Wildwood Boys (32 page)

 

They took no breakfast but coffee, wanting to be on their way
before sunup. Finley had saddled the girls’ horses and Black Josh tied
their grips to the cantles. There were hugs and kisses all around and
Jim gave Hazel’s rump a parting fondle. Then they were mounted
and hupping their horses into the woods and gone, Bill in the lead,
Josephine right behind him.

Forty minutes later the eastern sky was showing long low streaks
the color of raw meat when a Federal cavalry patrol came through
the front gate in a clatter of hooves and armament and headed up the
wagon track toward the house. Annette peered through the front
window curtains and said, “Oh Lord, honey, they’re here.”

Hazel put down her teacup and went to the window to look. “I
guess somebody in the sewing club wasn’t all that stalwart,” she
said. “Jim would say he told us so.” She looked around the room as
if rushing to memorize it.

The dogs raced out from under the porch, snarling, napes
roached, and met with a crackling salvo of pistolfire that knocked
them asprawl, writhing and yelping. The patrol lieutenant leaned
from the saddle as he rode up on the Boo dog struggling to rise on a
shattered leg and with a swipe of his saber took the muzzle off him.
Then the dogs were under the trampling hooves and done with.

Finley ran out of the stable with a rifle in hand and was shot
twice and sent sprawling. A sergeant veered off the column and rode
up to him and saw that his eyes yet fluttered and gave him a coup
bullet in the head.

Black Josh came out of the stable with his hands up high, waggling his arms like a man at a revival, saying, “I’se sure glad to see
you, Cap’n, I’se shorely is.” But the Federals had been informed
about him too, and the sergeant shot him in his false grin.

They stomped into the house and found the girls sitting in the
parlor with their hands in their laps. Annette stared pointedly at the
lieutenant’s muddy boots tracking the carpet and sighed.

“You’re both under arrest for conspiring against the government
of the United States,” the lieutenant said.

A Parchman visit

 

He knew just where to go, demanding of Annette that she lead
the way to the cellar. One of the soldiers held a lantern. Finding the
storeroom door padlocked, the lieutenant held out his hand and
said, “Key!”

 

“Why, I ate that for breakfast this morning,” Annette said with a
smile.

 

The officer backhanded her across the face and she swayed but
kept her feet.

 

“You goddamned
bully
!” Hazel shouted and hit the lieutenant
on the back with the heel of her fist. He whirled and slapped her
harder than he’d hit her sister, buckling her knees—and then she
lunged and tried to claw his eyes and he cursed and punched her in
the breast. She slumped back against the wall, holding herself as if
she’d been shot, mouth open but mute with pain, tears streaming.

 

The officer drew his pistol and put the muzzle to the lock and
fired. The room flashed with the discharge and the lock blew apart
and the bullet ricocheted and Annette felt it pass through her hair
and it hit a soldier on the stairway. The man yelped and dropped his
rifle and sat down hard, clutching his shin. The soldier with the
lantern went to illuminate his wound.

 

“God
damn
it!” the lieutenant said, glaring at the fallen soldier.
Then pulled the broken lock off the ring and opened the door and
stood peering into the darkness. He grabbed Hazel by the arm and
pushed her inside and demanded, “Lamp!”

 

She had a box of lucifers in her apron and her hand went to it.
She saw Annette standing behind the officer but couldn’t see her
expression clearly. Annie put her fingers to her mouth, whether to
stem the bleeding of her cut lip or in realization of her intention,
Hazel would never know.

 

If she had given it a moment’s thought she might have seen the
act as one of utter folly, perhaps even madness, and refrained. But
her only thought—if thought it might be called—was to even things
with this bastard who’d hurt her and her sister.

 

She struck the lucifer to reveal in the sudden sulfurous flare the
tables and bolted lanterns with the small wire cages over them, the
boxes of lead balls, the cans of black powder stacked to the ceiling,
the open cans on the table, the dark spills around them. . . .

 

She held the burning match over the table and laughed at the
look on the lieutenant’s face. And let the match fall.

“They say it busted windows all the way up in Westport. There were
portions of the house fifty yards in every direction. Part of the roof
was blocking the road till a mule team pulled it out the way. One
fella who lives close by said it sounded like several explosions all at
once and shook his house so bad he thought it was Confederate
shells. He heard a thump on his roof and went up there and found a
man’s bare leg with an army boot still on it. The crows showed them
where to collect the pieces of bodies.”

“Lord Jesus,” Mary Anderson said softly. She pushed away her
full supper plate and sighed and put her face in her hands.

A ceremony of hemp

 

They were at the table in the Parchman house, nearly a week
after the explosion, which the Andersons had not known about until
today. Socrates Johnson and Frank James and Riley Crawford had
been out scouting for George Todd and stopped by to get a feed and
tell them the news.

 

“Those poor girls,” Sock said. “So young and pretty—and both
of them damn able. There was nobody better at smuggling powder
and ball out of K.C. Quantrill sent Lionel Ward to Fort Leavenworth
dressed like a preacher to say he was Jimmy Vaughn’s cousin with
some bad family news. Lionel said Jimmy cried when he told him
about his sisters.”

 

“That must’ve been
some
bang,” Riley Crawford said through a
mouthful of greens, his face avid, as if the talk had been of a wagonshow entertainment they’d missed seeing. Josephine glowered at
him, and Frank James frowned and nudged him with an elbow. Riley
looked at them in puzzlement, his child’s nature untuned to the force
of the Anderson girls’ grief.

 

“It’s a mystery how that powder store got touched off,” Sock
Johnson said, “but I figure some fool Yank got careless.” Jenny came
around the table with a steaming pot and spooned more beans onto
his plate. He smiled at her and patted her lean girl’s haunch.

 

“I guess nobody’ll ever know exactly how it was,” Bill Anderson
said. He cut his eyes to his brother and thought he could read in
Jim’s face his own selfsame suspicion: The Vaughn girls had done it
and only they could have said why. The brothers would later talk
about it and arrive at no conclusion except that, whyever the girls
did it, they’d been brave to the bone and had killed more Yankees in
that moment than many a bushwhacker ever would.

 

They ate and drank in silence for a time before the talk turned to
the company. Sock said Quantrill and Todd had returned to their
women at the cabin to wait on the Yanks’ answer to a trade for
Jimmy Vaughn. But just two days later Todd came back to camp in a
blackass temper. A story went around that he and Frances Fry had
got in a drunken fight and she’d tried to put a knife in him and he’d
broken her arm in defending himself. Kate was so mad she ran him
off the place. There was no telling how true the story was, or who’d
even been the first to tell it, and nobody dared to ask Todd. Quantrill
was anyhow still at the cabin with Kate—and with Frances Fry too,
most likely—and Todd was in charge of both their bunches at Blue
Springs.

 

“Speaking of Todd,” Frank James said, “he’s been wondering
when you boys might be riding with us again.”

 

“I’m not leaving my sisters alone,” Bill said. “Not with the Feds
rounding up every woman with bushwhacker kin.”

 

“They might not know the first thing about your sisters,” Sock
said. He winked at Jenny, who winked back and smiled. “Hell, they
might not know the first thing about you and Jim. They don’t know
all
of us.”

 

“Or they might know plenty,” Bill said. “I ain’t chancing it. I’ve
got to find the girls somewhere safe to stay.”

 

“There’s no such a place in Missouri,” Frank James said.

 

“I know,” Bill said. “I’m thinking of going to Arkansas, to Texas
maybe. I don’t know yet.” He restrained a sigh. In truth he was restless and not at all sure he wanted to leave Missouri. He often found
himself wondering what the company was doing. He’d been
delighted when these three showed up and hallooed the house.
“What-all else you boys been up to?”

 

They’d been giving the Yanks fits all up and down the border,
robbing mail shipments, bushwhacking whatever militia patrols they
fell on, burning railroad bridges, harrying steamboats from the trees
along the banks. They’d been taking horses too, like always.

 

“Problem is,” Sock said, “there’s more mustangs showing up
lately, and them unbroke jugheads don’t fetch near as good a price.”

 

“Well hell,” Jim said, “why don’t you all break them before selling?”

 

“
Who
all?” Sock said. “There’s not a man in the company can’t
ride like an Indian, but there ain’t a true broncbuster in the bunch
neither. Buster Parr said he could break any horse alive, said that’s
why he’s called Buster. The first one he got on about threw him over
the trees and near busted his head and everybody said
that’s
why he’s
called Buster. He ain’t got on another one, I’ll tell you that.”

 

“Bring the jugheads to us,” Bill said. “We’ll bust them. Hell, I
could use the work.”

 

Jim was avid for the idea too and said there was a big clearing
about a quarter-mile into the timber that was perfect for the pair of
corrals they’d need to put up.

 

“The captain’ll be obliged,” Sock said.

 

Jim asked about the Berry boys. Frank James said they rode
mainly with Gregg but sometimes went with Dave Pool too. They’d
both proved ready and fearless fighters, but Butch was making a
name for himself as having extra-hard bark. “He started him an ear
collection,” Frank said. “Says he’ll have a longer one than Riley’s.”

 

“He’ll never,”
Riley Crawford said. His fingers went to his chest
where the necklace usually hung and he gave a start to find it gone—
then remembered that Mary Anderson had told him she wouldn’t
stand for having that filthy awful thing at the supper table and made
him leave it outside the house.

Fort Leavenworth. A warm and sunbright morning of pale blue. At
the request of the chaplain, the band plays “We Shall Gather at the
River,” plays it lustily to be heard over the babble and laughter and
clamoring of the nearly one thousand spectators, all of them brightfaced and eager for the proceeding to get under way. Children sit on
their fathers’ shoulders to have a better view, women work their fans
against the rising heat. The rooftops lined with onlookers. Dogs yapping, chasing after each other through the crowd, excited by the celebrant air. Hawkers plying their trade, selling boiled potatoes, bags
of salted cracklings, sugar candies. The air carries the smell of these
treats and of unwashed men and perfumed women, of the ripe
prairie grass beyond the town, of the new-sawn lumber used to
replace certain worn portions of the Leavenworth gallows.

An open, two-seat wagon bears Jimmy Vaughn from the guardhouse to his instrument of execution. He sits beside the driver, and a
pair of armed guards sit behind him. He looks out at the newrisen
sun and the thin range of redstreaked clouds above it, at the gentle
roll of green hills, and says to the driver that it sure is pretty. The
driver glances eastward and nods.

The crowd raises a great cheer at the sight of the condemned.
The wagon arrives at the foot of the gallows steps, and Jimmy
Vaughn, his hands manacled behind him, hops out and boldly
ascends the steps and turns to stare without expression on the audience of his death—most of them cursing and mocking him, calling
for his soul to rot in hell, asking how damn tough he feels now. But
some few are shouting encouragement, to trust in God and be brave.
Many of them quietly admit to each other that they’re impressed
with his fearless aspect.

The officer in charge of the execution party asks Jimmy Vaughn
if he would care to address the assembly, and Jimmy says he would.
The officer raises his hands to quiet the crowd, and it complies. Most
of the members of this gathering have heard a number of gallows
valedictions in the past year, and following Jimmy’s execution, there
will be debate in taverns and liveries and general stores about the
quality of this one. Every man is interested in the last words of
another, for every man wonders, sometime in the course of his days,
what his own might be.

He tells them his name is James Jefferson Vaughn and that he is a
devout believer in Jesus Christ and southern rights. His only regrets
on leaving this world are that he will not again see his beloved Mary
nor fight for brave Bill Quantrill—whose name incites the crowd to a
clamor of jeering and catcalls.

“I ask you to tell the truth about my death,” he says, “to say I
died bravely, a rebel to the backbone. And I ask of my executioners
the courtesy of a Christian burial.” He pauses and scans the crowd
as if he would take with him the clear memory of every face. “Know
this,” he says: “Not hell nor King Henry will prevent my comrades
from avenging me. My life will be paid for by two dozen or more.
Take it for a promise.” He hawks and spits on the planks at his feet,
at once expressing contempt and proving that his mouth is undried
by fear. “Now do your damned worst.”

Some hard jeering follows, but a scattering of applause as well,
of nodding respect for his courage. The officer in charge guides him
to a spot directly in the center of the trapdoor. As the executioner
places a black hood over his head Jimmy Vaughn catches the scent of
pipe smoke on the man’s fingers. The hangman snugs the noose
around his neck and someone presses a glove into one of his manacled hands and whispers for him to release it when he’s ready. He
hears the hanging party shuffle back from the trap. He thinks of his
good parents and his beautiful sisters, imagines them smiling and
waiting at heaven’s gate. He thinks of Mary’s lovely face and remembers the feel of her last fine kiss. He drops the glove.