled and everybody was talking at once except for
Butch Berry, who’d been closemouthed the past few days.

The girls laid out a large fine supper, and the talk at the table was
mostly about the ten-day chase the company had led the Federals
before making it to the Sni-a-bar. The men then took jugs out to the
spacious front porch and pulled chairs in a close circle and conversed
in low voices as the misty night chirped and hooted around them.

Gregg said the company was camped at the south end of Jackson
County, a couple of miles below the Santa Fe. Quantrill was in a lingering fury about losing the Olathe spoils.

“He’s always talked about making a raid into Kansas that
nobody’ll ever forget,” Gregg said, “but now he’s talking about it a
lot more. He wants a raid that’ll scare the bejesus out of every goddam Yankee and abolitionist for the rest of time.

“
And
one that’ll
even a lot of scores.”
And
one that’ll get us more loot than Olathe ever saw,” Andy

Blunt added.

 

“That’s a lot to ask of one damn raid,” Bill Anderson said.

 

“Where’s he got in mind?”

 

Gregg took his time about firing his pipe, puffing blue billows

 

into the dim light issuing from the front room windows. He looked

 

around at the Berry boys and Jimmy Vaughn and the brothers

 

Andersons. “Lawrence,” he said.

 

Bill Anderson grinned like he’d been told a mild joke. “Bullshit,”

 

he said.

 

Gregg shook his head and puffed his pipe. Bill looked to John

 

Jarrette, to Socrates Johnson, and neither man disputed Gregg.
“Lawrence is forty miles into Kansas and too much of it open

 

country and there’s a thousand Federals in between,” Jim Anderson

 

said. “No bunch of raiders can make it
halfway
to Lawrence.”
“Going ten miles over the border to Olathe is one thing,” Jimmy

 

Vaughn said. “Going to Lawrence is something other.”

 

“Why don’t you wise men tell me something I don’t know,”

 

Gregg said. “I’m just saying what the man’s been talking about.

 

Wants to do it come the spring. Cole Younger about laughed in his

 

face, but Todd thinks it maybe can be done.”

 

“Todd would think so,” Bill Anderson said.

 

“It’s anyway nothing to debate on for a while,” Gregg said. “A

 

hard winter’s coming on and we’ve got to clear out before we lose

 

the leaf cover. We’re going to Arkansas and camp with Jo Shelby’s
outfit. A few of the boys are staying in Missouri and laying low—

 

Cole Younger, for one. What about you fellas?”

 

“My sisters are here and I intend to watch over them,” Bill said.

 

“We’ll be waiting for you boys when the wildwood greens up

 

again.”

 

“Well, truth to tell, me and Butch are for Arkansas with the captain,” Ike said.

 

This was news to Bill. He looked at Ike, who shrugged and cut

 

his eyes at his brother to let Bill know it was Butch’s idea to go south.

 

Bill knew at once the reason was Josie, and saw at a glance that Jim

 

knew it too. He guessed the boy had had enough of her indifference

 

and had decided to put distance between himself and the cause of his

 

heartache, at least for a time. He felt sympathetic but also suspected

 

Butch might be feeling a touch sorry for himself. You don’t know the

 

half of it, he thought, staring at Butch, who would not meet his eyes.

 

Try feeling that way with your sister. See how much distance you can

 

put between you and
that
.

 

“Well,” Bill said, “the company’s better off for you boys being

 

with them. You send word on how you’re keeping, you hear?”
“We’ll do that,” Ike said. “And you boys take good care of the

 

girls.”

 

And at daybreak the bunch of them were gone.
III
The Captains
6
1862–1863

 

Winter moons

The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the
passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the
twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and
gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went
darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of
woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the
morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first
hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with
sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a
heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and
still under a high ivory moon.

They hiked deep into the barelimbed woods to targetshoot, lumbering in their heavy coats, their breath pluming white, the men wearing
their newest boots to break them in. They worked their horses and
curried them. They practiced rope tricks. They played penny poker
and finally capitulated to the girls’ entreaties and let them sit in and
were chagrined when Hazel Vaughn proved the sharp of the party.
Snow fell steadily for several days and they went out and romped in
it and shaped comic snowmen and constructed bulwarks and waged
a snowball war. Evenings they would gather in the parlor with harmonicas and fiddles and Jew’s harps and sing and dance in the light
of a crackling fire.

The Vaughn library was admirably stocked, and one night they
held poetry recitations. Taking turns reading from Poe, Bill and Jim
both provoked laughter and catcalls with their histrionic deliveries
of such as “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “Ulalume.” They
teamed up on the jangling monotony of “The Bells,” alternating the
lines between them for maximum effect, and Jimmy Vaughn threw a
boot and Jenny shouted “Get the hook!” But then Jim recited “Jenny
Kissed Me” from memory, and Jenny did indeed jump from her chair
and kiss him for it, and promised never to call for the hook on him
again.

Annette was partial to Cavalier verse and moved herself to tears
with Lovelace’s “To Lucasta,” but Hazel’s penchant ran to spooky
Romanticism, and her presentation of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
held the room enthralled. Jimmy Vaughn liked Pope, who’d been his
father’s favorite, and his witty readings of the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” got loud applause, and so too did Mary’s rendition of Shelley’s
“To a Skylark.”

Then Jenny provoked the men to lascivious laughter—and Mary
and Annette to blushing chides—when she read “A Sweet Disorder
in the Dress.” Mary shook a finger at Josie and said, “You put her up
to that, I know you did. You are

corrupting
this child, Josephine
Anderson.” Josie laughed and winked at Jenny, then added weight to
Mary’s accusation by reading with much passionate inflection
another Herrick verse—“Upon Julia’s Clothes.” At the poem’s conclusion the men clapped and whistled and stomped their feet like
they were at a Kansas City coochie show, and Josephine took bows
like an actress at a curtain call.

Some frosty evenings they sat bundled on the porch steps and
regarded the glittering sky and watched for shooting stars. Hazel and
Jim would perch on the bottom step with their arms around each
other, their whisperings and gigglings rising as blue mist against the
moonlight. They enjoyed each other’s touch, had in fact become
lovers, but they were agreed that their sexual affection did not describe
the true love they each expected to find someday. They made no
secret to the others of their intimacy, yet none of them, not even
young Jenny, was troubled by this unconventional friendship which
would have roused brimstone condemnation in the larger world
beyond the Vaughn place.

True love had, however, again found Mary Anderson. She sat
one porch step below Jimmy Vaughn and leaned back into his
embrace. The others were pleased by her recovery of heart and renewed delight in the world. Annette sometimes sat beside them and
brushed Mary’s hair and once remarked that it was like brushing the
moonlight itself.

On those cold front-porch evenings, Josephine would cuddle up
to Bill and sometimes slip her hand under his heavy coat and secretly
make bold with his person and then laugh softly when he’d growl
low in her ear to quit, dammit, there were people around. But she
would comport herself properly whenever Jenny joined them and
snuggled on Bill’s other side.

One day they went to Kansas City, the men taking turns at the
reins while the rest of the party huddled together for warmth in the
wagonbed. The countryside was layered with snow that day, the sky
bright with sunshine and so deeply blue it made them dizzy to stare
up into it. The city’s frozen streets rang under the horses’ shoes. The
air was hazed with coalsmoke. The town was thick with Yankee soldiers, but in this season of respite from the guerrillas the feeling of
the place was much relaxed, and the only attention their party drew
were looks of admiration for the girls.

The girls delighted in the chance to show off their pretty dresses
once they were out of the cold and shed of their coats, and the men
cut dashing figures in their fine suits. They attended a performance of
John Howard Payne’s “Home Sweet Home,” then went to a minstrel
show, then a puppet show, and finally to a sideshow where they marveled at a swordswallower and a boy with skin like a lizard’s and a
woman with a long black chinbeard that they were permitted to tug
on to see that it was real.

They had dinner in a fancy restaurant and dared each other to be
the first to eat an oyster off the half-shell. Bill did it and said he loved
it and vowed he would henceforth have oysters with every meal he
took in Kansas City. Jenny picked up a shelled oyster and examined
it closely, then made a face of repugnance and said “Eee

yew
!” and
put it back on the tray of crushed ice. Except for Josephine, the others also refused to put such a thing in their mouths. Annette said she
couldn’t stand to even look one in the eye, wherever its eye might be.
But Josephine followed Bill’s example and slurped one off the shell.
She rolled it around in her mouth and nodded and murmured
“Umm,
gooood
.” But even Bill had to laugh at the obvious strain of
her smile—and she suddenly spat the mouthful into her napkin and
said, “Lord Jesus, Billy, how can you
swallow
that!”

They browsed the stores of the city. The women bought dresses
and hats and rings and hairbrushes. The men bought smoking pipes
and honing stones and fobs for their watches. In one place, Bill spied
a black silk ribbon a yard long and not a half-inch wide, and that
evening at supper he gave it to Josephine as a present. She kissed him
on the cheek, then folded the ribbon and did something with it in her
hair, then dropped her hands and showed him, and the vision of her
with the ribbon looped in the spilling gleam of her hair was the most
beautiful he’d ever beheld.